Just Life

by Neil Abramson

  “… twenty-two Mississippi, twenty-three Mississippi…”

  “For Christ’s sake, type faster,” Daniel spluttered.

  “N-N-A. There, that’s it,” Sid said.

  Nothing happened.

  “… twenty-six Mississippi, twenty-seven Mississippi—”

  “I don’t understand!” Sid declared.

  “… twenty-nine Mississippi—” Sam’s voice quivered in panic.

  “Wait! That’s right!” Sid said to himself, and punched in an H.

  The bolt of the door slid open with a reassuring click. Sid smacked his forehead. “I forgot that the skeleton key is always a seven-symbol password. So I needed to add an H to the end of Channa’s name to make it fit.”

  “That’s really nice,” Daniel snarled. “But can we get the hell off the street now?”

  They moved inside and quickly shut the door behind them.

  Even in the dim emergency lighting, Sam could see the stainless steel polished to a high sheen that served as a proxy for professionalism and a poor substitute for empathy. She always felt like a contaminated swab in an otherwise sterile surgical field in Morgan’s hospital. “She keeps the heavy-duty lab stuff on the floor below us,” Sam said.

  Daniel and Sid followed her to a door that led to the staircase off one of the corridors. The door had the same type of alarm box as the entrance.

  “I don’t remember seeing that before,” Sam said, pointing to the alarm.

  “I put it in a few months ago,” Sid said. “Morgan told me she wanted to protect her more expensive equipment.”

  “Trusting fellow, isn’t she?” Daniel said.

  Sid took another key card out of his pocket and passed it through the box. Once the light on the box turned green, he entered the skeleton key passcode. The door snapped open, revealing a short flight of stairs.

  Sam reached to flip on the light switch at the top of the stairway.

  “Don’t!” Sid yelled. He was too late. Bright lights illuminated the stairs and then the floor below. “Does the phrase breaking and entering mean anything to you, dear?” Sid asked.

  “Relax. There are no windows downstairs,” Sam told him confidently. “No one can see the lights.”

  “I actually was worried about an auxiliary alarm system integrated into the light function.”

  Sam stopped mid-step. “A what?”

  “A remote alarm that gets triggered when the light switch is activated.”

  “Is there one?” Daniel asked.

  “I didn’t put one in,” Sid said. “Didn’t think of it. But I’m not the only locksmith in New York, you know?”

  “How do we find out?” Sam asked.

  Sid turned his head in every direction and listened. “There would be some signal—a beep or chirp—to give you a chance to deactivate. I don’t hear anything. And the light switch looks pretty low-grade—not strong enough to carry an alarm current.” Sid shrugged and led them down the stairs.

  The sublevel of Morgan’s animal hospital was huge and loaded with high-tech medical and computer equipment. “Jesus, you weren’t joking, Samantha,” Daniel said. “This is some serious stuff.”

  Sam was just as shocked. “This wasn’t here when I used to work with her. Most of this tech looks brand-new.”

  Daniel ran his hand over a particularly large and intimidating machine. “It would have to be. This Voss gas hematology machine was just being tested when I left Cornell.”

  “Where would she get the money?” Sam asked, furious at all the times Morgan had accused her of cutting into the profitability of her practice.

  “Perhaps she invested wisely,” Sid offered.

  “Well, it’s ours for the night,” Daniel said. “Let’s fire this stuff up and get to work.” He rubbed his hands together like a little kid with his first radio-controlled toy.

  Sam studied the digital controllers on the daunting machine. “You know how to use this?”

  “A little,” Daniel answered. “But luckily”—he grabbed a thick black binder from a spot next to the machine and showed it to her—“it comes with instructions.” He pushed a red button on the computer console attached to the machine and it whirred to life. “This’ll take a few minutes to boot up.”

  “What’s it do, exactly?” Sid asked, peering over their shoulders.

  “In about ninety minutes, it will kick out a detailed chemical analysis breakdown of a blood, urine, or fecal sample, tell us what’s in there that shouldn’t be and what should be there that isn’t.” Daniel dropped a pair of reading glasses on the bridge of his nose and, within moments, was lost in the manual, oblivious to everyone and everything except the workings of the machine slowly awakening in front of him.

  “Like on CSI?” Sid asked.

  That got only a “Hmmm” from Daniel.

  Sam knew that response. Her father’s all-encompassing concentration was what had made him such a brilliant scientist—and, as he got more successful, an increasingly crappy father. His enthusiasm for “solving the puzzle,” as he often called his work, was mutually exclusive with those characteristics that most people looked for in their fellow humans—like warmth, compassion, empathy, and self-awareness.

  “Can I help you?” Sam asked. Daniel’s response from behind the binder was unintelligible, but she took it as a “Not yet.”

  Sam found a computer monitor and keyboard across the room and powered them on. She figured that as long as they were here in violation of many laws, she would also pull the medical records on the dogs in isolation in the hope that there might be something useful in the treatment histories.

  In a few seconds the screen kicked into the Veterinary Office Practice Management Software program that Morgan and most other large veterinary practices used. VOPMS was a menu-driven program that allowed the treating vet instant access to any patient’s medical history. Morgan, not surprisingly, had the version of the system that also auto-billed for each service administered and then robocalled the client every ten days in the sinful event the client had left the office with a balance due.

  Sam clicked on the section of the screen for patient medical records and then double-clicked on the “Browse by name” section. She typed in the name of one of the dogs. The screen told her, “No records found.” She tried another name and got the same answer.

  “What the hell?” she muttered, and pulled out the list of owners of the dogs in isolation. Sam typed in the first name—“No records found.” Then the second name—“No records found.” She went down the list one by one and typed in the name of every owner. For each name she received the same smug answer from the computer monitor: “No records found.”

  She thought over the animals she knew and typed in “Monster”—“No records found.”

  Sam eventually guessed the terminal wasn’t connected to the master system, so she moved to another terminal. She received identical answers.

  She tried a third terminal with the same inexplicable results—no records of any dog.

  Finally Sam tried the terminal upstairs in the reception area. That terminal reported the same three impossible words: “No records found.”

  She returned to the basement scratching her head and found Sid reading a book entitled Canine Anatomy Studies.

  “Fascinating stuff,” he said. “I never realized how closely the heart resembles your average, bottom-of-the-market lock tumbler system.”

  “Some hearts are less complicated than others,” Sam said with a nod toward her father. “How much do you know about computers?”

  “I can turn them on, but that’s about it,” Sid said.

  Sam phoned Luke at the shelter. He was their resident computer geek.

  “How do you feel about a little breaking and entering?” Sam asked. Luke had a deeply rooted moral code. The problem, Sam had learned, was that his code actually had little to do with the law. She was counting on that now. “I need your help with a computer problem.”

  “Sure.” Luke sounded oddly happy
with the request. “Give me two minutes to pull my thumb drives together.”

  “The alarm is still off. We’re in the basement,” she told him, and then hung up.

  Less than five minutes later, Sam heard soft footsteps on the floor above. She hoped Luke would be able to make sense of this.

  “Right. Checking it out now,” the voice upstairs said.

  Sam knew that voice and it didn’t belong to Luke.

  Sid, Daniel, and Sam shared a look of “the thing is coming for us and we can’t get away” panic. They couldn’t hide under a desk, turn off the lights, or fade into the walls. They were nailed.

  Kendall reached the bottom step, still talking into his cell phone. He scanned the room, taking it all in. Sam could tell that he was as shocked to see them as they were to be seen. “Hold on, Cap. Need to check something out,” Kendall said into the phone while staring at Sam. She met his eyes and slowly shook her head.

  “No,” Kendall spoke into the phone. “All fine here. Must be a short in the auxiliary alarm. I’ll let Morgan know everything is OK so she can go back to bed.” Kendall turned around and headed back up the stairs without a further glance at the intruders.

  When Kendall reached the top, they all started breathing again. “Just be sure to turn off the lights and lock up when you leave,” Kendall called down the steps. He closed the basement door without waiting for an answer.

  A few seconds later, Sam heard the front door close. She turned to Sid. “Auxiliary alarm?”

  He shrugged. “Not mine. I guess she didn’t trust my work.”

  Before Sam could say another word, Luke bounded down the stairs like a puppy freed from a kennel. This time Daniel didn’t even bother to look up from his binder.

  “What’ve you got?” Luke asked.

  “I’m trying to retrieve the medical records of the dogs that came to us through Morgan. No matter what I do, the system tells me there are no records.”

  Luke sat at the nearest terminal, removed a thumb drive from a chain around his neck, and shoved it into the USB port on the terminal. The screen went blank and then returned with a blinking A:/ prompt. He made a few keystrokes and a wash of information poured onto the screen almost too fast to follow. “Well, that’s a problem,” he said, and tugged on his ponytail.

  “What?” Sam asked.

  “All the data on the main drive has been dumped and scrunched.”

  “Dumped?”

  “Yeah, backed up onto a portable flash drive and then—”

  “Deleted?”

  “No, not just deleted. Deleted you can find. Deleted material stays on the hard drive and can be reconstructed. This drive was scrunched—a specific program was used to shred the data on the hard drive to prevent it from being reconstructed.”

  “Seems like a lot of effort to go through,” Sam said.

  Luke shook his head. “Not really. You can download a program off the Internet for twenty bucks, load it onto your machine, and it will do it automatically. Maybe she had a problem with security and liked to keep her records mobile.”

  “Or maybe she was trying to hide something from her staff,” Sam suggested.

  “There’s that too.”

  “But you’re sure it’s all gone?” Sam found it difficult to believe Morgan would just delete her files. She had always seemed so anal.

  “Pretty much. Let me see something.” Luke took another thumb drive off his chain and swapped it with the one in the USB port. “Depending on what program she used, I might be able to…” Luke watched the data load on the screen. “There it is.” He hit a few buttons and the printer attached to the computer spit out three sheets. “I can tell you the file names that were downloaded onto the flash drive. This is the most recent activity.” Luke handed Sam the sheets.

  “Thanks, but I need the records themselves. The names won’t help.”

  “Sorry. Best I can do. There might be other scraps buried here and there on the system, but not the whole records and probably obscured by gibberish. You’d need a real computer forensics guy to figure that out.”

  “Thanks for trying,” Sam said, both confused and disappointed.

  Luke rose from the chair. “I better get back before Greg kills someone. Things are a bit tense at the moment. I’ll keep thinking, though.” Luke jogged up the stairs.

  Sam flipped through the sheets from Luke. Sure enough, many of the file names matched the last names of the dogs now in her care. “Weird,” she mumbled. She was just about to give up when she noticed a record name on the final page.

  Nick.

  No last name. Certainly a coincidence, but…

  “Luke!” Sam waved him back down and showed him the page. “Can you see if you can find any other references to the name Nick on the system? Anything, anywhere, OK?”

  Luke was already at the terminal, his fingers flying across the keys.

  Sam paced, trying to make sense of this latest development. In five minutes four sheets of paper shot out of the printer. “There were only two other hits,” Luke said. Sam grabbed the papers. The first three pages appeared to be a duplicate of the prior printout except that all of the file names were followed by “-cvtp.” The last page was covered with binary code gibberish. Totally meaningless, except—

  There, in the middle of the page, squeezed among all the zeros and ones, Sam saw two words that made the room spin: Nick Lewis.

  “That can’t be,” she said. “Wait a minute. Could this be an old record, like from when I worked here?”

  Luke shook his head. “These are the most recent activity entries. That’s why I can still get them. Two weeks old maybe, and that’s probably tops.”

  “But why does she have a record of my dog?”

  “Only Morgan can tell you that.”

  Sam called Sid over. “Can you go back to the shelter with Luke and give Greg a hand?”

  “Of course,” Sid said, and followed Luke up the stairs.

  Sam grabbed her cell phone and dialed Greg. She could hear the barking and whining of a roomful of dogs behind him as soon as he picked up. “Sending you back some help. Is everyone stable?” she asked.

  “So far. What did you find?”

  “Trying to figure something out. Has Nick been at Morgan’s in the last week?”

  “Nope. Why?”

  “This is really important. Think!” Sam hoped the urgency in her voice got through to him.

  “OK, OK.” Greg was silent for a long minute. “Wait. Yeah. I had to return some of her mail we got by accident. You know how she gets about—”

  “Was he ever out of your sight?”

  “I’m thinking… maybe… wait. Morgan said she wanted to talk to me. Some bullshit about warning me not to provide veterinarian services at the shelter. I left Nick in reception for a few minutes—didn’t want any more trouble between them. But he was right where I left him when I got back. Now tell me why?”

  “I’ll explain later,” Sam said, and hung up on him.

  In the cold confines of Morgan’s basement, Sam stared at the list of files in her hand and struggled to pull the jagged pieces together. The problem was that the pieces made no sense. She began to get the feeling that everything was tilting out of control and downward.

  “Samantha!” Daniel shouted from the other end of the room. She found him bent over the eyepieces of a stereomicroscope. “I need you to look at something,” he said.

  “From the blood analysis?”

  “No. The first samples are still cooking. But while I was waiting, I figured I’d take a look at some of the fecal samples using Morgan’s high-mag microscope.”

  Sam peered into the tubes. “What am I looking at?” She saw what appeared to be a tiny jumble of elongated translucent capsules. “What are those? Parasites?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then what?”

  “Not certain. I’ve never seen it in a canine sample before.”

  “But you have seen it before?”

&
nbsp; “I think so,” he said, and looked into the scope again.

  “Can we stop playing twenty questions, Dad? I’m having a bad day. What the hell is it?”

  “Cholera. I think it’s cholera.”

  Sam stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Dogs don’t get cholera.”

  “True. Generally not. Unless they ingest a massive amount of infected material or are immune-compromised.”

  “There’s no cholera here. Those kids at Riverside have rabies symptoms, not vomiting and diarrhea. And anyway, cholera is bacterial, not viral. You must be wrong.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

  “Whose sample is this anyway?”

  Daniel checked his notes. Sam witnessed the very rare event of his scientific confusion. “It’s Nick’s,” he said.

  “What?” Sam grabbed the notes from his hand and confirmed the name. “Now I know this is FUBAR. My dog eats organic dog food at fifty dollars a bag. There’s no way he picked up a casual case of cholera in New York City.”

  “Then I can’t explain how. There’s a dip test that can confirm this, but…”

  “But we can’t get it without disclosing why.”

  “And turning the dogs over to the CDC,” Daniel said.

  “And assuming it is cholera?”

  “We’re doing everything correctly. Fluids, antibiotics, careful disposal of contaminated feces, and lots of bleach in the infected areas. This also may explain why the dogs seem to be doing better. With appropriate palliative care to minimize dehydration and antibiotics, cholera usually isn’t fatal.”

  “What about the other samples?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Sam remembered the papers in her hand. “Do the letters CVTP mean anything to you?”

  “No. Why?”

  She explained the deletion of the records and the reference to Nick on Morgan’s computer.

  “You don’t think this is coincidence?” Daniel asked.

  “No. And you don’t either,” she said.

  “But where’s the connection? As you said, these kids certainly don’t have cholera.”

  “There may be no connection to these kids at all,” Sam said. “That’s the point. The dogs are being blamed for an illness that has nothing to do with them—”