A pretty blond girl who had attempted to take over the chest compressions, her long hair repeatedly flopping in the way, slowed after a dozen thrusts. "This one doesn't feel right!" she said, her eyebrows bunched into a frown, but she continued to labor over the dead woman's chest.

Thomas walked over to the bed, reached through the crowd, and placed the tips of his fingers along Elizabeth Matthews's neck. "You're not producing a pulse." He signaled the young intern to step back- she'd already grown flushed from trying- and attempted a few compressions himself. A puzzled expression crept across his forehead. He stopped pumping, threw the covers entirely off, and turned the woman's body to reveal large purple blotches on her hips and the back of her shoulders. He looked up at the supervisor. "The woman's been dead four hours, minimum." He pointed to the discolorations and turned to the residents. "These markings take at least that long to appear. We call the phenomena lividity, where venous blood pools at the lowest point of the body once a person has died." His voice had slipped into the clipped tones most seniors used when teaching. He threw the bedsheet back over Matthews, allowing it to float down on her like a shroud. "A code blue never should have been called."

Yablonsky's cheeks burned red at the rebuke.

As the others cleaned up their equipment, Thomas Biggs led her to the corner of the room. "Why'd you do it?" he asked.

He may have intended their conversation to be private, but Jane easily overheard them.

A flicker of alarm shot through Mrs. Yablonsky's eyes. "I beg your pardon?" she puffed with indignation.

"Why'd you call the code? You could feel and see her as well as I did. The skin had gone cold. The lividity formed where she lay."

Mrs. Yablonsky's face flamed further, and the cords of her neck muscles tightened.

Oh, boy, thought Jane, who knew from other visits up here that the woman had a temper. And Thomas could be less than diplomatic when pointing out someone else's mistakes.

But thankfully, this morning Yablonsky seemed set on avoiding a fight. Her rigid posture relaxed a notch. "Sorry," she said, "I should have checked."

Thomas studied her, then his eyes crinkled good-naturedly as he gave her a smile. "That's okay. We can all forget something sometimes. It just surprised me. Calling a code on her"- he gestured at Matthews's body-"is a rookie move."

Yablonsky's eyes hardened.

Ah, shit! Jane thought. Now why did he have to add that? He seems set on provoking her.

The supervisor adopted a time-to-put-this-smartass-on-the-defensive look. "Oh, really? Well, I'd advise you to write it up by the book, Dr. Biggs, because Dr. Earl Garnet himself is going to be taking a big interest in her death."

The merriment in the corners of his eyes slipped a notch. "What do you mean?"

"Just what I said. Dr. Garnet will want to know what happened here, believe me."

"Why would Dr. Garnet be interested in a terminal cancer case?" he asked. The cockiness in his voice had faded a bit more.

"Because he personally doubled her morphine dose last night without her physician's knowledge."

Thomas's mask elongated as his jaw sagged in disbelief. "What made him do that?"

The other residents had started to pay attention.

"Ask the man yourself," she answered, making no attempt to lower her voice. "All I know is, he intended to jump-start some kind of audit into how we medicate pain. Well, it backfired. He'll get his audit, but now it'll be him on the hot seat."

"But surely a terminal patient's death won't be questioned." Thomas sounded more incredulous by the second.

"Oh, but it will, Dr. Biggs, because according to her doctor, she still had months to live."

"Nobody can predict that sort of thing with any certainty."

"That may be. But I advise you to write this one up without skipping any details. It's going to be gone over with a microscope, I promise you."

The ridges in Thomas's forehead thickened a little. "I see," he said.

"I should hope you all do," she added, addressing everyone in the room as if they'd all been errant schoolchildren.

The bitch! Jane thought, as wide-eyed with astonishment as everyone else at what she'd just heard. But the part that most shocked her was not that the woman had pulled a classic shift-the-focus-and-cover-your-own-behind move but that she'd done it specifically at Dr. G.'s expense. Thanks to her big mouth, rumors of his having possibly overmedicated the woman would be the talk of the hospital by breakfast. In the court of innuendo, he'd be convicted before noon. Getting out from under that kind of cloud, even if the official verdict cleared him, could be a struggle, and Yablonsky had been around long enough to know it. So why the hell would she do something so vicious?

If anyone hadn't heard about his connection to Elizabeth Matthews, Earl Garnet didn't run into them on his way to the eighth floor.

Among the groups of nurses, residents, or doctors he passed in the corridors, conversations stopped dead as he rushed by, replaced by whispers and embarrassed glances in his direction. Some he encountered avoided eye contact altogether. Even the janitors looked away. But everybody had a good gawk at him behind his back. He could feel their stares like a thousand arrows.

Thanks to small mercies, he got to ride the elevator alone. Sunday mornings, even at shift change, tended to be quieter than the start of other days. As the floors ticked by, he braced himself for the imminent confrontation with Peter Wyatt. Earl had hung up on the man rather than listen to him scream threats over the phone, but not before he'd heard a good part of what the oncologist had planned for him. For starters there'd be charges of unprofessional conduct; a motion to suspend his appointment as VP, medical; and, after confirmation of lethal morphine levels in Elizabeth Matthews's blood, an official coroner's inquiry. Wyatt then pledged to lead a push that would see Earl prosecuted by law for gross negligence at best, manslaughter at worst. And of course he'd indicated a willingness to leak every savory detail of the process to the media.

But what Earl dreaded most had nothing to do with facing Peter Wyatt.

The door slid open, and he stepped into the ward. His welcome committee stood waiting for him by the nursing station, but he focused only on the elderly man with the gaunt eyes who sat hunched in a chair, looking out the window at a dreary gray dawn.

Monica Yablonsky, her brow furrowed like a gathering storm, tried to glare at him, faltered, and fidgeted with her glasses. Two nurses whom he hadn't seen before flanked her, their expressions expectant, as if he might be there to fix the mess. Wyatt, dressed for the occasion in his three-piece churchgoing best, bolted forward like the leader of a lynch mob in a bad western.

"Shut up, Peter," Earl said before Wyatt could open his mouth. Then he walked right by him, focusing solely on the frail figure by the window. "Mr. Matthews," he said, kneeling by his side.

The old man made no reply and didn't even glance his way.

Earl hesitated, uncertain whether to take the lack of response as a refusal to speak with him, or as the paralyzing impact of grief.

"Mr. Matthews," he repeated.

"Go away, please." The wavering voice sounded hollow, as if emanating from a gourd that had had the insides gouged out.

Earl swallowed. "Mr. Matthews, I know you have every right to be angry…" He trailed off, overwhelmed by how useless his words sounded. They always did when he attempted to comfort the living in the aftermath of a death, and this time he'd more than usual to account for. "I'm so sorry," he said again. He cast about for something to add, then let it be, resigned that nothing he could say would help.