Not a hospitalissued device, a personal one, the kind that logged continuous data to a remote server. And Dorian Vale, who had introduced Dr. Voss into Saraphina's life 18 months ago, ran the division that controlled Veil Nova's internal data systems. He stood up, went to the elevator, and drove to the hospital where he worked. The equipment logs were not difficult to access if you knew where to look and had the clearance of a maintenance technician who had been servicing the systems for two.
It took him until three fou in the morning. What he found was not a smoking gun. It was quieter than that and more damning. A Veil Nova analysis unit had been remotely accessed on the night of Saraphina's original diagnosis 14 months ago. The access timestamp was 11 minutes before Dr.
Voss had called Saraphina with her results. The user credential attached to the access log had been deleted, but the deletion itself had been logged as standard protocol required and the deletion request had originated from an administrative account that reported to the director of operations. Dorian's division, Malik, photographed everything. Then he tracked down a contact from his industry network, a former Veil Nova lab technician named Gary Stson, who had been terminated 8 months ago. Malik had met him twice at maintenance conferences and had his contact information in a professional directory.
He called. Gary picked up on the third ring, listened for 30 seconds, and gave Malik his address. Gary answered the door in a bathrobe, looked at Malik for a long moment, and said, "I figured someone would show up eventually. " "I just thought it would be a lawyer. " "Tell me what you know about the diagnostic protocol on Saraphina Veil's file," Malik said. Gary looked at him for another moment, then he stepped back from the door. Khalan called at 7:30 while Malik was driving back across the city.
"Hey," Kalen said. Mrs. Patterson made pancakes. Are you coming home in a little while? Malik said, "You doing okay? " "Yeah, a pause.
Is Saraphina okay? " Malik watched the road. "She's going to be. You figured it out. " He thought about Gary Stson's kitchen table covered in printed logs and suppressed lab reports. And the quiet, precise account of a man who had watched something wrong happen and had been waiting for someone to ask him about it. "Almost. " Okay, Callen said in the tone he used when he had decided to trust something without needing all the details.
The pancakes are really good. Mrs. Patterson puts blueberries in. Save me some, Malik said. He hung up.
The ring was still in his jacket pocket. He could feel the weight of it, small and specific against his ribs. He didn't take it out, but he didn't forget it was there. He went to the hospital at 8. 0 in the morning with a folder of printed documents, a USB drive, and the name of the attending physician who had treated Saraphina the night before, Dr.
Carol Mines, whose name he had noted because she had been the only person in that corridor who had looked at Voss's assessment with something other than immediate agreement. Dr. Mines listened to him in her office for 22 minutes without interrupting. She was a compact woman in her 50s with the particular stillness of someone who had learned to absorb difficult information without showing the impact on her face. When Malik finished, she looked at the documents for a long moment, then picked up her phone and made two calls, one to the hospital's medical ethics board and one to a colleague in oncology.