Fatigue was combining with the tension of waiting to drive me into a frenzy of nervous irritation. I kept checking my barricades, moving into the examining room to listen to Louisa’s shallow, gasping breaths, back to the office to look at Ms. Chigwell.

Finally I turned on the doctor, putting all my feverish energy into prying his story from him. It made a short, unedifying tale. He had worked so many years with the Xerxes blood tests that he’d managed to forget one niggling little detail: He wasn’t letting people know he thought they might be getting sick. When I showed up asking questions about Pankowski and Ferraro, he’d gotten scared. And when Murray’s reporters had shown up he’d become downright terrified. What if the truth came out? It would mean not just malpractice suits but terrible humiliation at Clio’s hands—she’d never let him forget that he hadn’t lived up to their father’s standard. That comment brought him the only fleeting sympathy he had from me—his sister’s fierce ethics must be hell to live with.

When the doctor’s suicide attempt failed he didn’t know what to do. Then Jurshak had called—Chigwell knew him from his workdays in South Chicago. If Chigwell would give them a little simple help, they would arrange for any evidence against him to be suppressed.

He’d had no choice, he muttered—to me, not his sister. When he learned all they wanted was for him to give Louisa Djiak a strong sedative and look after her down at the plant for a few hours, he was happy to comply. I didn’t ask him how he felt about going one step further and giving her a fatal injection.

“But why?” I demanded. “Why go through that charade to begin with if you weren’t going to give employees their results?”

“Humboldt told me to,” he mumbled, looking at his hands.

“I could have guessed that part!” I snapped. “But why in God’s name did he tell you to?”

“It—uh—it had to do with the insurance,” he muttered in the back of his throat.

“Spit it out, Curtis. You’re not leaving until I know, so say it and get it over with.”

He stole a look at his sister, but she sat white and still, lost in her own cloud of exhaustion.

“The insurance,” I prompted.

“We could see—Humboldt knew—we had too many health claims, too many people were losing work time. First our health insurance began going up, way up, then we were dropped by Ajax Assurance and had to find another company. They’d done a study, they told us our claims were too high.”

My jaw dropped. “So you got Jurshak to act as your fiduciary and screw up the data so you could prove you were insurable to another carrier?”

“It was just a way of buying time until we could figure out what the problem was and fix it. That was when we started doing the blood studies.”

“What was happening on the workers’ comp side?”