The hospital board room was thickly carpeted, quiet and dimly lit. Large plate glass windows flanked an expansive oak conference table and high backed leather chairs in the center of the room. Beyond the glass, tall evergreen trees waved their limbs in lazy cadence with a freshening evening breeze. Just visible through the tops of the trees, the sky rapidly darkened as it grew crowded with gray and black, rain-laden clouds. The air felt humid and oppressive, even to the two men and one woman who huddled at one end of the table in the air conditioned room.

"This is a disaster. I tell you, this man they're sending to audit us is top notch. He's an experienced ex-Army officer, and word has it that he's thorough and not to be fooled. He might just find us out." The speaker was a handsome man, in a classical way: tall with aquiline features, hair swept back from his forehead in a stylishly casual cut, and the long, soft fingers of a surgeon. "We've made it through audits before, but this one has got me worried. We've been taking a lot of patients, lately. It's not a good time."

The woman, who was markedly smaller than her two cohorts, shook her head and spoke in calming tones. "I've talked to the Director about this and our guidance is to hold to our guns and ride this audit out. We've weathered worse than this before and come out just fine. Besides, when you come right down to it, it's just a routine audit. He won't find a thing. We have our own people in patient records. I've checked with them, and everything's in order."

"But what if he does find something?" The second man's voice was high-pitched, whiny and there was hardly any hair left on his balding pate. A small paunch hung over his belt and parted his long white doctor's coat as he shifted his weight nervously in his chair. "What will we do then? I don't want to go to jail for murder."

The woman reached out with both hands and patted the two men's forearms, like a comforting grandmother or aunt. "No one's going to jail for anything. What's to find? We've been very careful about the patients we've selected. They all would have most likely died on their own, even if we hadn't helped them along. And in the remote chance that he did find something to implicate us, it would be very hard to prove under those circumstances."