“I’ve been going over old records related to Kelly’s death, specifically my father’s old medical chart on her. In it I found photocopies of M and M reports on two cases of dig toxicity in 1974, the year of her disappearance. Her name was on the order sheets, as well as yours. And get this, the staff person initialing the orders was hubby Chaz.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I don’t know what to make of them or why they’d be there. I wondered if maybe Kelly asked my father to review the cases because she thought there was wrongdoing somewhere.”

“On the part of whom?” She sounded astonished.

“Her husband. I thought perhaps she’d been looking for something to hold over his head in order to keep him at bay, as part of her plan to leave him.”

Silence reigned for a few seconds. “I see. I suppose that makes sense.”

“What I wanted to know, Melanie, was if you can recall anything suspect about Chaz Braden’s clinical work that year. In particular, do you remember any issues around his management of patients on digoxin?”

“Not generally. Do you know the patient names?”

“Not yet. I only have chart numbers.”

She chuckled yet again, the tone a pitch higher this time. “Sorry. You’ll pardon me if I don’t recall all the cases I wrote orders on. Will you be looking up the original charts?”

“No, Earl Garnet’s getting those-” He could have kicked himself. Blurting out to the likes of Melanie Collins that Earl was helping him – what an asshole move. More than anyone, with her intuition about Kelly being in love, she could nail Earl as the man. God, he sucked like an amateur at this sleuthing stuff. “I needed someone who’d been in her class to question her contemporaries,” he quickly added. “Had to twist his arm, yet he finally agreed.”

“But Mark, I could have helped you.”

Yikes. “Oh, I knew you would, Melanie. The thing is, since I’m basically questioning if Chaz’s competency was an issue back then, the inquiry could get nasty, and I thought it better to ask someone well beyond the long arm of the Bradens.” Amazing how quickly he could come up with a credible lie when he had to.

“Chaz isn’t the brilliant man his father is,” Melanie said, after a long silence. “But he makes up for it by being fastidious. Drives people nuts, the way he always double-checks and micromanages things, yet by putting in long hours does get things done. A real workaholic. So let’s just say he wouldn’t be chief without ‘Daddy’ pulling the strings. But out and out negligence? No way. Not even ‘Daddy’ could cover that up these days.”

“What about in ‘seventy-four?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Those days he was only a few years out of a cardiac residency and up-to-date in his training, so he appeared to do pretty well. As son of the big man, he certainly got the benefit of any doubts over his clinical abilities. I don’t think anyone in the hospital besides his father and friends of Kelly knew about his weekend drinking then. We only learned of it through her and what we saw for ourselves at parties up there. The truth is, most people at NYCH didn’t even realize what a bastard he was until much later.”

“So there could have been more chance of an error by him going undetected in ‘seventy-four?”

“It’s worth a thought, isn’t it? Certainly no one would have been keeping a suspicious eye on him. Listen, Mark, I have to go. Rounds start at seven, and Monday’s always a monster for consults in the ER. When you know the names of those patients, give me a call. And I’m penciling in a visit with you for two weeks from now.”

He thanked her and said good night. The first thing that came to mind after hanging up had nothing to do with the case.

If he kept picking the Melanies of the world, he told himself, he might turn into another Collins – a middle-aged physician coming on to horny, lonely thirtysomethings for sex and company. The thought gave him the creeps. Yet if someone as successful and good-looking as she could end up that way…

He eyed his desk. Paperwork and unopened mail, never something he attended to promptly in the best of times, had piled up more than usual since Kelly’s body had been found. And he had his own monster day tomorrow, the weeks before the snow flew always being a busy period, his elderly patients needing flu shots and final checkups before they tucked themselves in for the winter. Tucking in… exactly what he needed to do for himself. He was beat. He detoured by the closet, then took himself and his trusty bat to bed.

Monday, November 19, 8:30 A.M.

New York City

The rhythmic electricity in the streets of Manhattan never changed for Earl. Even in old thirties movies Fred Astaire could be dancing along Times Square, and in the background there would be the purring motors, strident horns, thousands of teeming footsteps and bobbing heads, all syncopated to the buzz of chattering voices and leaving little doubt where Busby Berkeley or Gershwin got their inspiration. These days, he figured, those same rhythms spawned the beat to hip-hop, but the sound remained the same, and it washed over him as he walked down Second Avenue toward New York City Hospital.

Standing in the building’s shadow, waiting for the red to change at the intersection of Thirty-third, he closed his eyes. The familiar cacophony carried him back in time, to the point he imagined he would open his eyes again to find Kelly, Melanie, Tommy, and Jack at his side, impatiently waiting at that same stoplight, fretting about morning rounds.

He blinked and was alone. The two who were dearest to him in those days were dead – Jack, his closest friend, who’d sacrificed his life for him, and Kelly. Tommy had parlayed his B-student vexations into the stuff of a grade-A whine-ass, and Melanie, always a coquette, had apparently become the female counterpart to a roué.

The light changed, and he started across, huddled in his raincoat as wind and drizzle gusted up Thirty-third from the East River.

The cement-and-glass structure where he’d been forged into a doctor loomed over him, its upper stories lost in fog. For an instant it reclaimed the hold it used to exert on his nerve, jacking up his heartbeat and giving the acid in his stomach a stir before it just as quickly became simply another hospital, no different from the hundreds he’d visited in various official capacities throughout his long career.

Still, when the sliding doors opened to receive him, and hospital smells assaulted his nose, he felt caught in the crosscurrents of then and now.

Security was as meticulous as in his own St. Paul’s, the officers checking photo ID, scanning him down for metal, even having him remove his shoes. “No stinky feet,” he murmured, smiling to himself and missing Janet after his night alone in the hotel.

His grin must have made him look suspicious because a frowning guard gave him another extra thorough once-over with his wand before sending him through. But they did have his visitor’s badge waiting. Mark had obviously been on the job as far as greasing the administrative wheels.

He set out for medical records, pushing through the rush of white-coated students, interns, and residents, all scurrying after the flapping white coats of their appointed staff person and engaged in the constant banter of questions and answers that had been the method of choice for teaching medicine since the days of Socrates.

“What’s the differential of a solitary swollen red joint?” demanded an elegant gray-haired woman leading her pack into the outpatient’s department.

“Traumatic, inflammatory, septic,” a blond young man with the shortest clinical jacket in the group snapped back at her.

“Very good. Now what’s the most likely diagnosis in the inflammatory category?”

“Which joint?” demanded a woman with red hair pulled back in a ponytail.