Page 79 of Dozer

I smile despite myself and get up.

By nine, the softness is gone and the work has taken over again. My contact confirms the package is secure and, more importantly, agrees to overnight a working copy back to a secure drop point Hunter arranged. Not the originals, those will stay exactly where they are until we know this is over, but enough of a duplicate that I can finally, properly, put the full picture together.

I spread everything across the kitchen table, laptop open, decrypted files from the hospital cabinet cross-referenced against the tissue samples I pulled at the morgue. Dates line up. Patient numbers line up. Trial records connect to shell companies, shell companies connect to contracts, and the government stamp from the pharmaceutical records finally gets a name attached to it instead of just a signature I don't recognize.

My pulse kicks up. "Got him," I say quietly.

Dozer looks over my shoulder. "Who."

I angle the screen toward him. "Senator Whitmore Cole."

He comes closer, one hand braced against the back of my chair as he studies the screen. His shoulder brushes mine, and neither of us moves away.

"Walk me through it."

"He sits on two oversight committees. One of them is specifically responsible for auditing exactly this kind of pharmaceutical contract." I click through another decrypted file, hands moving faster now, certainty replacing the exhaustion of the last few days. "Which means he wasn't just benefiting from the cover-up. He was the oversight that was supposed to catch it, and instead he signed off on burying it."

Dozer's jaw tightens. I keep going.

"The trafficking network we thought we were dealing with when this started was never the whole story. It's the enforcement arm for a much bigger operation. Falsified drug trials. Silenced patients. Families given manufactured explanations. And a senator making sure nobody with real power ever asks the right questions. There’s millions if not billions of dollars at stake here."

"That's not something we can take down with a phone call."

"No." I look up at him. "It's not."

His hand settles briefly against my shoulder.

"This is going to need Hunter and probably Ruby, if not more of our team. Whoever's protecting Cole has already proven they can hit a convoy clean and track an untraceable phone. We're past the point where two people off the grid can finish this alone." I tell him.

He nods once. "Then we call them."

We call Hunter together. After making sure he’s in a secure location and on a phone that isn’t being traced, we put him on speaker and walk him through the timeline, the samples, the pharmaceutical trial fraud, the government contract stamp, the senator's name attached to all of it. I hear him go quiet on the other end.

"I need to verify this independently before we move," Hunter says finally. "It’s not that I don’t trust you, Kenzi. I trust you completely. I just want a second set of eyes on it. I’m calling in Ruby." I’m not offended, I understand his need to double check my work, so later he can say he did.

Ruby comes on the line a moment later. I've only spoken to her twice before this, both times briefly, both times impressed by how fast she moves through information most people need hours to parse.

"Send me everything you've got," she says, no preamble, already working before I've finished agreeing. "I'll cross-reference against what we've already got on file for Cole. If this checks out independently, it's not just enough to move on. It's enough to make sure nobody can bury it a second time."

It takes her forty minutes. Forty minutes that feel considerably longer. I pace the small kitchen while we wait until Dozer catches my hand as I pass him for the fourth time.

"You're wearing a path into the floor."

"I'm thinking."

"You're pacing."

"I can do both."

"Apparently."

I look down at our joined hands. Neither of us lets go. "You're very distracting."

"Wasn't trying to be,” he said.

"Liar."

"Maybe."