“This one, I think you can leave to me,” Sean murmured, producing a pick set from his pocket and moving my father aside. The lock was clearly intended to keep out casual trespassers rather than those with more serious intent, and it yielded to Sean’s nimble fingers in less than a minute.
He straightened and pushed the door open, meeting my father’s sharp gaze with a bland expression on his face. I could see that my father really wanted to snipe at Sean further for his obviously illegal abilities, but even he recognized it would be hypocritical to do so under the circumstances.
Inside, the room turned out to be a cramped office, its floor space three-quarters occupied by two chairs and a desk, which was empty apart from a double filing tray, a telephone, and a blank computer terminal. All the usual office detritus of books, photographs and paperwork was missing, leaving shadows in the dust and faded patches on the walls.
My father crossed to the desk and sat behind it, hitting the power button on the computer as he reached for his glasses.
“How did you know this would be empty?” I asked.
His eyes flicked over me briefly. “This was Jeremy’s office,” he said shortly, and turned his attention back to the screen. “His was a particular specialty. Recruiting his replacement will take some time.”
“Are you sure you can access his records from here?” Sean asked.
“I’ll answer that in just a moment,” my father said, attacking the keyboard once the computer had booted itself up. I tried not to hang over his shoulder as he tapped his name and password into the required boxes.
The computer thought for a moment, then came up with the message: ACCESS DENIED.
“Damn,” I muttered. “What now?”
“Hm, they have been thorough, haven’t they?” my father murmured, not sounding at all surprised. “But not that thorough, I think.”
This time, he typed Jeremy Lee into the name field, and a seven-character password. I caught only the first couple of letters—M and I—but I could guess the rest. His wife’s name. I remembered the photograph Miranda had showed us of the pair of them on the yacht, happy, carefree, and my throat constricted.
My father hit ENTER. The computer clicked and whirred again, thought about being awkward while we held our collective breath, and then gave up its secrets.
It didn’t take more than a few seconds for my father to navigate his way to the appropriate section of the Electronic Medical Record system and key in the name of his dead colleague. Within moments, Jeremy Lee’s official patient records were on screen for us to see.
My father leaned closer, scanning the information with the mental dexterity of a natural speed reader. His face darkened as he read on in silence, his only movement to stab the key to page down. We didn’t interrupt him until he was done.
“Fabrication,” he snapped, almost throwing himself back in the chair. “Maybe they’ve been more thorough than I first thought.”
“What does it say?”
“That Jeremy suffered multiple fractures of his thoracic vertebrae in his fall, causing hemiplegia—lower-body paralysis—which led to a urinary tract infection, in turn leading to septicemia, which killed him.”
“And is that feasible?”
“As a course of events? Perfectly,” my father said, even more clipped than usual. “Hemiplegia often causes such problems, in that the patient can’t adequately empty his bladder. Having a lot of urine in the bladder at all times is a situation ripe for a UTI.” He nodded toward the screen. “They note that he had an indwelling Foley catheter to keep his bladder empty, which is a common enough route for infection. All very logical,” he said bitterly. “All very made up.”
“So, no mention of osteoporosis?” Sean said. “Spinal or otherwise?”
My father gave a snort. “Oh yes, as a minor side issue. But as a major factor of his condition? No.” He scrolled back up through the document. “Nor is the Storax treatment mentioned anywhere in his records, despite the fact that the technicians Storax sent clearly identified its presence. They state he was on heavy-duty antibiotics for the infection, and Oxy-Contin for the pain. Nothing else.”
“What about cause of death?” I asked.
“Well, I’d hardly expect them to admit in black and white that it was the hundred milligrams of morphine injected into his IV line that did the job.” He unhooked his glasses and almost threw them onto the desktop, hard enough for them to clatter against the surface, and stared after them as though he was going to be able to divine some kind of answer in the grain.
Eventually, he looked up, hollow-eyed. “We’re at a dead end. Jeremy’s already been cremated and they’ve covered their tracks to the point where it would be just my word against theirs. And they’ve ensured that my word would not carry very much weight at the moment.”
Sean glanced at his watch. “We need to get out of here,” he said. “That little stunt you pulled downstairs is likely to have them looking for a practical joker.”
My father reached towards the keyboard again, but Sean leaned across him and switched on the printer. “Print it all out and we’ll take it with us,” he said. “Mrs. Lee will be able to testify how much of it is false.”
For a moment, my father looked scandalized at the thought of actually stealing a patient’s records. Then I saw the realization hit that the originals had been stolen well before he’d been anywhere near them.
A watched printer, like a watched kettle, takes forever to boil. This one looked modern but might as well have been a monk with a quill pen dipped in ink for all the time it took to go through its start-up routine and begin spitting out the pages. Just as the last one settled into the catch tray, the phone on the desk began to ring.
My father glanced up. “They’re on the ball,” he said tightly. “They must have the file flagged on the EMR and they’re checking up on who’s accessing it.”
Sean snatched the papers out of the printer. “Okay, we’re out of here,” he said to my father. “You may as well leave the computer on—they already know we’ve been in there.” He jerked his head to me. “I’ll take him out the way we came in. You get your mother and meet us, okay?”
I nodded and opened the door a crack as if expecting to see security men rushing to detain us. The corridor outside was deserted.
I slipped through the gap and made for the nearest staircase, taking it at a run and jumping the last few steps onto each half landing as I went, heedless of the residual bruises from my taxi encounter. After the first couple of flights my left leg started complaining bitterly at this treatment, but I ignored it.
I reached the ER and spotted my mother sitting in the waiting area, pretending to leaf through a magazine. She looked tense and awkward, but so did everyone else there. They all looked up when I hurried into view.
“Ma’am, would you come with me, please?” I said in my best generic East Coast drawl.
I didn’t have to feign the urgency in my voice, nor she the way her face paled at my words, but nobody watching saw anything amiss. Some even threw her sympathetic glances as she jumped to her feet and followed me out.
“What it is?” she said as soon as we were out of earshot. “Where’s Richard?”
“He’s fine,” I said. “We got what we came for, but they know we’re here.”
I was aware of a tension in my chest that had nothing to do with running down a flight of stairs. We’d pushed our luck coming here to begin with, and were pushing it even further with every minute we stayed. If anything, the disguises made it worse, like being caught out of uniform behind enemy lines. As if it made the difference between being treated as a legit prisoner of war, or being shot outright as a spy.