Sarah's List by Elizabeth Gunn

Author:Elizabeth Gunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448304271
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2020-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

NINE

Tuesday

The small meeting room looked unusually elegant, freshly vacuumed and set up with ice water and glasses. Ah, but we’ll have it looking lived-in before long, Sarah thought, as she and Jason pulled out chairs and unloaded notes, dark glasses, two digital tablets, a purse and a stack of mail. An office tech was fussing with a projector and a laptop on a side table.

‘You look rested,’ Jason said. ‘Really getting into this paid leave business, huh?’

‘That’s right,’ Sarah lied, ‘just drifting in the hammock looking up at blue sky.’ Her arms were still throbbing from the bougainvillea cuts.

Then Delaney strode in, all business, and plopped down a folder at the head of the table.

‘Lot to go over,’ he said, ‘let’s get started.’ Jason’s eyebrows went up; his smooth face and handsome shaven head inclined one degree toward Delaney and seemed to ask, Who’s holding you back?

‘I want to begin where the incident began,’ Delaney said. ‘Alice, you ready?’ The steno touched a key, and a chart appeared on the screen across the room. It was a computer-drawn depiction of fifty feet of the ICU at St. Mary’s Hospital, on squared paper with distances indicated along the top and sides of the graph.

‘The first picture shows the dimensions of the north section of the Intensive Care Unit where the attack occurred,’ Delaney said, ‘and the positions of the three people who walked into it together on Friday.’ His laser pointer danced over the stick figures labelled a, b and c, and a legend at the bottom of the page that named them. ‘First, do you both agree that this is where you were, relative to each other, as you came through the doors? Jason, you were farthest left, like this? And you were in the middle, Sarah?’ He recited the distances he wanted established – between the stick figures, then from the figures to the third door in the hall, drawn in red. Nodding, the two detectives watched his red dot. ‘Both good with this? Next picture, Alice.’

The figures were all in the same places but there was an addition, a stick figure for the man in scrubs pushing a wheelchair.

‘And that man in scrubs,’ Sarah said, ‘could have pushed his chair on into that room without a cross word from me. He looked perfect to be exactly where he was. But Judy really knows her turf, she spotted him right away for a fake. Tore into him like a sheep dog and got knocked down for her pains.’

‘OK, next chart, Alice,’ Delaney said. ‘This is where we need you to clear up a few things, Jason. We established that you were thirty feet from the suspect when he knocked Judy down, but I don’t believe you tased him from that distance, did you?’

‘No. We spent one whole winter and spring wrangling over which taser to buy, and most of the following summer training with it. So we’ve all got those parameters drilled into our brains – ten to twenty feet of clear space with nobody in it but your target bad guy.

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