“Hello?” Raymond said with a degree of trepidation.

“This is Taylor Cabot. There’s a problem.”

Raymond visibly stiffened and his brow furrowed.

Taylor quickly summarized the Carlo Franconi situation and his call to Kevin Marshall.

“This operation is your baby,” Taylor concluded irritably. “And let me warn you: it is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. If there is trouble, I’ll scrap the entire enterprise. I don’t want bad publicity, so handle it.”

“But what can I do?” Raymond blurted out.

“Frankly, I don’t know,” Taylor said. “But you’d better think of something, and you’d better do it fast.”

“Things couldn’t be going any better from my end,” Raymond interjected. “Just today I made positive contact with a physician in L.A. who treats a lot of movie stars and wealthy West Coast businessmen. She’s interested in setting up a branch in California.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Taylor said. “There isn’t going to be a branch anyplace if this Franconi problem isn’t resolved. So you’d better get busy. I’d say you have about twelve hours.”

The resounding click of the disconnection made Raymond’s head jerk. He looked at the phone as if it had been responsible for the precipitate termination of the conversation. The waiter, who’d retreated to an appropriate distance, stepped forward to retrieve the phone before disappearing.

“Trouble?” Darlene questioned.

“Oh, God!” Raymond voiced. Nervously he chewed the quick of his thumb. It was more than trouble. It was potential disaster. With his attempts at retrieving his medical license tied up in the quagmire of the judicial system, his current work situation was all he had, and things had only recently been clicking. It had taken him five years to get where he was. He couldn’t let it all go down the drain.

“What is it?” Darlene asked. She reached out and pulled Raymond’s hand away from his mouth.

Raymond quickly explained about the upcoming autopsy on Carlo Franconi and repeated Taylor Cabot’s threat to scrap the entire enterprise.

“But it’s finally making big money,” Darlene said. “He won’t scrap it.”

Raymond gave a short, mirthless laugh. “It isn’t big money to someone like Taylor Cabot and GenSys,” he said. “He’d scrap it for certain. Hell, it was difficult to talk him into it in the first place.”

“Then you have to tell them not to do the autopsy,” Darlene said.

Raymond stared at his companion. He knew she meant well, and he’d never been attracted to her for her brain power. So he resisted lashing out. But his reply was sarcastic: “You think I can just call up the medical examiner’s office and tell them not to do an autopsy on such a case? Give me a break!”

“But you know a lot of important people,” Darlene persisted. “Ask them to call.”

“Please, dear…” Raymond said condescendingly, but then he paused. He began to think that unwittingly Darlene had a point. An idea began to germinate.

“What about Dr. Levitz?” Darlene said. “He was Mr. Franconi’s doctor. Maybe he could help.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Raymond said. Dr. Daniel Levitz was a Park Avenue physician with a big office, high overhead, and a dwindling patient base, thanks to managed care. He’d been easy to recruit and had been one of the first doctors to join the venture. On top of that, he’d brought in many clients, some of them in the same business as Carlo Franconi.

Raymond stood up, extracted his wallet, and plopped three crisp one-hundred-dollar bills on the table. He knew that was more than enough for the tab and a generous tip. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to make a house call.”

“But I haven’t finished my entree,” Darlene complained.

Raymond didn’t respond. Instead he whisked Darlene’s chair out from the table, forcing her to her feet. The more he thought about Dr. Levitz, the more he thought the man could be the savior. As the personal physician of a number of competing New York crime families, Levitz knew people who could do the impossible.

MARCH 4, 1997

7:25 A.M.

NEW YORK CITY

JACK Stapleton bent over and put more muscle into his pedaling as he sprinted the last block heading east along Thirtieth Street. About fifty yards from First Avenue he sat up and coasted no-hands before beginning to brake. The upcoming traffic light was not in his favor, and even Jack wasn’t crazy enough to sail out into the mix of cars, buses, and trucks racing uptown.

The weather had warmed considerably and the five inches of slush that had fallen two days previously was gone save for a few dirty piles between parked cars. Jack was pleased the roads were clear since he’d not been able to commute on his bike for several days. The bike was only three weeks old. It was a replacement for one that had been stolen a year previously.

Originally, Jack had planned on replacing the bike immediately. But he’d changed his mind after a terrifyingly close encounter with death made him temporarily conservative about risk. The episode had nothing to do with bike riding in the city, but nonetheless it scared him enough to acknowledge that his riding style had been deliberately reckless.

But time dimmed Jack’s fears. The final prod came when he lost his watch and wallet in a subway mugging. A day later, Jack bought himself a new Cannondale mountain bike, and as far as his friends were concerned, he was up to his old tricks. In reality, he was no longer tempting fate by squeezing between speeding delivery vans and parked cars; he no longer slalomed down Second Avenue; and for the most part he stayed out of Central Park after dark.

Jack came to a stop at the corner to wait for the light, and as his foot touched down on the pavement he surveyed the scene. Almost at once he became aware of a bevy of TV vans with extended antennae parked on the east side of First Avenue in front of his destination: the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for the City of New York, or what some people called simply, the morgue.

Jack was an associate medical examiner, and he’d been in that position for almost a year and a half so he’d seen such journalistic congestion on numerous occasions. Generally it meant that there had been a death of a celebrity, or at least someone made momentarily famous by the media. If it wasn’t a single death, then it was a mass disaster like an airplane crash or a train wreck. For reasons both personal and public Jack hoped it was the former.

With a green light, Jack pedaled across First Avenue and entered the morgue through the receiving dock on Thirtieth Street. He parked his bike in his usual location near the Hart Island coffins used for the unclaimed dead and took the elevator up to the first floor.

It was immediately apparent to Jack that the place was in a minor uproar. Several of the day secretaries were busily manning the phones in the communications room: they normally didn’t arrive until eight. Their consoles were awash with blinking red lights. Even Sergeant Murphy’s cubicle was open and the overhead light was on, and his usual modus operandi was to arrive sometime after nine.

With curiosity mounting, Jack entered the ID room and headed directly for the coffeepot. Vinnie Amendola, one of the mortuary techs, was hiding behind his newspaper as per usual. But that was the only normal circumstance for that time of the morning. Generally Jack was the first pathologist to arrive, but on this particular day the deputy chief, Dr. Calvin Washington, Dr. Laurie Montgomery, and Dr. Chet McGovern were already there. The three were involved in a deep discussion along with Sergeant Murphy and, to Jack’s surprise, Detective Lieutenant Lou Soldano from homicide. Lou was a frequent visitor to the morgue, but certainly not at seven-thirty in the morning. On top of that, he looked like he’d never been to bed, or if he had, he’d slept in his clothes.