Bücher online kostenlos Kostenlos Online Lesen
The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

Titel: The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Tess Gerritsen
Vom Netzwerk:
stethoscope and moved to the bedside. For a moment she just watched Ursula’s chest rise and fall. Seldom did she examine the living; she had to pause to call back her clinical skills, acutely aware that Dr. Sutcliffe was a witness to just how out of practice she felt when examining a body whose heart was still beating. She had worked so long with the dead that she now felt clumsy with the living. Sutcliffe stood at the head of the bed, an imposing presence with his broad shoulders and intent gaze. He watched as she shone a penlight into the patient’s eyes, as she palpated the neck, her fingers sliding across the warm skin. So different from the chill of refrigerated flesh.
    She paused. “There’s no carotid pulse on the right side.”
    “What?”
    “There’s a strong pulse on the left, but not the right.” She reached for the chart and opened it to the O.R. notes. “Oh. The anesthesiologist mentions it here. ‘Absent right common carotid artery noted. Most likely a normal anatomical variation.’ ”
    He frowned, his tanned face flushing. “I’d forgotten about that.”
    “So it’s an old finding? The lack of a pulse on this side?”
    He nodded. “Congenital.”
    Maura slipped the stethoscope onto her ears and lifted the hospital gown, exposing Ursula’s large breasts. The skin was still pale and youthful despite her sixty-eight years. Decades of protection beneath a nun’s habit had spared her from the sun’s aging rays. Pressing the diaphragm of the stethoscope to Ursula’s chest, she heard a steady, vigorous heartbeat. A survivor’s heart, pumping on, undefeated.
    A nurse poked her head into the cubicle. “Dr. Sutcliffe? X-ray called to say that the portable chest film’s ready, if you want to go down and see it.”
    “Thanks.” He looked at Maura. “We can look at the skull films too, if you’d like.”
    They shared the elevator with six young candy stripers, fresh-faced and glossy-haired, giggling among themselves as they shot admiring glances at Dr. Sutcliffe. Attractive though he was, he seemed oblivious to their attention, his solemn gaze focused instead on the changing floor numbers. The glamour of a white coat, thought Maura, remembering her own teenage years working as a volunteer in St. Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco. The doctors had seemed untouchable to her. Unassailable. Now that she herself was a doctor, she knew only too well that the white coat would not protect her from making mistakes. It would not make her infallible.
    She looked at the candy stripers in their crisp uniforms, and thought of herself at sixteen—not giggly, like these girls, but quiet and serious. Even then, aware of life’s dark notes. Instinctively drawn to melodies in a minor key.
    The elevator doors opened, and the girls spilled out, a sunny flock of pink and white, leaving Maura and Sutcliffe alone in the elevator.
    “They make me tired,” he said. “All that energy. I wish I had a tenth of it, especially after a night on call.” He glanced at her. “Do you have many of those?”
    “Nights on call? We rotate.”
    “I guess your patients don’t expect you to rush in.”
    “It’s not like your life here in the trenches.”
    He laughed, and suddenly he was transformed into a blond surfer boy with smiling eyes. “Life in the trenches. That’s what it feels like sometimes. The front lines.”
    The X rays were already waiting for them on the clerk’s counter. Sutcliffe carried the large envelope into the viewing room. He slid a set of films under the clips and flipped on the switch.
    The light flickered on through images of a skull. Fracture lines laced across bone like lightning strikes. She could see two separate points of impact. The first blow had landed on the right temporal bone, sending a single fine crack downward, toward the ear. The second, more powerful, had fallen posterior to the first blow, and this one had compressed the plateau of cranium, crushing it inward.
    “He hit her first on the side of the head,” she said.
    “How can you tell that was the first blow?”
    “Because the first fracture line stops the propagation of an intersecting fracture from a second blow.” She pointed to the fracture lines. “You see how this line stops right here, where it reaches the first fracture line? The force of impact can’t jump across the gap. That tells me this blow to the right temple came first. Maybe she was turning away. Or she didn’t see him, coming at her from the

Weitere Kostenlose Bücher