Chapter 8 - THE HOSPITAL HUNT
Agent Ellis ordered the floor locked down.
Hospital security searched every corridor.
Dr. Pike’s identification badge had opened the neonatal service elevator five minutes earlier.
The elevator led to an underground loading dock.
Alexander ran toward the stairs.
Agent Ellis stopped him.
“You are a witness and a target.”
“He drugged my daughter.”
“And he may be waiting for you.”
Maya removed the tape from her hospital wrist.
“I saw him near the pharmacy.”
Alexander looked at her.
“When?”
“Before they finished my stitches.”
Pike had not simply come for the memory card.
He had accessed the medication rooms.
Lily’s chart showed a new order placed under another doctor’s name.
A high dose of sedative was scheduled for six in the morning.
The dosage could have stopped her breathing.
Agent Ellis canceled every medication order and placed an officer inside Lily’s room.
Maya remembered seeing Pike carrying a blue medical cooler.
The hospital’s lower level contained a private laboratory connected to Vale Medical Holdings.
Alexander had funded the facility.
Grant and Pike had likely used it for the illegal testing Rebecca discovered.
They entered the laboratory with an armed team.
Rows of locked freezers lined the walls.
One contained blood samples labeled with children’s names.
Another contained experimental medications that had never received federal approval.
Maya found Lily’s name on a file.
The record began two years earlier.
Celeste had been giving Lily unapproved anxiety medication through vitamins.
The drugs caused confusion, memory loss and breathing problems.
Celeste then told Alexander that Lily was emotionally unstable following her mother’s death.
Alexander felt physically sick.
He had trusted Celeste’s reports.
He had punished Lily for behavior caused by secret medication.
He remembered every time his daughter begged not to take the “special vitamins.”
He had insisted.
“I helped them hurt her,” he said.
Maya looked at him.
“You believed people you trusted.”
“I did not believe Lily.”
“That is the part you can change.”
A metal door slammed at the rear of the laboratory.
Dr. Pike ran toward the loading dock.
Alexander followed.
Pike reached a waiting ambulance.
Grant sat behind the wheel.
Celeste was in the passenger seat.
Before the vehicle moved, Agent Ellis blocked the exit with an armored car.
Grant reversed through a security gate.
The ambulance disappeared into an underground service tunnel.
Pike had dropped the blue cooler.
Inside was the stolen memory card.
There was also a blood sample marked ALEXANDER VALE.
Agent Ellis examined the label.
“They were testing something on you.”
Alexander remembered the sedative Grant planned to use before forcing his signature.
Maya found a second document beneath the samples.
It showed Alexander had already been exposed to small doses of the same substance for almost a year.
The whiskey served in his private office had been contaminated.
His fatigue, headaches and memory lapses were not caused by overwork.
Grant had been poisoning him slowly.
Then Agent Ellis received a call from Vale headquarters.
The replacement had arrived.
May you like
Adrian Cole was standing before the company board.
And every director believed he was Alexander.
