Lynn tipped forward again, taking her eyes away from staring blankly at the ceiling. The mere thought that Carl’s disastrous condition might not have been an accident made Lynn’s blood run cold. It was such an unnerving idea that she wondered if she was becoming delusional. Was her fragile emotional state turning her into a conspiracy theorist?
Intent on proving herself wrong, she went back to what she had been doing. Spread out in front of her on Carl’s desk were sections of vital-sign tracings from each of the three cases. With a pair of scissors she’d found in Carl’s top desk drawer — after briefly looking again at the engagement ring — she had cut them out of the anesthesia record graphs. The segments she had chosen showed the blood pressure, pulse, oxygen saturation, and ECG of each patient from the moment of the frame offset to the sudden fall in blood oxygen. Her idea was to look for slight alterations in the vital signs in all three cases to see if there were any similarities. What she hadn’t anticipated was that by isolating these portions and just looking at one of them before comparing all three, she was able to see something that apparently everyone else had missed, including herself.
To confirm what she thought she had noticed, Lynn took the cut-out segment of Carl’s record and proceeded to cut it up into smaller pieces, each representing one minute of anesthesia time. Once she was done, she took all the pieces and arranged them in a vertical column so that she could compare one to the other. Once she did this, what she thought she had seen earlier became even more apparent. There was definite periodicity, meaning the tracing repeated itself. Every minute the recording of the vital signs had been looped, meaning the same one-minute segment was playing over and over, from the moment of the frame offset until the oxygen saturation suddenly dropped.
Printing another copy of Carl’s anesthesia record and taking one of the minute segments she’d cut out, Lynn was able to match the repeating segment. It had come from the minute time period just prior to the frame offset.
Lynn was stunned. For a moment she didn’t move or even breathe as her mind churned. What she had discovered was definitely real, and the implications were more than disturbing. One thing she understood: from the moment of the frame offset until the fall in the blood oxygen, the anesthesia machine wasn’t monitoring Carl’s vital signs. Instead it was constantly replaying the same, normal segment and masking what was really happening to her lover while the monitors suggested everything was normal. “My God!” she said out loud. With copies of Scarlett Morrison’s and Ashanti Davis’s records, she quickly determined it was the same.
Grabbing her mobile phone, Lynn speed-dialed Michael’s number. Her pulse was racing as the call took its time going through. She looked at the clock. It was almost eleven-thirty. It was late, but Michael usually stayed up until midnight. The distant phone rang four times. On the fifth Michael picked up.
“Yo!” Michael said with no preamble, knowing it was Lynn. “Vlad here is just about to bag it. Can I catch you in a moment?”
“I need to talk,” Lynn said with unmistakable urgency.
“You all right?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Are you in mortal danger this very second?” There was a touch of sarcasm in his tone, which wasn’t all that unusual.
“Not literally, but I just discovered something that has me totally unglued and will blow your mind.”
“Okay, I got you covered, but I need five. I’ll be right back to you.” He then disconnected.
Feeling moderately panicky after her metaphoric lifeline was summarily terminated, Lynn put her phone down. She did it slowly. Her mind was going a mile a minute. As bad as the implications were about Carl’s, Morrison’s, and Davis’s anesthesia disasters not being accidents or even episodes of malpractice, the added issue of the serum protein abnormality popped back into her head.
Could the gammopathy and the looping of the anesthesia record be related? It didn’t seem possible, but if there was one thing that Lynn had learned about medical diagnostics during her four years of medical school, it was that even when you were faced with a patient with disparate and seemingly unrelated symptoms, more often than not the underlying problem was one disease.
A sudden noise, not necessarily loud but somehow foreign, registered in Lynn’s ears. It came from the floor below, either from the living room or the foyer. It was more like a vibration of the whole structure of the house than just a sound carried in the air. Trying to figure out its origin, Lynn held her breath, listening intently. Her first thought was that it was a book falling and landing flat. Her second thought was perhaps Pep had jumped from a piece of furniture onto the floor. But Lynn quickly ruled out Pep as the culprit when she caught sight of the cat fast asleep in the club chair by the fireplace. Seeing that the animal’s keen senses had not been disturbed gave her a bit of encouragement, but it didn’t last.
Alone in the large, aging house, Lynn had been careful to make sure she had completely closed and securely locked the front door when she had arrived. Although she had turned on a number of lights during her despondent wanderings, she had turned them all off. As far as she knew, the only lights on in the whole house were the two library-style brass lamps on Carl’s desk in front of her. Even the corners of the study were lost in shadow.
Then there was another noise, a faint creak. Was it her imagination from her heightened sensitivity from not having identified the first noise? Then, almost instantly, came a rapid series of creaks from the ancient wood flooring in the foyer below, followed by another rapid series of noises from the stair treads. With a shudder of fear, Lynn sensed she was not alone. Someone was coming up the stairs!
In a panic Lynn snatched up her mobile phone. Quickly she tapped in 911. But then she hesitated to place the call. It suddenly had occurred to her that she was the trespasser, and the people coming might be Carl’s parents or a neighbor with a key who knew what had happened to Carl and were responding to the light in the study.
Unfortunately for Lynn these thoughts came more from hope than reality, and her hesitation cost her the chance to call for help. In the next instant a large figure dressed in black with a black balaclava silently flashed into sight from the dark hallway. Worse yet, clutched in the individual’s hand was an automatic pistol with a silencer. Lynn’s heart leaped into her chest.
BOOK 3
35.
Tuesday, April 7, 11:31 P.M.
Darko had arrived at the southern end of the Charleston peninsula twenty minutes earlier. He’d parked the van on South Battery. Wearing a long Burberry coat and carrying a small satchel, he’d met up with Timur, who had been standing vigil beneath a large shade tree on Church Street, across from Vandermeer’s house.
Both expatriate Russians spoke fluent English, as the two had been living in Charleston for five years, like Leonid, and had made an effort to learn the language. Still, when they were together, they much preferred the mother tongue.
“Was the house dark when you got here?” Darko asked Timur while eyeing the structure. He liked that on the side of the house with the veranda there was an empty lot, the remains of what had once been a formal garden. That meant there was a close neighbor on only one side, instead of both.
“Yes,” Timur said. “But I was in the car at that point and couldn’t see all the windows.”