Stepping-Stone for Mia novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Peer Review

The peer review was in Conference Room C on the seventh floor, forty feet from the spot where Ronnie Beal had cut me.

Somebody had replaced the carpet.

A slightly different gray, a perfect rectangle in front of the secretary's desk.

The panel sat at the far end of a long table. Three men in white coats.

Bennett's golf partner was the chair. He had a pen he kept clicking.

Bennett wasn't on the panel. He sat in a chair against the wall, legs crossed.

I sat alone at the near end of the table.

Tim had offered to sit with me. The policy said a witness couldn't.

"This is a peer review, not a trial," the chair said. "Let's keep it collegial."

"Then let's start with the night nurse's notebook," I said.

He clicked his pen.

"We've reviewed the copy you submitted. A personal notebook kept by an individual employee. Undated pages. No chain of custody."

"Every page is dated."

"Handwritten dates."

"She's written every page by hand for thirty years. Ask her. She's in the hall."

"We've read her statement."

They didn't call her in.

They called Tim.

He sat down across from me and told it the same way he'd told it in the lecture hall.

The OR, the ice, the lounge, the pager face down.

The fellowship roommate asked him one question.

"Dr. Brogan, are you in a romantic relationship with Dr. Sarah Harwood?"

"No."

"Would you like to be?"

Tim looked at him for a long moment.

"That's not a question about Kelly Beal," he said.

"I'll take that as a yes."

The vice-chair wrote something down.

They thanked Tim, and he left, and on his way out he touched the back of my chair with two fingers. Nobody saw but me.

I put the Akron recording on the table.

I'd cut it down to two minutes.

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