Chapter 6 - The Empty Bed
The hospital corridor was dead silent when my car skidded to a halt outside the emergency entrance. I didn't bother locking the doors. I sprinted through the automatic sliding doors, flashing past the security desk before the guard could even raise his head, and vaulted up the stairwell toward the third floor.
My lungs burned with every breath. The words of the night nurse echoed endlessly in my mind: His room was just breached. He’s gone.
When I burst through the doors of the pediatric ward, the scene was a chaotic blur of flashing blue and red lights reflecting off the linoleum walls. Detective Miller stood in the center of Room 4B, his face dark with suppressed fury, while two uniformed officers dusted the window frame and door handle for latent fingerprints.
The hospital bed was stripped bare. The white sheets hung limply over the side, the IV pole swinging gently from the sudden disturbance, its plastic line dripping sterile saline onto the empty floor.
"Clara!" Detective Miller called out, stepping forward to block my path as I lunged toward the bed. "Stop, don't contaminate the crime scene."
"Where is my son?" I screamed, my voice cracking with a primal terror that ripped straight from my chest. "Where is Leo? You said there was a deputy stationed outside his door!"
"There was," Miller said grimly, rubbing the back of his neck in frustration. "Officer Davies was found unconscious in the breakroom down the hall. Someone slipped a concentrated dose of fast-acting sedative into his midnight coffee. By the time the nursing staff realized what happened and checked the room, the window was forced open from the outside, and the boy was gone."
I grabbed the metal railing of the empty bed, my knuckles turning white. "Arthur. It has to be Arthur or his lawyer. They sent someone to finish what they started in that laundry room."
"Not necessarily," Miller corrected, pulling a small, clear plastic evidence bag from his pocket and holding it up. Inside lay a small, metallic object—a heavy silver cufflink stamped with an intricate corporate monogram: AS.
"Marcus Sterling," I whispered, the name tasting like ash on my tongue.
"We're pulling traffic cameras around the hospital perimeter right now," Miller said, his tone turning razor-sharp. "Whoever took Leo couldn't have gotten far in this weather. Clara, I need you to stay calm. We are going to find him."
Calm was a luxury I abandoned the moment I saw my son tied to a washing machine. Now, with Leo out there in the freezing night, hunted by the very people whose crimes I had just downloaded onto a flash drive, I felt a cold, calculating rage take over every nerve in my body.
May you like
I reached into my coat pocket and gripped the small plastic flash drive. They thought they could silence me by taking my child. They didn't realize they had just given me the ultimate weapon to burn their entire world to the ground.
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