Chapter 8 - The Interrogation Room
By noon, the atmosphere had shifted from the suffocating tension of my son’s bedroom to the sterile, fluorescent-lit coldness of the city’s central police interrogation suites. I sat in the darkened observation room alongside Detective Miller and my primary corporate counsel, watching through the one-way mirror as Julian and Vanessa were broken down in separate, adjacent interrogation chambers.
In Room B, Vanessa had completely disintegrated within ten minutes of being shown the high-resolution prints of her infrared fingerprints on the glass dropper. Without a defense attorney present—having waived her right to counsel in a desperate bid to save her own skin—she was weeping into a paper towel and singing like a canary to the junior detective assigned to her case.
“It was all Julian’s plan from the very beginning!” Vanessa wailed, her voice piping through our observation speaker with crystal clarity. “When Noah got that lung infection last month, Julian came to my apartment and said it was a sign from God! He said if Noah died from a medical complication, the entire trust fund would default to the secondary lineage! He told me he’d give me five million dollars to clear my credit card debts and buy that gallery in Manhattan if I just helped him acquire the chemicals!”
“Where did you acquire the compounds, Ms. Vanessa?” the junior detective asked firmly, tapping his pen against his legal pad. “Standard hospital pharmacies don't dispense synthetic paralytics to walk-in customers.”
“Dr. Thorne!” Vanessa blurted out, her entire body shaking as she threw the final conspirator under the bus without a second thought. “Dr. Gregory Thorne! He’s the head of cardiology at the private clinic on West End! Julian has been paying him ten thousand dollars a month in cash for the past year to supply unregistered pharmaceuticals! Thorne told us exactly how much of the digitalis to put in the syrup every night so it wouldn't trigger a standard autopsy alert!”
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In the observation room, Detective Miller turned to me, her jaw clenched tight. “Dr. Thorne was the second consulting specialist who told you last week that Noah’s condition was terminal and advised against transferring him to the Mayo Clinic.”
“Yes,” I said, my voice barely a whisper as the sheer scale of the betrayal washed over me. The man I had trusted with my son’s medical care—the doctor I had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to save my boy—had been actively taking bribes from my brother to ensure Noah never left that bed alive.
