Desai was short and squat, his skin several shades darker than John DuPre’s and his Pakistani accent coated with a thin veneer, courtesy of his British boarding school education. I invited him into the boardroom and whispered to Mercer that he should call Sarah and ask her to do a Lexis/Nexis check on DuPre, to search for news stories in the Georgia papers about the details of his pending lawsuit.

I introduced myself to Dr. Desai and sat him at the table opposite me. Chapman rejoined us before I had gotten very far into the résumé.

Desai was one of the newest members of the neurosurgical team, recruited to Minuit by Gemma Dogen the year before to start his residency there. He was clipped in his responses to us and fiercely defensive about his relationship with Dogen. She had been his mentor and his sponsor and it was clear to me that Desai was sincere in his expression of how devastated he was by Gemma’s loss.

Mike focused his attention on the operation Spector had performed when he plucked Desai and Harper out of the gallery to stand in for the absent Dogen. “What’d you think when she didn’t show up for surgery? Worried about her?”

“Quite unlike her, of course,” Desai replied. “Gemma was a consummate professional, Mr. Chapman. Did I think she’d gone missing? Not at all. I assumed something more pressing in her schedule had come up. Or that she and Spector had another row about something and-”

“Row about what, Dr. Desai?”

“I wasn’t privy to that information, detective. I knew there were issues that involved the program at Minuit that put the two of them at odds, but I’m much too junior a member of the department to have been let in on those conversations.”

“You were Dogen’s friend, though, as well, weren’t you?”

“Her friend, Mr. Chapman, certainly. But not her confidant. Our relationship was strictly confined to the hospital and medical school. Gemma drew a firm line between her students and her private life and I’m not aware of anyone who dared attempt to cross it.”

“And Dr. Spector, he trusted you enough to call on you to stand in for Dogen in the OR even though you were quite well identified as her protégé?” I asked.

“Spector’s primary interest, Miss Cooper, whether one likes his style or not, is the well-being of his patients. I never got myself involved in the politics of the medical school and it’s obvious neither Spector nor Dogen held that against me in any manner.

“Besides, there were only a handful of us in the room who were qualified to assist him when the situation presented itself. It was, shall we say, an honorific moment rather than a critical one. I might have passed him a few instruments and nodded my agreement with his decisions, but Harper and I were basically there to admire Spector’s handiwork close up, if you will. Neither Coleman nor I added a great deal to the procedure.”

There was something old-fashioned and comfortable about Banswar Desai’s manner that put me at ease. I had grown up in a home in which the medical profession was revered and respected. My father’s accomplishments had won international adulation. My brothers and I had been surrounded from childhood by my parents’ coterie of brilliant and caring physicians and nurses who devoted themselves to the finest traditions of the science and art of healing. Our nightly discussions at the dinner table, joined in with equal gusto by my mother-whose nursing background made her as knowledgeable as any of the doctors who spoke-always centered around the most interesting clinical events of the day.

The memories of my lifelong involvement with the health care community led inevitably to thoughts of my love affair with Adam Nyman and the engagement that had shattered so stunningly with his death just hours before we were to be married. I had daydreamed and wandered from the discussion that Chapman was having with Desai, for which I paid doubly. The haunting image of Adam in his OR fatigues when he kissed me good-bye for the last time pushed itself back into view. In addition, I had lost all track of the direction of the conversation that concerned Gemma Dogen’s murder.

“That’s all we’ve got for you today, Dr. Desai. If anything comes to your attention that you think we’d like to know about, please give me a call,” Mike said, passing a business card to the young resident.

They walked together to the door and, as Desai left, Chapman waved Coleman Harper into the room.

“Thanks for your patience, Dr. Harper. It seems Detective Chapman and I have kept you waiting a second time,” I said, referring to our first meeting at the police precinct the night Harper and DuPre had made their discovery of Pops in his bloodstained pants.

Mike flipped through his notepad until he came to the pages that contained the information he had taken from Harper at our earlier meeting. In answer to Mike’s first question, Harper repeated that it was at DuPre’s suggestion that the two of them had gone down to the radiology department.

“I don’t want to get you all twitchy like you were that night we were at the station house, Doc, but DuPre’s pretty insistent that you were the one that wanted him to go downstairs with you.”

Harper hesitated, his head stationary but his eyes darting back and forth between our faces as he tried to figure out whether there was any significance to Mike’s question.

“Are you suggesting that I knew the old man was in the room before John and I went down there together?”

“You tell me, Doc. Did you?”

“Wh-what for? Of course I hadn’t known he was there before we found him-I hadn’t been to the radiology department all afternoon. What difference would it have made?”

Not much, it seemed to me, and I figured Mike was simply trying to rattle Harper, who rose to the bait rather quickly and seemed as ill at ease now as he had the night we met him.

“I don’t think we ever got the details of your relationship with Gemma Dogen, did we, Dr. Harper?”

“Same as most around here. Respected her work, professionally, but had very little else to do with her.”

Chapman flashed a glance at his notes. “You two met on your first go-round here, almost ten years ago, is that right?”

“Yes, yes, it is.”

“Work for her?”

“Not exactly. I came up here after medical school. Did my internship and residency here, then started my neurological practice. That’s about the time we met. Dr. Dogen had just come over here to teach at Minuit.”

“She teach you?”

“Just in the sense that we all rotated through the neurosurgical department.”

“Never wanted to go into surgery, Doc? Just wanted the medical end up ‘til now?”

“Yes, well, more or less. I mean, I did apply to get into the neurosurgical residency right after my internship but I didn’t make the cut that year. I was content with what I was doing and, um, didn’t push for it very hard. As you probably know by now, it’s a very small program, very elite. Lots of us got passed over-no big deal. I was only in New York another year, working up at Metropolitan Hospital, actually. My wife wanted to go back to Nashville and I was ready to get out and start practicing on my own.”

“So what does this fellowship do for you exactly?”

Harper’s thick fingers clutched the arms of his chair and he massaged the smooth wood of the antique reproduction boardroom furniture as he explained his current function to us.

“I, uh, I guess I was anxious for a change after ten years. Maybe I just never got out of my system the idea that I could do neurosurgery. Felt I’d given up on it too quickly when I didn’t make the program on the first shot. This, um, fellowship lets me get started in the OR while I wait for the results of my applications.”

“What applications?”

“Oh, I assumed Dr. Spector must have told you. I’m completing the fellowship and hoping to be accepted to the neurosurgical residency here any day now. That’s why I was willing to enter the program and take a pay cut for a year.”