"He used to be so strong.... Why, he could hush a room by just walking in, remember? He could bring the entire town to tears with just one song... a poem. Like the poem about the lions of the hills, you remember it?"

Timmie heard her voice grow smaller as the other voice took hold. A low voice, a soothing voice, a compelling voice in the dead of night. "Yes."

'"The lions of the hills are gone, and I am left alone—alone.' It's him, yes? Such a beautiful thing. It's so hard to see that light fade right before your eyes when you know how magnificent it once was."

Now her heart was bouncing around like a frog in a skillet. "Who is this? What do you want?"

"This just has to hurt him so much. Somebody like him, not even remembering his name, much less all those beautiful words he used to love so much. But I know you know that."

I do. Jesus, I do.

"It's torture, isn't it?"

Yes.

"What do you want?" she repeated, her voice a whisper.

It was so dark outside, no moon, no stars. The lights were off in the house, too, so that Timmie could see only shadows. Could hear only tickings and creakings and whisperings, as if the house were already haunted with her father's voice.

"What do you want?"

A soft sigh, like the wind. Like her own regret. "I just want to help."

"To help."

"To help you and Joe both. You have the power to help him, Timmie, do you know that? Only you. It would be so easy."

She couldn't breathe. She couldn't think. "I do?"

"So easy," the voice purred, sinking straight into her. "He deserves better than to be tied down and drugged, Timmie."

Don't ask me to answer, she all but begged. Don't.

"And you just have too much to deal with right now. You have to be tired. And you have to be wondering if you're really helping anybody after all with all those questions."

In all truth? Probably not. Timmie turned her head toward the window where the sky should have been, where trees should have stood out against a moon of some kind. There was just the faint reflection of her own face, moon pale in the darkness. As insubstantial as the voice on the phone.

"And?"

"And... I thought we could help each other out. You could just kind of leave this alone, and I could... well, your father could finally have some peace."

Timmie went perfectly still. She closed her eyes and held on to the phone. "If I just... stop. Right?"

"He's only going to get worse, Timmie. You know that."

She didn't answer. She couldn't. It didn't seem to matter.

"Tell you what," the voice said, its cadence even and soothing and sweet. "Why don't you take a day on it? Visit your dad. Think of what he'd want to do. You can get another call tomorrow night about this time if you have any questions. That would be all right, wouldn't it?"

"Yes. Yes, I think it would, if you promise to... uh, wait."

"Of course. I only want what's best for him and for you."

"And he wouldn't..."

"Suffer? No, of course not. That's the whole point, isn't it? Take your time. Just think of what you'd be doing for him, how easy it would finally be for him, how much you want him to finally have peace. Just think about that, Timmie."

Timmie didn't answer. She didn't even hang up the phone. She just lay there staring at the sky and shaking. She didn't call Micklind. She didn't call Murphy, which she should have.

She had twenty-four hours to decide.

Twenty-four hours.

Because the man on the phone hadn't just offered to make her a deal. He had offered to fulfill her most terrible wish.

Chapter 20

When Murphy stumbled into his house later that morning from his abbreviated run, the phone was ringing. He wasn't really in the mood to answer it, so he let it go. It refused to stop.

It rang while he brewed coffee and while he washed his face and while he opened the paper to see the front-page teaser about his article on Joe Leary. It stopped briefly and then began to ring again when he poured his coffee.

So he picked it up.

"Do you know what time it is?" he demanded.

"You've been out running," the soft voice retorted.

Instinctively Murphy hit the record and caller id buttons. A woman, he thought, although he couldn't say why, or whether it was the same one. The voice was more muffled than the last time he'd heard it, deep in the night.

"I've been out limping," he corrected, sitting down at his table. "What do you want?"

"I... you... you need to do something."

Murphy sipped at his coffee. "You think I'm not doing anything?"

"No. If you were, it wouldn't still be happening."

Murphy stopped sipping and sat up straight. "What do you mean?"

"Last night. It's not going to stop, because nobody wants it to. It's only old people, after all. Well, nobody asked those old people, you know?"

"Yeah," he answered, his brain kicking painfully into gear. "I know. You say somebody else died last night? Who, do you know? Was it Bertha Worthmueller?"

There was a startled little sound and a pause. "Then you know."

"I may not be flashy," he said, "but I get the work done. Was it Bertha?"

"No. She's still alive. It was Alice Hampton, a newer patient, which doesn't make any sense. But ask Timmie Leary. She was there. She can tell you."

Leary, huh? Why hadn't she called him about it? What did she know, and what had she done about it?

"You tell me," he insisted. "Tell me what you know."

"No... I can't. Timmie can do it."

"Do you know who it is?"

Another, microscopic pause, more telling than the last. "No. I just know that somebody does, and it has to stop."

Click.

A new death. Another call from his mysterious angel, who most certainly did suspect who was responsible for the deaths but was too afraid to admit it. And, this time, a tape of the conversation and a phone number to boot. Murphy wrote it down, just to be sure, but figured with his luck it was probably a pay phone someplace.

He was going to have to talk to Leary. He didn't really want to. Not after what he'd forced out of her yesterday. He'd sat up most of the night staring at the pictures of his daughters, trying to decide if it was time to call them, and hadn't been able to come to any conclusions. He couldn't imagine how she'd spent her night. She knew too much, that little nurse did. She'd told him things about his own kids he'd successfully avoided for years, and he could have done without that for the rest of his life. He could just imagine what kind of night she'd spent.

So, why hadn't she called him about the latest death?

Murphy checked his watch and still came up with only a quarter after the crack of dawn. Leary was not a crack-of-dawn person. So he would call her after he showered and checked a couple of things, like who belonged to the phone number in his hand. And, maybe, checked on the girls. By then Leary should at least be communicative, if not any happier to see him.

* * *

He tried at nine and he tried at eleven, and then he called the hospital to find that she wasn't scheduled for work. He called his buddies at the Post and got the address of that phone number from the cross-street reference, to find that it belonged to a gas station pay phone. He called Barbara to find out that Timmie had asked the doctor to do some testing on one Alice Hampton, who was even now cooling her heels in the hospital morgue waiting for her primary physician to decide what to do with her mortal remains. The physician in question was due back from a gerontology conference that afternoon. Barbara couldn't say much more than that, since Leary had evidently decamped immediately after her request, and hadn't been heard from again.