"My son. He... he was so... angry..."

Timmie's stomach hit her knees. She saw the gunpowder soot at the edge of that hole, the scrapes on the man's fingers, and she yanked out her scissors. She instinctively catalogued the pallor, the panting, grunting breaths the man was taking, the sheen of sweat on his skin.

"It's gonna be okay," Timmie assured the man in her patented small-kids-and-terrified-animals tone.

As quickly as she could, she half-rolled him to find that there was no exit wound. Low-velocity bullet, which meant it could have visited any number of organs before giving up. No gaping hole, though. No completely vaporized organs. Bad news and good. He was crashing fast, but not so fast they couldn't get him as far as a level one trauma center, which Memorial definitely wasn't.

"He has breath sounds," Barb said, her voice a little panicky. "I never would have guessed gunshot. How'd you know?"

"I never would have guessed pulmonary embolism," Timmie said with a manic grin as she cut his shirt up the side, as for away as she could from the evidence. "Never saw that many. Paul, find a couple of lunch bags, okay? Nobody touch his clothes but me."

"Lunch bags?" the tech demanded, hands full of catheter trays and IV bags. "I don't think he's hyperventilating here."

"To cover his hands. For evidence. This is Prosecutionville. Start the IVs higher in his arms, and Barb, for God's sake, don't put any tubes through that hole."

Cindy made trumpet noises as she fumbled with the trauma flow sheets she was attempting to fill out. "Timmie Leary, forensic nurse to the rescue!"

"Consider this on-the-job training, kids," Timmie offered as she worked. "The police will be grateful."

"He needs to be CAT-scanned," Barb said.

"I don't think we have time," Timmie assured her. "See if there's a hole we can plug with a finger till we get him to a real hospital. You find it, I'll do the ride along." Then she took a breath and made a wild stab. "Check his descending aorta."

Barb stopped dead, shot a look at the man's face, his eyes that couldn't quite focus anymore. "You serious?"

"You're a surgeon," Timmie retorted, hooking an IV line to the number-fourteen catheter she'd inserted just south of the man's elbow. "You're supposed to live for shit like that."

Barb took another look at the pallor, the panting breaths, the blood pressure machine that was reading an unsteady seventy diastolic pressure and closed her eyes. Then she asked for a blade and an ETA for the helicopter.

"Jesus!" she whispered five minutes later, wrist-deep in the man's torso, blood spattering her shoes. "You're right."

"Transport's landing," the secretary called from the door. "The Big House is notified and standing by, chest doc on line three to talk to you, Barb. Timmie, will you please call your baby-sitter back? She yelled at me this time."

With Barb's finger in the hole, the patient's pressure started to click up. The flow of blood from the chest eased, and the crew slowed its pace from frantic to steady.

"You sure you want to go?" Barb asked. "It's a long ride."

"I'd love to," Timmie said. "Anything rather than deal with a baby-sitter who can't manage one active six-year-old and her pet."

"It's not about your daughter," the secretary said. "Didn't I tell you? It's about your father."

Timmie pushed her goggles into place and reached alongside Barb's wrist. "That settles it. Send me in, Coach."

Timmie heard the doors open outside and feet stutter down the hall. God, she loved this. It was what kept her at L.A. County-USC, longer than she should have stayed. It was what had sent her beating leather to every trauma center in the St. Louis bistate area. It was what had finally put her here at Memorial's tiny dog-and-pony show instead of a more sedate floor job. Most days she couldn't manage a child, an ex-husband, and a lizard. She certainly couldn't manage a father. But she could manage this. And sometimes that was enough.

The transport team swept into the room in their blue jumpsuits and attitudes, and Timmie did her best not to laugh out loud with delight.

* * *

Timmie didn't make it back to Memorial until almost three, when she hopped a ride with one of the investigating officers from Puckett, who was returning to arrest a twelve-year-old named Clifford Ellis for shooting his father.

Timmie felt sated and content. Real action in an unlikely place with a not-bad outcome. She'd been able to get Mr. Ellis to surgery. She'd surprised the cops with her gift of viable evidence. She was a hero. She was Traumawoman, who could see through chest walls and diagnose faster than a speeding bullet. Florence Nightingale with clusters. Even though she still had to unscramble the mess her baby-sitter had dropped in her lap, she'd done a good day's work, and she felt like celebrating.

Which was why it took her so long to realize just what was wrong when she walked into the ER.

"Why are you still here?" she asked the silent little group clumped together on the secondhand brown plaid chairs in the nurse's lounge when they should have been scrambling to get out the door to see horses over at the county park.

It was Barb who looked up, her face oddly blank. "He's dead," she said.

Timmie's stomach dropped. "He can't be," she protested. "They swore he was doing okay. I mean, it didn't take much over an hour to get back out here."

But Barb was shaking her head. "Not Mr. Ellis," she said. "Billy."

Timmie forgot to breathe. "Billy who?" she asked inanely.

Ellen lifted her discolored plump little face that was now tear-streaked. "My Billy. An hour ago. He just... crashed. From the flu. The goddamn flu."

Timmie ended up on a straight chair. What had the supernurse missed? What had Florence ignored in her prejudice against that overweight, unpleasant man?

"Well," she said before thinking, "at least Van Adder can't sign this one off without asking questions."

"He already did," Barb said.

"What?"

But it was Ellen who answered. "Van Adder said that since Billy had a history of high blood pressure and alcoholism, what could we expect? The mortuary picked him up half an hour ago."

Timmie opened her mouth to say something and realized she couldn't think of a thing to say. She could understand a hospital like Memorial dropping the ball like this. But she couldn't abide the idea that Tucker Van Adder had. He wasn't just sloppy or lazy, he was criminally incompetent.

"Then we'd better do something about it," Timmie decided. "There's something going on here that isn't right."

Timmie might have felt better about her call to action if she hadn't caught sight of Ellen's reaction. Billy Mayfield's ex-wife didn't look as if she agreed. In fact, she looked appalled. Which made Timmie wonder what the hell else she'd missed.

Chapter 2

Daniel Murphy stood at the edge of the crowd that spilled across Sweeney Park and wondered what the hell he was doing here. He knew he'd asked for just this kind of assignment, but Jesus. Show jumping. Just what a reporter who'd covered everything from Vietnam to Oklahoma City needed on his resume. Just what he wanted to do on a spanking clean October afternoon when crime ran rampant in the cities and scandal waited to be exposed.