He loaded the cart with six arrangements and pushed it toward the elevator.The corridor was quiet at this hour — shift change still twenty minutes out, the building operating on the thin overnight staffing that the syndicate had used to run its transfers unobserved.In forty minutes, the day shift would flood the building.In fifty, the alarm would turn all of it into controlled chaos.
He delivered the first three arrangements to third-floor patients who didn’t recognize him because they were asleep.Patients on the third floor always were at six in the morning.He held the small, calibrated steadiness of a man who had walked these corridors twenty times in three weeks.Slow pace.Visible badge.Clipboard tucked under the arm.Eye contact with anybody who looked at him for more than half a second.A man without anything to hide makes eye contact.
At six-oh-five, he was in the south stairwell between the second and third floor when Mitch DeMario’s voice came through his earpiece.
“All four perimeter positions confirmed.Loading dock has eyes from the county road.North dock is gap-only — we’ll see them coming, we won’t stop them.”
“Copy.”
“Pruitt is in the building.”
Graham stopped on the landing.“Where?”
“First floor.Came in through the visitor entrance at five-fifty.Visitor badge.He’s in the lobby pretending to read a brochure about cardiac rehab.”
“He didn’t go up.”
“Not yet.He’s waiting for something.Or somebody.”
“Keep eyes on him.He moves toward an elevator, I want a thirty-second warning.”
“You’ll get forty-five.”
Mitch clicked off.Graham stayed on the landing for another beat, listening to the building.The hospital was waking up— in pieces, a cart wheel here, a door closed there, the soft mechanical hum of a coffee machine in a break room three floors up.He’d learned this building’s sounds.He’d learned them better than the cottage on Lake Road, better than any place he’d lived in the past four years.
Mason Thompson was at the second-floor landing when Graham came through the door.
The physician was in scrubs and a long white coat, his ID on a lanyard, his hair flattened at one side from sleeping on it.He looked like a man who had slept three hours and was operating on the clean fuel of caffeine and adrenaline.
“Morning,” Thompson said.
“Morning.You good?”
“I’m here.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Thompson looked at him.The doctor had been in this op since the second week, had walked the hospital’s evacuation plan with Graham four separate times, had given them the floor maps and the camera blind spots, and the names of the three security guards on day shift who could be trusted not to ask questions.He’d done all of it for free, because what he’d learned about Creighton in the eleven months since the death of a patient he should have been able to save had eaten through everything else in his life.
“I’m steady,” Thompson said.“I’ll do my job.”
“That’s all I need.”
“Where do you want me?”
“First floor.Visible.When the alarm sounds, you’re a senior physician triaging the rally point.If anything goes sideways on the floor, you’re the one with the authority to walk a nurse out of a corridor without a security escort.”
“Copy.”
Thompson started down the stairs.He was halfway to the first-floor landing when he stopped and looked back up.
“Graham.”
“Yeah.”
“When this is over.Whatever happens to Creighton.I want a chance to be in the room when somebody asks her about Margaret Reilly.”
Margaret Reilly.The patient eleven months ago.The one who shouldn’t have died.
