Chapter 3 - The Empty Bed
The backup generators kicked on with a heavy, low thrumming roar six seconds later. The harsh yellow emergency floodlights flickered to life, painting the corridor in deep shadows.
I sprinted down the hall toward Room 6, ignoring Vance’s command to stay back.
The glass door to Laura’s room was swinging open.
Inside, the IV pole was knocked over, a pool of saline spreading across the vinyl floor. The heart monitor was displaying a flatline signal—not because Laura’s heart had stopped, but because the leads had been ripped violently from her chest.
The bed was empty.
On the floor lay an oxygen mask, torn from its tubing, and a single drop of fresh blood on the crisp white bedsheet.
"Laura!" I shouted, rushing to the side of the bed.
The rear emergency exit door at the end of the ICU hall—a fire door that led directly out to the hospital’s subterranean loading dock—was propped open with a folded piece of cardboard.
I ran through the door into the concrete stairwell. The cold night air rushed up from the basement level, carrying the sharp scent of exhaust fumes and wet asphalt.
Down below, four flights down, heavy footfalls echoed against the concrete walls.
"Laura!" I yelled down the stairwell, my voice bouncing off the metal railings.
A voice came back up through the darkness. Not Laura’s.
A deep, distorted male voice, amplified through the echoing stairwell:
"Go back upstairs and take care of your boy, Ethan. If you follow us down here, the police will find your wife in the river before the sun comes up."
I froze on the third-floor landing.
Footsteps pounded down the stairs behind me. Detective Vance burst onto the landing, his service weapon raised, flashlight cutting through the gloom.
"Did you see them?!" Vance yelled.
"They're going toward the loading dock," I panted, pointing down. "It's a man. He has Laura."
"Stay here!" Vance ordered, shoving past me and charging down the steps with three uniformed officers behind him.
I didn't stay. I didn't go down either.
I turned around and ran back into the ICU, straight to Room 4.
Noah was still there. Nurse Sarah stood over him with a manual resuscitation bag, her hands steady, pumping air into his lungs.
"His heart rate is stabilizing," Sarah whispered, her face pale under the fluorescent lights. "Ethan, what is happening? Who cut the power?"
I walked over to my son’s bedside. I took his cold, tiny hand in mine.
On his inner wrist, right where the pulse point lay, was a tiny blue stamp—a small rubber-stamped mark in the shape of a numbered circle: 104.
My stomach dropped into a bottomless pit.
That wasn't a motel mark. That wasn't a police mark.
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104 was the internal security code for the private psychiatric wing on the seventh floor of St. Mercy Hospital—a wing that had been locked, abandoned, and privatized by a medical holding company three years ago.
Noah hadn't been poisoned at home. He had been taken into the hospital before he ever went to the motel.
