Katie pulled into her driveway and killed the engine. She sat in a daze, staring out the windshield at nothing in particular. She had a couple of hours before Matt was due to pick her up, but all she wanted to do at this point was figure out who killed Ellen and put it behind her.

She got out of the car and went into the house through the kitchen door.

Caleb met her there. “Katie,” he said. “Thank God. I’ve been texting you for an hour.”

Katie pulled out her phone and saw the texts. She’d turned her phone to silent and hadn’t checked it. “What’s wrong?” Katie asked.

“Just a bit of stellar computer work on my part.”

“You texted me twenty times to brag?”

“You’re going to want to see this,” Caleb said.

Katie followed him into the dining room.

“I finally cracked the code to get into the locked files,” Caleb said.

Katie dumped her bag on the ottoman in the living room and went to lean over his shoulder at the dining room table.

“The files each have names on them, and they’re all individually locked,” Caleb said. “But now that I got into the main file, the rest should be easy.”

“Show me what you’ve got,” she said.

“We talked about how one of her clients may have killed her because she knew too much about them,” Caleb said.

Katie nodded.

“When I opened the main file, this is what I saw.” Caleb clicked and a window popped open revealing the contents of the protected files. There were three of them: clients, taxes, and research.

“Let’s start with clients,” Caleb said. He clicked on that file, and a list of names popped up: Nick Hawkins, Lynn Swanson, Matt Gregor, Sandra Boules, Aaron Latimer, Jackie Munson. Katie only recognized the first three.

“Oh, I see,” Katie said. Matt was one of Ellen’s clients. Did he have a secret that was big enough to kill over? Could he have injected Ellen with the Demerol right there in the ER? There had been stories about renegade medical personnel using their access to harm patients.

“It’s not that I thought he was a homicidal maniac, but I thought you might want to know about this before you got too involved.” Caleb had been almost as devastated as Katie when Justin broke off their relationship. They had become as close as brothers—it had been one of the things she loved about Justin. Since Justin, Caleb had become more protective of Katie.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Katie said. “Thanks.” Katie had to get a grip. This was what came of investigating. It was similar to treating patients. All the secrets came out, often ones you didn’t want to know. But also the physician had to consider all possibilities until everything but the culprit was ruled out.

Caleb grunted and clicked on the research file.

Twenty or more documents filled the computer window. Caleb clicked on the first one.

“A scientific journal on color-blind genetics,” Caleb said. “She was obsessed.”

“What’s the next one?”

“Looks like a scan of a newspaper article.” He zoomed in.

There was a picture of two couples. The caption read, “Jack and Sylvia Riley with Eugene and Lily Talbot.”

The next document was a birth announcement for Christopher.

After they’d opened all the documents and spent an hour reading through them, Katie still felt like she didn’t know more than before they had broken into the computer.

“Can you put all this on a thumb drive for me?”

“Sure,” Caleb said. He rummaged among the papers on the table and came up with a thumb drive. He stuck it into the slot on the side of the laptop and copied it.

“Thanks. I’ll have to read through all the articles more carefully and see if I can figure out what she was looking for.”

Caleb pushed away from the computer. “I haven’t looked at the client files yet. Do you want to do that on your own?”

“Yeah, I think I should,” Katie said. “Thank you, Caleb. I’ll let you know what I find.”

She tamped down the discomfort of snooping in Ellen’s private files and clicked on one of the names she didn’t recognize first. Maybe if she found something in those notes, she wouldn’t have to read the files on the people she knew.

After reading about Sandra Boules’s desire to be a tour guide in Italy and not a secretary at the phone company, she hovered the mouse over Matt’s name. It seemed that Ellen had been doing life coaching stuff with Sandra; maybe that’s all these files were about. People who just needed a little help getting their priorities straight and formulating a plan for success.

But Matt was already successful. Why would he need a life coach? And he hadn’t told her he knew Ellen professionally. She checked the time. He was due in a half hour. Should she click, or should she ask him? Gabrielle’s voice floated into her mind. Everybody lies. She didn’t want to get involved with another man who had only a passing acquaintance with honesty or who had no idea what he really wanted. She clicked.

* * *

The doorbell startled her out of her computer trance. Crap. He was early.

Caleb zipped out of his room and went to the door. “I have to meet him before you can go out with him,” he said. Katie rolled her eyes.

She heard Matt’s voice at the door and jumped up to go change into something better than her clinic-day clothing.

She heard them talking but couldn’t tell what they were saying. She hurriedly tossed on a wool skirt and tights, ankle boots, and a soft gray sweater. She heard them laughing and hoped Caleb hadn’t trotted out some embarrassing story from childhood. She swiped on another coat of mascara and decided that would have to do.

There was a quiet knock on the door. Caleb.

“Caleb, if that’s you, come in.”

The door opened a crack and he slipped inside. “Matt thought I was your boyfriend.” Caleb was fighting a smile and losing. “He said he heard at the hospital that you were ‘living with some guy.’ I said you were, but the guy was your brother. He seems cool. He asked me which online games I play. He saw the equipment and said he plays too.”

Katie had to interrupt the budding bromance, or she’d never get out of the house. Just as she was about to cut into this stream of admiration, her stomach dropped. Caleb had left Matt alone in the dining room. With the computer that Katie had left open to Matt’s file. She pushed past Caleb and rushed out to the dining room.

Matt was sitting in the chair that she had recently vacated. He looked up as she entered the room.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. He gestured to the computer. “This one seems to be all about me.”

“Matt, I can explain,” Katie said.

Matt shook his head. “No need. I know what this is. Somehow you got your hands on Ellen’s files, and rather than ask me about it, you read my file.”

“That’s only partly true,” Katie said. This was going so wrong, so fast. “You know I’m helping Beth figure out who killed her mother. I had no idea there would be a file about you on there.”

“That’s okay,” Matt said. “I came here thinking you were living with a guy and had agreed to date me behind his back, so I guess we haven’t really established trust.”

“Matt, I’m sorry.” And she really was. She had known that reading those files would put her in an uncomfortable spot in general. She hadn’t known it would ruin things with the first guy she’d been really interested in since Justin.

“It’s fine,” Matt said. He headed to the door. “I’m sure you’ll understand that I don’t much feel like going out tonight.”

Caleb came and stood behind Katie.

“It was nice to meet you, Caleb.” Matt shut the door, and seconds later they heard his car roar to life and head down the street.

Caleb turned to Katie. “Katie, I’m sorry. I should have flipped the computer shut.”

Katie shook her head and wiped her eyes. “It’s my fault. I should have asked him before I read it.” She made a weak attempt at a smile. “At least now there’s nothing to distract me from the case.” Katie took off her boots and slid into the seat in front of the computer.

Several hours later, her brain was filled with snippets of information. She felt like someone had dumped a complicated jigsaw puzzle out of its box and took away the picture.

A huge yawn overtook her, and she felt dizzy and blurry-eyed. She was no stranger to sleep deprivation, but usually she kept active to stay awake. She stood and stretched, feeling the tension in her shoulders as she finally unhunched.

She saved all the files back to the thumb drive and brought it with her to her room, where she undressed quickly and fell into bed. She closed her eyes and waited for sleep. And waited.

Her brain continued to try to put some of the things she’d read into perspective. Of course, she had read the Matt Gregor file and was relieved to discover that he had been seeing Ellen for career counseling. He was thinking about leaving medicine and was exploring other career options. That’s why he was doing all of the locum tenens work. It paid really well, and he’d be able to take some time off in another year.

Lynn Swanson’s file held no surprises either. Ellen had met her at the women’s shelter where she volunteered. She described Lynn as skittish and was not confident that she would ever leave her husband. They had arranged for private counseling away from the shelter, as Lynn was worried her husband would find out what she was up to.

The biggest surprise was Nick Hawkins. He was seeing Ellen for burnout. Katie thought all physicians got burned out once in a while. It was part of the job in many ways. Caregivers of all sorts eventually got to the point where they had to learn to take care of themselves first or risk losing the ability to care for others. But true burnout was harder to shake. The emotional toll of caring for sick and dying people and the constant demands of time and emotion were often too much to bear. The protective mechanism was to put distance between oneself and the patient. And then stop seeing them as individuals. And then stop caring. Nick had endured his own difficult recovery from his motorcycle accident, and his dependence on pain medicine combined with his continuing work with chronic pain patients was taking its toll.

He hadn’t been having an affair as the rumor mill claimed. He’d been trying to save his career. Katie had to figure out how to steer the police away from Nick as a suspect without requiring Emmett to give him an alibi. She would ask Beth to turn the computer over to the police. Once Chief Carlson saw that there had not been an affair, maybe he would let Nick go. She knew that neither Nick nor Emmett wanted to tell him where they had actually been, and for the time being she would respect that choice.

Her brain continued to run in circles and finally exhausted itself. Katie fell asleep and didn’t dream.