Chapter 2

"Two people, two locks. Cameras end to end. Electronic records and paper records running in parallel.

"Forget me. The president of this hospital couldn't walk one ampoule out of that room without leaving a trail."

Noah wasn't listening.

Or rather, he'd reached the point where listening to anything might damage the version of himself he'd already decided to be, so he refused to hear it. He went the other way instead. He took out his phone, and in front of all of them he dialed the number I'd only ever had to call when a family turned violent.

"Hello, is this the hospital police office? I want to report a crime.

"The chief of cardiothoracic surgery, Marcus Hale, has been using his position to traffic controlled anesthetics. The evidence is solid.

"You need to get down here. He's trying to use an emergency case to destroy it."

The word trafficking turned the whole corridor to ice.

The kid almost made me laugh. Diverting and trafficking aren't cousins. One of them costs you your job. The other one buries you so deep you don't come back up.

Two officers in uniform came off the elevator within minutes.

"Who called this in? What's going on here?"

The older one, Sergeant Ray Whitaker, had a hard, careful face, and he swept the corridor with it.

Noah went to him like a man finding solid ground. He crossed the space in one step and pushed the crumpled printout into his hands.

"Him. He still wants to go in there. God knows whether he's saving anybody or going in to get his story straight with whoever's helping him and make the problem disappear."

Whitaker listened, and his brow knotted up. He looked at my half-tied scrubs. He looked at the red light burning above the procedure-room doors.

"Dr. Hale, is that right?" he said finally. "Until we understand what's happened here, I'm afraid I can't let you go in."

The words were barely out of him when the doors behind me banged open from the inside and Kayla Ross leaned half her body into the corridor. Her face was white.

"Dr. Hale! Now! He's in V-fib. We've shocked him twice and he won't convert. The rhythm is almost flat."

I moved. Whitaker put his arm out and stopped me flat.

"Dr. Hale, stay calm and cooperate with us."

"Calm?" I stared at him, and the effort of holding it down had scraped my voice raw. "Every word I say to you out here takes another percent off that man's chances. He's fibrillating. His myocardium is dying in sheets, and none of it comes back.

"You're not blocking me. You're blocking his life."

While we were locked there, a voice came off the outer edge of the crowd like a clap of thunder off flat ground.

"Noah Grant! What in God's name do you think you're doing?"

Robert Hayes shouldered through the crowd, heavy-set and moving fast, and he was out of breath by the time he reached us.

"Who gave you permission to stand in front of a resuscitation? Do you understand that every second you're wasting here is a piece of a homicide?"

Robert arriving turned the whole thing over. He'd been deputy president for years and he carried enough weight in this building that Noah's fresh-out-of-school nerve dropped by half the moment he was in front of him.

"Dr. Hayes, I'm protecting the integrity of this hospital. I'm exposing what's underneath it."

"Underneath it? You've been here under three months. You don't know a damn thing about what's underneath it."

Robert had gone past his limit and the profanity came out with it. He turned to the two officers.

"Officers, I will stake my position and my reputation on it. There is nothing wrong with Dr. Hale. We brought in a new procedural protocol recently and the anesthesia dosing model is still being reconciled. Every unit is on the books somewhere.

"There's a man's life on the other side of that door. Step aside and let him work. Anything that comes of it is on me."

The deadlock was breaking, and Noah, cornered against the wall, threw his head up.

"Of course you're speaking for him," he said. "Administrators covering for administrators, one hand washing the other. You all think this place is private property."

He pulled in a breath, swept the corridor with a look, and played the card he'd been holding.

"I'll tell you exactly who I am. My name is Noah Grant. The president of this hospital, Arthur Grant, is my grandfather."