Chapter 5 - An Unusual Target
Before Vance or Miller could stop me, I turned on my heel and walked toward the staff exit at the back of the clinic.
"Marcus!" Miller barked from the waiting room. "Where the hell do you think you’re going? Internal Affairs has ordered you to surrender your weapon and badge pending the preliminary review!"
"I'm on leave until Titan wakes up," I replied without turning around. "And if you want my badge, Captain, you'll have to send someone to take it."
I slipped out into the freezing rain of the rear alleyway. I didn't take the cruiser; Miller’s team would have the GPS tracked within ten minutes. Instead, I pulled up the hood of my rain jacket, jogged two blocks to an open parking garage, and retrieved my personal vehicle—a ten-year-old, beat-up Toyota 4Runner that didn't have department tracking transponders embedded in the dash.
The drive to Seattle Children’s Hospital took fifteen minutes through the gathering evening fog.
The hospital was guarded, but not by standard private security. At the entrance to the emergency pediatric wing, two men in dark overcoats and earpieces stood near the sliding doors, their eyes scanning every pedestrian with military precision. Federal marshals. If the U.S. Marshals Service had already thrown a protective detail over David Vance’s family, it meant the federal government knew the threat was real, even if the city politicians were pretending it was a dog bite.
I bypassed the main desk, flashed my leather police wallet to a King County deputy stationed in the elevator bank—a former academy classmate who nodded and looked the other way—and rode the lift to the fourth floor.
Room 412 was at the very end of the hall. A single marshal sat in a folding chair outside.
"Officer Marcus," a voice said behind me before I could reach the door.
I turned. A man was walking toward me from the consultation alcove. He was tall, thin, in his late thirties, wearing a rumpled button-down shirt with the collar open. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with the deep shadows of someone who hadn't slept in forty-eight hours.
David Vance.
"Mr. Vance," I said, keeping my hands visible. "I came to check on Lily."
Vance stopped three feet from me. He didn't look like an angry parent ready to sue the city. He looked terrified. He reached out his hand, his fingers trembling, and gripped my forearm with surprising strength.
"She’s asleep," Vance whispered. "The doctors ran every toxicological panel they have. No venom. No puncture wounds. Only minor bruising on her collarbone where your dog hit her." He took a ragged breath. "She told me everything, Officer. She told me she saw the snake rise out of the leaves. She told me she saw its yellow eyes right before the dog took the bite for her."
A heavy weight lifted off my chest, only to be replaced by cold fury. "Then why did the City Attorney say you were refusing to give a statement? Why are they letting the media destroy Titan?"
Vance pulled me into the small consultation room and shut the door firmly, locking it from the inside.
"Because the people trying to kill my daughter aren't common street thugs," Vance said, his voice dropped to a harsh whisper. "For eighteen months, my task force has been building a federal RICO indictment against North-Pac Logistics. On paper, they’re a shipping and customs conglomerate operating out of the Port of Tacoma. In reality, they are the primary Pacific Northwest distribution network for a transnational syndicate specializing in high-end narcotics, rare wildlife trafficking, and contract executions."
"The snake," I realized. "It was smuggled through the port."
"Crotalus adamanteus," Vance nodded grimly. "An untraceable weapon. If a child dies in a public park from an exotic snakebite, it looks like an accidental release from an irresponsible private collector. It doesn't trigger a murder investigation. It doesn't look like retaliation against a federal prosecutor. It breaks a man's heart and forces him to step down from the trial to mourn his daughter."
Vance stepped toward the window, looking out over the rain-drenched lights of Seattle.
"They warned me two weeks ago. An anonymous courier left a child’s funeral program on my car windshield with the date left blank. I requested federal protection, but we thought they would use a sniper, a car bomb, an ambush at my home. We never imagined Centennial Park. We never imagined they would plant an exotic viper in the leaves where Lily plays frisbee every Sunday."
"And Titan broke their plan," I said.
"Titan didn't just break it," Vance turned back to me, his jaw set. "He ruined the perfect crime. And now, the syndicate is panicking. They used their assets inside city politics to leak that edited video to paint your dog as a public menace. They want Titan euthanized immediately because if an autopsy or blood sample proves exotic envenomation, the federal murder conspiracy is confirmed. They’re erasing the evidence, Marcus."
My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a text alert from the monitoring app hooked into the veterinary clinic's ICU telemetry.
ALERT: PATIENT 4-KILO-9 (TITAN) - CRITICAL DROP IN MEAN ARTERIAL PRESSURE. CARDIAC ARRHYTHMIA DETECTED.
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My stomach dropped into a bottomless pit.
"They're not just waiting for the city to destroy him," I said, cold sweat prickling my forehead. "They’re at the clinic."
