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"I don't want any sedative," Laurie shrieked. She tried again to free her hands.

"That's just the kind of response the sedative is to prevent," Jazz said. "Elizabeth, would you mind holding Miss Montgomery while I do the honors."

With a smile not too dissimilar from Jazz's, Elizabeth grasped Laurie's shoulders and leaned her considerable weight over her. Laurie tried to squirm, but it was to no avail.

She felt the cold alcohol pledget swipe across the skin of her upper arm, followed by a pinch and a short, sharp pain. Jazz straightened up, replacing the cap on the used needle.

"Sleep tight!" Jazz said. She waved to Elizabeth, and the two women walked out of the room.

A helpless moan escaped from Laurie's lips as she settled back onto the pillow.

Earlier, with her pain and the effects of the drugs she'd been given, she had believed it would have been impossible for her to feel more helpless than she already had, but she was wrong. She was now literally tied to the bed like a potential sacrificial victim. She had no idea what kind of injection she'd been given. For all she knew, it was a poison and the struggle was already over. If it was a sedative, as Jazz had claimed, then soon she was destined to be that much more vulnerable.

Although Jack was in superb aerobic shape from both basketball and biking, he was out of breath when he skidded to a stop in front of the elevators in the OCME. He'd heard Carl Novak yell out his name as Jack ran past the security office, but Jack didn't slow down. No one was in the mortuary office. Jack struck the elevator button repeatedly, as if doing so would speed up its arrival.

As he waited, he tried to think of what Laurie could have possibly done with the CD

she'd burned in Roger's office. It had to have been on the CD that Laurie had come across the MEF2A reference. The elevator arrived and Jack jumped on. The CD hadn't been with the charts or the lists, and he hadn't seen it in her desk drawers. The only place he hadn't looked was the four-drawer file cabinet. He glanced at his watch. It was five minutes past four. He'd now been gone from the Manhattan General a little more than three hours, which he felt was the upper limit of what he was comfortable with. As he had decided, he was going to hold himself to fifteen minutes for the CD search.

The elevator bumped to a stop, and it seemed to take an inordinately long time for the door to open. Impatiently, Jack hammered at it with the base of his fist. In its own time it slid open, and Jack took off down the darkened hallway. Like a cartoon character, he almost missed the door into Laurie's office because of how quickly he was running.

He had to grab the jamb to keep from sliding past on the heavily waxed floor. Once inside Laurie's office, he started with the top drawer of the file cabinet.

After five minutes of vain searching, Jack slid the bottom drawer closed and stood up.

He scratched his head, puzzling over where on earth she would have put the damn CD.

He glanced at Riva's desk but dismissed it as a possibility. There would be no reason for her to store it there. A better possibility was that he had missed it when he'd gone through Laurie's desk, so he sat down and searched all her drawers again. This time he was particularly thorough, believing the CD had to be in there somewhere.

Jack sat up again after closing the last drawer. "Damn," he voiced out loud. He looked at his watch. He had less than five minutes of his allotted time left. As he looked back up at the desk surface with the idea of going through the stack of charts to see if the CD had inadvertently gotten into one, his eyes noticed the tiny yellow light on the frame of Laurie's computer monitor. Although the screen was dark, the light suggested that the computer was booted but the monitor had powered itself down.

With his right index finger, Jack hit one of the keys on the keyboard. Instantly, the screen illuminated, and Jack found himself looking at a page of Stephen Lewis's record, listing the results of all his laboratory tests. The print was small, and Jack had to fumble with the reading glasses he'd secretly gotten. With the glasses on, he was able to read the print, and his eye went down the column on the left-hand side of the page. Eventually, he came to "MASNP," and running his finger along horizontally, he found "positive MEF2A."

With a shake of his head at his stupidity of not looking for the CD in Laurie's CD

drive, Jack took hold of Laurie's mouse and spent the next several minutes scrolling through the digital record of various patients in Laurie's series. What he found didn't surprise him. With every case that he looked at from both the Manhattan General and St.

Francis, he found that the MASNP test was positive for a marker for any one of a number of deleterious gene mutations. Some he recognized, but others he did not. When he got to Darlene Morgan's chart, he got a particularly chilling wake-up call. Her MASNP was positive for the BRCA1 gene!

For a split second, Jack stared frozen at the screen. Up until that very minute, he'd thought of Laurie's risk as a potential target for whoever was killing these patients as relatively low, since statistics were on her side. Suddenly, that was no longer the case.

Whoever was doing the killing was seemingly targeting people with inherited deleterious genes, and he remembered that Laurie, like Darlene Morgan, had BRCA1.

As if propelled by a rocket, Jack leaped up, dashed out of Laurie's office, and rushed headlong back down the corridor to the elevator. Luckily, the car was still there when he pressed the down button. As he descended, he fumbled for his cell phone in his coat pocket. He looked at his watch. It was sixteen minutes after four. Quickly, he dialed the Manhattan General Hospital, but he didn't try to put the call through. He had no signal.

The moment the doors opened on the basement level, Jack ran the length of the hall, passing a surprised Carl Novak for the second time just going in the opposite direction.

Again, Jack ignored the man. He had his cell phone plastered to his ear after having pressed the call button the moment he'd emerged from the elevator. The hospital operator answered as he thundered down the short run of stairs from the morgue's loading dock to the pavement. After identifying himself as a doctor and without slowing down, Jack breathlessly asked to be put through to the PACU. What he wanted was reassurance that Laurie would not be moved until Dr. Riley made rounds. Running full tilt, Jack reached 30th Street and turned west.

Just as he reached First Avenue the PACU phone was picked up. He recognized the charge nurse's authoritative voice and Jack pulled himself to a stop. It wasn't raining as hard as it had been a quarter hour earlier when he'd dashed back to the OCME, but it was still raining just the same, such that he felt he had to shield his phone with his free hand. In front of him, relatively infrequent cars raced northward.

Between breaths, Jack identified himself to Thea.

"Wait a second," Thea said. Then, off the line, Jack could hear her yelling directions about which bed a new patient should be put in. Then she came back on the line. "Sorry, we're kind of busy here. What can I do for you, Dr. Stapleton?"

"I don't mean to be a bother," Jack said. While he was talking, he was looking for a taxi. He'd not seen any. "I wanted to check on Laurie Montgomery's status." He finally saw a cab in the distance with its vacant light illuminated. He was about to step off the curb and raise his hand when Thea shocked him with her response.

"We don't have a Laurie Montgomery."

"What do you mean?" Jack questioned with a start. "She's in the bed against the opposite wall. I was in there tonight. You even told me she was a charmer."

"Oh, that Laurie Montgomery. I beg your pardon. Over the last few hours, we've had a revolving-door situation with a bunch of trauma victims. Laurie Montgomery left the PACU. She was doing just fine, and we needed the bed."

Jack's mouth went suddenly dry. "When did this happen?"

"Right after I got the disaster call from the OR supervisor. My guess would be about two-fifteen."

"I left you with my cell phone number," Jack sputtered. "You were supposed to call me if there was any change in her status."

"There wasn't any change. Her vitals were rock-solid. We wouldn't have let her go if there had been any trouble whatsoever, believe me!"

"Where did she go?" Jack managed, desperately trying to control the anger and dismay in his voice. "To the ICU?"

"Nope! She didn't need the ICU, and it was full anyway. So was OB-GYN. She went to room 609 on the surgical floor."

Jack snapped his phone shut and desperately looked out into the mostly empty, dark, wet avenue. The cab he'd seen earlier had gone by during his preoccupation with the shocking, disastrous conversation with Thea Papparis. The idea that Laurie had been out of the PACU in her vulnerable state for two hours while he'd been out running around on his stupid errands was almost too horrible for him to contemplate. The question
What have I been thinking?
reverberated around inside his mind like clashing cymbals. Overwhelmed with panic, Jack began running northward up First Avenue, mindless of the puddles that appeared like pools of black crude oil. He knew it would take him much too long to run all the way to the Manhattan General, but also knew he couldn't just stand there.

TWENTY-FOUR

IT HAD BEEN A BUSY NIGHT, maybe one of the busiest Jazz could remember at her present place of employment. They'd been inundated with trauma patients coming up from the PACU and filling all the empty beds. As the self-appointed acting charge nurse, a status that was soon to change, according to rumor, with the hiring of a new, senior night-shift RN, it had fallen to Jazz by default to divvy the patients up among the current night-shift nurses and the nurse's aides. There hadn't been too much complaining, since Jazz had made it a point to take her share. More important, she'd also made it a point to add Laurie Montgomery to her patient roster. Once that had been established and accepted, Jazz relaxed. She knew she'd be able to carry out her Operation Winnow responsibility at her whim.

Jazz stretched her arms over her head and rotated her head a few times to loosen up her neck muscles. She was tense. She'd just finished the last of some paperwork and was looking at some well-earned downtime from patient care, which she intended to put to good use. Even the lunch break had been truncated for everyone because of patient demand, forcing Jazz to skip eating altogether. Instead, she used the time to disappear into the ladies' room outside the cafeteria to load a syringe with the potassium chloride she'd pilfered from the ER stock and to dispose of the empty ampoule. From her perspective, the preparation for a sanction had become routine.

It was four-forty A.M., and all was ready. She had been waiting for the right moment, and it had arrived. Elizabeth, who had been sitting there with Jazz two seconds earlier, doing her own paperwork, had been called to help a patient in room 637 and had just disappeared from view. At the same time, all the other nurses and aides were likewise out of sight, tending to their assigned patients. The dimly lit corridors had that peaceful nighttime tranquility that Jazz had come to appreciate. She looked up one corridor and down the other. It was a perfect opportunity.

Pushing back from the desk, Jazz stood up. Her hand went into her right jacket pocket for a reassuring fondle of the full syringe. Taking a deep breath to control her excitement, she set off. With quickening steps, she silently hastened down to room 609.

Pausing outside the door, she cast yet another glance up and down the long corridor.

Once she'd started a mission, she preferred not to be seen to avoid any talk after the fact.

Conveniently, no one was in sight. The only sound was the quiet, metronomic beeping of a monitor in a nearby room. Jazz smiled. Sanctioning Laurie Montgomery was possibly going to be the most effortless assignment she'd done, both because she'd been able to pick the time and because the target was sedated and in restraints.
What
could be easier?
Jazz questioned under her breath.

Jazz stepped into the room. A half hour earlier, when she had found herself passing by on her way back to the nurses' station after tending another patient, she'd ducked in to make certain the sedative had taken effect. It had. While she was there, she'd lowered the back of Laurie's bed so she was horizontal. She had also turned off the overhead fluorescent lights. Now, similar to the corridor, the room was bathed in a gentle incandescent glow from the recessed nightlights positioned just above the baseboard.

Without a sound, Jazz moved over to Laurie's bedside. Laurie was in a deep, drug-induced sleep. Her mouth was slightly open, and Jazz could see that her lips and tongue were dry and crusted. "Oh, poor dear," Jazz whispered scornfully. Jazz was enjoying herself. Of all the patients Jazz had so far sanctioned, she felt Laurie deserved it the most, with all her demands and poor attitude. For Jazz, Laurie was the quintessentially entitled, rich bitch who was the female equivalent of all the Mr. Ivy Leagues Jazz had to endure. And on top of that, she was a doctor who was still ordering Jazz around while she was a patient! From Jazz's perspective, Laurie Montgomery with her silver-spoon past "had it coming to her" to be taken down one big, ultimate peg.

Jazz eyed the restraints binding Laurie's wrists and felt a shiver of pleasure. There was no doubt that the restraints made the mission easier, and she was confident that Laurie wouldn't be scratching her arm like that bastard Stephen Lewis. But beyond the practical, she thought the restraints had an appeal similar to what she felt when she watched the collection of bondage movies she had downloaded off the Web. For her, it was a control issue.

Gently, Jazz lifted Laurie's head and slipped out the pillow. She was confident with the sedative she'd given her that Laurie wouldn't stir, and she didn't. Jazz tucked the pillow under her arm. She wanted it handy to slap over Laurie's face in the eventuality that Laurie made any untoward noises like pain-in-the-neck Sobczyk. She didn't expect Laurie would; the IV was a central line, meaning the concentrated potassium would be dumped into a major vein and would be less painful than a superficial one, but Jazz wanted to be prepared. She prided herself in being a quick learner, and the fewer the surprises, the better.