“Okay,” he said. “I was on my way back to the office from playing racquetball — I play racquetball twice a week, Stephanie and I go skiing on the weekends. That’s why I moved out here from New York, for the skiing. I do downhill and cross-country, so you can see it’s impossible for me to have had a heart attack.”

“You were on the way back to the office — ” Joanna prompted.

“Yeah,” Greg said. “It’s snowing, and the road’s really slick, and this idiot in a Jeep Cherokee tries to cut in front of me, and I end up in the ditch. I’ve got a shovel in the car, so I start digging myself out, and I don’t know what happened then. I figure a piece of ice off a truck must have hit me in the head and knocked me out, because the next thing I know, there’s a siren going, and I’m in an ambulance and a paramedic’s sticking these ice-cold paddles on my chest.”

Of course, Joanna thought resignedly. I finally get a subject Maurice Mandrake hasn’t already corrupted, and he doesn’t remember anything. “Can you remember anything at all between your — between being hit in the head and waking up in the ambulance?” Joanna asked hopefully. “Anything you heard? Or saw?” but he was already shaking his head.

“It was like when I had my cruciate ligament operated on last year. I tore it playing softball,” he said. “One minute the anesthesiologist was saying, ‘Breathe deeply,’ and the next I was in the recovery room. And in between, nothing, zip, nada.”

Oh, well, at least she was keeping him in bed until the cardiologist got there.

“I told the nurse when she said you wanted to talk to me that I couldn’t have had a near-death experience because I wasn’t anywhere near death,” he said. “When you do talk to people who have died, what do they say? Do they tell you they saw tunnels and lights and angels like they say on TV?”

“Some of them,” Joanna said.

“Do you think they really did or that they just made it up?”