Lethal Practice Read Online Free

fine, really, I’ll be all right,” he said weakly. But he continued to slouch in the chair where we had put him while his sister made nervous fluttering movements. By the time she finished, she had also realized her brother was no longer in charge. She looked to Watts and me for orders as angrily as if we had just staged a coup d’etat.
    Watts continued the takeover. “Miss Hurst,” he asserted, fully formal now, “would you please get your brother a cup of tea? Dr. Garnet and I will stay here and wait for the police.”
    She grudgingly nodded and left, but on the way out she gave me a sullen look to make it clear I didn’t rate similar respect. Gray hair again. It conveys automatic seniority in our business and, in this case, not wrongly. Watts’s excellence with the living reflected his years spent as a general practitioner before he became a doctor for the dead.
    We stationed ourselves at the doorway of Kingsly’s office. I continued bothering Watts about the thermostat and a time of death. “I saw him earlier tonight, around seven. He’d been drinking and was stumbling along the hall, so I alerted security. We can check why they didn’t pick him up or, if they did, why they didn’t take him home. But the room here was an oven when I arrived, so the heat must have been on for quite a while before the cleaners found him.”
    Watts looked at me intently as I talked, probably thinking he was hearing the raving of an amateur detective.
    “Maybe,” he finally said. “Room temperature wouldn’t change heat loss much though. Besides, there are other signs to estimate the time of death. Leave that for a moment. Where’s the blood?”
    He looked at me, saw I hadn’t a clue what he meant, and went on. “If that bit of metal in his chest turns out to be the cardiac needle we both think it is, then there should be at least a few spurts of blood that shot out during the time it took the pressure to fall. Even if the stab stopped the heart instantaneously, which is unlikely if the needle broke off, then a stream of blood would still have sprayed all over the place for a few seconds. Think back to the times you’ve put a needle in a patient with cardiac tamponade.”
    I did think about it. Tamponade is a condition where the sac around the heart becomes filled with fluid. The tension prevents the heart from beating even though the electrical impulses keep firing to organize the pump of a heartbeat.
    We would routinely get the pumping action back by sticking a special long needle attached to a syringe into the swollen sac around the heart to pull off the constricting fluid. If we went too far, the tip of the needle would enter the heart muscle and set off an electrical disturbance that if allowed to continue could degenerate into ventricular fibrillation and a full cardiac arrest. But Robert was right; this took time. In Kingsly’s case the needle would have passed directly into the center of his heart and set up the fatal dysrhythmia. Unless the needle had been attached to a containing syringe until Kingsly had died and the needle had been broken off afterward, there should have been a lot of blood, streams of it everywhere.
    “And,” Watts said, “if the needle hadn’t broken off in the struggle but was intact, then whoever stabbed him simply could have removed the needle with the syringe attached. A neat withdrawal leaves a minimal mark and would have been the logical way to try to hide that Kingsly was murdered. No one would deliberately snap it off after and risk the broken fragment being found in the body.”
    “I suppose you’re right, but once the needle had broken off, why not just pull it out then?”
    He frowned at me as if I were one of his residents and should have known the answer myself. “Because the killer wouldn’t know how deep in it was without probing for it,” he explained not too patiently, “and that would enlarge the puncture site, making the wound obvious.” He paused and looked