Chapter 4: The Diner Booth
The rain had settled into a miserable, freezing mist by the time I pulled my car into the desolate parking lot of an all-night diner twenty miles outside the estate gates. The neon sign buzzed and flickered, casting a sickly pink glow over the wet asphalt. I pulled the collar of my navy coat high around my neck, stepping out into the damp chill before pushing open the heavy glass door of the diner.
Marcus Vance sat in a corner booth near the back, nursing a cup of black coffee. He was a retired federal prosecutor who had stepped down after a brutal political battle, but his eyes were as sharp and unforgiving as ever. When I slid into the vinyl booth across from him, he didn't offer a greeting; he just slid a manila folder across the Formica table.
"You look like hell, Julian," Marcus said quietly, his voice cutting through the hum of the diner's old refrigerator. "And your voice on the phone sounded like a man standing on a ledge."
"I am standing on a ledge," I said, opening the folder to reveal my microcassette player and a photograph of the stolen ledger pages. "Thorne isn't treating me. He's poisoning me. The exact same way he killed Clara."
Marcus stared at me, his gaze unblinking. He didn't dismiss the accusation. Instead, he reached out, pressing the play button on the recorder. We sat in tense silence as Thorne's voice echoed softly through the small speaker against the background noise of sizzling grills and distant highway traffic. When it ended, Marcus let out a slow, heavy breath, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
"An audio recording and a dead woman's diary won't hold up in a standard courtroom against a respected pillar of the medical community," Marcus said grimly. "Thorne has half the city council in his pocket. If we move too fast, he'll have you committed under emergency psychiatric provisions before the ink on an indictment dries."
"Then what do we do?" I asked, leaning forward, the raw urgency in my voice unmistakable.
"We need physical evidence from his private clinic archives," Marcus said, tapping a finger against the table. "His primary registry—the real one, not the sanitized logs he shows the medical board. It's kept in a subterranean vault beneath his medical pavilion downtown."
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"How do we get in?"
Marcus offered a grim, humorless smile, sliding a heavy brass skeleton key across the table. "You don't go as a patient, Julian. You go like a thief in the night."
