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seven thirty.” Joe stepped back to the door to call out to Doris, “Do you know if he had an emergency call to meet a patient before the office opened?”
    Doris blew her nose. “That wouldn’t go through me. Some patients have the emergency number that goes straight to him.”
    “What patients?”
    “People who have a history of suicidal thoughts. Things like that.”
    “You have a list?”
    She shook her head.
    Bing stepped up next to Joe. “We’ll need that. How many active patients did he have?”
    “Around a hundred and fifty? I’m not sure. I can check. Some people only see him once every six months for maintenance.”
    Bing’s jaw worked silently for a second. “I’m going to put in for a warrant for his patient files. I’d appreciate it if you could get them ready for handing over.”
    Doris’s swollen eyes widened. “You think it was a patient?”
    “That’s one possibility. Also could have been someone else he knew. Or an act of random violence. You keep any drugs here?”
    “No. The pharmaceutical company reps drop off samples now and then, but we take those to the free clinic.”
    Bing went back to Philip.
    Joe strode to the front door. No sign of forced entry. “Was this door unlocked when you came in?”
    Doris stared for a startled second. “I had to unlock it.”
    “How about his office door?”
    “Closed. I opened it to see if Dr. Brogevich had anything in his Out bin. He stayed to catch up with work yesterday after I left.”
    “The back door?”
    “I didn’t check. He would have locked it last night before he went home. He always did.”
    Bing came back out of the office again, glanced at Doris. “I’m going to need you to cancel today’s appointments, as soon as possible. It’d be better if patients didn’t start showing up. To avoid contaminating the crime scene.”
    Then he turned to Joe. “As long as you’re here, why don’t you canvass the neighbors? In case anyone saw or heard anything.”
    He checked over the office door, not because he didn’t trust Joe, but because that was the way they did things. They checked and double-checked.
    Joe walked out, grabbed some police tape from Bing’s car, and cordoned off a twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot area in front of the entrance, tying the tape to the railings on the new handicap ramps that stretched in front of each suite. He checked the ground. No cigarette butts that they could send to the lab, no garbage. No footprints either, since the entire lot was paved.
    He strode over to the pediatrician’s office next door. Still closed. He glanced through the window. Nobody behind the reception desk. The suite on the other side of Philip’s stood empty. The ob-gyn beyond that hadn’t come in yet either, his receptionist just arriving.
    The few people Joe found, he questioned, but nobody had seen or heard anything. The offices were soundproofed for privacy. If there’d been an argument or struggle, it probably wouldn’t have been heard even if the murder had happened in the middle of the day.
    Jesus, Philip.
    Joe went on being a cop, doing the cop thing. But part of him was still catching up to Phil’s death. Why? He was going to figure that out, dammit.
    People were visibly shocked by the news of murder. They had a million questions and wanted answers. Joe had to put them off as politely as possible. Even if he had information, which he didn’t, he couldn’t discuss the case at this stage.
    By the time he strode back to Suite 1025, Detective Harper Finnegan was arriving. A couple of years older than Joe, whiskey-brown hair, square jaw, nose broken in a bar fight—not in the line of duty. He pulled his cruiser up to the captain’s, staring at Joe as he got out. “What happened to your face?”
    “Ran into an argumentative phone pole on the four-wheeler.” Since he’d gone undercover to catch a dirty cop, the assignment was strictly confidential. Only one person at each station knew about the undercover op—Captain