Chapter 5 - The Missing Patients
Claire turned slowly.
Vanessa Mercer stood beside the locked door in a cream suit and impossible heels.
“Congratulations,” Vanessa said. “Mrs. Vale.”
Claire closed the laptop. “Does Ryan know you’re here?”
“My husband tells me everything.”
“That would be a new habit.”
Vanessa’s smile vanished. She was not merely Ryan’s wife. She was the daughter of Halcyon Therapeutics chairman Grant Holloway, which explained Ryan’s sudden career and his confidence that one phone call could end Claire’s.
“You found something in those trial files,” Vanessa said.
“I found bad recordkeeping.”
“You found five patients who don’t concern you.”
Claire’s pulse jumped.
Vanessa walked closer. “Walk away from Northbridge. Enjoy Ethan’s money. Buy dresses. Pretend you won.”
Claire remembered every overnight shift she had worked while Ryan studied. Every time he had called her ambitions “cute” because one day she would supposedly stay home with their children.
“No.”
Vanessa’s eyes hardened. “You still don’t understand the room you’re in.”
Claire tapped her phone screen beneath the table.
Recording.
“I understand you came here to threaten me over missing clinical-trial patients.”
Vanessa glanced at the phone.
Then the fire alarm screamed.
Sprinklers burst overhead.
Claire looked toward the ceiling just as smoke rolled under the lab door.
Vanessa swore and unlocked it.
The hallway was already black.
They ran together because fire did not care who hated whom.
At the stairwell, Vanessa vanished into the crowd.
Claire made it outside coughing, soaked, and furious.
Ethan arrived six minutes later.
“You called him?” Claire asked her supervisor.
“No,” Ethan said. “The building alarm alerted my security team.”
“Of course it did.”
Firefighters contained the blaze to a records room.
The exact room holding archived paper consent forms from the failed trial.
Claire stared at the smoke-stained windows.
“That wasn’t random.”
Ethan’s jaw tightened. “No.”
Her phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number.
STOP LOOKING FOR THE FIVE PATIENTS.
May you like
A second message arrived.
YOUR MOTHER DIDN'T.
