"Right!"

She felt jubilant, as if she'd won a great victory, stood up to the fates, spat in their eye, seized the brass ring, and cliche of all cliches, done it all her way.

And gotten herself a sexy woodsman from Tennessee to boot.

Just like Daisy Mae.

Monday, July 14, 9:30 p.m.

Earl leaned back in his study chair and let the speed dial of his cellular ring through to Michael's house. The man would have to run the department during death rounds tomorrow and needed a heads-up. Should the anticipated fireworks take place, it could be a long session.

"Hello?" Donna answered with the throaty slur of someone who's been asleep.

"Donna, it's Earl. Did I wake you? Sorry. I wanted to speak with Michael. I thought you guys would be up." They were one of the last holdouts in his age bracket who stayed up to watch the eleven o'clock news.

"But he's in ER this evening."

Oh, shit. "Of course, how stupid of me. I can't keep up with the schedule anymore," he said quickly, wanting to get off the line. "I'll call him there. You get back to sleep. Good night." He hung up before she could say anything.

He'd made other calls over the years to the homes of staff members only to be told by a puzzled spouse that the person should be in ER. And he always played the absentminded professor, claiming to have forgotten the schedule. But he could no more forget what shifts he'd assigned to people than his own phone number. Everyone had their regular slots. They knew them; he knew them. An ER physician's life revolved around the damn schedule: who gets what vacations, who works Christmas, who does New Year's Eve. There's no steadier headache for a chief than making sure every hour of every day of every year is covered. Michael didn't do Monday evenings. So unless he had pulled a last-minute switch with someone- not a total impossibility- he had lied to Donna about where he'd gone.

Catching someone out always cost Earl. He didn't like knowing the personal problems of people he worked with. But trouble at home often translated into trouble at work. So he kept a close eye on the men and women whose secret lives he'd unintentionally discovered. But to find it out about his friend, colleague, and acting chief of the department meant worry on all three fronts and having to walk on eggshells at a whole new level.

Please let me be wrong about this one, he thought, ringing ER. "Hi, it's Dr. Garnet. Who's on call tonight?"

"Dr. Green and Dr. Kradic," said the clerk, naming the two veterans who had manned the shift for years. "Do you wish to speak to one of them?"

"Actually, I wondered if anyone saw Michael. Maybe he's working in his office?"

"One moment. I'll check."

He took a deep breath and watched the trees outside his window toss in the wind as yet another storm threatened. Their leafy branches swept back and forth in front of the streetlamps, covering and uncovering the lights in a frenzied semaphore.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Garnet, but no one's seen him."

Tuesday, July 15, 7:00 a.m.

Pathology Conference Room, St. Paul's Hospital

The remains of Elizabeth Matthews lay in open Tupperware containers arranged end to end along the length of a massive polished oak table. Earl scanned her ocher-colored liver, a pair of charcoal-tinted smoker's lungs, two glistening gray kidneys, and a maroon heart coated with yellow fat, the four cardiac chambers sliced open like the inner compartments of a large red pepper. A separate tray displayed the piece de resistance: an amorphous knobby-shaped mass of pearl-colored tumor that had penetrated the ovaries and uterus, reducing much of the structures to an unrecognizable reddish brown mush. The final two specimens, a coil of bowel and the halves of her brain, were parked to one side, too anticlimactic for comparison.

Pre-SARS, the aroma of fresh coffee would partly cut the acrid fumes at these sessions, but not anymore. Nothing was served at morning rounds these days. Signs posted throughout the hospital read NO EATING ON THE JOB, and cartoons of people raising their masks to gobble down donuts bore stamps of big red circles with lines slashed through them. Most found this new form of prohibition harder to take than the clampdown on cigarettes. Smokers were a minority. Restrictions on food left everyone hungry, in caffeine withdrawal, and snarly as hell.

Even so, death rounds remained popular with staff and trainees. A pathologist's knife spared nobody in exposing the final diagnosis and laid bare the mistakes of all, from the loftiest chief to the lowliest student. The combined prospect of picking up teaching pearls and witnessing the great equalizer of a public stripping-down usually packed them in.

Except today Earl had invoked his powers as VP, medical and limited participation to the players directly involved in the case. What he had in mind required them and only them, not a general audience. Hurst had gladly gone along with the ruling, never even questioned it, always eager to keep anything controversial as secret as possible, SARS or no SARS. And it still wasn't clear if Mr. Matthews would launch a lawsuit.

Earl looked around at the invited guests.

On this side of the table Thomas Biggs sprawled in a chair a few spaces away. Dressed in a crisp white coat, he sleepily inspected the open containers from under drooping eyelids, the aftereffect of a recent string of night calls.

Beside him Jimmy sat upright and alert, leaning forward and raring to go, but wearing a king-sized frown, obviously baffled at why he'd been included.

Everyone else had chosen to sit opposite Earl, face-off style.

Midpoint in the lineup, Paul Hurst formed his graceful fingers into an elongated triangle and absently beat a tattoo with them on the front of his mask.

His sister, Madelaine Hurst, director and chief of all things to do with nursing at St. Paul's, occupied the place at his right side. No surprise there. She always took that position, either oblivious of or indifferent to its symbolic right-hand-man implication. An asthenic woman with austere gray eyes, and known to protect her domain as fiercely as her brother defended the hospital, she clamped her steel gaze on Earl. It felt cold and hard as shackles.

Next to her sat Mrs. Quint, seemingly relaxed, her expression a thousandfold more congenial than her boss's. Earlier she'd even wished Earl good morning. But her corpulent figure exuded an air of authority, and as acting supervisor at the time of the incident, she'd be defending her "girls" just as vigorously as Madelaine

Hurst would.

The most openly hostile pair, Peter Wyatt and Monica Yablonsky, glared at him in unison from the far end of the table. Having placed themselves near the large, wall-mounted video screen that would be used for the upcoming presentation, they'd picked the prime spot to make sure everyone else would witness their show of disapproval.

Predictable, Earl thought.

Stewart Deloram, however, surprised him. He'd positioned himself at Paul Hurst's left elbow and, with surprising charm, cozied up to him from the minute they sat down together, chatting breezily while studiously avoiding eye contact with Earl.

Now what could that be all about?

Len Gardner, habitually occupying the oversized chair at the other end of the table, rose to his feet. "We might as well begin," he said, and with a touch of a finger to his laptop computer, the wall-mounted screen sprang to life. A swirl of pink lines and blue dots appeared, the primal color scheme pathologists use when staining body tissues so that they will be visible under a microscope. This particular pattern, wavy mauve strands reminiscent of a van Gogh, were woven beneath an array of tiny purple dots worthy of a Monet. Together they depicted normal uterine muscle lined with disintegrated mucosa.