Main Dishes

The 7-year-old boy was quietly DYING in the chaotic emergency room, and NOBODY had even noticed. The ER was slammed with 43 patients from a massive highway pileup on Route 9. Gurneys were stacked in the corridor, and there was bld on the floor tiles. Dr. Roland Voss, our arrogant new chief, wanted everything running…

PART 2 Morning had not come to Port Angeles. Only a grayer kind of night pressed against the windows. Snow still blew past Owen Mercer’s cedar house in sheets, and the wind off the Strait of Juan de Fuca found every seam in the walls. Inside, the kitchen smelled of wet dog, warmed towels, cedar…

The air in the forty-second-floor Manhattan ballroom tasted of expensive champagne and calculated ambition. Sixty executives milled about in their tailored December finery, their voices a continuous, overlapping hum of quarterly projections and London market acquisitions. Not a single one of them noticed the little girl sitting at the far end of the banquet table….

I was standing at the visitor counter at Marine Corps Base Quantico in jeans still damp from the rain, hair in a wet ponytail, eyes burning from a red-eye flight I’d caught out of San Diego the night before. It was 7:33 in the morning. The rain was hammering the low roof of the brick…

The light inside the Pier Tap on Orange Avenue was that clean, golden Coronado evening light—the kind that catches the pressed tin ceiling and throws it back into the room like a dare. I was sitting on the second stool from the end of the polished mahogany bar in dark jeans and a cream knit…

“The mid-afternoon Virginia air was thick, heavy with the suffocating stench of salt, melting asphalt, and hot diesel exhaust rolling off the long line of vehicles backing up behind me. I sat quietly in the driver’s seat of a plain, rented gray sedan, the glare of the relentless summer sun reflecting harshly off the windshield….

PART 2 I held the tan folder in my right hand. I didn’t open it. I didn’t need to. I knew every piece of paper inside it by heart. I walked back toward the primary pump. Linda was watching me now. Her arms were crossed. The smugness was still there, but her eyes were tracking…

PART 2 I looked directly into Karen Whitmore’s eyes. The cabin of the Boeing 737 felt like a vacuum. Three hundred people were frozen in place. The only sound was the low, steady hum of the jet engines outside the reinforced glass. I extended my arms. “Give her back.” I didn’t shout. I didn’t have…