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knows how many other trained staff members.”
    I’d already figured how to narrow that group down considerably, but I needed the postmortem on Kingsly to be sure. The problem was, if we found what I expected, I was going to have a hell of a lot more trouble with Bufort.
    “Maybe,” I mumbled, getting up to leave. “By the way, we got another DOA that gave me something of a surprise. When I was checking him, I found a mark at his left xiphoid-sternal junction.”
    “What!”
    “Relax, it’s probably a mole. But given what I found on Kingsly, I’m afraid I overreacted and noted it on the form, asking you to verify it.”
    I thought he’d make some parting crack about making moles into mountains.
    “Earl, you don’t need a goddamn pathologist to diagnose a goddamn mole, no matter where the goddamn thing is located!” he exploded, shocking the hell out of me.
    “Robert, I’m sorry. Don’t bite my head off. I was just being careful, obviously too careful. Let’s forget about it.”
    Watts took a breath. “Sorry, Earl, this killing’s got to me too. I shouldn’t have jumped all over you like that. It’s just that it’s doubled my work, and I’m behind as it is. The last thing we need around here is someone of your experience and background seeing needle marks every time you spot a mole.” He smiled, then added, “We all need to relax, and just do what we normally do. Think horses, not zebras, remember?” It was an old saying from medical school. It was meant to keep the overactive imagination of untrained students from galloping off after uncommon diagnoses.
    I grinned at him, feeling pretty sheepish. “Thanks, Robert,” I said, then let myself into the warren of tunnels and catacombs outside his dissection room.
    Dripping noises mingled with silence; cobwebs mixed with a lot of dust; a jumble of pipes and wires ran overhead. Some of these drooped down in tangles and resembled malignant varices, enlarged tortuous vessels dissected open and left hanging. Several layers of fuzzy mold riddled with scurrying eight-legged life, grown fat on droppings from Watts’s table, covered the pipes and wires.
    This was where his next two patients waited to receive their final medical act, shrouded, silent, and parked on stretchers. Then I realized one of them might have been our DOA. Watts would declare him yet another victim of the street, and my embarrassing note would disappear onto some dusty shelf. At least I didn’t have to worry about Bufort’s reaction to it now.
    The tunnel stretching in either direction was occasionally pocked with a dim pool of light that added more gloom than illumination. I gratefully fled back up the stairs to the comfort of the noise, confusion, and bright lights of my own department.
    Entering my office, I managed to jostle my secretary, who was on her way out with an armload of paper.
    “Why, it’s Carole Lament,” I exclaimed playfully, bowing as I held open the door to let her pass.
    “I’m glad to see you too.” She laughed. It was a shared joke. We sometimes went the better part of a day without seeing each other, only a string of notes and phone messages connecting us. Then we’d have a chance encounter and quickly update each other in a shorthand possible only after years of working together. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she called over her shoulder. “I need to talk to you.”
    Carole Lamont was singly the person who had sustained me most through my time as chief. She kept the department afloat from day to day. More than a dozen doctors, all our residents, and a team of nurses and clerks deferred to her to coordinate staffing and keep the schedule covered. By slowly taking over most of these logistics, she had freed me to concentrate on teaching, medical matters, and standards of care.
    Managing an ER is primarily a matter of managing people: knowing who to stroke, who to push, who to nail to the wall. Yet it was Carole who was the keeper of everyone’s secrets.