Chapter 17 - The ICU Whistleblower
I spent the rest of the night locked inside my office, my back braced against the door.
The files Finch had dropped were scattered across the floor like autopsy photographs.
Among the pages of financial spreadsheets was an internal transfer slip for a patient admitted twenty-four hours earlier under a Jane Doe alias.
Room 412, Coronary Intensive Care.
The admission notes carried a red flag that stopped my breathing: *Severe post-operative thrombosis following synthetic valve implantation.*
The valve serial number listed in the chart matched the prototype Daniel had claimed to have destroyed six months ago.
He hadn't destroyed them.
He had been testing them illegally on uninsured patients brought in through private transport services.
I threw on my white coat, bypassed the main elevators, and took the emergency stairwell directly to the fourth floor.
The ICU was silent save for the rhythmic, mechanical chirp of heart monitors.
I slipped into Room 412, pulling the curtain shut behind me.
In the bed lay a woman no older than thirty, her skin tinged with the unmistakable gray cast of end-stage tissue rejection.
Her eyes fluttered open as the floorboards creaked.
"Who... who are you?" she gasped through an oxygen mask.
"I’m Dr. Emma Hayes," I whispered, gently checking her surgical dressing.
The scar across her sternum was jagged, inflamed, and completely unhealed.
The woman’s hand reached out, her fingers digging weakly into the fabric of my sleeve.
"He... he said it was free," she sobbed, a single tear cutting through the dried saline on her cheek.
"The doctor with the blond hair and the silver watch..."
"Daniel," I whispered.
"He told me if I signed the paper, the clinic would pay for my son's insulin."
"He put this machine in my chest three weeks ago in an office park near Gary."
"And then the pain started..."
My hands shook as I listened to the irregular, mechanical clicking inside her chest.
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The valve was failing.
The valve Daniel had stolen from my mother, improperly manufactured and rushed into human bodies to generate data for Vancorp’s stock launch.
