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and hospitals in the old fee-for-service system hadn’t lost sight of that goal, fee-for-service would still be the standard of care in the land.
    Davenport flicked off the kitchen and hall lights and slipped out the door into the garage. As he was shutting the door behind him, he swore he heard Gloria’s prizewinning snoring emanating from the master suite, upstairs and at the far end of the house.
    The broad garage door was closed, and Gloria’s neat little white BMW roadster was in its customary spot, but his Cadillac Seville was missing. Suddenly nonplussed and anxious, Davenport hit the button on the wall beside him. As the automatic door glided upward, he sighed with relief. The silver Caddy, an absolute joy from the day six months ago when he decided to make the switch from his Lincoln, was parked a dozen or so yards down the drive, right by the walk to the front door.
    Curious.
    Davenport distinctly remembered driving into the garage last night when he returned from work, and also closing the electronic door behind him. Only Gloria, their garage-door service company, and their attorney knew the keypad password. Not even their groundskeeper, Julio, had it.
    Davenport glanced at his Rolex. Almost five-thirty. He had a mountain of work to get done before the others arrived and this most significant of days got under way. It had to have been Gloria, he decided as he stepped out onto the drive and shut the garage door behind him. She obviously ran out of booze late last night and in a moment of clarity decided to take the heavier, safer car to get restocked. Davenport grimaced at the image of her fumbling with the keypad in the Caddy, then finally giving up, leaving the car where it was and entering the house up the front walk instead. The notion of her driving sloshed, which she was even before he went to sleep, produced a knot in his throat. Gloria was capable of doing damage that not even their ten-million-dollar umbrella liability policy could cover. He wondered how the neighbors would feel having some homeless, crippled accident victim take over Sycamore Hill.
    With images of another trip to rehab suddenly occupying his mind, Davenport slipped the key into the ignition and turned it. The Caddy purred to life. He put the car in reverse, checked over his right shoulder, and gently depressed the accelerator. The journey to Unity Comprehensive Health lasted just four feet. Cyrill Davenport heard the explosion a nanosecond before he and the Cadillac were blown to bits. All twenty-three windows on the south side of 3 Serenity Lane shattered.
    In the second-floor master suite, Gloria Davenport, her blood-alcohol level still three times legally intoxicated, opened her eyes a slit and tried to make sense of the noise she had just heard and the chilly air she was feeling. Then she pulled the covers over her head and sank back to sleep.

CHAPTER 4
    The jangling phone slammed into Patty’s dream like a wrecking ball, shattering a scene in which she was flying, arms outstretched, over the houses and buildings of Pittsfield, her hometown. In the dream, a recurring one since childhood, she would put her head down, sprint ahead, and leap, only to fall heavily to the ground. Again and again she would repeat the maneuver until at last, after numerous tumbles and bruises, she would hover just a bit before the painful fall. Finally, after increasing periods just above the ground, pulling through the air like a frog through water, she would suddenly gain altitude and fly. It was a glorious experience when she made it to the clouds, but thanks to the disrupted, bizarre sleep patterns associated with her job, the occasions when her soaring reached such an altitude were few and far between.
    “’lo?”
    “Patty Moriarity?”
    “Yes?”
    The LED on her bedside clock read 6:00, not that early, but she had been riveted to the computer screen in her office until nearly two, researching serial killers.
    “Sorry to have woken