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All Chapters of He Accused Me During Code Blue: Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

8 Chapters

Chapter 1

The Code Blue tone cut straight through Arthur Grant's quarterly report.He didn't hesitate for even a second. His eyes came up off the page and landed on me. "Marcus. Go."I was already turning before he finished the word. Diane Keller caught up with me in the hallway and gave me the handoff at a jog."Frank Delaney, fifty-four. Chest pain for an hour, arrested before the medics got him here. Looks like a big anterior MI."The corridor to the procedure suite isn't a hundred yards. It felt like the whole distance between a man being alive and being dead.I was halfway out of my white coat when someone stepped into my path. A young man, a wrinkled pharmacy printout in his hand.Noah Grant. First-year resident, three months on the job."Dr. Hale." He'd pitched his voice so the whole corridor could hear it. "Your department signed out sixty ampoules of controlled anesthetic in March, and the count doesn't reconcile. Did you take them out and sell them?"For a second I thought I'd

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 jo

Chapter 3

"I'm standing here because I'm sick of watching people in this building treat a hospital like their own cash machine and treat patients like cattle," Noah said. "Somebody has to show every patient you've kept in the dark what's actually going on behind these walls, and it's going to be me."The whole corridor went still. Even Robert was caught flat-footed.And the families who'd been standing there for the entertainment of it — their faces changed completely. The president's own grandson turning on his own house. That single fact settled the question for them. There was rot in this hospital, and now it was proven.A few of them, worked up, started pushing forward. Their bodies made a wall across the last few steps between me and the doors."He's the president's grandson. No wonder he's got the nerve.""We can't let this crook in there to destroy the evidence."Noah's introduction had detonated the corridor, and the shouting came from every direction at once."Don't let him in!"

Chapter 4

The blood went out of Arthur's face.He knew exactly how hard that case was, and he knew there was no one in the department except me who could take that table. He came at me almost stumbling, his eyes locked on the right hand hanging loose at my side, his lips working without producing anything.He understood better than anybody in that corridor what a cardiac surgeon's right hand is. It isn't a hand. It's the line a great many people are hanging off of.And his grandson, the one he'd spoiled longest, had just broken it with a cold steel chair."What do we do," he said. "God, what do we do."Nobody moved. Their eyes went back and forth between the shape of my forearm and the closed doors. Most of them didn't know any medicine, but they could all read that much: the surgeon was finished, and the man on the table was in trouble.Noah had a hand over his cheek, and for the first time there was fear in his face."Robert." I broke the silence. "You take the table. I'll run it."The

Chapter 5

My voice came out flat and level."Don't drive it with your fingertips, you'll make it whip. Use your wrist. Picture it already through the lesion, and it'll find its own way."On the other side of the glass Robert took a breath and went back to the screen. Under his hands, the wire crept toward the vessel that had almost entirely closed itself off.The whole team had stopped breathing."Good. That's it. Hold it there." I kept it quiet, and my eyes never came off the numbers on the monitor. "Pressure's starting to drop. Anesthesia, start a dopamine drip."You can pick up the pace. We don't have time to spend."Maybe the push did something, because Robert got decisive after that.Everything was running the way it should.Out beyond the observation glass, Arthur was trying to read something off my face. He was going to be disappointed. There was nothing on it but fatigue. What's happening on a table has never once been written on the surgeon's face."Balloon's positioned. Ready

Chapter 6

"We're going to need you to cooperate."I answered calmly. The pain had taken away any appetite I had for extra words."I don't have time. My arm needs treating.""You'll get it treated, and then you're coming in with us."He took a clear evidence bag off his partner and held it up in front of me."We've done a first pass on your department's drug room. Sixty ampoules logged as used in March. Fifty-five empties with documentation to match. Five with nothing at all. And the part that matters —"He turned the bag over. Sealed carefully inside it was a withdrawal form, and after each of those five serial numbers sat the same signature, big and looping and confident.I knew that signature better than anyone alive. I'd written it several thousand times over sixteen years."— every one of the five is signed in your own hand," Cole said. "Dr. Hale, I'd like you to explain why drugs you personally signed out never went into a patient and never got documented as wasted."Did they evapo

Chapter 7

I hadn't raised my voice, but every word of it landed clean.Every person in that corridor was looking at one thin piece of paper.Cole's eyes went hard. He sent his partner off to pull my old signatures for an on-the-spot comparison.The sweat at Arthur's temple had gathered into a bead and was running down the deep line beside his mouth. He finally found his way back out of the shock."That's a fabrication. Marcus, you are publicly slandering the leadership of this hospital. You want to move everyone's attention with some hearsay about handwriting? It's a joke.""Whether it's a joke, you'd know better than I would," I said. "In this entire building, apart from you — who's only just moved into the president's office — who else could go around me that easily and requisition anesthetics in bulk under my name?"You've probably forgotten. You walked me through my first major case yourself, and afterward you laughed at my signature. You told me my finish was too flat. You showed me t

Chapter 8

Arthur talked, and quickly, once he was in custody.He'd used the authority of the president's office to go around the two-person, two-lock system on the controlled cabinet. He filed false requests under my name, and then he moved the drugs out through an underground broker.They ended up in private cosmetic-surgery outfits and pain clinics that had no license to hold anything like them. He was getting better than ten times what the hospital had paid.The inventory sheet Noah brought down to the corridor had genuinely been taken out of the pharmacy by Noah himself.But the person who arranged for him to happen across the discrepancy was Arthur.He'd read his own grandson exactly right. He knew the boy couldn't stand the sight of corruption and couldn't resist a chance to say so out loud, so he left the flaw where Noah would trip over it and let him do the chasing.The plan had been for Noah to expose Marcus Hale, seller of anesthetics, in front of as large an audience as possible

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