He stood up. His T-shirt and jacket hung over the back of a chair near the cot. He reached for the shirt and started putting it on with one hand. It was a clumsy struggle without being able to completely raise and extend his left arm. But he managed to twist and turn and tug it down over his head.

Rae poked her head through the curtain. A moment later, Kali entered the little space.

“Thought you were out in the waiting room,” Carmody said.

“I was.” She got the jacket off the chair and held it so he could get an arm into the sleeve. “I thought you might need some help.”

“I don’t.”

“Of course not,” she said, and went around behind him to assist with the other arm.

Rae was looking at him.

“You weren’t admitted, Mr. Carmody, so I can’t stop you from leaving as an outpatient,” she said. “I strongly recommend that you avoid strenuous activity for a few days. Rest overnight. I’d like to see you back here in a week or so. But I know I won’t.”

“How can you tell?”

Rae looked at Kali over his shoulder. Kali returned the glance and finished getting him into the jacket.

“Thank you for your patience, Doctor,” she said. “Will that be it?”

Rae nodded.

“That’s it,” she said.

It was six fifteen as Kali and Carmody left the emergency room and turned downtown toward headquarters, the sun in deep decline across the river, the daylight grainy and diffuse over Tenth Avenue. The wailing patrol cars and ambulances that arrived after Ki Marton was killed had left. Traffic had thinned. The office crowd had nearly evaporated. From several blocks north of the hit-and-run, Carmody couldn’t see the chalk markings near the crosswalk, but he knew they were still there. It would take a while before they were erased by tires and rain.

His cell rang in his pocket. He thought for a second that it might be Lombardi again. It was Morse.

“Are you feeling all right?” she asked.

“Not really,” Carmody said. “What’s up?”

“We have something on the Wendell Balen AKA,” Morse said. “How close are you?”

Carmody looked a block or two ahead to the Terminal. “If you toss a water balloon off the roof, I’d get plopped.”

“I won’t add insult to injury,” she said. “Hurry up to my office. You’re going to want to hear this.”

“So talk,” Carmody said. “Wendell Balen.”

He sat backward in a chair in Carol Morse’s office, his legs spread. Morse was sitting behind her desk, Kali and Leo Harris on his side of it.

“The credit card outfit gave us their information,” Morse said. “It was good of them. Even with identity theft laws and exigent circumstances, they could have made us wait for the paperwork.”

“What about Balen?” Carmody said.