Missing persons! Ellie froze, suddenly realizing how the McGavins might be getting away with the crime. There were two national, public files: one for missing persons and one for John and Jane Does in hospitals and morgues. The brain-trauma wing had restricted access; employees in that wing were the only people who knew what ABTC’s unidentified patient truly looked like. If those employees were tricked into believing their patient’s photograph was correctly filed, the McGavins could submit any photograph they wanted to the national database. Therefore, the McGavins could have manipulated their in-house software so that all of their on-site computers showed Jane Doe’s unaltered photograph. The ruse would be exposed only if someone on the trauma wing searched the unidentified-persons file for Washington, D.C. on their home computer and saw that their off-site computer showed a different photograph than the on-site computer.
Natalie had emptied her locker. “Are you ready to head home?”
Ellie shook her head. “I’m going to stay and use the computer for some homework. Off the clock.”
“No offense, Elizabeth, but that’s weird. Your brother must have a computer at home that you can use, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah, but I want to get to work right now, before I forget my idea. See you tomorrow.” She left the locker room. If she could just make a couple of printouts, she might be on the verge of discovering the major piece of hard evidence that they needed.
Chapter 23
A few minutes later, Ellie forced herself to stay seated despite her anxiousness as she waited for a printout. She was printing out the records for the three unidentified women found in Washington, D.C. as they appeared on the on-site computer at ABTC. If her suspicions were correct, this listing was actually a dummy file that appeared only on ABTCs in-house computer. This fake file would show the real Jane Doe, whereas when she logged onto her own computer at Daniel’s apartment, she would see the altered photo the McGavins had filed with the FBI.
A troubling thought occurred to her. Jake had seen Jane Doe when he used his brain flash-drive on her. But, for all his computer time in the ten days that they’d been living at Daniel’s place, Jake had never once mentioned that Jane Doe’s image was absent from the national file of unidentified persons. That either disproved Ellie’s entire theory about the subterfuge the McGavins were pulling, or it revealed how unlikely it truly was that an employee would use off-the-clock time to look at unidentified-persons listings.
“You’re still here?” Tyler snarled at Ellie as he came through the door.
Damn it! Tyler was like a zit—always popping up at the worst possible time! “I’m leaving in a minute. I’m just waiting for a printout. Homework.”
“That’s work that you do at home. Hence the word: ‘homework.’ Do you actually have a home? Seems to me like you live here.”
Before Ellie could formulate a suitably snide reply, Ethan strode into the room. Ellie’s stomach clenched into nervous knots. “Hello, Tyler,” Ethan intoned. “It’s unusual to find you loitering like this.”
“Just waiting for Ellie to free up the computer.”
Ethan glared at Ellie. “Your shift ended at least fifteen minutes ago. You signed out.”
“Sorry, Dr. McGavin.”
“I spoke to you just yesterday about how you needed to stay on task!”
“This is my personal time. I was using the computer for some homework and was just about to leave.” She grabbed the printout and stashed it into her backpack.
“I see,” Ethan said. “So you’re only taking advantage of our resources, not our salary. That’s semi-comforting.”
“She told me she needed a printout for a homework assignment,” Tyler interjected.
“I’m done. It won’t happen again.” Still wanting to maintain her insider’s access to ABTC, Ellie had the one angle to play—Ethan didn’t want Tyler to know about Jennifer’s cancer. To further call attention to Tyler’s presence, she shifted her gaze to Tyler, then back to Ethan. “I meant to talk to Jennifer before I left,” she told Ethan. She held her breath, hoping that Ethan would not fire her on the spot over her veiled threat.
Ethan squared his shoulders. “Dr. McGavin is out of the office. She’ll be here on Monday, at the latest. Anything I can help you with?”
“No, thank you. It’ll wait.”
Ethan glowered at her. “You’re skating on thin ice, Elizabeth. No more use of the computer for anything beyond data entry.” Ethan left the room, his fists buried in his jacket pockets.
Tyler smirked at her. “You should thank me for not throwing you under the bus, ‘Lizbet’. I saw you were looking at unidentified persons. If that’s a homework assignment, you must be taking a social-worker class.”
“It’s an independent work-study credit that I’m getting from my guidance counselor,” Ellie fired back, thinking fast. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
#
The moment she got home, Ellie rushed into Jake’s room and found him at the computer. “Hey,” he muttered in greeting.
“You sound annoyed,” Ellie said. As usual. “Where’s Daniel?”
“At Spy Headquarters.” Jake was referring to the office building across from ABTC. “He told me about Jennifer collapsing and you finding her. After you left her office to get Ethan, Ethan and Jennifer talked privately. He gave her an injection of Demerol and called a taxi for her. Did you know she has cancer?”
“Ovarian. Natalie’s mother knows and told Natalie.”
Jake nodded, but his vision had drifted back to his computer screen. “Daniel also told me that Ethan told her, ‘We have to ramp up our timeline.’ My take is they’re going to shift Jennifer’s mind into some coma-victim’s body without any additional test subjects.”
“They’ll put her into Jane Doe’s body, you mean?”
“I doubt it. She’s been in a coma too long and her muscles will be atrophied. She’ll do for a test subject, but for the real thing? No way.”
Grabbing the printout from her purse, Ellie said, “I think you—”
“Hang on,” Jake interrupted, holding up a hand. He entered a few words into his computer, then cursed. “Daniel still hasn’t managed to gain access to the highest-clearance level. Without that, we won’t be able to change the code on your badge and open the door of the brain-trauma wing. We don’t want to waste any time with locks. We’ll be lucky to have five minutes in the wing before the security guards spot us on one of the cameras.”
“Jake,” Ellie said firmly, “drop what you’re doing and pull up the listings for unidentified persons, then click on Washington, D.C. I think I might have figured out why nobody has found out who Jane Doe is, even after six weeks.”
“You mean—because she’s an illegal immigrant?”
“Just because she’s Hispanic doesn’t mean she’s an illegal. Nor that nobody is searching for her.” Ellie’s printout showed the photographs and listed the physical characteristics of three unidentified young women in the D.C. area. The final photograph showed a Hispanic woman who was probably in her twenties. “Check out the bottom photograph.”
“Yeah, that’s her,” Jake said.
Ellie looked at the three photographs on Jake’s screen. The first two displayed records were identical to ABTC’s printout, but the bottom picture on Jakes screen showed a bleached blonde who appeared to be asleep.
“Aha!” Ellie cried. “They submitted an altered record and photograph to the authorities! In the meantime, they jerry-rigged their own database so that, whenever employees look at the listings, they see the actual Hispanic Jane Doe, and won’t suspect a thing.”
“But the police would have taken the photographs of Jane Doe themselves,” Jake argued.
“So maybe this blonde was simply under heavy sedation, and they pulled a patient switcheroo the moment the police left the building. It doesn’t matter how they did this. It just matters that they did it, and that we can prove it. All we need to do is find the Hispanic Jane Doe in the missing-persons file an
d call that police officer or federal agent. We can catch the McGavins red-handed!”
“Geez, Ellie!” Jake said raking his hand through his dark-brown hair. “Do you think I’m some kind of an idiot? I’ve been searching the missing-persons listing for Jane Doe every single day. She’s not there. She probably is an illegal immigrant. Unless we can actually identify her, we’ve got nothing.”
Crushed, Ellie took a moment to pull together an argument. “But we can prove they filed a bogus report,” she countered. “Furthermore, if the Feds seize their computers, they’ll find that there’s a doctored computer file that shows the bogus record for Jane Doe.”
“Even if we can prove that the filing of a ‘bogus report’ was deliberate and malicious, how would we prove the McGavins were behind it? And what criminal charges could we bring against them? Improper paperwork?”
“The police and FBI are investigating Jane Doe’s real identity, so they’re impeding a criminal investigation!” Ellie fired back.
“Eventually, they’ll get a firm slap on the wrist,” Jake said, his attention once again focused on a computer search. Ellie watched his screen. Apparently, Jake had hacked into ABTC’s database this time; now the photograph of the blonde came up as “unidentified.” Jake snorted. “Yep. I signed on as if I was using an ABTC computer on the premises, and here’s the bogus file with the actual Jane Doe. Daniel’s probably wondering who’s looking at this file.”
A terrifying realization dawned on Ellie. “Oh, my God. A keystroke tracer!”
Jake looked at her. “Last I heard, the tracer Daniel had you put on the data-entry computer is working fine.” As he studied her features, his expression grew stony. “Shit! You mean the McGavins must have a keystroke tracer on that computer, too!”
She nodded.
“Tell me you didn’t get interrupted by Ethan or Jennifer, this afternoon!”
Ellie nodded again, feeling a little faint. Before her knees could buckle, she made her way over to the sofa that doubled as Jake’s bed. “By Ethan. Twice today, while I was looking at patient information. Ethan has put a tracer on the data-entry workstation. That’s why he knew to interrupt me. I should have figured that out immediately.”
Jake rubbed his forehead, apparently left speechless by Ellie’s hideous oversight.
“They know I was looking at Jane Doe’s photo this evening.”
Jake gripped the armrests of his chair, but remained silent.
“I told Ethan I was using the computer for a homework project. And I told Tyler that it was an independent work-study thing for my school. Maybe they’ll buy it.”
“No, they won’t,” Jake said quietly.
“Just because I was looking at unidentified persons doesn’t mean they’ll figure out that a high-school student was spying on them. They still have no reason to suspect I’m Elony Montgomery.”
Again, Jake said nothing. Grimly, he raked back the dark hair that was falling into his eyes. Her words were sounding hollow to her own ear.
“I just put Jane Doe’s life in jeopardy, didn’t I?” Ellie asked, unable to keep her voice from cracking. She started to cry.
“Not necessarily, Ellie,” Jake said gently. “There’s been no missing-person listing for her, and the McGavins didn’t restrict the access to the unidentified-persons file that they know you viewed.”
“That’s just because they realized they’d have raised their employees’ curiosity if ABTC computers had restricted access to a public website.”
Jake grimaced, which verified Ellie’s fears.
“Meanwhile,” Ellie said in a wavering voice, “Ethan’s kept the poor woman in a drug-induced coma for six weeks now.”
“Off and on, at least. They probably used my device on her and brought her out of the coma for a short while, then learned she still had her own memories and put her back under immediately. Which would explain why they suddenly started testing Alzheimer’s patients. They want to see how restoring a patient’s own memories works. They’ll want to find out if Jane Doe can possess both your and her own memories simultaneously.”
“Why wouldn’t they just test Jane Doe herself, once she was conscious?”
“And risk letting her tell a nurse that her last memory was of getting jabbed with a syringe by a man in a ski mask?” Jake shook his head.
She swiped the tears off her cheeks. “This is my fault.”
“No, it’s not. I should have focused on getting her out of there immediately. Actually, it’s been foolhardy of the McGavins to let the situation go this long.”
“Maybe they’ll be too absorbed in dealing with Jennifer’s condition to do anything for a few more days.”
“I guess that’s possible.”
“We have to do something! We can’t just sit back and let them kill a woman!”
“No, we can’t.” He sounded, at the most, only half convinced.
Determined not to let Jane Doe’s death weigh on her conscience, Ellie didn’t want to reconsider; she had to save Jane Doe. “We need to risk taking Natalie’s mother into confidence . . . ask her to help us get Jane out of there.”
Jake grimaced. “Maybe so. Between Nurse Stein’s and my medical training, we could probably keep Jane Doe’s vitals strong enough to get her to an actual hospitable.” His voice was anything but optimistic.
“Do you have a better idea?”
“No, I don’t. We’ll have to ask Stein to assess Jane’s status before we can take any kind of action. Her condition might be too unstable to survive being abruptly removed from the hospital.”
“I’ll ask Natalie to introduce me to her mom tomorrow. We’ll go from there.”
“If the patient’s condition is stable.” He hesitated. “But, Ellie, when we kidnap Jane Doe, the gig’s up. We don’t have the evidence to prove a single crime has been committed at ABTC. Meanwhile, we will be guilty of kidnapping a comatose patient. In other words, the McGavins could take over two more victims’ bodies, while we land ourselves in jail. And Jane Doe could die in spite of our efforts. Is a small chance of saving her life worth letting your father’s killers go free?”
“Yes!” Ellie allowed the tears to run down her cheeks unabated. “I put this woman’s life in immediate jeopardy, Jake. I did that. I can’t knowingly let them murder her. I can’t. It’s too hard. I have no choice but to wake up every morning in Alexis Bixby’s body. But I can’t go to sleep each night, knowing my actions cost a woman her life, while I did nothing to help her. I do have a choice about that.”
Jake looked utterly defeated. “That’s what we’ll do, then.”
Ellie got an idea. “She’s got the best chance if she’s with specialists—anesthesiologists—to bring her out of the coma, right?”
“Right, but that—”
“I’m going to call nine-one-one and tell them the story. They’ll surely put Jane Doe under protective custody.”
Jake nodded. “Okay. We can have them test her drug levels. There’s a chance that will prove she’s been under a drug-induced coma all this time. Which will, at least, support our side of the story.”
Ellie dried her eyes. “And, one way or another, this whole thing will be over.” She grabbed her cellphone.
“Wait. Let me call Daniel. Before the police arrive at ABTC, we need to give him the chance to pack up and get the hell out of Spy Central. Otherwise he’ll get charged with invasion of privacy because we planted bugs.”
“I’ll call him.” She dialed and listened as the phone rang twice. She felt a flutter in her chest at the sound of Daniel’s “hello.” She wondered if she’d see him again, now that their ordeal was ending. “Hi, Daniel.”
“Ellie. I was just about to call you. I’ve been listening to the bug in Ethan’s office. A minute ago, some guy knocked on Ethan’s door and told him that—”
For a second or two, Ellie’s brain could not register Daniel’s words. She felt as though her heart had stopped.
Jake was watching her. He rose and stepped toward
her. “What happened?”
“We’re too late,” she said in a half whisper. “Jane Doe is dead.”
Chapter 24
An hour or two later, reeling from the horror of discovering she’d hastened someone’s death, Ellie was lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling when Daniel entered the apartment. “More bad news,” he said as he closed and double-bolted the lock.
“What now?” Jake asked. He’d made dinner for them—pasta, which seemed to be his only recipe.
“I had to clear out all my surveillance equipment. I picked up a cross-signal from someone else’s bug in the break room.”
Alarmed, Ellie jerked herself upright. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. We have to assume it’s the McGavins who put it there, which goes hand-in-hand with their having a keystroke tracer on the computer in the data-entry room. And it verifies my suspicion that they know we’ve bugged them.” He removed his jacket and draped it on the back of the dining-table chair. “Maybe it’s time we all threw in the towel.”
“And do what?” Ellie asked. “Hide out in Mexico?”
“That would be better than getting killed,” Daniel said.
She shook her head. “I want to do more with my life than just: avoid death for as long as possible.” And I’d be deserting my mother!
“You have got to stop working at ABTC,” Jake said to Ellie.
“I realize that,” Ellie said, “but if I disappear now, immediately after Jane Doe dies, they’ll know for sure that ‘Elizabeth Peterson,’ Daniel’s half-sister, was the one who planted bugs in their building.”
“They already do know that,” Daniel said.
“All they know for sure is that I snooped into the unidentified-persons report, which they resolved by getting rid of Jane Doe. Meanwhile, they’ve got their hands full with Jennifer’s worsening condition. Logically, they’ve got to be focused on getting a new Jane Doe right now.”
“Which, for all we know, is going to be you,” Jake retorted.
Ellie paused, needing a moment to shake off that appalling suggestion. “Would Jennifer really choose to occupy the body of a teenager?”
The Body Shifters (Book 1 Body Shifters Trilogy): A Novel (The Body Shifters Trilogy) Page 16