Murphy shook his head, sipping coffee and nudging eggs. "Not by choice. I get up to run every morning. Penance for my sins."

"Which are undoubtedly numerous. Too bad you couldn't jog last night, huh, Murphy?"

He caught the very dry humor in her voice and turned around, properly chagrined. "Considering what mayhem you had the chance to wreak after that... unfortunate slip of the tongue, I'd like to say what a lady you are for not considering it."

She poured herself some coffee and took a good slug of it. "I've been propositioned by more than one concussion victim in my time," she said with a tired smile.

"Which I hope means you won't be bringing me up on charges."

She allowed a brief flicker of attraction to spark those huge blue eyes, then purposefully locked it away again. "It means that if you don't ever mention the rose, I won't mention the meaningless sex."

Murphy sighed. "Used to be, I'd at least get the meaningless sex before I couldn't talk about it."

"Times are tough all round these days."

He gave up and went back to his eggs, which were crisping around the edges from inattention. Timmie reached into a cabinet and pulled out a chipped Melmac plate for his eggs and a bottle of generic acetaminophen for his headache.

"Thanks."

"You're welcome. You dizzy or seeing double?"

Murphy dished up his eggs and shut off the gas. "Not much. How do I look to the trained eye?"

She squinted hard. "Like a train wreck trying to pass itself off as performance art. Good thing Halloween's today. You'll fit right in. But the scars will be minimal."

"You guys do good work."

Timmie eased her jeaned bottom clown in one of the three mismatched Naugahyde chairs that surrounded the metal table. "Of course we do. We're the wave of Memorial's future."

"I thought that was Restcrest," Murphy said, gingerly sitting himself down across from her.

Timmie's laugh sounded awfully fatalistic. "Not after we get through with it."

Murphy heard every nuance in that statement and forgot the eggs he'd been anticipating since dawn. "Can I ask a question?"

"As long as it isn't about sex."

"Aren't you worried?"

Timmie raised eyebrows at him. "Worried about what?" she retorted, suddenly cautious. "Crime on the streets? The rising cost of medical care? The chance of contracting the ebola virus?"

"How this whole escapade is going to affect your father. I know what he means to you, Leary. You're putting him in a pretty vulnerable spot."

Murphy could see her jaw working as if she were chewing up her words before she spat them out. He saw how tight her eyes were and wondered at every little secret he didn't know.

"What brought this up?" she asked.

"His room. Sleep isn't very productive the first night after a crack on the head, and I didn't have anything to smoke. So I got to spend a lot of time looking at memorabilia." He retreated to his eggs as he spoke, the residue from those long, dark hours a little too fresh. "Raymond may be an android, but he's right. Your dad is something special, even only working on three cylinders. Raymond told me how he used to watch your dad lead you down the street singing to you when you were a little girl. Tough to get an image like that out of a person's head. Tougher to imagine that that guy could end up as bait."

She sucked in a breath that hissed in the quiet kitchen like a flaring match. "How do we know he isn't in danger already unless we find the murderer?" she asked carefully.

"Then why leave your father there at all?"

Murphy couldn't imagine her going any more rigid without just shattering. "The benefits outweigh the risks."

"You're sure about that."

Her laugh was dark. "I'm not sure about anything, Murphy. But if you'd like to take him home with you, the whole thing will be settled for the foreseeable future. But don't forget that he likes to roam around the streets in his underwear scaring church organists, and that when he gets frightened he swings."

Murphy went back to his eggs, cutting them into bites small enough to satisfy an anorexic. Timmie drank the very last dram of coffee in her cup. The sun, making it past the next-door neighbor's, splashed sun-catcher colors on a dingy wall. Murphy tried hard to focus on food rather than the easy sensuality that had so quickly vanished from Leary's movements the minute her father had been brought up. He missed it. He also wondered at it.

"I know it's an imposition," he said, "but would you mind driving me back home? I want to start making background calls."

That made her laugh as she dropped her cup on the table with a thunk. "Not unless you're better with a metric wrench than I am. My car died last night, and I'm going to have to spend the morning trying to find out why. You might as well use my phone."

He tried smiling again. "You're holding me against my will?"

"Of course not. I'm laying odds you won't make it down my front steps without ending up on your nose. I also don't think you really want to be seen at work looking like Rocky Raccoon."

His smile grew into near-genuine proportions. "You know far too much about male egos, Leary."

Her eyes still looked sore and tired. "More than you'll ever know, Murphy."

"All right, then," he said. "Let's work together. If you or Dr. Adkins can gig the hospital computer for more information on those patients and I can get more background on the business angle, we can maybe find out exactly what the death rate might have to do with the bid by GerySys. Working together we can get answers in half the time."

She was already shaking her head as she climbed to her feet. "Not today. I have a car to fix, a costume to sew, and after that, I don't care if Alex Raymond is the Green River Killer, it's Halloween. I am spending the evening with my daughter. Tomorrow's soon enough."

"Okay, then," he said, a lot slower following to his feet, his plate only partially emptied. "I'll start. When you get the phone bill, forward it to the paper. Sherilee'll be happy to pay for a scoop like this. She's been smelling expose since I hit town."

That brought Timmie to a dead stop, her cup caught between her hands and her gaze off somewhere out the window. Murphy didn't have to ask why.

"Leary?"

Timmie turned to face him, and Murphy wondered if she knew how frightened she looked.

"You can still back out of this. It could protect your dad."

Out in the living room, the doorbell chimed. Neither of them turned to it. Timmie Leary stood there in the doorway to her kitchen as if caught in warring winds, her hands wrapped tightly around that old brown coffee mug, her posture taut.

"I'll tell you something, Murphy," she said, her voice way too soft. "This may sound ugly, but I'm getting real tired of always having to balance what's right against what's good for my father. Just once I'd like to act without having to worry about how it will affect him."

Murphy heard the anger, saw the sorrow, and couldn't think of a thing to say, except the obvious. "I didn't think you'd been back that long."

The door chimed again, more insistently this time. Timmie seemed to come back to life. She smiled with the kind of bleakness Murphy knew too well. "Don't kid yourself," she said. "You know that lovely picture Alex likes so much of Dad and me walking hand in hand when I was a little girl?"