Free Covert M.D. by Jessica Andersen

through her mouth so she wouldn’t smell the death. But it lingered, coating the insides of her nostrils and throat like bile. “I’ll go up and call. You stay here with the body. If we leave and the killer comes back…”
    They could lose the evidence that proved this was more than a few missing drugs and a cluster of transplant rejections. Something was going on at Boston General. Something deadly.
    But Rathe shook his head. “He knows who we are, Nia. I don’t want you going anywhere alone. Not now.”
    She didn’t bother to argue, merely lifted her chin. “Then we both stay.”
    He held her eyes for a moment, then nodded. “Fine. We both stay.”
    When he turned away and punched a string of numbers into his phone, Nia let out the breath she’d been holding. She glanced down the hall, toward the room where they’d found Short Whiny Guy. She closed her eyes against the memory of the gaping bloody smile beneath his chin and the holes where his eyes should have been. He’d been left there for them to find, she was sure of it. But why? As a message?
    Or a warning.
     
    A FEW HOURS LATER Rathe and Nia met with the administrators and the cops in Director Talbot’s office.
    “I think we should turn the entire investigation over to the police,” Logan said. “No offense to HFH,” he nodded at Rathe and didn’t meet his eyes, “but this is already beyond what we had envisioned.”
    The clock said 6:00 a.m. Rathe was bone tired, and if he was feeling it, Nia must be close to dropping. But being Nia, she’d refused to show her fatigue. She’d led the detectives to the dead man and watched as the corpse was photographed, bagged and wheeled out onto the loading dock for the body wagon.
    Now, hours later, she was repeating the whole story once again for Director Talbot, the two Chinatown detectives and Assistant Director Hart—who had slid his chair closer to hers when he thought nobody was looking.
    “And what had you envisioned?” She glared at Talbot. “That we’d come in, poke around for a few days and find nothing? Maybe the bad guys would get nervous? The supplies would stop disappearing and your survival percentages would miraculously increase?”
    Though Rathe’s gut still twisted at the memory of Nia’s face when she’d run to him and clung, his lips twitched when Talbot frowned.
    Score one for HFH. That’s exactly what the director had thought.
    “Listen here, Dr. French,” Talbot began, only to be neatly interrupted by the younger of the two detectives.
    “You can rest assured, gentlemen,” Detective Peters’s eyes flickered to Nia, “and lady, that we will actively pursue the murder of Arnold Grimsby.” That had been the name finally attached to Short Whiny Guy. He’d had his license on him, but no ID. His name hadn’t popped up in the hospital databases, which meant he didn’t work at Boston General.
    Yet he’d carried a hospital master key.
    Rathe shifted in his chair. This was turning into a bigger case than he’d expected. At this point he’d be glad to hand the whole mess over to the cops.
    But Nia pounced. “You said you’d investigate the murder. What about the missing supplies? The transplant rejections? It’s all connected.”
    The detective frowned. “We can’t be sure the murder is connected. Disappearing supplies are small potatoes, and a slight bump in transplant deaths isn’t going to ring the chimes of our superiors. Though we’ll keep your problems in mind, we’re going to have to focus on the murder.” He glanced at his partner, Sturgeon, who had remained in the back of the room, quietly sucking on a peppermint and observing the proceedings like a character from an Agatha Christie novel.
    Sturgeon nodded and shifted the candy to his cheek. “Between budget cuts and man hours, we can’t promise much.”
    “But Grimsby’s eyes were cut out! ” Nia slashed a finger at the older detective. “Doesn’t that worry you?”
    “Murder always worries me, Dr.