Chapter 5
Noah stood in Hannah’s living room, still in his briefs. He’d given her a few minutes to pack a bag and find him some pants, then they’d head out to his truck to get gas and leave Oscar in their wake.
His plans to mourn Lizzie’s death would just have to wait for another time. It was more important these two got to safety and he turn himself in to the authorities.
He wouldn’t think too much about the latter right now.
He wandered around the apartment, taking in the photographs and artwork that had clearly been done by Brady. It was a warm space, but he imagined it had been difficult for her since her husband died. One picture in particular caught his eye—Hannah and what could only be her husband with the baby.
Death sucks.
People didn’t pass peacefully from one realm into another. They were torn away from those who loved them as surely as if they’d shared the same flesh, leaving terrible wounds in their wake.
He didn’t know how he would come to grips with his sister’s death, and he found himself wondering how Hannah had dealt with her husband’s.
A plaque on the wall caught his attention.
To Dr. Joseph Fielding, Director of the Hospital Accreditation Team, with our grateful thanks for a job well done.
It was dated a month after he died. He must have been some kind of administrator, completing most of the work before he passed away. Accreditation of any institution was a lengthy process that required every department meet certain standards.
A paper-pushing nightmare.
He continued to walk around the room, arriving at a desk with a corkboard on the wall next to it, the papers on it noticeably yellowed and worn. It didn’t take a genius to figure out this was Joseph Fielding’s desk and Hannah hadn’t touched it since he died.
Noah pulled out the chair and sat down, wondering again who this man was to his sister. Lizzie was an accountant. As the accreditation manager, Fielding would need lots of information from her department. Or hell, maybe he was her direct supervisor.
There was no way to tell for sure.
He wanted to know what their connection was, wanted to understand why Fielding’s death had affected his sister enough to keep his obituary on her refrigerator for months on end.
If it was an affair, he wanted to know that, too—anything to get some answers why his sweet sister might have ended her life.
If that’s what she did.
It didn’t sit right with him. It never had.
He pulled open drawer after drawer, rifling unashamedly through the other man’s things.
He found a wallet-sized picture of Hannah that had clearly been cut out of a larger one, and immediately knew why.
She sat by a campfire and looked to be laughing, her beauty leaping from the page, and Noah ran his finger over it before flipping it over.
Love you.
Joe Fielding was a lucky man.
Noah dropped the picture onto the desk and moved to the side drawers, finding one full of files, and he flipped through them, one tab catching his attention.
Accounting Problems.
He scanned page after page of documents, including several memos between Lizzie and Fielding as they tried to reconcile the medication inventory with the corresponding paper trail, each time coming up short by thousands of units, the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of drugs.
The last page in the file was a letter from Fielding to the head hospital administrators making pointed allegations of fraud by someone within the organization. Noah’s eyes went to the date. It was less than a week before Fielding died. Handwritten across the top was a note.
BCC: Lizzie Ryker.
Blind carbon copy. Lizzie had been copied on the letter, but the others didn’t know she had been.
“Holy shit.”
His mind worked to catch up with what he was learning. Fielding was on the trail of missing drugs and Lizzie knew about it. Noah didn’t know how Fielding died, but if there was the slightest possibility Fielding had been killed for this letter…
Then maybe my sister was, too.
He needed to talk to Hannah and find out exactly how her husband died, and what, if anything, she knew about the alleged fraud at the hospital.
But she didn’t trust him and he had a limited amount of time with her before he’d be arrested or would have to turn himself in.
If he waited too long, there was sure to be a manhunt and his own chances of living would decrease considerably.
He’d have to work quickly.
He was struck by the realization that none of this was random.
There was a reason he’d ended up in Hannah Fielding’s apartment, one that defied coincidence or simple happenstance.
Something had brought her into that bodega at just the right moment for him to find her.
He’d come to the island desperate for answers, ready to face the harrowing storm outside.
He glanced to the window and the darkness beyond. Maybe that was exactly what he’d been given.
He gathered the papers into a pile and shoved them into his go bag.