But tonight Timmie didn't look. She didn't stroke old leather or visit well-known tides. She focused instead on her daughter.

"I thought you didn't like it here."

Meghan didn't quite face her. Meghan hated to admit she was wrong. "I can't have a horse in California," she whispered.

Timmie probably should have told her that she couldn't have a horse here, either. But she knew what her little girl meant. Meghan had already begun to be seduced by those quiet, dark nights and corkball games. By walking home from school and having a pony down the block she could feed apples to on her way by. And Timmie had no right taking those things away from her.

Even for the sound of sirens.

She sighed. "So you've decided to be a country mouse?"

Meghan nodded, head still tucked into Timmie's neck. "Only if my daddy could find me."

Timmie held on tighter. She fought all the old anxieties. "Your daddy knows where to find us," she assured her little girl. "As long as we're where he expects us to be, he'll find us."

Where he expects us to he.

Where he expects us to be. Why did that suddenly make her want to turn around and go back down to her statistics...

Timmie froze midthought.

Oh, God. Oh, no. She was wrong. She had to be wrong. That couldn't have been what she'd seen.

Timmie almost dropped Meghan down the stairs. She squeezed her hard, then set her on her feet. "Hang on a second, hon. I have to check something."

"Mom!"

But Timmie was already back down the stairs. Grabbing a highlighter out of the pen forest she'd been collecting in an old popcorn tin, Timmie bent back over the printout. She highlighted the names that were familiar to her. Lila Travers, Milton Preston, maybe Clara Schultz. Patients she'd personally dismissed from her ER. Added to the ER statistics as their own, as if they had come from the outside with only moments to live so they just brushed along the fringes of the hospital.

Except they hadn't come from the outside. That was what suddenly stood out to her. She had worked on the assumption that the numbers were okay because she was checking familiar ratios to see if they were wrong. ER, OR, ICU, Med/Surg. The ER numbers had been higher, but that didn't reflect on the hospital proper. The ER stood separate, individual, like an island in a larger sea. And Timmie would have seen a change in the ER. She would have heard, would have sensed or smelled.

But she'd been wrong. Not about the ER. About the ratio. It wasn't right. The ER numbers weren't honest. Timmie hadn't taken into account the patients they'd been seeing from Restcrest. The policy had changed no more than six months ago so that any Restcrest patient with a resuscitation order would be immediately transported to the ER if they needed treatment.

And if they died, they were dismissed as ER patients.

No, no, no, she wanted to say with her whole heart. It can't be that. I'll find it isn't that when I look closer.

She had to get back to that computer. She had to double-check which patients had come in from Restcrest. Because if her suspicions were true, it wasn't the ER's numbers that were going up, it was Restcrest's. And intentionally or not, the hospital's new policy was camouflaging that.

They were hiding the fact that there were more people dying in Restcrest than anybody knew.

Chapter 13

Another geek, Murphy thought with no little frustration. Another undernourished, overeducated freak of nature who seemed unable to communicate with anything but a microscope and, evidently, Alex Raymond.

No wonder these guys got into so much trouble.

Lanky and dark, Peter Davies was good-looking in an absentminded professor kind of way, with unkempt hair he kept dragging out of his eyes as he talked, deep-set hazel eyes, and a sheepish grin that probably delighted the ladies. If they wanted to put up with that six-week-old lab coat, that is, or the constant chatter about gene therapy and amyloidal plaques.

Davies's realm was much more impressive than his hygiene, anyway. Definitely high tech, gleaming white, with acres of test tubes, herds of centrifuges, walls of gleaming stainless-steel refrigerators. Light microscopes and electron microscopes and enough DNA testing equipment to staff the FBI. There was great work going on here, as reflected in the serious young faces of the research assistants and the static of excitement that permeated their conversation. Science was their god, and they were its priests facing down demon Alzheimer.

"I've already shown you the PET scan pictures," Davies said, shoving his hair out of his eyes with one hand and waving a color-enhanced photo of a shriveling brain with the other as they walked away from the populated area of the lab. "So you see the progressive destruction of the cortical areas, yes?"

His eyes still full of desiccated brain, Murphy nodded. Here he took notes. He was hearing about hippocampuses and neurofibrillary tangles and serum amyloid P. Words so familiar to Davies that he didn't stop to explain them to the reporter. The reporter, frustrated, tired, and disappointed by finding just what people had said he would, desperately wanted a cigarette. Instead, he got a stool at the far end of the lab, which made him think Davies had probably forgotten where his office was.

"It is the amyloidal plaques we're interested in," Davies said, pacing. "They're sort of like neurological junk piles that build up in certain areas of the brain, yes? Our focus is to keep them from forming and interfering with the neurotransmitters that link neural synapses and form thought. You understand?"

No.

"Sure."

A quick nod and he was off again. "To do that, we have concentrated on the part played by a substance known as apolipoprotein E, or Apo E, which seems to collect the plaques like a... well, a lint catcher."

Murphy jotted the words protein lint catcher and left it at that. He didn't give a damn about proteins he couldn't pronounce. He just wanted to know what they had to do with Restcrest.

"And how does your unique arrangement with Restcrest help you do this?" he asked.

Davies blinked a moment in response to the change of conversational direction. "Research money, of course. Alex is a whiz at that kind of thing. And we do excellent work because of our relationship with Restcrest. Restcrest gives us access to raw material other research labs are begging for."

"Raw material?"

Davies blinked again. "You do know that right now the only way to definitely diagnose Alzheimer's is through autopsy, yes?"

"You can't just mock up the problem on a computer simulation, you mean."

"Exactly. We need affected tissue to study it, and Restcrest provides that. It also enables us to correlate a patient's symptomology and family history with the postmortem microscopic changes on a scale not easily matched. A rare opportunity."

"I imagine."

Davies bounced, then leaned close. "Most people don't appreciate how important that is," he insisted, his eyebrows telegraphing his intensity like furry semaphores. "Without a facility like Restcrest, we would have to rely on donations. We wouldn't have complete access to the patients to study them while they're alive, not to mention the next generation of potential patients before they're symptomatic. As a matter of fact, because of the good image Restcrest has, we're starting to see donations of nonsymptomatic brains with familial histories. Young brains, Mr. Murphy. We don't get many of those, you see?"