Chapter 6 - The Boardroom Wolves Smell Blood While the Boss Plays a Pauper
By midnight, the biomedical lab on the fourth floor of the university annex was humming with the low drone of chemical centrifuges.
Dr. Elena Cross—Mia’s cousin, a brilliant biochemist with sharp eyes and zero tolerance for nonsense—pulled the mass spectrometer printout from the thermal printer and slapped it down on the steel examination table.
"It’s lethal," Elena declared without preamble. "A synthetic liquid concentrate of digitoxin bonded with concentrated cyanide salts. Less than two milliliters would shut down an adult male’s central nervous system within twenty minutes of ingestion. Who made this?"
"Daniel Reed’s private chemist," Ethan said, staring at the chemical graphs. "He wanted me dead before Friday’s shareholder assembly."
"Why Friday?" Mia asked, leaning over the table.
Ethan opened his laptop, which he had retrieved from Detective Vance's secure precinct locker. He tapped into the Brooks Hospitality master mainframe using his executive private encryption key.
"Because on Friday morning at nine o'clock," Ethan explained, turning the screen toward Mia and Vance, "the board of directors is scheduled to vote on a five-hundred-million-dollar acquisition of an offshore resort conglomerate called Helios Holdings."
"And who owns Helios Holdings?" Vance asked.
"On paper? The D. Carter Legacy Foundation," Ethan replied grimly. "In reality, it’s a blind trust controlled entirely by Daniel Reed via proxy accounts in the Cayman Islands. If the board votes yes, Brooks Hospitality transfers half a billion dollars in cash directly into Reed's hands. If I'm dead, Daniel acts as the interim trustee of my family's voting shares. He approves the deal himself, the money vanishes overseas, and Mia's family takes the legal fall for the greatest corporate theft in Midwest history."
Mia slumped into a lab chair, tears of shock and fury spilling down her cheeks. "He spent four years planning this. Ever since my dad died."
"He murdered your father, Mia," Ethan said, his voice dropping into a register of chilling certainty. "David Carter didn't die in an accident. David must have discovered Daniel's initial embezzlement four years ago, and Daniel staged that car crash to silence him."
Mia looked up, her green eyes blazing with a fierce, burning resolve. "We can't let him get on that stage on Friday. We can't let him win."
"He won't win," Ethan said, standing tall. "Because Daniel Reed thinks I'm currently running for my life in an alley. He thinks we have no evidence, no witnesses, and no leverage."
"What do we have?" Vance asked.
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Ethan tapped the mass spec report, then pointed to the stack of wire transfer records Mia had pulled from the printer.
"We have the poison. We have the paper trail. We have the chef's upcoming testimony. And most importantly... Daniel doesn't know Mia Carter is standing right next to me."
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