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just got paged, Artie. Some cops want to talk to you. They’re in the lobby.”
    Artie had a momentary vision of Susan on the road to Willow with the tule fog smothering the freeway.
    He picked up his briefcase. “Right behind you, Jerry.” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a pale Connie sag back in her chair. Serve her right if she died at her desk.
    He worried about Susan all the way to the lobby, but a part of his mind kept going back to Connie’s lecture. Somewhere along the line, he must have fucked up. And Jesus, he needed the job; he was too old to hustle for a new one. Maybe Hirschfield had put Connie up to it, was giving Artie a warning before calling him in. Or maybe Connie was just trying to make it look like the program premise was all his idea, and if the ratings sucked the albatross would be around his neck.
    Then he remembered the confused look on Connie’s face at the end and felt a sudden chill slide down his spine. Connie had been trying to convince him of something and had tried to make her point by picking an argument. But all of it had been out of character for Connie—way out. When was it that she had started to sound like somebody else? Just after she’d guessed that Adrienne Jantzen was going to blow it?
    “Mr. Banks?”
    He had reached the lobby, where two cops were waiting for him. His mind immediately filled with visions of Susan in a wreck on I-5.
    It came as a complete shock when the cops told him about Larry Shea.

CHAPTER 3
     
    The room in the city morgue had a tiled floor with a drain in the center, several waist-high stainless-steel tables covered with rubber sheeting, and against the far wall a bank of stainless-steel drawers. Sullivan, the older and more poker-faced of the two cops, checked the names and motioned to the attendant in blue scrubs, who pulled one of the drawers halfway out. Artie could feel the butterflies start fluttering in his stomach. He’d seen war victims in ’Nam but had never gotten used to it. Besides, that had been a lifetime ago.
    The attendant folded back the sheet so the body was exposed down to the navel. Sullivan glanced at it impassively. “His wallet ID was for one Lawrence Shea, M.D. Can you confirm that?”
    Artie forced himself to step closer and take a long look. It was Shea, all right—but just barely. The eyes were blank and staring, the hair matted with dried blood. The soft tissues around the mouth were gone, exposing the teeth, and both the jugular and carotid arteries in the neck had been torn. The rest of the face was hamburger.
    “Yeah, it’s Larry.” A part of Artie was morbidly comparing the body in the drawer with the live Larry Shea, laughing and cracking jokes and full of off-color stories about the nurses and interns at Kaiser. Another part of him was numb with the sense of personal loss.
    “You sure?”
    Artie nodded. “Didn’t Cathy … didn’t his wife identify him?”
    “We called her last night—helluva thing to have to tell her. She said she’d come right over but she never showed. We called again this morning and nobody answered. The Oakland police reported a neighbor said she’d seen Mrs. Shea and two boys leaving the house early the previous evening. One of the doctors who worked with him at the hospital should be down any minute, but we like to get more than one ID if we can.”
    Artie wondered why they’d called him and how they’d gotten his name, then forgot it when he took another look at the body. He felt like throwing up. The attendant covered what remained of Shea’s face with the sheet and rolled the drawer back into the wall. It seemed like it was freezing cold in the room and Artie wanted to rub his hands together to warm them up; the two cops seemed oblivious to the chill or were making a point of not noticing it.
    Sullivan took pity on him. “Coffee, Mr. Banks?”
    Of the two officers, Sullivan seemed the more relaxed in his uniform. McNeal, younger and buffed, was still playing the