parted, letting him through, some asking him questions he didn’t bother answering.
“Detective Anthony Santini,” he told the pale woman. “You were with her when she was killed?”
His tone indicated that he made no final assumptions, waiting for her to answer one way or another. His dark gray eyes took precise measure of her, looking for some kind of sign, a “tell” as the poker players called it, to show him whether she was lying.
The woman’s voice was low, soft, but strong as she replied, “No. She was already shot when I saw her. Mr. Stevens was standing over her—he was the one who found her.” She took a breath, as if trying to put that between herself and the memory. “I tried to revive her. I’m a doctor,” she added belatedly.
Tony nodded, keeping his eyes on her face. “Then she was still alive when you came?” It didn’t seem likely, given that the victim was shot in the middle of her forehead, but he played along, waiting to see what the woman would say. “Did she try to say anything?”
Sasha moved her head from side to side, still trying to come to terms with what had happened. “There was no pulse,” she told him, her voice devoid of emotion, as numb as she felt.
“But you still tried to revive her.”
She couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic, or just pressing her for information. “Sometimes, you can bring them back,” she replied quietly.
The hurt was beginning to burrow its way into her. Death was a terrible, terrible thing. In her head, she could still hear Angela’s voice.
I’ll see you Friday, Angela had said.
Except now, she wouldn’t, Sasha thought. Who was going to tell Angela’s little girl her mother wasn’t going to be coming home anymore?
“But this wasn’t one of those times,” she heard the detective saying.
Sasha looked at him sharply. But there was no humor, no sarcastic twist to his mouth. After a moment, she shook her head.
“No,” she whispered more to herself than to the tall, dark-haired detective with the attitude, “this wasn’t one of those times.”
The woman looked, he thought, genuinely shaken up and he wondered why. Was she close to the victim? Did she know more than she was saying? Like the popular cult icon from a few years ago, Fox Mulder from The X Files, Tony’s initial approach to a case was always the same: “Trust no one.” Every word needed to be verified or supported before it became a viable piece of the puzzle.
Tony looked at the small, heavyset man in the dark navy-blue uniform standing beside Dr. Snow White. A quick glance would have had someone labeling the older man a policeman. Only closer scrutiny would have taken note of the differences in uniforms. But there was one unsettling similarity.
“You have a gun,” Tony observed.
One ham-like hand immediately covered the gun butt as if to acknowledge the weapon’s existence.
“I’ve got a license,” Stevens said quickly. “The agency pays more per hour for guards who have gun permits. And there’ve been muggings…” With a sigh that seemed to come from his very toes, Stevens’s voice trailed off as he looked down again at the slain nurse.
Tony was aware that there’d been reports of people being accosted late at night in the hospital’s parking facility.
“But none of them were fatal,” he pointed out to the security guard.
“No. Not until now,” Walter Stevens agreed heavily. Looking at the police detective, he blew out a shaky breath. “It’s my fault.”
Tony’s eyes narrowed. Confessions didn’t usually come this early in the game and in his experience, never without some sort of prodding and usually in trade for a lessening of the ultimate sentence. Taking that into account, he truly doubted that the guard was about to make life easy for him.
Drawing on his rather limited supply of patience, Tony asked, “How’s that?”
Scrubbing a hand over his stubbled chin, Stevens rendered his confession. “I usually make my rounds earlier. If I’d been here five, ten minutes sooner, who knows? The nurse might still be alive.” He looked down at the prone figure. “I might have been able to stop whoever did this.”
Moved, Sasha placed her arm around the man’s shoulders. At five-seven, she was approximately an inch taller than he was. “You don’t know that,” she said in a comforting tone. “Whoever it was might have shot you, too.”
One of those, Tony thought, scrutinizing the woman again. A perpetual spreader of sunshine. Someone who felt called upon to lift burdens and cheer people up.
They had their place, he supposed, but preferably not in his investigations. Frowning, Tony focused on what was important.
“Why were you late in making your rounds?” The question was sharply asked, pinning the security guard to the proverbial wall.
If the attack had actually been planned, someone would have gone to a lot of trouble learning the guard’s rounds and when he passed areas of the complex. For the nurse to have been slain when she was, it had to have been an unexpected attack, without any previous knowledge of the security guard’s route. Maybe this was just a crime of opportunity and the young nurse had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or someone could have followed her without giving the guard any thought at all, which meant that he or she was unfamiliar with the hospital’s policy.
There were a great many things to consider before they could feel that they were on the right path to solving the crime.
He looked at the guard expectantly.
“Something I ate,” Stevens told him, pressing his wide hand to his less-than-flat midsection. “Been to the men’s room three, four times so far tonight.” He offered a sheepish smile. “Throws off my timing.”
“I’ll bet.” Tony cut him off before the man could get more graphic. He glanced toward the doctor. “I didn’t get your name, Doctor.”
“Sasha Pulaski.”
“Sasha,” he repeated. “Is that Russian?”
“Polish,” she corrected. “My parents are Polish.”
He noticed, even though she still looked shaken, that there was a touch of pride in her voice. He wondered what that was like, to be proud of who you were, where you came from.
His eyes swept over the doctor and the guard. “I’d like to take you both down to the precinct for a formal statement.”
Stevens looked a little uncertain about the turn of events. “If I go, there’s no one down here to cover for me,” he protested, concerned. “I’ll lose my job and I can’t afford to have that happen. I have bills—”
The guard sounded as if he was just getting wound up. Tony put his hand up to stop the flow of words before they started.
“Henderson,” he called over to his partner. The older man was consulting with one of the forensic investigators. “See if we can get one of the patrolmen to fill in
