Show of Evil

now grabbing the edge of the speaker's platform with both hands. From below him, Vail could see his hands shaking.

Yancey took all the applause, taking deep breaths to calm himself down.

'Before I begin, I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce, uh… my… m-m-my right and left, uh, left…' His speech was slurred and he was stuttering.

Vail leaned forward in his chair. What the hell was wrong with Yancey? he wondered.

'… one of this… this, uh…'t-t-this country's great p-p-prosecutors, and the m-m-man who… uh…'

Yancey stopped, staring around the room helplessly, blinking his eyes. Vail got up and rushed towards the end of the head table, but even as he did, Yancey cried out, 'Oh!', pitched forward over the lectern, arms flailing, and dropped straight to the floor.

Vail rode in the ambulance with the stricken DA, after first calling St Claire and sending him to find Yancey's wife, Beryl. Yancey was grey and barely breathing. The paramedics worked over him feverishly, barking orders to each other while the driver called ahead to alert the trauma unit and summon Yancey's personal physician to the emergency room. When they arrived, they pushed Yancey's stretcher on the run into the operating room and Vail was left alone in the wash-up room.

Almost an hour passed before Yancey's doctor came out of the OR. Dr Gary Ziegler, was a tall, lean man with a craggy, portentous face studded with sorrowful eyes. He looked perpetually worried and was not a man who exuded hope to those waiting to get news of a stricken loved one. He wearily pulled off his latex gloves and swept off his cap and face mask, then pinched the bridge of his nose with a thumb and a forefinger and sighed.

'That bad, Gary?' Vail asked.

Ziegler looked over at him and shook his head.

'I hope you have a lot of energy, Martin.'

'What the hell does that mean?'

'It means you're going to be a busy man. It's going to be a long time before Jack goes back to work - if he ever does.'

'Heart attack?'

'Massive cerebral thrombosis.'

'Which is what, exactly?'

'Blockage of a main artery to the brain by a thrombus - a blood clot. Specifically, it means the cerebellum of the brain has been deprived of blood and oxygen.'

'In other words, a stroke.'

'In other words, a massive stroke. He's suffering severe Hemiplegia - we can already determine that, his reflexes are nil. And I suspect he's suffering aphasia, although I can't tell how bad it is yet.'

'Translate that into simple English for me,' Vail said.

Ziegler walked to the sink and began scrubbing his hands. 'Paralysis down his entire left side caused by damage to the right cerebral hemisphere. A speech deficiency caused by damage to the left hemisphere. It could have been brought on by a brain tumour, atherosclerosis, hypertension, I can't be sure at this point. Right now we've got him stabilized, but his condition is poor and he's unconscious.'

'My God.'

'The fact that he survived the first two hours is encouraging,' Ziegler said. 'If he holds on for another week or ten days, the outlook will be greatly improved. But at this point there's no way of predicting the long-term effects.'

'What I hear you saying is, Jack could be a vegetable.'

'That's pretty rash,' Ziegler said, annoyed by Vail's description.

'It sounds pretty rash!'

'Well, nothing good can be said about a stroke of this magnitude, but until we can do an ECG, blood tests, CAT scans, an angiography, hell, I couldn't even guess at the prognosis.'

'Can I see him?'

Ziegler pointed to the door of the Intensive Care Unit.

'I'm going to clean up. If Beryl gets here before I come out, talk to her, will you? I won't be long.'