“Not her again!” Ramesh groaned out loud. “This Hernandez woman is becoming intolerable.”

“What should I do if Mrs. Lucas insists on the autopsy?”

“Like I told Rajish Bhurgava over at the Queen Victoria, make sure the autopsy request gets picked up by one of the magistrates we’re accustomed to working with, and inform him there’s to be no autopsy. Meanwhile, try your best to get Mrs. Lucas to agree to cremate or embalm. Lean on her! Is she still at the hospital?”

“She is, sir.”

“Do your best.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ramesh disconnected and immediately called Inspector Naresh Prasad.

“Good evening, sir,” Naresh said. “I don’t hear from you for months, then twice in one day. What can I do for you?”

“What have you learned?”

“What have I learned about what?”

“About the mole in the Queen Victoria Hospital and the thorn in my side, Jennifer Hernandez.”

“You’re joking. We just spoke today. I haven’t started looking into either issue yet. I’m just putting a team together for tomorrow.”

“Well, both problems are getting worse, and I want some action.”

“How are they getting worse?”

“There was another death, and again CNN had it on the air almost immediately. I heard about it from a deputy whose assistant happened to catch it on TV not much later than the CEO of the hospital heard it directly from his staff doctor who’d tried to resuscitate the patient.”

“Am I to assume it was the same hospital, the Queen Victoria?”

“No, this time it was the Aesculapian Med Center.”

“Interesting! Changing hospitals might help if the culprit is a staff physician. He or she would have to have privileges at both hospitals. That could narrow the list down quite nicely.”

“Good thought. That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“Maybe that’s why you’re a bureaucrat and I’m a police investigator. What about the woman? What’s she done to irritate you further?”

Ramesh told Naresh what Khajan had told him about Jennifer talking the wife into requesting an autopsy even before the hospital had informed the woman her husband had died.

“How did the Hernandez woman know the man had died?”

“I don’t know for certain, but I’d have to guess she saw it on CNN International.”

“Maybe she knows someone at CNN who is informing her. What do you think of that idea?”

For a moment Ramesh did not respond. He found himself getting vexed at wasting his time with such mental gymnastics. That was Naresh’s job, not his. What he wanted was results. He wanted to be rid of the whole mess so that the public-relations damage could be fully accessed and then, he hoped, repaired.