“St. Catherine’s. I have a flash drive. It may involve medical fraud, retaliation, and a patient death.”

He paused. “Do not give it to anyone. Do not go home. I’m sending someone to you now.”

Forty minutes later I sat in the back room of a coffee shop two blocks from the hospital, with Daniel, Vanessa, and an investigator named Mara Singh. Vanessa’s cream coat lay folded across her lap.

Without the confidence of the disguise, she looked younger. Exhausted. Her anger sharpened by grief.

Mara slid the drive into an offline laptop, and the files opened one after another — emails, meeting minutes, edited incident reports, audio recordings.

Nathan’s voice came through the speakers, calm and irritated. “We need to be precise in the language. Dr. Monroe was emotionally compromised. Her recollections aren’t reliable.”