“Ms. Lambert?” Riley said as the call connected.

“Detective.” I broke into a run again and sprinted past Lester’s car. I headed for the cross street at the end of the block. I heard his car door open behind me.

“It’s about your husband.”

My breath caught, but I kept on running, slaloming around trash cans and fenced-in sidewalk trees. I kept my eyes peeled for a cab, but in the corner of my vision I saw Lester breaking into a run after me.

“He’s in the hospital,” Riley said.

A flash of yellow came through the intersection, and I shot my arm straight up. The cabbie swerved to the curb, and I dove into the backseat.

DETECTIVE RILEY WAS waiting for me at the hospital entrance. “Where’s your muscle?” he asked, his eyes searching the street behind me.

I’d intended to call Alice from the cab, but when I didn’t see Lester following, I’d thought better of it. Mark didn’t need to know that I’d rushed to my husband’s bedside any more than he needed to know about my ambush of Nelson Ledbetter. “I gave her the day off,” I said.

Riley’s shaggy eyebrows met in a frown, and he hustled me off the street and into the hospital lobby. “They’ve moved him to the sixth floor,” he said, leading the way to the elevator bank.

“What happened?”

“Overdose.”

I nodded. No surprise there. “But why were you notified?”

“I wasn’t.” He pushed the call button. “I’m the one who found him.” The doors slid open, and I followed him onto the elevator. “Unresponsive. Shallow breathing. Lips and fingers blue. All the signs.”

I nodded again. I knew all those signs, too. I’d committed them to memory, just in case.

Riley pushed the button for the sixth floor. “The ER docs pumped him up with naloxone and IV fluids. They say he’ll be okay.”

I heard the skepticism in his voice. I agreed with it. But I still wasn’t following. “You just happened to recognize him?” They’d never even met.

He shook his head. “I’ve been looking for him. For a while now.”

The elevator doors opened on the sixth floor, and he swung his arm out to hold them apart. “Room six-fifteen,” he said.

DAVID LAY FLAT on his back, so thin under the blue cotton blanket that his body looked like nothing more than a faint swell in a dead-calm sea. A white sheet was turned back in a cuff over the top edge of the blanket and tucked in tight up to each armpit. His eyes were closed, and tubes looped around his ears and into his nostrils. Another tube ran from a needle in his hand to a plastic bag on a pole. An oximeter was clipped to his finger and a blood pressure cuff wrapped around his arm. His chest rose almost imperceptibly with each shallow breath. His skin was gray beneath the stubble of his beard, and his cheekbones jutted out like mountain crags above the hollows in his face.