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she’d climbed into bed.
    Then the phone rang.
    It wasn’t the hospital. It was Brad Clayton. He was asking for her help. It wasn’t a medical emergency, he told her immediately, but he needed her.
    Mallory sat up in bed and looked at the clock. She asked him to repeat himself because she couldn’t believe what she’d heard. Brad Clayton, the great and moody doctor asking her for help.
    â€œI’m at the police station,” he said.
    He wouldn’t go into why he was there or why he had no car, though he said he’d been arrested. But she hadn’t really needed an explanation, she hopped out of bed, dressed and left for the police station.
    â€œI’m looking for Dr. Bradley Clayton,” she told the officer at the desk when she entered the brightly lit station. The man looked up at her and down at a clipboard, apparently checking for Brad’s name.
    â€œHe’ll be right out.”
    Mallory moved away from the glass-paneled area where he sat. As she turned she wondered if it was bulletproof. She’d never been in a police station. It looked exactly as she expected it would. This was an old building, probably built in the 1930s and serving several government functions before being convertedinto a police precinct. The walls were a drab gray, the furniture old but sturdy. The floors were marble, grooved in places from the thousands of feet that had crossed them in decades of use.
    A case with trophies sat across from the officer. Mallory stared into it, not reading the inscriptions, not really seeing what was there. Her mind was on Brad and how he’d come to be arrested. What was he being charged with, and more important, why had he called her?
    An electronic click that signaled the opening of a door had Mallory turning toward the sound. Brad came out. He was wearing his bomber jacket and jeans. He looked tired. She went to him as if he were a patient about to collapse.
    â€œAre you all right?” She took his arm. Her medical bag was in the car. He’d said it wasn’t an emergency, so she hadn’t carried it in.
    â€œLet’s get out of here.” He headed for the exit, and she followed him.
    â€œMy car is over there.” She pointed to the black Saab across from the station. The car had been a graduation present to herself when she completed medical school. She’d used the last of her inheritance to buy it. If she was going to have to get to the hospital in the middle of the night, she needed to have reliable transportation, and her last car, ten years old, had conveniently died. Mallory had never thought she would need to use it to go to a police station and pick up one of the hospital’s upstanding doctors.
    â€œWhat happened?” she asked when they were inthe car. Brad said nothing. Mallory started the engine, put the car in gear and stared straight ahead. The silence between them stretched until she couldn’t stand it. He made her want to scream. Still, Mallory held her temper in check.
    â€œBrad, where do you live?” She asked the question slowly and clearly, as if he were a child and she was trying to coax his address out of him.
    â€œChurchill Road, 1730 Churchill Road.”
    Philadelphia wasn’t a planned city like Washington, D.C. It wasn’t laid out numerically with avenues and streets, like Manhattan, either. One needed to know where a street was, which area of the city, in order to find it. Mallory had no idea where Churchill Road was.
    â€œI’ll need directions.”
    He pointed ahead, and she started driving.
    â€œAre you going to tell me why I had to pick you up at a police station at this hour?”
    â€œIt was all a mistake,” he answered.
    Mallory waited for him to continue. She thought he might be angry because of whatever had happened, and she should give him time to recover.
    â€œYou missed the turn.”
    Mallory clamped her teeth on her bottom lip to keep from saying