"Everybody's accounted for," Carlo said.

"There you go, Lieutenant," Louie said.

Lou stood up and took out one of his business cards. He placed it on the table. "In case you suddenly hear something about the hit, give me a call." He then headed for the door. A few paces away, he turned back into the room. "I'd also heard a rumor that Paulie Cerino is getting out on parole. Give him my best; we go way back."

"I'll do that," Louie said.

As soon as the door closed, the four hoodlums returned to the table, taking the same seats they had vacated earlier. Carlo Paparo was seated directly to Louie's right. He was a muscular man with large ears and a pug nose. He wore a black turtleneck under a gray silk sports jacket and black slacks.

"Did you know that clown?" Carlo asked.

"I'd heard of him from Cerino, but I'd never met him. Paulie hated him so much he loved him. Apparently, they'd butted heads for so long they'd come to respect each other."

"He's got balls just showing up like this. None of the cops in Jersey would do such a thing without a partner and backup SWAT team waiting outside."

Louie had been recruited from Bayonne, New Jersey, to fill in as boss for the Vaccarro Queens operation. In Bayonne, he'd run a similar but smaller enterprise. When he'd made the transition, he'd brought over his most trusted underlings, including Carlo Paparo, who had been with him the longest, Brennan Monaghan, Arthur MacEwan, and Ted Polowski. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons they played penny ante, unless there was something big going down.

"Have any of you guys heard anything about Vinnie Dominick and his pack of assholes knocking anybody off?" Everybody shook his head.

"I think we ought to check it out," Louie said. "The detective is right. We don't want any trouble with the police nosing around just when we're about to jack up operations, especially cops from downtown. Most of the local guys we can handle, but even that might change if the big boys come causing trouble."

"How do you propose to check it out?"

"We could contact that skinny Freddie Capuso," Brennan suggested. "It would cost a few bucks, but he might know who got bumped off."

"He'll know shit," Carlo said. "Half the time we used him, it turned out he gave us crap. He's just a damn gofer."

"I think we should tail Franco Ponti for a few days," Louie said. "If Vinnie needs somebody whacked, he always uses Franco, and if there's to be more killing, I'd like to know sooner rather than later who's getting bumped off. The Lucias are causing enough trouble in general. I don't want them ruining our expansion plans."

"It'll be easy to follow Franco with that ancient hog he drives around," Arthur MacEwan said, giving everybody a good laugh. Franco's car was famous in the neighborhood, with its black-and-white foam dice and a picture of him and his then girlfriend, Maria Provolone, at the senior prom hanging from his rearview mirror.

"It's the tail fins that crack me up," Ted Polowski said. "What's it from, the nineteen fifties?"

"You know, I'm liking this idea of tailing Ponti better and better," Louie said, while thinking over his own suggestion. "Remember last year when we were wracking our brains about how they get their drugs into the city and never figured it out."

"We never thought of tailing Ponti!" Carlo said, knocking his forehead with the heel of his hand. "How come we were so stupid? I mean, we tried everything else."

"Maybe this little episode will have an unexpected payoff," Louie said, not knowing how prophetic his comment would turn out to be.

"When should we start?" Carlo asked.

"My mother, God rest her soul, always said, 'Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today'…"

"Yeah, yeah," Carlo said. "Because today is yesterday's tomorrow."

Brennan, Arthur, and Ted smiled wanly. Like a lot of Louie's pet sayings, they'd heard both of the proverbs one too many times.

"Time is money," Louie said, raising his eyebrows teasingly. He knew his minions found his adages sappy.

"All right!" Carlo said. "We'll have to do this in shifts. I'll start. Who wants to come along?"

"I'll come," Brennan said.

"Keep me posted," Louie said.

10

Armed with yet another MRSA case from Chet, Laurie retreated to her office, still marveling that a series of infections were occurring despite the fact that it was impossible for them to be doing so, and it made her wish she'd studied more epidemiology during her training. Silently, she reiterated to herself the primary reason it couldn't be occurring. First off, the patients were all seemingly healthy, and healthy people usually could deal with a small number of staph being introduced into their nose or mouth. Ergo, for primary pneumonia to occur, there would have had to have been a large enough dose of staph introduced in a relatively short time to overcome the patients' natural defenses. But as Laurie had learned that very day, the HVAC systems of the Angels Healthcare hospitals were designed so that such a scenario could not happen. Above and beyond the fact that staph cannot be aerosolized, it was impossible for there to be a sudden surge of airborne bacteria in a room whose air intake was through a HEPA filter, whose air was changed every six minutes, and whose occupants were tested clean for MRSA, and who were all wearing surgical masks.

From an epidemiological and scientific perspective, Laurie became progressively concerned that the MRSA problem in the Angels hospitals could not be caused naturally, and that understanding led her to the more unsettling notion that the outbreak had to be deliberate. Then suddenly Laurie had an idea. There was one person in the OR who could conceivably manage to cause the pneumonias, and that was the person giving the anesthesia. With control of the airway and often ignored, the anesthetist or the anesthesiologist could conceivably manage in some devilish fashion to introduce secretly enough viable staph deep into the respiratory tree to cause the fatal pneumonia.

With a sense of urgency, Laurie snapped up her matrix and was immediately relieved. The matrix was at an early stage, but even with the small number of entries she had, she saw that there were different anesthetists and different anesthesiologists. But then she had another thought. What if it wasn't a single person but rather a cabal of anesthetists or anesthesiologists who were involved in some sort of vicious contract dispute with Angels Healthcare? But the second she'd conceived the conspiracy theory, she dismissed it as the product of how desperate she was to find an explanation. She even mocked herself for entertaining such a ridiculous, paranoid hypothesis, and she immediately vowed not to confess to anyone, especially Jack, that she had thought of such a thing. And after she'd returned to rationality, she realized the hypothetical bad guys couldn't be anesthetists or anesthesiologists because a number of the cases were not primary necrotizing pneumonia but rather fulminant surgical-site infections resulting in toxic shock syndrome.

Having run out of ideas, Laurie went back to expanding her matrix and filling in the blanks. When she'd first walked into her office, there was a note from Cheryl stuck on her monitor screen that indicated that most of the records Laurie had requested from the various Angels hospitals were in her e-mail inbox and that the rest should arrive the following day. Laurie had also found the packages sent from the ME offices in Brooklyn and Queens containing the files of their six cases and, in a separate envelope, the case files of the two missing cases of Besserman and Southgate, which had not been in their office when Laurie had gotten the four others.