Chapter 2 - The Paper Trail
By midnight, St. Jude’s Memorial Hospital was completely cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape.
Because the pediatric wing was destroyed, the non-critical patients had been transferred to Mercy General across town. Rachel had refused to leave Emma’s side, sleeping in a vinyl armchair beside Emma’s new bed in Mercy’s pediatric ward.
At 2:00 a.m., the door to Emma’s room opened quietly.
Dr. Daniel Hayes stepped inside. He had finally washed the soot from his face and changed into a pair of clean blue scrubs, but the exhaustion in his eyes ran bone-deep.
Rachel sat up instantly. “Daniel? What’s happening? Did they find out why Margaret did it?”
Daniel walked over to the window, looking out at the city lights. He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Rachel.
“Agent Lin just finished the first four hours of Margaret’s interrogation,” Daniel said, his voice rough. “Margaret hasn't confessed to setting the fire yet, but the state police executed a search warrant on her locker in the staff lounge an hour ago.”
Rachel opened the paper. It was a photocopy of a bank statement under the name M. Cole.
“Two weeks ago,” Daniel explained, “a wire transfer of forty thousand dollars was deposited into Margaret’s account from a shell company registered in Delaware called Apex Medical Real Estate Holding.”
Rachel’s brows furrowed. “Real estate? What does a real estate company want with a pediatric nurse?”
“St. Jude’s is a non-profit municipal hospital,” Daniel said, leaning against the windowsill. “It sits on twelve acres of prime lakefront land near downtown Chicago. For the past three years, the board of directors—led by Arthur Vance—has been trying to sell the hospital to a private commercial developer.”
Rachel gasped. “Sell a children’s hospital?”
“The community fought them,” Daniel continued, his jaw tightening. “The city council blocked the sale six months ago, stating that St. Jude’s provided essential, irreplaceable pediatric trauma care. The only way the board could bypass the city council’s block was if the hospital suffered a 'catastrophic infrastructure failure' that made the pediatric wing too expensive to rebuild.”
Emma sat up in her bed. Although she couldn't hear their voices, she watched their lips intently. She reached for her dry-erase board on the nightstand and wrote in neat, dark marker:
BOX IN THE ROOM.
Daniel looked at the board. “What box, Emma?”
Emma picked up her marker again:
The lady carried a cardboard box into the room before the smoke.
Daniel turned to Rachel, his eyes widening. “The medical supply room where the fire started... that wasn't just a storage closet. That was where the floor’s physical patient archives were kept. Paper charts from the last fifteen years.”
“Why burn paper charts in a digital age?” Rachel asked.
“Because,” Daniel said, a sudden, horrifying realization dawning on his face, “three months ago, the state audit department began investigating St. Jude’s for medical billing fraud. They suspected someone on the board was billing Medicaid for millions of dollars in pediatric cancer treatments that were never delivered.”
Daniel stood up straight, his energy returning in a sudden rush of adrenaline.
“Margaret wasn't just setting a fire to ruin the building,” Daniel whispered. “She was destroying the paper records that proved the fraud. And someone paid her forty thousand dollars to do it.”
Suddenly, the monitor beside Emma’s bed chimed softly.
Emma didn't look at the monitor. She looked at the door leading into the hallway.
Shadows were moving outside the frosted glass window of her room.
A man in a dark maintenance uniform stepped into the doorway. He was tall, thick-set, and carried a heavy canvas tool bag in his right hand. He didn't look like the night-shift staff at Mercy General. His eyes swept the room, skipping right past Rachel and Daniel, locking directly onto nine-year-old Emma.
“Room 312?” the man asked, his voice low and raspy. “Facilities sent me to check the oxygen wall valves.”
Emma gripped her mother’s hand, her small body going rigid.
She tapped Rachel’s arm rapidly, pointing at the man’s boots.
He was wearing black work boots, but around the laces of his right shoe was a thin, bright green thread—the exact same color as the embroidery on Margaret Cole’s nursing shoes.
May you like
“Get out,” Daniel said instantly, stepping between the man and Emma’s bed. “No one ordered a facilities check at two in the morning.”
The man didn't argue. He reached into his canvas tool bag.
