Ross didn't know what kind of answer Ash wanted. He wished they would have allowed him to bring his lawyer into the room. He had to rely now upon the truth, and this made him uneasy. "It's always possible to give an improper dose of any drug. If Mr. Markham's heartbeat had become irregular, I could envision the need to administer a therapeutic dose of potassium. It's also possible, though rare, for a drug's concentration in solution to differ from what's on the label."

He was slightly shocked to find Ash prepared for this. "Of course. Please assume we have the drip bag that held the potassium in this case, and the concentration is correct. Also assume that there is no indication that Mr. Markham's heart, prior to the attack brought on by the overdose, was malfunctioning. So given these assumptions, do you have any explanation for these events other than that this was an intentionally administered overdose?"

Ross wiped sweat from his upper lip. "I guess I don't see any other possibility. Do you mind if I take off my coat?"

"Not at all." In half a minute, he was seated again. Ash hadn't lost her place. "So, Doctor, if Mr. Markham was intentionally overdosed-"

"I didn't say that." Then, amending, "I didn't realize we'd gotten to there."

At this, Ash turned dramatic. She paused, as though in midthought, and glared down at him. "That's exactly where we are, Doctor. Did you and Mr. Markham have serious disagreements, for example, over policy?"

Ross lifted his chin in controlled outrage. "Are you joking?" he asked her.

"About what?"

"As I take it, you're asking me if some argument about business would have made me want to kill my longtime friend and business partner. I resent the hell out of the question."

"I never asked that question," Ash said. "You made that leap yourself. But having asked it, please answer." She fixed him with a steadfast gaze.

He matched her with one of his own. "No, then, nothing. Nothing that even remotely would have made me consider anything like that." He spoke directly to the jury. "Tim was my friend, a close friend."

Ross forced himself to slow down. A fresh pitcher of water had appeared-maybe it had been there for a while. He poured some into his glass and took a sip. "I need to point out, Ms. Ash, that the medical decision on Baby Emily, though hugely unpopular, wasn't all wrong. Baby Emily did in fact make it to County and to the premature baby unit, where she lived until she was transported back to Portola. I didn't kill her by any means, or even endanger her unnecessarily."

"But how did Mr. Markham react to all this?"

"He was all right with it until it became big news."

"You two did not have words over it?"

"Of course we did, after it blew up on us. He thought I should have consulted him, that I shouldn't have acted only on business considerations." Again, he directed his words to the grand jury. "We had some heated words, that's true. We run a big, complicated business together, and our roles sometimes overlap. We'd been doing this for twelve years." He made some eye contact, decided he'd be damned if he'd even dignify Ash's insinuation with a further denial.

As they'd been sitting down to the Tuesday lunch group at Lou the Greek's, Treya had made apologies for Glitsky's absence. He'd been called away at the last minute to a murder scene in Hunter's Point. Hardy was convinced that this excuse was an outright falsehood.

A murder scene at Hunter's Point indeed, he mused. As though they didn't happen every week. Hardy knew that unless some gangbangers had slaughtered themselves and twenty or thirty other bystanders in a daylight shootout involving children, drugs, the Goodyear blimp, and a sighting of the Zodiac Killer, Glitsky the administrator wouldn't need to be called to a "murder scene in Hunter's Point."

In Hardy's mind, the nature of the excuse had even deeper implications. The mundanity of the explanation, though perfectly plausible on the surface, was in reality so lame that Hardy took it to be a secret yet personal fuck-you message to himself. Murder scene, my ass, he thought. Right up there with "My grandmother died." Or "The dog ate my homework."

Furious at most of them, but especially at him, Abe was avoiding the group today. It probably hadn't helped when he'd gotten the word this morning that Jackman had directed Strout to go ahead with Wes Farrell's request to dig up his clients' mother. Before they'd sat down, Strout told Hardy that he had called Abe as a courtesy to tell him about this decision. He'd endured an angry earful of Glitsky's opinion on the question, then thanked him for it, and said he'd be going ahead on Jackman's approval anyway.

But no one else seemed bothered by his absence. They'd barely gotten settled before the conversation had gotten into full swing. David Freeman had started with a few comments about the Parnassus situation, how prescient they'd all been last week. Before too long, half the table had chimed in with one comment or another. Eventually, they got to Jeff Elliot's first column on Malachi Ross, which led Jeff to ask Marlene Ash if she'd talked to Ross yet and, if so, how he'd fared before the grand jury.

She'd smiled, glanced at Jackman, and sipped her iced tea. "No comment, I'm afraid, even if we're off the record here."

"Ross and Markham were close personal friends is what I hear," Hardy said. "Never a cross word between them." He shot a look at Treya across the table from him. "Kind of like me and Abe."

But Elliot thought he knew where the story lay. "Let me ask you this, Marlene," he began. "Diz thinks they are close personal friends, yet I have heard that they disagreed on just about every decision either one of them made over the past couple of years-Baby Emily, Sinustop, formulary issues, you name it."

Marlene Ash sipped her iced tea. "I can't talk about it, Jeff. It's the grand jury, get it? I'm not even saying who I talked to. You want to think it was Ross, you go ahead."

"It was today, though, right? The grand jury still meets Tuesdays and Thursdays?"

Gina Roake joined in. "Anybody else here for repealing the First Amendment?" But the words were innocent banter, lightly delivered. "She can't talk about it, Jeff. Really. Even to an ace reporter like yourself."

"And far be it from me to try to make her." Elliot shook his head, truly amused at the games these lawyers played, and apparently even took seriously. He flashed a smile around the table. "However, for our own edification, Dr. Ross has a secretary, Joanne, who told me when I called that that's where he was. I don't think she's been let in on the top secret part."

"She talked to you," Roake asked incredulously, "after what you did to her boss last week?"

Elliot nodded soberly. "She might have gotten the impression that I called to apologize or something."

As Freeman and Jackman fell into a more serious discussion about last week's issue-the possibly fraudulent outpatient billings-Hardy leaned over and spoke quietly to Elliot. "How'd you hear about Sinustop?"

"Same way I found out Ross was at the grand jury. I'm a reporter. I ask. You'd be surprised. People talk."

"Not as surprised as you'd think. I've talked to a few people myself. Have you found anything on Kensing's list?"

Elliot gave the high sign and stopped as Lou came around and described today's special, which involved eggplant, tofu, squid, and some kind of sesame oil-based sweet-and-sour sauce. Really good, he promised, maybe even a culinary breakthrough, although those weren't the exact words he used.

When they'd all ordered the special, since there was no other choice, Lou moved to another table, and the buzz resumed at Jackman's. Elliot leaned back toward Hardy. "But about those unexplained deaths? I know one thing is true. It's a definite rumor."