Mercy

CHAPTER 31

Jordan Cobb greeted Julie at the apartment front door. There was no foyer, so when Julie entered she stepped into a living room that barely accommodated the sofa, two chairs, and a television. The walls were painter’s white, but decorated with a scattering of family photos. Aromas coming from the kitchen told her someone was cooking dinner.

Seated on the couch were two young girls, close in age, one maybe eleven and the other a bit younger. It was the older girl with mocha-colored skin, pigtails, and a pretty blue dress who had tossed out the keys. Both girls had books spread out in front of them and were doing homework while the TV played the kind of cartoon Trevor had only recently stopped watching.

Jordan, still wearing his scrubs from work, greeted Julie with an apprehensive expression.

“I’m in big trouble, aren’t I?” he said.

“No, Jordan, you’re not. But before we get into that, I’d love to meet your sisters, if I could.”

The older girl jumped off the couch and approached Julie with an outstretched hand. She had a firm shake and made eye contact the way Julie taught Trevor to do.

“I’m Teagen,” the girl said, in a confident voice. “And this here is my sister, Nina.”

“How do you do,” Julie said, returning the keys to Teagen. “It’s very nice to meet you both.”

“Nice to meet you,” Nina said in a softer voice.

She was the shy one, Julie thought.

“I see you’re doing homework, so I don’t want to disturb you. But I would like a moment of time with your brother. Is there a place we can talk?” Julie asked Jordan. “In private?”

Jordan gave a nod. He escorted Julie into a small but serviceable kitchen, where a pot of water heated on the stove and an oven gave off warmth. Julie looked around, wondering if Jordan’s mother might be at home, but got the feeling Jordan was in charge.

“The girls are my half-sisters,” Jordan said, stirring the pasta in the boiling water. He checked the chicken in the oven using a meat thermometer and turned over the asparagus on the bottom rack. “My mom’s at work. She works for Marriott and does the overnight shift sometimes. I look after the girls when she’s gone.”

“Need any help with dinner?”

Jordan gave a laugh. “I think I got it, but fine if you want to pitch in.”

Julie hung her jacket on the back of a chair and got right to work. Cooking always relaxed her, and memories of the eventful day faded as she strained the pasta, flavored it with Parmesan cheese, and added some seasoning to the chicken. Afterwards, Julie set the table even though Jordan said that was the girls’ job.

“Gives them more time for homework,” Julie said with a smile.

When the table was set, Julie poured three glasses of milk, but Jordan would not be sitting just yet. He covered his plate with another plate to keep his food warm.

“Nina, Teagen, you girls eat without me,” Jordan called out. “I have to speak with Dr. Devereux alone for a minute.”

The girls came running the way puppies might. Soon they were seated and eating, happy as could be.

Julie followed Jordan down a narrow corridor into a small, dark room where she could make out the outline of a bed and not much else. Jordan turned on the light and Julie’s eyes went wide with surprise. The bookcases, of which there were several, sagged from the weight of all the heavy tomes. Julie had owned many of these titles because Jordan’s collection belonged in any medical student’s library. All the classics were there-Essentials of Medicine, Gray’s Anatomy, Sidman’s Neuroanatomy were just a few of the titles to catch Julie’s eye.

The rest of Jordan’s room was free of clutter, and his bed made to military standards. There was a wooden desk with a Dell computer on it and a chair well worn from hours of sitting. The desk alone was neater than any square inch of Trevor’s room.

“It isn’t much, but it’s all mine,” Jordan said, pulling out the desk chair for Julie to sit. He plunked down on the twin bed, which groaned and creaked under his weight.

Julie stood and gazed slack-jawed at his expansive library. “Jordan, how did you get this collection of books?”

“Would you believe one book at a time?” Jordan said. His grin was endearing. “I don’t buy much else. What my mom doesn’t need, I spend on books and research materials.”

“You’ve read all these?”

“Cover to cover. Understand it all, too. I’ve taken a lot of practice MCAT tests just to make sure.”

“I read your notes to Brandon Stahl. I have no doubt you did fine. I just can’t believe you’re self-taught.”

Jordan gave a shrug. She had seen him make the gesture before.

“I’m pretty confident I know my stuff.”

He smiled again, and Julie saw why Lucy always talked so fondly of him. He came across as warm and kindhearted, with a sweet, inquisitive nature.

“Do you want to be a doctor someday?”

“I did,” Jordan said, in a voice tinged with regret. “I always had a passion for medicine, biology, that sort of thing. When I was in seventh grade I made a model of the human body out of clay for an extra-credit science project. We’re talking a spleen, made to scale. You could take out any organ and put it back where it belonged. I still have the index cards explaining what every body part does.”

“Incredible to have such a clear vision and drive at that young age. I have a twelve-year-old son, and some days I think his only passion is Minecraft.”

Jordan chuckled. “Yeah, well he and Teagen would be fast friends. We only have this one computer and it’s a battle to get her off it. Nina, she’s more like me, more into books.”

“So why didn’t you pursue a medical degree?”

Jordan’s lip curled. “Not a lot of medical schools want to admit convicted felons.”

Julie leaned forward. Lucy had never shared any information about Jordan’s past.

“Convicted of what, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Possession with intent to distribute. It was marijuana, and a lot of it. It’s hard out here-these streets, they can pull you in if you’re not careful. I made a bad choice and it landed me in prison. Did five years hard time at MCI Cedar Junction, so I know Brandon Stahl’s new home real well. In prison I kept at my studies. Read what I could. Petitioned publishers for their old textbooks, and a lot of them came through.”

“You probably already know this, but there are medical schools out there that will overlook your past.”

“Even if I found a school willing to take a chance on me, no way could I afford it. I still have to go to college. Before my arrest, my plan was to join the military. Become an army medic to help pay for school. My mom thinks everything happens for a reason. I agree, but I don’t think it’s God’s hand at work. I think we make choices and live with the consequences. That’s reason enough.”

“Maybe your mom is right. If you had walked any other path, you might never have seen Brandon Stahl’s medical record. Maybe that is the reason.”

“Never thought of it that way.”

“You’ve been browsing medical records at White to help fill in your knowledge gaps. Is that it?”

Jordan made that signature shrug of his, and looked a little uncomfortable about sharing. “Yeah, it’s a hobby, I don’t know how else to explain it. Just fires me up to learn. I figured out how to get into the system without being caught. I took some online computer classes.”

Julie glanced at the old laptop computer on Jordan’s desk. “My goodness, you’re a self-taught hacker, too.”

“I come from the DIY generation-that’s do it yourself.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with the acronym. My son uses the same lingo. So, what made you look at the Donald Colchester file?” Julie asked.

“It was high profile. A nurse from our hospital kills a state rep’s son. He’s moving into my old home. How could I not look? Wasn’t thinking anything strange at first. Just looking, you know? Results from the cardiac troponin were high, so I didn’t even need to check the EKG to tell he had a heart attack. But I looked anyway. It was a pretty strange reading.”

“How good are you at reading EKGs?” Julie could not contain her surprise.

“I’m no cardiologist,” Jordan said, “but I get by.”

“What made you think takotsubo cardiomyopathy? That’s not an easy determination to make.”

Jordan motioned toward his bookshelf. “It’s all there. Just got to know how to look. For this one, I dug like an archeologist. The weird EKG made me look at the echo and, well, I’d never seen a heart valve look like that one before. Didn’t look like a heart attack brought on by morphine to me. Looked like something else entirely.”

“Takotsubo is a very rare stress phenomenon, so I’m not surprised you hadn’t seen it before. Well, I am surprised, because you’re a morgue technician with a physician’s mind, but you get my point.”

Jordan gave a laugh. “Thanks. If you ask me, I’d say it’s obvious Brandon Stahl’s defense team got it all wrong. But there’s nothing I can do about it now. Appeal is over. He lost.”

“What do you think about the morphine they found in Brandon’s apartment?”

“I thought about that a lot before I wrote my letter. There were two possible explanations. I don’t think he killed anybody, so either Brandon’s a junkie and that’s tough luck, or somebody heard that recording and wanted to make sure Brandon did the time for that crime.”

“You think somebody planted evidence?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time it happened to an innocent man.”

“Let’s play out your theory, because I have the same suspicion, but for reasons we won’t get into. Donald Colchester suffers a fatal heart attack after Brandon Stahl is caught on tape offering to kill the legislator’s son. The tape isn’t heard until after the body has been buried. Someone thinks Brandon is going to get away with murder, so they make sure they pin it on him by bribing Sherri Platt to testify and planting evidence in Stahl’s apartment. That sound about right to you?”

Jordan’s eyes turned fierce. “More than right.”

“I’m pretty sure I know who’s behind it, too.”

“The father,” Jordan said.

“Yes. William Colchester. He’s got motive to keep Brandon in jail. Maybe his wife pressured him into it. According to Brandon, she was the hawk monitoring Donald’s quality of care.”

“So how do we help Brandon? I think the guy is innocent.”

“We’d have to prove there’s a pattern of takotsubo cases at White Memorial. My fiancé died of the same thing. I’m not a stats geek, but the probability of an unlikely event being isolated to the two cases we just happened to stumble upon is pretty darn low. I’m going to dig through the medical records of everyone who died from a heart attack at White and see if I’m right. It’s a long shot, but maybe it’s enough to overturn Brandon Stahl’s conviction. Maybe in the process I’ll figure out what really killed my fiancé.”

Jordan’s expression was skeptical. “I don’t know if I would do that if I were you.”

“Why not?”

“When I accessed Donald Colchester’s file, I noticed somebody had altered his medical records. I couldn’t tell who, or what they did exactly, but I do know they deleted information from his file.”

“Deleted?”

“That’s what it shows in the logs. Somebody used the same superuser access I have to delete some data from Colchester’s record. The date stamp showed it happened postmortem. Now, why does somebody want to alter a patient record after someone has died? I didn’t think much of it, until you started talking about looking for information. Maybe someone was trying to keep a secret.”

Julie’s brow furrowed. “Can you check Sam’s file for me without anybody knowing you’re in the system?”

“Sure. I can do it from here using the superuser ID. It gives me admin access, plus I know how to mask my IP-that’s my Internet address-so I can’t be traced.”

“Do it.”

It took Jordan a few minutes to bring up White’s electronic medical records system. He used a special key that generated a one-time password. The key, the size of a credit card and nearly as thin, generated a series of numbers that cryptographically authenticated the user. It was the same technology Julie used to access the records system from any remote location, typically her home.

“Where did you get hold of one of those?” Julie asked.

Jordan was typing furiously as screens of meaningless data scrolled by at a rapid rate.

“Um, some questions I think I’d rather not answer.”

He went quiet for a bit, with the intense concentration and focus of a surgeon. Then his eyes opened wide. “Look here, you can see the date Sam’s record was created.”

Julie peered over Jordan’s shoulder at a screen titled Transaction Log. The date was the day of the accident, and it brought back dark memories.

“The transaction logs show limited data. You can see the date a record was created, and there’s a transaction type for records being added, modified, or deleted.”

“It doesn’t say what exactly was done to the record?”

“No. I’ve actually read up on that, because I had the same question. I don’t know any EMR system that records every adjustment to the medical record itself. It would create too unwieldy a file. You’d have to invest a lot of money to get a system robust enough to handle something like that. Transaction logs are used for IT troubleshooting only. Your typical techs don’t know a tibia from a femur, but they can understand transaction types just fine.”

“Did someone delete something from Sam’s record?”

“Look right here.”

Julie focused where Jordan pointed and she saw a record deletion entry made on the same day Sam had died.

“Whoever deleted the record used a superuser ID to make changes. Just like with Colchester’s EMR, I can’t tell who altered it or what they deleted.”

“Let me have a look. Maybe I can remember.”

Julie took her time to examine Sam’s extensive medical record carefully. It was all there: treatments, medications, operations, a complete compilation of an unfathomably expensive stay in the hospital. But for the life of her, Julie could not figure out what was missing from his file. Everything seemed to have been recorded properly.

Jordan came back from checking up on the girls. “What did you find?”

“I don’t see anything,” Julie admitted.

“Two cases of this rare fatal heart disease and two altered records tells me that someone isn’t going to like you digging around a bunch of EMR files on a treasure hunt. Know what I’m saying?”

“Not exactly.”

“Let me do the digging for you. I know how to get into the system and poke around without being spotted. You go in as you, and you’re broadcasting yourself to anyone who wants to keep something hidden.”’

Dr. Coffey and William Colchester were two names that popped into Julie’s head as possible secret keepers. Sherri Platt was another.

“I don’t want you involved with this, Jordan. Can you teach me how to do it?”

“Depends. How good are you with tech?”

Without embarrassment, Julie told Jordan she had needed Trevor’s help to load a music player with digital files. Jordan’s look told her plenty.

“Yeah, that isn’t going to work too well. Again, let me do it for you. I want to do it. Heck, I got this far, I should see this to the end.”

Julie thought about the man at the river and her tense meeting with William Colchester. She did not want Jordan involved, but on the flip side she wanted answers. She hesitated before extending her hand. They shook.

Partners.

LINCOLN COLE sat in his parked van, waiting for Julie to come out of Jordan Cobb’s apartment. What he needed now was some direction. He had given Julie a little shove down by the river, and then driven his motorcycle into the back of his van. He had parked right off the exit to hasten his vanishing act. He figured that after the scare, Julie would take some time off her crusade to think things over. Instead, she surprised him by paying Colchester a visit, calling Sherri Platt, and getting Jordan Cobb from White Memorial involved in her little quest.

Lincoln guessed the sizable man escorting Julie back to her car was the morgue tech. He knew Jordan Cobb by voice only. Soon he’d know everything there was to know about him. His employer needed to make some hard choices based on this new information. For now, Lincoln would do his job. He would follow the doctor. But these latest developments were very troubling. If Lincoln’s gentle shove had not done the trick, something more punishing might be in order.

Those considerations were for another time. Julie had pulled away from the curb.

And Lincoln did the same.