"What have you done?" Melanie screamed again. She struggled to understand. Her terrified eyes darted back and forth, sweeping the room for a way out. She made a sudden dash for the living room door. Campbell grabbed her wrist and brought the bloody knife up to her throat. "Please," she whimpered, her eyes frozen. "Please don't kill me." "The truth is, Melanie, I'm here to save you," he said as he smiled into her quivering face. Campbell lowered the blade and sliced into her. The slender body jolted up with a sudden cry. Her eyes flickered like a weak electric bulb. A deathly rattle shot through her. Why? her begging eyes pleaded. Why? It took a full minute for him to regain his breath. The smell of Melanie Brandt's blood was deep in his nostrils. He almost couldn't believe what he had done. He carried the bride's body back into the bedroom and placed her on the bed. She was beautiful. Delicate features. And so young. He remembered when he had first seen her and how he had been taken with her then. She had thought the whole world was in front of her. He rubbed his hand against the smooth surface of her cheek and cupped one of her earrings- a smiling moon. What is the worst thing anyone has ever done? Phillip Campbell asked himself again, heart pounding in his chest. Was this it? Had he just done it? Not yet, a voice inside answered. Not quite yet. Slowly, he lifted the bride's beautiful white wedding dress.

IT WAS A LITTLE BEFORE EIGHT-THIRTY on a Monday morning in June, one of those chilly, gray summer mornings San Francisco is famous for. I was starting the week off badly, flipping through old copies of The New Yorker while waiting for my G.R, Dr. Roy Orenthaler, to free up. I'd been seeing Dr. Roy, as I still sometimes called him, ever since I was a sociology major at San Francisco State University, and I obligingly came in once a year for my checkup. That was last Tuesday. To my surprise, he had called at the end of the week and asked me to stop in today before work. I had a busy day ahead of me: two open cases and a deposition to deliver at district court. I was hoping I could be at my desk by nine. "Ms. Boxer," the receptionist finally called to me, "the doctor will see you now." I followed her into the doctor's office. Generally, Orenthaler greeted me with some well-intended stab at police humor, such as, "So if you're here, who's out on the street after them?" I was now thirty-four, and for the past two years had been lead inspector on the homicide detail out of the Hall of Justice. But today he rose stiffly and uttered a solemn "Lindsay." He motioned me to the chair across from his desk. Uh-oh. Up until then, my philosophy on doctors had been simple: When one of them gave you that deep, concerned look and told you to take a seat, three things could happen. Only one of them was bad. They were asking you out, getting ready to lay on some bad news, or they'd just spent a fortune reupholstering the furniture. "I want to show you something," Orenthaler began. He held a slide up against a light. He pointed to splotches of tiny ghostlike spheres in a current of smaller pellets. "This is a blowup of the blood smear we took from you. The larger globules are erythrocytes. Red blood cells." "They seem happy," I joked nervously. "They are, Lindsay," the doctor said without a trace of a smile. "Problem is, you don't have many." I fixed on his eyes, hoping they would relax and that we'd move on to something trivial like, You better start cutting down those long hours, Lindsay. "There's a condition, Lindsay," Orenthaler went on. "Negli's aplastic anemia. It's rare. Basically, the body no longer manufactures red blood cells." He held up a photo. "This is what a normal blood workup looks like." On this one, the dark background looked like the intersection of Market and Powell at 5:00 p.m." a virtual traffic jam of compressed, energetic spheres. Speedy messengers, all carrying oxygen to parts of someone else's body. In contrast, mine looked about as densely packed as a political headquarters two hours after the candidate has conceded. "This is treatable, right?" I asked him. More like I was telling him. "It's treatable, Lindsay," Orenthaler said, after a pause. "But it's serious." A week ago, I had come in simply because my eyes were runny and blotchy and I'd discovered some blood in my panties and every day by three I was suddenly feeling like some iron-deficient gnome was inside me siphoning off my energy. Me, of the regular double shifts and fourteen-hour days. Six weeks' accrued vacation. "How serious are we talking about?" I asked, my voice catching. "Red blood cells are vital to the body's process of oxygenation," Orenthaler began to explain. "Hemopoiesis, the formation of blood cells in the bone marrow." "Dr. Roy, this isn't a medical conference. How serious are we talking about?" "What is it you want to hear, Lindsay? Diagnosis or possibility?" "I want to hear the truth." Orenthaler nodded. He got up and came around the desk and took my hand. "Then here's the truth, Lindsay. What you have is life threatening." "Life threatening?" My heart stopped. My throat was as dry as parchment. "Fatal, Lindsay."

THE COLD, BLUNT SOUND of the word hit me like a hollow-point shell between the eyes. Fatal, Lindsay. I waited for Dr. Roy to tell me this was all some kind of sick joke. That he had my tests mixed up with someone else's. "I want to send you to a hematologist, Lindsay," Orenthaler went on. "Like a lot of diseases, there are stages. Stage one is when there's a mild depletion of cells. It can be treated with monthly transfusions. Stage two is when there's a systemic shortage of red cells. "Stage three would require hospitalization. A bone marrow transplant. Potentially, the removal of your spleen." "So where am I?" I asked, sucking in a cramped lungful of air. "Your erythrocytic count is barely two hundred per cc of raw blood. That puts you on the cusp." "The cusp?" "The cusp," the doctor said, "between stages two and three." There comes a point in everybody's life when you realize the stakes have suddenly changed. The carefree ride of your life slams into a stone wall; all those years of merely bouncing along, life taking you where you want to go, abruptly end. In my job, I see this moment forced on people all the time. Welcome to mine. "So what does this mean?" I asked weakly. The room was spinning a little now. "What it means, Lindsay is that you're going to have to undergo a prolonged regimen of intensive treatment." I shook my head. "What does it mean for my job?" I'd been in Homicide for six years now, the past two as lead homicide inspector. With any luck, when my lieutenant was up for promotion, I'd be in line for his job. The department needed strong women. They could go far. Until that moment, I had thought that I would go far. "Right now," the doctor said, "I don't think it means anything. As long as you feel strong while you're undergoing treatment, you can continue to work. In fact, it might even be good therapy." Suddenly, I felt as if the walls of the room were closing in on me and I was suffocating. "I'll give you the name of the hematologist," Orenthaler said. He went on about the doctor's credentials, but I found myself no longer hearing him. I was thinking, Who am I going to tell? Mom had died ten years before, from breast cancer. Dad had been out of the picture since I was thirteen. I had a sister, Cat, but she was living a nice, neat life down in Newport Beach, and for her, just making a right turn on red brought on a moment of crisis. The doctor pushed the referral toward me. "I know you, Lindsay. You'll pretend this is something you can fix by working harder. But you can't. This is deadly serious. I want you to call him today." Suddenly my beeper sounded. I fumbled for it in my bag and looked at the number. It was the office-Jacobi. "I need a phone," I said. Orenthaler shot me a reproving look, one that read, I told you, Lindsay. "Like you said," -- I forced a nervous smile" therapy He nodded to the phone on his desk and left the room. I went through the motions of dialing my partner. "Fun's over, Boxer," Jacobi's gruff voice came on the line. "We got a double one-eight-oh. The Grand Hyatt." My head was spinning with what the doctor had told me. In a fog, I must not have responded. "You hear me, Boxer? Work time. You on the way?" "Yeah," I finally said. "And wear something nice," my partner grunted. "Like you would to a wedding."