"What can I do for you?" she pressed; this time her voice had an impatient edge.

"I would like to talk to you about the circumstances surrounding Caroline's illness and the cause of her death."

"I'm sorry, there are privacy issues. It is not something I can discuss."

"I understand, doctor, but I have been given legal access to all of her papers, her medical records included."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Marten," she said sharply, "there is nothing I can do to help you. Please don't call again." Abruptly she hung up.

Marten remembered standing there, the receiver still in his hand. Like that, he'd been shut down and shut off. What it meant was that if he wanted to see Caroline's medical records he would have to go through an entire legal process and then months and perhaps thousands of dollars in legal fees later, he might or might not get to see them. Even if he did-especially if Caroline had been right and there had been foul play-how could he be sure that the records he had been given access to had not been tampered with?

From his own past experience he knew that investigators who took no for an answer and went home rarely got any answers at all. The detectives who stayed in the game and pressed it, who sometimes didn't go home for days were the ones who got the resolutions they were looking for. It was why he knew what he had to do next. Get to Dr. Stephenson right away and ask her point-blank if she thought Caroline had been murdered.

It was an approach that more often than not got some kind of concrete response. Usually it came in the way a question was answered, a hesitation or an awkward wording of a phrase, or by the person's eye movement or body language, sometimes by all three. Rarely did someone involved with a crime not somehow give themselves away. Proving it, of course, was something else. But that was not his purpose now, only to get some sense that Caroline had been right, that she had deliberately been given some kind of toxin that had killed her. And if she had, to see if Dr. Stephenson had personally been involved.