Chapter 4: The Ambulance Bay
The ambulance took the rear exit so the girls never crossed the open lot where Michael Carter still stood at the locked glass doors. Daniel followed in a patrol car with his supervisor’s approval, the sealed evidence envelope and the pharmacy printout locked in the vehicle’s secure bag. Rain streaked the windshield in long silver lines. Inside the ambulance, according to the medic’s radio updates, Olivia’s pain had not eased; her blood pressure was low-normal and her drowsiness was deepening. Emma refused to release her sister’s hand and answered every question with the same flat clarity she had used at the station: Daddy made her swallow it, Daddy said not to tell, Daddy checks pockets.
At the hospital the paramedics moved Olivia straight into a pediatric exam room. Emma was allowed to stay because separating her produced immediate panic that the triage nurse judged more harmful than her presence. Daniel remained in the corridor long enough to transfer custody of the evidence bag to the hospital’s secure protocol liaison and to give a clean, chronological statement to the arriving child-services worker: time of arrival, exact words used by Emma, recovery of the syringe from the shoe, pharmacy code search, father’s name as prescriber, father’s simultaneous missing-child report claiming the girls had refused medicine and wandered off, the locking of the station doors, and the children’s explicit request for protection before the parent reached them.
