I shook my head, exhausted and sick. Sick of the stench in the plant, of the foulness of the three men, of my own destructive rage. My gorge rose; I skipped behind a vat to throw up. Wiping my face with a Kleenex, I returned to Ms. Chigwell. The bullet had grazed her upper arm, leaving a bloody furrow of singed flesh but no deep wound. I felt a small measure of relief

“We’ve got to get into an office, someplace we can secure, and call the police. There’re at least three more men outside and you and I are not taking on any more thugs tonight. We’ve got to move fast before they start worrying about Dresberg and come looking for him. Can you hold out awhile longer?”

She nodded gamely and helped me bully her brother into showing us the way to his old office. I pushed Louisa’s stretcher behind them. She was still alive, her breath coming in short shallow gasps.

When we were inside with the door locked I moved Louisa into the tiny examining room to one side of the office. With the remaining shreds of my strength, I pushed the heavy metal desk athwart the door. I sank to the floor and pulled the phone down next to me.

“Bobby? It’s me. Sorry to wake you, but I need your help. Lots of help and fast.” I explained what had happened as clearly as I could. It took a few tries to get him to understand me and even then he was skeptical.

“Bobby!” My voice cracked. “You’ve got to come. I have an old woman with a bullet wound and Louisa Djiak with some awful drug in her and three thugs prowling outside. I need you.” The anguish got through to him. He took directions to the plant and hung up before I could say anything else.

I sat for a moment with my head in my hands, wanting nothing more than to lie down on the floor and cry. Instead I forced myself to stand up, to release the half-empty clip and slip in a full one.

Chigwell had taken his sister into the little examining room to patch up her arm. I wandered in to look at Louisa. While I stood there her eyelids fluttered open.

“Gabriella?” she said scratchily. “Gabriella, I might’ve known you wouldn’t forget me in my troubles.”

Louisa went back to sleep while I held her hand. When her weak grasp had relaxed I turned to Chigwell and demanded fiercely what he had given her.

“Just-just a sedative,” he said, licking his lips nervously. “Just morphine. She’ll sleep a lot for the next day, that’s all.”

From her seat at the desk Ms. Chigwell gave him a look of scalding contempt, but seemed too exhausted to put her feelings into words. I fixed a pallet for her in the examining room, but she came from a generation too modest to lie down in public. Instead she sat upright in the old office chair, her eyelids drooping in her white face.

Fatigue was combining with the tension of waiting to drive me into a frenzy of nervous irritation. I kept checking my barricades, moving into the examining room to listen to Louisa’s shallow, gasping breaths, back to the office to look at Ms. Chigwell.

Finally I turned on the doctor, putting all my feverish energy into prying his story from him. It made a short, unedifying tale. He had worked so many years with the Xerxes blood tests that he’d managed to forget one niggling little detail: He wasn’t letting people know he thought they might be getting sick. When I showed up asking questions about Pankowski and Ferraro, he’d gotten scared. And when Murray’s reporters had shown up he’d become downright terrified. What if the truth came out? It would mean not just malpractice suits but terrible humiliation at Clio’s hands-she’d never let him forget that he hadn’t lived up to their father’s standard. That comment brought him the only fleeting sympathy he had from me-his sister’s fierce ethics must be hell to live with.

When the doctor’s suicide attempt failed he didn’t know what to do. Then Jurshak had called-Chigwell knew him from his workdays in South Chicago. If Chigwell would give them a little simple help, they would arrange for any evidence against him to be suppressed.

He’d had no choice, he muttered-to me, not his sister. When he learned all they wanted was for him to give Louisa Djiak a strong sedative and look after her down at the plant for a few hours, he was happy to comply. I didn’t ask him how he felt about going one step further and giving her a fatal injection.

“But why?” I demanded. “Why go through that charade to begin with if you weren’t going to give employees their results?”

“Humboldt told me to,” he mumbled, looking at his hands.

“I could have guessed that part!” I snapped. “But why in God’s name did he tell you to?”

“It-uh-it had to do with the insurance,” he muttered in the back of his throat.

“Spit it out, Curtis. You’re not leaving until I know, so say it and get it over with.”

He stole a look at his sister, but she sat white and still, lost in her own cloud of exhaustion.

“The insurance,” I prompted.

“We could see-Humboldt knew-we had too many health claims, too many people were losing work time. First our health insurance began going up, way up, then we were dropped by Ajax Assurance and had to find another company. They’d done a study, they told us our claims were too high.”

My jaw dropped. “So you got Jurshak to act as your fiduciary and screw up the data so you could prove you were insurable to another carrier?”

“It was just a way of buying time until we could figure out what the problem was and fix it. That was when we started doing the blood studies.”

“What was happening on the workers’ comp side?”

“Nothing. None of the illnesses were compensable.”

“Because they weren’t work related?” My temples ached with the effort of following his convoluted tale. “But they were. You were proving they were with all that blood data.”

“Not at all, young lady.” For a moment his pompous side reasserted itself “That data did not establish causality. It merely enabled us to project medical expenses and the probable turnover of the work force.”

I was too appalled to speak. His words came out so glibly that they must have been spoken hundreds of times at committee meetings or before the board of directors. Let’s just see what our work-force costs will be if we know that X percent of our employees will be sick Y fraction of the time. Run different cost projections tediously by hand in the days before computers. Then someone has the bright idea-get hard data and we’ll know for sure.

The enormity of the whole scheme made me murderous with rage. Louisa’s harsh breath in the background added fuel to my fury. I wanted to shoot Chigwell where he sat, then ride off to the Gold Coast and plug Humboldt. That bastard. That cynical, inhuman murderer. Anger swept through me in waves, making me weep.

“So no one got their proper life or health coverage just to save you guys a few miserable stupid dollars.”

“Some of them did,” Chigwell muttered. “Enough to keep the wrong people from asking questions. This woman here did. Jurshak said he knew her family so he was obligated to look after her.”

At that I thought I really would commit murder, but a movement from Ms. Chigwell caught my attention. Her gaunt face was unchanged, but she’d apparently been listening despite her seeming remoteness. She tried holding out a hand to me, but her strength wasn’t up to the task. Instead she said in the thread of a voice:

“What you’re describing is too heinous to discuss, Curtis. We’ll talk tomorrow about our arrangements. We can’t go on living together after this.”

He deflated again, shrinking inside himself without speaking. He probably couldn’t think beyond tonight, with its threat of arrest and prison. Perhaps other horrors were adding to the gray pallor around his mouth, but I didn’t think so-I didn’t think he had enough imagination to picture what he’d really been doing as the Xerxes doctor. Maybe being booted into the cold by the sister who had always protected him was punishment enough-maybe it would hurt him worse than anything I could do.