Chapter 3 - The Woman on Floor Six
Tessa spent her first hour off duty in the hospital cafeteria because she had nowhere she wanted to go. Imani had arranged a security escort to her building and offered to connect her with temporary accommodation, but going home now meant arriving at a place somebody had photographed as a threat. Tessa used the borrowed cafeteria phone to call the local police contact assigned to the hospital incident. She gave the officer the message and agreed to provide her own phone records. She did not call Marco. His people had already proved that being armed did not mean they knew who was safe.
A woman sat down opposite her with a paper cup of tea. She was small, perhaps forty, with tired eyes and the pale indentation of an ID badge recently removed from her scrub top. “I'm Lena Ortiz,” she said. “Respiratory supply. I heard what happened to the backup ventilator.”
Tessa set down her sandwich. “Then you should talk to patient safety.”
“I tried.” Lena glanced toward the cafeteria entrance. “Last month, I reported six replacement units that arrived with serial numbers matching devices we'd already retired. Procurement said the labels had been entered twice. I wasn't allowed to inspect the crates again.”
“Did you keep a copy of your report?”
“It's in the system. Or it was. This morning my login stopped working.” Lena opened her palms on the table. “I don't want your patient's men to know I came here. My father still works on the docks. Everybody on that waterfront knows what happens when someone asks expensive questions.”
Tessa could not promise Lena that nothing bad would happen. “Come with me to Dr. Shah. We can ask the hospital to protect your information while investigators look into it. I can't hide evidence, and I won't tell you to keep this to yourself.”
Lena thought for so long that the tea stopped steaming. Then she stood. They took the public elevator rather than the service corridor. As the doors shut, Lena said she had once believed the replacement equipment was simply a paperwork mistake. The problem became impossible to ignore when a unit returned from the hospital's waterfront outreach clinic with a different manufacturer's plate inside the casing. Somebody was buying one kind of equipment, supplying another, and charging the hospital for the difference.
On the sixth floor, Dr. Shah was meeting the director of patient safety, a brisk woman named Mara Chen. Mara was not related to Luca's lawyer, though the shared surname caused Marco to make an unnecessarily suspicious face when he appeared later. She listened to Lena without interruption. Then she asked for dates, original records, and the exact wording of the warning Lena had submitted. Her questions were dull and painstaking. Tessa found them reassuring. This was what it sounded like when a person wanted a fact to survive scrutiny.
“Calder told me the devices were part of a rush shipment,” Lena said. “The vendor was Tideglass Medical Logistics. I checked its address. It was a mailbox two streets from Pier Nineteen.”
Mara wrote down the name. She did not claim to know what it proved. Instead, she called the hospital's internal audit team, requested that procurement records be preserved, and told Lena to stop using her disabled work account. Imani assigned a guard to the corridor. An hour later, Lena's personal phone rang. She glanced at the screen, then turned it face down.
“Dad?” Tessa asked.
Lena nodded. “He's already had two men come by his shop asking when I get off work.”
The threat moved from abstract to ordinary in a way Tessa recognized. It was one thing to say a witness was in danger; it was another to imagine her father standing alone behind a counter, refusing to admit that his hands were shaking. Mara offered to help Lena speak to investigators immediately and to discuss leave and workplace protections through the hospital. Lena accepted the first offer. Her father, she said, would make his own choices.
Meanwhile, Luca's breathing improved enough that Dr. Shah could begin evaluating whether he might eventually manage without the machine. She would not give Marco a time. Marco had learned to ask fewer questions in a voice that sounded like an order. When Luca woke briefly, he asked for a pen. Tessa fetched one and held a notepad where he could reach it without straining. He wrote two shaky words: TIDEGLASS. RENZO.
She did not show the page to Marco first. She handed it to Dr. Shah, who documented the communication and notified investigators. Marco watched, grim-faced, but he did not interfere. Tessa wondered whether loyalty was supposed to look like that: letting other people see what your boss wanted hidden. She had never believed loyalty alone was a virtue. It mattered what a person chose to be loyal to.
The detective who arrived was Naomi Ellis, a middle-aged Baltimore officer with sensible shoes and an expression that discouraged speeches. She spoke separately to Tessa, Lena, and the medical staff. She asked what each had seen firsthand and marked what they had learned from other people. When she examined the threatening message, she did not promise to catch the sender by lunch. She asked Tessa whether there was anyone else who might have access to her apartment information. Tessa mentioned the staffing agency and hospital personnel office.
Detective Ellis looked up. “Who requested your assignment here?”
“A scheduling coordinator. Why?”
“Was it a routine opening?”
Tessa thought back to the call. She had been offered unusually generous overtime if she agreed to cover Luca's room on short notice. The coordinator said a donor had insisted on a nurse with trauma experience. At the time, the extra money had sounded like a blessing. Now Tessa remembered that the coordinator had specifically mentioned her name before she had confirmed her availability.
She called the staffing agency with Ellis beside her. The coordinator retrieved the booking request, read the account responsible for it, and went quiet. Tessa asked her to repeat the name slowly. The request had come from a private administrative office connected to Vesceri Community Relief. The same office had sponsored the false physician's badge.
“Someone chose me,” Tessa said after the call ended.
May you like
Ellis corrected her gently. “We know somebody requested you. We don't know why yet.”
Tessa looked through the hospital window toward the waterfront. For the first time, the most frightening question was not why the killer had recognized her. It was why someone had placed her beside Luca's bed before the killing even began.
