Barb lifted an eyebrow. "You'd trust Cindy with delicate information? You are desperate."

Timmie shut her eyes. "Oh, man. The things I do for the truth."

"Now," Barb said, dropping the instruments on the sterile towel and ripping off her gloves. "Let me look at that list."

She looked while Timmie cleaned Murphy's face, dressed his cut, and handed back his shirt and ice packs.

She hummed and whistled and paged back and forth as if she were going through a company ledger. And then, when Timmie had all but run out of patience, Barb sat back on the wingback she'd commandeered, crossed her leg over her other knee, and nodded.

"You're right. This is weird."

Timmie looked up from the trash bag she'd been filling. "You do recognize them, then?"

Barb blinked. "Recognize who?"

Timmie's heart sank. "The patients from Restcrest who were dismissed out of the ER. Because of that new policy of transferring all seriously ill Restcrest patients to the ER, the Restcrest mortality numbers are skewed. On the printout, it looks like they're declining. They're really going up."

"Oh, that," Barb retorted. "Sure. I figured that out." She opened the pages again and pointed to several lines. "The thing that bothers me is that they almost all died of cardiac arrest."

Timmie dropped what she was doing. "What?"

Now it was Murphy's turn to look confused. He'd just tottered to his feet and was tucking his blood-encrusted shirt back in. "I guess I don't have this right. I thought cardiac arrest was something you died of."

"Of course it is," Barb snapped. "It's what everybody dies of, if you want to get technical about it. Your heart stops beating, you die. But something else causes the heart to stop beating, and that's what should go on these lines. You understand?"

Timmie imagined that Murphy nodded. She didn't see, though. She was already bent over the printout, furious at her own oversight. "Oh, my God," she whispered, seeing the evidence for herself. "You're right."

Barb kept skimming with a blunt finger. "See? There's Mr. Cleveland, and Mrs. Salgado?" She stabbed at one line in particular and smiled an oddly whimsical smile. "And here's Mr. Stein, you remember him? He always dropped by with cookies."

Timmie shook her head, still too stunned. "I missed it."

Line after line, Barb pointed out the obvious, tucked in among the myocardial infarctions, the cardiovascular accidents, the sudden infant death syndromes, the multiple traumas from MVA.

Cardiac arrest

Cardiac arrest

Cardiac arrest

At least fifteen of them. And they'd never been caught by the hospital, the coroner, or the physician who was the heart and soul of the most advanced Alzheimer's unit in the country.

"They're all Restcrest's?" Timmie asked.

Barb nodded. "I recognize enough of them."

Now even Murphy was looking. "Weren't you suspicious that you had so many people coming in from the same place?"

"Why should we be?" Barb retorted. "They were old. You expect old people to die, ya know?"

That was when Timmie felt the worst. The most ridiculously, pompously, self-delusional worst. "Which is why it's so easy to murder them," she admitted, wanting suddenly to cry. "It's one of the first lessons I learned in forensics. The easiest people to murder are the elderly, because nobody's really surprised when they die."

"Especially people with Alzheimer's," Barb agreed.

Murder. They had been murdered. Maybe not all of them. Probably not all of them. They were, after all, all over the age of sixty, some well into their nineties and frail and high risk.

But enough. Enough that Timmie the death investigator, the Forensics Fairy, should at least have asked. Instead, she'd just wrapped them up and rolled them out and only questioned their disposition when the coroner had been an asshole.

And now, the only way to make amends was to spend at least ten hours up to her hips in meandering, muttering, miscast phantoms from a thinking person's nightmare. She was going to have to do time at Restcrest. And then she was going to have to face her father and then admit that she was putting him in danger by even asking the questions she needed to ask. She was going to have to face every demon that had sent her screaming from this town. It was enough to make her want to vomit.

And to think that the only reason she'd gotten into this in the first place was because she'd decided it would be better than dealing with Jason.

Jason.

Hell, she hadn't decided what to do about him, either.

Well, Scarlett, she thought, so close to tears she had to leave the room, tomorrow's just come, and you're not ready.

Chapter 15

Murphy had survived other mornings after.

This one was pretty typical except for the fact that he didn't have alcohol mucking it up. He was sore in a thousand places, dizzy if he turned too fast, and moving on a par with an arthritic octogenarian. It didn't make a bit of difference to his stomach, which was as much a tyrant as ever. So when he awoke right on cue at dawn, he only managed to stay in bed another couple of hours before venturing out into Leary's kitchen.

Besides, even the kitchen was better than that back bedroom he'd slept in with its stale smells and sad mementos. Murphy couldn't imagine having to live in this house with all its discarded history. He couldn't imagine Timmie Leary moving through it as if it all didn't exist. But then Timmie Leary was a series of contradictions that intrigued an old newsman almost as much as that red-and-green tattoo on her right thigh.

The outside of her thigh, just at panty line, where nobody but a beaten-up drunk lying on the floor could have seen it.

Damn tattoo. Murphy hadn't been actively libidinous in years. It wasn't worth the effort. But he'd dreamed of that tattoo at least twice during the night, even knowing perfectly well it wouldn't do him any good. Timmie Leary didn't want to come within spitting distance of him, and in his more cognizant moments, Murphy couldn't agree more.

If only he hadn't seen the tattoo.

"That's disgusting," he heard behind him.

Murphy probably turned too fast, but then guilt will do that. He grabbed the edge of the old gas stove for balance when the room spun and he saw two or three Learys standing in the doorway in jeans, Marvin the Martian sweatshirt, and bare feet.

His first instinct was that she'd overheard his more objectionable thoughts. Not quite. Her focus was on the eggs that were spitting in her frying pan on the stove.

"Like some?" he asked with wry amusement.

Timmie's smile was not pretty. "I hope you'll be sufficiently warned if I just tell you that not even coffee helps me at this hour of the morning."

He didn't even bother to smile. Just turned back to the stove, picked up the Rabid Nurse coffee mug he'd been drinking his own coffee from, and flipped his eggs.

"Make yourself at home," she said and padded in.

From the looks of her, Timmie hadn't slept any more than Murphy had. Her eyes were sunken again, and her hands trembled. And he was positive she didn't want him to notice. So he didn't.

"I left a dollar on the refrigerator," he said. "Sorry to be so presumptive, but I'm always up long before this."

Timmie groaned. "A day person."