Manpower has to be reduced to ensure officers are dealing with all open cases.

We still have good leads, there’s no reason to give up hope.

These things take time, Mrs. Romera.

It’s been well over a month, Mr. and Mrs. Romera. Alexis’s file will remain open but until we have any fresh leads there isn’t a lot we can do right now. Keep us apprised if you should hear from your daughter.

“Vanilla pudding? Sister, tell me you did not just take the last vanilla pudding.” The voice cuts through my thoughts. I turn around to find one of the fresh interns glaring at the pudding cup in my hand, the one I just took from the refrigerated cabinet in front of me. She looks up and I gain a perverse sense of pleasure when I witness the realization dawn on her face—ahh shit! Resident. I know the girl, Jefferies. She’s a loudmouth; thinks she’s a contender for a surgical placement. But then again these walking, talking morons all think they’re in the running for a surgical placement.

“Problem, Jefferies?”

She shakes her head. “No Dr. Romera. Definitely no problem here.” She squeezes past me, grimacing, hightailing it before I can give her morgue rounds with Bochowitz for the rest of the week. They hate that punishment. Bochowitz has been working the morgue for the last thirty-eight years. He’s impossibly cheerful all the time, like all the time, and he has this unnerving habit of talking to his patients. Of course, they’re all dead so they don’t respond, and Bochowitz, somewhere along the line, developed a habit of replying for them. It is creepy, yes, but despite all of his peculiarities there isn’t a single thing Bochowitz doesn’t know about the human body. As an intern, I’d voluntarily spent a lot of time down in the basements underneath the busy hub of St. Peter’s keeping Bochowitz company, keeping my head down. It was best not to involve myself in the politics and factions formed by my contemporaries. But more importantly, I’d been learning.

I catch sight of Dr. Patel on the other side of the canteen, eating alone. I haven’t seen him since the night Zeth brought Lacey in. He looks up, sees me approaching, smiles…

“Hey, Sloane. What’s cracking?” He kicks out the chair on the other side of the table opposite him with his sneakered foot. “Heard you got stuck with the mafia kid with the GSW.”

There was a time when a gunshot wound was an exciting case we would have fought over, but now, having seen so many, we all know they’re just liabilities waiting to happen. The outcomes on them are so bleak that a lot of residents do their best to pass them off to whoever’s standing closest at the time. “Yeah, I know. Guy circled the drain for a moment there but we pulled him back.”

Suresh nods, swallowing a mouthful of food. “That kid’s got a rap sheet longer than your arm. My mom shops at that store. Keep telling her not to. She used to like chatting to the woman there—what’s her name? I can’t remember. Anyway, it was her husband Frankie that got shot there couple of weeks ago. Both her and the brother, the kid you have upstairs? Both of them know who killed Frankie but neither of them will breathe a word to the cops. Apparently they’re scared shitless.”

This all sounds like something that would go down in New York or Chicago to me; I open up my pudding, spooning some into my mouth. “I don’t really wanna think about any of that. I wanna think happy thoughts,” I tell him, grinning. “When’s your wedding again?” I received an invite months ago and mentally filed the event away under the heading happening too far in the future to worry about. But now that date is creeping up and half the hospital’s buzzing with gossip about it.

“Two weeks,” Suresh tells me, winking. “A married man. It’s just unfair really. I’m in my prime. The world’s women shouldn’t be denied this.” He gestures with his fork down his own body, waggling his eyebrows. He isn’t what you could term classically handsome, but he has something about him that women really do go crazy for. I laugh off his silliness and shrug.

“You’re gonna love it. Rebecca’s so excited.”

“I know,” he says, his voice turning serious. “She told me to tell you that you have to bring a plus one. Mandatory, I’m afraid.”

I haven’t even thought about a plus one. I cower into my seat, eyes down on my pudding. Maybe I could bring Pip as my plus one. People do that, right? Bring friends as dates to weddings? I ask Suresh this and he just gives me a look.

“No. It has to be someone you’re sleeping with.”

Ha! Yeah, right. Like Zeth Mayfair is plus one material.

“Or someone you intend on sleeping with after you get shitfaced at my wedding,” Suresh continues, winking again, just as one of my colleagues, another resident, Oliver Massey, hurries into the canteen. He looks harassed. He spots me and my stomach sinks when he hurries in my direction.

“Need you upstairs, Sloane. The cops are demanding a play-by-play with the doctors working on the Monterello guy.”

Great. I throw my plastic spoon back into my pudding cup. Lunch break over.

“Remember, Sloane,” Suresh calls after me. “Someone you’re fucking!”

The entire canteen, full of people, turns to watch me scurry away, red-faced.

*****

“This patient is witness to a murder. He’s under protective custody. It’s incredibly fucking important that this guy doesn’t get shot to death while in this hospital. You people know what that means?” The fat detective in the bad suit is talking down to us like we’re degenerates of the highest order. He’s short and bald and walks like an angry Rottweiler. The slender female detective—his partner, I assume—is patiently waiting for him to shut up so she can speak. Finally she gets her chance.