Deadly Errors (35 page)

She turned to Benson, and mouthed the word, “wife,” before opening the door. With a beaming smile, she swung the door open, said warmly, “Come on in. It’s Nancy, isn’t it?”

The woman hesitated, her face displaying obvious confusion. “And you are?”

Jill extended her hand, “Jill Richardson. We work with Tyler.” She tossed a quick nod toward the living room. “This is Arthur Benson, Maynard’s CEO. We were just having a talk with Tyler.”

The woman’s face brightened in relief as she stepped over the threshold.

Jill shut the door and nodded for Benson to take over.

K
HAN WAVED THE gun left, whispered, “Step back, in the doorway, please.”

Tyler couldn’t take his eyes off the barrel aimed dead center at his heart. And when he did, it was to fix on the finger pressed against the trigger.

The gun flicked sideways. Khan whispered harshly, “Move, Mathews. Before someone sees us.”

“What the hell …?” and stepped back into the shadows. “I haven’t … I don’t understand …”

“What I’m doing here?”

“Yeah, that’s a good place to start.” He looked at the gun again but couldn’t see it, it was so dark in here. His heart hammered his sternum. His throat constricted into a straw. “Jesus, I mean …”

Khan waved, whispered, “Keep it down,” and glanced toward the loading dock.

“Why?” Tyler asked, voice normal, hoping someone on the street might hear. “I mean, what’s the problem?” He stepped toward the street.

Khan grabbed his arm and whispered, “Don’t be foolish. Those men you saw? They’re security guards and they’re waiting for you. That whole act on the dock? A set up. You think it was an accident the last one left the door open? No, don’t be foolish.”

Something nagged Tyler. He studied Khan’s face a moment before it hit him. “Your accent … it’s—”

“Gone?” Khan gave a humorless laugh. “Disarming, is it? First time you met me, I bet you thought I was just another incompetent rag head right off the boat.”

“No, I—”

Khan waved again. “Some other time. Right now we need to talk.”

“Can you put that gun away. It scares the shit out of me.”

Khan raised a finger to his lips, whispered, “Shhhhhh,” and pointed over Tyler’s left shoulder.

He turned. Back out on the loading dock stood another man dressed in denim bib overalls. For a moment he scanned the area before turning and exiting through the same door.

He felt a tap on the shoulder. Khan whispered, “Come on, this way.”

Staying in the darkest part of the shadows, Khan moved along the brick wall toward the street.

Tyler followed Khan out the alley in the same direction he’d entered, across the deserted street and into a similar garbage-scented alley on the next block. While crossing the street, it occurred to Tyler that he could simply turn and run up the block and escape. What was Khan going to do it? Shoot at him? Run after him and tackle him? But at this point what Khan had to say definitely held his interest. They stopped just a few feet in from the street at a point no longer bathed in streetlight yet not completely dark.

“How do you know about the guards?” Tyler repeated.

“Easy. As head of information services I have the ability to access every computer, telephone, pager, and cell phone supplied to any medical center employee. Including Arthur Benson. And I have this.” He held up a hand-held radio. “Here,” he offered it over, “you want to listen to their conversation?”

Tyler waved it away. “But—”

“Either of you gents spare any change?”

Startled, Tyler spun around. An emaciated pale woman, early thirties perhaps, stringy ends of dishwater blond hair brushing bony shoulders, in a faded tank top, shorts, and flip flops, stood at the entrance to the alley, eyes darting from Tyler to Khan and back again.

Tyler slapped his pockets and remembered purposely not bringing any change for fear it might make noise. “You’re out of luck.” He turned back to Khan.

“How ’bout a blow job? Twenty bucks for the two of you,” she offered hopefully.

Tyler shook his head and turned to her again. “Not interested. We’re busy.”

Khan told her, “Wait, don’t go,” then to Tyler, “I have an idea.”

Shocked, Tyler started to protest but Khan waved him silent, and moved a few steps toward the depths of the alley pulling Tyler along. “Hear me out on this.”

Fidgeting, left hand rubbing her right arm, the woman eagerly watched, apparently waiting for whatever deal Khan was going to offer. Khan turned back to her, “Give us a minute here, okay?”

She shrugged. “Whatever,” but did not take the hint and move away.

Khan sidled up next to Tyler, lowered his voice. “Look, six months ago I started to notice some,” he made finger quotations marks with both hands, “problems with our new EMR. I—”

“What kind of problems?” Tyler broke in.

Khan shook his head, frustrated. “Same kind of problems you noticed. But the point is I became concerned after there was a report of a patient who died. The doctor who submitted the report was convinced the computer made an error but when the root cause analysis came back it showed human error. I wasn’t convinced the report was correct. What really happened, although I can’t prove it, was someone—someone with super-user privileges—changed the record to make it look like human error. I kept my mouth shut and acted dumb, but I also started tracking all bug and error reports turned in. Every one of them got channeled through Jim Day. So, I started keeping an eye on him.”

“Keeping an eye on him?”

Khan shrugged. “Electronically. I started reading his email and voice mail. Eventually I started recording his phone calls. That’s how I know about tonight.”

Khan’s lips drew up into a faint smile. “Come, I’ll prove it to you.” He held out his hand. “Your key to Med-InDx, please.”

Tyler considered this a moment. Other than the key, what did he really have to lose? If he lost the key in the deal, he could still go to Ferguson with the evidence accumulated so far. The FBI was the one thing neither Khan nor Benson knew about. His trump card. He pulled the key from his pocket and handed it to Khan.

Khan moved to the fidgeting blond. “I forgot my attaché case this evening when I left the office earlier. I’ll give you twenty dollars to fetch it for me.”

Her tongue flicked across her lips. She scratched the back of her neck. “What? You think I’m stupid? No fucking way, man.”

“No, I know you’re not stupid, but I think you need the money for whatever you’re on. This is all quite simple. I need my case. I want you to get it for me. You need the money. You do the task, you get paid. That’s all there is to it.” Khan started across the street toward the alley they’d left moments ago. She followed, Tyler just behind her. They stepped into the street.

“Man, what a crock of shit. You want some frigging attaché case, go get it yourself. I don’t need to be starting no trouble.” She rubbed both biceps and shivered in the warm air.

Khan stopped at the entrance to the alley, pulled out his wallet, held a twenty dollar bill up in front of her face. “You want this, you earn it by going in that building down there.” He pointed to the loading dock. “And get that case.” His other hand dangled the key. “Here’s the key to my office.”

The woman’s eyes riveted on the bill fixed between Khan’s fingers, then shot to the key and back again. “Ahhh man, if this ain’t a huge crock of shit …” She glanced up the street as if wrestling with a decision, then back to Khan. “Why don’t you dudes just settle for a blow? I’m good, man … I can suck the paint off a Ford pickup truck.”

Khan had another twenty in his other hand now. “Twenty now. Twenty when you return with my case.”

“Fuck!” Her hand shot out, snapped the bill from between his fingers. “Let’s get this show on the road.” She muttered, “Know damn well I shouldn’t friggin’ be doing this.”

Khan walked her down the alley, Tyler dropping back to tail them. They stopped a few feet from the edge of the loading dock where Khan handed her the copy of Jim Day’s key and pointed out the door off the loading dock. He explained the location of Bernie Levy’s office and told her the maroon leather attaché case was inside on the corner of the desk. Khan did such a good job spinning the tale that Tyler found himself almost believing it. A moment later Tyler watched her trudge up the stairs and vanish through the door.

Soon as the door closed, Khan said, “I suggest we move to another location,” and started back to Tyler’s original hiding place.

They hadn’t waited two minutes before the door banged open. Two men stepped out onto the loading dock, the thin woman between them. She said something and pointed to the spot where she had left Khan. The men squinted, jumped down onto the pavement and glanced around.

Staying in the shadows, Khan and Tyler moved quickly toward the street. Once they rounded the corner, their pace picked up.

Khan glanced over to Tyler. “See, I kept you from walking into a trap. Do you trust me now?”

N
ANCY LISTENED TO the huge man tromp downstairs and say a few words to the tall thin one introduced as Benson. A moment later she heard what may have been the front door close, then the sound of a television being turned on. Before the man left, he’d removed her blindfold. She scanned the combination bedroom/office again, saw a bed, a desk with computer, an elliptical cross-trainer and a sliding glass door out to what would logically be a deck. Two solid doors. One obviously a closet. The other probably into a bathroom. With the overhead room light on and it being dark outside, the reflection off the glass made it impossible to see more than the first few inches of deck beyond the door track.

The man had told her to sit in a black leather chair, then he’d tied her wrists together with what looked like quarter inch rope and bound her across the abdomen to the chair. Probably because of her hysterical crying he hadn’t bound her ankles or gagged her. More importantly, he hadn’t tied her wrists all that tightly. She sniffed the last of her tears and decided there was no one to help her but herself. What to do? She glanced around the room once more. Seeing nothing that might help her, she raised her wrists up and examined the binding. A double square knot. Splaying her hands apart, she worked her mouth down between her wrists until her front teeth could bite a grip on the cord and pull.

The first loop came easily. The second one did not. As hard as she tried, it would not loosen. Just then she heard the heavy tromp of the man’s feet on the stairs.

A moment later his huge shape obliterated most of the doorway. She looked up, saw his eyes studying her, felt them focus on her breasts. She looked down and tried to quell the urge to scream at him, for if she did, he might gag her.

“Want a beer?”

She shook her lowered head.

“You sure? ‘Cause I’m a going to have one. Way I figure, you and me can have us a pretty good party a little later. And there’s no sense you being all tight-assed when we do. Might as well get yourself drunk so’s you’d enjoy it. Know what I mean?”

She shook her head again.

“Hey, suit yourself. But me? I’m going to pop me a beer, enjoy me a little one-eyed monster and then, like the Terminator says, I’ll be back.”

T
YLER SAID TO Khan, “Let me get this straight—you never changed the lab results on Torres?” They were sitting in a booth over in one corner of an all-night donut shop that smelled of fried dough, cigarettes, coffee, and sweat. Tyler believed the majority of customers were either crackheads or dealers. Either way, he and Khan were the oldest people in this place and looked pathetically out of context. Out the window, curbed at the other side of the street, a baby blue SPD cruiser idled with the front windows rolled down, two uniformed cops to either side of a vertical, dashboard-mounted shotgun, drinking coffee.

Khan picked up a paper cup filled with steaming, overcooked coffee, blew across the top. “I monitored that case.” He paused to sip. “After you filed the report, I went through the proper protocol and passed it on to Jim Day. You see, the way it is supposed to work—and this is lovely, the way Med-InDx set it up—is if you,” nodding to Tyler, “find a bug or problem with anything in the entire Clinical Information System, you’re supposed to report it directly to an on-site technician. Problems of that nature are really not intended to be handled by my department. And it makes sense, in a way … since what we have is a beta version, one they’re still actively working on. The problem is we have such a turn over of employees, there is always a group who aren’t familiar with that policy. As a result, a number of so-called problems come across my desk every week. Most are simple user mistakes, nothing of any importance. And so, I hand them off to the Med-InDx tech like a good little minion.” His angry eyes looked up at Tyler. “They all think because I’m Pakistani I’m too stupid to notice what’s going on in that medical center and I do nothing to assuage that impression.

“But this does not answer your question. Yes, I followed the Torres chart. I passed on the information to Med-InDx and within hours Torres’s medical record had been altered. Believe me, it wasn’t me who did it.”