Alex paled. Clasped his hands together. Bent his head. Timmie thought he was praying. He wasn't. He was just frozen.

"What did you think those patients were dying of?" she asked.

He didn't budge. "They were frail. They were sick. It wasn't such a surprise, Timmie."

"It was an answer to a prayer, Alex," she accused, having recited a similar version herself more than once. "It was an answer to a lot of prayers."

And it was just easier to pretend it was all okay.

God, she'd lived with that one most of her life. She just couldn't do it anymore. Not simply because her father had been threatened. Because she'd almost been seduced into killing him for her own comfort.

"There's something I don't understand, Alex," she said, standing before him. That forced a laugh from her, a short, sharp sound that made him flinch. "Hell, there are a lot of things I don't understand. But one thing in particular. I don't know Davies from Adam. And yet, he knew me. He knew my dad. He said things..." She stopped for a second, pulled herself up straight, as if that could help her reassert control. "He talked about my dad like he'd known him his whole life, Alex. How could he do that?"

Alex looked up at her, his face ashen and still. His smile, when it came, was wistful, just like it always was when he discussed her dad. "Peter Davies is my partner, Timmie. And your dad... well, you know how I feel about your dad. I talk about him all the time...." He shook his head, tentative acceptance of Timmie's words dying. "It couldn't have been Peter. It simply couldn't. And he is not committing euthanasia just to get research material. I mean, my God, what kind of man do you think he is?"

"You need to find out," Timmie said, and saw him flinch again.

She guessed Alex figured that Alzheimer's was enough reality for him in this lifetime. If he paid his dues to reality there, maybe he wouldn't have to set his feet in it anywhere else.

Well, Timmie waded hip deep in reality every time she set foot in an ER. But reality also waited outside those doors for her, just like it did for everyone else. Everyone else who wasn't Joe Leary or Alex Raymond, evidently.

"Help me, Alex," she said. "Protect the people you've spent your whole life trying to help."

If it were any other situation, any other threat, she would have asked him to think of his mother. She would have asked him whether he would have wanted to put his mother in this kind of peril, simply because she was ill. But she'd walked much too close to that truth to offer it up now.

He was shaking his head again. "There has to be some other explanation."

"Then help me find it. Order a postmortem on Alice Hampton. Go back through those other charts with a fine-toothed comb. Call the police and demand an investigation. Raise holy hell before somebody else does and blames you and the unit."

Still, unbelievably, he just sat there. Just as Timmie had done only yesterday, which meant she couldn't really blame him merely because she was finally ready to act. She could blame him for being deliberately blind, but that wouldn't help.

"Let me think," he begged, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. "I need to think."

"If that's what you need to do," Timmie conceded. "But I can't wait."

She didn't. Even before Alex made it all the way out the front door, she was on the phone to Micklind. By the time Timmie went in to work at three, she had assurances that Conrad was hard at work sending the medicines in her box through both his gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer and his fingerprint techs, Ginny was making a statement to Murphy about Dr. Davies, and Detective Micklind was pressuring his chief to open a case investigating the strange death of Alice Hampton.

Which left Timmie with the big question of what Alex was going to do. She never got the chance to find out. Twenty minutes after she arrived at work, the area had its first full-fledged ice storm of the year, which inevitably signaled the kickoff of the Puckett County TraumaFest.

* * *

Murphy realized what was happening to the roads when he made the last turn onto Charlie Cleveland's street and slid sideways into a mailbox. The mailbox, one of those craft-show specials that looked like a barn on a milk can, tilted over. The Porsche stopped, without noticeable injury. Murphy cursed himself blue. Then after pulling the mailbox upright, he left the car at the side of the street and slid the rest of the way downhill to Charlie's house.

He'd spent the first two hours of the afternoon getting a five-minute statement from the hospital night operator who had seen Peter Davies wandering around the hospital two nights in a row, when he had no reason to. The operator had said he'd been mumbling to himself, a man intent on a mission.

Or a man terrified of an outcome.

Murphy had followed the talk with the operator with a call to his friend at the Post about the state of Peter Davies's research.

"Fine," he'd said, punching up names on his computer, which was even more ancient than Murphy's. "Getting a lot of notoriety. Matter of fact, he's in the final running for a huge health department grant that could set him up into the next century."

"He is, huh?"

"Yeah. Finalists' names came out this week."

"When do they decide?"

"Next couple of weeks. I've had four calls from the Price PR department in the last two days about it, and the health and leisure editor's three up on me."

Which meant that Davies might well have had an impulse to quiet things down the last few days or so. Tough to convince a government agency that you're working for the welfare of patients you're killing to get their brains.

But if Davies had just been informed in the last week about the finalists' position, would he have had as much reason before to kill people off, raw material or no? Murphy had sat and talked with the guy, and he wasn't convinced that murder was his standard MO for getting his material. And an offer made out of desperation was a lot different than one made during the course of a regular working day.

Davies was gifted, no question. Dedicated, focused, probably brilliant. Definitely a geek with clusters. But a man who didn't just murder people, but made their relatives take part in it? Murphy couldn't quite see it.

Which was why he'd decided to visit Charlie Cleveland.

"Well, hi there, Mr. Murphy," the gray man greeted him when he opened the door to Murphy's knock. "Awful day outside, isn't it?"

"It is, Mr. Cleveland," Murphy agreed. He'd traded in his standard uniform for the turtleneck, leather jacket, and combat boots he'd used for some of his more mobile assignments, and he was still wet and miserable. "Mind if I come in?"

Mr. Cleveland cast a careful look over his shoulder. He wasn't reading the paper this time, but his half glasses were pushed up to the top of his head as if he'd been working at something. Behind him, Murphy could hear the chatter of a television.

"It's important," Murphy insisted gently. "The woman who was here with me before got a call very much like yours, and we taped it. I need to know if you recognize the voice."

Mr. Cleveland said not another word. He just pushed open the storm door and stepped aside.

And then reinforced Murphy's suspicions ten minutes later, after he'd heard the tape.

"That's not him."

Mrs. Cleveland stood in the doorway to the kitchen, as if distance could protect her from her husband's admissions. She was as tidy and unremarkable as Mr. Cleveland, with helmet-permed steel-gray hair and the kind of housedress Sears sold. She was frowning, but Murphy had the feeling she wasn't given to it.