Deadly Errors (32 page)

T
YLER CROUCHED, BINOCULARS steadied on a rusted, metal-capped parapet, studying his apartment windows across the street. The downward angle didn’t allow an entire view of the living room and kitchen, but gave him enough coverage to believe no one was waiting inside. He’d been crouched up here on this stinking tar roof for what felt like a half hour but was probably more like fifteen minutes, making his knees ache, making him edgy to move on. Besides that, the black roof was radiating enough heat to make breathing the putrid exhaust from a nearby vent a real pain in the ass.

Leaning forward, the heavy German glasses angled downwards, he studied the cars and pedestrians once again, coming back to an anthracite BMW 7-series still curbed just down from the entrance to his building. It had been parked there doing nothing since he first looked. The driver side window was down, an elbow perched on the edge, a wisp of what could be cigarette smoke curling up over the top edge every once in a while. Short of walking up and asking what the hell the driver was waiting for, there was no way to prove they were watching for him or not and it seemed highly doubtful it would be Ferguson’s car.

Might as well get on with it, he decided.

He duckwalked back from the edge before standing and heading for the bare concrete stairwell. A few minutes later, on the basement level of the apartment building, he hit a button switch. A roll-up, metal-slat garage door groaned upwards, allowing him to walk up the steeply angled driveway into the alley. From here he traveled two blocks north, turned east for two blocks before heading south for another two blocks, bringing him to a 24/7 convenience store. He entered and nodded to the familiar counter clerk, the air thick with the smell of spicy hotdogs rotating under a set of heat lamps.

He passed a wire stand stocked with various potato chip choices and followed an aisle to a large cooler filled with beer, soft drinks, and half gallon milk cartons. A narrow hall led past a unisex lavatory radiating ammonia fumes to a metal fire door.

Tyler cracked the door and peered out. The alley, atherosclerotic from green dumpsters, was impassable to any vehicle wider than a Volkswagen Jetta. Twenty feet away a man in soiled clothes was urinating against a brick wall.

Tyler crossed the alley to his apartment building back door and punched a six digit security code onto an aluminum keypad. The door lock responded with a hard, metallic snap. He stepped inside and for the next thirty seconds stood on the stairwell landing breathing deeply, trying to slow his heart and light headedness. He listened for someone in the stairwell. Nothing. Slowly he cracked the door and peeked into the first floor lobby. Seeing no one, he slipped into the hall and punched the manager’s doorbell and waited down the hall so that he couldn’t be seen from the street. A moment later the door opened, framing an unshaven face with bloodshot basset hound eyes.

“Doc Mathews.” The manager combed nicotine stained fingers through greasy salt and pepper hair.

“Sorry to bother you, Carlos, but I—”

“Y’don’t have no keys.” The man yawned, scratched both love handles and nodded. “You okay, man? Sure as shit din look worth a damn last night when they drug you outta here. Juz a minute.” For a beat he vanished from view only to reappear, keys in hand. He wore a faded Grateful Dead tee shirt and black jeans, no socks. He started toward the elevator without bothering to close his own door, probably figuring no one would have the nerve to enter, much less steal anything.

“I gotta tell ya, Doc, the owners don’t want no druggies livin’ here. I’m gonna cut ya some slack this time, but anything like last night happens again… . Well …” He let it float.

Fed up with trying to defend himself, Tyler answered, “Understood.”

Carlos pulled a ring of keys from a retractable belt holder and opened his door. “Here ya go, doc.”

“Hold on a second, I want to give you something.”

Carlos shot him a suspicious look. “Gimme something?”

Tyler swept his hand toward the entrance. “A thank you for your trouble here.”

The manager grinned, showing a missing canine. “No need.”

“You can wait here or come on in.” Tyler entered his apartment, figuring if someone were waiting for him Carlos could run and call the police. Carlos followed him in.

“Hold on.” Tyler make a quick tour through the one bedroom apartment before stopping in the kitchen and grabbing the only bottle of wine in the place, a Merlot he’d bought in hopes of cooking dinner for Nancy. “Here you go.”

Carlos smiled. “Hey thanks, man, but ya know, you don’t need to do this.” He held up the bottle. “Ya sure?”

Tyler gave him a shoulder pat, ushering him toward the door. “For all your troubles. Thanks again.”

A moment later he locked the door and surveyed the place more closely. His keys were on the counter where he’d left them. There were no signs of a struggle in either living room or bedroom. Even the syringe was gone. He checked the answering machine. Unplugged. At first he considered plugging it back in, then decided to let it go. If the killers knew it was unplugged, called, and found it plugged in again, they’d know he’d returned.

A floorboard creaked. Tyler froze.

Could he have overlooked something?

Both eyes on the bedroom, Tyler backed up toward the coat closet where he kept a baseball bat for the occasional pick up games between MMC surgeons and anesthesiologists. It was a well-used Louisville slugger from high school. Bat raised, ready to swing, he moved toward the bedroom and stepped inside. His breath caught. The bathroom door was closed—something he never did living by himself. Tyler turned the doorknob until he heard it click. He waited a beat before throwing it open and stepping back into a batting crouch. He waited.

No one.

T
YLER DUMPED THE Range Rover two blocks from the hospital, fed the parking meter with enough quarters to stave off the meter maids for an hour, and took off on foot. He was wearing black Levi’s, a black cotton mock tee, and his Nike jogging shoes. A few minutes later he approached the main loading area for the medical center. As expected for this time of morning, a truck was backed up to the dock. With his ID badge clipped to his belt, in clear sight but difficult to read, he moved briskly along the sloping driveway, up a set of chipped concrete stairs onto the loading dock. With a cordial nod to a worker, he slipped inside, jogged a set of stairs down to the subbasement, then a tunnel to the annex. Moving quickly and purposefully, he climbed the stairs to the correct floor, darted through the hall to the office.

Jim Day looked up from his desk with a startled expression. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Keep your hand away from the phone and your keyboard.” Tyler surprised himself with the force of his command. He shut the door isolating the two of them from the hall and anyone passing by. He leaned over the desk, both hands on the surface and locked eyes with Day. “How long have you known about the bug?”

Day’s face went expressionless. “Excuse me?”

“The bug. How long have you known about it.”

Day glanced nervously around as if someone else might hear. “The fuck you talking about?”

“Don’t start with that shuck and jive routine. I know you know exactly what I’m talking about. The medical record system. It’s got a bug and it’s killing patients. And if word gets out, you and everybody who hid the fact is going to be running for cover. And you know what? Those of us on the low end of the totem pole are the ones going to take the fall for the other guys. Know what I’m saying?”

Day coughed into his first. “Man, I don’t need this shit. You been shooting again? That what this is all about? ’Cause sure sounds like you’re high.”

“Think so? Think that’s why the FBI came sniffing around two days after I filed the NIH report on Childs?”

Day stopped fidgeting and stared back.

“Yeah, that’s right. Wasn’t even 48 hours before a federal agent was in my office asking about it. Seems that one of your predecessors got worried about what was happening and … well, you know … went to Mexico scuba diving and never came back.”

Day picked up a ballpoint pen, started drumming it on the edge of the desk. After a moment he said, “So, what are you trying to say?”

“I think you know about the bug. Least that’s what I told the FBI.”

“You what!” Day slammed down the pen, started drumming his fingers on the desk instead. “You fucking crazy?”

“That’s right,” Tyler smiled insanely, “I told them you not only know about the bug, but that you’re part of the cover up. They’ve had you under surveillance for the past week.”

Day studied Tyler’s eyes a moment, perhaps looking for a bluff. “And what’s this bug supposed to do?”

“Hell, you know more about this than I do. You tell me. What can go wrong? A value gets corrupted because of a magnetic flaw in the storage media? Maybe two values are inputted at exactly the same time so the CPU confuses them? What? I don’t know
how
it happens. I only know it
does
happen. So,” meeting Day’s eyes full on now, “you tell me.”

Day continued drumming the table and studying Tyler’s face. “It’s possible, I suppose … just not likely.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’d know about it already. That’s what this past few years of beta testing’s been all about.”

“Now there’s an interesting answer. It can’t be happening because we don’t know it’s happening. I think there’s a name for that kind of logic but I can’t exactly remember it at the moment.”

Day just sat glowering at him.

“Know what I think?”

Day shook his head. “No, enlighten me.”

“I think everybody in your company knows about it but prays to hell word doesn’t hit the media before the IPO hits Wall Street. Either that or you believe by some sort of miracle it’s going to be fixed in time to hold a press conference in which your PR guru or Bernie Levy will announce to the world that you discovered it just in the nick of time, before it before it could cause trouble. That’s what I think.”

Day looked away, the overhead neon light glistening off two beads of sweat over his upper lip. “You can say what you want to whoever you want. But you can’t prove shit.”

“Before you just blow this off and stonewall again, think about what’ll happen if Med-InDx gets the JCAHO nod and becomes the gold standard. You really want to know you had a chance to stop this but didn’t because you wanted to boost the value of your stock options? Is that what you
really
want?”

“Hey, don’t cop an attitude with me.” Day sat upright. “This FBI dude … you really tell him about me? Like what?”

Tyler saw fear in Day’s eyes. “Like I already told you … said you knew about it and that I’d asked you to help me.”

“And?”

“That discussion’s not over yet. So, I guess that depends on how much help you give me.”

An idea flashed in Tyler’s mind. He raised his hand, cutting off Day’s next remark. “Hold on, let me ask you something first. Every time I asked about changing the radiation dose field you told me
you
couldn’t. But what about someone like Bernie Levy, could he do it?”

Day wagged his head. “Oh man, Bernie? Nerdy Bernie?” He seemed to mull this over. “Yeah, guess maybe … He’s the man who penned the code. Don’t see why he couldn’t. But then again, there’d be a record of it.”

“Yeah? Well maybe not.” He remembered his college roommate, a computer programmer who wrote games as a means of supporting his tuition and board. “I assume since Bernie wrote the code, he’d know the program’s trap doors.”

“He’d have to. He wrote them.”

From the intensity of Day’s eyes he could tell the technician had already anticipated the next logical point. “Then couldn’t it be possible for Levy to change the value of, say, Childs’s radiation dose and not leave a record of it?”

Day let out a long slow whistle. “Lord have mercy, this is getting a bit heavy.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“Shit yeah, it’s possible. But I don’t know, man … geeky old Bernie doing something like that … ?” He wagged his head. “Man, that’s cold.”

“So let me ask you once more … have you heard anything about a system flaw? A bug that can corrupt or change parts of records?”

Day exhaled a long slow breath and stroked his upper lip. After a moment he leaned forward. “Okay, so maybe there’s been some rumblings and shit for maybe six months now, maybe longer. No one’s sure what the problem is, but hell yeah, there’s a problem.”

Tyler’s heart accelerated. If a record existed of trouble shooting the bug and he could get hold of a copy, it could go a long way toward settling the score with Ferguson even if his career as a neurosurgeon was finished. “You know if there’s any formal record of it?”

Day gave a resigned nod. “Not something formal, but more than likely there’d be notes or a list of traps to trouble shoot it. Word has it someone’s been working on it. Probably Levy since he’s so proud of that part.”

“Where would those notes be?”

“Only one place they’d keep something like that. Levy’s office.”

The other day he might have been sitting within ten feet of that information and didn’t know it. But more than that, Day had just confirmed what he’d suspected all along. Levy had been lying.