Chapter 5 - THE MISSING TIME
By 9:00 PM, the hospital corridors had quieted down. Ellie had finally fallen asleep on the small visitor sofa in Room 408, wrapped in her mother’s coat.
Nathan was awake, his vision clearing as the heavy sedatives wore off. Clara sat beside his bed, gently wiping his forehead with a damp cloth.
"Nate," Clara whispered softly, her eyes brimming with tears. "Do you remember anything? From Tuesday night?"
Nathan closed his eyes, his brow furrowing as he tried to piece together the fractured memories haunting his mind. "The car... someone ran me off the bridge road," he rasped, his voice raw. "I remember the headlights... then the paramedics..."
"They said your heart stopped in the ER," Clara said.
Nathan shook his head slowly against his pillow. "No, Clara... I was conscious when they brought me in. I remember the bright lights of the trauma bay. I remember a woman's voice saying 'He's matching parameters.' And then..."
He stopped, a cold shiver running through his frame.
"And then what?" Clara asked, leaning closer.
"Someone injected something into my neck," Nathan whispered, looking at her with wide, terrified eyes. "I tried to scream, but I paralyzed. I could hear them talking... they said I was legally dead before they even hooked up the monitors."
Meanwhile, three floors down in the hospital’s subterranean records archive, Detective Miller sat at a glowing computer terminal alongside a young medical records clerk.
Miller was reviewing the raw timestamped telemetry logs from Nathan Cross’s admission on Tuesday night.
"Scroll back to 11:30 PM," Miller instructed, leaning over the clerk’s shoulder.
The clerk clicked the mouse, bringing up the real-time electrocardiogram feed from Trauma Bay 2.
The digital green line moved steadily:
11:32 PM — Patient admitted. Vitals unstable.
11:34 PM — Blood pressure dropping.
11:35 PM — [ENTRY BLANK]
Miller frowned. "Wait. What is that?"
The clerk clicked on the blank space. The digital log skipped directly from 11:35 PM to 11:47 PM.
11:47 PM — Cardiac arrest confirmed. Pronounced dead by Dr. E. Reed.
Miller stared at the monitor screen, his eyes narrowing in suspicion.
Between 11:35 PM and 11:47 PM—exactly eleven minutes—there were no heart rate logs, no nurse notes, no medication entries, and no audio recordings from the trauma bay.
May you like
Eleven minutes were missing from his medical record.
Miller pulled out his cell phone and dialed his partner at the precinct. "Hey, Jim," Miller said into the receiver, his voice cold and sharp. "Put a twenty-four-hour guard on Nathan Cross’s room right now. And locate Dr. Elizabeth Reed. She’s got some explaining to do."
