Reluctantly he looked over at Stewart.

The man's pupils grew to the size of quarters.

Oh, my God, Earl thought, his insides plummeting further. "This is what made you say the reports were bogus?" he said, sounding incredulous despite knowing he'd stumbled on the truth.

Stewart's forehead began to glisten under the overhead lights, the effect of a sudden sheen of sweat. "No, honest-"

"Don't lie to me, Stewart!"

"I'm not. I mean, it's not what you think. Please, Earl, you have to believe me-"

"Of course he's lying about it," Monica said, "to protect his ass!" Fury propelled her voice down to its deepest registers, stripping it raw, and the words scraped against the back of her throat. "Who else around here wanted to talk with the dead?"

Department of Clinical Research, subbasement, St. Paul's Hospital

"I swear to you, Earl, I didn't do anything wrong." Stewart's voice shook. He rose from his desk, fluttering his gloved hands here and there, his fingers as tremulous as wings. A lifetime of data on resuscitation outcomes and volumes of scientific papers about critical care towered about him in stacks. Except now the piles seemed about to fall in on him as he cowered at their center, shot up with fear, eyes as jumpy and desperate as any junkie's.

Earl leaned against the closed door and watched with clinical fascination as Stewart spun and turned, until the sight of him falling apart turned repugnant.

As the meeting had disintegrated into confusion, Stewart had fled death rounds, his eyes straining so far to the side toward his accuser that they nearly disappeared into their sockets. Earl had chased after him to his cubbyhole office.

"You lied to me," he said to Stewart.

"Yes, I know, but only about what those patients told me. I knew if word of that got around, people would react exactly the way everyone else at the table did- think that I had something to do with it." He spoke in short, rapid spurts, alternating between a whimper and a bellow. "All it takes is a whiff of shit to finish you off as a researcher in this game. And I've made more than my share of enemies, believe me, though as far as I can see it's for no reason other than envy."

How about on account of insufferable conceit? Earl thought.

"Oh, there'll be plenty of volunteers to mount a whisper campaign against me," Stewart continued, then blanched whiter still. "Oh, God! My funding, it'll dry up overnight-"

"What, specifically, were you afraid these whisperers would say?" Earl interrupted. He tried hard to sound sympathetic, to keep him talking, but found it difficult.

Stewart reacted with an impatient wave. "You know very well. That I'd badgered dying patients without getting their consent." He expanded his restless movements and started to pace. But in a ten-foot cubicle he still ended up turning in circles. "That I precipitated the near-death state to get more material to publish. That I went after immediate accounts of the experience rather than retellings, to silence critics of my original work. All of it crap, but clever enough to do damage."

Earl shuddered from the creeping realization that just as he didn't know for certain whether Stewart would be capable of something so appalling, neither could he dismiss the possibility. With increased foreboding, he asked, "And how might these so-called accusers explain you could pull such a thing off?"

Stewart immediately came to a standstill, looked at Earl, and went so white around the eyes, he seemed about to faint. He laid a hand on his desk as if to steady himself, and slowly sat down again. "You think I did it too, don't you?"

Come across as an ally, Earl told himself. He also sized up Stewart's physique, wondering again if he could have been the man who attacked him. Hard to tell, he thought. Despite spending most of his hours in the darkness of ICU, Deloram had managed to keep reasonably trim. He also had the height and the breadth of shoulders to fit the bill.

"Jesus, Earl," Stewart continued, "you of all people have to believe me. And it could be anyone trying to set me up-"

The ring of his phone cut him off.

"Hello?" he answered. His forehead grew fire red and his skin glistened with sweat again. "No, there's nothing to it," he said to the caller on the other end of the line. "Just some negligent nurse who's trying to blame everyone else…"

His coloring deepened, and his knuckles glowed white under the latex as he tightened his grip on the receiver.

Obviously somebody at death rounds had talked, and word had gotten out. Probably Yablonsky. It fit her style.

"She even tried to incriminate Earl Garnet. I guess it's my turn now. Who knows, maybe next it will be yours." He laughed far too loud and long. "No problem," he cried. His desperate cheeriness set Earl's teeth on edge. In ER, that sound usually accompanied a chilling smile and signaled a person who might go home, open the medicine cabinet, and start counting out pills.

As Stewart continued to reassure his caller, a laptop on his desk began to chime, announcing the arrival of separate e-mails. The noise continued, like a slot machine paying off, and the dread in his eyes deepened at each sound. Still, he managed another pumped-up laugh and gaily suggested, "Let's have lunch sometime soon. Do you like Mexican?"

He hung up and clasped his head in both hands as if he were afraid it would fall off. "This is going to ruin me!" he said, his voice quivering on the edge of a sob. He looked up at Earl with the agonized stare of a man who didn't quite comprehend why his world seemed to be crumbling around him. "I swear, in all my years of research, I never, ever breached a single ethical protocol."

Earl struggled for something to say, but the phone rang again, once more bailing him out of an embarrassing silence.

Stewart frowned, hesitated, then picked it up and repeated the same bravura performance he'd put on minutes earlier, except this time he offered to buy dinner and suggested Chinese.

When he hung up, Earl asked, "Was the show you put on at death rounds about Matthews your idea, or did Hurst approach you?"

He didn't answer, choosing instead to peer at the tropical fish that languidly swam across the screen of his computer.

"Stewart?"

He took a deep breath, as if he were a diver about to take a plunge. "I approached Hurst to warn him that there might be strange stories floating around Palliative Care about near-death experiences that wouldn't do St. Paul's, or me, any good. Up until then, near as I could determine, any nurse who reported the patients' experiences to a doctor or supervisor had been told they had to be hallucinations and not to take them seriously. But I still wanted to make sure no one said anything to implicate me. He promised to silence any such insinuations, but suggested I also put an end to your poking around and stirring up trouble on the ward by making the Matthews inquiry end in a draw. That would be good for St. Paul's, and with no clear wrongdoing, he said, you wouldn't have cause to investigate any further, which would reduce the chances of you also turning up the near-death stories, which would be good for me."

"You were that naive?"

"I was that desperate."

Earl said nothing.

The phone interrupted them again.

Earl watched as he sweated through another frayed showing of high spirits- eyeballs bulging with fear, squirming in his seat, rattling off yet more futile reassurances, his free hand ceaselessly searching for a place to light.

As if babbling frantic lies to a few people could save him, Earl mused. Not in the age of the Internet. After a lifetime of scientific toil, he would be pilloried around the globe with a push of a key.

Stewart issued yet another invitation, jovially suggesting drinks at a nearby Italian bistro this time, then hung up the phone and pulled the cord out of the jack. "Fuck 'em!" he muttered in a bleak attempt at defiance.