"I need to tell you some things in confidence," she said. "It won't take much of your time. I pretended to be a patient because I don't want anyone in your life to know you've spoken to an FBI agent. Before I leave, I need you to write me a prescription for Levaquin and tell your nurse that I had a urinary-tract infection. Tell her that the symptoms were so obvious that you didn't need to do a urinalysis. Will you do that?"

Chris was too surprised to make a conscious decision. "Sure," he said. "But what's going on? Are you investigating something? Are you investigating me?"

"Not you."

"Someone I know?"

Agent Morse's eyes didn't waver. "Yes."

"Who?"

"I can't tell you that yet. I may tell you at the end of this conversation. Right now I'm going to tell you a story. A quick story. Will you sit down, Doctor?"

Chris sat on the short stool he used in the examining room. "Are you really from North Carolina? Or is that just a cover?"

"Why do you ask?"

"You talk like a Yankee, but I hear Mississippi underneath."

Agent Morse smiled, or gave him what passed for a smile with her-a slight widening of her taut lips. "You have good ears. I grew up in Jackson. But I'm based in Charlotte, North Carolina, now."

He was glad to have his intuition confirmed. "Please go on with your story."

She sat on the chair where her handbag had been, crossed her legs, and regarded him coolly. "Five weeks ago, my sister died of a brain hemorrhage. This happened at University Hospital in Jackson."

"I'm sorry."

Agent Morse nodded as though she were past it, but Chris saw held-in emotion behind her eyes. "Her death was sudden and unexpected, but before she died, she told me something that sounded crazy to me."

"What?"

"She told me she'd been murdered."

He wasn't sure he understood. "You mean she told you someone had murdered her?"

"Exactly. Her husband, to be specific."

Chris thought about this for a while. "What did the autopsy show?"

"A fatal blood clot on the left side of the brain, near the brain stem."

"Did she have any disease that made a stroke likely? Diabetes, for example?"

"No."

"Was your sister taking birth-control pills?"

"Yes."

"That might have caused or contributed. Did she smoke?"

"No. The point is, the autopsy showed no abnormal cause for the stroke. No strange drugs, no poisons, nothing like that."

"Did your sister's husband resist the autopsy?"

Agent Morse actually beamed with approval. "No. He didn't."

"But you still believed her? You really thought her husband might have killed her?"

"Not at first. I thought she must have been hallucinating. But then-" Agent Morse looked away from Chris for the first time, and he stole a glance at her scars. Definitely lacerations caused by broken glass. But the punctate scarring indicated something else. Small-caliber bullets, maybe?

"Agent Morse?" he prompted.

"I didn't leave town right away," she said, focusing on him again. "I stayed for the funeral. And over the course of those three days, I thought a lot about what Grace had told me. That's my sister's name, Grace. She told me she thought her husband was having an affair. He's a wealthy man-far wealthier than I realized-and Grace believed he was involved with another woman. She believed he'd murdered her rather than pay what it would have cost him to divorce her. And to get custody of their son, of course."

Chris considered this. "I'm sure women have been killed for that reason before. Men, too, I imagine."

"Absolutely. Even completely normal people admit to having homicidal impulses when going through a divorce. Anyway…after Grace's funeral, I told her husband I was going back to Charlotte."

"But you didn't."

"No."

"Was he having an affair?"

"He was. And Grace's death didn't slow him down in the least. Quite the reverse, in fact."

"Go on."

"Let's call Grace's husband Bill. After I discovered the affair, I didn't confront Bill. I engaged the resources of the Bureau to investigate him. His personal life, his business, everything. I now know almost everything there is to know about Bill-everything but the one thing I need to prove. I know far more than my sister knew, and I know a lot more than his mistress knows now. For example, when I was going through Bill's business records, I found that he had some rather complex connections to a local lawyer."

"A Natchez lawyer?" Chris asked, trying to anticipate the connection to himself. Unlike most local physicians, he had several friends in Natchez who were attorneys.

"No, this lawyer practices in Jackson."

"I see. Go on."

"Bill is a real estate developer. He's building the new ice hockey stadium up there. Naturally, most of the lawyers he deals with specialize in real estate transactions. But this lawyer was different."

"How?"

"Family law is his specialty."

"Divorce?" said Chris.

"Exactly. Though he also does some estate planning. Trusts, wills, et cetera."

"Had 'Bill' consulted this lawyer about divorcing your sister?"

Agent Morse shifted on her chair. Chris had the impression that she wanted to stand and pace, but there wasn't enough room here to pace-he knew from experience. He also sensed that she was trying to conceal nervousness.

"I can't prove that," she said. "Not yet. But I'm positive that he did. Still, there's no evidence of any relationship whatever between Bill and this divorce attorney prior to one week after my sister's death. That's when they went into business together."

Chris wanted to ask several questions, but he suddenly remembered that he had patients waiting. "This story is very intriguing, Agent Morse, but I can't see how it has anything to do with me."

"You will."

"You'd better make it fast, or we'll have to postpone this. I have patients waiting."

She gave him a look that seemed to say, Don't assume you're in control here. "After I found the connection between Bill and this divorce lawyer," she continued, "I broadened the investigation. What I found was a web of business relationships that boggled my mind. I know something about dummy corporations, Dr. Shepard. I started my FBI career in South Florida, and I worked a lot of money-laundering cases there."

Chris silently thanked his stars for being too afraid to say yes to the various friends who had offered to "put him into some investments" in the Cayman Islands.

"This divorce attorney has interests in just about every business you can think of," Morse went on. "Mostly partnerships with various wealthy individuals in Mississippi."

This didn't surprise Chris. "Is it strange that a rich lawyer-I'm assuming he's rich-would be into a lot of different businesses?"

"Not in and of itself. But all this activity started about five years ago. And after looking closely at these deals, I couldn't see any reason that the lawyer was put into them. They're brother-in-law deals, you might say. Only the lawyer isn't related to the parties in question. Not by blood or marriage. In some cases he acted as counsel, but in most, not."

Chris nodded and stole another glance at his watch. "I'm following you. But what does all this add up to?"

Agent Morse looked intently at him, so intently that her gaze made him uncomfortable. "Nine of the individuals that this divorce lawyer is in business with share a common characteristic."

"What? Are they all patients of mine?"

Morse shook her head. "Each of them had a spouse who died unexpectedly in the past five years. In several cases, a relatively young spouse."

As Chris digested this, he felt a strange thrill, an alloy of excitement and dread. He said nothing though, but rather tried to get his mind fully around what she was saying.

"Also," Agent Morse added, "they actually all died within two and a half years of each other."