Doctored Evidence Read online

  “If I can,” allowed Karen. “It won’t be easy.”

  “Why not?”

  “I sent it e-mail.”

  Karen felt self-conscious and furtive as she used her key to unlock the door to the administrative offices in the old wing of the hospital. She glanced involuntarily at the security camera that peered at her obliquely from its perch at the end of the hall. There was no way anyone observing her could know she was not headed to her own office, but her awareness of what she was up to made her stop and look both ways before slipping through the doorway.

  The administrative offices were dark and silent. Karen was relieved that nobody was working late, including Anne Delaney, who worked evenings with regularity. The rest of the administrative staff usually went home for dinner at the end of the workday. Karen considered this a wholesome practice, a way in which the hospital, and businesses in Jefferson generally, compared favorably to the Chicago law firm where she had clerked. There, young lawyers routinely worked into the evening, scarfing down pizza or Chinese carryout. Also in stark contrast to the modus operandi in Chicago, Karen noted, was the minimal security in hospitals in places like Jefferson. Anne had described to her the stringent security measures necessary at Raasch Evangelical Medical Center in Chicago. At Shoreview Memorial, Karen knew, there would be only two or three security guards patrolling the entire hospital campus, and that most of their time would be spent in patient areas, where drugs and hypodermic supplies were stored and intoxicated or disturbed patients could cause problems. The administrative offices, including Joe Grimes’s, were never locked, even though a lot of confidential records were kept there. Sometimes the hospital’s casual security bothered Karen, but on this occasion she was glad for it. She took her shoes off before entering Joe’s office, to avoid making noise on the tile floor, and left the lights off. She set her shoes down on the black glass of the desktop and turned on Joe’s computer.

  It seemed to take an hour to boot up. She needed to enter Joe’s e-mail in order to delete the memorandum she had sent him that afternoon. When the program requested Joe’s user name, Karen entered Joe’s initials, J-P-G. Everyone at the hospital used his or her initials as their user names. The menu appeared on the computer monitor. One of the choices on the menu was “e-mail.” Karen scrolled to e-mail and pressed “Enter.” The program then demanded:

  “ENTER PASSWORD.”

  Now for the hard part, thought Karen. She typed “J-P-G,” held her breath and pressed “Enter.” The program responded:

  “PASSWORD INCORRECT. ENTER PASSWORD.”

  Karen sighed, “Oh, shit.” She tried “J-O-E.”

  “PASSWORD INCORRECT. ENTER PASSWORD.”

  She tried “G-R-I-M-E-S.” Inconect. She tried “J-O-S-E-P-H,” she tried his wife’s name, her initials, his daughter’s name, her initials, the name and initials of his beloved country club, the name of his college, his birthday, his telephone extension, the numbers in his street address, each time only to be reprimanded:

  “PASSWORD INCORRECT. ENTER PASSWORD.”

  Karen heard voices echoing in the hall outside. She clenched her fists and closed her eyes. An idea was coming; then, there it was. She typed, “M-E-M C-E-O,” and pressed “Enter.” A list of Joe’s e-mail messages scrolled up on the screen.

  Her own message was listed third from the top. She only needed to scroll down to it, press “Enter,” select “Read message” from a list of options, “Exit” the message, then “Delete” the message. Seven key strokes and she would be done.

  The voices in the hall had grown louder. Karen recognized one of the voices. It was Joe. Grimes was about fifteen feet away, headed for his office, with a companion. She tried to think of an explanation for being in his office after hours, in the dark, with her shoes off and the computer on. She moved to push the power button on the computer, but realized the sudden darkening of the room would be noticeable from the hall. Joe and his guest were right outside the door, talking.

  “You should quit the Jefferson Country Club, Len. Too much water on the back nine and the food isn’t nearly as good as Westbrook’s.”

  Karen looked around. She had no place to go. Under the desk? The desk had no modesty panel. That figures, she thought, its owner has no modesty. She grabbed her shoes and backed toward the corner, bumping into one of the large Moroccan urns.

  “You’ll get me to join Westbrook yet, Joe,” said the other voice. It was Dr. Leonard Herwitz, the Chief of the Medical Staff. She could see part of his back through the door. Desperation flooded her. Out of alternatives, she lifted her left leg and set it down inside the urn, then did the same with her right. She shoved her shoes under the fronds of the palm tree planted in the adjacent urn, and bent her knees. Her hips jammed in the mouth of the urn.

  “You could maintain both memberships for a while, then see which club you use more.”

  Karen’s hips popped through the opening. She lowered herself into the urn. Her shoulders stuck. Dr. Herwitz stepped into the room.

  “I might be able to swing that, if I wasn’t being shaken down to invest in MRI equipment.” The two men chuckled softly.

  Karen folded her shoulders forward and squeezed them through the mouth of the urn. Her coccyx butted into the bottom of the urn, but her head still protruded from the top. She could see Joe entering the office. He switched on the lights. If he looked in her direction, he would see her. She realized the only reason she had not been spotted already was that Joe was not checking to see if any heads were sticking out of his urns.

  Karen scrunched down as far as she could. Her knees were pressed against the inside of the lip of the urn. There was no room to pull her head in. She cocked her head sideways and tucked the left side of her head just under the lip of the urn’s mouth. Her ear stuck on the edge. She pushed with her neck, and her head slid into the urn.

  “Actually, Len,” said Joe, “that’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about, the MRI. Take your coat off.”

  Abruptly, Karen was in darkness. Joe had tossed his coat over the urn.

  “I have an idea about how we might get the clinic into the MRI profits.”

  “Something we couldn’t talk about in the doctor’s lounge, you said.”

  “Right,” said Joe. “I think I’ve come up with a way for the doctors to get fifty percent of the action on the MRI without putting up any cash.”

  “I thought your lawyer lady said that was a no-no,” said Dr. Herwitz.

  “Uh-huh. Speaking of my lawyer lady, I see I’ve got an e-mail message from her. I guess my secretary left my computer on.”

  Karen’s heart pounded like a jackhammer. She felt out of breath, but forced herself to breathe shallowly, quietly.

  “One can always postpone a message from one’s lawyer,” postulated Dr. Herwitz.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” concurred Joe. Karen heard the computer click off.

  “Say,” said Dr. Herwitz, “do you know why we’re using lawyers in medical experiments now instead of rats?”

  Joe played along. “Why?”

  “Because there are certain things rats just won’t do.” Both men guffawed. “So what is this idea of yours?”

  Karen heard Joe’s desk chair squeak as he leaned back. Her neck ached, her feet began to get numb. “Well,” Joe began, “say I’ve been in touch with a local, mmmm, philanthropist, a supporter of the hospital and its mission, whom I think I can persuade to make a large contribution, say, $1 million.”

  “Yes, say,” rejoined Dr. Herwitz. Karen’s curiosity took hold. Her claustrophobia backed off slightly.

  “The money could be put into a newly created subsidiary of the hospital, which would purchase an MRI.”

  “Okay,” said Dr. Herwitz. “Go on.”

  “I have a stockbroker who owes me. Not only has the hospital done all of its investing through him for years, I’ve sent him other business. He wants to keep it coming.”

  “Dean Williams at Jackson, DeSalle. I know him.”

>   “Right,” continued Joe. “Jefferson Clinic could open an account there, and the hospital subsidiary would also have an account. As the MRI throws off cash, fifty percent could be transferred to the clinic account from the hospital sub’s account.”

  “Transferred?”

  “After a fashion. The hospital sub could make a series of unlucky investments while the clinic makes a series of lucky ones.”

  “How could we be sure that happens?” Dr. Herwitz inquired.

  “Twenty-twenty hindsight,” responded Joe. “And backdated confirmation slips. Dean Williams can paper up a series of trades that eventually move half of the MRI profits from the hospital sub’s account to the clinic’s account. The Medicare auditors will never turn it up, and nobody’s going to rifle Jackson, DeSalle’s records, because the loser in the deal, the hospital sub, won’t complain.”

  “Won’t somebody on the Board of Directors of the hospital subsidiary kick up a fuss when half the profits evaporate?” asked Dr. Herwitz.

  “The board of the hospital sub will be me, you, and Dean Williams.”

  The room was quiet for a moment. Inside the urn, Karen’s breathing sounded like a typhoon. Her heart was thumping so loud she was afraid it would start the urn ringing like a bell. The scheme Grimes had laid out for Herwitz was a clear violation of federal law, since it was merely a ruse to transfer half of the hospital’s profits on the MRI to the clinic. The payoff to the clinic was being made so that the clinic doctors would refer more patients for MRI diagnostics. It had been only a few hours since she had carefully explained to Joe Grimes why it would be illegal for the hospital to share MRI revenues with the clinic. Joe had wasted no time cooking up this elaborate subterfuge to hide the payoff.

  Joe’s proposition to Dr. Herwitz was criminal, but apparently Joe thought the scheme’s gloss of financial sophistication made it okay somehow. How did a guy get this slimy? Was he born that way? And who was this mysterious, anonymous donor? Could it be Paula Conkel, about to become a wealthy woman due to Larry’s untimely death? Was the million-dollar donation a payoff for arranging Larry’s “accident”? Karen tried to quiet her breathing as Herwitz considered Joe’s proposal.

  “It’s food for thought,” Herwitz finally responded. “Can I talk this over with some of the other doctors?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t talk about it with anybody, not even your wife,” asserted Joe. “Nobody except the Secretary-Treasurer of the clinic. That’s Ed Bernard. You can let Ed in on it.”

  “How about the clinic’s attorney?”

  “Why do that? He’ll just tell you it’s illegal But Len, it’s a bigger risk for the hospital than the clinic, and I don’t think it’s much of a risk for us. Think it over, get back to me before Christmas if you can.”

  “Fine. Have to run now; Gina and I have tickets for the symphony.”

  Light flooded into the urn. Joe had picked up his coat. Karen heard shuffling and footsteps, and then it was dark again. The footsteps of the two men faded away.

  In the best of circumstances Karen was not a devotee of business meetings, but she had never been so relieved and grateful to have a meeting end. She flexed the aching muscles in her neck slowly, so as not to scrape her left ear, pressed as it was against the inside of the urn.

  Her head did not move. She pulled harder and pushed against the inside of the urn with her right elbow. Still no movement. She felt a rush of terror. Instantly, black circles appeared in the center of her field of vision, sweat emanated from her pores, and she felt herself begin to convulse. She pulled as hard as she could with her neck, pushed with her arms and legs. Nothing. No leeway to reposition her body.

  Karen was trapped inside the urn.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Panic ripped through Karen like the claws of a wild animal. She pushed out furiously in all directions without result. Abandoning all concern about her job or embarrassment, she cried out for help. “Get me out of here! Please, please, someone, get me out of here!” She screamed until her throat was raw. She fought back her panic and tried to think, tried to ignore her own violent trembling. She felt as if she might lose consciousness, which would be a relief, but then realized that with her neck folded over at a ninety-degree angle, if her muscles went slack she might crimp her trachea and suffocate. Top priority, she told herself, keep breathing.

  Karen expected her life to flash before her eyes, but it didn’t. One image from her past did impose itself, and she clung to it, drawing enough comfort to stop herself from blacking out.

  The image was of Jake, smiling broadly, his face wreathed by enormous grape ivy leaves, in a place to which Karen returned, if only in her mind, whenever she felt overwhelmed. The image was linked with the feel of warm sun on her face and the fermentative smell of a forest in late September and was drawn from her memories of her wedding day.

  On the morning of Karen and Jake’s wedding, Gene Decker’s house had been teeming with relatives preparing for the nuptials, but the atmosphere on what was supposed to be a festive occasion was as fractious and flammable as a border dispute in the Balkans. Gene and Elizabeth, having just recently separated, were barely civil to each other, and their respective siblings had sided along bloodlines and separated into hostile camps.

  The only thing Karen’s relatives agreed upon that day was their disdain for the groom’s family, which consisted solely of Jake’s brother Jason and a trio of Jason’s uninvited, unwashed motorcycle buddies. They had roared up to the house on their Harleys, invaded the liquor cabinet, and made crude remarks to the female guests, even the elderly ones. When Karen’s parents, aunts, and uncles carped at her about the antics of the Jason contingent, as if it were somehow her responsibility, she thought she would explode with disappointment, frustration and anger.

  As she watched what was supposed to be the most joyful day of her life rapidly deteriorate, Jake had appeared at her side and took her by the hand. Together they had walked through sphagnum moss and golden tamaracks, up a steep hillside ablaze with scarlet sumacs to the base of a towering oak. The giant tree had branches that rotated around the trunk, and Jake and Karen climbed the branches until they emerged from the twilight of the forest floor to the bright sunshine above the canopy of the trees. The treetops were matted with a thick web of grape ivy, and Jake coaxed Karen into lying down with him in the nest of vines, which they could then rock gently, like a hammock.

  Now, Karen concentrated on this mental image, deliberately slowing her breathing, and conjuring up the deep warmth she had felt when Jake, with nobody in attendance save birds, dragonflies and one noisy red squirrel, had reached into his pocket, produced her wedding band, and recited the vows they had planned for the church ceremony. Karen had recited her own vows, and they embraced, swinging in the grape ivy and gazing upon the spectacular view of the flowage, with its tawny waters whiffled into an intricate pattern of fan-shaped whitecaps. Afterward, they considered their marriage to have occurred at that moment, and the tense, trite ceremony later that afternoon to have been merely redundant.

  Karen clung to the vivid memory of how, as she had looked into Jake’s smiling face surrounded by the ivy leaves, all remnants of her earlier anger and frustration were swept away by a surge of joy at what seemed an impossible stroke of luck. In her entire life she had known only one person who could keep his head when all around him were losing theirs, only one person who hadn’t cluttered his own radar screen with a lot of static, only one person to whom her feelings always seemed to matter, and she was marrying that person. Wasn’t that enough, all by itself, to make a person happy?

  Well, no, it wasn’t. Not if that person was trapped in a giant urn, fighting for her life. The memory of Jake swinging to and fro in the vine hammock gave Karen an idea. If she could shift her body weight back and forth, she might get the urn rocking. If she could tip it over, it might break on the tile floor and she would be free. If it did not break, she could roll it, maybe get out the door and …

&n
bsp; It was no use. Karen could not move enough to budge the broad base of the heavy clay pot. She had no alternative but to try to maintain consciousness until someone discovered her, hope that she did not slip into permanent psychosis in the meantime, and breathe, breathe.

  CHAPTER

  13

  At 9:15 P.M. that Monday night, Steven Linder lay comfortably in his patient bed on the third floor of Shoreview Memorial Hospital, recuperating from carpal tunnel surgery he had undergone earlier that afternoon. The surgery already seemed like a distant memory. He felt remarkably good, beatific and serene as he chatted with a fellow patient from an adjacent room. The other patient, a thin man of medium height with short, graying hair, had a small port wine birthmark on his left temple and smooth, even features. He seemed quite interested in Steven’s description of his surgery, his job, his life in general. The visitor smiled warmly as he listened, occasionally laughing sympathetically and putting his hand on Steven’s knee. Steven began to feel euphoric and drowsy at the same time—a pleasant, floating feeling. His visitor reached one hand under the white sheet and pulled back Steven’s hospital gown.

  Inside the terra-cotta Moroccan urn in Joe Grimes’s office, Karen Hayes shivered and whimpered softly. She had been trapped inside for less than three hours, but it had already been over an hour since she had given up anticipating morning, which seemed long overdue. Her cognition had shut down. Her consciousness spanned only the time frame from breath to breath. It took her several seconds to realize that a sound from outside the urn had reached her ears. The sound of footsteps on a tile floor.

  The footsteps moved slowly across the large office. They paused, then moved again. Paused again. When the footsteps started moving again, they seemed to be getting farther away from Karen, moving toward the door. Whoever it was had apparently finished whatever he or she had come to do and was leaving. Whoever it was, whatever they were doing there, Karen did not want them to leave.