Page 68 of Shades of Henry
Henry sighed and waited for Lance to get in the car before pounding emphatically on his phone. “Okay, so here’s what’s going down. Goddammit, Rivers, I’m not a fucking kid!”
“What’s going down is you’re fighting with your new friend about who gets to play in the sandbox,” Lance said dryly, starting the CR-V. “Anything else?”
He could practically hear Henry rolling his eyes.
“Wait… wait… oh! Hey! He called in reinforcements. Oh! Okay. That’s cool. Very good.”
Henry clicked some more and finally put his phone away as Lance made the turn onto Howe.
“Look, so I need you to get me into the hospital and past the patient areas. I need access to the offices of the board members—Sampson in particular. That’s where Rivers and I went when we were looking for proof that he was selling drugs. Now, he confessed to the police—but Jackson’s detective friend says they only gave a brief look at the office because of the confession. And one of the things Sampsonhasn’tdone is mention Summer Frasier’s name.”
“And Summer Frasier is…?” Lance was still a little lost.
“The nurse who didn’t give patients the full dose of drugs because she was saving them for her side business.”
Lance frowned. “That still doesn’t make any sense. She wouldn’t get anywhere near enough to make a decent amount of money.”
“We have proof she’s doing it,” Henry said. “We have pictures of her signature on two different electronic documents for the same patient. But we don’t have the pills she’s been stashing. We know where they are—but all Jackson got were shitty photos, no flash, because he was afraid of getting caught.”
Lance’s blood froze to a sluggish trickle. “Getting caught where?”
“Getting caught in Sampson’s closet while they were having sex,” Henry said, like, “Getting caught picking his nose” or “Getting caught eating cookies before dinner.”
“This is going to be your life now, isn’t it?” Lance asked in horror. “I mean, I keep thinking I get a handle on it, but you’re going to be hiding under people’s beds while they do the nasty, and I’m going to be texting you about a date and you’ll be, ‘Not right now, they’re almost finished.’”
Henry appeared to think about it seriously. “I don’t know, Lance. If you were naked and waiting for me and we had a house to ourselves, I might just stand up, take a picture, and say, ‘I gotta go, my boyfriend is waiting.’ I mean, I do want to make you my priority.”
Lance ground his teeth. “You are being an asshole.”
“And you knew this about me, and still, we have an inflatable mattress that is almost flat and might never recover. Now do you want to know how this needs to go down or what?”
Fuckingluminous.It was infuriating and worrisome, but Lance couldn’t even look at his face without wanting to bang him.Thiswas who Henry Worrall was supposed to be. Not grim and angry, not hurt and lost.This.Cocky and excited and snarky and fun.
Lance might not understand it, but God, if this was what it took to make Henry happy, he had damned well better be on board.
“What do I need to do?”
“Just get me into the office. That’s all you need to do. Now if you can’t, if it’s going to get you in trouble—”
“He’s been arrested. There’s no expectation of privacy there,” Lance said. “Now if you were trying to hack his computer, that’s doctor/patient privilege and that could be a thing, but if we’re just, say, going into the closet to get some supplies, I can ask the office manager. No big deal.”
“I like the way you think, Dr. Luna. This will be much more comfortable than hanging out in the dusty utility closet, listening to two criminals have sex.”
“I thought you said you were in the bathroom when that happened!” Lance’s stomach roiled.
“I was! But Jackson texted me a blow-by-blow. It wassonot pretty. This will be much easier. Unless, you know, Frasier walks in.”
“Why?”
“Because if she knows we’re sniffing around, she’ll have time to destroy evidence before we get the cops in there. I mean, Jackson’s pictures showed alotof prescription bottles that—”
“Those should have been locked up!” Lance’s outrage over protocol felt silly, but medical staff was tested repeatedly on drug protocols. Things like what Martin Sampson’s father had done weren’t supposed to happen.
“Yes,” Henry said patiently. “Theyshouldhave been locked up. That’s how we know they were illegal. But we also know the police just vacated Sampson’s office—Jackson’s buddy says they didn’t find the evidence so they didn’t search the closet. So this is important. We need to present this evidence to Jackson’s department friend so we can get Frasier out of the medical profession, at the very least.”
“Not in jail?” Lance asked, his outrage still fresh.
“Sampson committed murder—two and a half that we know about.”
