Chapter 5 - THE MEDICAL ORDERS THAT NEVER CAME FROM A DOCTOR
Evelyn broke on the third day.
Not completely.
Enough.
Through an attorney, she admitted adding drops to some bottles.
She insisted she believed they had been ordered to keep Leo calm and reduce vomiting.
“Who gave you the instruction?” the detective asked.
Evelyn said it arrived through internal medical memos.
The memos used Dr. Chen’s name.
They were fake.
The files had been printed from a computer inside the Rossi estate management office.
That meant the sabotage was not one careless nurse improvising alone.
Someone had built a system around her.
Evelyn received cash bonuses labeled as overnight hardship pay. The payments came through the Rossi Family Office.
Lorenzo’s attorney initially suspected Marco.
Then the accountants showed something strange.
Marco had authority over security.
He did not approve payroll bonuses.
Only three people did.
Lorenzo.
His late wife Sofia.
And, after Sofia’s death, her older brother Adrian Bellini, who had temporarily taken over several administrative functions while her estate was being settled.
Lorenzo stared at the authorization sheet.
“Adrian?”
The name affected him differently than Marco’s.
Adrian had been Sofia’s older brother.
Leo’s uncle.
The man who had stood beside Lorenzo at Sofia’s funeral.
The man who brought meals to the hospital and told everyone Lorenzo needed sleep.
“He was helping with the estate,” Lorenzo said.
His attorney looked uneasy.
“He also approved the private nursing vendor.”
Another fact surfaced.
The special formula Leo supposedly “failed” on had come from a medical-nutrition distributor partly owned by Bellini Medical Foods—Adrian’s company.
Lorenzo stood so abruptly his chair rolled backward.
“Call him.”
The detective stopped him.
“Not yet.”
Lorenzo’s expression hardened.
“That is my son.”
“Which is why we need proof before you warn whoever is doing this.”
Lorenzo sat again.
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I watched a man accustomed to controlling outcomes discover that the only way to protect his child was to surrender control to a process he despised.
And somewhere inside that process, his dead wife’s family had just appeared.
