12th of Never

don’t know how much a four-week-old baby can sense, but I didn’t want her to know how scared I was. How scared we were.
    I said, “Hi, sweetie. How’s my girl?” “I want a second opinion,” said Joe.
    “What do you mean, Joe? We shouldn’t do the chemo?”
    “I want someone else to see her, to do the tests again, see if we get the same results.”
    “But that could waste valuable time. Maybe that loss of time would just tilt the odds from fifty–fifty to sixty–forty against her. I
like
Dr. Dwy. I
like
this hospital.”
    Joe said, “May I hold her?”
    I gave the baby to my husband and he held her against his shoulder the way he likes to. He walked around the small room with her, rubbed her back. She closed her eyes and started to breathe rhythmically until she was in a deep sleep.
    I thought about my mother’s cancer, what a tenacious bitch it was, and how, despite the chemotherapy, the radiation, the surgery, and my mother’s strong will to live, she had died.
    I heard Dr. Dwy in my mind saying, “These acute leukemias move very quickly.”
    “I want to take her to Saint Francis,” Joe said. “I’ve done a lot of research. There’s a very highly regarded hem-onc there.”
    “A what did you say?”
    “Hematologist-oncologist. I want to bring Julie to Mark Sebetic. He’s busy. He’s famous. He’s well guarded by his staff. I’m going to knock down whatever doors I have to. I won’t accept ‘no’ for an answer. I’ll sleep outside his office if that’s what it takes.”
    I was torn right down the middle of my heart. I didn’t want Julie to go through the sickness and discomfort of chemotherapy, but I also didn’t want to delay treatment that could save her life.
    My husband is older than me, has been uncle to more than a dozen children, and has made life-and-death decisions for other people his entire professional life. But we loved Julie equally. We had to agree on the best course of treatment for our baby.
    We had to decide together what was best for her.

Chapter 78
    CONKLIN TURNED AWAY from the dead man’s partially submerged body and saw Claire Washburn coming toward him in the watery gloom. Her scene kit was in hand and three techs trailed in her wake.
    “Hey, cowboy,” she called out. “Where’s your partner?”
    Conklin said, “You got me. She’s a mom first these days. I keep getting her voice mail. So what happened, Claire? You ducked out the back door and Dr. Morse doesn’t know you’re missing?”
    “If we didn’t have a ten-car smashup on the freeway, he’d be here instead of me. Hey, Charlie,” she said. “How goes it?”
    “What I love about this job is that it’s always different. Take a look at that.” Charlie Clapper pointed to the hole in the wall, six feet off the ground, water flowing through it as though it were a fire hose. He said, “Could be that the shot went wild, or could be it was deliberate, so that everyone’s mind would go to the six hundred million gallons of water coming into the tunnel, not to the vic or the shooter.”
    “I hope someone’s going to put their finger in the dike,” Claire said, looking at the stream. “Meanwhile, I need to get a look at the DB.”
    Conklin stood beside Claire as she photographed the body and the wound. He said, “I think I know this guy.”
    “You do? Tell me about it,” she said.
    “This English professor came in to see us a couple of weeks ago. He said he’s been having these dreams.”
    Claire moved around the body, got another angle on the head wound. “What do you mean, ‘dreams’? I’ve been a little out of the loop since Faye Farmer was boosted from my freezer.”
    “This professor had dreams of people being murdered. First time, it was a woman who liked to shop at his local grocery store. He described her down to her toenail polish. Bang, she takes a hit in the ice cream section. Just what he dreamed.”
    “So you’re saying this professor sees dead people? But he sees them when they’re alive?”
    “Something like that. So a few days after the supermarket hit, the professor comes in again. This time he’s dreamed that a female streetcar driver on the F line took one through the forehead. He described her as blond-haired. Even described advertising inside the car.”
    Claire said, “Richie, if you’re waiting to ID this man, let me put your mind at rest. I’m not turning the body in this swamp. Lyle, call Henry, tell him to hurry up with that stretcher.”
    “Just