by Maia Ross
I made my way up the driveway to the stairs that had been added to the side of the house, presumably to allow the second-floor tenant and their guests to come and go as they pleased.
It had been my experience that if you looked like you belonged somewhere, people didn’t question you much about it. And the good Irma didn’t say a peep, so presumably, I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Not to mention the fact that Charlotte, Scooter’s next of kin, would surely have given me permission to look at the apartment, had I asked, so I’d practically been invited in.
After reaching the door, I inserted my lock picks, shielded by my body, of course, and had the door open in less than twenty seconds. But I couldn’t feel smug. It was a terrible setup. I closed the door behind me and locked it out of habit; if someone came up the stairs after me, it would give me a few seconds to make my escape.
I walked over to the window in the tiny eating area and looked out. It was big enough for me to fit through. I was about to start my search and pat myself on the back for putting together such a brilliant escape plan, but I stopped, then walked back to the window and looked again. One storey wasn’t so high when you were looking out the window, but it was very high when you were falling out of it. My throat got uncomfortably tight. Part of the reason I’d retired was because a former partner—six years younger than I—had tried to scamper down a trellis, which had then collapsed under her. I’d developed a fear of getting a broken hip as the years had gone by, but she’d acquired two of them for her trouble. Now she walked like a lemur with an attitude problem.
I opened the window and looked down. I examined all the angles. I couldn’t be sure I could make it. It was possible my days of escaping out of windows were over.
Bloody hell.
I surveyed the room for an alternate hidey-hole and settled on the niche between the couch and the wall. I could almost hear Mother tell me that good things come in small packages. I let out a long breath, then I focused.
If pressed, it would have been hard for me to explain exactly what I was doing here. Especially since I was now a civilian. I should stay out of it. I should. But between Charlotte’s pleas and Julian’s malpractice quandary, to say nothing of John Doe Driveway dying practically under my nose, some questions really needed answers. What I was looking for was a better idea of what Scooter had been up to lately, specifically if he was using drugs in his spare time. If he’d taken another narcotic before arriving at the clinic, it would explain his overdose.
The apartment was well maintained but small. A studio, I suppose you would call it. The living room area was quite atrociously dirty; fast food containers and puddles of discarded clothing everywhere, and a somewhat awkwardly arranged international flag collection on the wall behind the sofa. The television had to be sixty inches wide. The best way to describe the décor was über bachelor.
The desk had nothing on it at all. Maybe a laptop computer was normally kept there? I wondered if Scooter had brought it to Renée’s the day of the robbery. I needed to speak to her anyway, so I tucked the thought away. There were no bookshelves, no other papers or anything helpful whatsoever. I wondered how long he’d had this apartment, and how many of his belongings were still in the flat over Charlotte’s garage that he’d been living in for years.
I drummed my gloved fingers on the desk, my head cocked. Then I tried all the usual spots people hid things they didn’t want found: the toilet tank, the freezer, under the mattress. Nothing. Except for a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People beside a plant on the coffee table. The plant was unidentifiable and very dead. Something like sadness fluttered in my chest when I saw the book. I didn’t know him well, but Scooter had always seemed like a lost soul. I wondered if he was aware that Charles Manson had used that very book as a guide to ensnaring some of his victims; if he woke up from his coma, I’d definitely give him that particular intel.
I padded over to the refrigerator and settled a kitchen chair in front of it. I inspected the top of the fridge and the cabinets around it. There was an overhead vent in the kitchen that seemed promising—
Footsteps on the stairs.
But that was impossible because the landlord was out of town, and there were only two apartments in the building. I knew this because Laverne was always careful about details. It was one of the reasons I liked her.
Maybe a postal carrier?
The steps came closer, light and quiet and careful, and adrenaline thundered through me. That was no mailman.
I leapt off the chair and dove behind the couch as quietly as I could manage.
The feet kept coming. I covered my nose so I didn’t sneeze. Scooter, sadly, was not an accomplished housekeeper.
Then, silence.
I did some breathing exercises. Maybe I was going out that window after all. Perhaps I should have done some more stretches before breaking in.
“Daddy!” A little girl’s voice burst out.
“Yes?”
“Can I do it? Can I? Can I?”
“Go for it, honey.”
Something shot out of the mail slot and onto the floor. Despite myself, I flinched.
“Very good, Petunia. Now let’s get some lunch.”
Excellent idea.
The two of them marched back down the stairs and away, thank heavens. I waited a few moments to make sure they wouldn’t come back and check on their handiwork before letting out a massive exhale. And three sneezes.
I checked what treasure had been pushed through the slot; an advertisement for farm-fresh produce at the grocery store. I exhaled mightily. I was glad early season organic lettuce was on sale. I was even more glad my hips were still attached to me, and I hadn’t had to go out that window after all.
I finished up my search, ultimately disappointed in that kitchen vent, but happy I’d failed. I now knew that Scooter most likely didn’t have a drug problem. I’d found no pills, no drug paraphernalia at all. It didn’t help Julian whatsoever, but it maybe meant that Scooter had a better chance of surviving his current struggles. I locked up nonchalantly and made my way back to Stu’s.
Nine—Violet
“Thanks.” I took the tea and cupcake from Irma, who must have made a run to Luna’s Café down the street. That was when I realized how badly Irma wanted help with all this; she’d never have willingly purchased anything made of white sugar otherwise.
The tea had been steeped for about seventeen years, as was Irma’s way, but it was still delicious. And the cupcake was poetry: delicate vanilla paired with sumptuous chocolate with a buttercream icing that was still floating in my senses when—
“You’re drooling, dear.”
“I haven’t had a cupcake in years. I regret nothing,” I said, grinning. “Okay, here’s where we’re at. This is a more complex system than you’d think, based on its function, which I find interesting. You’re probably over-provisioning unless you really do need all the features,” I said to Julian. “Plus, if you have people like Stu work on this gear, you’re going to void the warranty.”
“Seriously?” Julian’s forehead furrowed. “I went through a lot of stuff with Medicil when we got these units, and no one ever mentioned anything like that. Stu was just going to repair the power cord housing.”
“I’m sure it’s in the fine print somewhere. In any case, you’re right, Julian, this unit has been preconfigured not to exceed two millilitres of propanifen in any fifteen-minute increment, and I couldn’t find any way to change that. If the other unit was set up the same way and didn’t follow that protocol, then it was potentially tampered with somehow.”
“I know that has to be what happened, but on the other hand, it’s impossible,” Julian said, his shoulders slumped. “The only people who can change the maximum dosage configuration is Medicil. It’s totally locked down.”
Irma frowned. “So, if Scooter had been hooked up to the machine right in front of us, he would have been—”
“Fine, yes,” I said.
“Who has physica
l access to the IV machines?” Irma asked.
“Just our staff,” Julian said.
“How many of them?” Irma asked.
“Everyone, pretty much. Plus the cleaners. We don’t hire people we don’t trust.”
“Right, but when the units are hooked up to patients, they’re not supervised, right?” I asked.
Julian nodded.
“Are there any cameras inside the clinic?” I asked.
“No, we have to preserve our patients’ confidentiality.”
“Right,” I said. “So how are the IV machines connected to each other? You have a network called CLINICNET, that this machine—IV03—is connected to. What else sits inside that network? Your office computers and printers, that type of thing?”
“We have a network for our medical devices, and a second one for the office equipment, and they’re totally separate. And the medical device network can’t connect to the internet,” Julian said.
I held up a hand to quiet Irma, who looked like she was going to explode imminently. It was a look I was becoming familiar with. “They don’t need to, actually. I’ll bet other types of devices can connect into your medical network. Someone could pull up to your parking lot, jump on CLINICNET and upload a virus from their laptop. Their phone, even. And there has to be some sort of remote access for operating system upgrades and patches so Medicil can connect from their office in Vancouver. And the techs from Medicil will connect with root level—God—access.”
“Actually, Medicil comes into the clinic every other month to do maintenance and updates,” Julian said. “All remote capabilities were shut off when the units were shipped to us. And the reason we have them patch manually is because this is new technology, and we were concerned about these kinds of issues.”
“That’s great,” I said, “But if they’re networked, even if it’s not on the internet, they’re hackable. It’s just that simple. And there’s no way to upload anything to these units manually via USB or some other interface. I checked.”
“Then how does the device company do it?”
“Maybe using a nonstandard port and configuration and a hidden network of some kind.”
“Will all the other units be set up the same way?” Irma asked.
“I’d have to check to be sure, but I’m assuming so, yes,” I answered. “I’ve downloaded the config and logs from IV03 to my laptop. I’m going to go home and take a look at them a bit more deeply. I don’t know much about this type of technology, so it’ll take me a while. But it’s a Linux-based machine. A proprietary flavour of Linux, but the main commands will be the same.”
Julian swallowed uncomfortably. “If something’s wrong with the units, can you fix it?”
“If you have a contract with your supplier, they should be able to take care of it,” I said.
“Not when it’s an emergency, obviously,” Julian said, his voice tight.
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. It’s not uncommon, unfortunately, for the fine print to mean that your support isn’t quite as…er, supportive, as you thought it was.” I didn’t add that I might be the CTO of a tech startup, but all I’d been doing for the last few years was sitting in meetings, not solving real-world tech problems. Of course, everyone needs to get back to the basics every once in a while. Maybe a little project would help get my mind off the fact that I was still waiting for the bank to call.
“What could cause a computer to fail in its main tasks?” Julian asked. “I don’t know how to say it exactly.”
“Like if the CPU was overloaded, or one of the apps had a memory leak or something. That might cause some system applications or functions to fail,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“But most complex systems are configured to fail passively, not actively. So the infusion should have stopped completely, not gone berserk.”
He nodded, his eyes shuttered.
“Well, first I’d need to do some more work understanding how these things are supposed to function.” I frowned. “But based on the little research I’ve just done, the state of security regarding medical devices right now is a little nuts. It’s cutting-edge technology, which is generally focused on functionality versus security. And apparently, there’s been a rise in ‘medjacking,’ with hackers holding either resources or patient data hostage.”
“How does that work?” Irma asked.
“The office or hospital will get infected because someone’s clicked on a malicious link in an email about miniature Mediterranean donkeys or whatever, and then they get locked out of their systems after their hard drive is encrypted by the hackers. After a ransom demand, the medical office pays the medjackers, and they’re given a password that decrypts the data for them. A woman died in a German hospital recently because of it.”
Julian groaned. “What a nightmare.”
“It’s not just that, it’s IOT, it’s—”
“IOT?”
“The Internet of Things. This is why people’s thermostats are online, how their refrigerator is talking to them, why their TV is watching them.”
He ran a hand through his hair and made a frustrated noise. “It doesn’t seem like it should be allowed.”
“Welcome to my world. But to your question, yes I’ll take a look at it,” I said, watching the grin take over his face. It warmed my insides.
“Thank you. If we go to the police with an explanation for Scooter’s overdose, they might back off. And I…I need to know what happened to him. If it was something on our end, we have to deal with it right away.” He sighed. “And the hospital on the mainland called: All signs from their testing points to Scooter having received fifty millilitres of propanifen. And they didn’t administer any narcotics to him once he was admitted, which I can attest to because I was there.”
Irma’s face was completely blank, which was always a little unnerving. I wasn’t feeling so great myself. If Scooter had been overdosed at the island clinic, Julian was in deep trouble.
I tried to keep my voice level so Julian didn’t get more upset than he already was. “What other technologies do the IV stands connect to?”
“Our patient records. That’s how we track when meds have been administered and how many, that kind of thing. It helps us manage supply inventory as well.”
Irma suddenly sprang to her feet, and I gasped. “What’s wrong, dear?” she asked me.
I put my hand on my chest. “You just have a...way about you that makes me feel like armed guerrillas are about to smash through the windows. Wherever we go. Every single place.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Not a compliment, Irma.”
“It feels like a compliment,” Irma replied under her breath. “Can we go now and verify all this? Shouldn’t Scooter’s patient records reflect what the IV stand was doing? If we can just sit in the parking lot, then...”
Julian held a hand up. “Let’s let the police finish their work.” When Irma looked like she was about to jump up and down in her tiny shoes, he continued, “I don’t want anyone to be able to point at us accessing things and maybe deleting or altering anything. Plus we have to preserve Scooter’s patient confidentiality. We need to be above reproach on this.”
“Young man, we cannot simply—”
“Irma, please. It’s killing me to say no. But I’m begging you, let’s wait until they’re done.”
“He’s right, Irma,” I chimed in, even though I was now itching to find out the truth too. It had been a long time since I’d had a good problem on my hands. Too long, maybe.
“All right,” Irma said grudgingly. But the look on her face meant trouble.
Ten—Irma
The night became another beautiful summer morning. I rang Stu to see if we were still sailing today, but the weather reports were forecasting exactly zero wind. Bugger.
I tootled around the house for a bit and had my first cup of tea on the back deck, studiously ignoring the sky-high bags of trimix I was planning on using to re-invigorate my flow
er beds. I was also on a reduced running schedule to get into fighting shape for the half-marathon this weekend, which was a bother.
I knew what I needed: to see my friend Geraldine and get the car on the road and drive. I’d taught evasive manoeuvres when I’d been in my twenties, and again in my sixties, and I missed it. It helped me think, and I needed to sort through my thoughts. Plus, Geraldine always had excellent intel. If she wasn’t involved herself, that is.
I put on my driving gloves and pulled out of my laneway, but a glance at my right flank revealed my lovely neighbour, Mrs. Sepp, running toward my car. She was a sturdy woman but ran like a sylph. It was mesmerizing.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Sepp, and how are you this fine day?”
She was perspiring a little and dabbed at her forehead. “I was wondering if I could ask you a favour.” Her words were wrapped up in a delightful Estonian accent.
“Of course.”
Deep in her cleavage, a little head poked out. Mr. Pugglesworth opened his mouth and started panting. “Are you able to take Mr. P for a walk? One of my grandchildren fell down a well and—”
“Again?”
She nodded sadly. Granted, it was a pretty shallow well, but sometimes I wondered what went on in her family.
“Of course I’ll take him,” I said. Mr. P seemed to know what I was saying—which was partly why I was so fond of him—and started wiggling harder. He looked like he was about to fling himself in the air and onto me, his tiny legs jostling mightily against Mrs. Sepp’s robust chest.
“I’ll just go get his car seat.”
I tried not to grit my teeth. I didn’t love the way the seat made dents in my upholstery, but she’d taken great pains to explain to me how Mr. P got upset if he couldn’t sit in his little chair, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. She handed Mr. P to me and went to rummage around her garage for the spare booster seat.