Chapter 3 - The Paper Trail
The conference room was cold, lit only by the harsh glare of a laptop screen sitting on a long mahogany table. Vivian sat at the far end, her hair disheveled, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen with tears. But there was something else in her expression—a twitchy, defensive panic that I had seen before whenever she was caught in a lie.
Agent Cole sat down across from us, sliding a thick blue folder into the center of the table.
"Three weeks ago," Cole began, opening the file, "Caleb broke his radial bone during recess. Standard greenstick fracture. The school nurse called you first, Aaron. But you were in meetings across town, so Mrs. Vance picked him up."
"Yes," I said, eyeing Vivian. "She took him to Greenfield Community Clinic. She told me the ER at the regional hospital had a four-hour wait."
"That was a lie," Cole said plainly.
I turned my head slowly to look at my wife. "What?"
Vivian flinched, clutching her paper coffee cup until the cardboard collapsed. "Aaron, listen to me... I was trying to save us money! You have no idea how bad things were!"
"Save us money?" I whispered, confusion and fury warring inside my chest. "We have comprehensive health insurance, Vivian!"
"Greenfield Community Clinic wasn't a licensed medical facility, Mr. Vance," Agent Cole interrupted, tapping a page in the file. "It was an unaccredited, black-market holistic center operated by a former orthopedic physician named Dr. Victor Vance—your cousin."
The room seemed to spin. "Victor? Victor was struck off the medical register five years ago for illegal clinical trials on human subjects in Mexico!"
"And he opened an underground practice right here in the valley," Cole continued. "Your wife didn't take Caleb to Greenfield because of long wait times at the ER. She took him there because she owed Dr. Victor Vance sixty thousand dollars in unpaid gambling debts from an illegal online syndicate he operates out of the back of that clinic."
I stood up so fast my chair slammed against the drywall behind me. "You took our ten-year-old son to an outlawed criminal to settle a gambling debt?!"
"He promised me he would waive the interest!" Vivian sobbed, hiding her face in her hands. "He said he just needed to run a quick plaster cast as part of a 'routine study' he was doing for a private pharmaceutical sponsor! He swore it was completely safe, Aaron! He said it was just experimental waterproofing gel mixed into the plaster!"
"Pharmaceutical sponsor?" I roared, my hands trembling as I leaned over the table toward her. "They put living parasites into our son's plaster! They used Caleb as a human incubator!"
"Mr. Vance, sit down," Agent Cole ordered calmly, though his eyes reflected a deep, burning anger of his own. "Your wife was an unwitting accomplice to a bio-weapons testing scheme. Victor Vance wasn't just running an underground clinic. He was being funded by an international corporate research entity called Aethelgard Bio-Tech."
Agent Cole clicked a button on his laptop, projecting an image onto the wall screen. It was a photograph of a massive, ultra-modern research complex nestled in the remote mountains of West Virginia.
"Aethelgard has been attempting to harvest the neural-secretion toxins of Nectromorpha appalachia to create advanced, non-lethal neurological control agents for military applications," Cole explained. "They needed live human hosts to test the organism's bio-compatibility. Victor was supplying them with unsuspecting patients from his debt list."
I looked at Vivian, who was shaking uncontrollably, unable to meet my eyes. The woman I had loved for twelve years, the mother of my child, had traded our son’s health, his arm, and his sanity to cover up her own toxic vices.
"Where is Victor now?" I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm.
"He went dark three hours ago," Cole said. "Shortly after your son was admitted to the ER. But we tracked a high-frequency radio signal leaving his clinic, heading straight toward the Aethelgard facility in West Virginia."
I turned toward the door.
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"Where are you going, Aaron?" Cole asked, raising an eyebrow.
"To get the antidote," I said, my voice cold as iron. "Because if those parasites aren't out of my son's arm in thirty-six hours, you aren't going to need a judge to sentence my cousin. You're going to need a coroner to identify him."
