Webster drawled, “I once arrested a sucker that did that—chased calls from ambulance scanners. Stopped at the accident sites and pretended he was a doctor. Eventually, we did arrest him. But let me tell you, he did a right fine job of patching people.”

“A hero’s complex,” Marge stated. “What some people won’t do to be the star of the show.”

“You’d think Sparks would get enough of that in the operating room.” Oliver pocketed his comb.

Gaynor said, “I guess it’s hard for some people to come down to planet earth.”

“If I were a big shot like Sparks, I wouldn’t be anxious to come down to earth,” Oliver said. “It’s nice getting all that reverence. Having people bow down to you.”

“Like his secretary,” Marge said. “She thought he was God.”

“Exactly.” Oliver turned to Decker. “What about his kids? How’d they view their old man?”

Decker thought a moment. “The younger ones seemed very upset. The others weren’t overly emotional about the death. Probably they were all in shock.”

“It’s hard for kids to live with God as a father,” Oliver said. “No one made a Freudian slip about Dad.”

Decker flipped through his notes. “Two of the brothers—Lucas and Paul—talked about Dad being intimidating…bossy…emasculating—”

“They used that word?” Marge asked.

“Uh…no, they said Dad emasculated his son-in-law.”

“Veddy interesting,” Oliver said, rubbing his hands together.

Decker said, “I think they rebelled against him in their own ways. Two of his children have money problems, another was a former drug addict, another became a Catholic priest instead of a minister of Sparks’s Fundamentalist Church, the older sister married a Jew—”

Marge broke in, “How did that come up?”

“It came up,” Decker said.

“Did she convert?” Marge asked.

“No, she didn’t. She still belongs to her father’s church. And so do her children. Nonetheless, she still married a man who refused to convert to her faith. She’s unhappy about it now. But way back when, when she originally married the man, you have to think she was telling her Fundamentalist Christian daddy to go screw himself.”

“Sounds like they all got their digs in,” Martinez said.

Oliver said, “Makes me feel better.”

“What about the wife?”

“Dolores Sparks,” Decker said. “Didn’t talk to her much. Upon hearing the news, she immediately started denying he was dead.”

“Did she ask how?”

“Uh, she did ask if it was a car accident. When I told her no, it was a homicide, she immediately went into denial. He can’t be dead. That kind of thing.”

Marge said, “So it’s okay if he dies from a car accident but not from a homicide?”