"It was a pig's heart. They probably left it in my car the night before, where it baked all day in the heat. I still can't get rid of the smell."
"The man is mindfucking you," saidVivian Chao. "I say you should fuck him right back."
Abby and Vivian pushed through the front doors and crossed the lobby to the elevators. It was Sunday noon at Massachusetts General, and the public elevator was already crammed tight with visitors and get-well balloons bobbing overhead. The doors slid shut and the scent of carnations was instantly overpowering.
"We don't have any proof," murmured Abby. "We can't be sure he's the one doing this."
"Who else would it be? Look what he's done already. Manufacturing lawsuits. Shoving you in public. I'm telling you, DiMatteo, it's time to press charges. Assault. Terroristic threatening."
"The problem is, I understand why he's doing it. He's upset. His wife's having a rocky post-op course."
"Do I detect a note of guilt?"
Abby sighed. "It's hard not to feel guilty every time I pass her bed."
They stepped off the elevator onto the fourth floor and headed up the hall towards the cardiac surgery wing.
"He has the money to make your life hell for a very long time," said Vivian. "You've got one lawsuit against you already. There'll probably be more."
"I think there already are. Medical Records told me they've had six more chart requests from Hawkes, Craig, and Sussman. That's the law firm representing Joe Terrio."
Vivian stopped and stared at her. "Jesus. You're going to be in court for the rest of your natural life."
"Or until I resign. Like you."
Vivian began walking again, her stride as fierce as ever. The little Asian Amazon, afraid of nothing.
"How come you aren't fucking back?" said Abby.
"I'm trying to. The problem is, the man we're up against is Victor Voss. When I mentioned that name to my attorney, she turned a few shades whiter. Which is an amazing feat for a black woman."
"What was her advice?"
"To walk away from it. And call myself lucky that I'm already a board-eligible surgeon. At least I can find another job. Or open up my own practice."
"Voss scares her that much?"
"She wouldn't admit it, but yes. He scares a lot of people. I'm in no position to fight, anyway. I was the one in charge, so it's my head that rolls. We stole a heart, DiMatteo. There's no way around that. If it had been anyone else but Victor Voss, we might have gotten away with it. Now it's costing me." She looked at Abby. "But not as much as it could cost you."
"At least I still have my job."
"For how long?You're only a second-year resident. You've got to start fighting back, Abby. Don't let him ruin you. You're too good a doctor to be forced out."
Abby shook her head. "Sometimes I wonder if it was all worth
"Worth it?" Vivian stopped outside Room 417. "Take a look. You tell me." She knocked on the door, then stepped into the room.
The boy was sitting up in bed, fussing with a TV remote. If not for the Red Sox cap on his head, Abby might not have recognized Josh O" Day, so transformed was his appearance by the rosy flush of health. At his first glimpse of Vivian, he grinned hugely.
"Hey, Dr. Chao!" he whooped. "Geez, I wondered if you were ever coming to see me."
"I did come by," saidVivian. "Twice. But you were always asleep." She shook her head in mock disgust. "Typical lazy teenager."
They both laughed. There was a brief silence.Then, almost shyly, Josh opened his arms for a hug.
For a moment Vivian didn't move. It was as if she didn't know how to respond. Then she suddenly snapped free of some invisible restraint, and stepped towards him. The embrace was brief and clumsy. Vivian seemed almost relieved when it was over.
"So how are you?" she asked.
"Real good. Hey, didja see?" He pointed to the TV. "My dad brought me all those baseball tapes. But we can't figure out how to hook up the VCR. You know how to do it?"
"I'd probably blow up the TV."
"And you're a doctor?"
"OK. Next time you need surgery, buster, you call a TV repairman." She nodded towards Abby. "You remember Dr. DiMatteo, don't you?"
Josh looked uncertainly at Abby. "I think so. I mean. ." He shrugged. "I forgot some things, you know? Things that happened last week. It's almost like I got dumb or something."
"That's nothing to worry about," said Vivian. "When your heart stops, Josh, you don't get enough blood to your brain. You can forget a few things." She touched his shoulder. It was not the sort of thing Vivian Chao would normally do. But there she was, actually making contact. "At least you didn't forget me," she said. And added with a laugh, "Though you may have tried."
Josh looked down at the bedspread. "Dr. Chao," he said softly, "I don't ever want to forget you."
Neither one spoke for a moment. They seemed frozen by embarrassment in that awkward pose, Vivian's hand on the boy's shoulder. The boy looking downward, his face hidden under the bill of his cap.
Abby had to turn away and focus on something else. The trophies. They were all there, all the ribbons and plaques, arranged on the nightstand. No longer an altar to a dying boy, but a celebration of life. Of rebirth.
There was a knock on the door and a woman called out: "Joshie?"
"Hey, mom," said Josh.
The door swung open and the room was invaded by parents and siblings and aunts and uncles, sweeping in with them a forest of helium balloons and the smell of McDonald's fries. They swarmed around the bed, assaulted Josh with hugs and kisses and exclamations of Look at him.t He looks so good. Doesn't he look good? Josh bore it all with an expression of sheepish delight. He didn't seem to notice that Vivian had slipped away from his bedside, to make room for the noisy army of O" Days.
"Josh, honey, we brought Uncle Harry from Newbury. He knows all about VCR's. He can hook it up, can't you, Harry?"
"Oh, sure. I do all my neighbours' VCR's."
"Did you bring the right wires, Harry? You sure you got all the wires you need?"
"You think I'd forget the wires?"
"Look, Josh. Three extra-large orders of fries. It's OK, isn't it? Dr. Tarasoft didn't say you couldn't have fries?"
"mom, we forgot the camera! I was gonna take a picture of Josh's scar."
"You don't want a picture of his scar."
"My teacher said it'd be cool."
"Your teacher's too old to use words like cool. No pictures of scars. That's an invasion of privacy."
"Hey Josh, you need any help eating those fries?"
"So Harry, you think you can hook it up?"
"Gee, I don't know. This is a pretty old TV…"
Vivian had managed at last to sidle around to where Abby was standing. There was another knock on the door, and a fresh spurt of relatives pushed into the room, with more cries of He looks so good.t Doesn't he look good? Through the crowd of O" Days, Abby caught a fleeting glimpse of Josh. He was looking their way. He gave them a helpless smile, a wave.
Quietly Abby andVivian left the room. They stood in the hallway, listening to the voices beyond the door. AndVivian said, "So, Abby. To the question of was it worth it? that's your answer."
At the nurses' station, they asked to speak to Dr. IvanTarasoff. The ward clerk suggested they look in the surgeons' lounge. That's exactly where Abby and Vivian found him, sipping coffee and scribbling in his charts. With his drooping glasses and tweed jacket, Dr. Tarasoft looked more like some puttering English gentleman than the renowned cardiac surgeon.
"We just saw Josh," said Vivian.
Tarasoft looked up from his coffee-splattered notes. "And what do you think, Dr. Chao?"
"I think you do good work. The kid looks fantastic."
"He has a little post-code amnesia. Otherwise, he's bounced back the way kids always do. He'll be out of here in a week. If the nurses don't kick him out sooner."Tarasoff closed the chart and looked at Vivian. His smile faded. "I have a very big bone to pick with you, Doctor."
"Me?"
"You know what I'm talking about. That other transplant patient at Bayside. When you shipped us the boy, you didn't tell me the whole story. Then I find out the heart was already assigned."
"It wasn't. There was a directed donation consent."
"Obtained through a certain amount of subterfuge." He frowned over his glasses at Abby. "Your administrator, Mr Parr, told me all the details. So did MrVoss's attorney."
Vivian and Abby glanced at each other.
"His attorney?" said Vivian.
"That's right." Tarasoff's gaze shifted back to Vivian. "Were you trying to get me sued?"
'! was trying to save the boy."
"You withheld information."
"And now he's alive and well."
"I'm only going to say it once. Don't ever do anything like this again."
Vivian seemed about to reply, but then thought better of it. Instead she gave a solemn nod. It was her deferential Asian act, eyes downcast, head dipping in a faint bow.
Tarasoft didn't buy it. He regarded her with a look of mild vexation. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. Turning back to his charts, he said: "I should have expelled you from Harvard. When I had the chance."
"Ready about. Hard a lee!" Mark yelled, and shoved the tiller.
The bow of Gimme Shelter turned into the wind, sails crackling, ropes lashing the deck. Raj Mohandas scurried across to the starboard winch and began cranking the jib sheet. With a loud whap, the sail filled, and Gimme Shelterheeled to starboard, sending off a clatter of soft drink cans in the cabin below.
"Upwind rail, Abby!" Mark yelled. "Get to the upwind rail!" Abby scrambled across the deck to the port side, where she clung to the lifeline and offered up another fervent vow of never again. What was it about men and their boats? she wondered. What was it about the sea that made them yell?
They were all yelling, all four of them, Mark and Mohandas and Mohandas's eighteen-year-old son Hank, and Pete Jaegly, a third-year resident. Yelling about sheets that needed tightening and spinnaker poles and wasted wind puffs. They were yelling about Archer's boat, Red Eye, which was gaining on them. And, every so often, they would yell at Abby. She actually had a role in this race, a role known politely as ballast. Dead weight. A job that could be performed by sandbags. Abby was a sandbag with legs. They'd yell and she'd run across to the opposite rail where, with some regularity, she'd throw up. The men weren't throwing up. They were too busy scampering around in their expensive boat shoes and yelling. "Coming up on the mark! One more tack. Ready about!" Mohandas and Jaegly resumed their frantic deck dance. "Hard a lee!"
Gimme Shelter turned through the wind and heeled to port. Abby scrambled to the other side. Sails flapped, ropes thrashed.
Mohandas cranked the winch, the muscles on his brown arm rippling with each turn of the handle.
"She's coming up on us!" Hank called.
Behind them, Red Eye had gained another half-boat-length. They could hear Archer yelling at hid/s crew, exhorting them to come up, come up.t Gimme Shelter rounded the buoy and started her downwind course. Jaegly struggled with the spinnaker pole. Hank pulled down the jib.
Abby was throwing up over the side.
"Shit, he's right on our tail!" yelled Mark. "Get the fucking spinnaker up! Go, go, go!"
Jaegly and Hank hoisted the spinnaker. The wind filled it with a thunderous whomp and Gimme Shelter suddenly surged ahead. "That's it, Baby!" Mark whooped. "Baby, baby, here we go!"
"Look," said Jaegly, pointing aft. "What the bell's happening?"
Abby managed to raise her head and look back, towards Archer's boat.
Red Eye was no longer in pursuit. It had turned around near the buoy and was now heading back to port.
"They've started their motor," said Mark. "Think they're conceding defeat?"
"Archer? Not a chance."
"So why're they going back?"
"I guess we'd better find out. Get the spinnaker down." Mark started the engine. "We're heading back too."
Thank you, God.t thought Abby.
Her nausea was already subsiding by the time they morored into the marina. Red Eye was tied up at the dock and her crew was busy folding up sails and coiling ropes.
"Ahoy Red Eye!" yelled Mark as they glided past. "What's going on?"
Archer waved his cellular phone. "Got a call from Marllee! She told us to come in. It's something serious. She's waiting for us in the yacht club."
"OK. Meet you at the bar," said Mark. He looked at his own crew. "Let's tie up. We'll have a drink and take her back out again."
"You'll have to do it without your ballast," said Abby. "I'm jumping ship."
Mark glanced at her in surprise. "Already?"
"Didn't you see me hanging over the side?! wasn't admiring the scenery."
"Poor Abby! I'll make it up to you, OK? Promise. Champagne. Flowers. Restaurant of your choice."
"Just get me off this goddamn boat."
Laughing, he steered towards the dock. "Aye aye, first mate." As Gimme Shelter glided alongside the visitor's dock, Mohandas and Hank stepped onto the pier and tied fast the bow and stern lines. Abby was off the boat in a flash. Even the dock seemed to be swaying.
"Just leave her rigged," said Mark. "Until we find out what's up with Archer."
"He's probably got the party started already," said Mohandas. Oh Lord, Abby thought as she and Mark walked up the pier, his arm slung possessively around her shoulder. More boat talk coming up. Tanned men standing around with their gin and tonics and their polo shirts and their booming laughter.
They went inside the club, stepping from sunlight into shadow. The first thing she noticed was the silence. She saw Marilee standing at the bar with a drink in her hand. Saw Archer sitting by himself at a table, no drink, just a paper coaster in front of him. Red Eye's crew was gathered around the bar, no one moving, no one saying a thing. The only sound in the room was the clatter of ice cubes in Marilee's glass as she lifted the drink to her lips, took a sip, and set it back down again on the counter.
Mark said, "Is something wrong?"
Marilee looked up and blinked, as if noticing Mark for the first time. Then she looked back down at the counter. At her drink.
"They found Aaron," she said.
It was the grinding of the Stryker bone saw that usually did it; that or the smell. This one smelled pretty bad.
Homicide Detective Bernard Katzka glanced across the autopsy table and saw that the stench had gotten to Lundquist. His younger partner was turned partially away from the table, gloved hand cupped over his nose and mouth, his movie-star good looks twisted into a squint of nausea. Lundquist had not yet developed the stomach for autopsies; most cops never did. While the cutting open of dead bodies was not Katzka's favourite spectator sport, over the years he had trained himself to view the procedure as an intellectual exercise, to focus not on the humanity of the victim but on the purely organic nature of death. He had seen bodies cooked in fires, bodies scraped off the pavement after twenty-storey free falls, bodies shot or stabbed or both, bodies gnawed by rodents. Except for the children, which always upset him, one body was like any other on the table, a specimen stripped, examined, and catalogued. To view them any other way was to invite nightmares.
Bernard Katzka was forty-four years old and a widower. Three years ago, he had watched his wife die of cancer. Katzka had already lived his worst nightmare.
He focused impassively on the body now being autopsied. The corpse was a fifty-four-year-old white male, married with two college-aged children, a cardiologist by profession. His identity had been confirmed by fingerprints as well as visual ID by the widow. The experience must have been profoundly upsetting to her. Viewing the corpse of a loved one is difficult enough. When that loved one has been hanging by the neck for two days in a warm and unventilated room, the sight would be truly horrifying.
The widow, he'd been told, had fainted dead away on the morgue floor.
And no wonder, thought Katzka, looking down at the corpse of Aaron Levi. The face was a bloodless white; its arterial supply had been cut off by the pressure of the leather belt looped around the neck. The protruding tongue was a scaly black, its mucous surface dried out by two days' exposure to air. The eyelids were only partially closed. The slitted openings revealed scleral haemorrhages which had turned the whites of the eyes a frightening blood-red. Below the neck, where the belt had imprinted its ligature mark, the skin showed the classic pattern of dependent pooling, a bruise-like discoloration of the lower legs and arms as well as pinpoint haemorrhages, called Tardieu spots, where vessels had ruptured. All of this was consistent with death by hanging. The only visible injury, aside from the ligature marks around the neck, was a coin-shaped bruise on the left shoulder.
Dr. Rowbotham and his assistant, both gowned, gloved, and wearing protective goggles, completed the thoraco-abdominal incision. It was shaped in aY, two diagonal incisions starting at the shoulders and joining at the lower end of the sternum, then a vertical slice down the abdomen to the pubic bone. Rowbotham had served thirty-two years with the ME's office, and very little seemed to surprise or excite him. If anything, he looked slightly bored as he cut into the body. He was dictating in his usual monotone as his foot clicked on and off the recording pedal. Now he lifted off the triangular shield of rib and breastbone and exposed the pleural cavity.
"Take a look, Slug," he said to Katzka. The nickname had nothing to do with Katzka's appearance, which was average in every way. Rather, it was a reflection of Katzka's unflappable nature. Among his fellow cops, the running joke was that if you shot Bernard Katzka on a Monday, he might react by Friday. But only if he was pissed.
Katzka leaned forward to peer inside the chest cavity, his expression every bit as flat as Rowbotham's. "I don't see anything unusual."
"Exactly. Maybe a little pleural congestion. Probably due to capillary leakage from hypoxia. But it's all consistent with asphyxiation."
"So I guess we're out of here, huh?" said Lundquist. Already he was sidling away from the table, away from the smell, impatient to get on to other things. He was like all the other young bucks, eager to cut to the chase. Any chase. Suicide by hanging was not something he wanted to waste his time on.
Katzka did not move from the table.
"We really need to watch the rest of this, Slug?" asked Lundquist. "They're just starting."
"It's a suicide."
"This one feels different to me."
"The findings are classic. You just heard it."
"He got out of bed in the middle of the night. He got up, got dressed, and climbed in his car. Think about it. Getting out of your nice warm bed to go hang yourself on the top floor of a hospital."
Lundquist glanced at the body, then looked away again.
By now Rowbotham and his assistant had severed the trachea and the great vessels and were removing the heart and lungs in one floppy bundle. Rowbotham dropped them into a hanging scale. The steel cradle bounced a few times, squeaking with the weight of the organs.
"It's your only chance to view it," said Rowbotham, his scalpel now at work on the spleen. "We finish up here, and it goes straight to burial. Family request."
"Any particular reason?" asked Lundquist.
"Jewish. You know, quick interment. All the organs have to be returned to the body." Rowbotham dropped the spleen in the scale and watched as the indicator needle quivered, then came to a rest.
Lundquist yanked off his autopsy gown, revealing shoulders bulky with muscle. It was all those hours in the gym, pumping and sweating. He had restless energy and he was showing it now. Always on to bigger and better things, that was Lundquist. Katzka still had to work on him, and the lesson today ought to be the fallibility of first impressions — not an easy thing to get across to a young cop who had all that confidence, all those good looks. That and a full head of hair.
Rowbotham continued with the disembowelment. He cut free the intestines, pulling out what seemed like endless loops of bowel. The liver, pancreas, and stomach were removed in a single mass. Finally the kidneys and bladder were dissected out and dropped in that squeaky scale. Another weight was called out, recorded. A few more mutterings into the tape recorder. What was left was a gaping cavity.
Now Rowbotham circled around to the corpse's head. He made an incision behind one ear and cut straight across the back of the scalp. He peeled the scalp forward in one flap, doubling it over the face. Then he peeled the other flap back over the neck, exposing the base of the skull. He picked up the oscillating saw. His expression twisted into a grimace as the bone dust began to fly. No one was talking at this point. The saw was too noisy, and the procedure had turned sickening. Cutting into a chest and abdomen, though grotesque, was somehow impersonal. Like butchering a cow. But peeling a man's scalp over his face was mutilating the most human, the most personal aspect of a corpse.
Lundquist, looking a little green, suddenly sat down in a chair by the sink and dropped his head in his hands. Many a cop had made use of that particular chair.
Rowbotham put down the saw and removed the skull cap. Now he freed up the brain for removal. He cut the optic nerves and severed the blood vessels and spinal cord. Then, gingerly, he lifted the brain out in one quivering mass. "Nothing unusual," he said, and slid it into a pail of formalin.
"Now we get down to the nitty gritty. The neck."
Everything that had come before this was merely preliminary to this stage. The removal of viscera and brain had allowed drainage of fluids out the cranial and chest cavities. The neck dissection could proceed with a minimum of obscuring blood and fluids.
The belt ligature had been removed from the neck early in the autopsy. Rowbotham now examined the furrow left behind on the skin.
"Your classic inverted V shape," he noted aloud. "See here, Slug, you've got parallel ligature marks which match the edges of the belt. And at the back here, you see this?"
"Looks like a mark from the buckle."
"Right. No surprises so far." Rowbotham picked up his scalpel and began the neck dissection.
By now Lundquist had recovered and was back at the table, looking a little humble. Nausea, thought Katzka, was so satisfyingly democratic. It brought down even musclebound cops with full heads of hair.
Rowbotham's blade had already sliced through the skin of the anterior neck. He cut deeper, exposing the pearly white superior horns of the thyroid cartilage.
"No fractures. You've got some haemorrhage over here, in the strap muscles. But the thyroid and hyoid bones both seem intact." "Meaning?"
"Not a thing. Hanging doesn't necessarily cause much internal neck damage. Death results purely from interruption of the blood supply to the brain. All that's needed is compression of the carotid arteries. It's a relatively painless way to kill yourself."
"You seem pretty sure it's suicide."
"The only other possibility is accidental. Autoerotic asphyxiation. But you say there was no evidence of that."
Lundquist said, "His cock was still zipped up. Didn't look like he'd been jerking off."
"So we're talking suicide. Homicidal hanging is almost unheard of. If someone was strangled first, you'd see a different ligature pattern. Not this inverted V. And forcing a man's head in a noose, well, that would almost certainly leave other injuries. He'd fight back."
"There's that bruise on the upper arm."
Rowbotham shrugged. "He could have hurt himself in any number of ways."
"What if he was drugged and unconscious before he was hanged?"
"We'll do a tox screen, Slug, just to make you happy." Lundquist cut in with a laugh, "And we do have to keep Slug happy." He moved away from the table. "It's four o'clock. You coming, Slug?"
"I'd like to see the rest of the neck dissection."
"Whatever turns you on. I say we just call it a suicide and leave it."
"I would. Except for the lights."
"What lights?" said Rowbotham, his eyes finally registering interest behind the protective goggles.
"Slug's hung up on the lights in that room," said Lundquist. "Dr. Levi was found hanging in an unused patient room of the hospital," explained Katzka. "The workman who found the body was almost certain the lights were off."
"Go on," said Rowbotham.
"Well, your time-of-death finding correlates with what we think happened — that Dr. Levi died very early Saturday morning. Well before sunrise. Which means he either hung himself in the dark. Or someone else turned off the lights."
"Or the workman didn't remember what the fuck he saw," said Lundquist. "The guy was puking his guts into the toilet. You think he'd remember if the light switch was up or down?"
"It's just a detail that concerns me."
Lundquist laughed. "Doesn't bother me," he said, and tossed his gown into the laundry bag.
It was nearly six o'clock that evening when Katzka pulled his Volvo into a parking space at Bayside Hospital. He got out, walked into the lobby, and took the elevator to the thirteenth floor. That was as far as it would take him without a pass key. He had to leave the elevator and climb the emergency stairwell to reach the top level.
The first thing he noticed as he emerged from the stairwell was the silence. The sense of emptiness. For months, this area had been undergoing renovations. No construction workers had come in today, but their equipment was everywhere. The air smelled of sawdust and fresh paint. . and something else. An odor he recognized from the autopsy room. Death. Decay. He walked past ladders and a Makita saw, and turned the corner.
Halfway down the next corridor, yellow police tape was plastered across one of the doorways. He ducked under the tape and pushed through the closed door.
In this room, the renovations had been completed. There was new wallpaper, custom cabinetry, and a floor-to-ceiling window with a view over the city. A penthouse hospital suite for that special patient with a bottomless wallet. He went into the bathroom and flicked on the wall switch. More luxury. A marble vanity, brass fixtures, a mirror with cosmetic lighting. A thronelike toilet. He turned off the lights and walked back out of the bathroom.
He went to the closet.
This is where Dr. Aaron Levi had been found hanging. One end of the leather belt had been tied to the closet dowel. The other end had been looped around Levi's neck. Apparently, he had simply let his legs go limp, causing the belt to tighten around his throat, cutting off carotid blood flow to the brain. If he had changed his mind at the last moment, all he had to do was set his feet back on the floor, stand up, and loosen the belt. But he had not done so. He had hung there for the five to ten seconds it had taken for consciousness to fade.
Thirty-six hours later, on a Sunday afternoon, one of the workmen had come into this room to finish grouting the bathtub. He had not planned on finding a dead body.
Katzka crossed to the window. There he stood looking over the city of Boston. Dr. Aaron Levi, he thought, what could've gone so wrong in your life?
A cardiologist. A wife, a nice home, a Lexus. Two kids, grown and in college. For one irrational moment, Katzka felt a flash of rage at Aaron Levi. What the hell had he known about despair and hopelessness? What possible reason did he have to end his life? Coward. Coward. Katzka turned away from the window, shaken by his own anger. By his disgust at anyone who chose such an end. And why this end?Why hang yourself in this lonely room where no one might find you for days?
There were other ways to commit suicide. Levi was a doctor. He had access to narcotics, barbiturates, any number of drugs that could be ingested in fatal doses. Katzka knew exactly how much phenobarb it took to end a life. He had made it his business to know. Once, he had counted out the right number of pills, calculated for his own body weight. He had laid them on his dining room table, had contemplated the freedom they represented. An end to grief, to despair. An easy but irreversible way out, once his affairs were in order. But the time had never been quite right. He had too many responsibilities to take care of first. Annie's funeral arrangements. Paying off her hospital bills. Then there'd been a trial that required his testimony, then a double homicide in Roxbury, and the last eight car payments to complete, and then a triple homicide in Brookline, and another trial requiring his testimony.
In the end, Slug Katzka had simply been too busy to kill himself. Now it was three years later and Annie was buried and those phenobarb pills had long since been disposed of. He never thought about suicide these days. Every so often, though, he'd think about the pills lying on his dining-room table, and he would wonder why he had ever been tempted. How he had ever come so close to surrender. He had no sympathy for the Slug of three years ago. Nor did he have sympathy for anyone else with a bottle of pills and a terminal case of self-pity.
And what was your reason, Dr. Levi?
He looked at that glowing view of Boston, and he thought about how it must have been in the last hour of Aaron Levi's life. He tried to imagine climbing out of bed at three in the morning. Driving to the hospital. Riding the elevator to the thirteenth floor and then climbing the last flight of steps to the fourteenth. Walking into this room. Tying the belt over the closet dowel and slipping your head into the loop.
Katzka frowned.
He crossed to the light switch and flipped it up. The lights came on. They worked just fine. So who had turned them off?. Aaron Levi? The workman who'd found the body?
Someone else?
Details, thought Katzka. It was the details that drove him craw.