Chapter 17 - THE CORNERED SNAKE
While federal marshals secured the underground vault, a secondary team moved upstairs to secure the executive wing.
Inside the hospital's private underground parking garage, a dark luxury van idling near the loading dock attempted to pull out toward the street. Two tactical police cruisers screeched around the corner, blocking the exit ramp and flashing bright red-and-blue strobe lights into the windshield.
Officers stepped out with rifles raised. "KILL THE ENGINE! OUT OF THE VEHICLE NOW!"
The van's sliding door opened slowly.
Stepping out with her hands raised high in the air was Dr. Elizabeth Reed—the attending trauma physician who had signed Nathan’s fraudulent death certificate on Tuesday night. Beside her sat two corporate fixers hired by Vance’s offshore investors to transport her out of the state.
"Don't shoot!" Reed screamed, her voice cracking in hysterical fear. "I'll talk! I'll tell you everything!"
Within an hour, inside an impromptu interrogation room set up in the hospital's security office, Dr. Reed sat trembling, clutching a paper cup of water as Detective Miller and Federal Prosecutor Sarah Jenkins took her sworn statement.
"They paid me two million dollars into an offshore account in Grand Cayman," Reed wept, wiping her eyes. "Vance’s investors were testing Xenophed-9—a drug designed to simulate biological death for covert patient transport and black-market organ preservation. When Nathan Cross logged the structural discrepancy in the sub-basement, Vance realized Cross would blow the whistle on the entire facility."
"So you staged his cardiac arrest," Miller said, his eyes hard as flint.
"The car accident on Route 9 was rigged," Reed admitted, her voice dropping to a whisper. "When the ambulance brought him in, he was conscious. I injected him with the paralytic in Trauma Bay 2 during those eleven minutes. I turned off the EKG monitors, cleared the room, and declared him dead before his family arrived. He was supposed to be shipped out to a private testing facility in South America after the funeral."
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"Except his daughter climbed into his casket," Miller noted softly. "And the drug wore off twelve hours early."
Reed covered her face with her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. "It was never supposed to go that far..."
