The sun had finally slipped away, hooding the neighborhood in a blue-black darkness. But in the light of the street lamps I could see Dr. Hamilton clearly. We said nothing for a moment, just two women, eyes meeting.

“Mom!” one of her kids yelled again.

She turned and walked toward the house, the crisp white of her shirt contrasting against the new night.

I walked back to the car, drove in silence. Fifteen minutes later, as I got off on North Avenue, she called.

T he exterior of Dr. Hamilton’s house might have been old Chicago, but the inside had been gutted and redone to perfection.

Dr. Hamilton looked as if she had been crying since I turned around and drove back to her house. She had put the kids to bed. The two of us sat at her kitchen table-big, made of a deep maple that shone luminously.

“Do you see all this?” She gestured at the delicate lights dangling over the island. They looked like hand-blown Italian glass. She pointed at the large, shiny appliances. “See that stove? That’s Le Corneau. It cost twenty-five thousand dollars. And my whole house is like that. Everyone thinks doctors make so much money. Are you kidding me? That’s what I thought too when I was in medical school and then in residency and then in my fellowship, and the whole time I’m just taking on loans and loans and loans. My husband and I have kids, and he stops working because I’m the doctor, right? I’m making so much money.” She stopped and put her head in her hands. Then she raised her face and looked at me, eyes tormented. “Do you really think Jackson Prince had anything to do with Jane’s murder?”

“I don’t know. I just know that I didn’t do it.” I took a breath. “Look, here’s the thing. I’m a lawyer.” I laughed. “Or I was. And I know you doctors don’t love lawyers, but it was…it is…a great profession. And I was a part of that until it went away last year, and I thought I had it bad then. But now I’m about to lose a hell of a lot more than my profession. I could lose my life here.” I hadn’t said that out loud before, hadn’t even really thought it. But it was true. And it was terrifying.

Dr. Hamilton must have seen the panic in my face. She dropped her head in her hands again. “I never should have told Jane anything. I should have kept my mouth shut.” She sat up and crossed her arms, then tugged at the collar of her white blouse. “I’m putting my license at risk if I talk about what I did. I mean, I didn’t kill anyone or anything, but…” She shook her head. “The thing is my husband is gone. And I don’t really want to practice medicine anymore. I really don’t.”

I said nothing. I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. But then the whole story poured out.

When she had been accepted into a rheumatology practice after her residency, she thought her life of bills and student loans was over. She was making enough not just to pay those loans back but to save and to put her kids in Ivy League colleges. Her children wouldn’t have to hustle and piece together scholarships and grants like she had. Dr. Hamilton and her husband bought the house. They put her kids in the University of Chicago Lab School, and they lived well, she said. They lived big.

But Medicare payments got cut, and then insurance companies slashed the amounts for which they would reimburse physicians. Meanwhile, her own insurance premiums skyrocketed. Her two partners at her small practice were getting older, and they asked her to step in as managing partner. She did, but sometimes she had to take a cut in monthly pay, just to pay her partners their salaries. Then one of her partners got sued, and the verdict was outside his insurance coverage. The attorneys for the patient went after the doctor’s practice group, and because of some legal loophole due to a shoddy limited liability corporation (set up before Dr. Hamilton was even on board) the practice took a hit, and then none of the doctors got paid for a while.

The result, Dr. Hamilton said, was that she found herself in dire financial straits. As she talked, her face looked stricken under the soft light that emanated from the Italian glass. She couldn’t admit it to anyone. She was a doctor, after all. She was the star of her family and her friends. And yet because her husband was staying home with the kids and not working, she found herself in a worse financial position than anyone she knew.

“And then I met Jackson Prince.” Her eyes stared up at the Italian glass, as if to stop tears from falling. “I can’t stand it when doctors testify against other doctors, especially in the same city. I said I’d never do it, but I started putting feelers out there, saying that I would review some medical malpractice cases. I needed to figure out some way to make money. Prince calls. Asks me to consult on one case. I gave a deposition for him. He said the other attorneys were blown out of the water because I was so cool under pressure. And I liked hearing that, you know? Because personally I was under so much pressure. I thought maybe I’d testify some more. But there aren’t a lot of rheumatology malpractice cases. I asked Prince a couple of times if he had any more work for me. He said not yet. And then he asked if I prescribed Ladera.”

She stopped, exhaling as if she’d just remembered to do so.

“And had you recommended that drug to your patients?” I asked.

She smiled bitterly. “That was another kick in the pants. The drug reps who pushed Ladera were persuasive. I mean, they can’t wine and dine doctors the way they used to back in the pharmaceutical heyday, but they would ask you to give talks for them and they paid you for the talks. The more you prescribed the drug, the more they liked you and asked you to do these talks and pay you for it. So I made Ladera my preferred arthritis drug. I prescribed it for ninety-five percent of my arthritis patients.”

“Did any of them have heart complications like the lawsuit alleges?”

“Some. Two died. I referred the cases to Jackson Prince’s office. And then he called one day. I remember it because I was in my office and our lawyers had just told me that we’d lost another lawsuit. One of my partners had really gotten sloppy in his old age. And so I get this call, and I can feel it all swooping away from me, and I was so scared. And then Prince calls and we talked and I thought, ‘How funny. One lawyer sinks me, another one saves me.’”

“What did he say?”

She pressed her lips together hard. “He said I must have other patients who had heart problems. He was looking for more plaintiffs.”

“Was this after the class action suit was filed?”

“Before. There were a smattering of isolated Ladera cases, but Prince wanted to get more and get them certified for class action status. He told me that’s where all the money is.”

“But if you personally didn’t have any other patients who had problems from Ladera, there was no one to refer to Prince, right?”

She sighed. “He didn’t just want referrals. He wanted me to go through my records and find anybody who’d developed the tiniest heart condition or wheezing or shortness of breath, or anything like that. I’ll give you an example. A large number of women over fifty develop mitral valve prolapse, okay? It’s a minor condition where the chambers of the heart don’t exactly close perfectly. It’s usually harmless, and it isn’t normally caused by anything specific. But it is a heart condition, and if that patient had taken Ladera, even if there was only a small chance the drug could have caused it, Prince could file a lawsuit for them.”

“And increase the numbers of plaintiffs,” I said. “And get lead-counsel status. And get a lot of money if the lawsuit brings settlements or verdicts.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know how all that legal stuff works. I didn’t want to know. I just heard Prince tell me that if I gave him the names of these patients and their contact information, he’d never say he got the names from me. He’d just contact them and ask if they’d ever taken Ladera, whether they’d ever had a condition like mitral valve prolapse-or whatever condition I told him they had-and he’d tell them he’d file a lawsuit for them. Patients don’t say no to that, right? It’s potential free money.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “And that’s what his offer was like for me, too.”