“Hello. I’m Whit Ewing. Chicago Tribune,” he said.

“Sorry. I’m Cindy Thomas.”

“Of the Chronicle?”

“That’s me.”

“I’ve been reading your reports. Not too bad.”

“Thanks, Whit. So, what’s the beef?”

“O’Mara is calling a defense witness as part of her case-in-chief. It’s a pretty clever tactic. Kramer can’t cross-examine his own witness —”

“So she gets over on him until he puts the witness on himself.”

“Very good.”

“Thanks, bud. I owe you one.”

“I just may hold you to that,” he said, grinning.

The sharp crack of Judge Bevins’s gavel brought the court to order.

“Please state your name,” said O’Mara.

“Dr. Sonja Engstrom.”

“Dr. Engstrom, what is your position at Municipal?”

“I’m director of pharmacy.”

“Here we go,” Whit Ewing said to Cindy. “The windup for the pitch.”

Chapter 55

SONJA ENGSTROM LISTED her credentials succinctly, said that she’d been at Municipal for seven years and was responsible for the systems and people who dispense medication. She seemed suitably impressed with herself, too.

O’Mara asked, “Could you tell the jury about those systems that you’ve put in place, Doctor?”

“Sure. We have an automated computer system linked to a dispensing mechanism.”

“What can you say about the accuracy of this system?”

“I’d say it’s ninety-nine point nine percent bulletproof.”

“Could you please explain?”

Cindy got it all down on her laptop. A physician would take a patient’s lab results and enter the diagnosis into the computer. The computer program would offer a menu of appropriate drugs, and the doctor would pick one. Then a nurse would pull up the patient’s name on the computer and enter her code.

“It’s a password, right? Everyone has their own code?” O’Mara asked.

“Exactly.”

“Please go on.”

“At the same moment the nurse enters her code, one of our pharmacists reviews and enters the order for that patient. This releases the brake on the machine that dispenses the drugs.”

“So it’s a kind of digital vending machine.”

“Correct,” said the witness, seemingly pleased with herself and with O’Mara for getting it right. “The nurse takes the patient’s drug out of a pocket in the machine and administers it to the patient.”

“A ‘bulletproof’ system?”

“Very close. The program can’t be altered, and the security codes leave an auditory trail.”

“I see,” said O’Mara. She walked back to her table, consulted her notes, turned back to the witness.

“Could a technician load the wrong drugs into the machine’s ‘pockets’?”

“I suppose it’s possible. . . .”

“Please answer yes or no.”

“Yes.”

“Could someone withhold a drug after removing it from the machine? Divert it, say, for personal use.”

“Yes.”

“If a physician makes a wrong diagnosis, wouldn’t the wrong medication be dispensed to the patient?”

The witness was blinking her eyes rapidly. Flustered maybe, Cindy thought, but more than that, she looked pained. So much for 99.9 percent reliability.

“Yes, but —”

“Thank you,” O’Mara cut in. “Now, isn’t it true that the number of pharmaceutical-based fatalities has increased threefold since Municipal was privatized three years ago?”