Page 73 of I’ll Be Watching You

“I planted a worm in the system so that I can get in through a back door. Let’s go to the office. The computers there are better than my laptop.”

“And they won’t trace it to us?”

Luisa gave me a look that said I was clearly an ignoramus. “No. I’m good at what I do.”

“I guess I have to trust you, don’t I? What do you need from the system?”

“The clinical trials have Willa Blankenship all over them, but she’s not a VA employee. Someone at the VA medical center had to have approved the Phase 1 trial. I need to find out who it is, and there should be records in the system. Tess and I have several names, but it’s a lot of people to investigate and we’re running out of time. Plus, I want to see what might have happened to the file that was deleted. Nothing is gone forever.”

“I think it’s Jim Novak,” I told her, and explained what I learned at Honor House about his Monday morning appointment at the medical center.

“That’s even better. I’ll search for him and if I don’t find anything, that confirms his file must be the one missing. Then I’ll try to undelete it, but that might take time because I don’t know their system yet. I also want to look at Christina Aberdeen’s record. You said Liz noticed a year was missing from a patient file before the file disappeared, right?”

“Yes. She also said it wasn’t the first time this had happened.

“Well, if we’re right and the year is missing from the patients who were illegally deleted from the clinical trial, then Aberdeen will also have a missing year.”

“Can you search everyone who has a missing year? Maybe we can find all ten people Georgia said were omitted from the report.”

Luisa laughed. “No. If I have a name or record number, then I can look at that record, but I can’t search on fields that don’t exist.”

“You know this is very illegal,” I said. “Medical records are sacrosanct.”

“I’m not going to look at anything I’m not supposed to.”

Now it was my turn to shoot her the look.

“I’m not going to do anything with any information I might accidentally see,” she clarified. “My goal is to identify the staff who had access to the initial research program, a list of vets who were part of the trial, and a list hopefully that includes the ten who were removed. And, search for Jim Novak’s file. If it’s completely missing, I’m screwed, but if it was deleted I might be able to find it.”

“Let’s not tell anyone about this, okay? Especially anyone with a badge.”

“Is Cal really that uptight?”

“Nope. But I don’t want to test him on something that is clearly a misdemeanor and likely a felony.”

“Fair enough. And I don’t think we should tell Jack either. He can be super uptight about breaking the rules.”

“Breaking rules he’s mostly cool with, it’s breaking laws where he has a problem.” I paused, considered other repercussions. “If we find something through these files that helps Dad, we can’t use it.”

“Of course we can,” Luisa said.

“No, because we got the information illegally. We’re going to have to get the info legally as well.”

Lu frowned. “Well, once we know what it is, then we can find it again, right?”

“I suppose,” I said, though I was getting a headache trying to figure out how. If we were cops, we’d be screwed—anything that came from our investigation using illegally obtained information would be dismissed from evidence. But we weren’t cops. We were PIs. We could find a way. We had to. Our dad’s freedom—and maybe his life—was on the line.

It didn’t take us long to reach the office. I didn’t want to stay and do nothing, but I wasn’t going to leave Luisa alone. I asked her to give me something.

“Tess is focused on those who are still working at the VA, but someone needs to talk to the woman who retired last year.”

“I’ll take her,” I said.

“She’s either in Wyoming or Scottsdale,” Luisa said as she plugged her tablet into her computer.

“Must be nice to have two homes,” I said. While I didn’t mind the heat, I wouldn’t mind spending all days that exceeded 120 degrees up in Wyoming. Basically, July and August.

“I’ve called Annette Blankenship, Willa’s daughter, four times,” Luisa said. “She hasn’t called me back.”