"Slow down," she told him, raising her voice above the din of rain that peppered the heavy leather top of her vehicle. It sounded like they were in a tent. "J.S. isn't going anywhere."

He eased off and leaned forward to see better. The wipers barely parted the steady cascade of water that poured down the windshield.

The three of them had agreed there must be a simple explanation. But they needed to talk with J.S. and discover that reason before anyone else stumbled onto the data, because the history of cluster studies had a dark side. Effective as they were in nailing the guilty, they had also destroyed the lives of the innocent, the same persuasiveness of numbers that made them so successful also being what made them so dangerous. Whenever such studies fingered someone who happened to be around but had nothing to do with the killings, even in cases when formal charges were never laid, the accused inevitably went through a legal wringer for years before being exonerated. Often the person never worked in health care again, and sometimes lost the support of family and friends in the process.

"My worry is Yablonsky," Earl had said. "As long as she feels threatened that someone might try to blame the rise in deaths on her, she'll continue her attempts to pin them on anyone else who's handy."

"But she's already done a pretty good job at setting up Stewart," Thomas had countered, his voice tight with tension. He seemed the most shaken up by what they'd found.

Earl had scowled at him. "Maybe. But you saw how scared she was yesterday. And once everybody else starts thinking straight, they're also going to have serious doubts that Stewart would knock off patients as part of some weird near-death research. So who's to say dear Monica won't see the writing on the wall, realize she could still take the fall, and mount her own study to try to shift the blame to yet another patsy? Hell, my talking about clusters yesterday might even have given her the idea. She knows as well as anyone what kind of trap they can be, and she already has access to the ward's death records. She could be sitting at home right now, trying to tap into nursing rosters and doing the same thing we are. If J.S. pops up on her screen, she's finished."

Thomas's ruddy complexion had gone pale listening to Earl's all-too-blunt stark assessment, so much so Janet felt obliged to give her husband a pinch on the butt to shut him up.

She also had said nothing about an even more obvious and imminent danger for J.S. The young nurse might be able to identify the real killer- she might be aware of someone else who worked the same nights as she did, someone who hadn't yet shown up on their study. That put her in danger. Some slight slip on her part, an innocent comment about having a schedule similar to that of the actual murderer, could be a death warrant- if it wasn't already too late. When Janet had phoned ICU to check on her this evening, the supervisor reported that J.S. had received a steady stream of nurses, clerks, porters, orderlies, even interns and doctors from ER, all dropping by to wish her well. And since her endotracheal tube came out, she'd been talking to all of them.

Thank God Earl had had the good sense not to blab out that particular risk- he must have seen it as readily as she had- or the already skittery Thomas would really be climbing the walls.

She glanced sideways at him and saw that he remained hunched forward as he drove, staring straight ahead, his jaw clenched, his features ghastly as they moved in and out of the shadows between overhead streetlamps. Maybe he'd already figured it out anyway.

Back at the house Janet had insisted to both men that she be the only one to talk with J.S. tonight. "For no other reason than she's my patient, and I won't have you two descending on her, scaring her silly. Besides, I may be able to keep what she says under doctor-patient confidentiality," she told them, figuring it sounded reasonable that she'd also want to protect Jane from the police. Mostly she needed as many reasons as possible to keep Thomas away from J.S. until he calmed down. The last thing J.S. needed would be for him to pass all his anxiety on to her. "And I'm going to briefly see her tonight, warn her to watch what she says, so she doesn't incriminate herself with some off-the-cuff comment about her schedule to the likes of Monica Yablonsky." At this point she'd managed to slip her husband a private little wink. He'd fired one right back. He knew her real concern, just as she'd thought. "I should give her a post-op check anyway, so my dropping by won't seem too out of the ordinary or alarming. So why don't both of you stay here until I come back?"

Thomas had refused to wait behind.

Now as she watched him drive, the tension in his neck and shoulders grew, subtly sculpting the shape of the muscles visible at the open collar of his white golf shirt. Definitely not in a state of mind to calm J.S.

"I have to see her alone," she reiterated for about the tenth time. "Until we know more, for her own good. Of course there's a perfectly plausible explanation for her schedule, but it may take a while to figure it out, and until then we must be careful."

He slowly turned and looked at her, a dappled yellow hue playing across his cheekbones from the rain-filtered glare of sodium lights. His eyes seemed sunken in their sockets and glittered at her through the darkness. "It's only right that I be at her side," he said, his voice a grim monotone.

She felt a chill at the flatness of it.

Earl punched redial.

"You have reached the home of Dr. Stewart-"

He slammed down the receiver.

He couldn't just stay here, pacing the floor and trying to figure out connections that didn't make sense.

The flashback of a dark form hurtling at him in the darkness increased his sense of urgency. He had to get answers before the real killer realized J.S. could identify him.

Best just go over to Stewart's house. Confront the son of a bitch face-to-face. Force him to reveal what he knew about the pattern of DNR and non-DNR deaths. Pin him down over what J.S.'s schedule might have to do with the killings. Grill him to admit who might want to get even with him for Jerome Wilcher's suicide.

He phoned Annie, their housekeeper, explained that an emergency had come up, and asked that she watch Brendan.

"Be there in five minutes, Doc."

Always willing to bail him out, bless her heart.

As he waited, he racked his brain over how J.S.'s name could have come up, but as before, got nowhere. He even considered the possibility there could have been a glitch in the program.

He went back to the computer screen and typed in his own name.

Zero correlation.

Janet's.

Same result.

He stood there, unable to think of what else to try.

Into that vacuum crept a gloomy acknowledgment. Even as the three of them had stood in this room and openly proclaimed that J.S. had to be innocent, a little stir of protest had wormed its way along the dark veins of his pessimism. In complete contrast to the way Janet's instincts could give J.S. a pass or Thomas's love could preclude his doubting her, Earl would test whether his comfortable assumptions about J.S. withstood scrutiny. It always had been his way of ordering the world- troubleshoot it and avoid nasty surprises- which meant he allowed himself to ask questions that no one else dared raise. In this case, could J.S. be someone he didn't know at all?

Annie arrived, using her own key to let herself in.

"Off you go," she said, waving him out. Then she gave Muffy a big pat and shook the rain from a soaked umbrella before folding it up. "I'm sure you've got lives to save." Though sixty, she wore her white hair in a Gl cut and still had a figure that let her borrow some of Janet's dresses. She swept by him into his den to plunk herself down in front of the computer.