"System's slow tonight.IT's running a backup.You want me to log you out and back in?"
"It's fine."Maren kept her eyes on the screen."Just waiting on a chart."
The wheel spun a fourth second.
The file opened.She scrolled to page two.
Position authorized by: Board of Directors, Blossom Springs General Hospital.
Recommending officer: H.Montgomery, Board Chair.
She photographed the screen with the burner phone held low against her thigh, closed the file, and opened a patient chart on top of it.The whole sequence took forty-one seconds.Paula was still narrating her handoff to the night nurse and didn't glance over once.
Maren finished her charting.She logged out of the station, gathered her bag from the locker room, changed out of her scrubs, and walked through the main entrance into the parking lot.
The air was warm for October.The palms along the front drive clicked dryly in a wind off the Gulf, and the streetlight at the edge of the lot had come on even though the sky still held the last gray of sunset.
She got in her car.Locked the doors.Sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel and let her shoulders drop for the first time in twelve hours.
Four appointments.
Creighton.Pruitt.Prescott.Trevino.Nursing.Facilities.Materials management.Human resources.Every one of them hired through the board.Every one of them reporting, directly or indirectly, to Harrison Montgomery.
She took the burner phone out of her bag.She sent the four photos she'd taken that day to the encrypted server Harper had set up on Sunday night.
The delivery confirmation came back inside of a minute.
A second message followed on the heels of the first.Graham.
Walk out?
She looked up through the windshield.Across the lot, past the row of night-shift cars pulling into the spaces the day shift had just vacated, a blue pickup was parked under the far streetlight with its headlights off.She couldn't see the driver, but she didn't need to.
She typed back.
Walked out.In my car.On my way.
A pause.Then:
Drive safe.
Two words.The kind of two words a person sent a dozen times a week without thinking about them.Except he'd thought about them.She could tell from the pause before he sent them — the half-second of him weighingdrive safeagainst the other thing he might have said, and choosing the one that didn't ask anything of her.
She started the engine.
The blue pickup pulled out of the far streetlight's circle and turned right at the parking lot exit, heading east toward Golden Acres.She turned right behind him.Not close enough for anyone watching to connect the two vehicles.Close enough that she could see his taillights all the way home.
Chapter 14
Her porch light came on at nine forty-four.
Graham watched it from the end of Golden Acres Road with his engine off and his window cracked, and he kept watching until he saw the hall light flash twice inside the house.Twice was the signal.Twice meant she was in, the door was locked, the alarm was set.
He put the truck in gear and drove.
The long way back to Lake Road took him past the cypress stand at the bend where the water got shallow, past the turnoff to Ronan and Lila's cottage, past the barracks road where the ranch hands parked their trucks on weekends.Twelve minutes was the usual run.He made it in twenty-three.He used the extra eleven to think, and when he got to the cottage and sat in the drive without turning off the engine, he was still thinking.
His phone buzzed on the seat beside him.
