Utter Madness by Steven Jon Halasz

Author:Steven Jon Halasz [Halasz, Steven Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798654918918
Published: 2020-06-18T18:30:00+00:00

7

Wade left the house without his dinner. It had burned by the time he thought about it again, and anyway, he needed to talk to Anna and there wasn’t a moment to lose.

With no medical experience he could hardly be expected to have made the connection between the sound of the hair dryer, Anna’s current pregnancy and her youthful abortion. Even so, he was angry with himself for having dismissed the fact of her abortion as irrelevant without even giving it a second thought. He should at least have considered whether it might have had implications. He’d been sloppy and it was unforgivable.

He cooled his heels for forty minutes while the jail personnel worked through the procedures to make his client available. When she finally did arrive in the conference room, it was a hardened woman who appeared before him. Three months in jail had changed her.

he thought. And while that was good and necessary for her to survive, it made him a little sad. “What’s up?” she asked.

“The abortion...” he began.

“Yeah, I know,” she whined. “That’s all they’re talking about in here. Will it hurt my case? Can we sue? We must be able to sue somebody.”

Maybe she could sue for breach of privacy, but it wouldn’t do her much good if she were convicted and there were more important things she needed to focus on. “The jury is locked up in a hotel with no access to news reports, but the thing is, I’ve just found out…”

He paused, considering how to approach the subject. “Found out what?” she asked.

“Anna,” he said. “What do you remember about your abortion? What was it like? Were you awake for it?”

She thought for a moment. “Yes. It was uncomfortable but not too bad.”

Wade took a deep breath. He was ill at ease discussing gynecological matters with his client. Finally, he asked, “What type of abortion did you have?”

“I don’t know. They stuck a tube inside me.”

“Was there any noise?”

Anna closed her eyes for a few seconds as if trying to remember, then said, “Yes, there was some kind of sound.”

“Like what?”

“Like a small vacuum cleaner, maybe, something like that.”

So it’s true, thought Wade. She did have the same kind of abortion as Lae. “Anna,” he said. “I think that explains why you shot Bart.”

Anna’s brow wrinkled. “What?” she said loudly. “What are you talking about?”

“You were protecting your baby. From an abortion. You had just found out you were pregnant. Some part of your brain associated the sound of the hair dryer with the procedure and interpreted it as a threat to your baby. Doesn’t that make sense?”

A strange expression came over Anna’s face. “No!” she replied emphatically. “Bart wasn’t trying to kill the baby! With a hair dryer?”

“You know that now. Consciously, you know that. But like you said, you shot him before you even had time to think about it. Your brain wasn’t fully engaged and you were on autopilot. After training yourself for years to draw that gun and

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