Part 6
Paula was explaining that temporary protective oversight might have to be considered while the assessment continued when a nurse came to Hannah’s door. Walt was at the unit entrance with a maintenance worker and records they wanted the investigators to see. The nurse asked whether Hannah wanted them admitted.
“Yes. Please bring them in.” Hannah looked at Paula, who agreed they could provide information with her permission. The nurse checked with the desk before escorting both men through.
Boone stayed outside the glass doors in the approved waiting area, his leash held by a security officer who had agreed to watch him. Hannah could just see him at the far end of the corridor when Walt entered. Ray followed with his folder pressed against his stomach.
“There are maintenance records the complaint leaves out,” Walt said. “Ray brought them. He worked on that floor.”
Paula asked for his full name and role. Ray gave both, turning his badge around so she could read it, then opened the folder on the small table by Hannah’s chair. Walt brought up the photographs on his phone beside the copies.
Hannah leaned forward. There were urgent reports on the panel that had burned, dated long before Boone had entered the hospital. The closure entries said the work had been resolved, and Ray told the investigators that the required replacement had never happened.
“I submitted two of these,” he said, pointing them out. “Those are my entries.”
“Can we take a formal statement from you?” Paula asked.
“Yes.” Ray drew the two pages together. “I’ll go through them.”
Walt showed the refrigeration records next. He explained the temperature failures and the alarms that had gone uncorrected, keeping the entries in date order. Hannah read the refrigerator locations and remembered the feed bags lined up on the cart beside her son’s crib.
“We don’t have the formula test results,” Walt said. “These are the storage reports.”
Leah set one of them beside a page from her binder. She went back to the electrical reports, checking the first date again. “Paula, these don’t match the history in the hospital affidavit.”
The women read in silence for a while. Hannah listened to Owen’s ventilator and waited for somebody to tell her what that difference would mean. Ray answered another question about who had closed the work orders, and Paula wrote down Voss’s office.
The oldest date came before Owen’s admission. Hannah checked it once more, then looked at the word urgent above the description of the odor. Someone had reported that smell before she had ever learned the route from the parking garage to room 412. The pages stayed on the table where both investigators could read them.
“With this information, we aren’t pursuing emergency custody action,” Paula told Hannah. “The assessment will continue. We’ll document these contradictions and refer the hospital’s complaint for review.”
“I can stay with him?”
“Yes. Nothing we’ve decided here removes you from his care.” Paula explained the next contact and made sure Hannah had her information. Before leaving, she apologized for the distress of conducting the interview at Owen’s bedside.
Hannah stayed upright until the investigators had gone. Then she bent over in the chair and cried into the collar of the borrowed shirt, unable to stop even when Diane’s familiar advice to breathe slowly came back to her. Walt moved away from the table, leaving room around her, and Ray stood looking at his folder.
When she could speak, she thanked Ray. He shook his head slightly. “They’ll have lawyers looking at all of this. You ought to know that.”
“I know,” she said. She wiped her face with a tissue and looked back at Owen. For now, nobody was asking her to step away from him.
By late evening he was stable enough for her to take a short break. Diane had come to Westhaven on her own time and been approved as a visitor; she sat beside Owen while his assigned nurse remained responsible for his care. Hannah agreed to call at the time she intended to return, even if all she had done was walk around the block.
She met Walt and Ray at the Maple Street Diner, three blocks away. The vinyl booth had a split seam that caught at her sleeve, and the coffee was too hot to drink. Boone lay under the table by Walt’s feet, clear of the aisle.
Tessa arrived last, carrying her laptop. She set it down beside the menus and pulled off her jacket, still wearing the hoodie Hannah had seen at the hospital. “My friend at the independent lab called back. She can run the samples if the custody records are right.”
“Do we have any samples?” Hannah asked.
“Shah’s working on preserving unopened bags through legal channels. We have to be able to show where they came from and who handled them.” Tessa moved a glass to make room for the laptop. “The hospital tried to dispose of product today.”
Ray looked up sharply. “Already?”
“Diane found out and called Shah. He contacted the state health department, and people here at Westhaven pushed it higher. A preservation notice went into effect at four-thirty. They have to keep what’s left.”
Hannah pictured Diane beside Owen now, reading some ordinary magazine while those calls were still part of the day behind her. “You got through to the lab, too.”
“Eventually,” Tessa said. “I kept calling.”
Walt laid out the maintenance photographs, Boone’s credentials, and Tessa’s timeline of the lab changes. Hannah moved the coffee cups back before setting her phone between the pages. They watched the first clip from Owen’s room, then the recording from the tour and evacuation.
In the first video, Boone turned at a movement from the crib, and his tail swept briefly across the floor. Hannah had forgotten that small interruption in the argument. She wanted to replay it, but Tessa was waiting for the next file, and there were things they still needed to establish before Hannah could go back upstairs.
The booth seemed too small for the alarm coming from the phone. Hannah lowered the volume, then put one hand flat against the table to keep it still. She could hear herself talking to Owen, but she watched the edge of the picture for patients they would have to conceal.
Ray looked away during the smoke. Tessa watched with her mouth pressed closed, and Walt waited until the last ambulance-bay frame had gone dark. Then he asked where Hannah had saved the recordings.
“Three cloud locations. I sent copies to myself, Diane, and my cousin.” She showed him the completed uploads. The originals were still on her phone too.
At the time she had meant to return, Hannah called Owen’s room. His assigned nurse confirmed that he was stable, and Diane said she could stay while they finished. Hannah arranged another check-in before agreeing to remain; she left the phone where she could see any incoming call.
Tessa drew her laptop closer. “If this goes online, they’ll challenge everything. Patient privacy. Defamation. They’ll keep using the part about your emotional state.”
Hannah looked at the frozen image on her phone. Another family was visible at the stairwell door, their child’s name printed on a sheet someone was carrying. They had been trying to get out, just as she had, and she hadn’t asked them to become part of this.
“We cover the families and the patients,” she said. “Names, faces, anything that identifies them. Staff who aren’t part of what we’re showing, too.”
She asked Tessa to help her describe the medical concerns without announcing a result they didn’t have. Walt could explain Boone’s training and what the alerts meant. Ray could decide how much of himself he was willing to put before strangers.
“The work orders can go in,” he said. “Keep my name and my face out of it for now.”
Hannah agreed. Then she looked around the table, giving each of them time to answer. “I’m going to tell people what happened. If you need to stay out of it, say so before we start.”
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇