Of Guilt and Innocence Read Online Free PDF Page B

heritage to be found in her voice.
    â€œHow do you know it’s a man? I have seen you very upset and can imagine you doing such things.” Carlos looked back down at the paper as he spoke, he no longer had a smile, but it was clear he was joking. Words seemed to glide off his tongue whenever he spoke. People enjoyed listening to him talk, with his smooth Spanish accent and passionate way of describing a situation.  
    â€œI won’t be home later. I have to check on a patient at the hospital and look at a few files. It may be a late night,” he said, continuing to skim the newspaper.
    Julia didn’t respond to Carlos’s advisement of his evenings plans. She had grown used to him not being around a lot.
    As the morning progressed, Carlos retreated to his home office, somewhere he spent a lot of time over the years. It was a small room he liked to go in to think. He kept the lighting dim and had no television or distractions in it. The majority of the time he was in the office he would have the door shut so he had total privacy. It was a room all his own. It was his sanctuary.  
    He sat at a large dark oak desk and stared at an open medical file. Although his eyes did not focus on the words on the pages, nor did his mind process what the file said, he was thinking about this particular patient whose file lay before him, but in the abstract. He was picturing his encounter with her just the day before. An elderly woman, she had been coming to the office to see Dr. Morris for years, although Carlos had never seen her before he spoke with her yesterday.
    She was having problems with her hip, which had been surgically replaced twelve years ago. He had consulted with her about it briefly, then gave her a ride home, which he found to be located in a very rough part of town. She seemed very matter of fact, very honest, however, her eyes told him a different story. He saw a look of guilt and a look of sadness in her eyes. After getting to know her a little bit he knew he shouldn’t take this kind of interest in one of his own patients, but he couldn’t help it; she was consuming him, what was in her eyes was consuming him, and he felt sorry for her. He knew what had to be done, he had done it many times before, but he wanted to be certain to make this one perfect.  
    And so he began to read, to study her file. He sat in his office for hours, reading it cover to cover, thinking, bulletproofing what he would do and how he would do it. As he thought and studied, slowly, a picture started forming in his head, a game plan. Piece by piece it came together, it developed like an orchestra slowly building, slowly adding more instruments, until finally, the crescendo. He seemed pleased with what he had formulated; he felt it would work. It would be perfect for her and her situation.  
    Carlos opened a locked desk drawer, the bottom one on his left hand side. He lifted a box of cigars up and placed it on the top of the desk. He then reached back down into the drawer and slowly opened the lid to another cigar box. He pulled an empty orange pill bottle out and closed his grip around it, staring blankly forward. After a few seconds his grip loosened and he read the name on the pill bottle, Elsa McMillian. He closed his eyes for an instant, as if to initiate the memory that came with reading the name. He smiled to himself, then slowly placed it back in the cigar box, alongside six other empty orange pill bottles. He shut the lid, put the box of cigars from the top of his desk back on top of the cigar box containing the empty pill bottles, and locked the drawer.  
    Carlos had a bit more studying to do to ensure the plan he had just developed would work. Perhaps there was still a minor detail or two that would require a tweak here or there. He opened a laptop computer that sat on the corner of his desk and pulled up the Broward County bus schedule. He found a starting location bus stop, an end location bus