“So,” Singh said, after the formalities of introduction, his accent clipped British with a modest amount of Indian. “I apologize for the delay and hope that Daintry has taken good care of you. She has been with me since the beginning, and I would be absolutely lost without her.”
“She’s been wonderful,” Nick said. “You’re lucky to have her.”
“Dr. Singh,” Daintry said, “as you requested, I’ve had the solarium prepared for Mrs. Collins’s private meeting.”
Nick and Jillian immediately exchanged sideways glances. They had seen the solarium on their tour—plants, sculptures, and waterfalls, but no computer. All Nick could do was shrug. The plus of having the security guard off on rounds had just been trumped by this latest turn. Why had he thought for even a moment that their plan would come off without a hitch? But this hitch was potentially fatal.
Jillian meeting with Singh in some Luddite heaven, devoid of the one thing they needed, was certainly not part of their strategy. If Nick’s SUD score had been hovering around a six, it just shot up close to an eight: Freaking out. The beginning of alienation.
He calmed himself with thoughts of a Buddhist quote from a college philosophy course that had stuck with him throughout the years: There are two mistakes one can make on the road to truth—not going all the way, and not starting. Now, he decided a third mistake needed to be added: Not possessing a backup plan.
Jillian, perhaps sensing his panic, stepped in for the save.
“Well,” she said, clearing her throat, “I hope the solarium is equipped with a computer. I wanted to show you pictures of movie stars and models with the sort of features we would like me to have, and I’ll need Internet access for that.”
“Most understandable,” Paresh Singh answered. “We can just convene in my office.”
Bless you, Mrs. Collins.
“That would be perfect,” Nick said. “I’ll be waiting here with Daintry. Take as long as you need.”
He glanced down at his watch, and, unseen by the others, Jillian checked hers. Precisely ten minutes until showtime.
Jillian air kissed Nick near the cheek and then, spinning around, accompanied Singh toward the elevator.
“I’m so looking forward to getting to know you,” Jillian said as they walked away.
Nick mentally ticked off one minute for Singh and Jillian to settle into his office. He had no doubt she would come up with the names for the surgeon to check out online. He knew she was nervous—probably as nervous as he was—but she was handling matters with incredible cool.
Praying that the security guard stayed away just a little longer, he made several laps around the massive center fountain, on occasion making eye contact with Daintry, smiling warmly whenever he did. Anxious husband. Nick checked his watch again. Five minutes down. He vowed to keep from looking too many times.
The succeeding minutes were an eternity. Finally, it was time. Nick made one last stroll around the fountain, until it was directly between him and Daintry. Then he shouted out and dropped to the floor, groaning in pain.
“Are you all right?” Singh’s receptionist called out, rushing around to him. “What happened?”
“Oh, dammit. It’s my knee. It’s locked. It’s happened before, but not for a while.”
Do it, but don’t overdo it, he was thinking as she knelt beside him.
He kept his left leg bent at a forty-five degree angle and rolled from side to side.
“What can I do?” Daintry asked, genuinely upset.
“There’s loose cartilage floating in my knee,” he said, groaning every few words. “A piece has gotten caught.”
“You didn’t slip or anything?”
Nick nearly smiled, imagining her wondering when she’d have to call their lawyer.
“No, no. I didn’t slip. Dammit, but this hurts.”
“I’ll call nine-one-one.”
“No!” Nick responded. “Like I said, this happens every few months. You can do what needs to be done, Daintry. Believe me, you can. Just take my foot and point the toes upward while you gradually turn the whole leg to the right, pulling it toward you as you keep pressure toward the floor.”
Daintry paled at the notion, and clearly could not visualize the instructions, which Nick was making as complicated as he dared.
“I . . . don’t feel comfortable with things like this,” she said.
Okay, he decided, it’s time.
“Dr. Singh can do this. It will only take him a minute.” Nick moaned and writhed from side to side for emphasis. “Please hurry and call him. This is killing me. . . . Oh, shit! . . . I’m sorry I cursed, but this really hurts. Man, I should have had it fixed.”
“I’ll call Dr. Singh.”
Atta girl.
Nick remained moaning on the floor behind the fountain as she raced back to her desk. He managed a glance at his watch. Jillian had to be ready.
“He’ll be right down,” Daintry said before she had even returned to him.
Nick imagined Jillian speeding into the sequence that Reggie had taught her. Three minutes to find the USB port, plug in the key, locate the rootkit application, and double click it. From there, the installation process should only take a minute.
To his left, the elevator chimed and, in seconds, Paresh Singh was kneeling at his side.
“I understand your trick knee has locked,” he said, totally calm. “Are you in much pain?”
Nick groaned the answer and mumbled something that required repeating. The trick now was not to make things too easy.
“It usually pops back pretty easily,” he managed.
“Wouldn’t you rather we called nine-one-one?”
Singh didn’t say the word “liability,” but Nick could tell he was thinking it.
“Please,” he begged. “People help me with this all the time. Just pronate my foot and slowly straighten the leg and the cartilage will pop out of the joint space. I guarantee it will work. If it doesn’t you can call the rescue squad.”
Singh sighed, clearly still weighing his options and the risks. Finally, he stood and took Nick’s foot in both his hands. No sooner had he begun to move the leg than Nick cried out and the knee straightened.
“Bless you, Dr. Singh,” Nick gasped. “Bless you.”
“That was easier than I expected,” Singh said. “Can you stand?”
“There’s only one way to find out. Give me your arm, please. You’re a wizard.”
In moments, Nick was on his feet, testing the knee.
At that instant, the elevator chime sounded. It was everything Nick could do to keep from cheering.
“Not the knee again,” Jillian said, squeezing his hand twice to say the job was done. “Jeff, we’re going to Dr. Gavryck right now. You could have been really hurt.”
“But did you and the doctor finish? He did an incredible job unlocking this knee.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Jillian said. “The rest of our session, I’m afraid, will have to wait. Daintry, I’ll call to reschedule.”
“That would be fine,” the woman said, still pale. “Call me as soon as you have matters straightened out.”
Jillian Collins took her husband by the arm and helped him to the door.
“Don’t count on it, Daintry,” she whispered.
CHAPTER 30
“We’re in.”
To Nick, Reggie’s words were all he wanted to hear. The Singh Medical Spa and Cosmetic Surgery Center held secrets, dirty secrets. He felt certain of it. Now, thanks to Jillian, they might have the means to prove it. Much as Nick wished that Buddha’s road to the truth was just a stroll down easy street, he had long known better. There was plenty of risk and disappointment, pain, and even death along the way. But now, there was hope.
Once again, Nick, Jillian, and Junie stood behind Reggie and his well-worn swivel chair. It took the teen hacker all of five minutes to access the computer on which Jillian had installed a rootkit. She recognized the desktop configuration now displayed on Reggie�
��s computer monitor as belonging to Paresh Singh.
“That’s amazing,” she said.
“With the rootkit, we can access that computer from right here,” Reggie said, “same as if we were sitting in his office.”
“Won’t they see us moving the cursor around?” Nick asked.
“Stop your worrying, Dr. G. It’s a zombie computer now.”
“Oh, that makes me feel so much better. But won’t they notice their PC eating the flesh of the living?”
Reggie laughed. “That’s a good one.”
“Once in a blue moon, I’m funny,” Nick said. “But this might not be it. What the heck is a zombie computer?”
“Well, basically, it’s just a computer that’s been compromised by a hacker, but the owner isn’t aware it’s being used by anybody else. The only clue they’d have is an unfamiliar IP address appearing in their access logs, provided they even had a reason to look.”
“IP address?” Jillian asked.
“It’s like a phone number for the Internet,” Reggie explained. “It can be traced to a home computer, same as your phone number can be traced to your address, or wherever you’re calling from. That’s how I got caught the last time, if you want to know the truth. But I think I know what I did wrong.”
“Reggie!” Junie said.
“Okay, okay. Just to be safe, though, I’m using a proxy to access the machine so nobody can trace the IP address back here.”
“Oh, I feel so much better now that you’ve explained,” Nick said. “Junie, how old did you say this terror on two legs was?”
“Too old and not nearly old enough,” she answered, bringing her fist down lovingly on the teen’s head.
Jillian leaned in closer.
“So what we’re looking at now is actually Dr. Singh’s computer desktop?”
“Yup. Thanks to you, we’re in control of his machine. For the time being we can access whatever applications Singh can, using his security credentials.”
“Amazing,” she said again.
“Not really. Computers get way too much credit—usually from people who don’t know how they work. Still, you have to know what you want them to do. Do you?”
“I think so,” Jillian said. “I didn’t have time to see what application they use for their electronic medical records, but seeing how they are a joint venture with my hospital, I’ll bet they use the same software we use at work. May I?”
“Be my guest.”
Reggie bowed to Jillian and motioned her to his chair. She bowed back respectfully and took his place. A connection had formed between the two of them. Nick had noticed it before.
Jillian went straight to the applications menu.
“I feel like I’m fifteen, sneaking out of the house to see my boyfriend.”
Nick, too, felt the thrill of the illicit—the adrenaline coursing through him as they closed in on secrets they were never meant to know.
“Do you see the EMR program?” he asked.
“Yes! This is it. It’s the same application we use at Shelby Stone. Eat your heart out, Mollender.”
Having been in one of the first groups trained on the software, Jillian was easily able to navigate through the various screens and prompts.
“Okay, from here I can search records by year. I’ll start from four years ago until now, yes?”
“Beginning in April. You got it,” Nick said.
He crouched low beside her, breathing in the intoxicating scent of the woman who, without his permission, seemed to have set up permanent residence in his thoughts. Jillian worked the application effortlessly.
“Okay, so it looks like the clinic has a database of about twenty thousand patients.”
“Is that substantial?” Junie asked.
“Not for a major hospital like Shelby Stone, but for a private practice it certainly is. According to this billing summary tab, the medi-spa’s gross income last year alone was over twenty-five million.”
“I’d call that respectable,” Junie said. “Just wait until next year’s Helping Hands fund-raiser. I think Dr. Singh will enjoy getting to know me.”
“Fear the Junie,” Nick said. “Listen, guys, we’ve got to keep moving. It’s possible someone could stumble onto the strange IP number, right, Reggie?”
“Ladies and gentlemen, he can be taught.”
“You wait, Smith; the next pass I throw goes right through your chest. Jill, can you search by name?”
“Of course.”
“How about we start with Manny Ferris first.”
Jillian typed “Manuel Ferris” into the designated search box. The query returned no records. Subsequent searches using variations of his name also yielded no results. The same was true when she tried “Umberto Vasquez,” and even “Belle Coates.”
“Dead end,” she sighed.
Damn, Nick thought. Mistakes on the road to truth . . . Number three, not possessing a backup plan, and number four, not bringing along hiking boots.
“We had no right to think we’d hit it on the first try,” he said. “Let’s get a look at all those records.”
“Um, listen,” Reggie said, “it may be hard to detect our IP address, but it isn’t impossible. Fifteen or twenty minutes, then we can try another time.”
“Got it,” Jillian said.
She switched screens and quickly filled in the required fields to generate patient reports from four years ago. The request took only a minute to run and when it did, the system returned a list of more than five thousand entries.
“Looks like every patient that walked through the doors of the place,” Junie said. “That’s a lot of information. Forget about fifteen or twenty minutes. We could be here for days.”
Damn, Nick thought again.
The screen displayed one record per row, listed by patient name, ID number, and ICD code. The ICD code, or International Classification of Diseases, Jillian explained, was used by physicians and hospital data entry personnel to label patients’ diagnoses such that procedures could be itemized and billed appropriately.
Five thousand entries for one year at the Singh Center.
“Each record is a mouse click away from more detailed information,” Jillian said. “Physicians’ notes, photographs, X-ray images, plus procedures performed, products used, and amount billed. Every scalpel, every box of gauze pads, every IV bottle. They’re all here.”
“Incredible,” Nick said, not bothering to mask his discouragement at such a vast amount of data on such a vast number of patients.
“Welcome to the wonderful world of electronic medical records,” Jillian said.
“Try the first one just so we can get an idea of what things look like.”
Without gathering any information on the patient in row one, Jillian clicked on the image tab and opened a photo of the frontal torso view of a naked woman. Reggie caught sight of the picture before she could remove it and quickly leaned in for a better look.
“Darn, but that chick’s got some mighty big—!”
“Reggie!” Junie snapped.
“And anyhow,” Jillian added, removing the photo and glaring at the youth with good humor, “she had them reduced. That’s this procedure code here.”
Nick sensed Jillian’s mounting tension as she opened the next record on the list. Her apprehension was understandable, he was thinking. Thanks to Reggie’s skill and the vulnerability of the electronic records system, they were committing an almost inexcusable invasion of privacy that would, quite possibly, cost Jillian and Nick their careers should they get caught. For the first time, he began to question his convictions.
Please, give us something. Anything.
Jillian merely sighed and began to scroll down the list. Nick did not recognize any of the names or most of the ICD codes as they flowed past. In his medical practice, he never dealt with lifts, reshaping, body contouring, liposuction, or breast work, so the unfamiliarity of the codes was understandable. Then, after a hundred or so patients, one ICD code caught his eye
: 929.9. As a trauma surgeon, he knew that code well. Crushing injury of multiple sites.
“That one, Jill,” he said. “Please click on that one.”
The name of the patient was Giuseppe Renzulli. Nick remembered reading something on Paresh Singh’s Web site about his world-renowned reputation for tackling difficult reconstructive procedures, specifically shotgun wounds to the face. From what Nick read in the file and observed in the pre-op images, this particular case would have required a mastery beyond compare.
According to the physician notes in Renzulli’s record, the 929.9 was elaborated as a shotgun wound to the face. Most impressive were the stunning three-dimensional CT scans, each showing a sea of floating bone fragments and shotgun pellets, sandwiched between a cracked mandible and a remarkably intact frontal bone.
“Oh man, that’s gross!” Reggie exclaimed. “That dude dead?”
“According to this, he’s very much alive,” Nick answered.
He leaned over Jillian’s shoulder and read aloud from one of many physician dictations—the conclusion of the admission note by Paresh Singh.
The patient is a twenty-eight-year-old Caucasian male, with massive trauma to the neck and face from a self-inflicted shotgun wound. Definitive reconstruction and repair of nasal, orbital, maxillary, mandibular, and ethmoid fractures feasible, requiring multistaged reconstructive maneuvers. Primary access to fracture sites will be via transcutaneous vertical Lynch incision. 70% of fractures appear to be Type III.
Jillian turned away as he read. It was then Nick realized the man’s suicide attempt was another painful reminder of Belle. How could he be so insensitive? He placed a hand on her shoulder. She in turn reached across her body to take his hand in hers. The moment was brief, but the emotions within it were intense.
“How could somebody shoot themselves like that and not die?” Junie asked.
Nick flashed on one such case he had treated in Afghanistan, but before he said anything about it, he turned to Jillian.
“Talking about this okay?” he asked.
Michael Palmer Page 18
