"Twenty-three."
"Between the six-fifteen count and now."
"Yes."
He looked up.His eyes were the color of river rock under shade — not gray, not brown, something in between that shifted depending on what he was doing with his face.Right now he wasn't doing anything with it except looking at her.
"You want to know what I'm thinking."
"I want to know if you're thinking what I'm thinking."
"If Maria's saline numbers are right, and the IV kit count matches, we can estimate how many patients moved through on any given night just from the supply differential.Twenty-three kits is four to six patients, depending on how many times they re-accessed each line."
"That's what I thought."
"Same sequence as the Thursday transfers.If the kits went out last night, something moved through here in the last eight hours that doesn't appear in the census."
A door opened two floors above.Footsteps on the stairs, going up.Not coming down.Maren kept her face neutral and her voice low.
"The handoff nurse signed at six-fifteen.That means whoever pulled the kits either had access before she signed or came through after.If they came through after, there's a camera on the north supply corridor that might have caught them."
"Might?"
"It's broken about half the time.Maintenance has been promising to fix it for six months."
"Who's in charge of maintenance?"
"Darren Pruitt."
Graham's expression didn't change, but something in him went still.The kind of stillness she'd started to recognize — the stillness of a man who'd just filed a piece of information exactly where it needed to go.
"Send me the photos."
"Already set up through the encrypted server.I'll push them from the parking lot on my first break."
He handed the phone back to her.Their fingers overlapped on the edge of the case, and neither of them moved for a beat longer than the transfer required.She felt the callus on the pad of his thumb before she felt the warmth of his skin.
The door two floors above opened again.Footsteps, descending this time.
Graham picked up the carnations."Room two-fourteen?"he said, loud enough for the stairwell to carry.
"Down the hall to the left.She'll love them."Maren kept her voice easy.Professional.The voice of a nurse directing a volunteer who'd taken a wrong turn.
He went up.She went down.
The footsteps above passed the landing without pausing.
* * *
Maria was in the break room when Maren got there on her ten o'clock.
She sat at the chipped Formica table with a yogurt and a gossip magazine that was two months old, turning the pages without reading them.Maria had been on day shift for eleven years — a wiry woman in her late forties with short dark hair and reading glasses she kept pushing up with her index finger.She had the efficiency of a nurse who'd learned that the fastest way through a twelve-hour shift was to never sit down for more than seven minutes at a time.
"You look like you ran the stairs."Maria didn't look up from her magazine.
"Elevator was taking too long."
Maren poured coffee from the pot on the counter.It was the same coffee that had been sitting there since six, thick and burnt at the bottom.She added two sugars and a pour of the powdered creamer someone had left on the shelf above the microwave.
