Chapter 7 - THE MAN BENEATH THE ORCHIDS
Police entered the underground laboratory.
They found Lucian Cross tied to a chair inside a refrigerated storage room.
Lucian served as Vale Consolidated’s chief financial officer.
He had worked for Gideon.
Then Sebastian.
His hands were blue from cold.
A plastic tube ran from an intravenous bag into his arm.
The bag carried the Bellglass research code.
Paramedics removed it.
Lucian regained consciousness at the hospital several hours later.
He requested immunity.
Detective Ellis offered protection, not immunity.
Lucian began talking anyway.
Eleanor had controlled Project Bellglass from the beginning.
Mercer managed the medical side.
Lucian moved the money.
The official goal was to create a reversible state of suspended metabolism for trauma patients.
The first trials involved animals.
Then Mercer used nursing-home residents.
The foundation paid facility directors to list deaths as natural.
Gideon discovered the trials.
He ordered them stopped.
Eleanor believed the project would make Vale Biotech more valuable than any company in the world.
She could not allow one frightened husband to destroy it.
“Who injected Gideon?” Sebastian asked.
“Mercer.”
“Who ordered it?”
Lucian looked at him.
“Eleanor.”
Sebastian stepped away.
The woman who raised him had killed his father.
Then allowed him to inherit the public burden of the company.
His success had been built on a murder he spent six years refusing to question.
“Why Rosalie?” Theodore asked.
“She found the death records.”
“She copied the financial archive.”
“Eleanor planned to have her declared unstable.”
“Rosalie contacted an investigative journalist before they could act.”
“So they killed her.”
“They planned to.”
Lucian explained that the dose should have stopped Rosalie’s heart after several hours.
Mercer miscalculated because Rosalie had secretly stopped taking a medication that interacted with V-17.
Her body remained paralyzed.
Her pulse survived.
“Why the fast funeral?”
“To avoid toxicology.”
“Eleanor planned to cremate her after the memorial.”
Theodore’s stomach turned.
“If I had not heard the taps—”
“There would have been no evidence left by evening,” Lucian said.
Rosalie’s microdrive had been given to Mercer.
He intended to destroy it.
Instead, he used it as insurance.
Mercer copied the files and hid them.
Eleanor learned this.
That was why she locked Lucian in the laboratory.
She believed he knew where Mercer had gone.
“Do you?” Ellis asked.
Lucian nodded.
“Vale Haven.”
The oldest nursing home in the foundation network.
It had closed after a boiler accident five years earlier.
Mercer kept a private clinic beneath the abandoned building.
Before police could move, the hospital alarm sounded.
Theodore ran toward Rosalie’s room.
A nurse lay unconscious beside the service elevator.
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Rosalie’s bed was empty.
On the pillow rested a strip of gray satin.
