Doctored Evidence

by Michael Biehl

  Karen considered whether she should venture deeper. Seize the moment, she decided.

  “Sometimes do you know?”

  “Sure,” he said. “My problem is, I’m still…” He cut himself off. Karen listened to five seconds of silence.

  “You’re still what?”

  Gene cleared his throat. “I’m still too damned busy at work. In fact, I’ve got some work to do right now.”

  “Okay. ’Bye, Dad.”

  “’Bye, Tootsie Roll.”

  Karen put the phone down, nearly certain that what her father had almost let slip, what he had choked back, was, “I’m still in love with your mother.”

  She ran up the stairs into the bedroom and pulled several sheets from file 3 and a few memoranda out of file 1. The clinic and the hospital used different patient numbers, but it took only a few minutes to determine that the dates of service on some of the outpatient services performed at Shoreview matched up with the clinic bills for physician services. Larry had merely been confirming on which dates an actual service was rendered at the hospital versus those dates for which the physician service was completely fictitious.

  Just like Larry to be so thorough.

  She checked the bedroom alarm clock. It was after 1:30 P.M. She gathered up the file folders, crammed them in her briefcase, and ran downstairs. Jake was in the living room with stereo headphones clamped on his ears and a cigarette going in a glass ashtray.

  “Jake,” she yelled. “Jake!”

  “What?” he yelled back, lifting one earphone. Ornette Coleman emanated from the headset.

  “You don’t have to yell,” Karen pointed out. “Put out the cigarette. I’m going into the office.”

  “I thought you were done with that gig for the month.”

  “I just figured out there is no evidence of hospital involvement in the clinic billing fraud. I’m going in to finish my letter to the Office of the Inspector General.”

  “Weren’t you bounced as of yesterday?”

  “Actually, Joe said, ‘the end of the week.’ I figure I have until midnight tonight. I need some stuff on my computer.”

  Jake removed his headphones and turned off the stereo. “How’d you figure out the hospital isn’t incriminated by Larry’s files?”

  Karen frowned and dropped her briefcase on the floor. She lowered her chin. “I jumped to a conclusion. Larry’s abbreviation, ‘consp,’ doesn’t mean conspiracy. It means conspectus. It’s just a billing summary.”

  Jake laughed. “Man, Larry was kind of a nerd, wasn’t he? Who uses a word like ‘conspectus’?”

  “My dad knew it.”

  “I rest my case.” Jake helped Karen on with her jacket as she scooped up the briefcase. “You wearing your yoga togs to the office? Cool.”

  “No time to change. Besides, nobody’ll be in the administration offices on Saturday afternoon, except maybe Annie. And I’m not worried about offending Annie’s fashion sense.”

  “Go get ’em. Your chariot awaits.”

  Karen ran out the front door, her jacket open and flapping in the cold wind. She slipped on the glare ice at the top of the concrete steps leading to the driveway, but caught herself with the handrail and kept right on moving down the steps. Jake followed her out onto the front porch. He called after her.

  “A woman of valor who can find?” he said. “Her value is far above rubies.”

  Karen turned. “Omar Khayyam?” she inquired.

  “I think it’s from the Torah.”

  Karen waved. “Shalom. Gotta go.”

  Karen backed the Volvo, now intact, down the driveway, squealing the tires when she braked to shift the car into first gear. She took liberties with the speed limit and stop signs on the way to Shoreview Memorial, and wasted twenty minutes getting nabbed at a speed trap. As she arrived in front of the hospital parking garage, a group of robed Christmas carolers from Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, visiting the nursing home next to the hospital, filed slowly across the driveway, chatting and smiling. Karen gave them a blast with her horn. They parted, and she went hurtling into the garage.

  It was late afternoon by the time Karen swept into her office, plopped her briefcase on her desk, and threw her jacket onto a guest chair. With determination and without wasted motion she sat down at her desk, rotated her briefcase to face her, and popped open the latches. She lifted the selected portions of Larry’s files from her briefcase and placed them in neat piles in front of her. When she ran out of space on the desktop, she moved a stack of papers, the one held down by the softball-sized crystal paperweight, from her desk to a space on her credenza next to her telephone console. That was when she noticed that the red “Message Waiting” button was blinking on the console.

  No time for that, she thought, as she punched the “on” button of her computer. As the computer booted up, she rotated her chair back around to her desk, pulled a pen out of her drawer, and began making notes. She had not acquired the knack of writing at the keyboard. She preferred to make at least a rudimentary sketch of each paragraph in handwriting, then type from her notes. But she found she could not concentrate on the letter. The blinking message light kept nagging at her. She rotated her desk chair back around to the telephone, lifted the receiver, and pushed the button to hear the message.

  “Enter your code number now.” Karen did so. “You have one message in your mailbox. Message one, received Friday at 5:15 P.M. To hear the message, press 2.” The message had come in after she had left the office on Friday afternoon. She pressed 2.

  “Karen, it’s Emerson Knowles. Hoo boy, have I got some news for you on the Conkel case!”

  CHAPTER

  27

  In the fall of her senior year in college, Karen had received an award for attaining the highest academic average in her class in natural science courses. The honor was something of an embarrassment, inasmuch as she was a history major who had no intention of going on to graduate school in science. As a science student, she did not consider herself in the same league with the wonks who practically lived in the lab. She hated lab and could never get the cookbook experiments to come out right. But because she had a knack for scoring high on the multiple-choice exams favored by Hartford College science professors, she had taken as many science courses as her schedule would allow, her sole purpose being to up her grade point average, to help her gain admission to law school or a graduate program in history. Receiving the science award seemed to her like getting a prize for gaming the system.

  The prize also presented her with a dilemma. Along with a gaudy, cut-crystal paperweight, the recipient of the award received a scholarship for a graduate science program at a university in England. It was unthinkable to turn the award down. No one ever had. Her parents and everyone else who knew her assumed she would accept a prestigious fellowship worth thousands of dollars in free tuition. Everyone, that is, except Jake, who understood that she might want to avoid two years in an educational cul-de-sac of five-hundred-year-old buildings, four thousand miles away from him. But he offered little guidance on the decision, other than spouting Buddhist aphorisms and a seemingly useless pop psychology cliché in vogue at the time: “Trust your feelings.”

  Karen was not one to trust her feelings. She did the rational thing, the expected thing, and took the fellowship. Her term in England was the loneliest, dreariest, most wretched time of her life. It was not, however, a complete loss. Her fellowship research project took her into the university hospital, which set in motion her interest in health care. Plus, the experience was so lamentable that it did teach her to trust her feelings. Over the years she had gotten better at interpreting them. As she listened to Emerson Knowles’s voice mail message, she stared into the crystal paperweight and waited for the feelings to come.

  “My hat’s off to you, Karen. Great idea to get Conkel’s medical records from St. Peter’s Hospital. I think it’s safe to say we’ve got the damages part of this lawsuit under control. You ready for a little quiz? Question one. Name a r
ecently deceased hospital Chief Financial Officer who not only had an enlarged heart, but also was HIV positive. Good guess. Question two. Name an egotistical, overrated personal injury attorney whose damage case just went down the crapper. Right again. Imagine what the HIV positivity together with the heart disease does to Conkel’s life expectancy. Ho, ho. Before this, we had a forty-year-old victim who might work another twenty-five years, might live another thirty or thirty-five. But with this, Ben McCormick can kiss his claim for lost income to age sixty-five goodbye. What’s even better, he can kiss jury sympathy goodbye. Hell, by the time I’m done putting on expert witnesses the jury’ll think the hospital did the guy a favor. And the jury won’t like the victim for putting our doctors and nurses at risk by not disclosing his HIV status. That’s if the case ever gets to a jury. Hey, I bet Conkel never told his kids or his friends about this. His wife isn’t going to want publicity either, so we can use this to pressure her into a cheap settlement. The more I think about this, the better it gets. So congratulations, the hospital got lucky on this one. Stop worrying about your malpractice insurance, you won’t need it. Have a nice weekend, celebrate a little, call me Monday.”

  “If you would like to hear the message again, press 2.”

  Karen hung up. The last thing she felt was celebratory; she felt strange. Was it fear? No, fear was familiar, she would recognize it immediately. This was more like a combination of anticipation and frustration. But anticipation of what? And why frustration? She got out of her chair and walked to the window. A light snow flurry had just started. Ideas swirled in Karen’s head like the windblown snowflakes outside her window. The office seemed stuffy and confining. The only advantage the old section of Shoreview had over the new wing was that the old section had windows that could be opened and closed. Karen unlatched the window and pushed up on the sash. It stuck for a moment and then opened with a bang, driving a lone sparrow from the branches of the sugar maple.

  The cold air blowing in made Karen’s eyes water and stung her nostrils. She took a few deep breaths and blinked, as her vision cleared and she looked out at the hospital parking garage and the Traymont apartment building across the street. Below her was the front entrance to the hospital. A seed of suspicion implanted in her brain. In an instant, it sprouted and grew into a satisfying hypothesis. Another blast of arctic air caused her to take a half step backward and close the window.

  For the first time in almost two weeks, Karen felt her favorite feeling of all. She felt right, and she felt it all the way down to the soles of her feet.

  In the time it took her to cover the distance from the window to her desk chair, she mapped out a course of action. She picked up her telephone receiver and dialed.

  “Anne Delaney.”

  “Annie, I’m so glad you’re in the office on a weekend. Do you still have the security camera tape from the weekend before Larry died?”

  “No, I returned it to Max. Karen, my telephone console tells me you’re calling from your office. I thought you were out of here.”

  “Almost, but not quite. Annie, I need you for a couple hours. Stay put until Max Schumacher gets to your office, then call me back. Have you still got the videotape player in your office and the chronology you prepared when you watched the tape from the day Larry died?”

  “Yeah, sure. What’s going on?”

  “A little experiment, Annie.” Karen lowered her voice to a near whisper. “If I’m right, in a couple of hours well know who killed Larry.”

  “Hayes, you’re giving me the heebie-jeebies.”

  “Under the circs, Delaney, heebie-jeebies are completely appropriate. Sit tight.”

  “Security. Schumacher.”

  “Max, it’s Karen Hayes.”

  “Oh, yeah, Mrs. Hayes, I just got off the phone with your husband. Funny guy, he told me a good one. What do you get when you cross a donkey with an onion?”

  “Max,” asked Karen, nonresponsively, “why were you on the phone with my husband?”

  “You asked me to call you with the name of the owner of the pickup truck.” Karen had forgotten. “Anyways, most of the time you just get a smelly vegetable with long ears. But sometimes, just every once in a while …”

  I’m sorry, Max, I don’t have time right now. Max, I need you to get all of the security camera tapes for the week Larry Conkel died out of safekeeping and take them down to Anne Delaney’s office, okay?”

  “Okay.” Max sounded hurt. “We don’t keep all of them, you know. Just the ones we have a reason to keep.”

  Karen said that would be enough.

  “Don’t you even want to know,” asked Max, “the name of the guy with the pickup truck? I went to a lot of trouble.”

  “Sure, Max, I’m sorry. What’s the name?”

  Max assumed a magisterial tone. “The vehicle in question is registered to one Vincent H. Bernard, a resident of the city of Jefferson.”

  Karen was not surprised. “How lovely,” she commented. “A family that preys together.”

  “How’s that again, Mrs. Hayes?”

  “Max, on Monday, check into whether Vincent Bernard is related to Dr. Edward Bernard of our medical staff. Like maybe brothers.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’d lay money on it.”

  “You want I should call the officer who took the report on your Volvo break-in and have him check out this Vincent Bernard? He might still have your stuff in the truck. We shouldn’t wait too long.”

  “It can wait, Max,” insisted Karen. “Security tapes. Anne Delaney’s office. Now.”

  “Okey-doke, Mrs. Hayes.” Max still sounded broody. Karen relented.

  “All right, Max. What do you get, every once in a while?”

  His voice brightened. “A piece of ass that brings tears to your eyes.”

  Karen’s phone chirped. Anne was on the line, reporting that Max had arrived at her office with the security camera videotapes. Karen asked Anne to put the tape from the morning of Larry’s biopsy into the videotape player and cue it up to the place on the tape where the time display showed 4:57 A.M. Then Karen asked to be put on the speakerphone.

  “Okay, Karen,” said Anne, “we’re looking at November 21,4:57 A.M., and rolling.”

  “Good. Now Max, does your watch have a digital display?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. Set it to 5:00 A.M. and leave it there without starting it for a moment.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Anne’s voice interrupted. “Hey, there’s you, Max, coming to unlock the cath lab.”

  “Jeez, that can’t be me. I gotta lose some weight.”

  Karen spoke. “Now, Max, when the time display on the videotape turns to 5:00 A.M., start your watch. Got it?”

  “Check.” All three were silent for two minutes and several seconds. “There it is,” said Max. “She’s going.”

  “Okay, guys,” said Karen, “here’s the deal. Max, you watch the time display for any irregularities. Anne, watch the picture and note the time the people in your chronology make their appearance.”

  “This’ll be a rerun for me,” said Anne. “How long are we supposed to watch this?”

  Karen said two hours.

  “Two hours!” protested Anne. “Boy, you’re going to owe me big time! What are you going to be doing while Max and I are spending the rest of our Saturday afternoon bored out of our minds?”

  “Playing computer games,” replied Karen. “Stay alert, now. I’ll call you back in exactly two hours.”

  Late Saturday afternoon, Dr. Edward Bernard left the office of his travel agent, tickets to Aruba in hand, and climbed into his white Jaguar sedan to head home to his wife and son. Paula Conkel decorated an enormous Frasier fir tree in her living room with glass ornaments and colored lights. Joe Grimes watched the Hartford College basketball team on cable television; the team was losing badly to Southern Illinois University. Dr. Carson Weber rested in a patient room on the third floor of Shoreview Memorial Hospital, where he had be
en readmitted two days earlier, suffering from bacterial pneumonia. Karen’s secretary, Margaret, was feverishly cramming clothes into a suitcase and cursing her boyfriend Marty, who had just broken up with her. Jake Hayes got out his acoustic guitar and began to compose the tune to go with the lyrics he had just written for a new song, which he had tentatively titled “Karaoke Bites.” Karen Hayes sat in front of the large folding table in Unit 207 of the Traymont apartment building and switched on Larry Conkel’s computer.

  CHAPTER

  28

  The computer in Larry Conkel’s apartment was connected via modem into Shoreview Memorial Hospital’s central computer files. The menu intimidated Karen. It seemed to go on forever. Her own office computer offered her a choice of word processing, electronic mail, an appointment calendar, a Rolodex of names and addresses, and a calculator. The central computer, to which the terminal in Karen’s office did not have access, had dozens of menu choices, including an Internet service, medical records, anti-virus scan, medical library, Nexis news service, purchasing files, financial records, contract directory, billing histories, personnel records, and, as Karen had anticipated, one called “Security System.” She scrolled to it and pushed “Enter.” The monitor read:

  “ENTER PASSWORD”

  Karen had no idea what Larry’s password was, nor was she certain Larry’s password would be authorized to access the most sensitive functions. But she knew a password she figured would work on anything in the hospital’s system. She entered: “MEM CEO,” Joe Grimes’s password. The words on the monitor moved up one line, and a new prompt appeared:

  “ENTER ACCESS CODE”.

  Karen had already searched Larry’s studio apartment, but then she had been looking for a large reddish-brown folder. Fortunately, the apartment was small enough that now it took her only forty-five minutes to determine that nowhere in the place was a notebook or piece of paper containing a list of access codes, although she did notice that the check to Emergency Medical Services from the Jefferson Clinic was no longer in the coffee mug on the wall-mounted shelf where she had seen it on her first visit. There was no point in searching Larry’s office for a list of access codes. If Larry kept such a list in his office, it would take months to find.