Hardy stood behind Glitsky and his son and watched as they loaded their goods onto the conveyor belt. It struck him that Louis XIV-the Sun King himself-probably didn't have this kind of food selection, this kind of weather, that in fact he was living in a kind of golden age and he'd be a fool to forget it. If it sometimes threatened to break his heart, it was a good thing.

He put a hand on Glitsky's shoulder, one on his son's.

"Rebecca Simms? This is Dismas Hardy again."

He thought he heard an intake of breath. Nurse Simms had been straightforward enough last time about not wanting to hear from him again, not wanting any more involvement. He rushed ahead before she could cut him off or hang up. "I know it's a little late, but I thought I owed you a phone call. Have you seen the news on TV?"

"No," she said. "I try not to watch too much TV. I read instead. What news?"

27

Jackman got the word out that he wanted them all in his office before eight o'clock the next morning. What the DA wanted, the DA got. Dead silent, Bracco and Fisk stood against the open door. Wes Farrell and Hardy sat on either end of the couch drinking coffee, while Glitsky was in the outer office with his wife. At a couple of minutes after the hour, Jackman arrived, accompanied by Marlene Ash and John Strout. After greeting everyone cordially, the DA went behind his desk, sat, and gave a sign to Treya. She ushered Glitsky inside and closed the door after him.

Jackman wasted no time on preliminaries. "Diz," he began, "I hear you've got ten more names on this magic list of yours. You'll be giving that to Abe, I presume."

"Yes, sir. Already done. Copies to Dr. Strout. And I spoke to another potential witness last night-a nurse at Portola-who's going to talk to the people she works with. Dr. Kensing only began his list about six months ago. My nurse witness might have more names."

"And that doesn't include what comes out of the woodwork," Marlene Ash put in. "I've got a feeling that everybody who died at Portola is going to seem fishy to somebody."

Jackman nodded in agreement, but he'd considered this.

"That's why I'm asking Dr. Strout here to have one of his assistants review what I expect is going to be a flood of requests for exhumations and autopsies. At least that way we'll make sure some doctor might have thought something was wrong about a premature death before we go ahead."

"Good luck with that," Farrell said. "You're talking about these folks overruling the PM their own hospital conducted. You're not going to get a lot of cooperation from doctors who work there. And the administration's going to be worse."

"They'll have to if we order it."

"Sure," Farrell said, "but we can't make doctors and nurses voice suspicions if they don't want to. Or don't have them."

Jackman wasn't worried about it. "Don't get me wrong. I don't want a lot of these requests."

"But we're going to get them, from families if no one else." Ash looked around the room. "We'd better be ready."

"All right." Jackman was ready to move on. "John, why don't you give us a little rundown of your results yesterday, although I think we've all gotten the basic message."

The medical examiner laid it all out for them. Mrs. Loring had been killed by an overdose of Pavulon and succinylcholine chloride. They were two muscle relaxants that, especially in the case of someone who is already comatose, might mimic a natural death.

"No might about it," Farrell interrupted. "Nobody thought a thing about it until Diz gave me her name and told me I'd be smart to look. I was even planning to sue the hospital over negligent care and didn't have any suspicion she'd been murdered."

Strout went on with his explanation. These drugs were extremely powerful, and always administered in IVs. Beyond that, since Mrs. Loring had been bedridden in the ICU, there was no real possibility that she'd taken pills orally in an effort to end her own life. She wouldn't have had access to them. The conclusion was that Strout was calling this homicide "death at the hands of another." In other words, some degree of murder.

"But no potassium?" Glitsky wanted that nailed down.

"Not any. No."

A silence settled in the room, and Jackman broke it. "It seems to me that the salient point here is not so much the type of drugs that may have been used in these two deaths. And I don't want to speculate ahead of the facts on potential future discoveries we might make. But more than the difference in drugs, the common feature of these two homicides is that somebody seemed to know, or believe, that Portola rubber-stamped their postmortems, when they were done at all, especially in the more obvious cases."

"I checked into that a bit," Strout volunteered. "Seems the cutbacks they've been livin' with have left them very short in this area. Hospital PMs, as a rule, aren't very thorough anyway. These guys were barely goin' through the motions. They don't even have a forensics specialist on staff anymore. Instead, they run only basic scans out to their lab-"

"If they even take it that far," Farrell said.

Strout bobbed his head. "I would agree that it might not always happen."

"So what are the standard scans, John?" Hardy asked.

"It can vary," Strout said, "but basically we're talkin' money and levels of complexity. You've got your A-scan, which is set for alcohol and some of your common drugs-aspirin, cocaine, and so on. Generally, you find a cause or possible cause of death at one level-say you've got toxic levels of cocaethylene, which is cocaine and alcohol, at the A-scan-then you stop looking. But if you want to keep goin', the B-scan's set for a slew of other drugs. Anyway, each level of scan gets more expensive. So if you got a cause of death at the zero-scan level, most folks stop there."

"And that's what you think happened here, with Mrs. Loring?" Jackman asked.

Strout nodded genially. "That's my best guess. Nobody looked too hard. They looked at all, somebody would'a seen 'em."

"Once you got a cause of death, did you stop, too, John?" Marlene asked him. "Or did you take it beyond there?"

"Yes, ma'am, I sure did. She had her chemo agent and some morphine for the pain. I got her records when I called for the body, and she was self-medicatin' with morphine in the hospital. But nowhere near a fatal dose of anythin' else."

"But if she was self-medicating," Farrell asked, "that means she was fairly coherent, doesn't it?"

"It could," Strout agreed. "She knew when she was hurtin', and when it got bad enough, she hit the button for a dose of morphine."

"Which is premeasured, am I right, John?" Ash asked him. "And time-release controlled?"

"Right. No way she overdoses herself, if that's what you're sayin'."

"So she wasn't in any kind of coma?" Hardy had for some reason imagined she was. Somehow the fact of her consciousness made her death all the worse. "You're telling us she was alert and somebody just came in and killed her?"

"I don't know 'bout that, Diz. She might'a been sleepin' at the exact time. But otherwise, in terms of was she in a conscious state? I'd have to say pretty much yeah."

Everyone seemed lost in private thoughts. The DA simply moved his head up and down, up and down. Finally, he stopped. "Mr. Farrell, I want to thank you for coming to this early call. I expect we'll be hearing from you in the near future. I appreciate your cooperation."

It took Farrell a moment to realize that Jackman was telling him to leave. When it clicked in, he was gracious about it, thanking the DA for thinking to invite him, then Strout for his efforts and Hardy again for his.

Strout spoke up, as well. "If you don't need me, Clarence, I got a feelin' I'm lookin' at a busy day, and I'd best get on with it."