Chapter 7 - The Interrogation
The facility in Schaumburg was a non-descript, heavily fortified commercial building tucked away in an industrial park. On the surface, it operated as a secure data center for Carter-Vanguard. Beneath the ground level, however, was a state-of-the-art corporate security suite, featuring isolated interrogation rooms, encrypted communications arrays, and private medical facilities.
I walked down the brightly lit, sterile concrete corridor toward Interrogation Room B. Marcus was waiting outside the reinforced door, holding a thick folder of intelligence reports.
"How is my son?" I asked before looking at the files.
"Dr. Vance completed the second round of screenings," Marcus replied. "The sedatives are clearing his system rapidly. His respiration is strong, and he's taking formula well. Dr. Vance has a full-time pediatric team watching him in Room 4A."
"Thank you, Marcus," I said. "Now tell me about Harrison."
Marcus opened the door's observation window. Inside, sat a middle-aged man with thinning gray hair, dressed in a wrinkled, expensive suit. Dr. Arthur Harrison sat hunched over a steel table, his hands handcuffed to an anchor ring set into the metal surface. Sweat glistened on his forehead, and his eyes darted frantically around the featureless room.
"He's terrified," Marcus noted. "He knows that if Miller's homicide unit gets ahold of him with the physical evidence we've pulled, he's looking at life without parole for first-degree murder under Illinois felony murder rules."
I took a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped inside.
The metallic click of the door closing behind me made Harrison jump. He looked up, his pale face breaking into a nervous, desperate mask.
"Mr. Carter! Please!" Harrison stammered immediately, his voice shrill. "You have to listen to me! I was coerced! Your mother... Eleanor... she threatened to expose my past medical licenses! She told me your wife was terminally ill and that I was simply assisting in an offshore palliative care arrangement!"
I pulled out the metal chair across from him and sat down slow and unhurried. I didn't say a word. I simply stared into his eyes, letting the heavy, suffocating silence fill the small room.
The psychological weight of unpressed silence is a weapon I had used in high-stakes boardrooms for decades. Innocent men defend themselves with details; guilty men attempt to fill the void with frantic lies until they trip over their own contradictions.
Harrison squirmed in his seat, the steel handcuffs clinking against the table. "I... I didn't want to induce labor early! Ryan brought the pharmaceuticals! He bought them off an illicit supply line in Canada! I told them it was dangerous! I told them her heart couldn't take the stress of the chemical cascade!"
"And yet you administered the dosage," I said, my voice flat, devoid of pitch.
"They paid me two million dollars!" Harrison sobbed out, breaking completely under the stare. "Two million dollars wired directly to an offshore account in Nevis! I was broke, Ethan! The malpractice suits ruined me! I needed the money!"
"Where is the paperwork for the illegal delivery?" I asked. "Where are the clinical notes you took while you were drugging my wife?"
Harrison swallowed hard, his eyes dropping to the table. "In my bag... the leather briefcase your men confiscated at the airfield. I kept detailed logs... because I knew Eleanor was going to try to throw me to the wolves if anything went wrong. I have the audio recordings of Eleanor ordering me to double the sedative dose the night before you landed."
I leaned forward, placing my hands flat on the table. "You kept audio recordings of my mother?"
"Yes!" Harrison blurted out, eager to offer anything to save himself. "She told me... she specifically said, 'Make sure she doesn't wake up before Ethan's flight clears Customs. We need the body staged and in the casket before he steps through the front door.' I have her saying it! On my phone's encrypted vault app!"
I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second, feeling the sharp, agonizing cold of that truth settle into my soul. They hadn't just planned her death; they had synchronized it with my flight schedule, using my travel time over the Pacific ocean as their operational window.
I stood up from the chair.
"Mr. Carter, please!" Harrison begged, leaning forward against his restraints. "I'll testify! I'll tell the Special Prosecutor everything! Just don't hand me over to the state prosecutors! Don't let Eleanor's people get to me in county jail!"
"You're going to testify, Harrison," I said quietly, looking down at him with utter disgust. "You're going to tell the judge, the jury, and the press every single detail of what you did to my wife. And then you are going to spend the rest of your natural life in a maximum-security cell, thinking about the two million dollars you sold your soul for."
I turned and walked out of the room, shutting the heavy door on his frantic screams.
Marcus was waiting in the hallway. "The state prosecutor's office just called," he informed me. "Detective Miller turned over the preliminary forensic evidence from the house. The District Attorney has signed off on emergency arrest warrants for Eleanor and Ryan Carter. They're being processed at the central booking facility downtown as we speak."
"What about the foreign syndicate?" I asked, walking down the hall toward the medical wing.
"Our financial intelligence team spent the last hour cross-referencing the data from the hard drives you recovered at Graceland," Marcus replied, handing me a fresh file. "The offshore shell company that lured Ryan into the debt trap is called Apex Global Ventures. It's a front for a foreign industrial espionage group operating out of Zurich. They were planning to use the stolen defense algorithms to short Carter-Vanguard's stock tomorrow morning at the opening bell, driving our valuation to zero while executing a hostile takeover."
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I stopped outside the door of Room 4A. Through the glass window, I could see my son sleeping peacefully in an incubator, wrapped in a soft white blanket.
"They thought they were dealing with a broken, grieving husband," I said, looking at my son's calm face. "Assemble the legal team, the public relations division, and our chief trading desk. We are going to execute a counter-squeeze on Apex Global the moment the London markets open tonight. I am going to bankrupt every single entity connected to that syndicate before sunrise."
