“Any word from the doctors?” Gage asked softly, a step away.

Spike shook his head as he looked up. His dark face and bloodhound eyes revealed nothing. He wasn’t about to give passersby fodder for speculation, later to be whispered to tabloid reporters as fact: Then this private eye came up. Tall. Solid-looking. About fifty. Not a snap-your-neck-tough-guy type, but you could tell he works out. First I thought he was like a college professor or something. Now I’m thinking that he looked a helluva lot more like a cop than the short, fat detective-that guy couldn’t run nobody down. Somebody told me the PI said he was going to…

“What about the shooter?”

“Not a damn thing.” Spike’s tone was low, grim.

Murmuring flowed from the waiting room. Gage glanced inside at the families of the night’s wounded huddled together in plastic chairs under brutal fluorescent lights. The air was heavy, almost sweating, reeking of unwashed bodies ripped from sleep by sickness or violence.

Gage and Spike turned as one as Dr. Ajita Kishore approached. She acknowledged Spike with a quick nod. They didn’t need an introduction. The trauma surgeon had sought him out a hundred times before on that same square of speckled tan linoleum, more often than not to report that a shooting or stabbing or beating had become a homicide.

Kishore looked up at Gage, her deep-set South Asian eyes expressing a compassionate familiarity, even an affection, that he hadn’t expected.

“You must be Graham,” she said. Her accent was Indianized British. Formal, but not distant.

Gage nodded, his jaw set tight for the worst, his eyes riveted on her.

She held his gaze. “Mr. Burch raised his hand and mumbled, ‘Graham, tell Graham’ just before we put him under. Something in his voice told me you’d be here when I finished. He must trust you very much.”