He flipped ahead, seeing entries indicating Cam Roper had provided Kelly with support therapy over several years, from 1970 until 1974. “Obviously these sessions involved other kinds of scars. Invisible ones. God knows Chaz gave her enough cause for grief, and Samantha wasn’t exactly a mother of the year.”

Mark nodded.

“What are these doing here?” Earl asked, finding what he immediately recognized from their format as reports from NYCH Death Rounds.

“I don’t know. I didn’t look at them too closely – figured they must have been misfiled.”

Earl riffled through them. After years of auditing his own department, he could read the chart of a resuscitation and run it like a movie in his head. He just didn’t glean information; he could place himself in the middle of the action and sense whether the team had worked together with grace or in utter discord. Most telling was the order sheet. The time entries indicated what drugs they gave in what sequence and revealed not only whether they’d done the right things, but if they’d been fast enough doing them. In minutes he had both cases pegged and more. “Now we’re getting somewhere, Mark.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes.” He spread the papers out between them. “First the cases themselves. Both received the right treatment in a timely enough way, but the woman was a close call. Initially, whoever ran the arrest almost fell into the trap of ordering more digoxin. See where the order’s been written, then canceled?” He pointed at the appropriate line. “One person figured out what was really going on in the nick of time. After that, everything went like a charm.”

“Okay, but that hasn’t got anything to do with Kelly-”

“Not so. Look at this signature on one of the orders.”

Mark peered at the paper. “I can’t make it out.”

“Not surprising, given how we all scrawl our names.” said Earl. Doctors’ signatures were always indecipherable. That’s why residents and physicians had to enter their training or license numbers after anything they wrote in a chart. “But some of these stand out to me because we were in a study group together all through med school. I’d recognize them as surely as if I’d gone through a yearbook of old class photos.” He picked up the photocopy of Kelly’s letter, folded it to the bottom third where she’d signed Kelly, and shoved it beside the order sheet. “Recognize the handwriting?”

Mark grabbed both papers and held them up together. “My God, it’s her signature!”

“She was there, Mark.” He pushed the order sheet for the man who’d died toward him. “And at this patient’s resuscitation as well. Her name appears several places.”

“My God.” Mark looked up from studying the papers. “But you said they managed this guy fine from the get-go, besides the fact he died.”

“Right. His was the more typical, straightforward presentation of digoxin toxicity, the usual slow heart rate that, when a patient’s on the medication, immediately makes us all think of the right diagnosis. So everybody was on the ball with him.”

“So why would my father keep a copy of either case in her file?”

“Look at the staffman’s initials on both order sheets.”

State regulations demanded that all orders by trainees must be countersigned by their supervising physicians. Most scribbled only their initials and license number.

Mark once more peered at the entries. “C. B. – Chaz Braden?”

“We can check his license number to be sure, but I’d say that’s the reason these files were with your father.”

“Because they were Chaz’s cases?”

Earl leaned back and took a sip of what by now was cold coffee. “Because Kelly feared Chaz,” he said.

Mark stopped midway reaching for his teacup. “Pardon?”

Earl leaned forward. “Think about her preparing to run from a man who might come after her. Maybe she brought his M and M cases to your dad and asked him to check them out, hoping to find if hubby had screwed up, trying to get something that would have given her leverage over him. She might have figured on using it to keep him at bay, making it easier for her to leave.” He picked her letter up from the table and pointed to where she’d written:

Regarding the other two matters, we must discuss those. Whatever I plan for myself, I can’t leave and let them go unresolved.

“She could be referring to something her husband did wrong with these two cases.”

“But you just said, apart from a close call, they were free from screwups.”

“That brings us back to your original question – why your father would bother to hang on to them. He must have still thought something seemed wrong. After all, even a case review can miss mistakes.”

“Not often.”

“They would if the doctor in question was an amoral son of a bitch intent on covering them up and had successfully falsified the records. Maybe Kelly and your father wanted to subject Chaz’s work to a bit more scrutiny.”

Earl knew he’d made spectacular leaps in logic to entertain such an extraordinary set of conclusions. He also knew they’d have to go through the original files in their entirety to ever prove what he’d just suggested. Even then, supposing his hunches were correct, they still might not find anything incriminating if Braden had covered his tracks well enough. But this was the first sign that evidence against Chaz might exist after all – evidence that would show he’d made lethal mistakes, then tried to hide them, and that Kelly found out, perhaps confronted him – he grabbed the order sheet from Mark, his excitement growing.

“I think I can make out a few other names from my class. Two of them, Tommy Leannis and Melanie Collins, attended the memorial service. And check this out. According to her signature here, Melanie seems to be the one who counteracted the order for digoxin and saved the day. With the license numbers of the people I don’t recognize, I could track them down for questioning as well. Maybe a few of them will tell me whether they remember anything screwy about working with Braden on cases involving digoxin. Most of us recall errors by our former professors, though we wouldn’t dare talk about it much at the time.” As he spoke, a sense of exhilaration swept through him. After nearly two weeks of holding his breath, helpless to do anything – the worst kind of agony for someone whose every instinct in a crisis is to act – he had something concrete to pursue.

“Wait a minute,” said Mark. “I’m the one to follow up on that. You and Kelly weren’t as discreet as you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the last thing you need is for one of your former classmates to put two and two together the way I did and nail you as the mystery man. Somebody is liable to do exactly that if you show undue interest in solving Kelly’s murder. I can just hear Chaz Braden suggesting the idea that his wife had realized she’d made a mistake having an affair, but you killed her when she tried to break it off. The NYPD would be back in the case and on your ass in a flash.”

“And I’ll say the mistake she made was to tell Braden she intended to leave him, and he killed her for it.”

“Terrific. The cops will throw you both in jail-”

“Mark, I’m doing it, and that’s that. The only hope I have of ever getting free of this mess before it destroys my whole fucking life is to catch the real killer, presumably Chaz Braden. The people we need to talk with at NYCH – classmates, nurses, and doctors – they’re all of the era when I did my training there. Chances are they’ll still consider me one of them and will open up, despite pressure from the Bradens on everyone to keep their mouths shut. Even the ones who think they don’t have any information, if I can get them reminiscing, might spill something useful.” He turned back to Kelly’s file. Nothing but a bunch of newspaper clippings remained. “Now what the hell are these?” he said, picking them up. Unaccustomed to being opposed or explaining his actions once he’d made up his mind, he considered the issue of who would do what closed. The sooner Mark realized that asking Earl Garnet to stay hands off and lay low was tantamount to telling him not to breathe, the better the two of them would work together.