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Tuesday, April 7, 11:11
P.M.

L
ynn 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.

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.

Tuesday, April 7, 11:31
P.M.

D
arko 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.”

“Has anyone come by?”

“No. She is alone. Initially she moved around a lot, as lights went on and off in various rooms, but for the last hour the only light has been in one window on the second floor.” Timur pointed to be sure Darko could see the light through the heavy drapes.

“Good job,” Darko said. “Sorry it has been a bit of an effort. I’ll take it from here. You can head back.”

“You don’t want me to help?” Timur asked, his voice reflecting his disappointment that his role was over. Darko was a legend among a number of the security and enforcement personnel of Sidereal Pharmaceuticals. Working with him on a job beyond mere surveillance would have afforded Timur bragging rights.

“No need for help,” Darko said. “I want to do this alone. I intend to enjoy myself.”

Timur laughed and nodded. “Got it! And she’s a looker.”

After taking what he needed from the satchel, he left it and the Burberry coat in a safe and convenient location to pick up later. With the proximity of neighbors, since the houses were built close to one another, Darko eschewed the normal explosive entry technique, which he generally favored, but instead used a Halligan bar, a tool he had become acquainted with only after coming to America. It was generally used by US fire departments for gaining access through locked doors. He knew that, handled appropriately, it was nearly silent in comparison to an explosive charge.

Once he breached the front door, Darko knew that timing was of the essence. Moving quietly but quickly, he ascended the main stairway and dashed toward the lighted room. Lynn was sitting at the desk, holding a mobile phone.

Darko reacted by pure reflex. He covered the distance between the hallway and the desk in the blink of an eye, snatching the phone from Lynn’s grasp with his free hand before she had a chance to react to his presence. Carelessly, he tossed it aside to bounce off the carpet and skid across the bare floor into the far corner of the room.

Lynn started a scream of terror, but it barely got out. Darko
viciously backhanded her as part of the follow-through of getting rid of the phone. The blow caught her squarely on the side of the face, crushing capillaries in her upper lip and in her nose and sending her sprawling facedown to the floor. The sudden action and noise propelled the cat into a headlong retreat to safer areas of the dark house.

Lynn tried to get up to follow the cat and save herself from this whirlwind assault that had materialized out of the night, but her legs temporarily wouldn’t cooperate. The next thing she knew was being pressed against the floor with a foot in the small of her back. She struggled to free herself to be able to breathe.

“Stay still!” Darko hissed. “Or you will be shot!”

Lynn let her body go limp. The foot eased up the pressure against her.

“Roll over!” Darko commanded.

Lynn did as she was told, looking up at her attacker. The only details she could see were his dark eyes and yellowed teeth. After her initial panic that the attack had caused, she now began to think in a survival mode. Would the neighbors hear if she suddenly screamed bloody murder?

“I will shoot you if you yell,” Darko snarled, as if reading her mind. Then, without warning, he reached down and yanked the cinch around her waist to loosen the knot of the bathrobe. The robe fell partially open, exposing one of her breasts.

With a quick flick of her wrist, Lynn covered herself. At the same time she brought her other hand up to her face and touched her lip, which was swelling and tender. Taking her hand away, she could see that she was bleeding. She knew she was also bleeding from her nose.

As if taunting her, Darko reached down with the gun and used the end of the silencer to re-expose the breast. Lynn didn’t try to re-cover herself. She had the impression the man was smiling behind his mask, possibly leering at her. Was this a rape? Her first thought was that perhaps the man standing over her had somehow
heard about Carl’s condition and had come to rob the house and that she was a surprise. Except for Michael, no one knew she was there.

Reining in her terror as much as she could, Lynn had the presence of mind to understand that her survival might depend on cunning. Perhaps she should try to get the man to talk. Maybe she should pretend to cooperate, as it might help. It had registered in her mind that he had an accent, which her panicked mind had yet to identify other than thinking it was familiar.

“Take off your robe!” Darko commanded. He took a step back and lowered the pistol to his side.

Assuming a false smile, Lynn sat up and then re-covered herself. “Why so fast?” she asked. She eyed the gun. Her goal was to get the man to put the gun down. If he did, maybe she could flee. With a little lead, she might be able to get away, as she knew the house intimately and assumed the intruder did not.

“Don’t play with me!” Darko snapped.

“And why not?” Lynn asked with raised eyebrows. She shakily got to her feet and recinched the robe, berating herself for not having gotten dressed after her shower. Her nakedness was a handicap on many levels, magnifying her vulnerability.

Steeling herself against what the man might do, she started toward the door. She moved slowly but deliberately, becoming more stable with each step. Her ear was still ringing from the blow she had taken.

“Stop!” Darko ordered.

“I’m just going to get a cold washcloth for my face,” Lynn explained, making a supreme effort to speak normally. “My lip is bleeding, which isn’t very pleasant for either one of us. Come with me if you’d like!”

When Darko didn’t answer, Lynn continued and stepped out of the study into the dark hallway. Her vague idea was to get him off stride and off balance. As she expected, Darko followed right behind her.

“Where are the lights?” Darko said.

“There’s no need,” Lynn said. “The bathroom is right here.” As Lynn entered, she switched on the sconces on either side of the mirror. Moving to the sink, she regarded her reflection. To project a casualness that she didn’t feel, she purposefully avoided even looking back at Darko. She sensed he had paused at the threshold. With her index finger she carefully examined her split lip. The laceration was mostly on the inside, having been made by one of her own teeth. Her nose had spontaneously stopped bleeding.

“Not as bad as I thought,” Lynn said while running the cold water. “Need to use the facilities?” Lynn couldn’t believe she was asking such a question. Darko didn’t bother to respond, but she had the sense she was confusing him.

With a wash rag soaked in the cold water pressed against her mouth, Lynn pushed past Darko back out into the hall, turning off the light as she did. All the while she maintained a nonchalance she didn’t feel. The man had a feral smell of perspiration and tobacco that she found particularly repulsive. Darko didn’t try to stop her and seemed flustered that she went back into the study. They faced each other in the middle of the room.

“Where would you like to sit?” Lynn asked, as if Darko had come by on a social visit.

With a suddenness that took Lynn’s breath away, Darko grabbed the lapels of her bathrobe and yanked her face within inches of his, practically lifting her off her feet. She now could smell his heated cigarette breath as well as his body odor.

“Enough of this shit,” Darko snapped with uncamouflaged anger. Then with an impressive shove, he propelled her backward onto the couch facing the fireplace. Her head hit hard against the back of the sofa. Had it not, she would have experienced whiplash.

“That’s it!” Darko snarled. “No more games.”

“Whatever you say,” Lynn said, cowering. She’d been shocked at how strong the man was, strong and vicious. Her nascent confidence
of somehow controlling the situation and possibly being able to flee vanished in a new sense of helpless terror.

“Now, listen, bitch!” Darko snapped. He was still holding the gun and was now using it to gesture in the air in a way that Lynn found particularly unnerving, since she could see that his finger was on the trigger. He leaned forward, crowding her space. Again she could smell and feel his hot, fetid cigarette breath.

In a vain attempt to protect herself, Lynn pushed back into the couch and pulled the bathrobe tighter. Then she wrapped her arms around her torso, hugging herself.

“You and your friend have pissed off a lot of people in high places,” Darko snarled. “It has to stop, completely stop, otherwise we will kill both of you.”

There was a pause, although Darko did not lean back. He remained with his masked face inches from hers. He continued to stare at Lynn with his dark eyes as if daring her to either contradict him or move and give him a reason to shoot her on the spot. Lynn held her breath. She was frozen in place.

“You understand what I am saying?” Darko questioned with somewhat less intensity. Then, after a short pause, he added with renewed venom, “Talk to me!” He slapped her again, causing her ears to ring all over.

Lynn righted herself and nodded but couldn’t speak. She couldn’t take her eyes off the man’s yellow teeth, which were bunched together at all angles in his lower jaw. She was terrified he would hit her again, maybe even pistol-whip her with the gun he was still brandishing.

“Not so cocky now,” Darko snarled. “Talk or I’ll shoot you!” He leaned back and slowly raised the gun to the point where Lynn could look directly into the barrel at the tip of the silencer.

“What do you want me to say?” Lynn squeaked.

“I want you to tell me you understand.”

“Yes,” Lynn managed. “I understand.”

“What are you doing in this house?”

“Mr. Vandermeer and I were friends,” Lynn said in a shaky voice. “He gave me a key. Some of my things are here.”

At that moment Pep reappeared, causing Darko to jump and briefly aim the gun at the animal. The cat nonchalantly made her way over to the club chair where she had been earlier and jumped onto it.

“So you and Mr. Vandermeer were lovers?” Darko said, turning his attention back to Lynn. He lowered the gun.

“Yes.” Lynn was relieved not to be staring into the gun barrel.

“Okay,” Darko said. “Lovers or not, I don’t give a fuck, but from now on, you leave the investigation of his anesthesia problem to the hospital authorities. Let it drop. Understand?”

“Yes.”

Darko straightened up. He then walked over to the desk, giving Lynn a moment of relative respite. He used the index finger of his free right hand to move some of the anesthesia segments around. “What is this?” Darko demanded. “Was this part of Vandermeer’s anesthesia record you cut up?”

Lynn nodded again. A new fear gripped her, sending a shiver down her spine. What if this intruder found out what she had so recently discovered? As significant as she thought it was, especially now that she was being told to stop her investigations by this hoodlum, would he then kill her rather than just warn her?

“Get over here!” Darko demanded.

Reluctantly Lynn got to her feet. She momentarily felt dizzy but made it over to the desk.

“What the hell were you doing cutting it up into pieces?”

Lynn hesitated, her mind in high gear. She knew she had to talk or the man might strike her again. But she didn’t want to tell the truth. Instead she started to describe how the anesthesia machine monitored the patient’s vital signs, going into details that she either knew or made up on the spot. For more than five minutes she
produced a word salad that would have made a true schizophrenic proud, never getting around to why she had resorted to scissors.

“All right, all right!” Darko yelled. “Shut the fuck up!” He gave her a forceful shove that sent her stumbling back to the couch. She sat down and again hugged herself and crossed her legs in a vain attempt to feel protected. She saw him look at his watch. Wondering why, she glanced up at the clock on the mantel. It was past midnight. Was he expecting someone else to come?

“All right, let’s review,” Darko said. “You and your friend are going to go back to being full-time medical students, am I right?”

Lynn nodded, though she didn’t know how Michael was going to respond to threats of violence by this lowlife.

“I warn you that if you don’t, we will kill both of you. You tell that to your friend.”

Lynn nodded. She would tell him, all right.

“Say it!”

“Yes!”

“Now let me add to the consequence of noncompliance.”

All of a sudden Lynn recognized the man’s accent. It was Russian. Now that she had identified it, she didn’t know why she hadn’t earlier but assumed it was because of her terror. The accent wasn’t heavy, and the man was very fluent in English.

“I know about your family. I know where your mother, Naomi, lives, and I know where your two sisters, Brynn and Jill, are going to college. I also know all about your friend’s family. If you don’t follow my orders, we will kill them all. I have killed many people in my life and a few more means nothing to me. Do we have an understanding?”

The blood drained from Lynn’s face. She believed this blackguard implicitly. Up until that moment the idea that her family and Michael’s could be at risk from her actions had not even occurred to her. Now, suddenly, she knew differently, and saw the whole affair in a much more dangerous context.