Boston Cream (20 page)

“See anything?” I asked.

“I was just wondering if the alarm was for real. Some people are too cheap to install one. They just get the decal and paste it on.”

“And?”

“She’s got the system. I can see contacts on the door frame and window.”

“All right, back to the car. We wait her out.”

We were heading back toward the street when a steel-grey Ford pulled up to the curb and two men got out, both in suits and overcoats and short haircuts. One lit a cigarette. Neither looked happy.

“Fuck,” Ryan said.

“Cops?”

“Gotta be. And by the cut of those suits, I’d say Homicide. They’re usually the snappiest dressers in a squad.” We turned and ran down the path into the backyard. There was a chin-high wire fence all around. Neither of us even stopped. We clambered up the fence, scrambling for toeholds, and vaulted over into the yard that bordered Carol-Ann’s at the rear. Ryan landed clear on the grass. My right foot hit a muddy patch and my legs went out from under me. I landed hard on my back, winded. I was trying to catch my breath when a glass door at
the back of the house slid open and an unshaven man in a bathrobe stuck his head out and said, “What the fuck you doin’ in my yard!” My
yad
.

“You seen a grey tabby cat?” Ryan asked. “It got out of the house and jumped the fence.”

“Bullshit,” the guy snarled. “I seen the woman who lives back there. I never seen a cat there and I sure as hell never seen you.”

“Stay cool,” Ryan said. “We’re just trying to find the cat.”

The guy reached behind him and stepped out brandishing a red aluminum baseball bat.

Another beefcake with a bat. I’d fucking had it with all of them. I got to my feet and pulled the Beretta from my holster and said, “Get back in your house, asshole.”

He put up his hands so fast the bat fell at his feet. Then he backed up into his house and slid the glass door shut. As we moved toward the side of his house I saw him drop a security bar down and turn the blinds closed.

It didn’t take long to get the details on an all-news radio station. An unidentified Roxbury woman had been found beaten to death in Franklin Park, which the news anchor called a “troubled area.” Her name was being withheld until next of kin were notified, but witnesses who saw the body before it was bagged described the victim as a white woman in her thirties. The police refused to comment on whether it was a sex slaying but a spokesman said they were following several leads. I wished I could just phone them and say, “Daggett did it,” and hang up and have it mean something.

“What now?” Ryan asked.

“We bypass her and go straight to Stayner,” I said. “He knows more than he told me.”

“You know where he’d be on a Saturday?”

I opened my cell and scrolled through my recent calls, and
selected Tania Hutchison. She answered on the second ring.

“Tania, it’s Jonah Geller, the investigator.”

“Hi,” she said. “What’s up?”

“If I needed to speak to Dr. Stayner today, where would I find him?”

“On a Saturday? I have no idea. It’s not golf season yet or beach weather.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“Yes, he had us all out there for a barbecue last year. But I can’t tell you that, it’s—”

“Tania, please. I wouldn’t have called if it weren’t urgent. This isn’t just about David anymore. My partner’s been abducted.”

“Oh my God. That’s—I—I don’t know what—”

“Dr. Stayner can help me find her. She’s a woman your age, and she was taken by a man who will kill her if I don’t find her first.”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do, Tania. You want to find out what happened to David too, don’t you? You told me that. You need to know how you got your new position. Just tell me where Stayner lives. He’ll never know it came from you.”

I heard her take a deep breath in and blow it out. “Do you know Concord at all?”

D
usk was falling as we drove into Concord. It was quaint, historic, a fine slice of period Americana. A month from now they’d be re-enacting the skirmish between the Minutemen and the British regulars that essentially marked the beginning of the revolution. Who gave a shit? I was dialled in on Stayner and how best to approach him. Reason with him? Push him around? Leave him alone in the room with Ryan? There was no guarantee he’d be home. He might have had plans for the weekend, might be gone up or down the Cape or the shore, whatever they called it here. A man of his means might have season tickets to the theatre, opera, a Celtics game. The road was dark—no street lights, banners or bunting out here, just a ditch and a line of hedges or walls in front of houses that were fairly traditional in design but big, the lots at least a hundred feet wide, with long driveways running up to columned entrances.

As the numbers rolled up to Stayner’s, there was nowhere to pull up, get a sense of how many people might be home, if any. There was no curb, barely a shoulder. We either had to go past his driveway for some further recon, or up it.

When in doubt, go up.

His was a large Tudor cottage with a substantial two-storey
extension on one side that almost doubled the size of the original house, matched closely but not exactly with timber and stucco. Lights showed on both floors. A black Mercedes SUV was parked on a crushed-shell drive. I parked directly behind it so it couldn’t move. We walked up a flagstone path to a door that had a wrought-iron knocker in the centre, a plain oval that I banged three times hard against oak.

A tall, graceful woman in her fifties answered. She looked at me pleasantly, then at Ryan and something shifted subtly in her, like a doe picking up a feral scent in the woods.

“I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I need a moment with Dr. Stayner.”

“Is he expecting you?”

“No. But it’s an emergency.”

“But he’s not on call.”

“It’s not a medical emergency. Please—is it Mrs. Stayner?”

“Yes. I’m Mrs. Stayner.”

“Please tell your husband Jonah Geller is here and that I have to speak to him.”

“Will it take long? We have to leave in an hour to pick up friends and then we’re going out for the evening.”

“The sooner you call him, the sooner we’ll be out of here.”

“All right, just a minute. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t invite you in.” Whether I minded or not, she closed the door and locked it. About forty seconds later, Charles Stayner opened it. He was wearing a casual gentleman’s weekend outfit: tan corduroy pants, a navy V-neck sweater and a white turtle-neck under it. Polished loafers, even in the house.

“Mr. Geller,” he said, extending his hand. “And you are?”

Ryan said, “Giulio.”

“I think my wife mentioned we don’t have much time—”

“Neither do I, Doctor. My partner’s been kidnapped.”

“That’s awful. Terrible. But why come to me?”

“Because it was Sean Daggett who took her.”

His face went taut fast, but not fast enough to conceal the flash of fear he felt at that name.

“I know everything,” I said. “The organ ring. The secret operations. That’s what David was running from, isn’t it?”

“Please, keep your voice down.”

“Tell you something else, Chuck. Carol-Ann Meacham is dead. She was murdered last night.”

“Are you serious?”

“Beaten to death and dumped in a park. The police haven’t released her name yet but my partner was watching her house. Someone lured her out with a phone call and killed her to keep her quiet. First David, now her. How safe do you feel, Chuck? Geez, I hope no one followed me here.”

His eyes darted up the driveway to the road, as if to scope it for more cars.

“Invite us in. Now. You tell us what we need to know, we leave, and you go on your double date.”

“The other option,” Ryan said, “is you cancel on medical grounds.”

“Are you threatening me?” Stayner hissed, his face growing red. “Geller, I can’t believe you brought this thug to my—”

His voice cut off as Ryan bunched his sweater and turtle-neck collar tight in one first. “This thug happens to love that girl too, Doc, so cut the shit and ask us in.”

He had Johnnie Walker Black in his study. He poured himself a drink and diluted it slightly from a jug of water in a beer fridge. He didn’t offer one to Ryan or me, which meant one less thing to throw in his face.

“This isn’t what you think,” he said.

“What do I think?”

“That I’m in this for money. I’ve never made a penny, not one. Everything he pays me I give to the hospital.”

“Guess what?” I said. “I don’t care. All I need from you is a way to find my partner.”

“Are you sure it was him?”

“I saw it with my own eyes. And if he hurts her, Doctor, you’re going to pay with everything you have. Now start with David. Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He hasn’t contacted me since he disappeared.”

“Not even once.”

“No.”

“That means he didn’t trust you. If you were really his friend and beloved mentor, he would have. It gets me thinking. Maybe you were the one who sold him out, told those thugs where to find him.”

“Never!”

“What happened to Mr. Patel?” I asked. “What went wrong?”

He looked stricken and sank down onto a couch that faced a wall unit lined with books on medicine and science and ethics, the scheming hypocrite.

“Two things,” he whispered.

“Speak up.”

“Are you recording this?”

“No, you asshole, just speak up.”

“Two things went wrong. The first was that David was there at all. You don’t imagine for a minute that I would have asked him to join this—this team I was forced to put together.”

“Forced?” I snorted. “That’s your story?”

“It is.”

“You never take money?”

“I take it,” he said. “But if you check the records at our foundation, you’ll see twenty-five-thousand-dollar donations made anonymously after every surgery.”

“Anonymously,” I said to Ryan. “What bullshit.” I actually
believed Stayner but didn’t want him to know it. A man doesn’t become a world-class surgeon without being a control freak. I wanted him worked up. That’s when things slip out.

“It’s true. Daggett has a son, Michael, who has chronic kidney disease. Nephritis, to be precise. Michael needed a transplant and nothing was materializing. Daggett came to me about a year and a half ago, when Michael was twelve, and told me he wasn’t going to watch his son die waiting for the organ bank to call. He had found a willing donor who was a good match and he wanted me to do a private transplant. I told him, of course, that I couldn’t help him, that he was out of line to even approach me. Then he showed me these.”

He went behind a walnut desk and opened the centre drawer. He took out an envelope and slid out half a dozen photos of the same boy whose photo was on his desk at work: in shorts and a T-shirt chasing a Frisbee in a schoolyard; in a school uniform getting into a car; entering the very house we were in.

“That’s my son Devin,” he said. “He’s sixteen. He has his first driving lesson Monday.”

“I get it,” I said.

“No, you don’t.” He took out a second envelope and tossed it to me. I opened it to find half a dozen grisly crime-scene photos of bodies hacked and shot to death, digitally altered to include his son’s face on each body.

“I threw my guts up when I saw these, Geller. My son is every bit as precious to me as Daggett’s is to him. What could I do? He made me assemble a team of people I thought would go along with it. They’d get ten thousand cash apiece for a few hours work. I’d get twenty-five. He’d cover all the costs.”

“How did you find this team?”

“I’ve been in Boston since medical school,” Stayner said. “I know everyone in medicine here. And I know who has a hard time making ends meet. Boston is an expensive place to live.
The taxes are high. Certain practitioners have alimony payments, kids in private school. I knew who could use an extra ten grand in cash. For obvious reasons I did not include David. No matter how desperate he was for money, I knew this was beyond his principles.”

“And you and this team performed the surgery on Michael Daggett.”

“Yes. The week of Christmas before last. The hospital had acquired a clinic in Framingham that had a wing under construction. It was deserted. We set up a sterile unit there one night and extracted the kidney from the donor and transferred it into Michael. We were gone before anyone arrived the next day.”

“Did you know anything about the donor?”

Stayner looked into his glass. It was empty. He looked at the Johnnie Walker, then set his glass down and looked for something else to do with his hands. “I didn’t want to know. And I didn’t want him to see me, so I insisted he be sedated before I arrived.”

“Do you know if he is alive and well today?”

“There’s no reason to assume otherwise,” he said. “A couple of days of post-operative care and he was discharged.”

“So how did it get from helping Daggett’s kid to an ongoing thing?”

“How do you think? He’s a natural predator. Not schooled in any way but clever as a wolf. It didn’t take him long to see the profits in this could be immense. Just consider the demographics. There are thousands of people in or close to Boston who need transplants, eighty per cent of them kidneys. If you’ve done the research I suggested, you know the supply is desperately short. And some of those thousands, as in any sample that size, are very wealthy people. Important people. More so here than in most cities.”

“And Daggett’s helping them jump the line.”

“Milking them for a fortune is what he’s doing. Funny
thing is, I know half of them. They’re lying there under sedation and I see people I know from one of the clubs, boards, conferences, charity things I do. Politicians, bankers, new money, old. Daggett is finding them and using me as his cash cow.”

“Are they still done out in Framingham?”

“No. He set up a clinic in a defunct mortuary he bought in Mattapan.”

“A mortuary.”

“It works. There are ambulance bays if his donors are being brought in anesthetized. Prep rooms that serve perfectly well as operating theatres. You don’t need much for laparoscopic surgery. We use one room for extraction, one for transplant.”