Chapter 14 - The Nurse Who Kept Copies
Harper Doyle had worked at Greywater for only seven months. She'd taken the job to pay off nursing school loans and had told herself the strange orders were just another part of an overwhelmed system.
Now she sat across from Grant with a stack of copied treatment logs.
"The doctor listed on these forms didn't sign them," Harper said. "I checked with the clinic. They'd never heard of some of the patients."
"Why keep copies?"
"Because one patient kept asking me whether his daughter knew he was alive. I couldn't find his name in the computer. When I asked the head nurse, she sent me home for the week."
Grant showed her a photograph of the man from the stretcher. Harper nodded immediately.
"That's Luis Aranda. Except the wristband called him Peter Sloan. He worked at the cleanup site. He kept saying the air made everyone sick."
Luis was in a county hospital now, guarded but safe. His lungs had been injured, and his answers came slowly. He remembered men being taken to the pumping station to remove contaminated equipment without proper protection. He remembered one worker collapsing and never returning. He remembered a maintenance supervisor showing up and demanding to see the safety records.
"Finch?" Grant asked.
Luis nodded. "He told them he had copies."
In the next room, a doctor said the patient needed rest, not another hour of questioning. Grant stopped immediately. The case needed testimony, but the people were not evidence machines.
Harper's records also showed that a night van had left the pumping station at 3:12 that morning. Its destination was listed as a warehouse on the eastern riverbank.
The sheriff organized a coordinated search of both properties. Owen and Iris remained under protection, far from either location.
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At 11:06 p.m., Deputy Kim called Grant from the riverbank warehouse.
"There's somebody inside," she said. "And he knows the boy's name."
