Chapter 4: The Clerk

Rhona found him in one day, because Rhona had been waiting years for someone to ask her to.

"The lab on your report is a storefront in Chamblee," she told me over eggs at midnight. "It has one employee who signs for results."

She slid a phone across the table with a driver's license photo on it.

"He quit three weeks ago. He drives for a food app now and lives in Doraville."

"How do you know that?"

"I took blood from his sister when she had her appendix out. People tell nurses everything."

Nathan had offered us a driver and a security man, and I had said no.

Some doors only open if a woman in scrubs knocks on them.

The next night, at nine, Rhona and I stood in a cinder-block hallway with a bag of takeout.

She knocked on 2C with her shoe.

"Delivery," she called in a bored voice.

A man opened the door on the chain.

He was thin and thirty, in a faded gray shirt, and he took one look at my face and tried to shut it.

Rhona put her boot in the gap.

"You typed my paternity report," I said.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Zero percent. Circled in red. You typed the zero."

His eyes went to the hallway behind us, then back to me.

"I'll call the police."

"Please do," Rhona said. "Tell them a lab clerk took money to forge a medical result and a woman lost her baby the next day."

The man stopped pulling on the door.

"I didn't know she would lose it," he said.

"She was eight months along," I said. "I'm the woman."

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