When she looked up as he entered, tiny lines feathered out from the corners of her eyes in her attempt to smile. The rest of her tanned, round forehead had the leathery look of someone who spent a lot of time outside. Petite and lean, she appeared at least a decade younger than her husband.

As he took a breath to speak, he cursed what he hated most about the new reality at St. Paul's. His gloves, mask, and gown created more than a stifling physical barrier to keep germs from passing between people. It blocked communication. She couldn't read his face any more than he could read hers, and she would hear the worst possible news from an invisible voice. He loosened the ties and tugged his mask below his chin.

Unbidden, she did the same. Her cheeks and mouth were as fine-lined as the rest of her, and rigid with fright.

As Earl explained Artie's hopeless situation, her features seemed to implode, and he took her arm to offer support. She felt as flimsy as a hollowed-out husk.

"I'm all right," she insisted.

He didn't think she even noticed when he replaced her mask and redonned his own.

At the door to the resuscitation room she gasped when she saw Artie, but her step never faltered.

Artie's eyes bulged at her approach and filled with tears again.

"Oh, baby," she whimpered, and sank into the chair, then leaned forward to cradle his face between her hands. She looked up briefly at Earl. "How long do I have?" she asked, her voice faint yet eerily smooth, almost matter-of-fact.

"For as long as he's conscious," Earl said.

J.S. nodded in agreement.

The woman once more lowered her mask and started to murmur Artie's name, over and over. Then she leaned forward and kissed his eyes, enclosing him in the privacy of her dark hair as it cascaded around his face. She began to speak of love, of all she adored in him, of forgiving the hurts they'd caused one another, of how proud she'd always been to be his wife…

Jimmy withdrew and herded anyone else out of the room who no longer had anything to offer.

J.S. and the respiratory technician continued to work in tandem.

Earl attempted to back out of earshot, yet stayed close enough to intervene if Artie started to seize or choke. Without trying to, he heard enough to think Mrs. Baxter couldn't have been more eloquent if she'd had years to compose her words.

Twenty minutes later Artie Baxter peacefully closed his eyes for the last time.

"I wish I could have asked him a few questions," Stewart said to Earl afterward as they wrote up the chart in the nursing station.

"What?"

"In all my research with post-cardiac-arrest survivors, I've always doubted how accurately they recall what they experienced. That's the trouble with after-the-fact retellings."

Stewart held the dubious honor of being America's expert on the near-death experience, having interviewed over a hundred patients who'd been resuscitated. Their accounts were all remarkably similar, echoing stories that individuals had related since the advent of modern resuscitation methods- rising above their own bodies, passing through tunnels, approaching bright lights- and Stewart claimed he'd demonstrated that these experiences had some basis in reality. But while his work on the topic had been in all the major newspapers and made him the toast of the afternoon talk shows on network TV, serious scientific journals savaged him for his articles. They accused him of betraying his reputation for serious science and considered his data to be the equivalent of alien abduction stories, nothing more than anecdotal evidence of mass hysteria better suited to the National Enquirer than the National Science Review.

Earl fought the urge to tell him he had the sensitivity of a rock to even think he could turn the ordeal they'd just witnessed into more fodder for his television junkets. "So what, Stewart? You still got a pile of publications out of those accounts," he said instead, hoping it would shut him up.

"But today," Stewart continued, "we could have had something I've repeatedly said this kind of research really needs."

Jesus, Earl thought, give it a rest. "What's that?" he asked, knowing he shouldn't.

"An interview with a dead man."

Friday, July 4, 11:45 p.m. Palliative Care, St. Paul's Hospital, Buffalo, New York

I crept up the back stairwell and let myself into the darkened hallway.

Empty.

So far so good. Still, better wait to see if a nurse emerged from one of the rooms.

I shrank back in the shadows.

The possibility of being spotted always worried me. I could make up a story to explain my presence, but people could see through that sort of thing, and it might invite questions.

My cover all the other times remained bulletproof. Then I became the person everyone knew me as. Not pretended it, but, like a Method actor, inhabited the role so completely that even the character's memories emerged as my own. It helped that I had invented up a past based on mine, and now that I'd lived my created history so long, it often seemed more vivid than the reality. But the real trick had been learning to believe my own lie. During those hours no one could trip me up, because I had banished my secret self to the point that what I'd been no longer existed, and the new me reigned supreme. Sometimes I even inherited the peace of mind that went with my created persona, and for those precious moments I fooled myself so completely that anyone could have read my thoughts and never guessed me to be other than what I seemed. I loved those times. They let me experience hope. After they passed, I knew, once I finished what must be done, I would enter that realm forever, pull on a fresh skin, and the thing that had eaten at me for so long would be dead.

The usual chorus of muffled cries drifted toward me, stoking a sense of dread that soured the pit of my stomach.

I also heard the distant sounds of nurses talking at the far end of the corridor, their carefree voices erupting into laughter.

But no one appeared.

Occasionally a flicker from a late reveler's fireworks came through the window and illuminated the floor in front of my hiding spot, but where I stood remained pitch-black. Nevertheless, the sooner I got in the room and completely out of sight, the easier I'd feel.

I started forward, having already chosen tonight's victim. I figured the holiday meant fewer doctors, and with rookies all over the place, the nurses in other parts of the hospital should be preoccupied, riding herd on the newcomers. They'd never notice me prowling about; the bunch on duty here would be their usual lazy selves. Perfect conditions to run another subject.

Locating the room number, I slipped inside the door and softly closed it behind me.

I stood perfectly still, letting my eyes adjust to the lack of light. Someone, presumably those idiotic nurses outside, had closed the Venetian blinds, blocking out the possibility that even a glimmer of illumination from the city, moon, or stars would reach the inhabitant who lay dying in the bed.

Fools, I thought. Cut off all sense of day or night, and a patient could become confused, perhaps psychotic. The observation came as a reflex, my training completely at odds with what I intended to do. The incongruity set my stomach churning, and bilious hot juices rose to the back of my tongue. I swallowed repeatedly and managed to send the acidic mix down the way it'd come up.

The ragged breathing of the woman I'd come for filled my ears. Sometimes the sound caught in her throat and ceased altogether, only to restart seconds later, when she would gasp, then exhale with a soft moan.

I tiptoed over to the blinds and opened them a sliver, just enough to admit an orange glow reflected from sodium lamps in the parking lot below. It cast her thin face in garish pumpkin shades, as if she'd applied too much makeup, and I could see that her mask had slipped down to her chest like a bib. She continued to breathe fitfully, yet remained asleep, completely unaware of my presence. But she could be roused awake. I'd made sure of that before picking her.