How Can I Kill Them with My Broken Arm? Chapter 06
I put dowly, giving every word its full weight
Now that something went wrong, you want me to take the blame? Too bad you didn’t account for the getting into aarden on the way and breaking my arm if that hadn’t happened, you would have pinned the whole thing on me tongs, worldn’t you?”
The moment those words left my mouth, every set of eyes in the room turned to Nina.
She stood there in a white coat with the state Women & Infants Hospital badge clipped to her chest She was ar intern, barely two months into her distetrics rotation. Without someone protecting her, she never would have had Ohe nerve to scrub in on a surgery,
“I didn’t “Nina shook her head frantically, her voice thin and shrill,
“Vera jo lying! She’s the one who performed that surgery! She’s jealous of me. She’s always been jealous of how
one Cole and I are…”
“That’s enough.” Captain Ross cut her off and reached for his radio,
“Get the tech unit in here, I want the raw surveillance data from the operating room, a full fingerprint analysis on the syringe, and notify the medical examiner to perform an autopsy,”
With every item he listed, another shade of color left Cole’s face,
Surveillance footage could be tampered with, but the raw data could not be erased. My fingerprints might have been on the syringe, but a closer examination would reveal exactly when that syringe had been used and for which procedure.
On top of that, a body did not lie. An anesthetic overdose causing cardiac arrest left a trail. Who administered the drug, at what time, and in what dosage were all things a forensic examination could determine.
I leaned back against the hospital bed with my right arm throbbing until it went numb, but I felt more certain than I had in a long time.
This time, the evidence was on my side.
Cole suddenly turned and headed for the door.
“Dr. Barrett.” Captain Ross’s voice stopped him from behind.
“I’m going to need you to stay as well. For the investigation.”
Code from where he stood.
Nina had completely fallen apart. She crumpled to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably, repeating the same words over and over.
“I didn’t mean to… I didn’t mean to…”
The patient’s family stood there in stunned silence. The middle-aged man who had just been screaming in my face and calling me a murderer had gone completely limp. He slid down the wall and sank to the floor.
His wife was dead. The baby was gone. He needed someone to hate, but now the person he was supposed to hate might be someone else entirely.
He looked at Nina, then at Cole, and his lips moved a few times without making a sound.
The patient’s mother had gone still too. Tears were drying on her cheeks and the wailing had stopped. She stared at Nina for a few seconds, then threw herself forward and grabbed a fistful of her hair.
“It was you! It was you all along!”
The room descended into chaos again, but this time the target was not me.
A nurse wheeled me out and moved me to a different room. Once the door closed, the screaming, the cursing and the footsteps were all muffled behind the corridor walls.
The nurse examined my right arm again. The kick from the husband had knocked the bone out of alignment, undoing the work they had just finished.
“We need to reset it,” she said, frowning as she carefully removed the cast. “It’s going to hurt. Do you want anesthesia?”
“No.” I closed my eyes. “Just do it.”
The pain was worse than the first fracture.
I needed it, though. It kept me sharp.
It kept every second of my last life vivid in my mind, from every word Cole had spoken on the witness stand, to my parents falling from the rooftop and the wind catching their clothes on the way down.
Once the bone was set again and a fresh cast was in place, the nurse started me on an anti-inflammatory drip. The room finally went quiet, with nothing left but the steady beeping of the heart monitor.
