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  What was his problem?

  But then she was struck by something familiar about him. If she imagined his hair four or five inches longer . . .

  He stuck out his hand. "My God, it's really you. I don't know if you remember me from high school, but I'm," The name leapt into her mind.

  "Gerry! " She grasped his hand. "Gerry Canney! "

  "Right! I'm flattered you remember."

  Remember? How could she forget? Co-captain and quarterback for the football team, captain of the swim team, and an honor student to boot.

  She'd had a monstrous crush on Gerry Canney all through Washington-Lee High in Arlington. She remembered positioning herself in the hall outside social studies after third period every day just to watch him stroll by. The scars on his face had wrought subtle changes on his looks, but he was still gorgeous.

  "You're flattered I remember you? " she said. "I'm flabbergasted you remember me."

  He grinned. "I've got a great memory for faces. And who could forget a girl with a name like Pasta." He'd said it again.

  She'd have to nip this in the bud.

  "It's Gin, Gerry. Gin."

  He blinked. "Got you. I don't think I ever knew your real first name. Gin it is. But I barely recognized you. You look great." He winced and waved his hands in the space between them, as if trying to erase the words. "Wait. That didn't come out right. I didn't mean, "

  "It's okay, " she laughed, placing a hand on his sleeve. "I understand. I'm not half the girl I used to be. And you . . . last time I saw you, you had huge sideburns and hair over your ears."

  He rubbed his clean-shaven cheeks. "Yeah. The seventies. Can you believe how we dressed back then? But tell me, what've you been doing with yourself?"

  "I just finished an internal medicine residency."

  "You're a doctor? That's great! " He glanced at his watch. "Look, I've been waiting down here to meet you since you walked in. I mean, I just had to see if it was really you. But now I'm late for a meeting and I've got to run. But let's get together soon."

  "That'd be nice."

  "How about tomorrow night? Are you free?

  She sensed he was asking about more than just time

  "Tomorrow? No, I'm moonlighting Tuesday night." She started a twelve-hour shift at Lynnbrook at eight.

  "Wednesday night? "

  "Sorry. Moonlighting again." But she didn't want to turn him down flat. "Maybe we could get together for an early bite before I go on duty. Or wait till Friday."

  "Friday's a long way off. An early bite it will be. Any place special you'd like to go?"

  "You choose."

  "Okay. I will." He pulled a small leather folder from his pocket and gave her two cards along with a pen. "Give me your number and I'll call when I think of an appropriate place." She wrote down her number and handed back the cards. He returned the bottom card to her.

  "That one's for you. Call me any time you witness a federal crime." He waved and moved off. "I'll call you tonight or tomorrow." And then he was hurrying through the glistening marble whiteness toward the exit. Gin glanced at his card, Gerald Canney, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  She smiled. Gerry was an FBI man? Amazing. She'd always imagined him going into business. Who'd have ever thought? And now the former major heartthrob of Washington-Lee High wanted to take her out. Who'd ever believe that?

  She just hoped they didn't wind up at a pasta place. That wouldn't be funny.

  Pasta . . . when had she picked up that name? Freshman year?

  Somewhere around the time her hormones had begun to flow. Overnight she'd seemed to balloon. It was horrible.

  She couldn't squeeze into her clothes. Her breasts were growing, which was fine, but so were her thighs and hips and waistline. She hadn't changed her eating habits but her body seemed to have stopped burning off the calories she'd once been able to pack away. She'd gone from slightly above average to obese in less than a year. She'd wanted to die.

  Her father couldn't see a problem, "There's more of you to love!" was definitely not a solution to her misery. Mama understood, and together they started a diet, but already it was too late. The school comedians couldn't resist "Pasta" Panzella.

  She changed internally as well, becoming moody and reclusive. Looking back now, from the far side of a medical education, Gin realized Pasta had sunk into a clinical depression. She'd tell people she didn't care about her weight or what anybody called her, and to prove it, she'd binge. Especially on lonely weekend nights. Primarily on chocolate.

  Pasta loved chocolate. Chocolate cake, chocolate donuts, Hershey's with almonds, and Snickers. God, she loved Snickers. And bingeing only made her fatter, which made her even more depressed.

  Pasta missed the junior and senior proms, and lots of other high-school activities in her self-imposed exile. The only bright spots in those dark days had been her novels and her part-time job in Dr. Lathram's office. Her grades began to slip but not enough to keep her out of the Ivy League.

  The summer before going off to college she realized that she had a chance to start all over again. The kids in Princeton had never heard her called Pasta. She vowed that none of them ever would. She began a strict diet, no bulimia, no starvation, no trading one problem for another, just low fat and calorie restriction, plus a grueling exercise program. She remembered the constant hunger, the burning lungs, the aching legs as she forced her body to jog one more mile . . . just one more. By the time she registered at Princeton she was proud to be merely overweight. According to her charts, her weight hit the fiftieth percentile for her age, height, and sex during sophomore year, as a junior she overshot and got too thin, so she backed off. When she graduated she was the person she wanted to be, She had her BS in biology, was on her way to U. of P. med school, and she liked what she saw in the mirror.

  She'd maintained that weight through four years of med school and three years of residency. Pasta Panzella was gone.

  Well, almost gone. The ghost of Pasta still haunted her, and every so often she'd propel Gin to the chocolate section of a candy store, and Gin would give in and let Pasta have a Snickers. But only once in a while, and only one.

  And now Gerry Canney was asking her out. Strange how things come full circle.

  She frowned. Hadn't she heard somewhere along the line that Gerry was married? She wanted to get to know Gerry, she certainly hadn't known him well in high school, but she wasn't into games.

  Pasta Panzella had been a vulnerable adolescent.

  Gin Panzella, MD, was anything but.

  '"Sorry I'm late," Gerry said as he burst into Marvin Ketter's cramped officer on the EYE Street side of the Bureau building. He was puffing a little and he'd broken a sweat on the rush up from the parking garage.

  "Took me a little longer than I planned."

  Which was true. It had taken Pasta, no. . . Gina, a long time to finish her business in the Hart Building. And all the way back here his mind had been on her instead of Senator Schulz. God, she was beautiful now.

  The metamorphosis from Pasta to Gin fascinated him. Reminded him of the time as a kid he'd left a caterpillar in a dry aquarium and returned after a weekend away to find a graceful butterfly fluttering against the glass. He'd let it fly around his room, watching it in awe for hours before opening the screen to let it glide out the window.

  "Well, you've had all mornin' to scratch," Ketter said. "Find any worms?" Marvin Ketter had ten years on Gerry. His dark curly hair was just starting to gray at the temples and he wore it very very short. His eyebrows were his outstanding feature, enormous, bushy, Groucho-league tangles that were longer and thicker than the hair on his head. Give him a wide black mustache and a cigar and he could join Harpo and Chico without a hitch. Until he opened his mouth. Groucho didn't have a Georgia accent.

  Ketter was SSA, supervising special agent. One notch above Gerry.

  Gerry wanted his job. He didn't want to kick him out or make him look bad, he liked Ketter, but when Ketter moved up, Ger
ry wanted to move into his chair. Not simply as a career move or because he'd been a field agent long enough, there were other, more important reasons.

  "Found a few goodies, but I don't know if they mean anything. And the more I learn about our boy, the less I like him. I mean, there didn't seem to be anything too small for this guy to steal."

  "Plenty like him down here."

  "So I'm beginning to see. Hell, I used to think I had few illusions about what really goes on up there on the Hill, but I'm beginning to think I've been a Pollyanna." He'd learned more than he wanted to know about Washington's honoraria industry.

  Years ago the Senate had voted to cap the amount of honoraria each member could collect in a year. This did not deter senators from accepting "speaking engagements," however. They continued to be flown to plush resorts, put up in lavish suites, wined and dined for days before and after their 'speech", usually a few after-dinner remarks to the corporate sales conference attendees, and then flown back to Washington loaded down with gifts. The thousand-dollar honorarium for speaking? That was donated, very visibly, to a charity.

  The all-expense-paid vacation and gifts were enough of a haul for most of the legislators, but not enough for Senator Schulz. He accepted every speaking invitation that came along, demanded high honoraria, but graciously donated every dime to a church in his hometown where his uncle was minister. Gerry's investigation had uncovered evidence that the minister was keeping only a quarter of the donations for the church and funneling the rest back to Schulz.

  But then Gerry had come across a connection between Schultz and Representative Hugo Lane. Both were cozy with one of the Japanese auto lobbies. A Japanese auto corporation had bought an $800,000 condo in Palm Beach. It was registered in the company's name, but its use was reserved exclusively for Schulz and Lane. Whenever they wanted some fun in the Florida sun, it was theirs. They simply had to work it out between themselves so they wouldn't arrive at the same time

  Congressman Lane had died in a car crash, ran it into a deep ravine in Rock Creek Park, two weeks before Schulz's death.

  A connection? Maybe. Gerry was looking into that. So far he'd come up with zilch, but he was still looking.

  "One interesting note," he said to Ketter. "I came across a fat canceled check for plastic surgery."

  "Let me guess, drawn on his reelection campaign funds." Of course.

  "So what's the point?"

  "Well, seems to me people who've looking to end it all don't drop a bundle on cosmetic surgery. Sounds more like someone who's looking toward the future."

  '"Possibly. Or someone who's unhappy with himself, tries plastic surgery to improve his looks, finds out it doesn't make him feel the least bit better, so he dives for the dirt."

  "Spoilsport, " Gerry muttered.

  "Leave the second-guessing to the shrinks. Got anything concrete?"

  "Yes. An odd little correlation popped out of the database. What if I told you that both Lane and Schulz had plastic surgery this summer?"

  Ketter shrugged. So?"

  "And what if I told you they both used the same surgeon?"

  "Same response. These Old Boys go to the same dentist, the same chiropractor, eat at the same restaurants, have the same personal trainer, sometimes the same mistresses. So why not use the same plastic surgeon? Who's the doc?"

  "Duncan Lathram."

  Ketter stared at him a moment. "Well now, " he drawled. "Seems I've heard that name before. And I do believe I heard it from you. Or am I wrong?"

  "No, you're right."

  "Seems to me you had yourself a bit of a hard-on for this Doc Lathram a while back."

  "We had a disagreement. That's all." More than a disagreement, actually.

  Duncan Lathram had flat out refused to operate on Gerry's face after the car accident. It had been a very bad time for Gerry. The worst.

  And Lathram's brush-off had almost put him over the edge. He still smarted from the sting of that rejection.

  "You seemed pretty heated up at the time, if I remember."

  "Look. The computer spit out the correlation on its own. I didn't go looking for it. But you've got to admit it seems a little strange that a congressman and a senator both die a month or so after plastic surgery performed by the same doctor."

  "One in a car accident, the other in a fall. I don't exactly see a trend here."

  "Neither do I. Just mentioning it as a curiosity."

  "Fine. So basically we've got no evidence of foul play in the Schulz death."

  "None."

  "Okay. Then let's fold up that tent and move on without muddying the water with plastic surgeons."

  "Will do."

  But Gerry's interest was piqued. It might be nothing, doubtless was nothing, but he'd keep an eye out for any other Lathram patients who wound up in the morgue.

  Just for the sheer hell of it.

  2

  "SURGERY DR. PANZELLA?"

  Gin sat before a computer terminal, completing a pre-op physical, summarizing her evaluation of a patient's cardiopulmonary status and suitability for surgery. At least that was what she was supposed to be doing. Actually she was staring at the screen ruminating about yesterday's disaster at Marsden's office and that officious little, Don't think about it.

  She looked up. A young black woman, dressed in surgical scrubs and cap, had poked her head and upper body through the door of the record room and was looking at her expectantly.

  '"He's ready to scrub," said Joanna, the surgicenter's OR nurse.

  "Be right there," Gin said.

  She hit F10 to save the H and P, jotted down the file name so she could finish it later, and headed upstairs for the operating suite. Even on a V.I.P morning, with only one very important patient, Duncan Lathram did not like to be kept waiting. She hustled.

  Not that she had that far to go. Lathram Surgical Associates sounded like a multicenter medical group, but actually it was one surgeon at one location in Chevy Chase. That location was an old single-story stone building, somewhat Gothic looking, that had once been a bank.

  Duncan Lathram and his brother Oliver, also a doctor, but a PhD in pharmacology, had maintained the old facade while completely gutting and refitting the interior into a state-of-the-art prlyate surgicenter.

  The main floor offered a two-room operating suite, a large recovery room with six cubicles, a private V.I.P recovery room, an examination/consultation room, and Duncan's office. The records room, lounge, and Oliver's lab took up the basement.

  Gin rushed into the scrub room, shucked her white coat, tucked her unruly black hair under a disposable cap, and joined Duncan at the sink.

  His forearms were already coated with tan lather.

  "Morning, Duncan." Since her first day here he'd insisted that since she was now a full-fledged physician, she must call him by his first name, "Call me Doctor Lathram once more and you're fired." But she had to make a conscious effort to say Duncan. He'd been her hero since she was ten.

  He grunted and nodded absently as he continued working the Betadine into his skin with the disposable brush.

  Hmmm. Preoccupied this morning.

  Gin watched him out of the corner of her eye as she adjusted the water temperature with the foot controls and began her own scrub. Assisting Duncan Lathram at surgery, still hard to believe it was true. Simply being alongside him like this never failed to give her a warm tingle.

  She'd been working with him for months now and still marveled at how good he looked for a man of sixty-two. Neat as the proverbial pin, with dark, glossy, perfectly combed hair graying at the temples, piercing blue eyes over a generous nose set in a longish, rugged face that creased deeply when he smiled, which wasn't all that often. Six feet, maybe six-one, with a weathered Gary Cooper-Randolph Scott look, more like a saddle hand than a plastic surgeon. Long, lean, and close to the bone, a rack of baby-back ribs.

  The image made her smile and took her back to her childhood when she worked in the family's Italian deli and meat market. Her
dad made a practice then, still did, no doubt, of labeling certain customers with the names of cuts of meat or one of his Italian specialty dishes. Mrs. Fusco, who always had to touch everything, was a calatnan, potbellied Mr. Prizzi was a pork loin, Mrs. Bellini, who'd always leave her shopping list home and could never remember what she needed, was capozella, and once when he'd thought she was in the front of the store, Gin had heard Dad ask one of the butchers if he'd got a load of the cannolis on Mrs. Phillips.

  Little Gin adopted the practice and began categorizing the kids she knew by cuts of meat. Duncan Lathram was definitely a rack of baby-backs.

  But Duncan's hands didn't quite go with the rest of him, long, delicate, agile fingers that could perform miracles, do medical origami with human tissues.

  She felt awkward even thinking it, but the old guy was sexy.

  Listen to me, she thought. He's older than my dad.

  But no getting around it, Duncan Lathram was an attractive man. Not that she felt any libidinous tugs toward him. God, no. But from a purely esthetic standpoint, he was pretty hot for an old dude.

  Must be our history, she thought. We go back a long way. And I've got the scars to prove it.

  The big guy was quiet today. Duncan almost always had something to talk about. A news junkie. Read all the District papers, plus the Baltimore San and the northern Virginia rags. Had them strewn all over his office every morning. Never missed MacNeil/Lehrer and Meet the Press.

  And never failed to find something to tick him off.

  Duncan had his Permanently-Ticks-Me-Off list and his Ticks-Me-Off-Today list. Always had something to talk about.

  But not today.

  The silence was starting to get to Gin.

  "Hear about Senator Schulz?" she said.

  She thought he seemed to stiffen at the name.

  "Schulz?" Duncan's voice was smooth, deeply melodic. "What about him?"

  "According to the TV there's rumors that his cause of death is being investigated."

  Duncan began to rinse the honey-colored foam from his arms and hands. "The scuttlebutt on Schulz is that he jumped. And with reason. He was, please excuse the demotic crookeder than most, and his scams were unraveling." Duncan shook his head sadly. "Twenty stories straight down, flat on his face." He sighed. "All that exceptional plastic work, all those hours of toil, wasted."