Chapter 4 - The Clean-Up
By 4:00 AM, Ridgemont Private Hospital had been effectively neutralized.
My private security team had secured every floor, locked down the administrative servers, and confiscated every digital and physical record connected to Dr. Emerson Voss and his network of corrupt administrators. The police wouldn't be called until I had wrung every single name, alias, and corporate backer out of Voss’s miserable carcass. Men like Voss didn't operate in a vacuum; they were grease in a much larger, dirtier machine that stretched far beyond the borders of Illinois.
Down in the subterranean sub-basement of the hospital, far away from the sterile lights of the recovery suites, the atmosphere was thick with damp concrete and rust.
Voss sat tied securely to a heavy steel chair, a strip of duct tape muffled his panicked whimpers, though he didn't need to speak. The terror radiating off him was palpable.
I stood in front of him, rolling up the sleeves of my shirt, while Marcus set a heavy leather briefcase on a folding metal table.
"You've had a busy week, Doctor," I said calmly, pulling a thick stack of printed financial ledgers from the case and tossing them onto his lap. "Embezzlement, medical tampering, and attempted homicide of an infant. That’s a life sentence in a maximum-security federal pen where the general population isn't particularly fond of men who wear white coats."
Voss shook his head frantically behind the tape, his eyes wide and bloodshot, murmuring desperate pleas for mercy.
"I don't deal in mercy," I said, leaning down until my face was inches from his. "I deal in accounting. You tried to make my nephew a statistic to cover up a paper trail. Now, you’re going to give me every single name connected to your little syndicate. Every board member, every corporate fixer, every politician who looked the other way."
I motioned to Marcus, who stepped forward and ripped the tape from Voss’s mouth.
"I’ll talk!" Voss sobbed immediately, his resolve shattering into dust. "I’ll give you everything! The board chairman, Arthur Sterling—he’s the one who ordered the hush-up! He said if the family found out about the funding discrepancies, the whole audit would trigger a federal investigation! He told me to make sure the baby 'didn't survive the night' so the transfer could be written off as an unpreventable neonatal failure!"
The name clicked into place. Arthur Sterling. One of the most powerful philanthropic donors in the Midwest, a man who smiled from the front pages of financial magazines while bleeding charitable trusts dry.
"Sterling," I muttered, tasting the name on my tongue. It felt like poison.
"He has connections everywhere, Mr. Vance!" Voss cried out, clutching at straws. "Judges, senators, federal prosecutors! You can't touch him—he's untouchable!"
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"Nobody is untouchable," I said coldly. "Some people just haven't met the right leverage yet."
I turned away from Voss, leaving him to the tender mercies of Marcus and his men, and walked back upstairs toward the private recovery wing where Isabella and Matteo were resting.
