She picked up the phone and turned it over in her hands.Then she slipped it into her bag.
“And I want to know what you find,” she said.“Not sanitized summaries.Not ’I’ll update you when I can.’Real information, in real time.If you’re asking me to risk my career and my safety, I’m not doing it blind.”
“Deal,” he said.
* * *
He walked her to her car.
She’d parked in the small lot behind the bakery, next to the dumpster and a stack of broken-down cardboard boxes.He scanned the lot while she dug for her keys.Two other cars, both empty.No one on the sidewalk.The alley behind Main Street was quiet.
Maren unlocked the car and leaned across the console.She opened the glove compartment, pulled out a spiral-bound notebook, and held it up.
“Six months,” she said.“Dates, transfer codes, physician names, patient descriptions, everything I could get down before the records were scrubbed.”She pulled the notebook back before he could take it.“I said you’d get a copy.But you should see what you’re working with.”
She opened it to the first page and handed it to him.
Graham flipped through it slowly.Tight, careful handwriting.Columns for date, time, patient description, transfer code, and admitting physician.Notes in the margins—follow-up calls, dead-end phone numbers, names of staff who’d been on shift during each disappearance.Some entries had asterisks.Others had question marks.One, near the middle, had a single word underlined twice:
Pattern.
He’d told her one signature wasn’t enough.She’d gone out and built a prosecution.
He closed the notebook and handed it back.“How soon can you get me a copy?”
“I’ll photograph every page tonight and send it through the burner.”
“Don’t use your home Wi-Fi.Go somewhere public.”
“The library.”
“Good.”
She put the notebook back in the glove compartment and locked it.Then she straightened and stood beside the open driver’s door, keys in her hand.
“The girl last night.The one they took.”She paused.“Do you think she’s still alive?”
He wanted to lie.The instinct to reassure was old and deep, rooted in years of holding people together with his voice when his hands weren’t enough.
“I don’t know,” he said instead.
She nodded once, like that was the answer she’d expected.The honest one.Then she got in her car and pulled out of the lot without looking back.
Graham stood in the alley and watched her taillights turn left onto Main Street.He waited thirty seconds, scanning for any vehicle that pulled out to follow her.Nothing moved.
He called Caleb.
“It’s worse than we thought.”He walked back through the bakery’s side entrance, past Jessie wiping down tables, past the older women still arguing about someone’s daughter.“Six months of sealed transfers.Patients disappearing.Records scrubbed.She built the pattern we asked for.Dates, codes, names, follow-ups.It’s thorough, Caleb.She’s been at this since the Montgomery form disappeared.”
“And they know she has.”
“They texted her personal phone this morning.Less than an hour after she started asking questions about the latest one.”
Caleb was quiet for a moment.Graham could hear the faint click of a keyboard.
“She’s not going to back off, is she?”
“No.”
