Chapter 7 - BENEATH THE BLUE HOUSE
Police entered the property before dawn.
Greg was not there.
A reinforced door beneath the laundry room led to a cellar with no exterior windows.
Owen lay near the stairs with a head injury and fractured ribs.
Nora was chained to a pipe on the opposite wall.
Both were alive.
Paramedics transported them under guard.
Nora’s first coherent question concerned Lily.
“She reached Marcus?”
“Yes,” Detective Morales told her.
“Did he open both boots?”
“Yes.”
Nora began crying.
Owen required emergency surgery but survived. He entered protective custody after admitting his role in transporting stolen drugs. Prosecutors would determine charges and cooperation terms later.
Nora remained hospitalized for dehydration, infection, and injuries caused during confinement.
She gave an initial statement only after treatment.
Greg began using Lily two months earlier.
He knew school staff and clinic workers rarely questioned heavy boots during rain. Nora discovered the vials after Lily complained that her legs hurt.
She photographed everything.
Greg caught her.
Alan Pierce ordered Greg to recover the evidence and move Nora to the blue house.
“Why did you name me?” I asked when investigators permitted a brief meeting.
Nora looked smaller in the hospital bed than she had on the video.
“My sister’s child was Ava Monroe.”
The room disappeared around me.
“You are Ava’s aunt?”
“Yes.”
“Did we meet?”
“Once. You spoke to our family after she died.”
I remembered a woman standing near the window while Ava’s parents asked whether they had missed a symptom.
“I told them we found no surgical explanation.”
“You told the truth you had.”
Nora later discovered Greg’s connection to hospital drugs. She searched old records and found Ava’s case number in a spreadsheet on his computer.
“That’s when I started copying files.”
“You believed Pierce caused her death?”
“I believed he altered the record. I still don’t know what caused it.”
Neither did I.
Nora had chosen me because my operative note was the only document in Ava’s file that recorded the medication discrepancy rather than repeating the official timeline.
“You wrote that the chart did not match what you observed.”
“I was told the discrepancy was corrected.”
“It wasn’t.”
Police searched the blue house.
They found clothing belonging to Mia Sanderson and her father, but neither was inside. A hidden tunnel exited through an old storm drain.
Greg had moved them before police arrived.
Nora said Mia’s father, Eric, discovered the trafficking while working as a medical transport driver. Greg took both Eric and Mia after Eric threatened to report him.
The operation did not merely use children.
It imprisoned witnesses with children to ensure silence.
Nora also revealed that Pierce and Greg shared a father. Their relationship was hidden, but Pierce had financed Greg’s courier company from the beginning.
“He taught Greg how hospital waste systems worked,” she said.
“Where would Greg take Mia?”
Nora closed her eyes.
“The place where they destroy records.”
“Where?”
“Pierce called it the clean room.”
St. Jude’s had one decommissioned sterilization facility known informally by that name.
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It stood beneath the hospital’s oldest wing.
The access logs showed someone had entered it twenty minutes earlier using my badge.
