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label of the hospital pharmacy. “Xanax from the pharmacy on the left and the pills you took from Adams’s nightstand on the right,” she said.
    Aidan frowned at the pills. “They look the same.”
    “That’s what somebody wanted her to think. Somebody emptied the capsules and refilled them with PCP.”
    Aidan met her troubled gaze. “Somebody went to a hell of a lot of trouble.”
    “Somebody wanted her to be out of her mind and totally suggestible.”
    Aidan thought about the pictures, the noose in the gift box. The loaded gun they’d found in a second gift box, stuffed in a closet. The step stool on the balcony that hadn’t been there the week before. The lilies. “Hell.”
    “Eloquently put,” Julia said. “Come back to the exam room. I want to show you something else.” He fol owed her and watched as she lifted Adams’s right arm. Deep, jagged vertical scars lined the inside of her wrists.
    “She’s tried to kill herself before,” he murmured.
    “At least once before.”
    “We found a loaded gun and a noose in her apartment.” Both in gift boxes, both with the same little gold gift tag. Both tags said “Come to me.”
    Julia sighed. “Somebody really wanted her to take her own life.”
    “So it would seem. You told me to remind you about the lilies.”
    “Yeah. She had pol en from the lilies in her nostrils.”
    “We found one of the flowers under her pillow.”
    “That makes sense then. I didn’t find any evidence of the pol en on her hands.”
    “Could she have washed it off?”
    “Perhaps, but with as many lilies as you said you found, it’s unlikely she wouldn’t have some under her nails if she’d handled all the flowers. Especially with those nails.”
    Aidan stared at Adams’s long bloodred nails. “So she didn’t touch the lilies.”
    “Probably not.”
    “So somebody else brought them in.” His cell rang and he pul ed it from his pocket. It was Murphy and he sounded… furious. “Where are you, Aidan?”
    “In the morgue. What’s wrong?”
    “Latent came back with an ID on the prints CSU pul ed from Adams’s apartment.”
    Aidan waited but Murphy said no more. “And? Murphy, what did Latent find?”

    19
    Karen Rose

    [Suspense 5]

    You Can't Hide
    “Just get up here,” Murphy bit out. “Now. Dammit.”
    Sunday, March 12, 12:30 P.M.
    Tess studied her reflection in the mirror next to her front door. A good bottle of concealer was worth its weight in gold, the dark circles under her eyes all but invisible. It was the second Sunday of the month, time for brunch with her friends at the Blue Lemon Bistro. After studying Cynthia Adams’s file for hours fol owed by a short, unrestful sleep, she was tempted to call her friends and beg off but resisted. The loss of a patient could not be allowed to derail her life. She should know this by now. It was a routine lecture from her friend Jon, a surgeon who lost patients on the table. Hopeful y not too routinely.
    Pushing the pendulum the other way, she’d decked herself out this morning, spending extra time on her hair, her makeup, even pul ing the price tag off the red leather jacket she’d been saving for a special occasion. Amy would swallow her tongue when she saw it, Tess decided. She’d beg to borrow it and as usual Tess would relent and let her. And as the sister she’d never had, Amy would keep the jacket until Tess raided her closet on a commando hunt to retrieve her things. It had been that way since Amy had come to live with the Ciccotelli family almost twenty years before.
    Tess closed her eyes. Just the thought of her family stung, especially on Sunday. They’d be gathering around the table right about now, back home in her parents’ old house in South Philly. It would be loud and noisy and wonderful, packed to bursting except for her own chair in the corner of the dining room. In the old tradition of remembering the family dead, her chair would remain empty. Because in her father’s eyes, she was dead to