“But don’t think I’m fingering him just because I want to get even with the guy. I really liked Bessie. If someone did mess with her, all I’m after is to damn well make sure nobody just shuffles what happened here under the rug. They’re a little laissez-faire about relapses and death around this floor for my liking.”

Earl again sympathized. Geriatrics was a discipline of settling, becoming resigned to death; in critical care, however, as in ER, they defied it.

“There’s another person to whom she might have confided. Dr. Collins visited her that night.”

“Melanie?”

“Just a social call. Bessie wasn’t admitted under her this time. But she thought the world of Dr. Collins. Told me more than once how that woman’s fast action staved off her first stroke. She blamed her current doctors for not doing the same.”

“Why do you think she’d tell Melanie anything about Chaz?”

“Bessie had been in a mood to talk about him, and I don’t think she intended to be flattering. Since I didn’t have time to listen, maybe she bent Dr. Collins’s ear.”

Earl thanked her and took the elevator down to the ground floor where he slipped outside the Thirty-third Street entrance, determined to contact Melanie. In the harsh glare of winter sunlight, he joined the other cell phone users who restlessly circled and turned like pigeons flocked at the pedestal of a statue, their murmurings rising above the noisy morning traffic.

He had to settle on leaving her yet another message. Why wasn’t she answering her calls?

An attempt to reach Mark yielded the same out-of-order recording he’d gotten last night.

“The whole planet’s gone wireless, and I can’t talk to a soul,” he muttered, waiting for an operator to get him the man’s home number.

This time he got through.

“Roper.”

“Mark, it’s Earl Garnet. I’ve got news.”

“I hope it’s better than mine. But you first.”

Earl told him all about Bessie McDonald, including the possibility that a few weeks after Kelly’s disappearance his father might have pulled her chart along with that of the man who’d died of digoxin toxicity. As he talked, he heard an annoying series of clicks on the line. Probably the result of a poor connection, he thought, ignoring them.

10:30 A.M.

Hampton Junction

Mark could tell a lot about a medical resident’s skill after observing the person handle a single patient.

Watching Lucy O’Connor, he waited until a half dozen of his regulars had passed through her hands before he admitted she practiced medicine as well as he’d first thought, she was that good. Most trainees managed a small number of people while he saw to the bulk of the visits, the entire process made much longer by his need to review and sometimes revise what they did. So far Lucy had seen all the morning appointments by herself, doing it as efficiently and thoroughly as he normally would. On checking her work, he found himself discussing cases with her on the level of a colleague, and she referred to recent journal articles with ease. What impressed him most was how, while drawing on an academic knowledge base that he considered awesome, she kept her therapeutic decisions practical and her recommendations for referrals or tests tailored to what they had available in the sticks.

And the local vote was unanimous.

“I like her!”

“She’s wonderful.”

“Not like those other ‘kids’ they usually send you.”

So he sat at his desk with time on his hands while Lucy worked the examining room. Besides using the opportunity to arrange for a loaner Jeep with his insurance company and make a stab at the piles of unopened mail, he kept trying to make sense of everything Earl had told him.

That his father had gone after those same two charts didn’t surprise him. After all, it was evident from Kelly’s file he’d had an interest in them. What that interest had been, he still hadn’t a clue.

The coincidence of Bessie McDonald slipping into a coma the night after Kelly’s body was identified – that left him incredulous. He couldn’t help but speculate how someone could have arranged for her to convulse herself into the far side of oblivion. As ideas popped into his head, he grabbed a pencil and started to jot a few down.

Strychnine?

Convulsions were a hallmark of its lethal effects. Not only would it be detected on testing but also would leave a telltale rictus grin on the victim’s face. Not much of a choice if the “relapse” were to be taken as natural.

What about something that caused seizures but wasn’t normally thought of as a poison? There were a lot of medications with convulsions as a side effect that wouldn’t initially be thought of as an agent to test for, as long as no one suspected unnatural causes. Lidocaine, the antiarrhythmic and lo-cal anesthetic, for instance, could cause prolonged seizures if given intravenously in large enough doses. But it or other drugs wouldn’t be so likely to escape notice in a forensic investigation. After all, a suspicious toxicologist could think up just as many agents as any poisoner when it came to screening for the pharmacology of deliberately induced status epilepticus. Would Chaz, for instance, have been reckless enough to assume no one would consider the woman’s coma to be the result of foul play?

Maybe… or maybe not.

Mark grabbed his copy of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine off his bookshelf and opened it to the section on seizures. Finding a table listing their causes, he considered other possibilities.

Trauma – too obvious.

Alcohol – too messy.

Recreational drugs – too obvious and messy.

Metabolic disturbances: Hypocalcemia; hypomagnesemia; hyponatremia – now here was something.

Some of these could be induced by medication, but persist after the offending pills were discontinued.

Take severe hyponatremia, a low sodium level in the blood, as an example. It could be brought on in susceptible individuals by certain diuretics, even at normal dose levels.

But that couldn’t be the case here. It would have taken days, maybe weeks to make it happen, not twenty-four hours. Unless Chaz, or someone, hadn’t waited for the police to confirm Kelly’s identity before making his move against Bessie. After all, he knew what the result would be, and it made sense to act ahead of time – no, that didn’t work either. The blood tests they’d done on Bessie the morning they found her would have revealed the drop in sodium.

Of course, there was the possibility of induced hypoglycemia. A shot of short-acting insulin could start a nondiabetic’s blood sugar heading downward in less than an hour, the maximum effect occurring within five to six hours. Since the nurses hadn’t been able to pin down the precise time of the seizure, the insulin could have been wearing off after they found her, and the intravenous dextrose she received would have masked any lingering effects. As for the time sequence, she would have had to receive the injection before midnight. Chaz could easily have concocted a reason to be in the hospital at that hour, though he’d have been taking a chance slipping into her room himself. So maybe he’d arranged for someone else to do his dirty work – He threw down his pencil and crumpled up his notes. Listen to me, he thought. Last night’s attack had him so chomping at the bit to nail Chaz, he was becoming obsessed with the man, dreaming up ludicrously wild scenarios about him.

For the hundredth time he eyed the phone, willing Dan to call with word on what he’d found at the wreck and whether he’d talked with Braden. Phoning the sheriff himself wasn’t exactly an option, having already bugged him so many times Dan had told him to back off.

He returned to opening his mail, trying to keep his mind off it all.