Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 69

YUKI SETTLED INTO HER SEAT in the courtroom as the lunch recess ended. Larry Kramer had begun to mount his case in defense of his client, Municipal Hospital. And she’d watched Maureen O’Mara attack his witnesses on cross.

It had been a spirited dance and good theater for the media, but these had been emotionally draining, grueling days for Yuki.

She tried to read the jurors’ faces, and it seemed to her that they had been satisfied with Kramer’s string of witnesses, nodding their heads as each doctor, each clever executive explained away deaths that should never have happened.

Yuki opened her pad and looked over her notes on Carl Whiteley’s testimony that morning. The hospital CEO had been fluent, even funny, under Kramer’s softball questioning.

Then O’Mara had drilled the CEO, asking him what she had asked the others: “Isn’t it true that pharmaceutical-based fatalities have increased threefold since Municipal was privatized three years ago?”

Whiteley had agreed — but unlike Sonja Engstrom, he hadn’t flubbed his lines. He whitewashed the individual deaths and threw national statistics at O’Mara, enough data to numb the jurors’ minds.

“Redirect, Mr. Kramer?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Kramer stood, addressing his witness from the defense table. “Those statistics you quoted, Mr. Whiteley. Between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand patients die annually from medical errors in the United States. This is commonly accepted knowledge?”

“That’s right,” said Whiteley. “According to the ISMP, approximately seven thousand people die each year from medication errors alone.”

Yuki scribbled in her notebook, getting it all down. The facts were shocking, but she didn’t care about what Whiteley had to say. He was an apologist, a corporate suit, the warm-up act. She’d stolen a glance at the defense table during the last recess.

She’d seen the witness lineup.

For a week, she’d waited for the next witness to take the stand.

As soon as Kramer was done with Whiteley, he was going to call Dr. Dennis Garza.