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particular.
    Fox’s laws .
    “Hi, Tamik,” Jessie said. “How’re you doing?”
    The two of them had gotten along well—very well—right up until the surgery. Since then, the teen hadn’t acknowledged her at all. This moment was no different.
    “I see you haven’t opened the CD I brought you,” she said, holding up the rap album she had picked out for the girl. “Want me to put it on?”
    Nothing.
    “Come on, Tamika. At least write me something—anything. Type it if you want.”
    Jessie centered the portable computer on the Formica tray table across Tamika’s lap.
    Nothing.
    She looked to Emily for guidance, but the nurse only shrugged. A quick exam, a final try to get some sort of response from their patient, and they turned to go. Carl Gilbride was standing in the doorway, watching them.
    The neurosurgical chief was, as always, impeccably dressed and groomed—tan suit, silk tie, wing tips, gold Rolex, starched and pressed lab coat, perfectly straight name tag— Carl W. Gilbride, Jr., M.D.; Chief of Neurosurgery . His wavy brown salon-cut hair and his round, rimless glasses helped produce an image that reminded Jessie of an SS interrogator in a grade B war movie.
    “Carl, hi,” she said lightly. “I thought you were going to be off lecturing for the day.”
    He stood motionless in the doorway, glaring at her.
    “What in the hell did I just hear about you doing a case with ARTIE in the operating room?” he said, giving no indication he cared about the girl in the bed behind her. “Just who the fuck do you think you are?”

Chapter 4
    “CARL, PLEASE. TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND TRY TO stop snarling at me like I just shot a white rhino. I didn’t hurt anyone or do anything wrong. At least I don’t think I did. Pete Roslanski was dead. A cadaver ! He and his family wanted his body to serve some purpose beyond fertilizing the north forty of some cemetery. You were away. I couldn’t have asked your permission even if I wanted to.”
    Jessie and Gilbride confronted each other across the table in one of the examining rooms on Surgical Seven. She had managed to curtail his tirade in Tamika Bing’s room before it got any more abusive, and to lead him down the hall. The teenager, who had surely overheard what was said, had reacted not at all. She merely lay there as she always did, propped up in whatever position the nurses had chosen for her, staring straight ahead at nothing.
    Gilbride’s fury had only marginally receded. He still looked like a bullfrog being squeezed tightly from below. Over the years Jessie had served in his residency and worked in his lab, he had lost his temper with her any number of times. Enduring his explosions went with the territory. And in truth, she really wasn’t treated much differently from any of the others who were on his B list. His A list consisted of those who never expressed a viewpoint or treatment approach different from his. And that sort of obsequiousness she was simply incapable of displaying—or even faking, as most of those who were on the A list did.
    She suspected that merely having two X chromosomes would have also been enough to disqualify her from the A’s. She had been the first—and to this point the last—female resident Gilbride had taken into his program, and the only woman on the neurosurgical faculty. It took just a few months of her residency—and of his snide, offensive, at times near-illegal—asides for her to understand how desperately the man must have needed her technical expertise in his robotics lab to have accepted her. There was even a rumor that he had once let slip his belief that she would wash out of the program before a year was out, and end up working full-time on his research.
    But on the plus side, she wasn’t playing the résumé-and-wait game every year in a field dominated by XYs, and she had a damn good job in a hospital that had risen to near the top of neurosurgery programs. She had friends like Emily and Hans Pfeffer,