“I know the routine,” Leonid said.
“When you return to Misha’s with the luggage, the driver will be there to take the car to Denver.”
“Where will you be?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Darko said with a shrug, “but I presume at the medical student’s dorm. Or I might be finished. If so, we could meet at the Rooftop for a vodka. Check and see if your phone has a mobile signal yet!”
Leonid got out his cell phone and turned it on. “There’s a signal. It’s not great — one bar. Wait! Now there’s two bars. Who do you want me to call?”
“Timur Kortnev. Put him on speakerphone.”
As the call went through, neither man talked. The sound of the distant ringing could be heard. Four rings, then five. Leonid was about to disconnect when Timur answered. He sounded mildly out of breath. He, too, spoke in Russian.
“Sorry,” Timur said. “I needed to change location before I answered.”
“Did you make visual contact with the girl?”
“Yes. I’ve been following her and her friend all evening. It hasn’t been easy.”
“Why? Where has she gone?”
“First the two of them went over to the hospital cafeteria. But then they went up to the OR. I have no idea what they did there. Following that, they went to the neuro ICU. She didn’t go in. but her friend did.”
“And then she went back to the dorm?”
“No. They stopped at the computer center.”
Darko had the distinct feeling that the warning he was to deliver to Lynn Peirce was becoming more critical.
“Do you know what they did in the office?”
“I don’t. There was no one there. The person on duty was up in the cafeteria at the time.”
“Did they then go back to the dorm?”
“Yes, but only briefly.”
“So she’s not there now?”
“No. About eight-thirty she left again. She went into the garage and then drove off in a Jeep. I had to scramble to commandeer a security vehicle so I could follow.”
“Was she with her friend at this point?”
“No, she was alone.”
“Where did she go?” Darko glanced over at Leonid. Darko didn’t like surprises, and all this was a surprise.
“She went into a single-family house on 591 Church Street down here in the very south of Charleston. I was trying to look in the front windows when you called.”
“Is she is alone?”
“I think so. The house was dark when she arrived and no one has come to visit. She turned on many lights initially, but now they are mostly off.”
“Okay,” Darko said with a smile. When he heard Lynn Peirce was, strangely, moving around the medical center, he’d become concerned. Now, alone in a private house, it seemed as if she wanted to make his job easier. “Any idea of whose house it is?”
“Yes. It belongs to Carl Vandermeer, one of the program’s test cases.”
Darko recoiled. Like a few people close to Sergei Polushin, he knew a bit about the program. He also stood to profit immensely from the Sidereal stock he’d been given over the years. He knew why he had been tasked to kill Sandra Wykoff. She was asking too many questions about her patient, Carl Vandermeer. And now this Lynn Peirce was staying in the man’s house!
Without realizing he was doing it, Darko pressed down on the van’s accelerator. Intuitively, he sensed his second job of the evening might be as important as the first. He was also counting on its being significantly more fun than being eaten by mosquitoes at the edge of a swamp.
34.
Tuesday, April 7, 11:11 P.M.
Lynn could not believe what she had just discovered. In shocked wonderment she tipped back in Carl’s desk chair to stare at the ceiling and think about the implications. It seemed that every time she studied the anesthesia records, she came across something new. On this occasion she was even more flabbergasted than she’d been that afternoon and immediately the question arose in her mind whether the phenomena she’d just found could be the result of an intermittent software glitch inside the anesthesia machine. But almost as soon as the idea occurred to her, she shook her head. The anesthesia machine had been used on innumerable cases, including a few that very day. Why would it happen only on three if it was a software problem? She couldn’t imagine it could be a glitch. Instead, if anything, she told herself it might be a hack. Was that possible? She didn’t know and would have to ask Michael, as he might know. But one way or the other, what she had stumbled on was yet another horrifying hint that what had happened to Carl, Scarlett Morrison, and Ashanti Davis might not have been an accident or a screwup. This finding was in the same unsettling category as the coincidental unexplained frame offset that had occurred at exactly the same time in all three cases. In fact, it was more disturbing, suggesting the unthinkable: This whole nightmare might be deliberate!
Lynn had gotten to Carl’s house at about a quarter to nine. Pep had been ecstatic to see her and had purred with such ferocity, Lynn had dropped everything and fed her right away. Once the cat had been taken care of, Lynn wandered around the house, going from room to room, thinking about Carl.
In retrospect, such reminiscing was probably not a good idea. Same with her coming back to Carl’s house at all. As Michael had suggested, she should have called Frank to take care of the cat because being there made her sense of bereavement overwhelming. Everything in the house reminded her of her stricken lover and his unique personality, his keen intelligence, his love of life, and even his compulsive neatness, which was a step beyond Michael’s. With a bit of embarrassment she remembered some of the petty quarrels they had had about how she hung up her bath towel and sometimes left her underwear on the bathroom floor.
With these thoughts in mind, the extent of her loss had weighed on her, and Lynn became depressed. It had gotten to the point of wondering who was worse off, she or Carl. What saved the day from such negative self-fulfilling reminiscence was the sudden realization that she couldn’t just wander around feeling sorry for herself. Instead she had to make a concerted effort to occupy her mind as she had done the evening before. To that end she had gone into Carl’s bathroom first and taken a long, hot shower. She’d stayed under the hot torrent long enough to dilute the day’s emotions. Following the shower, she’d donned one of Carl’s oversize bathrobes and gone into his study. At his desk she’d turned on the PC and went online.
What she had done first was find out how many people in the general population had blood serum protein abnormalities or gammopathies. The issue had been gnawing at her ever since she’d read Morrison’s chart and since she found out that Carl was seemingly developing it. Adding to her curiosity was finding out, from the otherwise disappointing visit to the IT Department, how many people discharged from the Mason-Dixon Medical Center had been diagnosed with that condition while they had been an inpatient.
What she had learned surprised her. Although the Mason-Dixon had far fewer episodes of hospital-based infections, as Dean English had pointed out, the hospital was off the charts when it came to the incidence of blood serum abnormalities. When Lynn looked into multiple myeloma, she’d found the same situation. Patients coming from the Mason-Dixon had five times the national rate for both problems. Lynn had no explanation for such discrepancies. Could it have something to do with the hospital or the lab? She had no idea, but she had definitely decided she had to bring up the subject with Michael to get his take.
At that point, to continue to keep herself from falling back to obsessing over Carl and feeling sorry for herself in the process, she’d turned her attention back to the anesthesia records she had brought from her room. Studying the printouts from a new and unique perspective had led to her shocking new discovery.