How Can I Kill Them with My Broken Arm? Chapter 07
I stared at the ceiling and started thinking about what came next.
Cole and Nina were not getting out of this. The chain of evidence had already fallen apart, and they had no time to patch it up, if patching was even possible. The moment the medical examiner’s autopsy report came in, the truth
would be impossible to bury.
However, was that enough?
It was not.
In my last life, I had been sentenced to death. My parents had been driven to jump off a building. My name had been dragged through the mud until every person in the state knew the hospital had employed a killer.
Even if the truth came out now, who was going to apologize to me? Who was going to give me my parents back?
Cole was not going to prison just for a medical incident. He had fabricated evidence, tampered with surveillance footage and committed perjury. Every single one of those was a criminal offense.
Nina was not going to get off with just having her license revoked, either. She had administered the anesthetic with her own hands and killed a mother and her baby. Involuntary manslaughter was the least of what she was
facing.
Even that was not enough. I wanted to make sure neither of them ever recovered from this.
My phone was still turned off in the car, so the nurse let me borrow hers. I dialed a number. It rang three times before the line picked up.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Hollins, it’s me. Vera.”
There was a two-second pause on the other end.
Margaret Hollins was a retired senior official from the state board of health and the woman who had mentored me. In my last life, she had been out of town recovering from an illness when everything happened.
By the time the news reached her, I had already been sentenced to death. She had sent someone to look into the case after that and managed to uncover a few things, but I was dead before she ever got the chance to tell me.
This time, I was not going to wait.
“Vera?” Her tone shifted immediately. “What’s wrong? Why does your voice sound like that?”
“I’m fine.” I took a deep breath. “Ms. Hollins, I need to ask you a favor.”
“Go ahead.”
“Every case Nina Foster has handled in the obstetrics department at the state hospital, from last year to now. Can you pull those records for me?”
The line went quiet again.
“Nina Foster?” Margaret thought for a moment. “Cole Barrett’s junior?”
“Yes.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I want to know if tonight was the first time she killed a mother and her child.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line.
Margaret had spent the better part of her career in the health system. She understood exactly what I was getting at
“Vera, do you realize what you’re saying?”
“I do.”
If Nina had made mistakes before and Cole had covered them up, then tonight was not an accident. It was a pattern of systematic concealment.
If it had happened more than once, this went beyond involuntary manslaughter and into the territory of unreported major medical malpractice.
Covering for her once could be written off as a lapse in judgment, but covering for her twice made him an accomplice. If he had done it three times or more, there was no version of this where he walked away.
“Give me two days,” Margaret said. “And don’t do anything rash. Focus on healing,”
“Thank you, Ms. Hollins.”
I hung up, returned the phone to the nurse, and closed my eyes.
Footsteps echoed down the hallway, heavy and deliberate, the sound of dress shoes on terrazzo. The door opened.
It was Cole.
He was still under police supervision, but he had managed to negotiate a few minutes. He probably wanted one last chance to say something to me, whether it was begging me to let Nina off the hook or begging me not to turn
on him.
He walked to the edge of the bed and looked at the cast on my right arm. His lips parted slightly.
“Vera, I…”
“You what?”
I opened my eyes and looked at him. He looked terrible. His white coat was wrinkled, his collar was undone, and his eyes were webbed with red.
Half an hour ago he had been standing in the other room, lecturing me in his most righteous voice about turning myself in.
Now it was his turn.
