Peter Clement - The Inquisitor

Muffy raised her head and looked up at her.

"I've become exactly like my own mother," Janet told her. "Now, she was a woman who knew how to make you feel loved. Drove me and my two brothers crazy, never missing an opportunity to give us a big smooch."

Muffy put her head back down, not at all interested.

Of course Brendan could react the same way as her brothers, Janet thought, and find that Mommy turned into a big, embarrassing bore when she hung around him all the time. Wouldn't that be a kick in the head.

She took another sip.

As for Earl, he'd be relieved to get her out of the hospital. He was so fastidious about tiptoeing around the question, never intruding on her right to make the decision, but his studied neutrality practically shrieked, "Get the hell out of there, woman!" What's more, the lovable goof would actually believe he'd been the epitome of a noninterfering husband.

But she damn well intended to interfere with him. She'd known when he became VP, medical that the combination of his instinct to sniff out crap and a complete inability to let shit slide would suck him into a ton of trouble sooner or later. Yet she'd encouraged him to take the job. Not just because he'd be miserable under the kind of hotshot MBAs that ran hospitals these days, but because the work would take him out of ER now and then. She knew he needed the rush of extreme medicine, the exhilaration of "raising the dead," as some of them called it, but as magnificent as he'd become at it, that addictive allure sometimes frightened her. What of the day he couldn't do it anymore, once he flamed out like a lot of his colleagues? They'd been equally exhilarated by the job, but past triumphs didn't save them when they ultimately stayed on one year too many. That's why people in the business calling emergency "the pit" seemed so apt. It eventually consumed all who worked there.

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.

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.