Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

THE HEAT WOKE ME.

I became aware of perspiration through my scalp, of a rusty orange glow behind my closed lids. I opened my eyes and saw crisp light dance through a palm tree outside, saw it play across the living room floor. There was an immediate sense of disorientation: Palm tree? Living room?

Why was I on the couch?

Right. Brooke. Nasty fight.

I raised my head off the chenille pillow, felt as though someone were grinding my brain beneath their boot. Unwisely, I tried to remember events of the night before. First, dinner and a bottle of that high-alcohol zin California vintners seem to be addicted to these days. Then the party with Brooke's friends. The glass after glass of good Scotch pushed into my hand.

It was all coming back.

The friend of Brooke's friend--the lawyer in jeans and French cuffs who thought he knew how to fix health care in the country. He'd droned on about the free market and incentives and how forty-seven million uninsured "isn't really that many." Eventually, I couldn't take it anymore. I'd bellied up to the conversational bar, armed with a killer buzz and a self-righteous 'tude. I saw Brooke's face fall when I opened my mouth, but I couldn't stop myself. "Idiot" was mentioned somewhere along the way, then "do your homework," then "moron." The next thing I knew, Brooke's hand was tugging mine and we were at the door, saying our good-byes.

Oh, and after beating a retreat from the party--Brooke whispering to our host, "I'm so sorry, he's been under a lot of stress," me shooting back, "It's stressful teaching a rock to think"--we got into the car and I still couldn't quit. "What a dickhead," I said. "What a complete dickhead." Little did I know that the hostess of the party was trying to make the gent in the French cuffs.

Terrific work, McCormick.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep again, but there was the sunshine and, now, some shuffling. The bedroom door opened, then the bathroom door opened and closed. Didn't even catch a glimpse of Brooke.

In my defense, my hard-drinking days were long gone, the guy was an idiot, and I actually had been under a lot of stress. I had just effected a cross-country transfer in life, from Atlanta to San Francisco. Not only was this a big red-state-to-blue-state shift, the move also marked a kind of a break point in my career. I'd been finishing up a two-year stint as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and would have been happy to work with the organization for a few more years. Initially, they said they'd love to have me stay at headquarters in Atlanta, that they wanted to groom me for more administrative duties. Not only did I not want to touch anything like an administrative duty, I certainly didn't want to be in Atlanta.

The humidity makes me break out.

Despite the offer of further employment at CDC, my ride there had been somewhat rocky. Granted, the year before, I got a few feathers in my cap for solving a case that extended from Baltimore to San Jose, but those feathers had been plucked from ruffled institutional poultry. Not to mention that I decided to blow off a meeting with my superiors--a meeting in Atlanta at which I was to be honored--following the whole tragic fiasco. Technically, I was AWOL at that time, since the CDC and U.S. Public Health Service still had some vestiges of the Navy from which they were born. That storm blew over when my boss got in...