"Schulz? " Duncan's voice was smooth, deeply melodic. "What about him? " "According to the TV there's rumors that his cause of death is being investigated." Duncan began to rinse the honey-colored foam from his arms and hands.

"The scuttlebutt on Schulz is that he jumped. And with reason. He was, please excuse the demotic crookeder than most, and his scams were unraveling." Duncan shook his head sadly. "Twenty stories straight down, flat on his face." He sighed. "All that exceptional plastic work, all those hours of toil, wasted."

"Duncan!"

"Well, it's true. If I'd known defenestration was in his future, I wouldn't have taken such pains with him." Gin thought she was used to his dark sense of humor, so often skating along the line between mordant and sick. But sometimes he did veer over the line.

He pressed his elbow against a chrome disk in the wall and the OR doors swung open. "Hurry up. Another of the kakistocracy's finest awaits us." Gin glanced at the clock. Another minute to go with her scrub.

She felt a warm flush as she remembered yesterday's chance encounter with Gerry Canney, and wondered if he'd call. Not the end of the world if he didn't, but it would certainly be nice. She reviewed the obscure words she'd collected to spring on Duncan today, and then her thoughts probed the enigma that was Duncan Lathram.

When they first met nineteen years ago he wasn't a plastic surgeon.

At age ten she woke up in a hospital with everything hurting.

Struggling through the maze of her jumbled thoughts was the memory of horsing around with two of the neighborhood boys, proving to them that she could ride a bike as well as they could, and matching any dare they wanted to try. Suddenly she was in the middle of Lee Highway with a panel truck screeching and swerving toward her. She remembered the pale blurs of the driver's bared teeth and wide, shocked, terrified eyes through the dirty windshield as he stood on his brake pedal and tried to miss her.