20. Friday, 11:45 p.m., March 22, 1996

   The first thing Jack was aware of was a ringing in his head. Slowly he opened his eyes and found himself staring directly up at the ceiling fixture in the kitchen. Wondering what he was doing on the kitchen floor, he tried to get up. When he moved he felt a sharp pain in his jaw that made him lie back down. That was when he realized the ringing was intermittent and it wasn’t in his head: it was the wall phone directly above him.
   Jack rolled over onto his stomach. From that position he pushed himself up onto his knees. He’d never been knocked out before, and he couldn’t believe how weak he felt. Gingerly he felt along his jawline. Thankfully he didn’t feel any jagged edges of broken bones. Equally carefully he palpated his tender abdomen. That was less painful than the jaw, so he assumed there’d been no internal damage.
   The phone continued to ring insistently. Finally Jack reached up and took it off the hook. As he said hello he eased himself into a sitting position on the floor with his back against the kitchen cabinets. His voice sounded strange even to himself.
   “Oh, no! I’m sorry,” Terese said when she heard his voice. “You’ve been asleep. I shouldn’t have called so late.”
   “What time is it?” Jack asked.
   “It’s almost twelve,” Terese said. “We’re still here in the studio, and sometimes we forget that the rest of the world sleeps normal hours. I wanted to ask a question about sterilization, but I’ll call you tomorrow. I’m sorry to have awakened you.”
   “Actually I’ve been unconscious on my kitchen floor,” Jack said.
   “Is that some kind of joke?” Terese asked.
   “I wish,” Jack said. “I came home to a ransacked apartment, and unfortunately the ransackers were still here. To add insult to injury they also kind of beat me up.”
   “Are you all right?” Terese asked urgently.
   “I think so,” Jack said. “But I think I chipped a tooth.”
   “Were you really unconscious?” Terese asked.
   “I’m afraid so,” Jack said. “I still feel weak.”
   “Listen,” Terese said decisively. “I want you to call the police immediately, and I’m coming over.”
   “Wait a sec,” Jack said. “First of all, the police won’t do anything. I mean, what can they do? It was four gang members, and there’s a million of them in the city.”
   “I don’t care, I want you to call the police,” Terese said. “I’ll be over there in fifteen minutes.”
   “Terese, this isn’t the best neighborhood,” Jack said. He could tell she’d made up her mind, but he persisted. “You don’t have to come. I’m okay. Honest!”
   “I don’t want to hear any excuses about not calling the police,” Terese said. “I should be there in fifteen minutes.”
   Jack found himself holding a dead telephone. Terese had hung up.
   Dutifully Jack dialed 911 and gave the information. When he was asked if he was in any current danger, he said no. The operator said the officers would be there as soon as possible.
   Jack pushed himself up onto wobbly legs and walked out into his living room. Briefly he looked for his bike, but then vaguely remembered something about his attackers wanting it. In the bathroom he bared his teeth and examined them. As he’d suspected from touching it with his tongue, his left front tooth had a small chip. Twin must have had something like brass knuckles under his gloves.
   To Jack’s surprise the police arrived within ten minutes. There were two officers, an African-American by the name of David Jefferson and a Latino, Juan Sanchez. They listened politely to Jack’s tale of woe, wrote down the particulars, including the make of the missing bike, and asked Jack if he’d care to come to the precinct to look at mug shots of various local gang members.
   Jack declined. Through Warren he understood that the gangs did not fear the police. Consequently, Jack knew the police could not protect him from the gangs, so he decided not to tell the police everything. But at least he’d satisfied Terese’s demand and would be able to collect insurance on his bike.
   “Excuse me, Doc,” David Jefferson said as the police were leaving. Jack had informed them he was a medical examiner. “How come you live in this neighborhood? Aren’t you asking for trouble?”
   “I ask myself the same question,” Jack said.
   After the police had left, Jack closed his splintered door and leaned against it while surveying his apartment. Somehow he would have to find the energy to clean it up. At the moment it seemed like an overwhelming task.
   A knock that he could feel more than hear made him reopen the door. It was Terese.
   “Ah, thank God it’s you,” Terese said. She came into the apartment. “You weren’t kidding when you said this wasn’t the best neighborhood. Just climbing these stairs was a trauma. If it hadn’t been you opening the door I might have screamed.”
   “I tried to warn you,” Jack said.
   “Let me look at you,” Terese said. “Where’s the best light?”
   Jack shrugged. “You choose,” he said. “Maybe the bathroom.”
   Terese dragged Jack into the bathroom and examined his face. “You have a tiny cut over your jawbone,” she said.
   “I’m not surprised,” Jack said. He then showed her the chipped tooth.
   “Why did they beat you up?” Terese said. “I hope you weren’t playing hero.”
   “Quite the contrary,” Jack said. “I was terrified into total immobility. I was sucker-punched. This was evidently some kind of warning for me to stay out of the Manhattan General.”
   “What on earth are you talking about?” Terese demanded.
   Jack told her all the things he hadn’t told the police. He even told her why he hadn’t told the police.
   “This is getting more and more unbelievable,” Terese said. “What are you going to do?”
   “To tell the truth, I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it,” Jack said.
   “Well, I know one thing you are going to do,” Terese said. “You are going to the emergency room.”
   “Come on!” Jack complained. “I’m fine. My jaw is sore, but big deal.”
   “You were knocked out,” Terese reminded him. “You should be seen. I’m not even a doctor and I know that much.”
   Jack opened his mouth to protest further, but he didn’t; he knew she was right. He should be seen. After a head injury serious enough to render him unconscious, there was the worry of intracranial hemorrhage. He should have a basic neurological exam.
   Jack rescued his jacket from the floor. Then he followed Terese down the stairs to the street. To catch a cab they walked to Columbus Avenue.
   “Where do you want to go?” Terese asked once they were in the taxi.
   “I think I’ll stay away from the General for the time being,” Jack said with a smile. “Let’s go uptown to Columbia-Presbyterian.”
   “Fine,” Terese said. She gave directions to the cabdriver and settled back in her seat.
   “Terese, I really appreciate your coming over,” Jack said. “You didn’t have to, and I certainly didn’t expect it. I’m touched.”
   “You would have done it for me,” Terese said.
   Would he have? Jack wondered. He didn’t know. The whole day had been confusing.
   The visit to the emergency room went smoothly. They had to wait as auto accidents, knife wounds, and heart attacks were given priority. But eventually Jack was seen. Terese insisted on staying the whole time and even accompanied him into the examining room.
   When the ER resident learned Jack was a medical examiner, he insisted Jack be seen by the neurology consult. The neurology resident went over Jack with utmost care. He declared him fit and said he didn’t even think an X ray was indicated unless Jack felt strongly otherwise. Jack didn’t.
   “The one thing I do recommend is that you be observed overnight,” the neurology resident said. He then turned to Terese and said: “Mrs. Stapleton, just wake him up occasionally and make sure he behaves normally. Also check that his pupils remain the same size. Okay?”
   “Okay,” Terese said.
   Later as they were walking out of the hospital Jack commented that he was impressed with her equanimity when she’d been addressed as Mrs. Stapleton.
   “I thought it would have embarrassed the man to have corrected him,” Terese said. “But I’m going to take his recommendations quite seriously. You are coming home with me.”
   “Terese…” Jack complained.
   “No arguments!” Terese commanded. “You heard the doctor. There’s no way I’d allow you to go back to that hellhole of yours tonight.”
   With his head mildly throbbing and his jaw aching and his stomach sore, Jack surrendered. “Okay,” he said. “But this is all far beyond the call of duty.”

   Jack felt truly grateful as they rode up in the elevator in Terese’s posh high-rise. No one had been as gracious to him as Terese in years. Between her concern and generosity he felt that he’d misjudged her.
   “I’ve a guest room that I’m confident you’ll find comfortable,” she said as they walked down a carpeted hallway. “Whenever my folks come to town it is hard to get them to leave.”
   Terese’s apartment was picture perfect. Jack was amazed how neat it was. Even the magazines were arranged carefully on the coffee table, as if she expected Architectural Digest to do a photo shoot.
   The guest room was quaint with flower-print drapes, carpet, and bedspread that all matched. Jack joked that he hoped he didn’t get disoriented since he might have trouble finding the bed.
   After providing Jack with a bottle of aspirin, Terese left him to shower. After he’d finished, he donned a terry-cloth bathrobe, which she’d laid out. Thus attired, he poked his head out into the living room and saw her sitting on the couch reading. He walked out and sat across from her.
   “Aren’t you going to bed?” he asked.
   “I wanted to be sure you were okay,” she said. She leaned forward to stare directly into his face. “Your pupils look equal to me.”
   “To me too,” Jack said. He laughed. “You are taking those doctor’s orders seriously.”
   “You’d better believe it,” she said. “I’ll be coming in to wake you up, so be prepared.”
   “I know better than to argue,” Jack said.
   “How do you feel in general?” Terese asked.
   “Physically or mentally?”
   “Mentally,” Terese said. “Physically I have a pretty good idea.”
   “To be truthful, the experience has scared me,” Jack admitted. “I know enough about these gangs to be afraid of them.”
   “That’s why I wanted you to call the police,” Terese said.
   “You don’t understand,” Jack said. “The police can’t really help me. I mean, I didn’t even bother to tell them the possible name of the gang or the first names of the intruders. Even if the police picked them up, all they’d do is slap their wrists. Then they’ll be back on the street.”
   “So what are you going to do?” Terese asked.
   “I suppose I’m going to stay the hell away from the General,” Jack said. “Seems like that’s going to make everybody happy. Even my own boss told me not to go. I suppose I can do my job without going over there.”
   “I’m relieved,” Terese said. “I was worried you’d try to be a hero and take the warning as a challenge.”
   “You said that before,” Jack said. “But don’t worry. I’m no hero.”
   “What about this bike-riding around this city?” Terese asked. “And riding through the park at night? And what about living where you do? The fact is, I do worry. I worry that you’re either oblivious to danger or courting it. Which is it?”
   Jack looked into Terese’s pale blue eyes. She was asking questions that he strictly avoided. The answers were too personal. But after the concern that she’d demonstrated that evening and the effort she’d expended on his behalf, he felt she deserved some explanation. “I suppose I have been courting danger,” he said.
   “Can I ask why?”
   “I guess I haven’t been worried about dying,” Jack said. “In fact, there was a time when I felt dying would be a relief. A few years back I had trouble with depression, and I suppose it’s always going to be there in the background.”
   “I can relate to that,” Terese said. “I had a bout with depression as well. Was yours associated with a particular event, if I may ask?”
   Jack bit the inside of his lip. He felt uncomfortable talking about such issues, but now that he’d started it was hard to turn back.
   “My wife died,” Jack managed. He couldn’t get himself to mention the children.
   “I’m sorry,” Terese said empathetically. She paused a moment and then said: “Mine was due to the death of my only child.”
   Jack turned his head away. Terese’s admission brought instant tears to his eyes. He took a deep breath and then looked back at this complicated woman. She was a hard-driving executive; of that he was sure from the moment he’d met her. But now he knew there was more.
   “I guess we have more in common than just disliking discos,” he said in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere.
   “I think we’ve both been emotionally scarred,” Terese said. “And we’ve both overly invested ourselves in our careers.”
   “I’m not so sure we share that,” Jack said. “I’m not as committed to my career as I once was, nor as I think you are. The changes that have come to medicine have robbed me of some of that.”
   Terese stood up. Jack did the same. They were standing close enough to appreciate each other physically.
   “I guess I meant more that we both are afraid of emotional commitment,” Terese said. “We’ve both been wounded.”
   “That I can agree to,” Jack said.
   Terese kissed the tips of her fingers and then touched them gently to Jack’s lips.
   “I’ll be in to wake you in a few hours,” she said. “So be prepared.”
   “I hate to be putting you through all this,” Jack said.
   “I’m enjoying this little bit of mothering,” Terese said. “Sleep well.”
   They parted. Jack walked back toward the guest room, but before he got to the door, Terese called out: “One more question: Why do you live in that awful slum?”
   “I guess I don’t feel as if I deserve to be all that happy,” Jack said.
   Terese thought about that for a moment, then smiled. “Well, I shouldn’t imagine I’d understand everything,” she said. “Good night.”
   “Good night,” Jack echoed.

21. Saturday, 8:30 a.m., March 23, 1996

   True to her word, Terese had come into Jack’s room and awakened him several times during the night. Each time they’d talked for a few minutes. By the time Jack awakened in the morning he felt conflicted. He was still thankful for Terese’s ministrations, but he felt embarrassed by how much of himself he’d revealed.
   As Terese made him breakfast, it became apparent that she felt as awkward as he. At eight-thirty, with mutual relief, they parted company in front of Terese’s building. She was off to the studio for what she thought would be a marathon session. He headed for his apartment.
   Jack spent a few hours cleaning up the debris left by the Black Kings. With some rudimentary tools he even repaired his door as best he could.
   With his apartment taken care of, Jack headed to the morgue. He wasn’t scheduled to work that weekend, but he wanted to spend more time on his backlog of autopsies that had yet to be signed out. He also wanted to check on any infectious cases that might have come in during the night from the General. Knowing that there had been three reportedly fulminant cases of Rocky Mountain spotted fever in the emergency room the day before, he was afraid of what he might find.
   Jack missed his bike and thought about getting another one. To get to work he took the subway, but it wasn’t convenient. He had to change trains twice. The New York subway system was fine for getting from north to south, but west to east was another story entirely.
   Even with the multiple train changing Jack still had to walk six blocks. With a light rain falling and no umbrella, he was wet by the time he got to the medical examiner’s office at noon.
   Weekends were far different than weekdays at the morgue. There was much less commotion. Jack used the front entrance and had the receptionist buzz him into the ID area. A distraught family was in one of the identification rooms. Jack could hear sobbing as he passed by.
   Jack found the schedule that listed the doctors on call for the weekend and was pleased to see that Laurie was among them. He also found the master list of cases that had come in the previous night. Scanning it, he was sickened to see a familiar name. Nancy Wiggens had been brought in at four A.M.! The provisional diagnosis was Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
   Jack found two more cases with the same diagnosis: Valerie Schafer, aged thirty-three, and Carmen Chavez, aged forty-seven. Jack assumed they were the other two cases in the General’s emergency room the day before.
   Jack went downstairs and peeked into the autopsy room. Two tables were in use. Jack couldn’t tell who the doctors were, but judging by height he guessed one of them was Laurie.
   After changing into scrubs and donning protective gear, Jack entered through the washroom.
   “What are you doing here?” Laurie asked when she caught sight of Jack. “You’re supposed to be off enjoying yourself.”
   “Just can’t keep away,” Jack quipped. He leaned over to see the face of the patient Laurie was working on and his heart sank. Staring up at him with lifeless eyes was Nancy Wiggens. In death she appeared even younger than she had in life.
   Jack quickly looked away.
   “Did you know this individual?” Laurie asked. Her own emotional antennae had instantly picked up Jack’s reaction.
   “Vaguely,” Jack admitted.
   “It’s a terrible thing when health-care workers succumb to their patients’ illnesses,” Laurie remarked. “The patient I did before this one was a nurse who’d ministered to the patient you did yesterday.”
   “I’d assumed as much,” Jack said. “What about the third case?”
   “I did her first,” Laurie said. “She was from central supply. I couldn’t quite figure how she contracted it.”
   “Tell me about it,” Jack said. “I’ve done two other people from central supply. One with plague and one with tularemia. I can’t understand it either.”
   “Somebody better figure it out,” Laurie said.
   “I couldn’t agree more,” Jack said. Then he pointed to Nancy’s organs. “What’d you find?”
   “It’s all been consistent with Rocky Mountain spotted fever,” Laurie said. “Are you interested to see?”
   “I sure am,” Jack said.
   Laurie took time out to show all the relevant pathology to Jack. Jack told her the findings were the mirror image of those he’d seen with Lagenthorpe.
   “It makes you wonder why just three got sick, since they were so sick,” Laurie said. “The interval from the onset of symptoms to the time of death was a lot shorter than usual. It suggests that the microbes were particularly pathogenic, yet if they were, where are the other patients? Janice told me that as far as the hospital knows there are no more cases.”
   “There was a similar pattern with the other diseases,” Jack said. “I can’t explain it, just like I can’t explain so many other aspects of these outbreaks. That’s why they’ve been driving me crazy.”
   Laurie glanced up at the clock and was surprised by the time. “I’ve got to get a move on here,” she said. “Sal has to leave early.”
   “Why don’t I help?” Jack offered. “Tell Sal he can go now.”
   “Are you serious?” Laurie asked.
   “Absolutely,” Jack said. “Let’s get it done.”
   Sal was happy to leave a little early. Laurie and Jack worked well together and finished up the case in good time. They walked out of the autopsy room together.
   “How about a bite up in the lunchroom?” Laurie asked. “My treat.”
   “You’re on,” Jack said.
   They disposed of their isolation gear and disappeared into their respective locker rooms. When Jack was dressed, he went out into the hall and waited for Laurie to appear.
   “You didn’t have to wait for…” Laurie began to say, but stopped. “Your jaw is swollen,” she said.
   “That’s not all,” Jack said. He bared his teeth and pointed to his left incisor. “See the chip?” he asked.
   “Of course I do,” Laurie said. Her hands went onto her hips and her eyes narrowed. She looked like an irate mother confronting a naughty child. “Did you fall off of that bike?” she asked.
   “I wish,” Jack said with a mirthless laugh. He then told her the whole story minus the part about Terese. Laurie’s expression changed from mock anger to disbelief.
   “That’s extortion,” she said indignantly.
   “I suppose it is in a way,” Jack said. “But come on, let’s not let it upset our gourmet lunch.”
   They did the best they could with the vending machines on the second floor. Laurie got a soup while Jack settled on a tuna-fish salad sandwich. They took their food to a table and sat down.
   “The more I think about what you’ve told me, the crazier I think it sounds,” Laurie said. “How’s your apartment?”
   “A bit dilapidated,” Jack said. “But it wasn’t so great before this happened, so it doesn’t much matter. The worst thing is that they took my bike.”
   “I think you should move,” Laurie said. “You shouldn’t be living there anyway.”
   “It’s only the second break-in,” Jack said.
   “I hope you’re not planning on staying in tonight,” Laurie said. “How depressing.”
   “No, I’m busy tonight,” Jack said. “I’ve got a group of nuns coming into town who I’m supposed to show around.”
   Laurie laughed. “Hey, my folks are having a little dinner party tonight. Would you care to come along? It would be a lot more cheerful than sitting in your plundered apartment.”
   “That’s very thoughtful of you,” Jack said. As with Terese’s actions the night before, this invitation was totally unexpected. Jack was moved.
   “I would enjoy your company,” Laurie said. “What do you say?”
   “You do realize that I’m not particularly social,” Jack said.
   “I’m aware of that,” Laurie said. “I don’t mean to put you on the spot. You don’t even have to tell me now. The dinner is at eight and you can call me a half hour before if you decide to come. Here’s my number.” She wrote it on a napkin and handed it to him.
   “I’m afraid I’m not such good company at dinner parties,” Jack said.
   “Well, it’s up to you,” Laurie said. “The invitation stands. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got two more cases to do.”
   Jack watched Laurie leave. He’d been impressed with her from the first day, but he’d always thought of her as one of his more talented colleagues, nothing more. But now suddenly he saw how strikingly attractive she was with her sculptured features, soft skin, and beautiful auburn hair.
   Laurie waved before slipping out the door, and Jack waved back. Disconcertedly he stood up, discarded his trash, and headed up to his office. In the elevator he wondered what was happening to him. It had taken him years to stabilize his life, and now his well-constructed cocoon seemed to be unraveling.
   Once inside his office Jack sat down at his desk. He rubbed his temples to try to calm himself. He was becoming agitated again, and he knew that when he became agitated he could be impulsive.
   As soon as he felt capable of concentrating he pulled the closest folder toward him and flipped it open. Then he went to work.

   By four o’clock Jack had accomplished as much paperwork as he could handle. Leaving the medical examiner’s office, he took the subway. As he sat in the bouncing rail cars with the other silent, zombielike people, he told himself he had to get another bike. Commuting underground like a mole was not going to work for him.
   Arriving home, Jack lost no time. He took his stairs two at a time. Finding a drunk, homeless person asleep on the first landing didn’t faze him. He just stepped over the man and continued. With his anxiety Jack needed exercise, and the sooner he got out on the basketball court the happier he’d be.
   Jack hesitated briefly at his door. It seemed to be in the same shape as he’d left it. He unlocked it and peered into the apartment. It, too, seemed undisturbed. Somewhat superstitiously Jack walked over to the kitchen and looked in. He was relieved to see that no one was there.
   In the bedroom Jack pulled out his basketball gear: oversized sweatpants, a turtleneck, and a sweater. He quickly changed. After lacing up his hightops, he grabbed a headband, a basketball, and was back out the door.
   Saturday afternoon was always a big day at the playground, provided the weather cooperated. Usually twenty to thirty people showed up ready to run, and this particular Saturday was no exception. The morning rain had long since stopped. As Jack approached the court he counted fourteen people waiting to play. That meant he’d probably have to wait through two more games beyond the present match before he could hope to join.
   Jack nodded subdued greetings to some of the people he recognized. The etiquette required that no emotion be shown. After he’d stood on the sidelines for the appropriate amount of time he asked who had winners. He was told that David had winners. Jack was acquainted with David.
   Careful to suppress the eagerness he felt, Jack sidled up to David.
   “You got winners?” Jack asked, pretending to be uninterested.
   “Yeah, I got winners,” David said. He went through some minor ducking and weaving that Jack had learned to recognize as posturing. Jack had also learned by sore experience not to imitate it.
   “You got five?” Jack asked.
   David already had his team lined up so Jack had to go through the same process with the next fellow who had winners. That was Spit, whose nickname was based on one of his less endearing mannerisms. Luckily for Jack, Spit only had four players and since he knew Jack’s outside shooting ability, he agreed to add Jack to his roster.
   With his entrance into the game now assured, Jack took his ball to one of the unused side baskets and began warming up. He had a mild headache and his jaw ached, but otherwise he felt better than he’d expected. He’d been more concerned about his stomach once he started running around, but that didn’t bother him in the slightest.
   While Jack was busy shooting foul shots Warren showed up. After he’d gone through the same process that Jack had done in order to get into the game, he wandered over to where Jack was practicing.
   “Hey, Doc, what’s happening?” Warren asked. He snatched the ball from Jack’s hands and quickly tossed in a shot that hit nothing but net. Warren’s movements were uncannily fast.
   “Not much,” Jack said, which was the correct reply. Warren’s question was really a greeting in disguise.
   They shot for a while in a ritual fashion. First Warren would shoot until he missed, which wasn’t often. Then Jack would do the same. While one was shooting the other rebounded.
   “Warren, let me ask you a question,” Jack said during one of his turns shooting. “You ever hear of a gang by the name of the Black Kings?”
   “Yeah, I think so,” Warren said. He fed Jack the ball after Jack had put in one of his patented long-distance jump shots. “I think they’re a bunch of losers from down near the Bowery. How come you’re asking?”
   “Just curious,” Jack said. He sank another long jump shot. He was feeling good.
   Warren snatched the ball out of the air as it came through the basket. But he didn’t pass it back to Jack. Instead he walked it to Jack.
   “What do you mean, ‘curious’?” Warren asked. He drilled Jack with his gun-barrel eyes. “You ain’t been curious about any gangs before.”
   One of the other things that Jack knew about Warren was that he was keenly intelligent. Had he had the opportunity, Jack was sure he’d be a doctor or a lawyer or some other professional.
   “I happened to see it tattooed on a guy’s forearm,” Jack said.
   “The guy dead?” Warren asked. He was aware of what Jack did for a living.
   “Not yet,” Jack said. He rarely risked sarcasm with his playground acquaintances, but on this occasion it had just slipped out.
   Warren regarded him warily and continued to hold the ball. “You pulling my chain, or what?”
   “Hell no,” Jack said. “I may be white, but I ain’t stupid.”
   Warren smiled. “How come you got banged up on your jaw?”
   Warren didn’t miss a trick. “Just caught an elbow,” Jack said. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
   Warren handed over the ball. “Let’s warm up with a little one-on-one,” he said. “Hit-or-miss for the ball.”
   Warren got in the game before Jack, but Jack eventually played, and played well. Spit’s players seemed unbeatable, to the chagrin of Warren, who had to play against them on several occasions. By six o’clock Jack was exhausted and soaked to the skin.
   Jack was perfectly happy to leave when everyone else departed en masse for dinner and their usual Saturday-night revelry. The basketball court would be empty until the following afternoon.
   A long, hot postgame shower was a distinct pleasure for Jack. When he was finished he dressed in clean clothes and looked into his refrigerator. It was a sad scene. All his beer had been drunk by the Black Kings. As far as food was concerned he was limited to an old wedge of cheddar cheese and two eggs of dubious age. Jack closed the refrigerator. He wasn’t all that hungry anyway.
   In the living room Jack sat on his threadbare couch and picked up one of his medical journals. His usual evening routine was to read until nine-thirty or ten and then fall asleep. But tonight he was still restless despite the exercise, and he found he couldn’t concentrate.
   Jack tossed the journal aside and stared at the wall. He was lonely, and although he was lonely almost every night, he felt it more keenly at that moment. He kept thinking about Terese and how compassionate she’d been the night before.
   Jack impulsively went to the desk, got out the phone book, and called Willow and Heath. He wasn’t sure if the phones would be manned after hours, but eventually someone answered. After several wrong extensions he finally got Terese on the phone.
   With his heart inexplicably pounding in his chest, Jack casually told her he was thinking of getting something to eat.
   “Is this an invitation?” Terese questioned.
   “Well,” Jack said hesitantly. “Maybe you’d like to come along, provided you haven’t eaten yet.”
   “This is the most roundabout invitation I’ve gotten since Marty Berman asked me to the junior prom,” Terese said with a laugh. “You know what he did? He used the conditional. He said: ‘What would you say if I asked you?’ ”
   “I guess Marty and I have some things in common,” Jack said.
   “Hardly,” Terese said. “Marty was a skinny runt. But as for dinner, I’ll have to take a rain check. I’d love to see you, but you know about this deadline we have. We’re hoping that we can get it under control tonight. I hope you understand.”
   “Absolutely,” Jack said. “No problem.”
   “Call me tomorrow,” Terese said. “Maybe in the afternoon we can get together for coffee or something.”
   Jack promised he’d call and wished her good luck. Then he hung up the phone, feeling even lonelier for having made an effort to be sociable after so many years and having been turned down.
   Surprising himself anew, Jack found Laurie’s number and called her. Trying to cover his nervousness with humor, he told her that the group of nuns he was expecting had to cancel.
   “Does that mean you’d like to come to dinner?” Laurie asked.
   “If you’ll have me,” Jack said.
   “I’d be delighted,” Laurie said.

22. Sunday, 9:00 a.m., March 24, 1996

   Jack was poring over one of his forensic science journals when his phone rang. Since he had yet to speak that morning his voice was gravelly when he answered.
   “I didn’t wake you, did I?” Laurie asked.
   “I’ve been up for hours,” Jack assured her.
   “I’m calling because you asked me to,” Laurie said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t call this early on a Sunday morning.”
   “It’s not early for me,” Jack said.
   “But it was late when you went home,” Laurie said.
   “It wasn’t that late,” Jack said. “Besides, no matter what time I go to bed I always wake up early.”
   “Anyway, you wanted me to let you know if there were any infectious deaths from the General last night,” Laurie said. “There weren’t. Janice even told me before she left that there wasn’t even anyone ill with Rocky Mountain spotted fever in the hospital. That’s good news, isn’t it?”
   “Very good news,” Jack agreed.
   “My parents were quite impressed with you last night,” Laurie added. “I hope you enjoyed yourself.”
   “It was a delightful evening,” Jack said. “Frankly I’m embarrassed I stayed so long. Thank you for inviting me and thank your parents. They couldn’t have been more hospitable.”
   “We’ll have to do it again sometime,” Laurie said.
   “Absolutely,” Jack said.
   After they had said good-byes, Jack hung up the phone and tried to go back to reading. But he was momentarily distracted by thoughts of the previous evening. He had enjoyed himself. In fact he’d enjoyed himself much more than he could have imagined, and that confused him. He’d purposefully kept to himself for five years, and now without warning he found himself enjoying the company of two very different women.
   What he liked about Laurie was how easy she was to be with. Terese, on the other hand, could be overbearing even while she was being warmly caring. Terese was more intimidating than Laurie, but she was also challenging in a way that was more consistent with Jack’s reckless lifestyle. But now that he’d had the opportunity to see Laurie interact with her parents, he appreciated her open, warm personality all the more. He imagined having a pompous cardiovascular surgeon for a father couldn’t have been easy.
   Laurie had tried to engage Jack in personal conversation after the older generation had retired, but Jack had resisted, as was his habit. Yet he’d been tempted. Having opened up a little with Terese the night before, it had surprised him how good it felt to talk with someone caring. But Jack had fallen back on his usual stratagem of turning the conversation back to Laurie, and he’d learned some unexpected things.
   Most surprising was that she was unattached. Jack had just assumed someone as desirable and sensitive as Laurie would have been involved with someone, but Laurie insisted she didn’t even date much. She’d explained that she’d had a relationship with a police detective for a time, but it hadn’t worked out.
   Eventually Jack got back to his journal. He read until hunger drove him to a neighborhood deli. On his way home from lunch he saw that a group of guys was already beginning to appear on the basketball court. Eager for more physical activity, Jack dashed home, changed, and joined them.
   Jack played for several hours. Unfortunately his shot wasn’t as smooth or accurate as on the previous day. Warren teased him unmercifully, especially when he guarded Jack during several of the games. Warren was making up for the ignominy of the previous day’s defeats.
   At three o’clock after another loss, which meant Jack would be sitting out for at least three games, maybe more, he gave up and returned to his apartment. After a shower he sat down to try to read again, but found himself thinking about Terese.
   Concerned about being rejected a second time, Jack had not planned on calling her. But by four he relented; after all, she had asked him to call. More important, he truly wanted to talk with her. Having partially opened up to her, he felt curiously disturbed not to have told her the whole story. He felt he owed her more.
   Even more anxious than he had been the evening before, Jack dialed the number.
   This time Terese was much more receptive. In fact, she was ebullient.
   “We made great progress last night,” she announced proudly. “Tomorrow we’re going to knock the socks off the president and the CEO. Thanks to you this idea of hospital cleanliness and low infection rate is a great hook. We’re even having some fun with your sterilization idea.”
   Finally Jack got around to asking her if she’d like to get together for some coffee. He reminded her it had been her suggestion.
   “I’d love it,” Terese said without hesitation. “When?”
   “How about right now?” Jack said.
   “Fine by me,” Terese said.
   They met at a small French-style café on Madison Avenue between Sixty-first and Sixty-second conveniently close to the Willow and Heath building. Jack got there ahead of Terese and took a table in the window and ordered an espresso.
   Terese arrived soon after. She waved through the window, and after entering, she forced Jack into a repeat of the cheek-pressing routine. She was vibrant. She ordered a decaf cappuccino from the attentive waiter.
   As soon as they were alone, she leaned across the table and grasped Jack’s hand. “How are you?” she asked. She looked directly into his eyes and then at his jawline. “Your pupils are equal, and you look okay. I thought you’d be black and blue.”
   “I’m better than I would have expected,” Jack admitted.
   Terese then launched into an excited monologue about her upcoming review and how wonderfully everything was falling into place. She explained what a “ripomatic” was and how they had managed to put one together with tape sequences from their previous National Health campaign. She said it was terrific and gave a good impression of the Do-No-Harm Hippocrates idea.
   Jack let her carry on until she’d exhausted the subject. After taking a few gulps of her cappuccino, she asked him what he’d been doing.
   “I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversation we had Friday night,” he said. “It’s been bothering me.”
   “How so?” Terese asked.
   “We were being open with each other, but I wasn’t completely forthright,” Jack said. “I’m not accustomed to talking about my problems. The truth is: I didn’t tell you the whole story.”
   Terese put her coffee cup down and studied Jack’s face. His dark blue eyes were intense. His face was stubbled; he’d obviously not shaved that day. She thought that under different circumstances Jack could appear intimidating, maybe even scary.
   “My wife wasn’t the only person who died,” Jack said haltingly. “I lost my two daughters as well. It was a commuter plane crash.”
   Terese swallowed with difficulty. She’d felt a welling of emotion clog her throat. Jack’s story was hardly what she’d expected.
   “The problem is, I’ve always felt so damn responsible,” he continued. “If it hadn’t been for me they wouldn’t have been on that plane.”
   Terese felt an intense stab of empathy. After a few moments she said: “I wasn’t entirely forthright either. I told you I’d lost my child. What I didn’t say is that it was an unborn child, and at the same time I lost the child, I lost my ability to have any more. To add insult to injury, the man I’d married deserted me.”
   For a few emotionally choked minutes neither Jack nor Terese spoke. Finally, Jack broke the silence: “It sounds like we’re trying to outdo each other with our personal tragedies,” he said, managing a smile.
   “Just like a couple of depressives,” Terese agreed. “My therapist would love this.”
   “Of course, what I’ve told you is for your ears only,” Jack said.
   “Don’t be silly,” Terese assured him. “Same goes for you. I haven’t told my story to anyone but my therapist.”
   “I haven’t told anybody,” Jack said. “Not even a therapist.”
   Feeling a sense of relief from having both bared their innermost secrets, Jack and Terese went on to talk about happier things. Terese, who’d grown up in the city, was shocked to hear how little of the area Jack had visited since he’d been there. She talked about taking him to the Cloisters when spring had truly arrived.
   “You’ll love it,” she promised.
   “I’ll look forward to it,” Jack said.

23. Monday, 7:30 a.m., March 25, 1996

   Jack was irritated at himself. He’d had time to buy a new bike on Saturday, but he’d failed to do so. Consequently, he had to use the subway again to commute to work, although he’d considered jogging. The problem with jogging was that he’d have to have a change of clothes in his office. To give him the option in the future he brought some to work in a small shoulder bag.
   Coming in from First Avenue, Jack again entered the medical examiner’s facility through the front entrance. As he passed through the glass door, he was impressed with the number of families waiting in the outer reception area. It was highly unusual for so many people to be there that early. Something must be up, he surmised.
   Jack had himself buzzed in. He walked into the scheduling room and saw George Fontworth sitting at the desk Laurie had occupied each morning the previous week.
   Jack was sorry Laurie’s week as supervisor was over. George had rotated to the position. He was a short, moderately overweight doctor of whom Jack had a low opinion. He was perfunctory and often missed important findings.
   Ignoring George, Jack headed over to Vinnie and pushed down the edge of his newspaper.
   “Why are there so many people out in the ID area?” Jack asked.
   “Because there’s a minor disaster over at the General,” George said, answering for Vinnie. Vinnie treated Jack to a jaunty but disdainful expression and went back to his paper.
   “What kind of disaster?” Jack asked.
   George patted the top of a stack of folders. “A whole bunch of meningococcal deaths,” he said. “Could be an epidemic in the making. We’ve got eight so far.”
   Jack rushed over to George’s desk and snapped up a folder at random. He opened it and shuffled through its contents until he came to the investigative report. Scanning it quickly, he learned that the patient’s name was Robert Caruso, and that he had been a nurse on the orthopedic floor at the General.
   Jack tossed the folder back onto the desk and literally ran through communications to the offices of the PAs. He was relieved to see Janice was still there, putting in overtime as usual.
   She looked terrible. The dark circles under her eyes were so distinct, she resembled a battered woman. She put her pen down and leaned back. She shook her head. “I might have to get another job,” she said. “I can’t keep this up. Thank God I have tomorrow and the next day off.”
   “What happened?” Jack asked.
   “It started on the shift before mine,” Janice said. “The first case was called in around six-thirty. Apparently the patient had died about six P.M.”
   “An orthopedic patient?” Jack asked.
   “How’d you know?”
   “I just saw a folder from an orthopedic nurse,” Jack said.
   “Oh, yeah, that was Mr. Caruso,” Janice said with a yawn. She excused herself before continuing. “Anyway, I started getting called shortly after I arrived at eleven. Since then it’s been nonstop. I’ve been back and forth all night. In fact, I just got back here twenty minutes ago. I tell you, this is worse than the the other outbreaks. One of the patients is a nine-year-old girl. What a tragedy.”
   “Was she related to the first case?” Jack asked.
   “She was a niece,” Janice said.
   “Had she been in to visit her uncle?” Jack asked.
   “Around noon yesterday,” Janice said. “You don’t think that could have contributed to her death, do you? I mean, that was only about twelve hours before her death.”
   “Under certain circumstances meningococcus has a frightful capacity to kill, and kill incredibly swiftly,” Jack said. “In fact, it can kill in just a few hours.”
   “Well, the hospital is in a panic.”
   “I can imagine,” Jack said. “What was the name of the first case?”
   “Carlo Pacini,” Janice said. “But that’s about all I know. He came in on the shift before mine. Steve Mariott handled it.”
   “Could I ask a favor?” Jack asked.
   “That depends,” Janice said. “I’m awfully tired.”
   “Just leave word for Bart that I want you PAs to get all the charts of the index case in each of these outbreaks. Let’s see, that’s Nodelman with the plague, Hard with tularemia, Lagenthorpe with Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and Pacini with meningococcus. Do you think that will be a problem?”
   “Not at all,” Janice said. “They are all active ME cases.”
   Jack stood up and gave Janice a pat on the back. “Maybe you should go over to the clinic on your way home,” he said. “Some chemoprophylaxis might not be a bad idea.”
   Janice’s eyes widened. “You think that is necessary?”
   “Better safe than sorry,” Jack said. “Anyway, discuss it with one of the infectious disease gurus. They know better than I. There’s even a tetravalent vaccine, but that takes a few days to kick in.”
   Jack dashed back to the ID room and asked George for Carlo Pacini’s folder.
   “It’s not here,” George said. “Laurie came in early, and when she heard about what was going on, she requested the case. She’s got the folder.”
   “Where is she?” Jack asked.
   “Up in her office,” Vinnie responded from behind his paper.
   Jack hustled up to Laurie’s office. Contrary to the way Jack worked, she liked to go over each folder in her office before doing the autopsy.
   “Pretty frightening, I’d say,” Laurie said as soon as she saw Jack.
   “It’s terrifying,” Jack said. He grabbed Laurie’s officemate’s chair, pulled it over to Laurie’s desk, and sat down. “This is just what I’ve been worrying about. This could be a real epidemic. What have you learned about this index case?”
   “Not much,” Laurie admitted. “He’d been admitted Saturday evening with a fractured hip. Apparently he’d had a brittle bone problem; he’d had a whole string of fractures over the last few years.”
   “Fits the pattern,” Jack said.
   “What pattern?” Laurie asked.
   “All the index cases from these recent outbreaks have had some sort of chronic illness,” Jack said.
   “A lot of people who are hospitalized have chronic illnesses,” Laurie said. “In fact, most of them. What does that have to do with anything?”
   “I’ll tell you what’s on his paranoid, sick mind,” Chet said. Chet had appeared at Laurie’s door. He stepped into the room and leaned against the second desk. “He’s got this thing about AmeriCare and wants to see conspiracy behind all this trouble.”
   “Is that true?” Laurie asked.
   “I think it’s less that I want to see conspiracy than it’s staring me in the face,” Jack said.
   “What do you mean by ‘conspiracy’?” Laurie asked.
   “He has this notion that these unusual illnesses are being spread deliberately,” Chet said. Chet summarized Jack’s theory that the culprit was either someone at AmeriCare trying to protect its bottom line or some crazy person with terrorist inclinations.
   Laurie looked questioningly at Jack. Jack shrugged.
   “There are a lot of unanswered questions,” Jack offered.
   “As there are in just about any outbreak,” Laurie said. “But really! This is all a bit far-fetched. I hope you didn’t mention this theory to the powers that be over at the General.”
   “Yeah, I did,” Jack said. “In fact I sort of asked the director of the lab if he was involved. He’s rather disgruntled with his budget. He immediately informed the infection-control officer. I imagine they’ve let the administration know.”
   Laurie let out a short, cynical laugh. “Oh, brother,” she said. “No wonder you’ve become persona non grata around there.”
   “You have to admit there’s been an awful lot of questionable nosocomial infection at the General,” Jack said.
   “I’m not even so sure about that,” Laurie said. “Both the tularemic patient and the patient with Rocky Mountain spotted fever developed their illnesses within forty-eight hours of admission. By definition, they are not nosocomial infections.”
   “Technically that’s true,” Jack admitted. “But…”
   “Besides, all these illnesses have been seen in New York,” Laurie said. “I’ve done some recent reading myself. There was a serious outbreak of Rocky Mountain spotted fever in eighty-seven.”
   “Thank you, Laurie,” Chet said. “I tried to tell Jack the same thing. Even Calvin has told him.”
   “What about the series of cases coming from central supply?” Jack asked Laurie. “And what about the rapidity with which the patients with Rocky Mountain spotted fever developed their illnesses? You were questioning that just this Saturday.”
   “Of course I’d question those things,” Laurie said. “They’re the type of questions that have to be asked in any epidemiological situation.”
   Jack sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I’m convinced something highly unusual is going on. All along I’ve been worried that we might see a real epidemic crop up. This outbreak of meningococcus may be it. If it peters out like the other outbreaks, I’ll be relieved, of course, in human terms. But it will only add to my suspicions. This pattern of multiple fulminant cases, then nothing, is highly unusual in itself.”
   “But this is the season for meningococcus,” Laurie said. “It’s not so unusual.”
   “Laurie’s right,” Chet said. “But regardless, my concern is that you’re going to get yourself into real trouble. You’re like a dog with a bone. Calm down! I don’t want to see you fired. At least reassure me you’re not going back to the General.”
   “I can’t say that,” Jack said. “Not with this new outbreak. This one doesn’t depend on some arthropods that aren’t around. This is an airborne problem, and as far as I’m concerned, it changes the rules.”
   “Just a moment,” Laurie said. “What about that warning you got from those thugs?”
   “Now what?” Chet questioned. “What thugs?”
   “Jack had a cozy visit from some charming members of a gang,” Laurie said. “It seems that at least one of the New York gangs is going into the extortion business.”
   “Somebody has to explain,” Chet said.
   Laurie told Chet what she knew of Jack’s beating.
   “And you’re still thinking of going over there?” Chet asked when she was through.
   “I’ll be careful,” Jack said. “Besides, I haven’t exactly decided to go yet.”
   Chet rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I think I would have preferred you as a suburbanite ophthalmologist.”
   “What do you mean, ophthalmologist?” Laurie questioned.
   “Come on, you guys,” Jack said. He stood up. “Enough is enough. We’ve got work to do.”

   Jack, Laurie, and Chet did not emerge from the autopsy room until after one in the afternoon. Although George had questioned the need to post all the meningococcal cases, the triumvirate had insisted; George relented in the end. Doing some on their own and some together, they autopsied the initial patient, one orthopedic resident, two nurses, one orderly, two people who’d visited the patient, including the nine-year-old girl, and particularly important as far as Jack was concerned, one woman from central supply.
   After the marathon they all changed back to their street clothes and met up in the lunchroom. Relieved to be away from the mayhem and a bit overwhelmed by the findings, they didn’t talk at first. They merely got their selections from the vending machines and sat down at one of the free tables.
   “I haven’t done many meningococcal cases in the past,” Laurie said finally. “But these today were a lot more impressive than the ones I did do.”
   “You won’t see a more dramatic case of the Waterhouse-Friderichsen syndrome,” Chet said. “None of these people had a chance. The bacteria marched through them like a Mongol horde. The amount of internal hemorrhage was extraordinary. I tell you, it scares the pants off me.”
   “It was one time that I actually didn’t mind being in the moon suit,” Jack agreed. “I couldn’t get over the amount of gangrene on the extremities. It was even more than on the recent plague cases.”
   “What surprised me was how little meningitis was involved,” Laurie said. “Even the child had very little, and I would have thought at least she would have had extensive involvement.”
   “What puzzles me,” Jack said, “is the amount of pneumonitis. Obviously it is an airborne infection, but it usually invades the upper part of the respiratory tree, not the lungs.”
   “It can get there easily enough once it gets into the blood,” Chet said. “Obviously all these people had high levels coursing through their vascular systems.”
   “Have either of you heard if any more cases have come in today?” Jack asked.
   Chet and Laurie exchanged glances. Both shook their heads.
   Jack scraped back his chair and went to a wall phone. He called down to communications and posed the same question to one of the operators. The answer was no. Jack walked back to the table and reclaimed his seat.
   “Well, well,” he said. “Isn’t this curious. No new cases.”
   “I’d say it was good news,” Laurie said.
   “I’d second that,” Chet said.
   “Does either of you know any of the internists over at the General?” Jack asked.
   “I do,” Laurie said. “One of my classmates from medical school is over there.”
   “How about giving her a call and seeing if they have many meningococcal cases under treatment?” Jack asked.
   Laurie shrugged and went to use the same phone Jack had just used.
   “I don’t like that look in your eye,” Chet said.
   “I can’t help it,” Jack said. “Just like with the other outbreaks, little disturbing facts are beginning to appear. We’ve just autopsied some of the sickest meningococcal patients any of us has ever seen and then, boom! No more cases, as if a faucet had been turned off. It’s just what I was talking about earlier.”
   “Isn’t that characteristic of the disease?” Chet asked. “Peaks and valleys.”
   “Not this fast,” Jack said. Then he paused. “Wait a second,” he added. “I just thought of something else. We know who the first person was to die in this outbreak, but who was the last?”
   “I don’t know, but we’ve got all the folders,” Chet said.
   Laurie returned. “No meningococcal cases presently,” she said. “But the hospital doesn’t consider itself out of the woods. They’ve instituted a massive campaign of vaccination and chemoprophylaxis. Apparently the place is in an uproar.”
   Both Jack and Chet merely grunted at this news. They were preoccupied with going through the eight folders and jotting down notations on their napkins.
   “What on earth are you guys doing?” Laurie asked.
   “We’re trying to figure out who was the last to die,” Jack said.
   “What on earth for?” Laurie asked.
   “I’m not sure,” Jack said.
   “This is it,” Chet said. “It was Imogene Philbertson.”
   “Honest?” Jack questioned. “Let me see.”
   Chet turned around the partially filled-out death certificate that listed the time of death.
   “I’ll be damned,” Jack said.
   “Now what?” Laurie asked.
   “She was the one who worked in central supply,” Jack said.
   “Is that significant?” Laurie asked.
   Jack pondered for a few minutes, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll have to look back at the other outbreaks. As you know, each outbreak has included someone from central supply. I’ll see if it is a pattern I’d missed.”
   “You guys weren’t particularly impressed with my news that there are currently no more cases of meningococcal disease over at the General.”
   “I am,” Chet said. “Jack sees it as confirmation of his theories.”
   “I’m worried it is going to frustrate our hypothetical terrorist,” Jack said. “It’s also going to teach him an unfortunate lesson.”
   Both Laurie and Chet rolled their eyes to the ceiling and let out audible groans.
   “Come on, you guys,” Jack said. “Hear me out. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that I’m right about some weirdo spreading these microbes in hopes of starting an epidemic. At first he picks the scariest, most exotic diseases he can think of, but he doesn’t know that they won’t really spread patient to patient. They are spread by arthropods having access to an infected reservoir. But after a few flops he figures this out and turns to a disease that is spread airborne. But he picks meningococcus. The problem with meningococcus is that it really isn’t a patient-to-patient disease either: it’s a carrier disease that’s mainly spread by an immune individual walking around and giving it to others. So now our weirdo is really frustrated, but he truly knows what he needs. He needs a disease that is spread mainly patient-to-patient by aerosol.”
   “And what would you choose in this hypothetical scenario?” Chet asked superciliously.
   “Let’s see,” Jack said. He pondered for a moment. “I’d use drug-resistant diphtheria, or maybe even drug-resistant pertussis. Those old standbys are making some devastating comebacks. Or you know what else would be perfect? Influenza! A pathological strain of influenza.”
   “What an imagination!” Chet commented.
   Laurie stood up. “I’ve got to get back to work,” she said. “This conversation is too hypothetical for me.”
   Chet did the same.
   “Hey, isn’t anybody going to comment?” Jack said.
   “You know how we feel,” Chet said. “This is just mental masturbation. It seems like the more you think and talk about this stuff the more you believe it. I mean, really, if it were one disease, okay, but now we’re up to four. Where would someone get these microbes? They are not the kind of thing you can go into your neighborhood deli and order. I’ll see you upstairs.”
   Jack watched Laurie and Chet dispose of their trash and leave the lunchroom. He sat for a few moments and considered what Chet had said. Chet had a good point, one that Jack had not even considered. Where would someone get pathological bacteria? He really had no idea.
   Jack got up and stretched his legs. After discarding his tray and sandwich wrappings, he followed the others up to the fifth floor. By the time he got to the office, Chet was already engrossed and didn’t look up.
   Sitting down at his desk, Jack got all the folders together plus his notes and looked up the time of death of each of the women victims from central supply. To date, central supply had lost four people. Jack imagined that the department head would have to be actively recruiting to keep up with that type of attrition.
   Next Jack looked up the time of death of each of the other infectious cases. For the times of death of the few he’d not autopsied, he called down to Bart Arnold, the chief PA.
   When Jack had all the information it became immediately apparent that with each outbreak, it had been the woman from central supply to be the last to succumb. That suggested, but certainly didn’t prove, that in each instance those from central supply were the last to become infected. Jack asked himself what that meant, but couldn’t come up with an answer. Still, it was an extremely curious detail.
   “I have to go back to the General,” Jack said suddenly. He stood up.
   Chet didn’t even bother to look up. “Do what you have to do,” he said with resignation. “Not that my opinion counts.”
   Jack pulled on his bomber jacket. “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “I appreciate your concern, but I’ve got to go. I’ve got to look into this strange central supply connection. It could just be a coincidence, I agree, but it seems unlikely.”
   “What about Bingham and what about those gang members Laurie mentioned?” Chet asked. “You’re taking a lot of risk.”
   “Such is life,” Jack said. He gave Chet a tap on the shoulder on his way to the hallway. Jack had just reached the threshold when his phone rang. He debated whether to take the time to answer it. It was usually someone from one of the labs.
   “Want me to get it?” Chet offered when he saw Jack hesitate.
   “No, I’m here, and I might as well,” Jack said. He returned to his desk and picked up the receiver.
   “Thank God you are there!” Terese said with obvious relief. “I was terrified I wouldn’t get you, at least not in time.”
   “What on earth is the matter?” Jack asked. His pulse quickened. He could tell by the sound of her voice that she was acutely upset.
   “There’s been a catastrophe,” she said. “I have to see you immediately. Can I come over to your office?”
   “What happened?” Jack asked.
   “I can’t talk now,” Terese said. “I can’t risk it with everything that has happened. I’ve just got to see you.”
   “We’re sort of in the middle of an emergency ourselves,” Jack said. “And I’m just on my way out.”
   “It’s very important,” Terese said. “Please!”
   Jack immediately relented, especially with Terese’s selfless response to his emergency Friday night.
   “All right,” Jack said. “Since I was just leaving, I’ll come to you. Where would you like to meet?”
   “Were you going uptown or downtown?” Terese asked.
   “Uptown,” Jack said.
   “Then let’s meet at the café where we had coffee on Sunday,” Terese said.
   “I’ll be right there,” Jack said.
   “Wonderful!” Terese asserted. “I’ll be waiting.” Then she hung up.
   Jack replaced the receiver and self-consciously looked over at Chet. “Did you hear any of that?” Jack asked.
   “It was hard not to,” Chet said. “What do you think happened?”
   “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Jack said.
   True to his word, Jack left immediately. Exiting from the front of the medical examiner facility, he caught a cab on First Avenue. Despite the normal afternoon traffic, he made it uptown in reasonable time.
   The café was crowded. He found Terese sitting toward the rear at a small banquette. He took the seat opposite her. She didn’t make any motion to get up. She was dressed as usual in a smart suit. Her jaw was clenched. She looked angry.
   She leaned forward. “You are not going to believe this,” she said in a forced whisper.
   “Did the president and the CEO not like your presentation?” Jack asked. It was the only thing he could think of.
   Terese made a motion of dismissal with her hand. “I canceled the presentation,” she said.
   “Why?” Jack asked.
   “Because I’d had the sense to schedule an early breakfast with a woman acquaintance at National Health,” Terese said. “She’s a vice president in marketing who I happened to have gone to Smith College with. I’d had a brainstorm about leaking the campaign to some higher-ups through her. I was so confident. But she shocked me by telling me that under no circumstances would the campaign fly.”
   “But why?” Jack asked. As much as he disliked medical advertising, he’d considered the ads Terese had come up with the best he’d seen.
   “Because National Health is deathly afraid of any reference to nosocomial infections,” Terese said angrily. Then she leaned forward again and whispered. “Apparently they have had some of their own trouble lately.”
   “What kind of trouble?” Jack asked.
   “Nothing like the Manhattan General,” Terese said. “But serious nonetheless, even with a few deaths. But the real point is that our own account executive people, specifically Helen Robinson and her boss, Robert Barker, knew all this and didn’t tell me.”
   “That’s counterproductive,” Jack said. “I thought you corporate types were all working toward the same end.”
   “Counterproductive!” Terese practically shouted, causing the nearby diners to turn their heads. Terese closed her eyes for a moment to collect herself.
   “ ‘Counterproductive’ is not the term I’d use,” Terese said, keeping her voice down. “The way I’d describe it would make a sailor blush. You see, this was not an oversight. It was done deliberately to make me look bad.”
   “I’m sorry to hear this,” Jack said. “I can see it’s upsetting for you.”
   “That’s an understatement,” Terese said. “It’s the death of my presidential aspirations if I don’t come up with an alternative campaign in the next couple of days.”
   “A couple of days?” Jack questioned. “From what you’ve shown me about how this process works, that’s a mighty tall order.”
   “Exactly,” Terese said. “That’s why I had to see you. I need another hook. You came up with this infection idea, or at least you were the source of it. Can you come up with another concept? Something that I can construct an ad campaign around. I’m desperate!”
   Jack looked off and tried to think. The irony of the situation didn’t escape him; as much as he despised medical advertising, here he was racking his brains for some sort of an idea. He wanted to help; after all, Terese had been so willing to help him.
   “The reason I think medical advertising is such a waste of money is that it ultimately has to rely on superficial amenities,” he said. “The problem is that without quality being an issue there just isn’t enough difference between AmeriCare and National Health or any of the other big conglomerates.”
   “I don’t care,” Terese said. “Just give me something I can use.”
   “Well, the only thing that comes to my mind at the moment is the issue about waiting,” Jack said.
   “What do you mean, ‘waiting’?” Terese asked.
   “You know,” Jack said. “Nobody likes waiting for the doctor, but everybody does. It’s one of those irritating universal annoyances.”
   “You’re right!” Terese said excitedly. “I love it. I can already see a tag line like: No waiting with National Health! Or even better: We wait for you, you don’t wait for us! God, that’s great! You’re a genius at this. How about a job?”
   Jack chuckled. “Wouldn’t that be a trip,” he said. “But I’m having enough trouble with the one I have.”
   “Is there something wrong?” Terese asked. “What did you mean when you said you were in the middle of an emergency?”
   “There’s more trouble at the Manhattan General,” Jack said. “This time it’s an illness caused by meningococcus bacteria. It can be extremely deadly, as it has been in this instance.”
   “How many cases?”
   “Eight,” Jack said. “Including a child.”
   “How awful,” Terese said. She was appalled. “Do you think it will spread?”
   “I was worried at first,” Jack said. “I thought we were going to have a bona fide epidemic on our hands. But the cases just stopped. So far it hasn’t spread beyond the initial cohort.”
   “I hope this isn’t going to be kept a secret like whatever killed the people at National Health,” Terese said.
   “No worry on that account,” Jack said. “This episode is no secret. I’ve heard the hospital is in an uproar. But I’ll find out firsthand. I’m on my way over there.”
   “Oh, no you’re not!” Terese commanded. “Is your memory so short that Friday night is already a blur?”
   “You sound like several of my colleagues,” Jack said. “I appreciate your concern, but I can’t stay away. I have a sense that these outbreaks are deliberate, and my conscience won’t let me ignore them.”
   “What about those people who beat you up?” she demanded.
   “I’ll have to be careful,” Jack said.
   Terese made a disparaging sound. “Being careful hardly sounds adequate,” she said. “It’s certainly not consistent with how you described those hoodlums Friday night.”
   “I’ll just have to take my chances and improvise,” Jack said. “I’m going over to the General no matter what anybody says.”
   “What I can’t understand is why you are so agitated about these infections. I’ve read that infectious diseases are generally on the rise.”
   “That’s true,” Jack said. “But that’s not due to deliberate spread. That’s from the injudicious use of antibiotics, urbanization, and the invasion of primeval habitats.”
   “Give me a break,” Terese commented. “I’m concerned about you getting yourself hurt or worse, and you’re giving me a lecture.”
   Jack shrugged. “I’m going to the General,” he said.
   “Fine, go!” Terese said. She stood up. “You’re being that ridiculous hero I was afraid you’d be.” Then she softened. “Do what you must, but if you need me, call me.”
   “I will,” Jack said. He watched her hurry out of the restaurant, thinking that she was a bewildering blend of ambition and solicitude. It was no wonder he was confused by her: one minute attracted, the next minute mildly put off.
   Jack tossed down the remains of his coffee and stood up. After leaving an appropriate tip, he, too, hurried out of the café.

24. Monday, 2:30 p.m., March 25, 1996

   Jack walked rapidly toward the General. After the conversation with Terese he needed some fresh air. She had a way of agitating him. Not only was she emotionally confusing, but she was also right about the Black Kings. As much as Jack didn’t want to think about it, he was taking a chance defying their threat. The questions were: Whom had he irritated enough to send a gang to threaten him, and did the threat confirm his suspicions? Unfortunately there was no way to know. As he’d told Terese, he would have to be careful. The problem with that flippant answer, of course, was that he had no idea with whom he had to be careful. He assumed it would have to be Kelley, Zimmerman, Cheveau, or Abelard because those were the people he’d irritated. The trick was to avoid them all.
   As Jack rounded the final corner, it was immediately apparent that things were abnormal at the hospital. Several wooden police sawhorses stood on the sidewalk, and two New York City uniformed policemen lounged on either side of the main door. Jack stopped to watch them for a moment, since they seemed to be spending more time talking with each other than anything else.
   Feeling confused about their role, Jack went up to them and asked.
   “We were supposed to discourage people from going into the hospital,” one officer said. “There was some kind of epidemic in there, but they think it’s under control.”
   “We’re really here more for crowd control,” the other officer admitted. “They were expecting trouble earlier when they were toying with the idea of quarantining the facility, but things have settled down.”
   “For that we can all be thankful,” Jack said. He started forward, but one of the officers restrained him.
   “You sure you want to go in?” he asked.
   “Afraid so,” Jack said.
   The officer shrugged and let Jack pass.
   The minute Jack entered through the door he was confronted by a uniformed hospital security officer wearing a surgical mask.
   “I’m sorry,” the officer said. “No visitors today.”
   Jack pulled out his medical examiner’s badge.
   “Sorry, Doctor,” the officer said. He stepped aside.
   Although calm outside, the inside of the hospital was still in a minor furor. The lobby was filled with people. What gave the scene a surrealistic aura was that everyone was wearing a mask.
   With the sudden cessation of new meningococcal cases some twelve hours earlier, Jack was reasonably confident that a mask was superfluous. Yet he wanted one, not so much for protection as for disguise. He asked the security officer if they were available. He was directed to the unmanned information desk, where he found several boxes. Jack took one out and put it on.
   Next he located the doctors’ coatroom. He entered when one of the staff doctors was exiting. Inside he took off his bomber jacket and searched for an appropriately sized long white coat. When he found one, he put it on, then returned to the lobby.
   Jack’s destination was central supply. He felt that if he was to learn anything on this visit, it would be there. He got off the elevator on the third floor and was impressed with how much less patient traffic there was than there had been on his visit the previous Thursday. A glance through the glass portal on the OR suite doors told him why. Apparently the ORs had been temporarily shut down. With some knowledge of hospital cash flow, Jack surmised that AmeriCare must be having a financial stroke.
   Jack pushed through the swinging doors into central supply. Even there the level of activity was a quarter of what it had been on his first visit. He only saw two women near the end of one of the long aisles between the floor-to-ceiling shelving. Like everyone else he’d seen so far, they were wearing masks. Obviously the hospital was taking this last outbreak particularly seriously.
   Avoiding the aisle with the women, Jack set off for Gladys Zarelli’s office. She’d been receptive on his first visit, and she was the supervisor. Jack couldn’t think of a better person with whom to talk.
   As he walked through the department, Jack eyed the myriad hospital supplies and equipment stacked on the shelves. Seeing such a profusion of items made him wonder if there had been anything unique sent from central supply to the index cases. It was an interesting thought, he reasoned, but he couldn’t imagine how it would matter. There was still the question of how the women in central supply could have come in contact with the patient and the infecting bacteria. As he’d been told, the employees rarely, if ever, even saw a patient.
   Jack found Gladys in her office. She was on the phone, but when she saw him standing at her door, she motioned exuberantly for him to come in. Jack sat down on a straight-back chair opposite her narrow desk. With the size of the office, he could not help overhearing both sides of Gladys’s conversation. As he might have imagined, she was busy recruiting.
   “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said when she finished her call. Despite her problems she was as affable as the last time Jack had talked with her. “But I’m in desperate need of more help.”
   Jack reintroduced himself, but Gladys said she’d recognized him despite the mask. So much for the disguise, Jack thought glumly.
   “I’m sorry about what’s happened,” Jack said. “It must be difficult for you for all sorts of reasons.”
   “It’s been terrible,” she admitted. “Just terrible. Who would have guessed? Four wonderful people!”
   “It’s shocking,” Jack said. “Especially since it’s so unusual. As you said last time I was here, no one in this department had ever caught anything serious before.”
   Gladys raised her uplifted hands. “What can you do?” she said. “It’s in God’s hands.”
   “It might be in God’s hands,” Jack said. “But usually there is some way to explain this kind of contagion. Have you given it any thought at all?”
   Gladys nodded vigorously. “I’ve thought about it until I was blue in the face,” she said. “I don’t have a clue. Even if I didn’t want to think about it, I’ve had to because everybody has been asking me the same question.”
   “Really,” Jack said with a twinge of disappointment. He’d had the idea he was exploring virginal territory.
   “Dr. Zimmerman was in here right after you on Thursday,” Gladys said. “She came with this cute little man who kept sticking his chin out as if his collar button were too tight.”
   “That sounds like Dr. Clint Abelard,” Jack said, realizing he truly was strolling a beaten path.
   “That was his name,” Gladys said. “He sure could ask a lot of questions. And they’ve been back each time someone else has gotten sick. That’s why we’re all wearing our masks. They even had Mr. Eversharp down here from engineering, thinking there might have been something messed up with our air-conditioning system, but apparently that’s fine.”
   “So they haven’t come up with any explanation?” Jack said.
   “Nope,” Gladys said. “Unless they haven’t told me. But I doubt that. It’s been like Grand Central in here. Used to be no one came. Some of these doctors, though, they’re a little strange.”
   “How so?” Jack asked.
   “Just weird,” Gladys said. “Like the doctor from the lab. He’s come down here plenty of times lately.”
   “Is that Dr. Cheveau?” Jack asked.
   “I think so,” Gladys said.
   “In what way was he strange?” Jack asked.
   “Just unfriendly,” Gladys said. She lowered her voice as if telling a secret. “I asked him if I could help him a couple of times, and he bites my head off. He says he just wants to be left alone. But, you know, this is my department. I’m responsible for all this inventory. I don’t like people wandering around, even doctors. I had to tell him.”
   “Who else has been around?” Jack asked.
   “A bunch of the bigwigs,” Gladys said. “Even Mr. Kelley. Usually I’d only see him at the Christmas party. Last couple of days he’s been down here three or four times, always with a bunch of people. Once with that little doctor.”
   “Dr. Abelard?” Jack asked.
   “That’s the one,” Gladys said. “I can never remember his name.”
   “I hate to ask you the same questions as the others,” Jack said. “But did the women who died perform similar tasks? I mean, did they share some specific job?”
   “Like I told you last time,” Gladys said, “we all pitch in.”
   “None of them went up to the patients’ rooms who died of the same illnesses?” Jack asked.
   “No, nothing like that,” Gladys said. “That was the first thing that Dr. Zimmerman checked.”
   “Last time I was here you printed out a big list of all the stuff that you’d sent up to the seventh floor,” Jack said. “Could you make the same list for an individual patient?”
   “That would be more difficult,” Gladys said. “The order usually comes from the floor, and then it is the floor that enters it into the patient’s data.”
   “Is there any way you could come up with such a list?” Jack asked.
   “I suppose,” Gladys said. “When we do inventory there is a way of double-checking through billing. I could tell billing I’m doing that kind of check even though we’re not officially doing inventory.”
   “I’d appreciate it,” Jack said. He took out one of his cards. “You could either call me or just send it over.”
   Gladys took the card and examined it. “I’ll do anything that might help,” she said.
   “One other thing,” Jack said. “I’ve had my own run-in with Mr. Cheveau and even a few of the other people around here. I’d appreciate it if this was just between you and me.”
   “Isn’t he weird!” Gladys said. “Sure, I won’t tell anybody.”
   Easing out from in front of Gladys’s desk, Jack bid good-bye to the robust woman and exited central supply. He wasn’t in the best of moods. After beginning with high expectations, the only thing of note he’d been told was something he already knew: Martin Cheveau was irascible.
   Jack pushed the down button at the bank of elevators while he pondered his next move. He had two choices: either he could just leave and minimize his risk, or he could make a careful visit to the lab. Ultimately, he decided in favor of the lab. Chet’s comment about the lack of availability of pathological bacteria carried the day, since it had raised a question Jack needed to answer.
   When the elevator doors opened, Jack started to board, but then he hesitated. Standing directly in front of the crowded car was Charles Kelley. Jack recognized him instantly despite his mask.
   Jack’s first impulse was to back away and let the elevator go. But such a move would have only drawn attention. Instead he put his head down, proceeded onto the elevator, and immediately turned to face the closing door. The administrator was standing right behind him. Jack half expected a tap on the shoulder.
   Luckily, Kelley had not recognized him. The administrator was deep in conversation with a colleague about how much it was costing the hospital to transport the ER patients by ambulance and the clinic patients by bus to their nearest facility. Kelley’s agitation was palpable. He said their self-imposed semi-quarantine would have to end.
   Kelley’s companion assured him that everything was being done that could be done, since the city and state regulatory people were all there making an evaluation.
   When the doors opened on the second floor, Jack exited with great relief, especially when Kelley didn’t get off as well. With such a close call, Jack wondered if he was doing the right thing, but after a moment of indecision he elected to continue with a quick visit to the lab. After all, he was right there.
   In contrast to the rest of the hospital, the lab was in full swing. The outer lobby area was thronged with hospital personnel, all of whom were masked.
   Jack was confused as to why so many hospital employees were there but thankful because it was easy to blend in with the crowd. With his mask and white lab coat he fit in perfectly. Since Martin’s office was just off this main reception, Jack had worried that he’d be apt to run into him. Now he felt the chances were next to nil.
   At the far end of the room was a series of cubicles used by the technicians to draw blood or obtain other samples from clinic patients. Near them the crowd concentrated. As Jack wormed his way past this area it dawned on him what was going on. The entire hospital staff was having throat cultures taken.
   Jack was impressed. It was an appropriate response to the current outbreak. Since most meningococcal epidemics resulted from a carrier state, there was always a chance the carrier was a hospital employee. It had happened in the past.
   A glance into the last cubicle made Jack do a double take. Despite a mask and even a surgical cap, Jack recognized Martin. He literally had his sleeves rolled up as he worked as a technician, swabbing throat after throat. Next to him on a tray the used swabs were piling up in an impressive pyramid. Obviously, everyone in the lab was pitching in.
   Feeling even more confident, Jack slipped through the doors into the lab itself. No one paid him any attention. In sharp contrast to the comparative pandemonium in reception, the lab’s interior was a study in automated solitude. The only sounds were a muted chorus of mechanical clicks and low-pitched beeps. There were no technicians in sight.
   Jack made a beeline for the microbiology section. His hope was to run across either the head tech, Richard, or the vivacious Beth Holderness. But when he arrived he found no one. The micro area appeared as deserted as the rest of the lab.
   Jack approached the spot where Beth had been working on his last visit. There he found something encouraging. A Bunsen burner was aflame. Next to it was a tray of throat culture swabs and a large stack of fresh agar plates. On the floor stood a plastic trash barrel brimming with discarded culture tubes.
   Sensing that Beth must be in the immediate area, Jack began to explore. The microbiology section was a room about thirty feet square divided by two rows of countertop. Jack walked down the center aisle. Along the back wall were several biosafety cabinets. Jack rounded the lab bench to his right and glanced into a small office. It had a desk and a file cabinet. On a bulletin board he could see some photos. Without going into the room, Jack recognized Richard, the head tech, in several of them.
   Moving on, Jack came abreast of several polished aluminum insulated doors that looked like walk-in refrigerators. Glancing over to the opposite side of the room, he saw a regular door that he thought could lead into a storeroom. As he was about to head in that direction one of the insulated doors opened with a loud click that made him jump.
   Beth Holderness emerged along with a waft of warm, moist air and nearly collided with Jack. “You scared me to death,” she said, pressing a hand to her chest.
   “I’m not sure who scared whom more,” Jack said. He then reintroduced himself.
   “Don’t worry, I remember you,” Beth said. “You caused quite a stir, and I don’t think you should be here.”
   “Oh?” Jack questioned innocently.
   “Dr. Cheveau is really mad at you,” Beth said.
   “Is he now?” Jack said. “I’ve noticed he’s been rather grumpy.”
   “He can be cranky,” Beth admitted. “But Richard said something about your accusing him of spreading the bacteria that we’ve been experiencing here at the General.”
   “Actually, I didn’t accuse your boss of anything,” Jack said. “It was only an implication I made after he irritated me. I’d come over here just to have a conversation with him. I really wanted his opinion about the plausibility of all these relatively rare illnesses having appeared so close together and at this time of year. But for reasons unknown to me, he was in as inhospitable a mood as he’d been on my previous visit.”
   “Well, I must admit I was surprised how he treated you the day we met,” Beth said. “Same with Mr. Kelley and Dr. Zimmerman. I just thought you were trying to help.”
   Jack had to restrain himself from giving this lively young woman a hug. It seemed as if she were the only person on the planet who appreciated what he was doing.
   “I was so sorry about your co-worker, Nancy Wiggens,” Jack said. “I imagine it’s been difficult for you all.”
   Beth’s cheerful face clouded over to the point just shy of tears.
   “Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything,” Jack said when he noticed her reaction.
   “It’s all right,” Beth managed. “But it was a terrible shock. We all worry about such a thing, but hope it will never happen. She was such a warm person, although she could be a bit reckless.”
   “How so?” Jack asked.
   “She just wasn’t as careful as she should have been,” Beth said. “She took chances, like not using one of the hoods when it was indicated or not wearing her goggles when she was supposed to.”
   Jack could understand that attitude.
   “She didn’t even take the antibiotic Dr. Zimmerman prescribed for her after the plague case,” Beth said.
   “How unfortunate,” Jack said. “That might have protected her against the Rocky Mountain spotted fever.”
   “I know,” Beth said. “I wish that I had tried harder to convince her. I mean, I took it, and I don’t think I was exposed.”
   “Did she happen to say she did anything different when she got samples from Lagenthorpe?” Jack asked.
   “No, she didn’t,” Beth said. “That’s why we feel she was exposed down here in the lab when she processed the samples. Rickettsia are notoriously dangerous in the lab.”
   Jack was about to respond when he noticed that Beth had begun to fidget and look over his shoulder. Jack glanced in the direction she was looking, but there was no one there.
   “I really should be getting back to work,” Beth said. “And I shouldn’t be talking with you. Dr. Cheveau told us specifically.”
   “Don’t you find that strange?” Jack said. “After all, I am a medical examiner in this city. Legally I have a right to investigate the deaths of the patients assigned to us.”
   “I guess I do,” Beth admitted. “But what can I say? I just work here.” She stepped around Jack and went back to her workstation.
   Jack followed her. “I don’t mean to be a pest,” he said. “But my intuition tells me something weird is going on here; that’s why I keep coming back. A number of people have been acting defensive, including your boss. Now there could be an explanation. AmeriCare and this hospital are a business, and these outbreaks have been tremendously disruptive economically. That’s reason enough for people to be acting strangely. But from my point of view it’s more than that.”
   “So what do you want from me?” Beth asked. She’d taken her seat and gone back to transferring the throat cultures to the agar plates.
   “I’d like to ask you to look around,” Jack said. “If pathological bacteria are being deliberately spread they have to come from somewhere, and the microbiology lab would be a good place to start looking. I mean, the equipment is here to store and handle the stuff. It’s not as if plague bacteria is something you’d find anywhere.”
   “It wouldn’t be so strange to find it on occasion in any standard lab,” Beth said.
   “Really?” Jack questioned. He’d assumed that outside of the CDC and maybe a few academic centers, plague bacteria would be a rarity.
   “Intermittently labs have to get cultures of all different bacteria to test the efficacy of their reagents,” Beth said as she continued to work. “Antibodies, which are often the main ingredient in many modern reagents, can deteriorate, and if they do the tests would give false negatives.”
   “Oh, of course,” Jack said. He felt stupid. He should have remembered all this. All laboratory tests had to be constantly checked.
   “Where do you get something like plague bacteria?”
   “From National Biologicals in Virginia,” Beth said.
   “What’s the process for getting it?” Jack asked.
   “Just call up and order it,” Beth said.
   “Who can do that?” Jack asked.
   “Anybody,” Beth said.
   “You’re joking,” Jack said. Somehow he’d thought the security at a minimum would be comparable to that involved in getting a controlled drug like morphine.
   “I’m not joking,” Beth said. “I’ve done it many times.”
   “You don’t need some special permit?” Jack asked.
   “I have to get the signature of the director of the lab on the purchase order,” Beth said. “But that’s just to guarantee that the hospital will pay for it.”
   “So let me get this straight,” Jack said. “Anyone can call these people up and have plague sent to them?”
   “As long as their credit is okay,” Beth said.
   “How do the cultures come?” Jack said.
   “Usually by mail,” Beth said. “But if you pay extra and need it faster you can get overnight service.”
   Jack was appalled, but he tried to hide his reaction. He was embarrassed at his own naïveté. “Do you have this organization’s phone number?” he asked.
   Beth pulled open a file drawer to her immediate right, leafed through some files, and pulled out a folder. Opening it up, she took out a sheet and indicated the letterhead.
   Jack wrote the number down. Then he pointed to the phone. “Do you mind?” he asked.
   Beth pushed the phone in his direction but glanced up at the clock as she did so.
   “I’ll just be a second,” Jack said. He still couldn’t believe what he’d just been told.
   Jack dialed the number. The phone was answered and a recording gave him the name of the company and asked him to make a selection. Jack pressed two for sales. Presently a charmingly friendly voice came on the line and asked if she could be of assistance.
   “Yes,” Jack said. “This is Dr. Billy Rubin and I’d like to place an order.”
   “Do you have an account with National Biologicals?” the woman asked.
   “Not yet,” Jack said. “In fact, for this order I’d just like to use my American Express card.”
   “I’m sorry, but we only accept Visa or MasterCard,” the woman said.
   “No problem,” Jack said. “Visa will be fine.”
   “Okay,” the woman said cheerfully. “Could I have your first order?”
   “How about some meningococcus,” Jack said.
   The woman laughed. “You’ll have to be more specific,” she said. “I need the serologic group, the serotype, and the subtype. We have hundreds of meningococcus subspecies.”
   “Uh-oh!” Jack said, pretending to have been suddenly paged. “An emergency has just come up! I’m afraid I’ll have to call back.”
   “No problem,” the woman said. “Call anytime. As you know, we’re here twenty-four hours a day to serve your culture needs.”
   Jack hung up the phone. He was stunned.
   “I have the feeling you didn’t believe me,” Beth said.
   “I didn’t,” Jack admitted. “I didn’t realize the availability of these pathogens. But I’d still like you to look around here and see if these offending bugs might somehow be stashed here now. Could you do that?”
   “I suppose,” Beth said without her usual enthusiasm.
   “But I want you to be discreet,” Jack said. “And careful. I want this just between you and me.”
   Jack took out one of his cards and wrote his home number on the back. He handed it to her. “You can call me anytime, day or night, if you find anything or if you get into any trouble because of me. Okay?”
   Beth took the card, examined it briefly, and then stuck it into her lab coat pocket. “Okay,” she said.
   “Would you mind if I asked for your number?” Jack said. “I might have some more questions myself. Obviously microbiology isn’t my forte.”
   Beth thought for a moment, then relented. She got out a piece of paper and wrote her phone number down. She handed it to Jack, who put it into his wallet.
   “I think you’d better go now,” she said.
   “I’m on my way,” Jack said. “Thanks for your help.”
   “You’re welcome,” Beth said. She was her old self again.
   Preoccupied, Jack walked out of the microbiology section and headed across the main portion of the lab. He still couldn’t believe how easy it was to order pathological cultures.
   About twenty feet from the double swinging doors that connected the lab to the reception area, Jack stopped dead in his tracks. Backing through the doors was a figure that looked alarmingly like Martin. The individual was carrying a tray loaded with prepared throat swabs ready for plating.
   Jack felt like a criminal caught in the act. For a fraction of a second he contemplated fleeing or trying to hide. But there was no time. Besides, irritation at the absurdity of his fear of being recognized inspired him to stand his ground.
   Martin held the door open for a second figure Jack recognized as Richard. He, too, was carrying a tray of throat swabs. It was Richard who saw Jack first.
   Martin was a quick second. He recognized Jack immediately, despite the mask.
   “Hi, folks,” Jack said.
   “You…!” Martin cried.
   “It is I,” Jack said cheerfully. He grabbed the end of his face mask with his thumb and forefinger and pulled it away from his face to give Martin an unobstructed look.
   “You’ve been warned about sneaking around in here,” Martin snapped. “You’re trespassing.”
   “Not so,” Jack said. He produced his medical examiner’s badge and pointed it toward Martin’s face. “Just making an official site visit. There’ve been a few more regrettable infectious deaths over here at the General. At least this time you were able to make the diagnosis on your own.”
   “We’ll see whether this is a legitimate site visit,” Martin said. He heaved the tray of throat swabs onto the countertop and snatched up the nearest phone. He told the operator to put him through to Charles Kelley.
   “Couldn’t we just discuss this like grown-ups?” Jack asked.
   Martin ignored the question as he waited for Kelley.
   “Out of curiosity, maybe you could just tell me why you were so accommodating on my first visit and so nasty on my next,” Jack said.
   “In the interim Mr. Kelley informed me what your attitude had been on that first day,” Martin said. “And he told me he had learned that you were here without authorization.”
   Jack was about to respond when it became clear that Kelley had come on the line. Martin informed the administrator that he’d again found Dr. Stapleton lurking in the lab.
   While Martin listened to an apparent monologue from Kelley, Jack moved over and leaned casually against the nearest countertop. Richard, on the other hand, stood rooted in place, still supporting his tray of throat swabs.
   Martin punctuated Kelley’s apparent tirade with a few strategically placed yeses and a final “Yes sir!” at the end of the conversation. As he hung up the phone he treated Jack to a supercilious smile.
   “Mr. Kelley told me to inform you,” Martin said haughtily, “that he will be personally calling the mayor’s office, the Commissioner of Health, and your chief. He’ll be lodging a formal complaint concerning your harassment of this hospital while we’ve been making every effort to deal with a state of emergency. He also told me to inform you that our security will be up here in a few moments to escort you off the premises.”
   “That’s terribly considerate of him,” Jack said. “But I really don’t need to be shown the way out. In fact, I was on my way when we happened to bump into each other. Good day, gentlemen.”

25. Monday, 3:15 p.m., March 25, 1996

   “So there you have it,” Terese said as she looked out on the expanded team of creatives for the National Health account. In the present emergency she and Colleen had pulled key people away from other projects. Right now they needed all the man– and womanpower they could muster to concentrate on the new campaign.
   “Any questions?” Terese asked. The entire group was squeezed into Colleen’s office. With no room to sit they were wedged in like sardines, cheek by jowl. Terese had outlined the “no wait” idea in an expanded form that she and Colleen had devised based on Jack’s initial suggestion.
   “We only have two days for this?” Alice questioned.
   “I’m afraid so,” Terese said. “I might be able to squeeze out another day, but we can’t count on it. We’ve got to go for broke.”
   There was a murmur of incredulity.
   “I know I’m asking a lot,” Terese said. “But the fact of the matter is, as I’ve told you, we were sabotaged by the accounts department. We’ve even got confirmation that they are expecting to present a ‘talking heads’ spot with one of the ER stars. They are counting on us to self-destruct with the old idea.”
   “Actually I think the ‘no wait’ concept is better than the ‘cleanliness’ concept,” Alice said. “The ‘cleanliness’ idea was getting too technical with that asepsis malarkey. People are going to understand ‘no waiting’ much better.”
   “There’s also a lot more opportunity for humor,” another voice commented.
   “I like it too,” someone else said. “I hate waiting for the gynecologist. By the time I get in there I’m as tense as a banjo wire.”
   A wave of tension-relieving laughter rippled through the group.
   “That’s the spirit,” Terese said. “Let’s get to work. Let’s show them what we can do when our backs are against the wall.”
   People started to leave, eager to get to their drawing boards.
   “Hold up!” Terese shouted over the buzz of voices that had erupted. “One other thing. This has to stay quiet. Don’t even tell other creatives unless absolutely necessary. I don’t want accounts to have any inkling of what’s going on. Okay?”
   A murmur of agreement arose.
   “All right!” Terese yelled. “Get to it!”
   The room emptied as if there had been a fire. Terese flopped back into Colleen’s chair, exhausted from the emotional effort of the day. Typical of her life in advertising, she’d started out that morning on a high, then sank to a new low, and was now somewhere in between.
   “They’re enthusiastic,” Colleen said. “You made a great presentation. I kind of wish someone from National Health were here.”
   “At least it’s a good idea for a campaign,” Terese said. “The question is whether they can put it together enough for a real presentation.”
   “They’ll certainly give it their best shot,” Colleen said. “You really motivated them.”
   “God, I hope so,” Terese said. “I can’t let Barker have a free field with his stupid ‘talking heads’ junk. That’s like taking advertising back to pre-Bernbach days. It would be an embarrassment for the agency if the client liked it, and we had to actually do it.”
   “God forbid,” Colleen said.
   “We’ll be out of a job if that happens,” Terese said.
   “Let’s not get too pessimistic,” Colleen warned.
   “Ah, what a day,” Terese complained. “On top of everything else I’ve got to worry about Jack.”
   “How so?” Colleen asked.
   “When I met with him and he gave me the ‘no wait’ idea he told me he was going back to the General.”
   “Uh-oh,” Colleen said. “Isn’t that where those gang members warned him against going?”
   “Exactly,” Terese said. “Talk about a Taurus, he’s the epitome. He’s so damn bullheaded and reckless. He doesn’t have to go over there. They have people at the medical examiner’s office whose job it is to go out to hospitals. It must be some male thing, like he has to be a hero. I don’t understand it.”
   “Are you starting to get attached to him?” Colleen asked gingerly, aware it was a touchy subject with Terese. Colleen knew enough about her boss to know that she eschewed romantic entanglements, though she had no idea why.
   Terese only sighed. “I’m attracted to him and put off by him at the same time,” she said. “He got me to open up a little, and apparently I coaxed him out a little too. I think both of us felt good talking to someone who seemed to care.”
   “That sounds encouraging,” Colleen said.
   Terese shrugged, then smiled. “We’re both carrying around a lot of emotional baggage,” she said. “But enough about me. How about you and Chet?”
   “It’s going great,” Colleen said. “I could really fall for that guy.”

   Jack felt as if he were sitting through the same movie for the third time. Once again he was literally on Bingham’s carpet enduring a protracted tirade about how his chief had been called by every major civil servant in the city to complain bitterly about Jack Stapleton.
   “So what do you have to say for yourself?” Bingham demanded, finally running out of steam with his ranting. He was literally out of breath.
   “I don’t know what to say,” Jack admitted. “But in my defense, I haven’t gone over there with the intention of irritating people. I was just looking for information. There’s a lot about this series of outbreaks that I don’t understand.”
   “You’re a goddamn paradox,” Bingham remarked as he visibly calmed down. “At the same time you’ve been such a pain in the butt you’ve made some commendable diagnoses. I was impressed when Calvin told me about the tularemia and the Rocky Mountain spotted fever. It’s like you’re two different people. What am I to do?”
   “Fire the irritating one and keep the other?” Jack suggested.
   Bingham grunted a reluctant chuckle, but any sign of amusement quickly faded. “The main problem from my perspective,” he grumbled, “is that you are so goddamned contumacious. You’ve specifically disobeyed my orders to stay away from the General, not once but twice.”
   “I’m guilty,” Jack said, raising his hands as if to surrender.
   “Is all this motivated by that personal vendetta you have against AmeriCare?” Bingham demanded.
   “No,” Jack said. “That was a minor factor to begin with, but my interest in the matter has gone way beyond that. I told you last time that I thought something strange was going on. I feel even more strongly now, and the people over there are continuing to act defensive.”
   “Defensive?” Bingham questioned querulously. “I was told that you accused the General’s lab director of spreading these illnesses.”
   “That story has been blown way out of proportion,” Jack said. He then explained to Bingham that he’d merely implied as much by reminding the lab director that he, the director, was disgruntled about the budget AmeriCare was giving him.
   “The man was acting like an ass,” Jack added. “I was trying to ask his opinion about the possible intentional spread of these illnesses, but he never gave me a chance, and I got mad at him. I suppose I shouldn’t have said what I did, but sometimes I can’t help myself.”
   “So you’re convinced about this idea yourself?” Bingham asked.
   “I don’t know if I’m convinced,” Jack admitted. “But it is hard to ascribe them all to coincidence. On top of that is the way people at the General have been acting, from the administrator on down.” Jack thought about telling Bingham about his being beaten up and threatened, but he decided against it. He feared it might get him grounded altogether.
   “After Commissioner Markham called me,” Bingham said, “I asked her to have the chief epidemiologist, Dr. Abelard, get in touch with me. When he did, I asked him what he thought of this intentional spread idea. You want to know what he said?”
   “I can’t wait,” Jack said.
   “He said except for the plague case, which he still cannot explain but is working on with the CDC, he feels the others all have very reasonable explanations. The Hard woman had been in contact with wild rabbits, and Mr. Lagenthorpe had been out in the desert in Texas. And as far as meningococcus is concerned, it’s the season for that.”
   “I don’t think the time sequences are correct,” Jack said. “Nor are the clinical courses consistent with—”
   “Hold on,” Bingham interrupted. “Let me remind you that Dr. Abelard is an epidemiologist. He’s got a Ph.D. as well as an M.D. His whole job is to figure out the where and the why of disease.”
   “I don’t doubt his credentials,” Jack said. “Just his conclusions. He didn’t impress me from the start.”
   “You certainly are opinionated,” Bingham said.
   “I might have ruffled feathers on past visits to the General,” Jack admitted, “but this time all I did was talk to the supervisor of central supply and one of the microbiology techs.”
   “From the calls I got you were deliberately hampering their efforts to deal with the meningococcal outbreak,” Bingham said.
   “God is my witness,” Jack said, holding up his hand. “All I did was talk to Ms. Zarelli and Ms. Holderness, who happen to be two pleasant, cooperative people.”
   “You do have a way of rubbing people the wrong way,” Bingham said. “I suppose you know that.”
   “Usually, I only have that effect on those I intend to provoke,” Jack said.
   “I get the feeling I’m one of those people,” Bingham snapped.
   “Quite the contrary,” Jack said. “Irritating you is entirely unintentional.”
   “I wouldn’t have known,” Bingham said.
   “In speaking with Ms. Holderness, the lab tech, I did uncover an interesting fact,” Jack said. “I learned that just about anyone with reasonable credit can call up and order pathological bacteria. The company doesn’t do any background check.”
   “You don’t need a license or a permit?” Bingham asked.
   “Apparently not,” Jack said.
   “I suppose I’d never thought about it,” Bingham said.
   “Nor had I,” Jack said. “Needless to say, thought provoking.”
   “Indeed,” Bingham said. He appeared to ponder this for a moment as his rheumy eyes glazed over. But then they quickly cleared.
   “Seems to me you’ve managed to get this conversation off track,” he said, regaining his gruff posture. “The issue here is what to do with you.”
   “You could always send me on vacation to the Caribbean,” Jack suggested. “It’s nice down there this time of year.”
   “Enough of your impertinent humor,” Bingham snapped. “I’m trying to be serious with you.”
   “I’ll try to control myself,” Jack said. “My problem is that during the last five years of my life cynicism has led to reflex sarcasm.”
   “I’m not going to fire you,” Bingham announced. “But I’ve got to warn you again, you’ve come very close. In fact, when I hung up the phone from the mayor’s office, I was going to let you go. I’ve changed my mind for now. But there is one thing that we have to be clear on: You are to stay away from the General. Do we have an understanding?”
   “I think it’s finally getting through,” Jack said.
   “If you need more information, send the PAs,” Bingham said. “For chrissake, that’s what they’re here for.”
   “I’ll try to remember that,” Jack said.
   “All right, get out of here,” Bingham said with a sweep of his hand.
   With relief Jack stood up and left Bingham’s office. He went straight up to his own. When he arrived he found Chet talking with George Fontworth. Jack squeezed by the two of them and draped his coat over the back of his chair.
   “Well?” Chet asked.
   “Well what?” Jack asked back.
   “The daily question,” Chet said. “Are you still employed here?”
   “Very funny,” Jack said. He was perplexed by the stack of four large manila envelopes at the center of his desk. He picked one up. It was about two inches thick. There were no markings on the exterior. Opening the latch, he slid out the contents. It was a copy of Susanne Hard’s hospital chart.
   “You’ve seen Bingham?” Chet asked.
   “I just came from there,” Jack said. “He was sweet. He wanted to commend me on my diagnoses of tularemia and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.”
   “Bull!” Chet exclaimed.
   “Honest,” Jack said with a chuckle. “Of course, he also bawled me out for going over to the General.” While Jack was talking, he took the contents out of all the manila envelopes. He now had copies of the hospital charts of the index cases of each outbreak.
   “Was your visit worth it?” Chet asked.
   “What do you mean, ‘worth it’?” Jack asked.
   “Did you learn enough to justify stirring up the pot once more?” Chet said. “We heard you got everyone over there angry again.”
   “Not a lot of secrets around here,” Jack commented. “But I did learn something that I didn’t know.” Jack explained to Chet and George about the ease of ordering pathological bacteria.
   “I knew that,” George said. “I worked in a micro lab during summers while I was in college. I remember the supervisor ordering a cholera culture. When it came in I picked it up and held it. It gave me a thrill.”
   Jack glanced at George. “A thrill?” he questioned. “You’re weirder than I thought.”
   “Seriously,” George said. “I know other people who had the same reaction. Comprehending how much pain, suffering, and death the little buggers had caused and could cause was both scary and stimulating at the same time, and holding it in my hand just blew me away.”
   “I guess my idea of a thrill and yours are a bit different,” Jack said. He went back to the charts and organized them chronologically so that Nodelman was on top.
   “I hope the mere availability of pathological bacteria doesn’t encourage your paranoid thinking,” Chet said. “I mean, that’s hardly proof of your theory.”
   “Umm hmm,” Jack murmured. He was already beginning to go over the charts. He planned to read through them rapidly to see if anything jumped out at him. Then he would go back over them in detail. What he was looking for was any way the cases could have been related that would suggest they were not random occurrences.
   Chet and George went back to their conversation when it was apparent Jack was preoccupied. Fifteen minutes later George got up and left. As soon as he did Chet went to the door and closed it.
   “Colleen called me a little while ago,” he said.
   “I’m happy for you,” Jack said, still trying to concentrate on the charts.
   “She told me what had happened over there at the agency,” Chet said. “I think it stinks. I can’t imagine one part of the same company undermining another. It doesn’t make sense.”
   Jack looked up from his reading. “It’s the business mentality,” he said. “Lust for power is the major motivator.”
   Chet sat down. “Colleen also told me that you gave Terese a terrific idea for a new campaign.”
   “Don’t remind me,” Jack said. He redirected his attention to the charts. “I really don’t want to be a part of it. I don’t know why she asked me. She knows how I feel about medical advertising.”
   “Colleen also said that you and Terese are hitting it off,” Chet said.
   “Really now?” Jack said.
   “She said that you two had gotten each other to open up. I think that is terrific for both of you.”
   “Did she give any specifics?” Jack asked.
   “I didn’t get the sense she had any specifics,” Chet said.
   “Thank God,” Jack said without looking up.
   When Jack answered Chet’s next few questions with mere grunts, it dawned on Chet that Jack was again engrossed in his reading. Chet gave up trying to have a conversation and turned his attention to his own work.
   By five-thirty Chet was ready to call it a day. He got up and stretched noisily, hoping that Jack would respond. Jack didn’t. In fact, Jack had not moved for the last hour or so except to turn pages and jot down more notes.
   Chet got his coat from the top drawer of his file cabinet and cleared his throat several times. Still Jack did not respond. Finally Chet resorted to speech.
   “Hey, old sport,” Chet called out. “How long are you going to work on that stuff?”
   “Until I’m done,” Jack said without looking up.
   “I’m meeting Colleen for a quick bite,” Chet said. “We’re meeting at six. Are you interested? Maybe Terese could join us. Apparently they are planning to work most of the night.”
   “I’m sticking here,” Jack said. “Enjoy yourselves. Say hello for me.”
   Chet shrugged, pulled on his coat, and left.
   Jack had been through the charts twice. So far the only genuine similarity among the four cases was the fact that their infectious disease symptoms had started after they had been admitted for other complaints. But as Laurie had pointed out, by definition, only Nodelman was a nosocomial case. In the other three situations the symptoms had come on within forty-eight hours of admission.
   The only other possible similarity was the one that Jack had already considered: namely that all four patients were people who’d been hospitalized frequently and hence were economically undesirable in a capitated system. But other than that, Jack found nothing.
   The ages ranged from twenty-eight to sixty-three. Two had been on the medical ward, one in OB-GYN, and one in orthopedics. There were no medications common to them all. Two were on “keep open” IVs. Socially they ranged from lower– to upper-middle class, and there was no indication that any of the four knew any of the others. There was one female and three males. Even their blood types differed.
   Jack tossed his pen onto his desk and leaned back in his chair to stare at the ceiling. He didn’t know what he expected from the charts, but so far he hadn’t learned anything.
   “Knock, knock,” a voice called.
   Jack turned to see Laurie standing in the doorway.
   “I see you made it back from your foray to the General,” she said.
   “I don’t think I was in any danger until I got back here,” Jack said.
   “I know what you mean,” Laurie said. “Rumor had it that Bingham was fit to be tied.”
   “He wasn’t happy, but we managed to work it out,” Jack said.
   “Are you worried about the threat from the people who beat you up?” Laurie asked.
   “I suppose,” Jack said. “I haven’t thought too much about it. I’m sure I’ll feel differently when I get to my apartment.”
   “You’re welcome to come over to mine,” Laurie said. “I have a sad couch in my living room that pulls out into a decent bed.”
   “You’re kind to offer,” Jack said. “But I have to go home sometime. I’ll be careful.”
   “Did you learn anything to explain the central supply connection?” Laurie asked.
   “I wish,” Jack said. “Not only didn’t I learn anything, but I found out that a number of people, including the city epidemiologist and the hospital infection-control officer, have been in there beating the bushes for clues. I had the mistaken notion it was a novel idea.”
   “Are you still thinking of the conspiracy slant?” Laurie asked.
   “In some form or fashion,” Jack admitted. “Unfortunately, it seems to be a lonely stance.”
   Laurie wished him good luck. He thanked her, and she left. A minute later she was back.
   “I’m planning on getting a bite on the way home,” Laurie said. “Are you interested?”
   “Thanks, but I’ve started on these charts, and I want to keep at it while the material is fresh in my mind.”
   “I understand. Good night.”
   “Good night, Laurie,” Jack said.
   No sooner had Jack opened Nodelman’s chart for the third time than the phone rang. It was Terese.
   “Colleen is about to leave to meet up with Chet,” Terese said. “Can I talk you into coming out for a quick dinner? We could all eat together.”
   Jack was amazed. For five years he’d been avoiding social attachments of any kind. Now suddenly two intelligent, attractive women were both asking him to dine with them on the same night.
   “I appreciate the offer,” Jack said. He then told Terese the same thing he’d told Laurie about the charts he was working on.
   “I keep hoping you’ll give up on that crusade,” Terese said. “It hardly seems worth the risks, since you’ve already been beaten up and threatened with the loss of your job.”
   “If I can prove someone is behind this affair it will certainly be worth the risks,” Jack said. “My fear is that there might be a real epidemic.”
   “Chet seems to think you’re acting foolishly,” Terese persisted.
   “He’s entitled to his opinion,” Jack said.
   “Please be careful when you go home,” Terese intoned.
   “I will,” Jack said. He was getting weary of everyone’s solicitude. The danger of going home that evening was something he’d considered as early as that morning.
   “We’ll be working most of the night,” she added. “If you need to call, call me at work.”
   “Okay,” Jack said. “Good luck.”
   “Good luck to you,” Terese said. “And thanks for this ‘no waiting’ idea. Everyone loves it so far. I’m very grateful. ’Bye!”
   Jack went back to Nodelman’s chart as soon as he put the phone down. He was attempting to get through the reams of nurses’ notes. But after five minutes of reading the same paragraph over and over, he acknowledged he wasn’t concentrating. His mind kept mulling over the irony of both Laurie and Terese asking him to dine with them. Thinking about the two women led to pondering again the similarities and differences in their personalities, and once he started thinking about personality, Beth Holderness popped into his mind. As soon as he thought about Beth, he began musing about the ease of ordering bacteria.
   Jack closed Nodelman’s chart and drummed his fingers on his desk. He began to wonder. If someone had obtained a culture of a pathological bacteria from National Biologicals and then intentionally spread it to people, could National Biologicals tell it had been their bacteria?
   The idea intrigued him. With the advances in DNA technology he thought it was scientifically possible for National Biologicals to tag their cultures, and for reasons of both liability and economic protection, he thought it was a reasonable thing to do. The question then became whether they did it or not.
   Jack searched for the phone number. Once he found it, he put through a second call to the organization.
   Early that afternoon on Jack’s first call he’d pressed “two” for sales. This time he pressed “three” for “support.” After being forced to listen to a rock music station for a few minutes, Jack heard a youthful-sounding male voice give his name, Igor Krasnyansky, and ask how he could be of assistance.
   Jack introduced himself properly on this occasion and inquired if he could pose a theoretical question.
   “Of course,” Igor said with a slight Slavic accent. “I will try to answer.”
   “If I had a culture of bacteria,” Jack began, “is there any way that I could determine that it had originally come from your company even if it had gone through several passages in vivo?”
   “That’s an easy one,” Igor said. “We phage-type all our cultures. So, sure, you could tell it came from National Biologicals.”
   “What’s the identification process?” Jack asked.
   “We have a fluorescein-labeled DNA probe,” Igor said. “It’s very simple.”
   “If I wanted to make such an identification, would I have to send the sample to you?” Jack asked.
   “Either that or I could send you some of the probe,” Igor said.
   Jack was pleased. He gave his address and asked for the probe to be shipped via overnight express. He said he wanted it as soon as possible.
   Hanging up the phone, Jack felt pleased with himself. He thought he’d come up with something that might lend considerable weight to his theory of intentional spread if any of the patients’ bacteria tested positive.
   Jack looked down at the charts and considered giving up on them for the time being. After all, if the opposite turned out to be the case, and none of the bacteria was from National Biologicals, perhaps he would have to rethink the whole affair.
   Jack scraped back his chair and stood up. He’d had enough for one day. Pulling on his jacket, he prepared to head home. Suddenly the idea of some vigorous exercise had a strong appeal.

26. Monday, 6:00 p.m., March 25, 1996

   Beth Holderness had stayed late to get all the throat cultures of the hospital employees planted. The evening crew had come in at the usual time, but at that moment they were down in the cafeteria having their dinner. Even Richard had disappeared, although Beth wasn’t sure if he’d left for the day or not.
   Since the micro section of the lab was deserted except for her, Beth thought that if she were to do any clandestine searching, this was as good a time as any. Sliding off her stool, she walked over to the door to the main part of the lab. She didn’t see a soul, which encouraged her further.
   Turning back to microbiology, Beth headed over to the insulated doors. She wasn’t sure she should be doing what she was doing, but having said she would, she felt some obligation. She was confused about Dr. Jack Stapleton, but she was even more confused about her own boss, Dr. Martin Cheveau. He’d always been temperamental, but lately that moodiness had reached ridiculous proportions.
   That afternoon he’d stormed in after Dr. Stapleton had left, demanding to know what she had told the medical examiner. Beth had tried to say that she’d told him nothing of consequence and had tried to get him to leave, but Dr. Cheveau wouldn’t listen. He even threatened to fire Beth for willfully disobeying him. His ranting had brought her close to tears.
   After he’d left Beth had thought about Dr. Stapleton’s comment that people at the hospital, including her boss, had been acting defensively. Considering Dr. Cheveau’s behavior, she’d thought Dr. Stapleton might be right. It made her even more willing to follow up on Dr. Stapleton’s request.
   Beth stood in front of the two insulated doors. The one on the left was the walk-in freezer, the other the walk-in incubator. She debated which one to search first. Since she’d been in and out of the incubator all day with the throat cultures, she decided to tackle that first. After all, there was only a small area in the incubator where the contents were unfamiliar to her.
   Beth pulled open the door and entered. Immediately she was enveloped by the moist, warm air. The temperature was kept close to body temperature, at 98.6° Fahrenheit. Many bacteria and viruses, especially those that affected humans, had understandably evolved to grow best at human body temperature.
   The door behind Beth closed automatically to seal in the heat. The compartment was about eight by ten. The lighting came from two bulbs covered with wire mesh mounted on the ceiling. The shelving was perforated stainless steel. It extended floor to ceiling on both walls, along the back, and down the center, creating two narrow aisles.
   Beth made her way to the rear of the compartment. There were stainless-steel boxes back there that she’d seen on numerous occasions but had never examined.
   Grasping one of the boxes with both hands, Beth slid it out from its shelf and put it on the floor. It was about the size of a shoe box. When she tried to open it, she realized it had a latch that was secured with a miniature padlock!
   Beth was amazed and instantly suspicious. Few things in the lab were kept under lock and key. Picking the box up, Beth slid it back into place. Moving along the shelf, she reached around each box in turn. Every one of them had the same type of lock.
   Bending down, Beth did the same on the lower shelf. The condition of the fifth box was different. As Beth stuck her hand around its back, she could feel that the padlock’s clasp had not been closed.
   Insinuating her fingers between the unlocked box and its neighbors, Beth was able to slide it out. As she lifted it, she could tell it wasn’t quite as heavy as the first locked box; she feared it would be empty. But it wasn’t. As she lifted its cover, she saw that it contained a few petri dishes. She also noted that the petri dishes did not bear the customary label that was used in the lab. Instead they only had grease-pencil alphanumeric designators.
   Beth gingerly reached into the box and lifted out a petri dish labeled A-81. She lifted the top and looked in at expanding bacterial colonies. They were transparent and mucoid and they were growing on a medium she recognized as chocolate agar.
   A sharp mechanical click of the insulated door opening startled Beth. Her pulse raced. Like a child caught in a forbidden act, she frantically tried to get the petri dish back in the box and the box back on the shelf before whoever was entering saw what she was doing.
   Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time. She’d only had a chance to close the box and pick it up before she found herself face-to-face with Dr. Martin Cheveau. Ironically, he was at that moment carrying a box identical to the one she was holding.
   “What are you doing?” he snarled.
   “I’m…” Beth voiced, but that was all she could say. Under the pressure of the circumstance, no potential explanation came to mind.
   Dr. Cheveau noisily stashed his box on one of the shelves, then grabbed Beth’s away from her. He looked at the open latch.
   “Where’s the lock?” he growled.
   Beth extended her hand and then opened it. In her palm was the open padlock. Martin snatched it and examined it.
   “How did you get it open?” he demanded.
   “It was open,” Beth asserted.
   “You’re lying,” Martin snapped.
   “I’m not,” Beth said. “Honest. It was open and it made me curious.”
   “Likely story,” Martin yelled. His voice reverberated around the confined space.
   “I didn’t disturb anything,” Beth said.
   “How do you know you didn’t disturb anything?” Martin said. He opened the box and glanced inside. Seemingly satisfied, he closed it and locked it. He tested the lock. It held.
   “I only lifted the cover and looked at one culture dish,” Beth said. She was beginning to regain some composure, although her pulse was still racing.
   Martin slipped the box into its position. Then he counted them all. When he was finished, he ordered her out of the incubator.
   “I’m sorry,” Beth said after Martin had closed the insulated door behind them. “I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to touch those boxes.”
   At that moment Richard appeared in the doorway. Martin ordered him over, then angrily related how he’d caught Beth handling his research cultures.
   Richard acted as upset as Martin when he heard. Turning to Beth, he demanded to know why she would do such a thing. He wondered whether they weren’t giving her enough work to do.
   “No one told me not to touch them,” Beth protested. She was again close to tears. She hated confrontations and had already weathered a previous one only hours earlier.
   “No one told you to handle them either,” Richard snapped.
   “Did that Dr. Stapleton put you up to this?” Martin demanded.
   Beth hesitated, not knowing how to respond. As far as Martin was concerned her hesitation was incriminating. “I thought as much,” he snapped. “He probably even told you about his preposterous idea that the plague cases and the others were started on purpose.”
   “I told him I wasn’t supposed to talk with him,” Beth cried.
   “But talk he did,” Martin said. “And obviously you listened. Well, I’m not going to stand for it. You are fired, Miss Holderness. Take your things and get out. I don’t want to see your face again.”
   Beth sputtered a protest and with it came tears.
   “Crying is not going to get you anywhere,” Martin spat out. “Nor are excuses. You made your choice, now live with the consequences. Get out.”

   Twin reached across the scarred desk and hung up the phone. His real name was Marvin Thomas. He’d gotten the nickname “Twin” because he’d had an identical twin. No one had been able to tell the two of them apart until one of them got killed in a protracted disagreement between the Black Kings and a gang from the East Village over crack territories.
   Twin looked across the desk at Phil. Phil was tall and skinny and hardly imposing, but he had brains. It had been his brains, not his bravado or muscles, that had caused Twin to elevate him to number-two man in the gang. He had been the only person to know what to do with all the drug money they’d been raking in. Up until Phil took over, they’d been burying the greenbacks in PVC pipe in the basement of Twin’s tenement.
   “I don’t understand these people,” Twin said. “Apparently that honky doctor didn’t get our message, and he’s been out doing just what he damned well pleases. Can you believe it? I hit that sucker with just about everything I got, and three days later he’s giving us the finger. I don’t call that respect, no way.”
   “The people want us to talk to him again?” Phil asked. He’d been on the visit to Jack’s apartment and witnessed how hard Twin had hit the man.
   “Better than that,” Twin said. “They want us to ice the bastard. Why they didn’t have us do it the first time is anybody’s guess. They’re offering us five big ones.” Twin laughed. “Funny thing is, I would have done it for nothing. We can’t have people ignoring us. We’d be out of business.”
   “Should we send Reginald?” Phil asked.
   “Who else?” Twin questioned. “This is the kind of activity he loves.”
   Phil got to his feet and ground out his cigarette. He left the office and walked down the litter-strewn hallway to the front room, where a half dozen members were playing cards. Cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air.
   “Hey, Reginald,” Phil called out. “You up for some action?”
   Reginald glanced up from his cards. He adjusted the toothpick protruding from his mouth. “It depends,” he said.
   “I think you’d like this one,” Phil said. “Five big ones to do away with the doctor whose bike you got.”
   “Hey, man, I’ll do it,” BJ said. BJ was the nickname for Bruce Jefferson. He was a stocky fellow with thighs as thick as Phil’s waist. He’d also been on the visit to Jack’s.
   “Twin wants Reginald,” Phil said.
   Reginald stood up and tossed his cards on the table. “I had a crap hand anyway,” he said. He followed Phil back to the office.
   “Did Phil tell you the story?” Twin asked when they entered.
   “Just that the doctor goes,” Phil said. “And five big ones for us. Anything else?”
   “Yeah,” Twin said. “You gotta do a white chick too. Might as well do her first. Here’s the address.”
   Twin handed over a scrap of paper with Beth Holderness’s name and address written on it.
   “You care how I do these honkies?” Reginald asked.
   “I couldn’t care less,” Twin said. “Just be sure you get rid of them.”
   “I’d like to use the new machine pistol,” Reginald said. He smiled with the toothpick still stuck in the corner of his mouth.
   “It’ll be good to see if it’s worth the money we paid for it,” Twin said. Twin opened up one of the desk drawers and withdrew a new Tec pistol. It still had some packing grease on the handle. He gave the gun a shove across the desk. Reginald snapped it up before it got to the edge. “Enjoy yourself,” Twin added.
   “I intend to,” Reginald said.
   Reginald made it a point never to show any emotion, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel it. As he walked out of the building, his mood was soaring. He loved this kind of work.
   He unlocked the driver’s-side door of his jet-black Camaro and slipped in behind the wheel. He put the Tec pistol on the passenger seat and covered it with a newspaper. As soon as the motor was humming, he turned on his tape deck and pushed in his current favorite rap cassette. The car had a sound system that was the envy of the gang. It had enough subwoofer power to loosen ceramic tile in whatever neighborhood Reginald cruised.
   With one last glance at Beth Holderness’s address and with his head bobbing with the music, Reginald pulled away from the curb and headed uptown.

   Beth hadn’t gone directly home. In her distressed state, she needed to talk with someone. She’d stopped at a friend’s house and even had had a glass of wine. After talking the situation over, she felt somewhat better, but was still depressed. She couldn’t believe she’d been fired. There was also the gnawing possibility that she’d stumbled onto something significant in the incubator.
   Beth lived in a five-story tenement on East Eighty-third Street between First and Second avenues. It wasn’t the greatest neighborhood, but it wasn’t bad either. The only problem was that her building was not one of the best. The landlord did the least possible in terms of repair, and there was always trouble with something. As Beth arrived, she saw there was a new problem. The outer front door had been sprung open with a crowbar. Beth sighed. It had happened before and it had taken three months for the landlord to fix it.
   For several months Beth had been intending to move out of the building, and had been saving her money for a deposit on a new apartment. Now that she was out of work, she’d have to dip into her savings. She probably couldn’t move, at least not for the foreseeable future.
   As she climbed the last flight of stairs she told herself that as bad as things seemed, they could be worse. She reminded herself that at least she was healthy.
   Outside of her door, Beth fumbled with the clutter in the depths of her purse to find her apartment key, which she kept separate from the building key. Her idea was that if she lost one, she wouldn’t necessarily lose the other.
   Finally coming up with the key, she let herself into her apartment. She closed and locked the door, as was her habit. After taking off her coat and hanging it up, Beth again searched through her purse for Jack Stapleton’s card. When she found it, she sat on the couch and gave him a call.
   Although it was after seven, Beth called the medical examiner’s office. An operator told her that Dr. Stapleton had left for the day. Turning the card over, she tried Jack’s home number. She got his answering machine.
   “Dr. Stapleton,” Beth said after Jack’s beep sounded. “This is Beth Holderness. I have something to tell you.” Beth choked back tears from a sudden surge of emotion. She considered hanging up to collect herself, but instead she cleared her throat and continued haltingly: “I have to talk with you. I did find something. Unfortunately I was also fired. So please call.”
   Beth depressed the disconnect and then hung up the phone. For a second she debated calling back to describe what she found, but she decided against it. She’d wait for Jack to call her.
   Beth was about to stand up when a tremendous crash shocked her into complete immobility. The door to her apartment had burst open, and it slammed back against the wall hard enough to drive the doorknob into the plaster. The deadbolt that she’d felt so secure about had splintered the doorjamb as if the jamb had been made of balsa wood.
   A figure stood on the threshold like a magician appearing out of a cloud of smoke. He was dressed from head to foot in black leather. He glanced at Beth, then turned and yanked the door closed. Quiet returned to the apartment with the same suddenness as the explosive crash. At the moment only the muffled sound of a TV in a neighboring apartment could be heard.
   If Beth could have envisioned this situation she would have thought she’d scream or flee or both, but she didn’t do either. She’d been paralyzed. She’d even been holding her breath, which she now let out with an audible sigh.
   The man advanced toward her. His face was expressionless. A toothpick jauntily stuck out of his mouth. In his left hand he brandished the largest pistol Beth had ever seen. Its ammunition clip protruded down almost a foot.
   The man stopped directly in front of Beth. He didn’t say a word. Instead he slowly raised the pistol and pointed it at her forehead. Beth closed her eyes…

   Jack exited the subway at 103rd Street and jogged north. The weather was fine and the temperature reasonable. He expected a big turnout at the playground, and he wasn’t disappointed. Warren saw him through the chain-link fence and told him to get his ass in gear and get over there.
   Jack jogged the rest of the way home. As he approached his building, thoughts of Friday night and his uninvited visitors unwelcomely entered his mind. Having been at the General that day and having been discovered, Jack thought it was very possible that the Black Kings would be back. If they were, Jack wanted to know about it.
   Instead of going in the front door, Jack descended a few steps and walked down a dank tunnel that connected the front and the back of his building. It reeked of urine. He emerged in the backyard, which looked like a junkyard. In the half-light he could make out the twisted remains of discarded bedsprings, broken baby carriages, bald car tires, and other unwanted trash.
   Against the back of the building was a fire escape. It didn’t descend all the way to the ground. The last segment was a metal ladder with a cement counterweight. By turning over a garbage can and standing on its base, Jack was able to reach up and grab the lowest rung. As soon as he put his weight on it, it came down with a clatter.
   Jack climbed up the ladder. When he stepped off onto the grate of the first landing, the ladder retracted to its original position with equal clamor. Jack stood still for a few minutes to be sure that the din didn’t disturb anyone. When no one stuck their head out of a window to complain, Jack continued climbing.
   On each floor Jack had ample opportunity to glance in at the various domestic scenes, but he assiduously avoided doing so. It wasn’t pretty. When he saw it close-up, Jack found true poverty enervating. Jack also kept his eyes elevated to avoid looking down. He’d always been afraid of heights, and climbing the fire escape was a test of his fortitude.
   As Jack approached his own floor he slowed down. The fire escape serviced both his kitchen window and his bedroom window, both of which were ablaze with light. When he’d left that morning, he’d left all the lights on.
   Jack sidled up to the kitchen window first and peered in. The room was empty. A grouping of fruit he’d left on the table was undisturbed. From where he was standing he could also see through to his door to the common hall. His repair was still in place. The door had not been forced open.
   Moving to the second window, Jack made sure that the bedroom was as he’d left it. Satisfied, he opened the window and climbed in. He knew he’d been taking a chance leaving the bedroom window unlocked, but he thought it worth the risk. Once inside his apartment, he made a rapid final check. It was empty with no sign of any unexpected visitors having been there.
   Jack quickly changed into his basketball gear and exited the same way he’d entered. Given his acrophobia, descent was more difficult than ascent, but Jack forced himself to do it. Under the circumstances, he wasn’t wild about stepping out of his front door unprotected.
   When Jack got to the street end of the tunnel, he paused in the shadows to view the area immediately in front of his building. He was particularly concerned about seeing any groups of men sitting in cars. When he was reasonably confident there were no hostile gang members waiting for him, he jogged down to the playground.
   Unfortunately, during the time he’d taken to climb up and down the fire escape and change clothes the crowd at the playground had swelled. It took Jack even longer than usual to get into the game, and when he did, he ended up on a comparatively poor team.
   Although Jack’s shot was on, particularly his long jumper, his teammates’ weren’t. The game was a rout, to Warren’s delight; his team had been winning all night.
   Disgusted with his luck, Jack went to the sidelines and picked up his sweatshirt. Pulling it over his head, he started for the gate.
   “Hey, man, you leaving already?” Warren called out. “Come on, stick around. We’ll let you win one of these days.” Warren guffawed. He wasn’t being a bad sport; ridiculing the defeated was part of the accepted playground behavior. Everybody did it and everybody expected it.
   “I don’t mind getting whipped if it’s by a decent team,” Jack shot back. “But losing to a bunch of pansies is embarrassing.”
   “Ohhhh,” Warren’s teammates crooned. Jack’s retort had been a good one.
   Warren strutted over to Jack and stuck his index finger into Jack’s chest. “Pansies, huh?” he said. “I tell you what. My five would devastate any five you could put together right now! You pick, we play.”
   Jack’s eyes swept around the court. Everybody was looking in their direction. Jack considered the challenge and weighed the pluses and the minuses. First of all, he wanted more exercise so he did want to play, and he knew that Warren could make it happen.
   At the same time, Jack understood that picking four people out of the crowd would irritate the ones he didn’t pick. These were people Jack had been painstakingly cultivating over the past months to accept him. Beyond that, the people who were supposed to have winners would be especially vexed, not at Warren, who was insulated from such emotion, but at Jack. Considering all the angles, Jack decided it wasn’t worth it.
   “I’m going running in the park,” Jack said.
   Having bested Jack’s retort and willing to accept Jack’s refusal to meet his challenge as another victory, Warren bowed in recognition of his team’s cheering. He high-fived with one of them and then swaggered back onto the court. “Let’s run!” he yelled.
   Jack smiled to himself, thinking how much the dynamics of the playground basketball court revealed about current intra-city society. Vaguely he wondered if any psychologist had ever thought about studying it from an academic point of view. He thought it would be fruitful indeed.
   Jack stepped through the chain-link gate onto the sidewalk and started jogging. He ran due east. Ahead, at the end of the block he could see the dark silhouettes of jagged rocks and leafless trees. He knew that in a few minutes he’d leave behind the bustle of the city and enter the placid interior of Central Park. It was his favorite place to run.

   Reginald had been stymied. There was no way he could have walked out into a playground in a hostile neighborhood. Having found the doc playing b-ball, he’d resigned himself to waiting in his Camaro. His hope was that Jack would separate himself from the crowd, perhaps by heading for one of the nearby delis for a drink.
   When he’d seen Jack quit the game and pull on his sweater, he’d been encouraged enough to reach under the newspaper and snap the safety off the Tec. But then he heard Warren’s challenge and was sure he’d be sitting through at least another game.
   He was wrong. To his delight, a few minutes later Jack came out of the playground. But he didn’t head west in the direction of the shops as Reginald had anticipated. Instead he headed east!
   Cursing under his breath, Reginald had to make a U-turn right in the middle of all the traffic. A cabdriver complained bitterly by leaning on his horn. It was all Reginald could do to keep from reaching for the Tec. The cabdriver was one of those guys from the Far East whom Reginald would have loved to surprise with a couple of bursts.
   Reginald’s disappointment turned back to delight when he became aware of Jack’s destination. As Jack sprinted across Central Park West, Reginald quickly parked. Leaping from the car, he grabbed the Tec along with the newspaper. Cradling the package in his hands, he, too, dashed across Central Park West, dodging the traffic.
   At that point an entrance to the park’s West Drive continued eastward into the park. Nearby was a sweeping stone stairway that rose up around a rocky outcropping. Lampposts partially lit the walkway before it disappeared into the blackness.
   Reginald started up the stairs where he’d seen Jack go seconds earlier. Reginald was pleased. He couldn’t believe his luck. In fact, chasing his prey into the dark, deserted park was making the job almost too easy.

   From Jack’s point of view at that moment the park’s desolate darkness was more a source of comfort than uneasiness, unlike when he’d crossed the park on his bike Friday night. He felt consolation in the fact that although his vision was hampered, so was everyone else’s. He firmly believed if the Black Kings were to harass him it would be in and around his apartment.
   The terrain where Jack’s run began was surprisingly hilly and rocky. The area was called the Great Hill for good reason. He was following an asphalt walkway that twisted, turned, and tunneled beneath the leafless branches of the surrounding trees. The lights from the lampposts illuminated the branches in an eerie fashion, giving the impression the park was covered by a giant spider’s web.
   Although he felt winded at first, Jack settled into a comfortable pace and began to relax. With the city out of view, he had a chance to think more clearly. He began to wonder if his crusade was based on his hatred for AmeriCare, as Chet and Bingham had implied. From his present perspective Jack had to agree it was possible. After all, the idea of the intentional spread of the four diseases was implausible if not preposterous. And if he found the people at the General defensive, maybe he’d made them respond that way. As Bingham had reminded him: Jack could be abrasive.
   In the middle of his musings Jack became aware of a new sound that coincided with his own footfalls. It was a metallic click, as if his basketball shoes had heel-savers. Perplexed, Jack altered his pace. The sound went out of sync for a moment but then gradually merged back.
   Jack hazarded a glance behind him. When he did, he saw a figure running in his direction and closing. At the moment Jack spotted the figure, the man was passing under a lamppost. Jack could see he was not dressed as a jogger. In fact, he was wearing black leather, and in his hand he brandished a gun!
   Jack’s heart leaped in his chest. Aided by an adrenaline rush, he put on a burst of speed. Behind him he could hear his pursuer do likewise.
   Jack frantically tried to figure the fastest way out of the park. If he was able to get among traffic and other people he might have a chance. All he knew for sure was that the closest way to the city was through the foliage to his right. He had no idea how far. It could have been a hundred feet or a hundred yards.
   Sensing his pursuer was staying with him and perhaps even gaining, Jack veered right and plunged into the forest. Within the woods it was considerably darker than on the walkway. Jack could barely see where he was going as he stumbled up a steep grade. He was in a full panic, crashing over underbrush and scrambling through dense evergreens.
   The hill leveled off at the summit and Jack burst through to an area with considerably less undergrowth. It was just as dark, but there were only dead leaves to contend with as he ran between the closely spaced tree trunks.
   Happening upon a massive oak tree, Jack slipped behind and leaned against its rough surface. He was breathing hard. He tried to control his panting to listen. All he could hear was the sound of distant traffic that reverberated like the muffled roar of a waterfall. Only occasional car horns and undulating sirens punctuated the night.
   Jack stayed behind the broad trunk of the oak for several minutes. Hearing no more footfalls, he pushed off the tree and continued heading west. Now he moved slowly and as silently as possible, nudging his feet forward in the leaves to keep the noise down. His heart was racing.
   Jack’s foot hit up against something soft, and to his horror it seemed to explode in front of him. For a second Jack had no idea what was happening. With great commotion a phantom figure swathed in rags lurched out of the ground as if resurrecting itself from the dead. The creature whirled about like a dervish, flailing at the air and shouting “Bastards” over and over again.
   Instantly another figure loomed up as well, equally frantic. “You’re not gonna get our shopping cart,” the second man yelled. “We’ll kill you first.”
   Jack had only managed to take a single step backward when the first figure threw himself at him, smothering him with a wretched stench and ineffectual blows. Jack tried to push him away, but the man reached up and drew his fingernails down Jack’s face.
   Jack marshaled his strength to rid himself of this fetid vagrant who clung to his chest. Before Jack could shake him loose, a burst of gunfire shattered the night. Jack felt himself sprayed with fluid as the tramp stiffened, then collapsed forward. Jack had to push him aside to keep from being knocked over backward.
   The other vagrant’s keening brought forth a second burst of gunfire. His wails of grief were cut off suddenly with a gurgle.
   Having seen the direction from which the second burst of gunfire had come, Jack turned and fled in the opposite direction. Once again he was in headlong flight despite the darkness and the obstacles. Suddenly the ground dropped off, and Jack stumbled down a steep hillside, barely keeping his feet under him until he plunged into a dense undergrowth of vines and thornbushes.
   Jack clawed his way through the thick bushes until he burst out onto a walkway with such suddenness, he fell to his hands and knees. Ahead he could see a flight of dimly lit, granite stairs. Scrambling to his feet, he dashed toward the stairs and took them two at a time. As he neared the top a single shot rang out. A bullet ricocheted off the stone to Jack’s right and whined off into the night.
   Trying to duck and weave, Jack reached the top of the stairs and emerged onto a terrace. A fountain that had been turned off for the winter stood empty in its center. Three sides of the terrace were enclosed by an arcade. In the center of the rear arcade was another stone stairway leading to another level.
   Jack heard the rapid metallic clicks of his pursuer’s shoes start up the stone stairway behind him. He would be there in an instant. Jack knew he had no time to make it to the second stairway, so he ran into the interior of the arcade. Within the arched space the darkness was complete. Jack advanced blindly by holding his hands out in front of him.
   The pounding footfalls on the first stairway abruptly stopped. Jack knew his pursuer had reached the terrace. Jack continued forward, moving faster, heading for the second run of stairs. To his horror he collided in the blackness with a metal trash can. The noise was loud and unmistakable as the can tipped over and rolled to a stop. Almost immediately a burst of gunfire sounded. The bullets entered the arcade and ricocheted wildly off the granite walls. Jack lay flat, clasping his arms over his head until the final shell whined off into the night.
   Standing up again, Jack continued forward, more slowly this time. When he reached the corner he encountered more obstacles: bottles and beer cans were strewn on the floor with no way for Jack to avoid them.
   Jack winced every time one of his feet struck an object and the resulting noise echoed in the arcade. But there was no stopping. Ahead a faint glow indicated where the second stairway rose up to the next level. As soon as Jack reached it, he started climbing, moving more quickly now that there was light enough to see where to put his feet.
   Jack was almost to the top when a sharp, authoritative command rang out in the stillness.
   “Hey, man, hold up or you’re gone!”
   Jack could tell from the sound of the man’s voice that he was at the foot of the stairs. At that range Jack had no choice. He stopped.
   “Turn around!”
   Jack did as he was told. He could see that his pursuer had a huge pistol leveled at him.
   “Remember me? I’m Reginald.”
   “I remember you,” Jack said.
   “Come down here!” Reginald ordered in between breaths. “I’m not climbing another stair for you. No way.”
   Jack descended slowly. When he got to the third stair he stopped. The only light was a suffused glow from the surrounding city reflected off the cloud cover. Jack could barely make out the man’s features. His eyes appeared to be bottomless holes.
   “Man, you got balls,” Reginald said. Slowly he let his hand holding the Tec pistol fall until it was dangling at his side. “And you’re in shape. I gotta hand you that.”
   “What do you want from me?” Jack asked. “Whatever it is you can have it.”
   “Hey, I’m not expecting anything,” Reginald said. “ ’Cause I can tell you ain’t got much. Certainly not in those threads, and I’ve already been to that shithole apartment of yours. To be honest, I’m just supposed to ice you. Word has it you didn’t take Twin’s recommendation.”
   “I’ll pay you,” Jack said. “Whatever you’re being paid to do this, I’ll pay you more.”
   “Sounds interesting,” Reginald said. “But I can’t deal. Otherwise I’d have to answer to Twin, and you couldn’t pay me enough to take on that kind of shit. No way.”
   “Then tell me who’s paying you,” Jack said. “Just so I know.”
   “Hey, to tell you the truth, I don’t even know,” Reginald said. “All I know is that the money’s good. We’re getting five big ones just for me to chase you around the park for fifteen minutes. I’d say that’s not bad.”
   “I’ll pay a thousand,” Jack said. He was desperate to keep Reginald talking.
   “Sorry,” Reginald said. “Our little rap is over and your number’s up.” As slowly as Reginald had lowered the gun, now he raised it.
   Jack couldn’t believe he was going to be shot at point-blank range by someone he didn’t know and who didn’t know him. It was preposterous. Jack knew he had to get Reginald talking, but as glib as Jack was, he couldn’t think of anything more to say. His gift for repartee had deserted him as he watched the gun rise up to the point where he was staring directly down the barrel.
   “My bad,” Reginald said. It was a comment that Jack understood from his street basketball. It meant that Reginald was taking responsibility for what he was about to do.
   The gun fired, and Jack winced reflexively. Even his eyes closed. But he didn’t feel anything. Then he realized that Reginald was toying with him like a cat with a captured mouse. Jack opened his eyes. As terrorized as he felt, he was determined not to give Reginald any satisfaction. But what he saw shocked him. Reginald had disappeared.
   Jack blinked several times, as if he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. When he looked more closely he could just make out Reginald’s body sprawled on the paving stones. A dark stain like an octopus’s ink was spreading out from his head.
   Jack swallowed but didn’t move. He was transfixed. Out of the shadows of the arcade stepped a man. He was wearing a baseball hat backward. In his hand he held a pistol similar to the one Reginald had been carrying. He went first to Reginald’s gun, which had skidded ten feet away, and picked it up. He examined it briefly, then thrust it into the top of his trousers. He stepped over to the dead man and with the tip of his foot turned Reginald’s head over to look at the wound. Satisfied, he bent down and frisked the body until he found a wallet. He pulled it out, pocketed it, then stood up.
   “Let’s go, Doc,” the man said.
   Jack descended the last three steps. When he got to the bottom he recognized his rescuer. It was Spit!
   “What are you doing here?” Jack asked in a forced whisper. His throat had gone bone dry.
   “This ain’t no time for rapping, man,” Spit said. He then indulged in the act that had been the source of his sobriquet. “We gotta get the hell out of here. One of those bums back on the hill was only winged, and he’s going to have this place crawling with cops.”

   From the moment Spit’s gun had gone off in the arcade, Jack’s mind had been spinning. Jack had no idea how Spit happened to be there at such a crucial time, or why he was now hustling him out of the park.
   Jack tried to protest. He knew leaving a murder scene was a felony, and there had been two murders, not one. But Spit was not to be dissuaded. In fact, when Jack finally stopped running and started to explain why they shouldn’t flee, Spit slapped him. It wasn’t a gentle slap; it was a blow with vengeance.
   Jack put his hand to his face. His skin was hot where he’d been struck.
   “What the hell are you doing?” Jack asked.
   “Trying to knock some sense into you, man,” Spit said. “We got to get our asses over to Amsterdam. Here, you carry this mother.” Spit thrust Reginald’s machine pistol into Jack’s hands.
   “What am I supposed to do with it?” Jack asked. As far as he was concerned it was a murder weapon that should be handled with latex gloves and treated as evidence.
   “Stick it under your sweater,” Spit said. “Let’s get.”
   “Spit, I don’t think I can run away like this,” Jack said. “You go if you must, and take this thing.” Jack extended the gun toward Spit.
   Spit exploded. He grabbed Reginald’s gun out of Jack’s hand and immediately pressed the barrel against Jack’s forehead. “You’re pissing me off, man,” he said. “What’s the matter with you? There still could be some of these Black King assholes hanging around here. I tell you what: If you don’t get your ass in gear I’m going to waste you. You understand? I mean I wouldn’t be out here risking my black ass if it hadn’t been for Warren telling me to do it.”
   “Warren?” Jack questioned. Everything was getting too complicated. But he believed Spit’s threat, so he didn’t try to question him further. Jack knew Spit to be an impulsive man on the basketball court with a quick temper. Jack had never been willing to argue with him.
   “Are you coming or what?” Spit demanded.
   “I’m coming,” Jack said. “I’m bowing to your better judgment.”
   “Damn straight,” Spit said. He handed the machine pistol back to Jack and gave Jack a shove to move out.
   On Amsterdam Spit used a pay phone while Jack waited nervously. All at once the ubiquitous sirens heard in the distance in New York City had a new meaning for Jack. So did the concept of being a felon. For years Jack had been thinking of himself as a victim. Now he was the criminal.
   Spit hung up the phone and gave Jack a thumbs-up sign. Jack had no idea what the gesture meant, but he smiled anyway since Spit seemed to be content.
   Less than fifteen minutes later a lowered maroon Buick pulled to the curb. The intermittent thud of rap music could be heard through the tinted windows. Spit opened the back door and motioned for Jack to slide in. Jack complied. Events were clearly not in his control.
   Spit gave a final look around before climbing into the front seat. The car shot away from the curb.
   “What’s happening?” the driver asked. His name was David. He was also a regular on the b-ball court.
   “A lot of shit,” Spit said. He rolled his window down and noisily expectorated.
   Jack winced each time the bass sounded in one of the many stereo speakers. He slipped the machine pistol out from under his sweater. Having the thing close to his body gave him a distinctly unpleasant feeling. “What do you want me to do with this?” Jack asked Spit. He had to talk loudly to be heard over the sound of the music.
   Spit swung around and took the gun. He showed it to David, who whistled in admiration. “That’s the new model,” he commented.
   With little talk the threesome drove north to 106th Street and turned right. David braked across from the playground. The basketball game was still in progress.
   “Wait here,” Spit said. He got out of the car and headed into the playground.
   Jack watched Spit as he walked to the basketball court and stood on the sidelines as the game swept back and forth in front of him. Jack was tempted to ask David what was happening, but his intuition told him to keep still. Eventually Spit got Warren’s attention and Warren stopped the game.
   After a brief conversation during which Spit passed Reginald’s wallet to Warren, the two men came back to David’s car. David lowered the window. Warren stuck his head in and looked at Jack. “What the hell have you been doing?” he demanded angrily.
   “Nothing,” Jack said. “I’m the victim here. Why be angry with me?”
   Warren didn’t answer. Instead, he ran his tongue around the inside of his dry mouth while he thought. Perspiration lined his forehead. All at once he stood up and opened the door for Jack. “Get out,” he said. “We have to talk. Let’s go up to your place.”
   Jack slid out of the car. He tried to look Warren in the eye, but Warren avoided his stare. Warren started out across the street, and Jack followed. Spit came behind Jack.
   They climbed Jack’s stairs in silence.
   “You got anything to drink?” Warren asked once they were inside.
   “Gatorade or beer,” Jack said. He had restocked his refrigerator.
   “Gatorade,” Warren said. He walked over to Jack’s couch and sat heavily.
   Jack offered Spit the same choices. He took beer.
   After Jack had provided the drinks he sat in the chair opposite the couch. Spit preferred to lean against the desk.
   “I want to know what’s going on,” Warren said.
   “You and I both,” Jack said.
   “I don’t want to hear any shit,” Warren said. “ ’Cause you haven’t been straight with me.”
   “What do you mean?” Jack asked.
   “Saturday you asked me about the Black Kings,” Warren reminded him. “You said you were just curious. Now tonight one of those mothers tries to knock you off. Now I know something about those losers. They’re into drugs big time. You catch my drift? What I want you to know is if you’re mixed up with dealing, I don’t want you in this neighborhood. It’s as simple as that.”
   Jack let out a short laugh of incredulity. “Is that what this is about?” he asked. “You think I’m dealing drugs?”
   “Doc, listen to me,” Warren said. “You’re a strange dude. I never understood why you’re living here. But it’s okay as long as you don’t screw up the neighborhood. But if you’re here because of drugs, you gotta rethink your situation.”
   Jack cleared his throat. He then admitted to Warren that he’d not been truthful with him when he’d asked about the Black Kings. He told him that the Black Kings had beaten him up, but that it involved something concerning his work that even he didn’t totally understand.
   “You sure you’re not dealing?” Warren asked again. He looked at Jack out of the corner of his eye. “ ’Cause if you’re not straight with me now you’re going to be one sorry shit.”
   “I’m being entirely truthful,” Jack assured him.
   “Well, then you’re a lucky man,” Warren said. “Had David and Spit not recognized that dude who came cruising around the neighborhood in his Camaro, you’d be history right now. Spit says he was fixing to blow you away.”
   Jack looked up at Spit. “I’m very grateful,” he said.
   “It was nothing, man,” Spit said. “That mother was so fixed on getting you that he never once looked behind him. We’d been on his tail almost the moment he turned on a Hundred and Sixth.”
   Jack rubbed his head and sighed. Only now was he truly beginning to calm down. “What a night,” he said. “But it’s not over. We’ve got to go to the police.”
   “Hell we do,” Warren said, his anger returning. “Nobody’s going to the police.”
   “But there’s someone dead,” Jack said. “Maybe two or three, counting those homeless guys.”
   “There’ll be four if you go,” Warren warned. “Listen, Doc, don’t get yourself involved in gang business, and this has become gang business. This Reginald dude knew he wasn’t supposed to be up here. No way. I mean, we can’t have them thinking they can just breeze into our neighborhood and knock somebody off, even if it is only you. Next they’d be icing one of the brothers. Leave it be, Doc. The police don’t give a shit anyway. They’re happy when us brothers are knocking each other off. All you can do is cause you and us trouble, and if you go to the police, you’re no friend of ours, no way.”
   “But leaving the scene of a crime is a—” Jack began.
   “Yeah, I know,” Warren interrupted. “It’s a felony. Big deal. Who the hell cares? And let me tell you something else. You still got a problem. If the Black Kings want you dead, you’d better be our friend, because we’re the only ones who can keep you alive. The cops can’t, believe me.”
   Jack started to say something, but he changed his mind. With his knowledge of gang life in New York City, he knew that Warren was right. If the Kings wanted him dead, which they apparently did—and would all the more now with Reginald’s death—there was no way for the police to prevent it short of secret-service-type twenty-four-hour guard.
   Warren looked up at Spit. “Somebody’s going to have to stick tight to Doc for the next few days,” he said.
   Spit nodded. “No problem,” he said.
   Warren stood up and stretched. “What pisses me off is that I had the best team I’ve had in weeks tonight, and this shit has cut it short.”
   “I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I’ll let you win next time I play against you.”
   Warren laughed. “One thing I can say about you, Doc,” he said. “You can sure rap with the best of them.”
   Warren motioned to Spit to leave. “We’ll be seeing you, Doc,” Warren said at the door. “Now don’t do anything foolish. You going to run tomorrow night?”
   “Maybe,” Jack said. He didn’t know what he was going to do in the next five minutes, much less the following night.
   With a final wave Warren and Spit departed. The door closed behind them.
   Jack sat for a few minutes. He felt shell-shocked. Then he got up, went into the bathroom. When he looked into the mirror he cringed. At the time he and Spit had been waiting for David to arrive with the car, a few people had glanced at Jack, but no one had stared. Now Jack wondered why they hadn’t. Jack’s face and sweater were spattered with blood, presumably from the vagrant. There was also a nasty series of parallel scratches from the vagrant’s fingernails down his forehead and over his nose. A cross-hatching of scratches marred his cheeks, from the underbrush, no doubt. He looked like he’d been in a war.
   Jack climbed into his tub and took a shower. By then his mind was going a mile a minute. He couldn’t remember ever being in such a state of confusion, except after his family had perished. But that was different. He’d been depressed then. Now he was just confused.
   Jack got out of the shower and dried himself off. He was still half debating whether or not to contact the police. In a state of indecision, he went to the phone. That’s when he noticed that his answering machine was blinking. He pushed the play button and listened to Beth Holderness’s disturbing message. Instantly he called her back. He let her phone ring ten times before giving up. What could she have found? he wondered. He also felt responsible for her having been fired. Somehow he was sure he was to blame.
   Jack got a beer and took it into the living room. Sitting on the windowsill, he could see a sliver of 106th Street. There was the usual traffic and parade of people. He watched with unseeing eyes as he wrestled with his dilemma regarding calling the police.
   Hours passed. Jack realized that by not making a decision he was in essence making one. By not calling the police he was agreeing with Warren. He’d become a felon.
   Jack went back to the phone and tried Beth for the tenth time. It was now after midnight. The phone rang interminably. Jack started to worry. He hoped she’d simply fled to a friend’s house for solace after losing her job. Yet not being able to get in touch with her nagged at him along with everything else.

27. Tuesday, 7:30 a.m., March 26, 1996
New York City

   The first thing Jack did when he woke up was to try calling Beth Holderness. When she’d still not answered he’d tried to be optimistic about her visiting a friend, but in the face of everything that had happened, the inability to get ahold of her was progressively more distressing.
   Still without a bike, Jack was forced back into the subway for his commute. But he wasn’t alone. From the moment Jack had emerged from his tenement he’d been trailed by one of the younger members of the local gang. His name was Slam, in deference to his dunking ability with the basketball. Even though he was Jack’s height, he could outjump Jack by at least twelve inches.
   Jack and Slam did not talk during the train ride. They sat opposite each other, and although Slam didn’t try to avoid eye contact, his expression never changed from one of total indifference. He was dressed like most of the younger African-Americans in the city, with oversized clothes. His sweatshirt was tentlike, and Jack preferred not to imagine what it concealed. Jack didn’t believe that Warren would have sent the young man out to protect Jack without some significant weaponry.
   As Jack crossed First Avenue and mounted the steps in front of the medical examiner’s office, he glanced behind him. Slam had paused on the sidewalk, obviously confused as to what he should do. Jack hesitated as well. The unreasonable thought went through Jack’s mind of inviting the man in so that he could pass the time in the second-floor canteen, but that was clearly out of the question.
   Jack shrugged. Although he appreciated Slam’s efforts on his behalf, it was Slam’s problem what he was going to do for the day.
   Jack turned back to the building, steeling himself for the possibility of having to face one or more bodies in whose death he somehow felt complicit.
   Gathering his courage, Jack pulled open the door and entered.
   Even though he was scheduled for a “paper day” and no autopsies, Jack wanted to see what had come in during the night. Not only was he concerned about Reginald and the vagrants, he was also concerned about the possibility of more meningococcus cases.
   Jack had the receptionist buzz him into the ID area. Walking into the scheduling room, Jack knew instantly that it was not going to be a normal day. Vinnie was not sitting in his usual location with his morning newspaper.
   “Where’s Vinnie?” Jack asked George.
   Without looking up, George told Jack that Vinnie was already in the pit with Bingham.
   Jack’s pulse quickened. Given his guilt about the previous evening’s events, he had the irrational thought that Bingham could have been called in to do Reginald. At this stage of his career Bingham rarely did autopsies unless they were of particular interest or importance.
   “What’s Bingham doing in this early?” Jack asked, trying to sound disinterested.
   “It’s been a busy night,” George said. “There was another infectious death over at the General. Apparently it’s got the city all worked up. During the night the city epidemiologist called the Commissioner of Health, who called Bingham.”
   “Another meningococcus?” Jack asked.
   “Nope,” George said. “They think this one is a viral pneumonia.”
   Jack nodded and felt a chill descend his spine. His immediate concern was hantavirus. He knew there had been a case on Long Island the previous year in the early spring. Hantavirus was a scary proposition, although it was still not an illness with much patient-to-patient spread.
   Jack could see there were more than the usual number of folders on the desk in front of George. “Anything else interesting last night?” Jack asked. He shuffled through the folders looking for Reginald’s name.
   “Hey,” George complained. “I got these things in order.” He looked up, then did a double take. “What the hell happened to you?”
   Jack had forgotten how bad his face looked.
   “I tripped when I was out jogging last night,” Jack said. Jack didn’t like to lie. What he said was true, but hardly the whole story.
   “What did you fall into?” George asked. “A roll of barbed wire?”
   “Any gunshot wounds last night?” Jack asked, to change the subject.
   “You’d better believe it,” George said. “We got four. Too bad it’s a paper day for you. I’d give you one.”
   “Which ones are they?” Jack asked. He glanced around the desk.
   George tapped the top of one of his stacks of folders.
   Jack reached over and picked up the first one. When he opened the cover, his heart sank. He had to reach out and steady himself against the desk. The name was Beth Holderness.
   “Oh, God, no,” Jack murmured.
   George’s head shot up again. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Hey, you’re as white as a sheet. You okay?”
   Jack sat in a nearby chair and put his head down between his legs. He felt dizzy.
   “Is it someone you know?” George asked with concern.
   Jack straightened up. The dizziness had passed. He took a deep breath and nodded. “She was an acquaintance,” he said. “But I’d spoken with her just yesterday.” Jack shook his head. “I can’t believe it.”
   George reached over and took the folder from Jack’s hands. He opened it up. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “This is the lab tech from over at the General. Sad! She was only twenty-eight. Supposedly shot through the forehead for a TV and some cheap jewelry. What a waste.”
   “What are the other gunshot wounds?” Jack asked. For the moment he remained seated.
   George consulted his master sheet. “I’ve got a Hector Lopez, West Hundred and Sixtieth Street, a Mustafa Aboud, East Nineteenth Street, and Reginald Winthrope, Central Park.”
   “Let me see Winthrope,” Jack said.
   George handed Jack the folder.
   Jack opened it up. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but his sense of involvement made him want to check the case. The strangest thing was that had it not been for Spit, Jack himself would have been represented there on George’s desk with his own folder. Jack shuddered. He handed Reginald’s folder back to George.
   “Is Laurie here yet?” Jack asked.
   “She came in just before you did,” George said. “She wanted some folders, but I told her that I’d not made out the schedule yet.”
   “Where is she?” Jack asked.
   “Up in her office, I guess,” George said. “I really don’t know.”
   “Assign her the Holderness and the Winthrope cases,” Jack said. Jack stood up. He anticipated feeling dizzy again, but he didn’t.
   “How come?” George asked.
   “George, just do it,” Jack said.
   “All right, don’t get mad,” George said.
   “I’m sorry,” Jack said. “I’m not mad. Just preoccupied.”
   Jack walked back through communications. He passed Janice’s office, where she was putting in her usual overtime. Jack didn’t bother her. He was too absorbed by his own thoughts. Beth Holderness’s death made him feel unhinged. Feeling guilty about his complicity in her losing her job was bad enough; the idea that she might have lost her life because of his actions was unthinkable.
   Jack pressed the button for the elevator and waited. The attempt on his own life the night before had given more weight to his suspicions. Someone had tried to kill him after he refused to heed the warning. The very same night Beth Holderness had been murdered. Could it have been in the course of an unrelated robbery or could it have been because of Jack, and, if so, what did that mean about Martin Cheveau? Jack didn’t know. But what he did know was that he could not involve anyone else in this affair for fear of putting them in jeopardy. From that moment on, Jack knew he had to keep everything to himself.
   As George had surmised, Laurie was in her office. While waiting for George to assign the day’s cases, she was using the time profitably, working on some of her uncompleted cases. She took one look at Jack and recoiled. Jack offered the same explanation he’d given George, but he could tell that Laurie wasn’t quite convinced.
   “Did you hear that Bingham is down in the pit?” Jack asked, to move the conversation away from his previous night’s experiences.
   “I did,” Laurie said. “I was shocked. I didn’t think there was anything that could get him here before eight, much less in the autopsy room.”
   “Do you know anything about the case?” Jack asked.
   “Just that it was atypical pneumonia,” Laurie said. “I spoke with Janice for a moment. She said they’d had preliminary confirmation it was influenza.”
   “Uh-oh!” Jack said.
   “I know what you’re thinking,” Laurie said, wagging her finger. “Influenza was one of the diseases you said you’d use if you were a terrorist type trying to start an epidemic. But before you go jumping off using this as confirmation of your theory, just remember that it is still influenza season.”
   “Primary influenza pneumonia is not very common,” Jack said, trying to stay calm. The mention of the word “influenza” had his pulse racing again.
   “We see it every year,” Laurie said.
   “Maybe so,” Jack said. “But I tell you what. How about calling that internist friend of yours and asking if there are any more cases?”
   “Right now?” Laurie asked. She glanced at her watch.
   “It’s as good a time as any,” Jack said. “She’ll probably be making her rounds. She can use the computer terminal at one of the nurses’ stations.”
   Laurie shrugged and picked up her phone. A few minutes later she had her friend on the line. She asked the question, then waited. While she waited she looked up at Jack. She was worried about him. His face was not only scratched up, it was now flushed.
   “No cases,” Laurie repeated into the phone when her friend came back on the line. “Thanks, Sue. I appreciate it. Talk to you soon. Bye.”
   Laurie hung up the phone. “Satisfied?” she said.
   “For the moment,” Jack said. “Listen: I asked George to assign you two particular cases this morning. The names are Holderness and Winthrope.”
   “Is there some specific reason?” Laurie asked. She could see that Jack was trembling.
   “Do it as a favor,” Jack said.
   “Of course,” Laurie said.
   “One thing I’d like you to do is look for any hairs or fibers on the Holderness woman’s body,” Jack said. “And find out if homicide had a criminologist at the scene to do the same. If there are any hairs, see if there is a DNA match with Winthrope.”
   Laurie didn’t say anything. When she found her voice, she asked: “You think that Winthrope killed Holderness?” Her voice reflected her disbelief.
   Jack looked off and sighed. “There’s a chance,” he said.
   “How would you know?” Laurie asked.
   “Let’s call it a disturbing hunch,” Jack said. He would have liked to tell Laurie more, but with the new pact he had with himself, he didn’t. He wasn’t about to put anyone else at risk in any form or fashion.
   “Now you really have my curiosity going,” Laurie said.
   “I’d like to ask one more favor,” Jack said. “You told me that you had a relationship with a police detective who’s now a friend.”
   “That’s true,” Laurie said.
   “Do you think you could give him a call?” Jack said. “I’d like to talk with him sorta off the record.”
   “You are scaring me,” Laurie said. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”
   “Laurie,” Jack said. “Please don’t ask any questions. The less you know right now the better off you are. But I think I should talk to someone high up in law enforcement.”
   “You want me to call him now?”
   “Whenever is convenient,” Jack said.
   Laurie blew out through pursed lips as she dialed Lou Soldano’s number. She’d not talked to him in a few weeks, and she felt it was a little awkward calling about a situation she knew so little about. But she was definitely worried about Jack and wanted to help.
   When police headquarters answered and Laurie asked for Lou, she was told the detective wasn’t available. She left a message on his voice mail for him to call her.
   “That’s the best I could do,” Laurie said as she hung up. “Knowing Lou, he’ll be back to me as soon as he can.”
   “I appreciate it,” Jack said. He gave her shoulder a squeeze. He had the comforting sense she was a true friend.
   Jack went back to his own office just in time to run into Chet. Chet took one look at Jack’s face and whistled.
   “And what did the other guy look like?” Chet asked jokingly.
   “I’m not in the mood,” Jack said. He took off his jacket and hung it over his chair.
   “I hope this doesn’t have anything to do with those gang members who visited you Friday,” Chet said.
   Jack gave the same explanation he’d given to the others.
   Chet flashed a wry smile as he stowed his coat in his file cabinet. “Sure, you fell while jogging,” he said. “And I’m dating Julia Roberts. But, hey, you don’t have to tell me what happened; I’m just your friend.”
   That was exactly the point, Jack mused. After checking to see if he had any phone messages, he started back out of the office.
   “You missed a nice little dinner last night,” Chet said. “Terese came along. We talked about you. She’s a fan of yours, but she’s as concerned as I am about your monomania concerning these infectious cases.”
   Jack didn’t even bother to answer. If Chet or Terese knew what had really happened last night, they’d be more than concerned.
   Returning to the first floor, Jack looked into Janice’s office. Now he wanted to ask her about the influenza case that was being posted by Bingham, but she’d left. Jack descended to the morgue level and changed into his isolation gear.
   He went into the autopsy room and walked up to the only table in operation. Bingham was on the patient’s right, Calvin on the left, and Vinnie at the head. They were almost done.
   “Well, well,” Bingham said when Jack joined them. “Isn’t this convenient? Here’s our in-house infectious expert.”
   “Perhaps the expert would like to tell us what this case is,” Calvin challenged.
   “I’ve already heard,” Jack said. “Influenza.”
   “Too bad,” Bingham said. “It would have been fun to see if you truly have the nose for this stuff. When it came in early this morning there was no diagnosis yet. The suspicion was some sort of viral hemorrhagic fever. It had everybody up in arms.”
   “When did you learn it was influenza?” Jack asked.
   “A couple of hours ago,” Bingham answered. “Just before we started. It’s a good case, though. You want to see the lungs?”
   “I would,” Jack said.
   Bingham reached into the pan and lifted out the lungs. He showed the cut surface to Jack.
   “My God, the whole lung is involved!” Jack commented. He was impressed. In some areas there was frank hemorrhage.
   “Even some myocarditis,” Bingham said. He put the lung back and lifted up the heart and displayed it for Jack. “When you can see the inflammation grossly like this, you know it’s extensive.”
   “Looks like a virulent strain,” Jack said.
   “You’d better believe it,” Bingham said. “This patient’s only twenty-nine years old, and his first symptoms occurred around six last night. He was dead at four A.M. It reminds me of a case I did back in my residency during the pandemic of fifty-seven and fifty-eight.”
   Vinnie rolled his eyes. Bingham had a mind-numbing habit of comparing every case to one that he’d had in his long career.
   “That case was also a primary influenza pneumonia,” Bingham continued. “Same appearance of the lung. When we looked at it histologically we were amazed at the degree of damage. It gave us a lot of respect for certain strains of influenza.”
   “Seeing this case concerns me,” Jack said. “Especially in light of the other diseases that have been popping up.”
   “Now, don’t head off into left field!” Bingham warned, remembering some of Jack’s comments the day before. “This isn’t out of the ordinary, like the plague case or even the tularemia. It’s flu season. Primary influenza pneumonia is a rare complication, but we see it. In fact we had a case just last month.”
   Jack listened, but Bingham wasn’t making him feel any more comfortable. The patient in front of them had had a lethal infection with an agent that had the capability of spreading from patient to patient like wildfire. Jack’s only consolation was the call Laurie had made to her internist friend who’d said there were no other cases in the hospital.
   “Mind if I take some washings?” Jack asked.
   “Hell no!” Bingham said. “Be my guest. But be careful what you do with them.”
   “Obviously,” Jack said.
   Jack took the lungs over to one of the sinks, and with Vinnie’s help prepared some samples by washing out some of the small bronchioles with sterile saline. He then sterilized the outside of the containers with ether.
   Jack was on his way out when Bingham asked him what he was going to do with the samples.
   “Take them up to Agnes,” Jack said. “I’d like to know the subtype.”
   Bingham shrugged and looked across at Calvin.
   “Not a bad idea,” Calvin said.
   Jack did exactly what he said he would. But he was disappointed when he presented the bottles to Agnes up on the third floor.
   “We don’t have the capability of subtyping it,” she said.
   “Who does?” Jack asked.
   “The city or state reference lab,” Agnes said. “Or even over at the university lab. But the best place would be the CDC. They have a whole section devoted to influenza. If it were up to me, I’d send it there.”
   Jack got some viral transport medium from Agnes and transferred the washings into it. Then he went up to his office. Sitting down, he placed a call to the CDC and was put through to the influenza unit. A pleasant-sounding woman answered, introducing herself as Nicole Marquette.
   Jack explained what he wanted, and Nicole was accommodating. She said she’d be happy to see that the influenza was typed and subtyped.
   “If I manage to get the sample to you today,” Jack said, “how long would it take for you to do the typing?”
   “We can’t do this overnight,” Nicole said, “if that’s what you have in mind.”
   “Why not?” Jack asked impatiently.
   “Well, maybe we could,” Nicole corrected herself. “If there is a sufficient viral titer in your sample, meaning enough viral particles, I suppose it is possible. Do you know what the titer is?”
   “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Jack said. “But the sample was taken directly from the lung of a patient who passed away from primary influenza pneumonia. The strain is obviously virulent, and I’m worried about a possible epidemic.”
   “If it is a virulent strain, then the titer might be high,” Nicole said.
   “I’ll find a way to get it to you today,” Jack promised. He then gave Nicole his telephone number both at the office and at home. He told her to call anytime she had any information.
   “We’ll do the best we can,” Nicole said. “But I have to warn you, if the titer is too low it might be several weeks before I get back to you.”
   “Weeks!” Jack complained. “Why?”
   “Because we’ll have to grow the virus out,” Nicole explained. “We usually use ferrets, and it takes a good two weeks for an adequate antibody response which guarantees we’ll have a good harvest of virus. But once we have the virus in quantity, we can tell you a lot more than just its subtype. In fact, we can sequence its genome.”
   “I’ll keep my fingers crossed that my samples have a high titer,” Jack said. “And one other question. What subtype would you think was the most virulent?”
   “Whoa!” Nicole said. “That’s a hard question. There are a lot of factors involved, particularly host immunity. I’d have to say the most virulent would be an entirely new pathological strain, or one that hasn’t been around for a long time. I suppose the subtype that caused the pandemic of 1918 to 1919 that killed twenty-five million people worldwide might get the dubious honor of having been the most virulent.”
   “What subtype was that?” Jack asked.
   “No one knows for sure,” Nicole said. “The subtype doesn’t exist. It disappeared years ago, maybe right after the epidemic wore itself out. Some people think it was similar to the subtype that caused that swine-flu scare back in seventy-six.”
   Jack thanked Nicole and again assured her he’d get the samples to her that day. After he hung up, he called Agnes back and asked her opinion on shipping. She told him the name of the courier service they used, but she said she didn’t know if they shipped interstate.
   “Besides,” Agnes added, “it will cost a small fortune. I mean overnight is one thing, but you’re talking about the same day. Bingham will never authorize it.”
   “I don’t care,” Jack said. “I’ll pay for it myself.”
   Jack called the courier company. They were delighted with the request and put Jack through to one of the supervisors, Tony Liggio. When Jack explained what he wanted, Tony said no problem.
   “Can you come to pick it up now?” Jack asked. He was encouraged.
   “I’ll send someone right away,” Tony said.
   “It will be ready,” Jack said.
   Jack was about to hang up when he heard Tony add: “Aren’t you interested in the cost? I mean, this is not like taking something over to Queens. Also, there’s the question of how you plan to pay.”
   “Credit card,” Jack said. “If that’s okay.”
   “Sure, no problem, Doc,” Tony said. “It’s going to take me a little while to figure out the exact charge.”
   “Just give me a ballpark figure,” Jack said.
   “Somewhere between one and two thousand dollars,” Tony said.
   Jack winced but didn’t complain. Instead, he merely gave Tony his credit card number. He’d envisioned the cost would be two or three hundred dollars, but then he hadn’t thought about the fact that someone might have to fly round-trip to Atlanta.
   While Jack had been engaged in giving his credit card information, one of the secretaries from the front office had appeared at his door. She’d handed him an overnight Federal Express package and departed without saying a word. As Jack hung up from the courier service he saw that the parcel was from National Biologicals. It was the DNA probes he’d requested the day before.
   Taking the probes and his viral samples, Jack went back down to Agnes. He told her about the arrangements he’d made with the courier service.
   “I’m impressed,” Agnes said. “But I’m not going to ask how much it’s costing.”
   “Don’t,” Jack advised. “How should I package the samples?”
   “We’ll take over,” she said. She called in the department secretary and commissioned her to do it with appropriate biohazard containers and labels.
   “Looks like you have something else for me,” she said, eyeing the vials containing the probes.
   Jack explained what they were and what he wanted, namely to have the DNA lab use the probes to see if they reacted with the nucleoproteins of the cultures taken from any of the four recent infectious disease cases he’d been working on. What he didn’t tell her was why he wanted it done.
   “All I need to know is whether it is positive or not,” Jack said. “It doesn’t have to be quantitative.”
   “I’ll have to handle the rickettsia and the tularemia agent myself,” Agnes said. “I’m afraid to have any of the techs working with them.”
   “I really appreciate all this,” Jack said.
   “Well, it’s what we’re here for,” Agnes said agreeably.
   After leaving the lab Jack went downstairs to the scheduling room and helped himself to some coffee. He’d been so frantic since he’d arrived that he’d not had much time to think. Now, as he stirred his coffee, he realized that neither of the homeless men that he’d inadvertently run into in his flight from Reginald had been brought in. That meant that they were either in some hospital or they were still out there in the park.
   Carrying his coffee back upstairs, Jack sat down at his desk. With both Laurie and Chet in the autopsy room, he knew he could count on some peace and quiet.
   Before he could enjoy his solitude, the phone interrupted. It was Terese.
   “I’m mad at you,” she said without preamble.
   “That’s wonderful,” Jack said with his usual sarcasm. “Now my day is complete.”
   “I am angry,” Terese maintained, but her voice had softened considerably. “Colleen just hung up from talking with Chet. He told her you were beaten up again.”
   “That was Chet’s personal interpretation,” Jack said. “The fact is, I wasn’t beaten up again.”
   “You weren’t?”
   “I explained to Chet that I’d fallen while jogging,” Jack said.
   “But he told Colleen…”
   “Terese,” Jack said sharply. “I wasn’t beaten up. Can we talk about something else?”
   “Well, if you weren’t assaulted, why are you sounding so irritable?”
   “It’s been a stressful morning,” Jack admitted.
   “Care to talk about it?” she asked. “That’s what friends are for. I’ve certainly bent your ear about my problems.”
   “There’s been another infectious death at the General,” Jack said. He would have liked to tell her what was really on his mind—his sense of guilt about Beth Holderness—but he dared not.
   “That’s terrible!” Terese said. “What is wrong with that place? What is it this time?”
   “Influenza,” Jack said. “A very virulent case. It’s the kind of illness I’ve been truly worried we’d see.”
   “But the flu is around,” Terese said. “It’s flu season.”
   “That’s what everybody says,” Jack admitted.
   “But not you?”
   “Put it this way,” Jack said. “I’m worried, especially if it is a unique strain. The deceased was a young patient, only twenty-nine. In the face of what else has been popping up over there at the General, I’m worried.”
   “Are some of your colleagues worried as well?” Terese asked.
   “At the moment, I’m on my own,” Jack admitted.
   “I guess we’re lucky to have you,” Terese said. “I have to admire your dedication.”
   “That’s kind of you to say,” Jack said. “Actually, I hope I’m wrong.”
   “But you’re not going to give up, are you?”
   “Not until I have some proof one way or the other,” Jack said. “But let’s talk about you. I hope you are doing better than I.”
   “I appreciate your asking,” Terese said. “Thanks in no small part to you, I think we have the makings of a good ad campaign. Plus, I’ve managed to have the in-house presentation put off until Thursday, so we have another whole day of breathing room. At the moment things are looking reasonable, but in the advertising world that could change at any moment.”
   “Well, good luck,” Jack said. He wanted to get off the phone.
   “Maybe we could have a quick dinner tonight,” Terese suggested. “I’d really enjoy it. There’s a great little Italian restaurant just up the street on Madison.”
   “It’s possible,” Jack said. “I’ll just have to see how the day progresses.”
   “Come on, Jack,” Terese complained. “You have to eat. We both could use the relaxation, not to mention the companionship. I can hear the tension in your voice. I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist.”
   “All right,” Jack said, relenting. “But it might have to be a short dinner.” He realized there was some truth to what Terese was saying, although at the moment it was hard for him to think as far ahead as dinnertime.
   “Fantastic,” Terese said happily. “Call me later and we’ll decide on the time. If I’m not here, I’ll be home. Okay?”
   “I’ll call you,” Jack promised.
   After they exchanged good-byes, Jack hung up the phone. For a few minutes he stared at it. He knew that conventional wisdom held that talking about a problem was supposed to relieve anxiety. But at the moment, having talked about the case of influenza with Terese, he only felt more anxious. At least the viral sample was on its way to the CDC and the DNA lab was working with the probe from National Biologicals. Maybe soon he’d start to get some answers.

28. Tuesday, 10:30 a.m., March 26, 1996

   Phil came through the outer door of the abandoned building the Black Kings had taken over. The door was a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood bolted to an aluminum frame.
   Phil passed the front room with the invariable pall of cigarette smoke and interminable card game and rushed directly back to the office. He was relieved to see Twin at the desk.
   Phil waited impatiently for Twin to wrap up a payoff from one of their eleven-year-old pushers and send the kid away.
   “There’s a problem,” Phil said.
   “There’s always a problem,” Twin said philosophically. He was re-counting the ragged stack of greenbacks the kid had brought in.
   “Not like this one,” Phil said. “Reginald’s been tagged.”
   Twin looked up from the money with an expression as if he’d just been slapped. “Get out!” he said. “Where’d you hear that shit?”
   “It’s true,” Phil insisted. He took one of the several beat-up straight-backed chairs standing against the wall and turned it around so he could sit on it backward. The pose provided visual harmony with the backward baseball cap he always wore.
   “Who says?” Twin asked.
   “It’s all over the street,” Phil said. “Emmett heard it from a pusher up in Times Square. Seems that the doc is being protected by the Gangsta Hoods from Manhattan Valley on the Upper West Side.”
   “You mean one of the Hoods iced Reginald?” Twin asked in total disbelief.
   “That’s the story,” Phil said. “Shot him through the head.”
   Twin slammed his open palm on the desk hard enough to send the tattered stack of greenbacks wafting off into the air. He leaped to his feet and paced. He gave the metal wastebasket a hard kick.
   “I can’t believe this,” he said. “What the hell is this world coming to? I don’t understand it. They’d do a brother for some white honky doctor. It doesn’t make sense, no way.”
   “Maybe the doc is doing something for them,” Phil suggested.
   “I don’t care what the hell he’s doing,” Twin raged. He towered over Phil, and Phil cringed. Phil was well aware that Twin could be ruthless and unpredictable when he was pissed, and he was royally pissed at the moment.
   Returning to the desk, Twin pounded it again. “I don’t understand this, but there is one thing that I do know. It can’t stand. No way! The Hoods can’t go around knocking off a Black King without a response. I mean, at a minimum we gotta do the doc like we agreed.”
   “Word is that the Hoods have a tail on the doc,” Phil said. “They are still protecting him.”
   “It’s unbelievable,” Twin said as he retook his seat at the desk. “But it makes things easier. We do the doc and the tail at the same time. But we don’t do it in the Hoods’ neighborhood. We do it where the doc works.”
   Twin pulled open the center drawer of his desk and rummaged around. “Where the hell is that sheet about the doc,” he said.
   “Side drawer,” Phil said.
   Twin glared at Phil. Phil shrugged. He didn’t want to aggravate Twin, but he remembered Twin putting the sheet in the side drawer.
   Twin got the sheet out and read it over quickly. “All right,” he said. “Go get BJ. He’s been itching for action.”
   Phil disappeared for two minutes. When he reappeared he had BJ with him. BJ lumbered into the office, his pace belying his notorious quickness.
   Twin explained the circumstances.
   “Think you can handle this?” Twin asked.
   “Hey, no problem,” BJ said.
   “You want a backup?” Twin asked.
   “Hell, no,” BJ said. “I’ll just wait until the two mothers are together, then nail them both.”
   “You’ll have to pick the doc up where he works,” Twin said. “We can’t risk going up into the Hoods’ neighborhood unless we go in force. You understand?”
   “No problem,” BJ said.
   “You got a machine pistol?” Twin asked.
   “No,” BJ said.
   Twin opened the lower drawer of the desk and took out a Tec like the one he’d given to Reginald. “Don’t lose this,” he said. “We only have so many.”
   “No problem,” BJ said. He took the gun and handled it with reverence, turning it over slowly in his hands.
   “Well, what are you waiting for?” Twin asked.
   “You finished?” BJ asked.
   “Of course I’m finished,” Twin said. “What do you want, me to come along and hold your hand? Get out of here so you can come back and tell me it’s done.”
   • • •
   Jack could not concentrate on his other cases no matter how hard he tried. It was almost noon, and he’d accomplished a pitifully small amount of paperwork. He couldn’t stop worrying about the influenza case and wondering what had happened to Beth Holderness. What could she have found?
   Jack threw down his pen in disgust. He wanted desperately to go to the General and visit Cheveau and his lab, but he knew he couldn’t. Cheveau would undoubtedly call in the marines at a minimum, and Jack would get himself fired. Jack knew he had to wait for the results with the probe from National Biologicals to give him some ammunition before he approached anyone in authority.
   Giving up on his paperwork, Jack impulsively went up to the DNA lab on the sixth floor. In contrast to most of the rest of the building, this lab was a state-of-the-art facility. It had been renovated recently and outfitted with the latest equipment. Even the white lab coats worn by the personnel seemed crisper and whiter than in any of the other labs.
   Jack sought out the director, Ted Lynch, who was on his way to lunch.
   “Did you get those probes from Agnes?” Jack asked.
   “Yup,” Ted said. “They’re in my office.”
   “I guess that means there’re no results yet,” Jack said.
   Ted laughed. “What are you talking about?” he questioned. “We haven’t even gotten the cultures yet. Besides, I think you might be underestimating what the process is going to be. We don’t just throw the probes into a soup of bacteria. We have to isolate the nuclear protein, then run it through the PCR in order to have enough substrate. Otherwise we wouldn’t see the fluorescence even if the probe reacted. It’s going to take some time.”
   Sufficiently chastised, Jack returned to his office to stare at the wall behind his desk. Although it was lunchtime, he wasn’t hungry in the slightest.
   Jack decided to call the city epidemiologist. Jack was interested in the man’s reaction to this case of influenza; he thought he could give the epidemiologist a chance to redeem himself.
   Jack got the number from the city directory and placed the call. A secretary answered. Jack asked to speak with Dr. Abelard.
   “Who should I say is calling?” the secretary asked.
   “Dr. Stapleton,” Jack said, resisting the temptation to be humorously sarcastic. Knowing Abelard’s sensitive ego, Jack would have liked to have said he was the mayor or the Secretary of Health.
   Jack twisted a paper clip mindlessly as he waited. When the phone was picked up again, he was surprised it was again the secretary.
   “Excuse me,” she said. “But Dr. Abelard told me to tell you that he does not wish to speak with you.”
   “Tell the good doctor that I am in awe of his maturity,” Jack said.
   Jack slammed the phone down. His first impression had been correct: the man was an ass. Anger now mixed with his anxiety, which made his current inaction that much more difficult to bear. He was like a caged lion. He had to do something. What he wanted to do was go to the General despite Bingham’s admonitions. Yet if he went over there whom could he talk with? Jack made a mental checklist of the people he knew at the hospital. Suddenly he thought of Kathy McBane. She’d been both friendly and open, and she was on the Infection Control Committee.
   Jack snatched up the phone again and called the Manhattan General. Kathy was not in her office, so he had her paged. She picked up the page from the cafeteria. Jack could hear the usual babble of voices and clink of tableware in the background. He introduced himself and apologized for interrupting her lunch.
   “It doesn’t matter,” Kathy said agreeably. “What can I do for you?”
   “Do you remember me?” Jack asked.
   “Absolutely,” Kathy said. “How could I forget after the reaction you got out of Mr. Kelley and Dr. Zimmerman?”
   “They are not the only people I seem to have offended in your hospital,” Jack admitted.
   “Everybody has been on edge since these infectious cases,” Kathy said. “I wouldn’t take it personally.”
   “Listen,” Jack said. “I’m concerned about the same cases, and I’d love to come over and talk to you directly. Would you mind? But it will have to be just between the two of us. Is that too much to ask?”
   “No, not at all,” Kathy said. “When did you have in mind? I’m afraid I have meetings scheduled for most of the afternoon.”
   “How about right now?” Jack said. “I’ll pass up lunch.”
   “Now that’s dedication,” Kathy said. “How can I refuse? My office is in administration on the first floor.”
   “Uh-oh,” Jack voiced. “Is there a chance I’d run into Mr. Kelley?”
   “The chances are slim,” Kathy said. “There’s a group of bigwigs in from AmeriCare, and Mr. Kelley is scheduled to be locked up with them all day.”
   “I’m on my way,” Jack said.
   Jack exited from the front entrance on First Avenue. He was vaguely aware of Slam straightening up from where he was leaning against a neighboring building, but Jack was too preoccupied to take much notice. He flagged a cab and climbed in. Behind him he saw Slam following suit.
   • • •
   BJ had not been entirely confident he’d recognize Jack from the visit to the doc’s apartment, but the moment Jack appeared at the door of the medical examiner’s office, BJ knew it was him.
   While he’d been waiting BJ had tried to figure out who was supposedly protecting Jack. For a while a tall muscular dude had loitered on the corner of First Avenue and Thirtieth Street, smoking, and intermittently looking up at the medical examiner building’s door. BJ had thought he was the one, but eventually he’d left. So BJ had been surprised when he’d seen Slam stiffen in response to Jack’s appearance.
   “He’s no more than a goddamn kid,” BJ had whispered to himself. He was disgusted. He expected a more formidable opponent.
   No sooner had BJ gotten his hand around the butt of his machine pistol, which he had in a shoulder holster under his hooded sweatshirt, than he saw first Jack and then Slam jump into separate cabs. Letting go of his gun, BJ stepped out into the street and flagged his own taxi.
   “Just head north,” BJ told the cabdriver. “But push it, man.”
   The Pakistani cabdriver gave BJ a questioning look, but then did as he was told. BJ kept Slam’s cab in sight, aided by the fact that it had a broken taillight.

   Jack jumped out of the cab and dashed into the General and across the lobby. The masks had been dispensed with now that the meningococcal scare had passed, so Jack couldn’t use one to hide behind. Concerned about being recognized, he wanted to spend the least time possible in the hospital’s public places.
   He pushed through the doors into the administrative area, hoping that Kathy had been right about Kelley’s being occupied. The sounds of the hospital died away as the doors closed behind him. He was in a carpeted hall. Happily, he saw no one he recognized.
   Jack approached the first secretary he came upon and asked for Kathy McBane’s office. He was directed to the third door on the right. Losing no time, Jack hustled down there and stepped in.
   “Hello,” Jack called out as he closed the door behind him. “I hope you don’t mind my shutting us in like this. I know it’s presumptuous, but as I explained there are a few people I don’t want to see.”
   “If it makes you feel better, by all means,” Kathy said. “Come and sit down.”
   Jack took one of the seats facing the desk. It was a small office with barely enough room for a desk, two facing chairs, and a file cabinet. The walls had a series of diplomas and licenses attesting to Kathy’s impressive credentials. The decoration was spartan but comfortable. There were family photos on the desk.
   Kathy herself appeared as Jack remembered her: friendly and open. She had a round face with small, delicate features. Her smile came easily.
   “I’m very concerned about this recent case of primary influenza pneumonia,” Jack said, losing no time. “What’s been the reaction of the Infection Control Committee?”
   “We’ve not met yet,” Kathy said. “After all, the patient just passed away last night.”
   “Have you spoken about it with any of the other members?” Jack asked.
   “No,” Kathy admitted. “Why are you so concerned? We’ve seen a lot of influenza this season. Frankly, this case hasn’t bothered me anywhere near the way the others did, particularly the meningococcus.”
   “It bothers me because of a pattern,” Jack said. “It presented as a fulminant form of a pneumonia just like the other, rarer diseases. The difference is that with influenza the infectivity is higher. It doesn’t need a vector. It spreads person to person.”
   “I understand that,” Kathy said. “But as I’ve pointed out we’ve been seeing influenza all winter long.”
   “Primary influenza pneumonia?” Jack questioned.
   “Well, no,” Kathy admitted.
   “This morning I had someone check to see if there were any other similar cases currently in the hospital,” Jack said. “There weren’t. Do you know if there are now?”
   “Not that I am aware of,” Kathy said.
   “Could you check?” Jack asked.
   Kathy turned to her terminal and punched in a query. The answer flashed back in an instant. There were no cases of influenza pneumonia.
   “All right,” Jack said. “Let’s try something else. The patient’s name was Kevin Carpenter. Where was his room in the hospital?”
   “He was on the orthopedic floor,” Kathy said.
   “His symptoms started at six P.M.,” Jack said. “Let’s see if any of the orthopedic nurses on the evening shift are sick.”
   Kathy hesitated for a moment, then turned back to her computer terminal. It took her several minutes to get the list and the phone numbers.
   “You want me to call them now?” Kathy asked. “They’re due in for their shift in just a couple of hours.”
   “If you don’t mind,” Jack said.
   Kathy started making the calls. On her second call, to a Ms. Kim Spensor, she discovered that the woman was ill. In fact, she’d just been preparing to call in sick. She admitted to severe flu symptoms with a temperature of almost 104°.
   “Would you mind if I talked with her?” Jack asked.
   Kathy asked Kim if she’d be willing to speak to a doctor who was in her office. Kim apparently agreed, because Kathy handed the phone to Jack.
   Jack introduced himself, but not as a medical examiner. He commiserated with her about her illness, and then inquired about her symptoms.
   “It started abruptly,” Kim said. “One minute I was fine; the next minute I had a terrible headache and a shaking chill. Also, my muscles are aching, particularly my lower back. I’ve had the flu before, but this is the worst I’ve ever felt.”
   “Any cough?” Jack asked.
   “A little,” Kim said. “And it’s been getting worse.”
   “How about substernal pain?” Jack asked. “Behind your breastbone when you breathe in?”
   “Yes,” Kim said. “Does that mean anything in particular?”
   “Did you have much contact with a patient by the name of Carpenter?” Jack asked.
   “I did,” Kim said. “And so did the LPN, George Haselton. Mr. Carpenter was a demanding patient once he started complaining of headache and chills. You don’t think my contact with him could be the cause of my symptoms, do you? I mean, the incubation period for the flu is more than twenty-four hours.”
   “I’m not an infectious disease specialist,” Jack said. “I truly don’t know. But I’d recommend you take some rimantadine.”
   “How is Mr. Carpenter?” Kim asked.
   “If you give me the name of your local pharmacy I’ll call you in a prescription,” Jack said, purposefully ignoring Kim’s question. Obviously his fulminant course started after Kim’s shift had departed.
   As soon as he could, Jack terminated the conversation. He handed the phone back to Kathy. “I don’t like this,” Jack said. “It’s just what I was afraid of.”
   “Aren’t you being an alarmist?” Kathy questioned. “I’d guess two to three percent of the hospital personnel are out with the flu currently.”
   “Let’s call George Haselton,” Jack said.
   George Haselton turned out to be even sicker than Kim; he’d already called in sick to the floor supervisor. Jack didn’t talk to him. He simply listened to Kathy’s side of the conversation.
   Kathy hung up slowly. “Now you’re starting to get me worried,” she admitted.
   They called the rest of the evening shift for the orthopedic floor, including the ward secretary. No one else was ill.
   “Let’s try another department,” Jack said. “Someone from the lab must have been in to see Carpenter. How can we check?”
   “I’ll call Ginny Whalen in personnel,” Kathy said, picking up the phone again.
   A half hour later they had the full picture. Four people had symptoms of a bad case of the flu. Besides the two nurses, one of the evening microbiology techs had abruptly experienced sore throat, headache, shaking chill, muscle pain, cough, and substernal discomfort. His contact with Kevin Carpenter had occurred about ten o’clock in the evening, when he’d visited the patient to obtain a sputum culture.
   The final person from the evening shift who was similarly ill was Gloria Hernandez. To Kathy’s surprise but not Jack’s, she worked in central supply and had had no contact with Kevin Carpenter.
   “She can’t be related to the others,” Kathy said.
   “I wouldn’t be too sure,” Jack said. He then reminded her that someone from central supply had perished with each of the other recent infectious cases. “I’m surprised this hasn’t been a topic of debate with the Infection Control Committee. I know for a fact that both Dr. Zimmerman and Dr. Abelard are aware of the connection, because they have been to central supply to talk to the supervisor, Mrs. Zarelli.”
   “We haven’t had a formal committee meeting since all this started,” Kathy said. “We meet on the first Monday of each month.”
   “Then Dr. Zimmerman is not keeping you informed,” Jack said.
   “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Kathy said. “We’ve never been on the best of terms.”
   “Speaking of Mrs. Zarelli,” Jack said. “She’d promised me printouts of everything central supply had sent to each of the index cases. Could we see if she has them and, if so, have her bring them down?”
   Having absorbed some of Jack’s anxiety about the influenza, Kathy was eager to help. After talking briefly to Mrs. Zarelli and ascertaining that the printouts were available, Kathy had one of the administrative secretaries run up to get them.
   “Let me have Gloria Hernandez’s phone number,” Jack said. “In fact, give me her address as well. This central supply connection is a mystery that for the life of me, I can’t understand. It can’t be coincidence and could be key to understanding what is going on.”
   Kathy got the information from the computer, wrote it down, and handed it to Jack.
   “What do you think we should do here at the hospital?” she asked.
   Jack sighed. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I guess you’ll have to discuss that with friendly Dr. Zimmerman. She’s the local expert. In general, quarantine is not very effective for influenza since it spreads so quickly. But if this is some special strain, perhaps it would be worth a try. I think I’d get those hospital personnel who are sick in here and isolate them: worst case, it’s an inconvenience; best case, it could help avert a disaster.”
   “What about rimantadine?” Kathy asked.
   “I’m all for it,” Jack said. “I’ll probably get some myself. It has been used to control some nosocomial influenza in the past. But again that should be up to Dr. Zimmerman.”
   “I think I’ll give her a call,” Kathy said.
   Jack waited while Kathy spoke to Dr. Zimmerman. Kathy was deferential but firm in explaining the apparent connection between the sick personnel and the deceased, Kevin Carpenter. Once she had spoken, she was reduced to silence punctuated only by repetitions of “yes” at certain intervals.
   Eventually, Kathy hung up. She rolled her eyes. “That woman is impossible,” she said. “At any rate, she’s reluctant to do anything extraordinary, as she puts it, with just one confirmed case. She’s afraid Mr. Kelley and the AmeriCare executives would be against it for PR reasons until it was undeniably indicated.”
   “What about the rimantadine?” Jack asked.
   “On that she was a little more receptive,” Kathy said. “She said she’d authorize the pharmacy to order in enough for the staff, but she wasn’t going to prescribe it just yet. At any rate, I got her attention.”
   “At least that’s something,” Jack agreed.
   The secretary knocked and came in with the printouts Jack had wanted from central supply. He thanked the woman, and immediately began scanning them. He was impressed; it was rather extraordinary what each patient utilized. The lists were long and included everything short of medications, food, and linen.
   “Anything interesting?” Kathy asked.
   “Nothing that jumps out at me,” Jack admitted. “Except how similar they are. But I realize I should have asked for a control. I should have asked for a similar list from a random patient.”
   “That shouldn’t be hard to get,” Kathy said. She called Mrs. Zarelli back and asked her to print one out.
   “Want to wait?” Kathy said.
   Jack got to his feet. “I think I’ve overstretched my luck as it is,” he said. “If you could get it and have it sent over to the medical examiner’s office, I’d be appreciative. As I mentioned, this central supply connection could be important.”
   “I’d be happy to do it,” Kathy said.
   Jack went to the door and furtively glanced out into the hall. Turning back to Kathy, he said, “It’s hard to get used to acting like a criminal.”
   “I think we’re in your debt for your perseverance,” Kathy said. “I apologize for those who have misinterpreted your intentions.”
   “Thank you,” Jack said sincerely.
   “Can I ask you a personal question?” Kathy asked.
   “How personal?” Jack asked.
   “Just about your face,” Kathy asked. “What happened? Whatever it was, it looks like it must have been painful.”
   “It looks worse than it is,” Jack said. “It’s merely a reflection of the rigors of jogging in the park at night.”
   Jack walked quickly through administration and across the lobby. As he stepped out into the early-spring sunshine, he felt relief. It had been the first time he’d been able to visit the General without stirring up a hornet’s nest of protest.
   Jack turned right and headed east. On one of his prior visits he’d noticed a chain drugstore two blocks from the hospital. He went directly there. Kathy’s suggestion of rimantadine was a good one, and he wanted to get some for himself, especially given his intention of visiting Gloria Hernandez.
   Thinking of the Hernandez woman made Jack reach into his pocket to be sure he’d not misplaced her address. He hadn’t. Unfolding the paper, he looked at it. She lived on West 144th Street, almost forty blocks north of Jack.
   Arriving at the drugstore, Jack pulled open the door and entered. It was a large store with a bewildering display of merchandise. Everything, including cosmetics, school supplies, cleaning agents, stationery, greeting cards, and even automotive products, was crammed onto metal shelving. The store had as many aisles as a supermarket.
   It took Jack a few minutes to find the pharmacy section, which occupied a few square feet in the back corner of the store. With as little respect as pharmacy was given, Jack felt there was a certain irony they even called the establishment a drugstore.
   Jack waited in line to speak to the pharmacist. When he finally did he asked for a prescription blank, which he quickly filled out for rimantadine.
   The pharmacist was dressed in an old-fashioned white, collarless pharmacist jacket with the top button undone. He squinted at the prescription and then told Jack it would take about twenty minutes.
   “Twenty minutes!” Jack questioned. “Why so long? I mean, all you have to do is count out the tablets.”
   “Do you want this or don’t you?” the pharmacist asked acidly.
   “I want it,” Jack muttered. The medical establishment had a way of bullying people; doctors were no longer immune.
   Jack turned back to the main part of the store. He had to entertain himself for twenty minutes. With no goal in mind, he wandered down aisle seven and found himself before a staggering variety of condoms.

   BJ liked the idea of the drugstore from the moment he saw Jack enter. He knew it would be close quarters, and as an added attraction, there was a subway entrance right out the door. The subway was a great place to disappear.
   After a quick glance up and down the street, BJ pulled open the door and stepped inside. He eyed the glass-enclosed manager’s office near the entrance, but experience told him it wouldn’t be a problem. It might take a short burst from his machine pistol just to keep everybody’s head down when he was on his way out, but that would be about it.
   BJ advanced beyond the checkout registers and started glancing down the aisles, looking for either Jack or Slam. He knew if he found one, he’d quickly find the other. He hit pay dirt in aisle seven. Jack was at the very end, with Slam loitering less than ten feet away.
   As BJ moved quickly down aisle six, he reached under his sweatshirt and let his hand wrap around the butt of his Tec pistol. He snapped off the safety with his thumb. When he arrived at the cross-aisle in the middle of the store, he slowed, stepped laterally, and stopped. Carefully he leaned around a display of Bounty paper towels and glanced down the remainder of aisle seven.
   BJ felt his pulse quicken in anticipation. Jack was standing in the same spot, and Slam had moved over next to him. It was perfect.
   BJ’s heart skipped a beat when he felt a finger tap his shoulder. He swung around. His hand was still under his sweatshirt, holding on to the holstered Tec.
   “May I help you?” a bald-headed man asked.
   Anger seared through BJ at having been interrupted at precisely the wrong moment. He glared at the jowled clerk and felt like busting him in the chops, but instead he decided to ignore him for the moment. He couldn’t pass up the opportunity with Jack and Slam standing nose to nose.
   BJ spun back around, and as he did so he drew out the machine pistol. He started forward. He knew a single step would bring the aisle into full view.
   The clerk was shocked by BJ’s sudden movement, and he didn’t see the gun. If he had, he never would have shouted “Hey” the way he did.

   Jack felt on edge and jittery. He disliked the store, especially after his run-in with the pharmacist. The background elevator music and the smell of cheap cosmetics added to his discomfort. He didn’t want to be there.
   As wired as he was, when he heard the clerk yell, his head shot up, and he looked in the direction of the commotion. He was just in time to see a stocky African-American leaping into the center of the aisle brandishing a machine pistol.
   Jack’s reaction was pure reflex. He threw himself into the condom display. As his body made contact with the shelving an entire unit tipped over with a clatter. Jack found himself in the center of aisle eight on top of a mountain of disarranged merchandise and collapsed shelves.
   While Jack leaped forward, Slam hit the floor, extracting his own machine pistol in the process. It was a skillful maneuver, suggesting the poise and expertise of a Green Beret.
   BJ was the first to fire. Since he held his pistol in only one hand, the burst of shots went all over the store, ripping divots in the vinyl flooring and poking holes in the tin ceiling. But most of the shots screamed past the area where Jack and Slam had been standing seconds before, and pounded into the vitamin section below the pharmacy counter.
   Slam let out a burst as well. Most of his bullets traveled the length of aisle seven, shattering one of the huge plate-glass windows facing the street.
   BJ had pulled himself back the moment he’d seen the element of surprise had been lost. Now he stood, crouched over behind the Bounty paper towels, trying to decide what to do next.
   Everyone else in the store was screaming, including the clerk who’d tapped BJ on the shoulder. They began rushing to the exits, fleeing for their lives.
   Jack scrambled to his feet. He’d heard Slam’s burst of gunfire, and now he was hearing another burst from BJ. Jack wanted out of the store.
   Keeping his head down, he dashed back into the pharmacy area. There was a door that said “Employees Only,” and Jack rushed through. He found himself in a lunchroom. A handful of open soft drinks and half-eaten packaged pastries on the table told him that people had just been there.
   Convinced that there was a way out through the back, Jack began opening doors. The first was a bathroom, the second a storeroom.
   He heard more sustained gunfire and more screams out in the main part of the store.
   Panicked, Jack tried a third door. To his relief it led out into an alley lined with trash cans. In the distance he could see people running. Among those fleeing, he recognized the pharmacist’s white coat. Jack took off after them.

29. Tuesday, 1:30 p.m., March 26, 1996

   Detective Lieutenant Lou Soldano pulled his unmarked Chevy Caprice into the parking area at the loading bay of the medical examiner’s office. He parked behind Dr. Harold Bingham’s official car and took the keys out of the ignition. He gave them to the security man in case the car had to be moved. Lou was a frequent visitor to the morgue, although he hadn’t been there for over a month.
   He got on the elevator and pushed five. He was on his way to Laurie’s office. He’d gotten her message earlier but hadn’t been able to call until a few minutes ago as he was on his way across the Queensboro Bridge. He’d been over in Queens supervising the investigation on a homicide of a prominent banker.
   Laurie had been telling him about one of the medical examiners when Lou had interrupted to tell her he was in the neighborhood and could stop by. She’d immediately agreed, telling him she’d be waiting in her office.
   Lou got off the elevator and walked down the hall. It brought back memories. There had been a time when he’d thought that he and Laurie could have had a future together. But it hadn’t worked out. Too many differences in their backgrounds, Lou thought.
   “Hey, Laur,” Lou called out when he caught sight of her working at her desk. Every time he saw her she looked better to him. Her auburn hair fell over her shoulders in a way that reminded him of shampoo commercials. “Laur” was the nickname his son had given her the first time he’d met her. The name had stuck.
   Laurie got up and gave Lou a big hug.
   “You’re looking great,” she said.
   Lou shrugged self-consciously. “I’m feeling okay,” he said.
   “And the children?” Laurie asked.
   “Children?” Lou commented. “My daughter is sixteen now going on thirty. She’s boy crazy, and it’s driving me crazy.”
   Laurie lifted some journals off the spare chair she and her officemate shared. She gestured for Lou to sit down.
   “It’s good to see you, Laurie,” Lou said.
   “It’s good to see you too,” she agreed. “We shouldn’t let so much time go by without getting together.”
   “So what’s this big problem you wanted to talk to me about?” Lou asked. He wanted to steer the conversation away from potentially painful arenas.
   “I don’t know how big it is,” Laurie said. She got up and closed her office door. “One of the new doctors on staff would like to talk to you off the record. I’d mentioned that you and I were friends. Unfortunately, he’s not around at the moment. I checked when you said you were coming over. In fact, no one knows where he is.”
   “Any idea what it’s about?” Lou asked.
   “Not specifically,” Laurie said. “But I’m worried about him.”
   “Oh?” Lou settled back.
   “He asked me to do two autopsies this morning. One on a twenty-eight-year-old Caucasian woman who’d been a microbiology tech over at the General. She’d been shot in her apartment last night. The second was on a twenty-five-year-old African-American who’d been shot in Central Park. Before I did the cases he suggested that I try to see if the two were in any way related: through hair, fiber, blood…”
   “And?” Lou asked.
   “I found some blood on his jacket which preliminarily matches the woman’s,” Laurie said. “Now that’s just by serology. The DNA is pending. But it’s not a common type: B negative.”
   Lou raised his eyebrows. “Did this medical examiner give any explanation for his suspicion?” he asked.
   “He said it was a hunch,” Laurie said. “But there’s more. I know for a fact that he’d been beaten up recently by some New York gang members—at least once, maybe twice. When he showed up this morning he looked to me like it might have happened again, although he denied it.”
   “Why was he beaten up?” Lou asked.
   “Supposedly as a warning for him not to go to the Manhattan General Hospital,” Laurie said.
   “Whoa!” Lou said. “What are you talking about?”
   “I don’t know the details,” Laurie said. “But I do know he’s been irritating a lot of people over there, and for that matter, over here as well. Dr. Bingham has been ready to fire him on several occasions.”
   “How’s he been irritating everyone?” Lou asked.
   “He has it in his mind that a series of infectious diseases that have appeared over at the General have been spread intentionally.”
   “You mean like by a terrorist or something?” Lou asked.
   “I suppose,” Laurie said.
   “You know this is sounding familiar,” Lou said.
   Laurie nodded. “I remember how I felt about that series of overdoses five years ago and the fact that no one believed me.”
   “What do you think of your friend’s theory?” Lou said. “By the way, what’s his name?”
   “Jack Stapleton,” Laurie said. “As to his theory, I don’t really have all the facts.”
   “Come on, Laurie,” Lou said. “I know you better than that. Tell me your opinion.”
   “I think he’s seeing conspiracy because he wants to see conspiracy,” Laurie said. “His officemate told me he has a long-standing grudge against the health-care giant AmeriCare, which owns the General.”
   “But even so, that doesn’t explain the gang connection or the fact that he might have knowledge of the woman’s murder. What’re the names of the homicide victims?”
   “Elizabeth Holderness and Reginald Winthrope,” Laurie said.
   Lou wrote down the names in the small black notebook he carried.
   “There wasn’t much criminologist work done on either case,” Laurie said.
   “You of all people know how limited our personnel is,” Lou said. “Did they have a preliminary motive for the woman?”
   “Robbery,” Laurie said.
   “Rape?”
   “No.”
   “How about the man?” Lou asked.
   “He was a member of a gang,” Laurie said. “He was shot in the head at relatively close range.”
   “Unfortunately, that’s all too common,” Lou said. “We don’t spend a lot of time investigating those. Did the autopsies show anything?”
   “Nothing unusual,” Laurie said.
   “Do you think your friend Dr. Stapleton comprehends how dangerous these gangs can be?” Lou asked. “I have a feeling that he’s walking on the edge.”
   “I don’t know much about him,” Laurie said. “But he’s not a New Yorker. He’s from the Midwest.”
   “Uh-oh,” Lou said. “I think I’d better have a talk with him about the realities of city life, and I’d better do it sooner rather than later. He might not be around long.”
   “Don’t say that,” Laurie said.
   “Is your interest in him more than professional?” Lou asked.
   “Now let’s not get into that kind of discussion,” Laurie said. “But the answer is no.”
   “Don’t get steamed up,” Lou said. “I just like to know the lay of the land.” He stood up. “Anyway, I’ll help the guy, and it sounds like he needs help.”
   “Thank you, Lou,” Laurie said. She got up herself and gave the detective another hug. “I’ll have him call you.”
   “Do that,” Lou said.
   Leaving Laurie’s office, Lou took the elevator down to the first floor. Walking through the communications area, he stopped in to see Sergeant Murphy, who was permanently assigned to the medical examiner’s office. After they talked for a while about the prospects of the Yankees and the Mets in the upcoming baseball season, Lou sat down and put his feet up on the corner of the sergeant’s desk.
   “Tell me something, Murph,” Lou said. “What’s your honest take on this new doctor by the name of Jack Stapleton?”

   After having fled from the drugstore, Jack had run the length of the alley and then another four blocks before stopping. When he had, he was winded from the exertion. In between breaths he heard the undulating wails of converging police sirens. He assumed the police were on their way to the store. He hoped that Slam had fared as well as he.
   Jack walked until both his breathing and his pulse were back to a semblance of normal. He was still shaking. The experience in the store had unnerved him as much as the ordeal in the park, even though the store episode had taken only seconds. The knowledge that once again he’d been stalked in an attempt to kill him was mind numbing.
   Additional sirens now competed with the normal clatter of the city, and Jack wondered if he should go back to the scene to talk to the police and perhaps help if anyone had been struck with a bullet. But Warren’s admonitions about talking to the police about gang affairs came to mind. After all, Warren had been right about Jack needing his protection. If it had not been for Slam, Jack sensed he would have been killed.
   Jack shuddered. There had been a time in the not-too-distant past when he’d not cared particularly if he lived or died. But now, having come close to death twice, he felt differently. He wanted to live, and that desire made him question why the Black Kings wanted him dead. Who was paying them? Did they think Jack knew something that he didn’t, or was it just because of his suspicions concerning the outbreaks at the Manhattan General?
   Jack had no answer to these questions, but this second attempt on his life made him more confident that his suspicions were correct. Now he had only to prove them.
   In the middle of these musings Jack found himself in front of a second drugstore. But in contrast to the first, it was a small, neighborhood concern. Entering, Jack approached the pharmacist who was manning the store by himself. His name tag said simply “Herman.”
   “Do you carry rimantadine?” Jack asked.
   “We did last time I looked,” Herman said with a smile. “But it’s a prescription item.”
   “I’m a doctor,” Jack said. “I’ll need a script.”
   “Can I see some identification?” Herman asked.
   Jack showed him his New York State medical license.
   “How much do you want?”
   “Enough for at least a couple of weeks,” Jack said. “Why don’t you give me fifty tablets. I might as well err on the plus side.”
   “You got it,” Herman said. He started working behind a counter.
   “How long will it take?” Jack asked.
   “How long does it take to count to fifty?” Herman replied.
   “The last store I was in told me it would take twenty minutes,” Jack said.
   “It was a chain store, right?” Herman said.
   Jack nodded.
   “Those chain stores don’t care a whit about service,” Herman said. “It’s a crime. And for all their poor service, they’re still forcing us independents out of business. It’s got me angrier than hell.”
   Jack nodded. He knew the feeling well. These days no part of the medical landscape was sacrosanct.
   Herman came out from behind his counter carrying a small plastic vial of orange tablets. He plunked it next to the cash register. “Is this for you?” he asked.
   Jack nodded again.
   Herman rattled off a list of possible side effects as well as contraindications. Jack was impressed. After Jack paid for the drug, he asked Herman for a glass of water. Herman gave him some in a small paper cup. Jack took one of the tablets.
   “Come again,” Herman said as Jack left the store.
   With the rimantadine coursing through his system, Jack decided it was time to visit Gloria Hernandez from central supply.
   Stepping out into the street, Jack caught a cab. At first the driver demurred about going up into Harlem, but he agreed after Jack reminded him of the rules posted on the back of the front seat.
   Jack sat back as the taxi first headed north and then across town on St. Nicholas Avenue after passing Central Park. He looked out the window as Harlem changed from predominantly African-American neighborhoods to Hispanic ones. Eventually all the signs were in Spanish.
   When the cab pulled up to his destination, Jack paid the fare and stepped out into a street alive with people. He looked up at the building he was about to enter. At one time it had been a fine, proud single-family home in the middle of an upscale neighborhood. Now it had seen better days, much like Jack’s own tenement.
   A few people eyed Jack curiously as he mounted the brownstone steps and entered the foyer. The black-and-white mosaic on the floor was missing tiles.
   The names on a broken line of mailboxes indicated that the Hernandez family lived on the third floor. Jack pushed the doorbell for that apartment even though his sense was that it didn’t work. Next he tried the inner door. Just as in his own building, the lock on the door had been broken long ago and never repaired.
   Having climbed the stairs to the third floor, Jack knocked on the Hernandezes’ door. When no one answered he knocked again, only louder. Finally he heard a child’s voice ask who was there. Jack called out he was a doctor and wanted to speak with Gloria Hernandez.
   After a short, muffled discussion that Jack could hear through the door, the door was pulled open to the limit of a chain lock. Jack saw two faces. Above was a middle-aged woman with disheveled, bleached-blond hair. Her eyes were red and sunken with dark shadows. She was wearing a quilted bathrobe and was coughing intermittently. Her lips had a slight purplish cast.
   Below was a cherubic child of nine or ten. Jack wasn’t sure if it was a boy or a girl. The child’s hair was shoulder length, coal black, and combed straight back from the forehead.
   “Mrs. Hernandez?” Jack questioned the blond-haired woman.
   After Jack showed his medical examiner’s badge and explained he’d just come from Kathy McBane’s office at the Manhattan General, Mrs. Hernandez opened the door and invited him inside.
   The apartment was stuffy and small, although an attempt had been made to decorate it with bright colors and movie posters in Spanish. Gloria immediately retreated to the couch where she’d apparently been resting when Jack knocked. She drew a blanket up around her neck and shivered.
   “I’m sorry you are so sick,” Jack said.
   “It’s terrible,” Gloria said. Jack was relieved that she spoke English. His Spanish was rusty at best.
   “I don’t mean to disturb you,” Jack said. “But as you know, lately people from your department have become ill with serious diseases.”
   Gloria’s eyes opened wide. “I just have the flu, don’t I?” she asked with alarm.
   “I’m sure that’s correct,” Jack said. “Katherine Mueller, Maria Lopez, Carmen Chavez, and Imogene Philbertson had completely different illnesses than you have, that is certain.”
   “Thank the Lord,” Gloria said. She made the sign of the cross with the index finger of her right hand. “May their souls rest in peace.”
   “What concerns me,” Jack continued, “is that there was a patient by the name of Kevin Carpenter on the orthopedic floor last night who possibly had an illness similar to your own. Does that name mean anything to you? Did you have any contact with him?”
   “No,” Gloria said. “I work in central supply.”
   “I’m aware of that,” Jack said. “And so did those other unfortunate women I just mentioned. But in each case there had been a patient with the same illness the women caught. There has to be a connection, and I’m hoping you can help me figure out what it is.”
   Gloria looked confused. She turned to her child, whom she addressed as “Juan.” Juan began speaking in rapid Spanish. Jack gathered he was translating for him; Gloria had not quite understood what he’d said.
   Gloria nodded and said “si” many times while Juan spoke. But as soon as Juan finished, Gloria looked up at Jack, shook her head, and said: “No!”
   “No?” Jack asked. After so many yeses he didn’t expect such a definitive no.
   “No connection,” Gloria said. “We don’t see patients.”
   “You never go to patient floors?” Jack asked.
   “No,” Gloria said.
   Jack’s mind raced. He tried to think what else to ask. Finally he said: “Did you do anything out of the ordinary last night?”
   Gloria shrugged and again said no.
   “Can you remember what you did do?” Jack asked. “Try to give me an idea of your shift.”
   Gloria started to speak, but the effort brought on a serious bout of coughing. At one point Jack was about to pound her on her back, but she raised her hand to indicate she was all right. Juan got her a glass of water, which she drank thirstily.
   Once she could speak, she tried to recall everything she’d done the evening before. As she described her duties, Jack struggled to think if any of her activities put her in contact with Carpenter’s virus. But he couldn’t. Gloria insisted she had not left central supply for the entire shift.
   When Jack could not think of any more questions, he asked if he could call if something else came to mind. She agreed. Jack then insisted she call Dr. Zimmerman at the General to let her know how sick she was.
   “What could she do?” Gloria asked.
   “She might want to put you on a particular medication,” Jack said. “As well as the rest of your family.” He knew that rimantadine not only could prevent flu, but if it was started early enough in an established case, it might reduce the duration and possibly the severity of symptoms by as much as fifty percent. The problem was, it wasn’t cheap, and Jack knew that AmeriCare was loath to spend money on patient care it didn’t feel it had to.
   Jack left the Hernandez apartment and headed toward Broadway where he thought he could catch a cab. Now, on top of being agitated from the attempt on his life, he was also discouraged. The visit to Gloria had accomplished nothing other than to expose him to Gloria’s influenza, which he feared might be the strain that so readily killed Kevin Carpenter.
   Jack’s only consolation was that he’d started his own course of rimantadine. The problem was, he knew rimantadine wasn’t one hundred percent effective in preventing infection, particularly with a virulent strain.
   It was late afternoon by the time Jack was dropped off at the medical examiner’s office. Feeling stressed and despondent, he entered and allowed himself to be buzzed in. As he passed the ID area, he did a double take. In one of the small rooms set aside for families identifying their dead, Jack saw David. He didn’t know David’s last name, but it was the same David who had driven Jack and Spit back to the neighborhood after the episode in the park.
   David also caught sight of Jack, and for the second their eyes made contact, Jack sensed anger and contempt.
   Resisting the impulse to approach, Jack immediately descended to the morgue level. With his heels echoing loudly on the cement floor he walked around the refrigerated compartments, fearful of what he was going to find. There in the hall was a single gurney bearing a newly dead body. It was directly beneath the harsh glare of a hooded overhead light.
   The sheets had been arranged so that only the face could be seen. It had been so posed for a Polaroid picture to be taken. Such a picture was the current method for families to identify their dead. Photographs were considered more humane than having the bereaved families view the often mutilated remains.
   A lump formed in Jack’s throat as he looked down on Slam’s placid face. His eyes were closed; he truly appeared to be asleep. In death he looked even younger than he had in life. Jack would have guessed around fourteen.
   Depressed beyond words, Jack took the elevator up to his office. He was thankful that Chet was not in. He slammed his door, sat down at his desk, and held his head in his hands. He felt like crying, but no tears came. He knew indirectly he was responsible for yet another individual’s death.
   Before he’d had a chance to wallow in guilt, there was a knock on his door. At first Jack ignored it, hoping whoever it was would go away. But then the would-be visitor knocked again. Finally he called out irritably for whoever it was to come in.
   Laurie opened the door hesitantly. “I don’t mean to be a bother,” she said. She could sense Jack’s agitation immediately. His eyes were fierce, like the needle ends of darts.
   “What do you want?” Jack asked.
   “Just to let you know that I spoke with Detective Lou Soldano,” Laurie said. “As you asked me to do.” She took several steps into the room and placed Lou’s phone number on the edge of Jack’s desk. “He’s expecting your call.”
   “Thanks, Laurie,” Jack said. “But I don’t think at the moment I am in the mood to talk to anyone.”
   “I think he could help,” Laurie said. “In fact—”
   “Laurie!” Jack called out sharply to interrupt her. Then, in a softer tone, he said: “Please, just leave me alone.”
   “Sure,” Laurie said soothingly. She backed out and closed the door behind her. For a second she stared at the door. Her concerns skyrocketed. She’d never seen Jack this way. It was a far cry from his normally flippant demeanor and reckless, seemingly carefree ways.
   Hurrying back to her own office, Laurie closed her door and called Lou immediately.
   “Dr. Stapleton just came in a few minutes ago,” she said.
   “Fine,” Lou said. “Have him give me a call. I’ll be here for at least another hour.”
   “I’m afraid he’s not going to call,” Laurie said. “He’s acting worse now than he was this morning. Something has happened. I’m sure of it.”
   “Why won’t he call?” Lou said.
   “I don’t know,” Laurie said. “He won’t even talk to me. And as we speak there is another apparent gang murder down in the morgue. The shooting took place in the vicinity of the Manhattan General.”
   “You think it involved him in some way?” Lou asked.
   “I don’t know what to think,” Laurie admitted. “I’m just worried. I’m afraid something terrible is about to happen.”
   “All right, calm down,” Lou advised. “Leave it up to me. I’ll think of something.”
   “Promise?” Laurie asked.
   “Have I ever let you down?” Lou questioned.