She'd decided the best to be hoped for with Earl would be to slow the process down a bit, maybe buy time to wean him off what had become like oxygen to him. A new challenge with fresh demands seemed just the ticket. But the expanded responsibilities appeared to be engaging him quicker and more than she ever predicted. Between their lovely romantic interlude earlier in the day and Brendan coming home from school, she'd listened with unease as he explained why recent clusters of deaths in palliative care troubled him. Since his suspicions ranged from a nurse playing an angel of death to Stewart Deloram covering up stories of near-death experiences, and the five patients who might have shed some light on the matter were conveniently dead or in a coma, this problem meant exactly the sort of trouble that would eat at her husband. She'd lived with his doggedness long enough to know he wouldn't back off until he either proved or disproved his worst imaginings. She also knew to never attempt to divert him head-on. And most sobering of all, she'd learned to trust his damned uncanny instinct to read patterns where others saw only a maze of unrelated events. Because more often than not, whenever he sensed rot and dug after it, he found exactly that.

But he hadn't a clue of what he needed most now- a sidekick. Someone to carry out all that rooting around he felt so compelled to do himself, but who could fly below the radar of Hurst or Wyatt. Those two, if they guessed what he'd be stirring up, would make his life a living hell, and by extension, hers and Brendan's.

Earl in battle mode meant having Hamlet in the house, he became so preoccupied. Worse, if he had stumbled onto foul play, a backlash from an angel of death who felt threatened could be bloody dangerous.

Yes, she'd make a good sidekick, one with time to spare during her son's school hours and who also had her own authority to quietly snoop through nursing work schedules and death records. She would be just the perfect answer to keep him out of trouble. And if the focus of her inquiry should stray a little outside her usual realm of obstetrics, who the hell would know? Best of all, if by some slim chance she found he'd been on a wild-goose chase, they could all relax.

But first she'd have to convince her Lone Ranger to accept his new Tonto. Being brighter than most people around him, he had an infuriating yet deeply ingrained propensity to solve a problem, even in ER, by barging ahead on his own. Well, maybe she could make him want to barge after his wife for help.

She drained her mug and stared outside.

The fog had lifted slightly, thinning into tendrils that reached out of the darkness and curled through the light of the street lamps, tentatively exploring the muted glow with a cautious touch. Then a breeze caught the swirls, and they languidly drifted away, joining more of their kind to swim through the night like bad dreams.

Chapter 10

Three days later, Saturday, July 12, 12:45 a.m. Palliative Care, St. Paul's Hospital

Earl pressed back into the darkness.

He had seen something move through the shadows at the far end of the hall.

His muscles ached as if someone had winched them tight, and he shifted his weight for the hundredth time since he'd sneaked into the room nearly an hour ago.

Yet he kept his gaze locked on the black recesses where a person could hide.

And waited.

He'd initially felt foolish coming here at all. But his idea about a cluster study hadn't yielded much so far. At least Janet hadn't found any obvious patterns in the duty rosters and mortality figures, but they had a ways to go.

The job had turned out to be huge, and thank God he'd been smart enough to ask for her help. The idea had come to him out of the blue while they were having breakfast a few days ago. Not only did it give him a big edge in processing a ton of data, the project turned out to be exactly the carrot that convinced Janet to take an early pregnancy leave. Best of all, she thought it was her own decision. Funny how things just turned out sometimes.

Too bad their results weren't as obliging.

No one nurse had worked significantly greater numbers of shifts that corresponded to patient deaths than anybody else, and Monica Yablonsky's record seemed least suspicious of all. From what they'd looked at to date, she stayed on after evenings to work a double no more frequently than once a week.

"So maybe Hurst got it right. Patients are simply being admitted sicker and dying sooner," Janet had said last night, almost hopefully, even though they still had months of data to check.

Or a self-appointed angel of mercy could have anticipated a classic cluster investigation, then dispatched her victims when she wasn't on duty, he'd thought. So he set out to see how easily anyone could get in here and move about with no one the wiser. He also realized this line of thinking bore a striking similarity to that of the hard-core conspiracy nuts who turned up in ER occasionally. But he figured his being aware of the likeness mitigated against total lunacy. Unless Janet found out, in which case he'd plead complete insanity.

Coming up the back staircase unobserved had been no problem. He'd calculated that no one would be there after midnight, as might someone intent on committing a mercy killing.

When he'd reached the eighth floor, he hesitated in front of the door. If he pulled it open, light would spill into the corridor on the other side, and any nurse who might be there could spot it. He stepped over to a triple set of wall switches and flicked them off, casting himself into near darkness. The pale glow of the illumination from landings below barely reached this level. Shouldn't attract much attention now, he thought, and turned the handle.

He'd managed to slip all the way up to his destination, the empty room where he now stood, but he could just as easily have stepped into any door and done as he pleased with any patient on the floor. And he still hadn't seen a single nurse, just heard their radio and them chatting in their work station near the elevators. Judging from the relaxed tone of their voices and occasional laughter, they remained as indifferent to the lowing cries that floated through the hallway as when he'd visited last Saturday evening.

He found the noises impossible to ignore. They permeated the air with a forlorn sadness yet had the same soft urgency that went with the sounds of making love.

The longer he stood in the doorway listening, the angrier he grew. Having proved that any fool could waltz onto the ward, he felt an urge to stick around and see for himself how long these alleged caregivers would let men and women lie unattended in their last hours. While he'd skin his own staff alive if they ever allowed anyone to suffer like this in ER, the bunch up here did worse than fail to treat pain. Their indifference conveyed a message tantamount to telling someone in his or her final moments, "You don't matter, not even so much as for us to hold your hand while you die."

By God, he would give these so-called nightingales thirty more minutes in which to hang themselves. He'd keep watch while holding the door open with the toe of his shoe so he could personally attest that not one of them had taken the trouble to check on their charges during his time here. Then he'd nail them.

At least that had been his plan until he'd seen the figure that now galvanized his attention.

The person glided from doorway to doorway, coming ever closer, faceless as a ghost. Yet light from the distant workstation caught the shape's eyes, causing them to glitter in the blackness.

Earl shivered, certain they were looking right at him. He slowly withdrew his foot and smoothly closed the door until only a crack remained for him to see through.