Chapter 11 - What the Water Couldn't Wash Away
The laundry basement smelled like hot pennies and wet concrete. Naomi had secured an emergency inspection with the state corrections compliance director, and Pike was required to let her inside. He came anyway, walking three steps behind the investigator as if his presence could erase her authority.
I wasn't allowed to accompany them. Instead, Naomi showed me photographs in the interview room an hour later: ceiling pipes, pooled water, a row of rusting lockers, number seventeen on a steel door that had been pried open.
"It's empty," she said.
"It wasn't empty last night."
"Can you prove that?"
"No. But Mina would've hidden something even if somebody found the obvious spot. She repaired things. She knew what people throw away."
Naomi tapped a photo. Water had washed dust off every locker except the narrow gap behind the baseboard. A triangle of purple thread stuck from the seam.
"Can you ask facilities to remove that trim?" I said.
She considered me. "I can document why I'd like to."
Two hours later she returned with an envelope. Inside was a folded strip of waterproof medical packing material wrapped around three carbon-copy pages. Mina had hidden them behind a loose metal strip that required a laundry key to remove. The numbered token wasn't a key at all. It was a direction.
The pages showed inhalers received at East Briar's loading dock and then removed under a different code. Every false removal had an approving officer's initials: G.P. The medication had not vanished into patients' hands; it had vanished into a vendor's resale channel.
"What do those initials mean?" Naomi asked.
"Graham Pike," I said. "But somebody above him approved the contracts."
I turned the third page over. On the back, written in pencil, were four words Mina had underlined until the paper nearly tore.
May you like
MARR KNOWS ABOUT NORA.
Naomi didn't speak for a long time. Then she said, "Nora Bell abandoned her last registered address three weeks ago."
