Paul squinted imperiously over the top of his bifocals at Len. "Of course, as a former surgeon I know enough never to go against the pathologist as far as cause of death is concerned. Morphine overdose, right? There we are in agreement?"

"Yes. But I repeat, shock did not play a role in that overdose."

"And the minutes will record your opinion. As for the rest, we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one."

His arrogance took Earl's breath away. In a court of law he'd never get away with such a bald-faced attempt to distort the facts. But death rounds had no legal status. Touted as a sacred crucible of final clinical truths, nothing guarded its integrity but good faith between physicians.

The constriction in Earl's gut coiled even tighter. He looked over at Yablonsky. She blanched and began to use her glasses as worry beads.

"Do you have anything to say, Monica?" he asked. "This leaves you much more out on a limb than it does me, and you know it."

Jimmy shot him a disapproving glance, as if to tell him to cut his losses and run.

Madelaine Hurst hunched forward, and her brow acquired the sharp-edged contours of a hawk's. "Now see here, Dr. Garnet-"

"I'm waiting for an answer, Monica," he said, ignoring them both.

Paul Hurst leaned closer to his sister. His normally colorless skin became dusky gray, the change suffusing up his temples, across his forehead, and down from under his mask to his neck like creeping smoke. "Garnet, we agreed not to discuss this-"

"I agreed to wait and hear the pathology reports before I took any action, not to cover them up."

"You can't be serious, throwing the hospital into a tumult at a time when-"

"What tumult? That's why I restricted this gathering to the people most directly involved. I'm betting someone in this room knows the truth about Elizabeth Matthews's death and the deaths of other patients on this ward. We can get at it, here and now, behind closed doors."

"You still aren't seeing the bigger picture."

"Oh, no?" He pointed at Yablonsky. "The bigger picture is that she tried to shift the blame for this patient's death onto me. And my chief resident, Thomas Biggs, tells me there's also been a rise in the number of people who die on the ward but are discovered only in the early morning. Clearly no one is keeping close watch during the night. A few days ago I witnessed that for myself, and our hospital chaplain, Jimmy Fitzpatrick, will back me up. Not only could I sneak onto the ward, but some other intruder came prowling around as well. I don't think we can ignore events like that, can we, Paul, what with a rise in the mortality rate and the possibility that Elizabeth Matthews's death might be part of a cluster-"

"No!" shrieked Monica Yablonsky, her eyes wide with fright. "I won't be your scapegoat." Her voice soared into the high, thin register that jangles the human ear and makes dogs howl. "I won't!"

Bingo! Earl thought. This was shaping up to be a "You can't handle the truth" moment.

Despite working on the numbers all weekend, even with Janet's help, Earl hadn't been able to conclude whether the statistics really indicated a cluster of suspicious deaths. He certainly hadn't been able to incriminate Yablonsky in anything specific. Nor could he tell whether his assailant had played a role in it all. But he'd come here to squeeze Yablonsky, because all her anxiety told him she knew something about what had been going on, and this in itself gave her good cause to be afraid.

Why? Ever since that groundbreaking article in the New England Journal, it was the nurses whom investigators went after when patients died and the reason wasn't clear. She'd know that, and it would scare her, whether she'd accidentally overdosed a single patient and lied about it, or done much worse, or hadn't done anything herself but covered up for the real culprit. Earl intended to rattle her enough that she'd drop her guard and let slip her secret, whatever it might be.

At least, that had been his plan, and it seemed to be working.

But then Jimmy sprang to her side, his arms protectively around her shoulders. "For the love of God, Earl, back off!"

Mrs. Quint quickly walked over to join them. "Monica, calm down," she said, rubbing her underling's back the way she would a child's. Her voice, no louder than usual, but ice smooth, rang out like a command.

Monica looked desperately from her to Jimmy and back again. "Calm down? It's not you he's after."

Madelaine turned on her brother. "Paul, stop this disgraceful attack on the good name of a fine nurse."

"Garnet!" Peter Wyatt roared, getting to his feet like some smoldering volcano rising from the sea. "I'm formally charging you with making libelous comments against my department."

"And I'm suspending your authority as VP, medical," Hurst chimed in, as if singing a duet with Wyatt, "pending a hearing into charges of unprofessional conduct."

Earl ignored them all and kept his sights on Yablonsky. "How about it, Monica? Stop lying now or I'll go to the police, and this business will finish you-"

"No!" Her voice once more cracked into soprano territory. "I won't be hung out to dry!"

"That's enough, Monica!" Madelaine Hurst's glare launched a thousand scalpels at her. "The subject's closed."

Monica's eyes flashed a counterstrike. "No, it's not closed. Not by a long shot." She swung back to face Earl, her pupils so dilated with fright that they squeezed her irises into thin brown rims. "Dr. Garnet, you wanted to know what the patients who reported a near-death experience told their nurses?"

Stewart sat bolt upright.

"That's right," Earl answered evenly. "Apparently no supervisor, including you, could find a single nurse who remembered anything."

"Because they were told to keep quiet-"

"Shut up, Monica," Madelaine Hurst shrieked.

"I won't, not when he's talking about clusters of unexplained deaths and hinting at allegations of murder." As she spoke, she trained her eyes only on Earl, as if forming a corridor that linked them together and excluded everyone else.

"Go on," he urged.

"Monica!"

"Some of the girls who heard those near-death stories found one particular detail doubly peculiar."

"What?"

"Damn it, Monica, I order you to stop."

"Patients didn't just claim they'd seen lights, tunnels, lost loved ones, or themselves floating above their bodies- all that standard stuff." She rattled off the usual catalog of near-death experiences with the contempt of someone who considered such matters to be utter nonsense.

Paul shot to his feet, toppling his chair backward. "Continue and you'll be suspended permanently, Mrs. Yablonsky." He spoke through clenched teeth.

Earl leaned over the table toward her. "No, you won't. Trust me. Talk now, Monica, and nobody can touch you, not even me. What's said in this forum has automatic immunity." He hadn't lied. Anything stated at death rounds could not be subpoenaed in a court of law. The rule had been intended to protect doctors from legal action if they honestly admitted their mistakes so that the rest of the staff could learn from them. But whether the law would protect Monica from a CEO and a nursing supervisor, he had no idea.

Monica must have believed it could. "A lot of the patients said that someone kept whispering questions at them throughout the whole ordeal," she said, never taking her eyes off him.

"Questions?"

"Yeah. Had they seen God? Were they looking down on themselves? What did heaven look like? Crazy stuff."

"You're kidding."

She retrieved a tissue from her pocket and dabbed her eyes, careful not to touch them with her gloved fingers. "I swear, it's the truth."

Earl felt he'd stepped into an elevator and dropped too fast.

Why should he believe her? This might merely be another attempt to throw suspicion on someone else. But the story sounded too bizarre for her to have made it up, and pieces of the puzzle snapped into place, giving an answer he didn't want.