Chapter 12 - THE SECOND DOSAGE
I met Detective Grant in a basement vault at the federal courthouse.
Dr. Laura Bennett sat at the conference table alongside Margaret Sloan, who had brought two senior state prosecutors.
Spread across the table were matching binders retrieved from Novacell’s sealed corporate archives in Zurich.
“It gets darker, Emily,” Dr. Bennett said, placing a pair of reading glasses on the table.
“The medication Daniel stole from Lily was never just a treatment for her organ failure.”
“What was it?” I asked, my knuckles turning white against my purse.
“It was an antidote,” Dr. Bennett revealed softly.
“The synthetic compound administered in 1997 created a progressive cellular decay.”
“The only way to pause that decay was a monthly dose of the Novacell biologic.”
“When Daniel redirected Lily’s doses to Vanessa’s clinic, he wasn’t just selling high-priced rare medicine on the black market.”
“He was executing a controlled suppression test.”
Margaret Sloan tapped her cane against the floor.
“They were testing how long a subject could survive when the antidote was withheld in incremental amounts.”
“Lily’s collapse at age eight wasn't an unexpected emergency.”
“It was the exact milestone predicted on page forty-four of Arthur Carter’s ledger.”
Tears of raw, cold fury welled in my eyes.
Daniel had sat beside Lily’s hospital bed for months, watching her oxygen levels plummet, holding my hand while I wept, pretending to be a grieving father.
All the while, he was measuring her pain against a clinical timeline designed by his own father.
“Where did the redirected doses go?” I demanded.
“To Switzerland,” Detective Grant said, opening a secondary file.
“To a private residential clinic outside Zurich managed by Julian Vance.”
“And that brings us to the second subject in the file.”
Grant pushed a high-contrast photograph across the table.
Sitting in a garden was a young woman with dark hair and bright green eyes.
She looked identical to Lily at age twenty.
May you like
Her name was Maya.
And according to the genetic sequencing report attached to her record, she was Lily’s twin sister—a child I had been told died at birth in 1998.
