"You're not staying at a hotel!" Alexis said with resolve. "Absolutely not. You have to stay at the house. We have plenty of room. I need to talk with you in person, and it would be best for the girls. Please, Jack."

There was a pause.

"Are you still there?" Alexis questioned.

"Yeah, I'm still here."

"Since you are making the effort to come up, I want you at the house. I really do. It will be good for everyone, although that might be selfish rationalization, meaning I know it will be good for me."

"All right," Jack said with a touch of reluctance in his voice.

"There's not been any testimony at the trial as of yet. The defense is giving its opening statement as we speak. The trial is very much still at the beginning."

"The more material you can give me about the case, the greater the chance I might be able to come up with some suggestion."

"I'll see what I can do about getting the opening statement of the plaintiff."

"Well, then, I guess I'll see you later."

"Thanks, Jack. It's starting to seem like old times knowing that you're coming."

Alexis ended the call and slipped her phone back into her bag. When all was said and done, even if Jack didn't actually help, she was glad he was coming. He would provide the kind of emotional support only a family member could offer. She headed back through security and took the elevator to the third floor. As she entered the courtroom and allowed the heavy door to close as quietly as possible behind her, she could hear that Randolph was still describing the deleterious effect current-day medical economics was having on the practice of medicine. Choosing to sit as close as possible to the jury, she could see by their glazed eyes that they were no more engaged than when she had left. Alexis was even more pleased that Jack was coming. It gave her the sense that she was doing something.

For a few minutes after hanging up with his sister, Jack sat at his desk and drummed his fingers on its metallic surface. He hadn't been completely up-front with her. Her assessment of why he'd avoided visiting her had been on the money, which he hadn't really acknowledged. Worse yet, he hadn't admitted it was still the case. In fact, it might even be worse now, since Meghan and Christina, Alexis's two youngest, were currently about the same ages as his late daughters, Tamara and Lydia. Yet he was caught in an emotional bind, considering how close he and Alexis had been back in Indiana. He was five years her senior, and the age difference was just enough for his role to be somewhat parental yet close enough to also be solidly brotherly. That circumstance, plus guilt from having avoided Alexis for the entire ten years he'd been in New York, made it impossible not to respond to her pleas in her hour of need. Unfortunately, it wasn't going to be easy.

He stood up and for a brief moment debated whom he should talk to first. His first inclination was Laurie, although he was hardly excited about the prospect, since she was clearly uptight about the wedding plans; her mother was driving her crazy and she was, in turn, driving Jack crazy. Consequently, he thought perhaps speaking first to Calvin Washington, the deputy chief, made more sense. Calvin was the one who would have to give Jack permission to take time off from the OCME. For even a briefer moment, the hope that Calvin would say no to additional leave passed through his mind, since both Jack and Laurie were already scheduled for two weeks' vacation starting Friday. Being denied leave to go to Boston would certainly solve his issues of guilt toward Alexis and reluctance to confront Alexis's daughters, and the need to bring up the idea with Laurie. Yet such a convenient excuse was not going to come to pass.

Calvin wouldn't say no; a family emergency was never turned down.

But before he'd even logged off his computer, rationality prevailed. Intuitively, he knew he should at least try to talk with Laurie first, since if he didn't and she found out that he hadn't tried, there'd be hell to pay, as close as it was to the wedding date. With that idea in mind, he walked down the hall toward Laurie's office.

There was another reason Jack was not excited about the proposed trip to Boston, and that was because Craig Bowman was far from his favorite person. Jack had tolerated him for Alexis's benefit, but it had never been easy. From day one when Jack had just met the man, he'd recognized the type. There'd been several similar personalities in Jack's medical school, all of whom had been at the very top of his class. They were the type of individuals who made it a point to smother anyone with an avalanche of journal article citations supposedly confirming their viewpoint whenever they got into a medical discussion. If that had been the only problem, Jack could have lived with it, but unfortunately, Craig's opinionated ways were also sprinkled with an irritating degree of arrogance, grandiosity, and entitlement. But even that Jack could have found bearable if he'd been able to occasionally steer the conversation with Craig away from medicine. But he never could. Craig was interested only in medicine, science, and his patients. He wasn't interested in politics or culture or even sports. He didn't have time.

As Jack closed in on Laurie's office door, he audibly harrumphed when his mind recalled Alexis suggesting he had avoidant traits in his personality. The nerve! He thought for a moment and then smiled at his reaction. With a flash of clairvoyance, he knew she was right and that Laurie would wholeheartedly agree. In many ways, such a reaction was evidence of his narcissism, which he had admitted to Alexis.

Jack poked his head into Laurie's office, but her desk chair was empty. Riva Mehta, Laurie's darkly complected, silky-voiced officemate, was at her desk and on the phone. She glanced up at at Jack with her onyx eyes.

Jack pantomimed by pointing toward Laurie's chair while raising his eyebrows questioningly. Riva responded by pointing downward and mouthing "in the pit" without taking the telephone receiver from her ear.

With a nod of understanding that Laurie was down in the autopsy room, undoubtedly doing a late case, Jack reversed course and headed for the elevators. Now if Laurie found out he'd gone to Calvin first, he'd have an explanation.

As per usual, he found Dr. Calvin Washington in his office next to the chief's. In contrast with the chief's, it was tiny and practically filled with metal filing cabinets, his desk, and a couple of straight-backed chairs. There was barely room for Calvin's two-hundred-fifty-pound frame to squeeze past his desk and lower it-self into his desk chair. It was Calvin's job to run the medical examiner's office on a daily basis, which was not an easy job considering there were more than a dozen medical examiners and over twenty thousand cases per year resulting in almost ten thousand autopsies. On a daily basis there were on average two homicides and two drug overdoses. The OCME was a busy place, and Calvin oversaw all the pesky details.

"What's the problem now?" Calvin demanded in his basso profundo voice. In the beginning, Jack had been relatively intimidated by the man's muscular bulk and stormy temperament. As the years passed, the two had grown to have a wary respect for each other. Jack knew Calvin's bark was worse than his bite.

Jack didn't go into details. He merely said he had a family emergency in Boston that required his presence.

Calvin regarded Jack through his wire-rimmed progressive lenses. "I didn't know you had family in Boston. I thought you were from somewhere out there in the Midwest."

"It's a sister," Jack said simply.