He opened the French doors with his key-a key that Braid had given Andrew Rusk over two years ago-then slipped inside and moved toward a closet beneath the main stairwell. Dr. Tarver was halfway there when a brief ping echoed through the house. He stepped into the closet and stood absolutely still, listening the way he had when he'd hunted for food as a boy.

He heard nothing.

He had planned to wait until Braid went to sleep to do his work, but now that he was here, he couldn't bear the thought of the wasted hours. It wasn't as if this operation were going to add a single line of data to his research notes. As he stood fuming in the closet, a possible solution struck him. If Braid was in the shower now, Eldon could do what he needed to do and be headed home before the moon was up. All it would take was a little audacity, which was not a scarce resource in the Tarver gene pool.

He removed his shoes, then opened the door and moved quickly along the carpet runner in the hall. At the end of this runner lay the master bedroom. He listened at the bedroom door with the same concentration he'd used in the closet. Nothing. Braid was almost certainly in the bathroom.

Dr. Tarver silently opened the door, confirmed that the room was empty, then moved straight to the closed bathroom door. Braid was either taking a shower or taking a crap. Eldon hoped it was the former. Looking down, he saw a faint trace of steam wafting up from beneath the door.

He moved to a highboy against the wall to his left. In the top drawer he found the weapons he had known would be there (man was a creature of habit): a dozen vials of insulin and two bags of syringes. There were two types of insulin: short-acting Humulin R and the longer-acting Humulin N.

Unsnapping his pack, he removed a 10 cc syringe and stripped off the packaging. This syringe could hold five times more liquid than the standard diabetic syringes in Braid's drawer-twenty times his usual dose. The doctor lined up ten vials from Braid's drawer, then quickly filled the syringe to capacity. To complete the charade that would later be played, he loaded two of Braid's syringes as well, then uncapped the needles on both. Held in one hand, they looked like the fangs of some cybernetic serpent.

As he reached for the doorknob, Eldon dimly heard the shower flowing. He had to move fast. If Braid emerged and saw him, there might be a struggle, despite the man's inebriated state. Even if Braid was suicidal, Eldon could not count on a passive victim. Facing the black maw of death, some would-be suicides would kill a dozen men to save themselves. Dr. Tarver turned the knob with his gloved hand and pushed.

He heard the hiss of wood against the nap of the carpet. The bathroom was large, but thick with steam. Braid had forgotten to switch on the exhaust fan. He must have the water very hot. He's so drunk he can't feel it.

Dr. Tarver felt intense satisfaction. This scenario was far better than his original plan. His sleeping gas left a traceable residue in the tissues for up to thirty-six hours (if you knew what to look for), and in some people it could cause allergic reactions. This method involved no forensic risk-only iron nerves.

He laid the two smaller syringes on the bathroom counter, then positioned himself to the left of the shower door. Behind the etched glass, a pale, flabby blur swayed in the steam. Eldon heard four wheezing breaths, then a groan that made him suspect Braid was either urinating or masturbating. A moment later, a strong odor confirmed the former. It took more than urine in the shower to disgust a pathologist, but Dr. Tarver was disgusted-not by the bodily function, but by Braid's essential weakness. The man had decided to change his life, then proved unequal to his desire. Braid's mental process eluded him. Why had the man broken down? Had he decided that it was all right to murder your wife quickly but a mortal sin if she suffered? That was the kind of contradictory thinking that afflicted the nation as a whole. Eager to be away, Eldon slid two gloved fingers behind the stainless steel pull on the shower door. Then he knelt, opened the door, and speared his needle into a prominent vein in Braid's lower leg.

There was no reaction.

He had injected almost the full barrel of insulin before Braid jerked away and gasped, "Wha…?" It reminded Eldon of the time his adoptive brother stuck a penknife into a cow's side. At first, nothing. Then the cow shambled three steps away and looked back at him in dumb incomprehension. Had Braid even felt the needle? Or was it the draft he'd noticed?

It was the draft! He was reaching out blindly to close the door. Either Braid suffered from severe neuropathy, or he was blind drunk. Before the door closed, Dr. Tarver slipped one hand behind Braid's ankles and yanked his feet out from under him. The man went down hard, banging his head on a tiled seat and possibly breaking his hip. After more than a minute of groaning, Braid tried to get back to his feet, but his left leg refused his considerable weight.

Dr. Tarver crabwalked away from the shower door and sat on the commode behind a small partition. Whatever injury Braid had sustained, the pain was severe enough to burn through the anesthetic alcohol. His groans slowly escalated to bellows of rage, then screams of panic. A plump white hand emerged from the open door, clutched the tiled edge of the shower basin. Eldon worried for a moment that the fat man might extricate himself from the shower, but then the insulin began to take effect. The fingers of the hand stopped moving, the screams faded back to groans, and finally the groans to silence.

Coma would soon follow.

Dr. Tarver got up, tossed the two unused syringes into the shower, then the empty vials from the drawer. Now came the truly unpleasant part of tonight's work. Before he left this house, he would have to search it from top to bottom, including the computers. He could take no chance that Braid had left behind a confession in any form.

Walking back to the shower stall, Eldon bent and pulled up one of Braid's eyelids. The pupils were fixed and dilated. William Braid was well on his way to being a vegetable, if he didn't die of shock on the journey. For the first time in many years, Eldon reflected, the fat man's face was not lined with care. As he walked down the hall toward Braid's study, Dr. Tarver decided that it would be no stretch to say that this operation had been a mercy.

Amen.

It was nearly dark in Natchez, but the stadium lights of three baseball fields had turned the surrounding park into an emerald island in the night. Chris had seen no further sign of Alex Morse, but he sensed that she was close. He had delayed going home to give himself time to think, but he wasn't going to get that time. After moping by the fence for a few minutes, Thora was now making her way up to him in the bleachers, two sweating bottles of Dasani in her hands. Chris had chosen a seat on the top bench, hoping to avoid endless recitations of medical symptoms. Thora spoke to every patient she passed, and they responded with the effusive welcome reserved for the wives of physicians on whom they depended.

"Are you going to tell me what's wrong?" Thora whispered, sitting beside him at last.

"Nothing," he said, staring straight ahead. "I just don't like to lose."

She set one of the bottles on the bench seat. "Seems like more than that."

"Nope."

Leaning toward him, Thora kept her eyes forward and spoke in a low voice. "I thought the prospect of sex would get you home early, win or lose."

He looked at her then. When she turned to him, Chris saw unfamiliar lines of tension around her eyes. "What did you do today?" he asked.

She drew back slightly. "That's a quick transition."