Chapter 8 - The Ghost Drive
That night, the Beacon Hill estate was bathed in a tense, suffocating quiet.
In Robert’s private study, the fire crackled in the hearth, throwing long, dancing shadows across the mahogany walls. Joey sat on the leather sofa, staring at the small silver flash drive sitting on the desk between him and Robert.
Lily stood near her father’s chair, her face grave.
"Ray came to me today," Joey said softly, his voice heavy with an emotion he had buried for over a decade. "The men who came with him... they said my mother didn't die of heart failure. They said she was part of an early trial for Vance Global’s nerve compounds."
Robert reached out and picked up the flash drive. His knuckles were white.
"Is it true, Dad?" Joey asked, looking up, his voice cracking with vulnerability. "Did you know?"
"No," Robert said firmly, looking directly into Joey’s eyes. "I swear to you on my life, Joey. I knew Arthur Vance was a ruthlessly corrupt businessman, but I had no idea his illegal trial programs went back twelve years into county public clinics."
"The man with the scar said you paid quiet-money back then," Joey added quietly.
Robert closed his eyes, taking a deep, painful breath. "Twelve years ago, Blackwood Enterprises made a charitable donation of five million dollars to the South Boston Public Health Clinic. I thought I was funding free prenatal care for underprivileged mothers. If Vance used my charitable foundation as a cover for his illegal drug testing... I was blinded by my own naive trust."
Lily walked over and sat beside Joey, putting her arm around her brother’s shoulders. "They're trying to destroy us from inside, Joey. They know if they make you doubt Dad, our family breaks apart."
"I don't doubt him," Joey said quickly, looking at Robert. "I just... I need to know what happened to my mom."
Robert stood up, plugging the silver drive into his encrypted, air-gapped terminal on the desk.
"Captain Vance," Robert called out into his intercom. "Get our cyber-forensics team online immediately. I want this drive decapsulated and swept for trojans within five minutes."
"On it, sir," Captain Vance’s voice crackled through the speaker.
For thirty minutes, complex strings of code and decryption algorithms scrolled across Robert’s monitors. The cyber-security team bypassed the drive's hardware locks, revealing a hidden partition filled with scanned clinical logs from 2014.
Robert, Joey, and Lily gathered around the screen.
Joey’s eyes scanned the patient logs until he saw it: Patient #408 – Mary Fletcher.
The records showed that Mary Fletcher had entered the clinic for routine treatment during her pregnancy. She had been administered an experimental metabolic stabilizer manufactured by a shell company owned by Arthur Vance. When she suffered severe adverse reactions, the clinic—funded in part by Blackwood charity money—had covered up the incident, falsifying her death certificate to hide the trial's failure.
Below the document was a signed approval memo.
Joey gasped.
The signature at the bottom of the order authorizing the drug test on Mary Fletcher was not Arthur Vance's.
It was signed by Dr. James Richardson—the very same pediatric neurologist who had almost killed Lily at Mass General two years ago.
"Richardson..." Robert growled, his voice turning ice-cold. "He wasn't just a hired doctor for Rebecca. He was Vance’s primary researcher for over a decade."
"And he’s currently out on bail awaiting trial," Lily realized, her face pale. "He’s the one who sent those men to threaten Joey!"
Robert shut the laptop with a heavy snap.
"They thought they could use your mother's memory to blackmail us into dropping the financial recovery lawsuits," Robert said, his eyes burning with intense, protective fire. "They thought they could drive a wedge between us."
May you like
Robert walked over, placing his hands on Joey's shoulders.
"We are going to give your mother the justice she was denied twelve years ago, Joey," Robert said. "And we are going to finish Richardson once and for all."
