notice his approach. He crouched beside her, scooped a few errant pennies from the ground, and held them out to her. Suddenly she focused on his face and then froze.
“Looks like you need some help,” he said.
“Oh.”
“I think you’ve got everything now.”
They both rose to their feet. He was still holding out the loose change, of which she seemed oblivious. Only after he’d deposited the money in her hand did she finally manage a weak “Thank you.”
For a moment they stared at each other.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” he remarked. “Why did you come?”
“It was—” she shrugged “—a mistake, I think.”
“Did your lawyer suggest it?”
She looked puzzled. “Why would he?”
“To show the O’Briens you care.”
Her cheeks suddenly flushed with anger. “Is that what you think? That this is some sort of—of strategy?”
“It’s not unheard of.”
“Why are you here, Mr. Ransom? Is this part of your strategy? To prove to your clients you care?”
“I do care.”
“And you think I don’t.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You implied it.”
“Don’t take everything I say personally.”
“I take everything you say personally.”
“You shouldn’t. It’s just a job to me.”
Angrily, she shoved back a tangled lock of hair. “And what is your job? Hatchet man?”
“I don’t attack people. I attack their mistakes. And even the best doctors make mistakes.”
“You don’t need to tell me that!” Turning, she looked off to sea, where Ellen O’Brien’s ashes were newly drifting. “I live with it, Mr. Ransom. Every day in that O.R. I know that if I reach for the wrong vial or flip the wrong lever, it’s someone’s life. Oh, we find ways to deal with it. We have our black jokes, our gallows humor. It’s terrible, the things we laugh about, and all in the name of survival. Emotional survival. You have no idea, you lawyers. You and your whole damned profession. You don’t know what it’s like when everything goes wrong. When we lose someone.”
“I know what it’s like for the family. Every time you make a mistake, someone suffers.”
“I suppose you never make mistakes.”
“Everyone does. The difference is, you bury yours.”
“You’ll never let me forget it, will you?”
She turned to him. Sunset had painted the sky orange, and the glow seemed to burn in her hair and in her cheeks. Suddenly he wondered how it would feel to run his fingers through those wind-tumbled strands, wondered what that face would feel like against his lips. The thought had popped out of nowhere and now that it was out, he couldn’t get rid of it. Certainly it was the last thing he ought to be thinking. But she was standing so dangerously close that he’d either have to back away or kiss her.
He managed to hold his ground. Barely. “As I said, Dr. Chesne, I’m only doing my job.”
She shook her head and her hair, that sun-streaked, mahogany hair, flew violently in the wind. “No, it’s more than that. I think you have some sort of vendetta. You’re out to hang the whole medical profession. Aren’t you?”
David was taken aback by her accusation. Even as he started to deny it, he knew she’d hit too close to home. Somehow she’d found his old wound, had reopened it with the verbal equivalent of a surgeon’s scalpel. “Out to hang the whole profession, am I?” he managed to say. “Well, let me tell you something, Doctor. It’s incompetents like you that make my job so easy.”
Rage flared in her eyes, as sudden and brilliant as two coals igniting. For an instant he thought she was going to slap him. Instead she whirled around, slid into her car and slammed the door. The Audi screeched out of the stall so sharply he had to flinch aside.
As he watched her car roar away, he couldn’t help regretting those unnecessarily brutal words. But he’d said them in self-defense. That perverse attraction he’d felt to her had grown too compelling; he knew it had to be severed, right there and then.
As he turned to leave, something caught his eye, a thin shaft of reflected light. Glittering on the pavement was a silver pen; it had rolled under her car when she’d dropped her purse. He picked it up and studied the engraved name: Katharine Chesne, M.D.
For a moment he stood there, weighing the pen, thinking about its owner. Wondering if she, too, had no one to go home to. And it suddenly struck him, as he stood alone on the windy pier, just how empty he felt.
Once, he’d been grateful for the emptiness. It had meant the blessed absence of pain. Now he longed to feel something—anything—if only to reassure himself that he was alive. He knew the emotions were still there, locked up somewhere inside him. He’d felt them stirring faintly when he’d looked into Kate Chesne’s burning eyes. Not a full-blown emotion, perhaps, but a flicker. A blip on the tracing of a terminally ill heart.
The patient wasn’t dead. Not yet.
He felt himself smiling. He tossed the pen up in the air and caught it smartly. Then he slipped it into his breast pocket and walked to his car.
* * *
THE DOG WAS deeply anesthetized, its legs spread-eagled, its belly shaved and prepped with iodine. It was a German shepherd, obviously well-bred and just as obviously unloved.
Guy Santini hated to see such a handsome creature end up on his research table, but lab animals were scarce these days and he had to use whatever the supplier sent him. He consoled himself with the knowledge that the animals suffered no pain. They slept blissfully through the entire surgical procedure and when it was over, the ventilator was turned off and they were injected with a lethal dose of Pentothal. Death came peacefully; it was a far better end than the animals would have faced on the streets. And each sacrifice yielded data for his research, a few more dots on a graph, a few more clues to the mysteries of hepatic physiology.
He glanced at the instruments neatly laid out on the tray: the scalpel, the clamps, the catheters. Above the table, a pressure monitor awaited final hookup. Everything was ready. He reached for the scalpel.
The whine of the door swinging closed made him pause. Footsteps clipped toward him across the polished lab floor. Glancing across the table, he saw Ann Richter standing there. They looked at each other in silence.
“I see you didn’t go to Ellen’s services, either,” he said.
“I wanted to. But I was afraid.”
“Afraid?” He
