"We have to get an autopsy," she told Barb, who was signing off on the chart with a flourish.

Barb looked up without noticeable reaction and proceeded to strip off her gloves.

Already pulling useless lines, Mattie didn't manage the same. "What do you mean?" she demanded, her hands full of tubing. "This poor old thing's nothing but brain waste. Leave her alone."

Timmie looked at Mattie a moment, but she knew she didn't have time to make her understand. She turned back to Barb. "I mean it," was all she said. "Can you do a drug screen on the blood you got? Double-check the levels of her prescribed meds? And don't send her downstairs without letting me know. I'll try and force Van Adder into doing something."

"It's not a coroner's case," Barb reminded her calmly. "How you gonna pull it off ?"

"Friends in high places. Just hold her. Please."

Over at the cart, one of the other nurses was hanging long strips of tape to the edge of the bed to begin wrapping the body.

Barb just shrugged. "Why not? I didn't like working in this county much, anyway."

"What are you talking about?" Mattie demanded. "Does this have something to do with why Walter's walking your girls home from school?"

Timmie didn't have time to answer, because Ellen was leaning in the door. "Mattie, those old ladies need you back in five."

Which was when Timmie heard it. Wafting on the breeze like a birdcall. Continuous, keening, impervious to soothing or shouting or sedating.

"Help!... Help!... Help!"

Timmie knew then why Mattie was so upset that they'd tried to save Alice. Timmie understood why she had tears in her eyes even as she turned for the door where Ellen waited.

"Help!... Help!... Help!"

Mrs. Clara Winterborn was back. Just as brain dead as before, just as brittle and empty and sere. Even older than when Timmie had been forced to save her the last time for another trip to the unit to be tortured and tormented and saved.

Timmie tried to pass the old woman's cubicle without looking in at the disaster that had once been a human, the two frail and fluttery jailers who held her here. She really did.

"Help!... Help!... Help!"

She didn't quite make it. Like the time she'd caught sight of her father naked in the bathroom, the first adult male she'd ever witnessed. Hairy and huge and alien. Timmie had been terrified, repulsed, appalled. She'd looked anyway, and kept on looking, because she just couldn't seem to stop. She looked now, just as repulsed. Just as terrified.

"Wish somebody'd do for this soul what they seem to be doin' upstairs," Mattie muttered on the way by. "No matter what Walter and his God say. It just ain't right."

"Mattie, you can't mean that," Ellen whispered. "Not you."

Shifting the Chux and catheter supplies in her arms, Mattie glared. "Me."

Mattie was right, Timmie thought. She should just go home. Leave them to tag Alice with her statistics and then wrap her like a pork roast and send her off to the freezer where someone would mourn, but not as much as if she'd lived.

Instead, Timmie turned and walked back upstairs.

* * *

When she reached Restcrest, it was to find even more of a commotion than when she'd left it an hour earlier. Not raucous, by any means. That would have upset the patients. The patients were upset anyway, because like children and horses, they could sense distress just from the way they were handled.

The cries were harsher, more strident, more frequent. From the level-two areas Timmie could hear the heightened babble of conversation and more than one argument. And on unit five, where she'd planned on talking to Gladys and collecting Alice's medications for analysis, she found not one nurse, but two, stiff-lipped, dry-eyed, and as tense as a terrorist cease-fire. The second nurse was one of the evening supervisors, which suited Timmie's purposes perfectly.

"I'm sorry," Timmie said, greeting Gladys. "She didn't make it."

Gladys closed her eyes. "I don't understand it," she insisted. "I just don't."

"Well, Miss Arlington's on her way in now to make us understand," the supervisor said dryly.

Miss Arlington. That meant Timmie didn't have much time.

"I need a favor," she said, holding up the evidence box she'd scooped up on her way out of the ER. "Alice's medications. I need to get them analyzed."

Gladys blanched. "Oh, I don't know..."

The supervisor, God bless her, held firm. "Well, I do. Take 'em before Mary Jane gets here. If something's going on, she's the last one who's going to want to know."

Timmie hesitated. "You're sure."

"I'm sure. Just make sure it's worth my job."

"I'll need you to sign and date the sealing tape," Timmie told her. "So we can protect the chain of evidence."

Gladys looked as if she were going to pass out. "Evidence."

The supervisor didn't say a word. She just reached out her hand until Gladys handed over the nurse-server key.

The supervisor helped Timmie clean out the medicine drawer and came away with handfuls of Dulcolax and Maalox dose packs, Ticlid, Digoxin, Tranzene, Nitropaste. Vials of Lasix and Compazine, and bottles of IV potassium chloride. Haldol and procainamide and half a dozen things Timmie recognized but couldn't immediately identify. Nothing Timmie wouldn't have expected, though.

Timmie and the supervisor both signed the red tape that Timmie stretched over the edge of the box, and Timmie thanked her. They were just finishing up when they both heard Gladys's surprised greeting. Ms. Arlington had wasted no time.

"I'm holding you responsible, Gladys," she was saying.

Timmie walked out of the room to see Gladys's mouth opened wide enough to show her uvula. "How could I...?"

Which was about when Mary Jane caught sight of the co-conspirators. "What are you doing here?"

"She helped code Alice," Gladys defended, now flushed and trembling. "And now she's—"

"Going back to see my father," Timmie allowed, the sealed evidence box safely tucked inside the jacket she'd balled up and held in her arms.

"I just can't believe that Alice is gone," Gladys said to no one in particular.

"Me, either," Timmie said. "I expected it to be Bertha Worthmueller."

Mary Jane's eyes snapped open so fast Timmie could see the tiny scars from her lifts. Her mouth opened, too, but she couldn't seem to manage anything. It was as if Alice's death was the final straw. It certainly seemed to be for Gladys, who was crying and glaring at the same time.

"It shouldn't have happened," she insisted, wringing her hands. "It never should have happened."

Timmie tried her best to assess each reaction. Gladys was distraught, the supervisor outraged, and Mary Jane... Timmie couldn't figure out what Mary Jane was, except cautious. Ah, hell. She might as well go for the gold.

"You really don't know who's doing this, do you?" she asked Gladys.

"No, we don't," Gladys said, her eyes lighting a little. "Do you?"

"Doing what?" Mary Jane asked just a little too late.

Timmie knew way back in her head that Mary Jane outranked her by at least ten levels of administration. She even remembered that Mary Jane might be a murderer with about as much conscience as Lucrezia Borgia. It didn't prevent her from reacting to that little piece of disingenuity with disdain.

"Come on, Ms. Arlington. At least twenty people have died on this unit. Fifteen of them have been the old-timers who've been costing this unit a ton of money. That's why I was worried about Bertha in there. She's the last one. What was it about Alice that made her a target?"