Chapter 17 - The Whistleblower’s DossierI didn't back down. Instead, I spent the entire night in my office going through encrypted hospital archives dating back ten years.
If Arthur Sterling and Richard Vance wanted to play corporate warfare, I was going to give them a masterclass.
At 3:00 AM, my private office door clicked open. I instinctively reached for my desk phone, but a familiar voice stopped me.
“Put the phone down, Mara. It’s just me.”
I looked up to see Dr. Patel walking in, holding a steaming cup of black coffee and a thick, yellowed manila folder tied with faded red string.
“Dr. Patel? What are you doing here at this hour?” I asked, rubbing my tired eyes.
“I saw the look on your face after the board meeting,” Patel said, setting the coffee cup beside my keyboard and laying the folder on my desk. “Sterling and Richard Vance have been playing a very dangerous game for a decade. They didn't just want to buy out the pediatric wing—they wanted to bury an internal environmental safety report.”
I opened the folder. Inside were chemical testing logs from the soil beneath St. Catherine’s pediatric wing.
“Toxic industrial runoff,” I whispered, reading the underlined medical lab results. “The old pharmaceutical plant upstream... it’s been leaking heavy metals into the hospital’s water supply for years. And the board covered it up to keep property values high.”
“Exactly,” Patel said grimly. “If you expose the board’s financial corruption tomorrow morning at the public trustee meeting, you won’t just save the pediatric wing. You’ll expose a public health disaster that could land every single one of those executives in federal prison.”
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I closed the folder, a fierce, determined smile spreading across my face.
“Get the federal marshals on the phone, Dr. Patel,” I said. “Tomorrow, we clean house.”
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