Chapter 7 - BETRAYAL IN SCRUBS
Arthur Sterling didn't panic. He slowly raised his hands, his expression merely mildly inconvenienced. "Detective, this is a privileged attorney-client consultation. You are violating my client's constitutional rights."
"You're not his attorney," Reynolds snapped, stepping into the room and slapping handcuffs onto Sterling's wrists. "You’re an accessory to corporate extortion, reckless endangerment, and attempted murder. We just raided the pharmaceutical floor at St. Jude Memorial. You want to tell him what you found, Sarah?"
Sarah Lin stepped into the fluorescent light, her uniform covered in grease and dust from the sub-basement archives. Her eyes were burning with fury. "It wasn't at O'Hare, Graham. The antidote was never in Chicago. It’s been sitting in the private cold-storage locker of Dr. Marcus Vance’s executive office for three days."
Graham felt as if the room had lost gravity. "Marcus? Marcus was in on this?"
"Vance owns four percent of Aethelgard Bio equity," Reynolds revealed, tossing a thick dossier onto the table over the settlement agreement. "We intercepted his phone calls forty minutes ago after Nurse Lin brought your original safety logs to the district attorney. Vance wasn't just stalling your resuscitation in the trauma bay, Graham. He was actively waiting for your daughter to suffer brain death so that an autopsy would destroy any chance of proving the compound came from his private stash instead of yours."
Graham didn't wait for Reynolds to finish. The primal instinct of a father stripped of all fear took over. He lunged across the table, grabbed the keys to his handcuffs from Reynolds' belt before the detective could react, and twisted the pin into the lock, snapping the cuffs open.
"Graham! Wait!" Reynolds yelled.
"Where is Vance right now?" Graham roared, his face contorted in an explosion of desperate rage.
"He just entered the PICU," Sarah cried. "He told the staff he was personally administering a high-dose sedative to prepare Lily for organ harvest protocol—he claimed she was brain dead!"
"No!"
Graham burst through the interrogation room door, vaulting the booking counter, ignoring the shouts of startled police officers. Reynolds sprinted after him, shouting into his radio: "Hold your fire! Escort him! Clear the damn streets to St. Jude Memorial right now!"
Graham burst through the precinct glass doors into the driving torrential rain. Reynolds’ unmarked cruiser screeched to a halt at the curb, the passenger door thrown open.
"Get in, Ashford!" Reynolds bellowed from the driver’s seat. "Let’s go save your girl!"
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The sedan launched into the midnight traffic, siren screaming, red and blue emergency strobes reflecting against the deluge of water hammering the windshield. Graham gripped the dashboard, his eyes burning into the darkness ahead.
Stay with me, Lily. Hold on for five more minutes. Daddy is coming.
