Read Online Lethal Practice by Peter Clement - Free Book Online

intimidate me.
    At first he didn’t reply. His expression showed nothing—not anger, not disappointment, not even resentment. But the widened blacks of his eyes warned me he was pumped with adrenaline. I felt my stomach knot as I waited for his next move.
    “There’s one file you could give me permission to see.”
    “Oh, whose is that?”
    “Yours.”
    I didn’t believe I’d heard him correctly. He’d spoken very softly, but with an edge in his voice that startled me. “Pardon?”
    “You could let me see your file,” he repeated, still in a quiet tone, but I noticed that his beefy cheeks were flushed.
    A chill went through me. Before I could speak, he spun around and left the office, his two policemen in tow.
    I was left standing behind my desk, trying to figure out what had just happened. Bufort must have been told he could have any minutes he wanted without having to ask me. And more than anyone he would know he couldn’t go through confidential files for the asking.
    Then I got it. He hadn’t wanted minutes or files. He wanted me, my reactions. He’d been checking me out. He’d wanted to see how I’d react to him going after old minutes and private files, particularly my own. But why? I felt another twinge of alarm. However crude his bursting in on me had been, he must have had a reason. What had he found or heard about me that interested him? Remembering the parting look on his face was giving me the willies.
    My fretting was cut short.
    “Ninety-nine, emergency! Ninety-nine, emergency!”
    I’d started to run out the door when I heard “Cancel ninety-nine, emergency! Cancel ninety-nine, emergency!”
    This meant the arrest code was called off for some reason. I slackened my pace but was still pretty brisk in covering the remaining ground back to the ER.
    Susanne met me with an outstretched palm to slow me down. Without my asking, she explained. “One of the cleaning men walked in on the DOA you left in C.”
    “I left?”
    “Yeah. Our cleaning guy just took a staff CPR course. Saw the body, called ninety-nine, and started mouth-to-mouth.”
    “On a corpse?”
    “You know civilians. They can’t tell how long somebody’s been dead. Hell, they’re taught not to quit until a medic or someone qualified says so.”
    “Where’s he now?”
    “In the can, barfing. The corpse is on the way to the morgue.” She shoved a sheaf of papers at me. “Now, for God’s sake, do the paperwork so they don’t send him back.”
    It took less than a minute to finish signing off on the forms, but then I hesitated. Looking at my note about the mark on the derelict’s chest after Bufort’s astonishing behavior, I wondered if making a fuss about such an unlikely possibility might draw his attention even more in my direction. Would he see my note as a feeble attempt to send the hospital’s pathologist on a wild-goose chase? If I could have erased the entry and had Watts check out the mark first, I would have. I even wondered if I should document the inappropriate attempt to resuscitate a long-dead corpse. To a trained doctor or nurse, it would have been inconceivable to start CPR on an obvious DOA. I certainly had never imagined that an inexperienced civilian with recent CPR training could walk in on one of our bodies and start pumping.
    But the same thing had happened with Kingsly. We never would have noticed the blood coming out from around the broken needle if the two cleaning women hadn’t started CPR on a body that had obviously been dead for hours. If such a scenario was inconceivable to a doctor or nurse in the ER, could the person who murdered Kingsly have made the same assumption—that by the time Kingsly’s body was found it would have been so evidently beyond resuscitation that CPR would never even come to mind, let alone be tried? An experienced resuscitator, trying to get away with Kingsly’s murder, would never have guessed that a course for the non-medical staff in CPR would give him