Dead Certain

attack just a few miles from Prescott Memorial, and I brought him into the emergency room. It just so happened to be a night that Claudia was taking trauma call. I mean, I drove a dead man to Prescott Memorial Hospital, and Claudia brought him back to life. There have to be hundreds of people that she saved, people that ended up being able to walk out of the hospital.”
    “And then just like that she’s gone,” her father said angrily. “Some animal breaks into her apartment looking for something he can pawn for drugs and takes her away from the world forever.” He frowned. “I used to believe that the death penalty was a barbarous perversion of the power of the state. Now... now I would like to kill whoever did this to my daughter, with my bare hands. I can’t stand the idea of him breathing air, eating food, enjoying the luxury of an uninterrupted night’s sleep, while my daughter lies there cold and dead.”
     
    I parked behind the apartment in the space reserved for one of the neighbors, a physicist who worked at the university’s facility in Argonne. Under the circumstances I didn’t think he’d mind. Beside us was Claudia’s car, a nine-year-old Honda Civic, just one more loose end that would somehow have to be dealt with.
    As I got out of the car I felt suddenly self-conscious, as if there were people watching me from every window. Even in a crime-ridden neighborhood like Hyde Park, murder is not an everyday occurrence. The interest of the neighbors would be intense. It made me feel vulnerable and strangely exposed.
    I went around to help Professor Stein out of the car and led him through the narrow passageway, no more than three feet wide, that ran between our building and the one directly to the north. I didn’t want him to go in the back way. Besides, I needed the buffer of more time before I made my way into the part of the house where Claudia had died.
    Elliott’s operative was an off-duty FBI agent named Cecilia Roth, who’d spent the night standing guard in the sunporch of the apartment. She was young but carried herself with the kind of self-confidence that comes from being not just physically fit but heavily armed. Who knows, I thought to myself, maybe Elliott has a thing for girls with guns?
    After we introduced ourselves, she made herself scarce. She said she was running out to get something to eat, and I believed her. I knew that a person could easily starve to death on what there was to eat inside the apartment.
    “The police are going to want to talk to you,” I said to Claudia’s father as the door closed behind Agent Roth. I knew that I was just stalling, making conversation so that I could put off doing what had to be done. “I’ll take you to the station as soon as we’re finished here.”
    “Why do they want to see me?” he asked.
    “I think it’s routine for them to talk to the family. He’ll probably also want to ask you some questions about the last time you saw Claudia, the last time you two spoke.“
    “We talked last night,” he said, his eyes resting on the telephone on the table in the entrance hall. “She called me when she came home after her shift. I was surprised to hear from her. She usually only calls on Sundays when the rates are low.”
    “Why do you think she called you last night?” I asked, wanting to know what time it had been and wondering if it might help Blades pin down the time of death. “Do you remember when she phoned?”
    “A little after nine. She said she was in some kind of trouble. She wanted to know what I thought she should do.”
    “You mean about the malpractice suit?”
    “Yes. She was very worried about it. Even though she knew that she hadn’t done anything wrong when she took out that woman’s appendix, she was terribly upset. She was afraid that the whole thing was going to end up ruining her career.”
    “Did she tell you that she’d hired a lawyer?” I asked. “Did she explain that she was going to fight the suit? „
    “Yes. But apparently the hospital people were very angry about that. They were trying to pressure her into agreeing to some kind of settlement.”
    “What kind of settlement?”
    “She didn’t say, but I think the hospital just wanted to do whatever they could to make the whole thing go away.”
    “Did she say who it was who was trying to pressure her?”
    “No. But they said that if she didn’t agree to the settlement, they’d make the charges against her public. You know she had a