Free Sleight of Hand by CJ Lyons Page B

and forget about the Ulrichs.
    She returned the volumes of charts to the clerk.  She had a stack of notes written in her cramped printing.  She slid them into the wastebasket, then added the copies of Charlie's ER visits that she'd retrieved from the computer.
    She watched the sheets of paper swirl down to the bottom of the black metal basket. Instead of feeling better, she felt worse.   
    She took a step away from the basket, heading for the exit, but stopped.  She turned, scooping up all of the papers.  Cassie spread them out on the counter, ignoring the jaundiced stare of the clerk, and examined them once more.
    That was it.  She traced a finger over the date of George's death with one hand and the date of Charlie's birth with the other.  Charlie had been born only five days after George died.
     
     
     

CHAPTER 6
     
     
    Cassie's vision darkened.  She gripped the counter's edge with sweaty palms.
    "Hey, if you're sick, the ER's one flight up," the clerk said, his voice sounding more annoyed than concerned.    
    "I'm okay," she mumbled, rolling her papers into a cylinder and shoving it into her coat pocket.  
    She stumbled out of medical records, her vision clear–too clear.  The thoughts that rushed through her mind disgusted her, but now she understood.  
    Virginia had no need to keep George alive when she had Charlie coming in a few days.  And it would be a burden to care for both infants at the same time.
    Cassie wanted to scream, to cry–she didn't want to understand this madness.  
    But somehow, it all made sense, in some twisted, grotesque way.  She pictured George and his mother out on that empty playground.  She could see Virginia look at George, and it wasn't a mother's love that she imagined in Virginia's face.  Then a hand reaching down to the little boy, so defenseless as the hand slowly pressed over his nose and mouth.
    No! Cassie forced the image from her mind.  She found herself in the stairwell.  She sat down on the grey concrete steps and tried to still the surge of anger that overwhelmed her.  Pounding her fist against the rough cinder block wall was the only thing that kept her from racing up the steps to the PICU and confronting Virginia Ulrich.  
    They'd think Cassie was the madwoman.  She looked down on her scraped and reddened hand.  Who would blame them?  She still had no tangible evidence.  Just an intuition, a feeling that twisted her gut with the force of a knife blade.  If experts like Sterling and Adeena believed  Virginia, what could Cassie do?
     
    <><><>
     
    "Why'd you wait so long to tell me about these cases?" Drake asked Jimmy as the older man drove them to the next scene in Highland Park.
    Jimmy cleared his throat.  "Truth is, after Sophia and Cleary went unsolved, your dad got kind of obsessed.  Threatened to leak it to the media that there was a serial killer loose in Pittsburgh.  Then Eades was found, and he was certain it was the same actor.  Wanted to work the case himself."
    "Who caught it?"
    "Miller.  When she got promoted it just sat collecting dust."  Jimmy grunted.  Commander Sarah Miller had leapfrogged through the ranks with a speed that put her on track to becoming the first woman police chief in Pittsburgh history.  "Right before he died, your father thought he'd found a connection between the cases.  Not a suspect, but maybe something to get them reopened."
    "What kind of connection?"
    "Dunno.  He never said, never wrote anything down. A lot like you that way."
    Drake smiled.  He never made any notes until he was certain of their importance to his case.  He loved it when defense attorneys invoked Rosario and subpoenaed his notebooks.  All they ever got for their trouble were pages of doodles and a few cryptic words left as reminders.
    "Think he told Miller about it?"
    "He was campaigning to get the case reopened, even sent to Quantico for the Feds to look at it.  That's why she was riding with him–" Jimmy stopped, cutting