A thought sparked in the chaos of Bekker's mind.

The jury.

He caught it, mentally, like a quick hand snatching a fly from midair.

Bekker slumped at the defense table, the center of the circus. His vacant blue eyes rolled back, pale and wide as a plastic baby-doll's, wandering around the interior of the courtroom, snagging on a light fixture, catching on an electrical outlet, sliding past the staring faces. His hair had been cut jailhouse short, but they had let him keep the wild blond beard. An act of mercy: the beard disguised the tangled mass of pink scar tissue that crisscrossed his face. In the middle of the beard, his pink rosebud lips opened and closed, like an eel's, damp and glistening.

Bekker looked at the thought he'd caught: The jury. Housewives, retirees, welfare trash. His peers, they called them. A ridiculous concept: he was a doctor of medicine. He stood at the top of his profession. He was respected. Bekker shook his head.

Understand…?

The word tumbled from the judge-crow's mouth and echoed in his mind. "Do you understand, Mr. Bekker?"

What…?

The idiot flat-faced attorney pulled at Bekker's sleeve: "Stand up."

What…?

The prosecutor turned to stare at him, hate in her eyes. The hate touched him, reached him, and he opened his mind and let it flow back. I'd like to have you for five minutes, good sharp scalpel would open you up like a goddamn oyster: zip, zip. Like a goddamn clam.

The prosecutor felt Bekker's interest. She was a hard woman; she'd put six hundred men and women behind bars. Their petty threats and silly pleas no longer interested her. But she flinched and turned away from Bekker.

What? Standing? Time now?

Bekker struggled back. It was so hard. He'd let himself go during the trial. He had no interest in it. Refused to testify. The outcome was fixed, and he had more serious problems to deal with. Like survival in the cages of the Hennepin County Jail, survival without his medicine.