Free Skill Set by Vernon Rush

Swiss army knife. Again he turned to the plentiful light that streamed through the spacious windows. It certainly looked like Soto’s; it was the right shade and approximate length. However, he took a small plastic bag from his pocket and stored the hair for analysis.
    His last stop was the connecting bathroom. There was a shower stall and a corner bath on one side. On the other was a double sink a towel rod and a full length mirror. All was pristine white, however there were a couple of tiny dots of red on the edge of one of the sinks. They had not been tagged by the CSI team, so again Rose assumed it was another oversight by the investigators. Like everything else he ’d seen and read made it clear the officers in charge of the case saw it as an open and shut case; the investigation, if it could be called one, was a mere formality.
    Isaac wasn ’t viewing it in the same way; Emma Soto’s death, no matter what it’s cause, was far from a run of the mill case. Before leaving, he opened a kitchen cabinet, removed a box of Q-tips and used one to mop up what he believed was blood. The cotton swab then went into another small bag and was quickly sealed.
    He didn ’t know at the time what he was going to do with this evidence. It was clearly of no interest to the investigating officers. However, he was willing to carry out his own test if necessary. One way or another, he was determined to get to the truth.

CHAPTER
9
    Sarah and Humphrey Worthington had been married nearly fourteen years when their only offspring, a son, Daniel, was born after only two and a half hours of light labor, during which Sarah was tempted to try and convince the resident intern on duty for that week in October that she must have a “ false pregnancy ” as her aunts and her mother had been telling her. Actually, she had sat upright on the hospital bed, eager for Humphrey to get back with her Coca-Cola (with crushed ice and a straw), when she stopped speaking suddenly right in the middle of a sentence. Her eyes widened hugely and she grabbed at her slightly bulging belly with her left hand and her right gripped the edge of the mattress so hard her knuckles turned white. The intern hardly noticed the change in her as he tried to write intelligently on her chart bringing it up to date as best he could with nothing much to add. Sarah inhaled deeply and then as slowly as a descending weather balloon losing its inside air, she leaned over to her left, her back as straight as a ramrod all the way, and she landed gently and quietly on her side with her bent legs rising up in tandem and protectively clenched together as if locked as tightly as the vault at her father’s bank. She didn’t make a sound. The nurse’s aide, busily see-sawing an emery board on one of her enviable fingernails, did a double-take and her mouth fell open when she realized the doctor hadn’t noticed Sarah’s leaning tower behavior. For a minute, the young nurse just stared, then she blinked once, glanced at the door of the hospital room just beyond the sliding patched sheeting around both of the beds, saw no one she could nominate for the next inevitable maneuver, so she blinked again and cleared her throat.
    “’ Scuse me, sir? Doctor? ”
    “ Mmmm? ” He kept writing, frowning with concentration.
    “Sir? Mister. . .uh. . doctor? I think. . .”
    “ Oh, my God. She ’s..;.she’s crowning, I think. . .HEY! Somebody? Get me a gurney in here, STET! And call McPherson, the OB/GYN. . .he’s on call tonight and I just saw him in the cafeteria. . .”
    Julie Brown, the teenaged nurse ’s aide-in-training forgot all about trying to get the young doctor to notice her lacy C-cup peeking out of the neck of her uniform and slapped both hands across her gasping mouth as the emery board flew to the floor and skidded away into oblivion.
    At this exact moment, Humphrey backed into one of the swinging doors to the ER exam room and carefully holding the two large paper cups full to the