Drying his back, he headed into his bedroom and placed his pajamas neatly in their drawer before dressing in his scrubs. He lifted his white coat off the chair in the corner and pulled it on, then removed his stethoscope from the inside pocket, and laid it across his shoulders. Until he felt the weight of the stethoscope around his neck each morning, he felt partially unclothed.

Walking into the study, he admired the perfectly even shelves, the rows of books organized by size and genre. Diplomas lined the far wall, framed in a cherry wood. Harvard undergrad and medical school, equally pompous with their scrolled Latin, started the row, followed by his UCSF residency certificate and board certification for Emergency Medicine. One of his Outstanding Clinical Instructor plaques hung slightly crooked. He straightened it with the edge of his thumb.

Turning to the large brass birdcage in one corner, he sighed before removing the drape. The Moluccan cockatoo awakened instantly on its perch, shifting from one black claw to the other. A bright salmon-pink crest protruded from behind its head, a flair of color on its otherwise cream body.

"Hello, Stanley," David said flatly.

"Elisabeth?" it squawked. "Where's Elisabeth?" David's wife had spent three painstaking weeks one summer training the cockatoo to ask for her when it wanted to be fed. Stanley's repertoire of comments had not since been expanded.

"On vacation in the south of France," David said.

It nodded its head to gnaw at something in its breast feathers, the long erectile crest spreading behind its head like an exotic fan.

David sprinkled some birdseed into the small cup secured to the cage bars, grimacing when some fell to the hardwood floor.

"M amp;M's," the cockatoo squawked. "Where's Elisabeth?"

"Took off for Mexico with embezzled funds."

The cockatoo regarded him suspiciously with a glassy black eye. "Where's Elisabeth?"

"Training Lipizzans in Vienna," David said.

His mother, were she still alive, would not have been pleased with the fact that David drove a Mercedes. Along with Doberman pinschers and von Karajan, they were, in his mother's mind, forever associated with the Third Reich. And though David would never admit it, the cast of the back-tilted headlights of his E320 sometimes reminded him of the requisite round spectacles perched on every Nazi nose in bad '50s films.

He passed the imperious Federal Building on Wilshire, the perpetual protesters outside imploring commuters to honk to free Tibet, and drove into the heart of Westwood. Turning onto Le Conte, he steered wide to avoid the grime kicking up from the jackhammers at the site across from the hospital. For two months, construction crews had been working day and night converting the building next to the Geffen Playhouse into a large retail store. A burly worker swung a sledgehammer at a 4-by-4 supporting a section of defunct scaffolding, and the section keeled over slowly, sending a burst of dust across the road. The olive hood of David's car dulled with the pollution. He made a note to schedule a trip to the car wash on his next free afternoon.

A thought seized him, and he pulled over and approached the crew of construction workers. The muscular worker stood in the midst of the fallen scaffolding, a sledgehammer angled back over one shoulder. He wore a goatee that tapered to a point. His white undershirt was soaked with sweat, permitting an enormous swastika tattoo to show through. Covering his torso from his clavicle to the top of his belly button, the tattoo had been poorly inked. A black box of a probation-and-parole monitor was strapped to his ankle on a thick metal band.

David's immediate thought was that this man could be the alkali thrower. He worked in the vicinity-he would have had easy access to the ambulance bay. David immediately reproached himself for having such a severe and unfounded first impression. The man turned a hard gaze in David's direction as David approached, and he noticed a slight facial asymmetry. The other men continued to work.

"Hello, I'm Dr. David Spier. I work in the Emergency Room at

UCLA."

"Zeke Crowley."

David watched Zeke's large, callused hand envelope his own. David pointed to the monitor on Zeke's ankle. "I had to cut one of those off once."

"Not your own, I'd guess." Zeke's voice, gruff and forceful, fit his appearance.

David smiled. "No, for a procedure on a patient, back when I was a resident. It kept getting in my way. I called the number on the tag. The operator was a bit of a pain."

"They tend to be." Zeke coughed into a fist. "Spier. That Jewish?"

"Sometimes. I'm sure you heard about the alkali attack that took place here yesterday. I was wondering… well, I just thought given your location here, you might have seen something."

"Sometimes," Zeke repeated. "How about in your case?"

"Yes. It is. Anyone here see anything?"

Zeke ran his fingers down his goatee and twisted the end. "Nope."