Chapter 7 - THE VENDOR AVA ASKED ABOUT
Ava could have walked away from Davies Genomics.
Instead she kept asking one question:
Why would Victor risk touching Liam’s paternity test?
Rachel thought jealousy manipulation.
Naomi thought panic.
Ava thought money.
She remembered Ames Biomedical Supply.
Davies Genomics paid the company:
$14.2 million over three years.
Sole-source specialty extraction reagent.
Victor disclosed that his brother had “a minority interest.”
Actual ownership records showed:
Victor’s brother, Caleb Ames, controlled 72%.
Victor himself held no direct equity.
But a family trust benefiting Victor’s children held 11%.
Conflict.
Not fully hidden.
Poorly disclosed.
Then product-quality reports.
Several reagent lots had elevated extraction failure rates.
Naomi’s lab requested vendor review.
Victor pushed back.
Why?
Switching vendors before a planned acquisition could:
delay validation,
trigger requalification costs,
and expose prior-quality concerns.
Then Ava found the connection.
The same low-yield problem affecting Liam’s secret paternal sample had occurred disproportionately in Ames reagent lots.
If Liam’s sample triggered a visible executive-level investigation, it could expose the vendor issue.
Victor needed the test completed without a lab-quality escalation.
That explained clearing the alert.
But not why the wrong sample produced non-paternity instead of simply recollecting.
Then Naomi found an archived message:
LAB SUPERVISOR:
Recollect executive donor?
VICTOR:
No recollect. Pair available control and close.
Ava went cold.
Available control.
He had knowingly told the lab to pair the sample with another male control.
He may not have known the relationship result would say exclusion.
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But he knew the paternity analysis would be meaningless.
And he let Liam receive it anyway.
