In the minutes it took to bind their hands and feet, the driver started to moan and come around. The passenger hadn’t budged, his respirations growing increasingly gurgly, and from the lie of his head, the neck looked a little twisted.

Mark grabbed the driver by the collar of his ski suit, pinched him hard on the earlobe to speed his ascent from the depths, and yelled, “What have you done to Lucy?”

The guy opened an eyelid. “Go see for yourself, asshole.”

Mark balled his fists and yanked the creep forward, as close to killing someone as he’d ever been. But Lucy mattered more. He threw the scum back, picked up the cell phone, and roused a very sleepy Dan Evans. “Don’t ask questions. Bring the cavalry-”

“Mark?”

“I’m east of the entrance to the home for unwed mothers. You’ll find two of Braden’s killers bound and gagged in Lucy’s car. One’s alive, the other – handle his neck with care if you ever want to question him.”

“Wha’-”

“Hurry! They’ve done something to Lucy.” He hesitated. Should he assume the worst? Better safe than sorry. “Get an air ambulance to the grounds of the building, pronto!”

“My God! Right!” He finally sounded fully awake.

Two minutes later Mark pulled his battered Jeep up in front of the gate, slipped the gun into his pocket, and yanked the headlamp over his ski hat. Quietly, he climbed the gate and started to run, entering the darkness of the forest. He didn’t turn on his light in case he’d give himself away. His insides seized with dread at what he’d find up ahead. Glancing at the luminous dial of his watch, he read 5:01.

New York City Hospital

Earl awoke with a jump, and immediately realized he’d dozed off. “Damn Demerol,” he muttered, glancing at his watch. Christ, he’d been asleep well over three hours.

Had someone slipped in here during that time?

He quickly eyed his IV bottle and did the calculation to estimate the amount that should remain. The fluid was at the line marked 250 ccs. Exactly where it should be. But anybody could have injected a needleful of God knows what into him or the bag. Yet he felt the same as before.

His stomach sent a shard of pain from his belly button through to his spine. No change there. Wait a minute. His arms and legs weren’t quite so listless. The potassium was kicking in.

He glanced over at his monitor.

The extra beats were less frequent.

If he’d been given something, it hadn’t hit him yet.

To keep his mind off doomsday scenarios, he fetched his diagram from where it had slid off the bed and got back to work. Just before he’d conked out, he’d started adding to his list of existing suspects all the people, especially doctors, who either had offered him food or drink between Saturday and Tuesday or come near enough in the hospital to have tampered with his IV, or both. Though he’d accepted the possibility of accomplices being involved, he still didn’t buy the idea of his having been contaminated at the funeral or in the cafeteria by rogue waiters or kitchen staff. Too messy.

That meant he started with Lena Downie. She’d brought tea to him a few times on Monday. The woman had no medical knowledge other than what she read in charts, and talked way too much ever to be chosen as an accomplice. Nevertheless, he wrote down her name at the side of the page.

Next there was Tanya, who’d made him coffee Tuesday morning. Of course he’d since put his life in her hands, but he put her down as well.

There were only two doctors he could specifically pinpoint. Again he felt there wasn’t much point, but wrote Melanie Collins and Tommy Leannis.

Except he’d already pegged his drink with Tommy as taking place after he’d been infected.

He added Samantha McShane to the list because of the coffee she’d served him when he’d been at her apartment on Wednesday morning. But that, too, had been outside the time frame for the organism to incubate. Besides, he’d already dismissed her as lacking the skills to be The Ghost on her own.

Which left Melanie and her martinis.

Great. He’d landed his own physician.

He pulled the covers around him, finding the air in the room clammy. Whether he was getting a fever, or the heating normally reached its nadir at this hour, he didn’t know. It was the quietest he’d ever heard the building, the usual rush of air through the ventilation system having been shut down. Out in the hallway a distant click echoed as if someone had closed a mausoleum door, and the squeak of rubber soles rushed by his room, then silence returned except for his own breathing and the occasional snarl of his intestines.

He doodled on his sheet of paper, making certain he hadn’t forgotten somebody who’d slipped him a nibble of food or sip of a drink. He couldn’t come up with a single other person. Only Melanie fit all the criteria.

“Yeah, right,” he muttered, his sarcasm venting the frustration of having drawn such a blank. She probably infected him with that blue lady she served at her penthouse. Fixed his IV herself, too, so she could add the bicarb. And the bloods, what better way to falsify his results than draw them herself, then substitute them with someone else’s.

He liked indulging in irony. It was often the most direct way to show up the absurdity of a bullshit idea and dispense with it – a valuable exercise in a busy ER where fuzzy thinking could be deadly.

Except this idea didn’t succumb. Instead of wilting under ridicule, it stayed in his head, nagging at him.

“Don’t be absurd,” he said out loud, trying to clear his mind and think straight, figuring the combination of pain, weakness, and Demerol were taking their toll.

Yet the notion stuck. Like a bad tune caught in a loop of memory, it kept going round and round. Because none of the other players he’d listed had the means and opportunity to do what had been done to him.

His little ditty didn’t ring so ironic all of a sudden.

No, he told himself. To think Melanie could be The Ghost was nuts. Insane. Had to be. For starters, what about motive? Why would she try to kill him? His investigation into Kelly’s murder didn’t have anything to do with her.

Besides, the reason she had means and opportunity wasn’t of her doing. She’d served him drinks on Tuesday because he’d wanted to see her then. She had access to his IV and took his bloods because he’d insisted in ER that she take care of him. To make anything more of it was plain paranoid.

Unless she’d used the situations he’d given her to her own advantage, suggested a perverse voice from the insolent part of his mind that had first played devil’s advocate by questioning the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, and Santa Claus when he was aged five. It had been getting him to the bottom of things ever since, and he ignored it at his peril.

Melanie had offered him that blue drink, topping his glass off from a separate pitcher, then washed her hands as thoroughly as if she were preparing for surgery. She’d arrived in his hospital room, carrying his IV bag that she’d already prepared elsewhere, despite everything she’d needed, including potassium vials, being in the medication bins at his beside. She took his bloods, slipping the full tubes into her lab coat pocket without labeling them first. All little details, none of which proved anything, but every one of them giving his suspicions free rein.

He sat huddled in the bedclothes, stunned by all the unthinkable things that swept so easily to mind, now that his normal checks against imagining the worst about her were breached.

What about motive – a motive that would make her commit murder to stop his investigation?

It couldn’t be because she herself had killed Kelly.

That idea was lunacy. She’d had no reason to murder her. Of course there’d been jealousy on Melanie’s part, Kelly being such a star. But surely that wouldn’t have been enough to commit murder over. Besides, around the time Kelly was killed, Melanie had already begun to blossom as a doctor. It must have been months earlier when she aced the Bessie McDonald case that started to build up her confidence. So people were well into making a fuss over her and her own work by that summer. He vividly recalled how she’d basked in all the attention. At times she carried it too far, the way she evidently craved and reveled in adulation. Judging from her grandstanding with the residents these last few days, he could see that nothing had changed on that front. But back then, as far as he could remember, after achieving her own moments in the spotlight, she threw off the old resentments about Kelly. If anything, he remembered Kelly growing cool to Melanie. She also seemed to find Melanie’s newfound enjoyment of being in the center of things during teaching rounds a bit off-putting. But he’d never heard words about it between the two women.