Janet Creighton’s office was small and pristine.A desk with a closed laptop.A window with the blinds drawn.A filing cabinet against the far wall, four drawers, gray steel, the kind that had been sitting in hospitals since the seventies.
Maren went to the desk first.She didn’t look at the photographs on the wall — a framed nursing-school class portrait, a certification certificate, a picture of a younger Janet shaking the hand of an administrator who’d been dead for eleven years.The cabinet could wait ninety seconds.The login couldn’t — the data pull had to be running in the background while she worked the drawers, or she’d never finish both inside the window.
She opened the laptop.The screen woke to a hospital login prompt, the cursor already blinking in the username field.
She typed it from memory.R-Embry-NS.Then the password off the folded paper she’d read a hundred times in her car and never once written down again — a string of letters and numbers Rose had reset the day she learned Creighton was still logging under her name.
The prompt cleared.A directory tree opened.Not the hospital’s patient system — a separate network path, unlisted, the shadow log exactly where Rose had said it would be.Sealed transfers.Patient codes.Medication disposal records that had vanished from the official system, all of it mirrored here under a nurse who’d resigned four years ago.
Maren didn’t stop to read.She found the shared folder Graham had described, selected the archive, and triggered the transfer to the address he’d made her memorize — a string that meant nothing to her and everything to the federal server on the other end of it.A progress bar appeared.Eleven percent.Nineteen.
It would run on its own now.She left the laptop open on the desk with the bar climbing and turned to the cabinet.
Top drawer.Sealed transfer authorizations.Filed by date.
She pulled the drawer.Files, color-coded green, six months’ worth of sealed transfers in alphabetical order by intake date.The tabs were typed labels: a date range, a code number, no patient names.
She pulled out her phone.
And she started photographing.
Click.Slide.Click.Slide.
She worked the way she worked a code blue — method first, speed second, her hands in the order they were supposed to be in.Each authorization was three pages.Front, middle, back.She held the phone steady.She kept the angle clean.She didn’t check the timer on her phone because checking the timer cost two seconds she couldn’t spend.
Six thirty-six.
Twelve files in the top drawer.She finished it.She slid it shut.She pulled the second.
Six thirty-eight.
Eleven files in the second drawer.She finished it.
Six thirty-nine.
The intercom cut through the alarm cycle.*Code Yellow, loading dock, Code Yellow, receiving level.All available supervisory staff respond.*
Maren’s hands stilled on the third drawer.
Code Yellow.Hazardous spill.The protocol named a list of three responders — the nursing supervisor, the day-shift charge, and the floor administrator.Janet’s name was on that list.
She didn’t know if the Code Yellow was real or if it was Harper.She didn’t need to.What she knew was that whatever Janet Creighton had been doing in the building during this safety drill, she was now required by hospital protocol to leave it and respond to the loading dock.
Maren pulled the third drawer.
Eight files.Sealed transfers, the most recent ones — last six weeks.The ones that mattered most.
She photographed.Click.Slide.Click.
Six forty.
Six forty-one.
She closed the third drawer.She left the fourth — the fourth held personnel files and time cards, not the documents Graham had described.She’d stayed inside the parameters.
She crossed to the desk.The progress bar was gone — a single line of text where it had been.Transfer complete.She closed the folder, backed the screen out to the login prompt the way she’d found it, and lowered the lid until it clicked.
She wiped down the cabinet handle with the cuff of her sleeve.She wiped down the door handle.She put her phone back in her thigh pocket and resealed the Velcro.
