The Angel Maker - 2 (19 page)

She walked him to the front of the building. She walked quickly, expecting him to keep up.

As they stopped to shake hands, she said, "The implications of what you're suggesting are horrible, of course. The medical community as a whole and surgeons in particular are just beginning to address ways of more closely monitoring the donor crisis. If more people donated their organs at death, we wouldn't be seeing any of this. If you're looking for a possible candidate," she continued, "I would start with surgeons reprimanded by the AMA-someone suspended and out of work. Frustrated. Angry. I assume we agree this person is deranged, and such thinking could easily distort the Hippocratic Oath. As doctors, we're sworn to save human life wherever possible. He or she reasons that the donor can get by on one kidney, that the recipient will die without that replacement organ. You have three dead, you said. Three out of a hundred or three out of five? That is how he is thinking. He may be playing percentages, I'm sorry to say." She touched his arm. "All this is just the long way of saying that it could be anyone disturbed enough to convince himself that what he's doing is not only acceptable, but ethically sound. He may see himself as an angel of mercy."

Mention of the word "angel" triggered vivid images from his youth. He remembered playing in the snow, lying down and fanning his arms and legs so that the impression he left behind resembled that of an angel. Only now he saw things differently: Inside that impression lay the bleached white bones of a skeleton. He said, "An angel? Hardly. An angel maker is more like it."

It gave Pamela Chase a sense of importance to be summoned at a moment's notice out to the farm. He needed her! Perhaps he would make love to her again; perhaps his calling-her out here had nothing whatsoever to do with work, as his phone call had implied.

A low, mid-morning smoke-gray fog hung over the area where the farm sat, running from the ground to the tops of the tall trees that rimmed the ridges behind it. She spotted the fog only briefly before disappearing into it, and this made her wonder whether you ever saw things for what they were while you were inside them, a part of them.

The fog forced her to drive more slowly, and it gave her a few minutes to think. Seemed like all she did was think-that's how a person all alone spends her time, she thought, trapped inside your thoughts and dreams as this car was trapped inside the fog. Moving slowly. Crawling. Waiting for the phone to ring.

Waiting for the workday to start. Waiting. Always thinking ahead, never really being where you are, but somewhere you hope to be. Strange way to live your life.

She parked alongside his Trooper and watched the mud as she climbed out, because she had been on her way to work when the phone had rung and wasn't very well prepared for the conditions out here. She loved the man-that was her problem. He knew it, too, which put her at a disadvantage because there was little she wouldn't do for him, and he made the most of it. With sex now part of their relationship, she wondered where it might lead next. Either it would turn magical or sour-no telling which. If those tics of his were any indication, then it was going sour. She wasn't sure where they had come from, but it gave her an incredibly creepy feeling each time one happened, and they were getting worse. No doubt about that.

She trudged around to the basement door and knocked. It was colder in the fog. She was shivering by the time he answered.

He locked the door securely behind her and started giving orders before he even said hello. "Run the blood tests, will you? Then scrub up and prep him please. Right kidney and spleen." "Both?"

He stopped, turned, and looked her in the eye. "Are you questioning me?" It was just a flicker, just something passing across his eyes like a reflection on a pair of mirrored sunglasses, but it ran her blood cold. There was an implied threat behind this question of his. There was someone else someone she didn't know-behind his eyes. just a flicker, then gone, like the tics when they had first started. "Right kidney and spleen," she repeated obediently. "Good," he said, turning his back on her. He had one of those tics then. His head snapped violently toward his lifting shoulder, remained pinched there, intractable, and finally relaxed. She wanted to offer her hands to him-to rub the knots out of his back. She knew the pain of these tics because she had witnessed his face recently all the muscles twitching and distorting like some kind of Halloween mask. It just had to hurt. A short backrub was just the thing for him. But she didn't offer it. They didn't talk about the tics; they both pretended they never happened at all.

She had to think: Was that the way their moment of intimacy was to be as well? As if it had never happened at all? It had happened right here in this room, and now she was to go parading about her work as Pam the Helper. Pam the Lover was apparently lost in the shadows. Burned to a crisp along with all the other contaminated waste.

He was starting to give her the creeps, the way he was so silent over there.

The donor was a black male between twenty-five and thirty. He was naked, face up, eyes open from the Ketamine, which paralyzed him but didn't actually render him unconscious. She was used to those eyes now, but at first they had really terrified her. Elden used Ketamine on all the donors, despite the dangers, because of its effect on memory. On some, he followed this up with electroshock. She didn't approve, but she understood.

That was how she felt about much of this. Elden's strength, his power of conviction, left little room for argument. She noticed this man's upper arm then, and like so often in her life, words came babbling out before she could control them. "My God, Elden! What happened to his arm?"

"His arm! Did Donnie do this to his arm?"

"Donnie?"

"It's a mess.

Lacerated, bruised. It might even be broken by the look of it."

"Yes, I noticed that. Perhaps we can help. But not now. Hmm?

Right kidney and spleen, Pamela. Are you ready for me or not?"

The image of him, framed against the silvery plastic wall, was something surreal, something not of this world. It seemed fitting somehow, for a man of such talents.

She collected herself and asked, "Do you want me to dress it?"

"Prep him," he instructed. He never did pay much attention to what she said. He was in a mood today. More and more so in the last few days. You couldn't reach him when he was in a mood, so she gave up trying. She drew several samples of blood, labeled them, started the HIV test on one of them, the hepatitis A and B test on another, and placed the third in the waist-high fridge. There were a number of drugs missing from the door of the fridge. She was about to mention this when she caught herself. Antibiotics mostly. Some Demerol and Valium, too. The thought briefly crossed her mind that perhaps Elden was experimenting with the drugs himself; perhaps this helped to explain his recent erratic behavior. But not Demerol and Valium, she corrected herself. If anything, he seemed wound up and agitated of late, more like on an amphetamine high.

Donnie had probably stolen them; he was always sneaking drugs.

Elden knew it, just as she did. They both did their best to police their supplies, but Elden never called Donnie on it unless he caught him in the act, and then he barely slapped his hand. A strange relationship existed between those two that she would never understand; why Elden would tolerate a man like that was beyond her.

She soaped and shaved the black man's side. Elden helped her to roll him over and she continued the procedure on his back.

"I made all the necessary arrangements," he said. "That is, Maybeck did," he corrected her. "You'll be back by this evening. I've written it all down." He hurried over to the work area and returned with a note written in his own handwriting, not Donnie's. Donnie could barely write at all. Elden never made the flight arrangements. "You'll meet Juanita at the gate.

The regular flight to Rio. Same as always."

"All right," she said, accepting the itinerary from him; but it felt wrong. Everything about this felt wrong. Was it just her?

she wondered-expectations carried over from their encounter Saturday night? "Now then," he said from over by the sink. He doused his hands in antiseptic and then snapped on a pair of surgical gloves. He turned his back to her to have her tie his mask in place, which she did. "All set?"

"I'm worried about you," she said softly to his back. She placed her hand gently on his shoulder. It was something she could never say while facing him.

There was a long, heavy silence in which she could hear the deep breathing of the man on the table behind her. She heard the plastic ceiling crinkle as it warmed. Neither she nor Elden was breathing. What she had said had stopped them both.

Finally his head bobbed slightly. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs completely, and said in a ghostly whisper,

"It's him I'd worry about." The way he said it frightened her.

"Elden?" His voice returned; he reminded her, "The patient always comes first."

L L They rose above the city, climbing an on-ramp at the end of Columbia that connected to the viaduct, then headed south toward the docks and Boeing Field. You could see the next wave of rain out over the water, hanging above the stunning green of Bainbridge Island-a mare's tail stretching down, a light gray mist feathered beneath charcoal clouds. If you didn't mind rain, it was a beautiful sight. If you minded rain, you didn't live here in February and March. Boldt turned on the wipers to fend off the spray from a van ahead of them.

Daphne crossed her legs and leaned over to check the speedometer.

"I don't like driving fast," Boldt explained. "That's an understatement," she said. "At first I thought there was something wrong with this thing." She had asked to come along with him at the last second. Boldt had warned her it might be a long meeting, but she had persisted. He'd been wondering when she would tell him whatever it was that couldn't wait.

Finally, his patience ran out. "So what's up?"

"I hate being wrong," she complained. "It doesn't come easy."

"You, wrong?"

"I had that talk with Cindy Chapman. I wanted to run Agnes Rutherford's descriptions of the two men by her-the grating voice, the bad breath. There are tricks you can play with the mind. Subtle ways to make it safe for a person to remember something they would rather not remember." Boldt asked, "Where the hell is the toxicology report on Chapman?

The blood workup? "Are you interested in this or not?"

"Go ahead."

"She remembers Sharon and me tending to her at The Shelter.

She's very clear on that. I worked with her on the events before the surgery. Could she remember being abducted? Could she remember faces, voices, surroundings? A week before, a day before, an hour before? As it turned out, you were right about the money." She added, "That's what I mean about my being wrong. I was convinced you were wrong about that."

His hands were sweating against the wheel. He rolled down the window for some air. "They paid her for the kidney?" he asked.

"It was a business arrangement. They offered her five hundred dollars." "Five hundred?" he asked incredulously. "I thought the going rate is fifteen thousand. That's quite a mark-up."

"And there's no proof she ever received it."

"Well, it fills in a few blanks," he admitted. "It helps to explain why we never received any formal complaints against the harvester. If you're a teenager and you've cut a deal to sell your kidney, you don't turn the guy in. It also means there were-are-probably a lot more donors than we know about. The lucky ones lived to spend their five hundred. it may also explain the use of the electroshock."

"I don't think so," she interrupted.

"Not the electroshock. Dixon's three victims-Blumenthal, Sherman, and the other one, Julia Walker, showed no sign of electroshock. If a few days had passed, that might be more easily explained, but in at least two of the cases-the deaths caused by hemorrhaging-those bodies would have been seen by the medical examiner rather quickly, wouldn't they? And that would indicate that those victims did not show signs of electroshock." "You have something going," he said. "I can hear it in your voice."

"What if only the dissenters receive the electroshock the real serious memory blocking? What if you're right about there being a lot of others? A runaway, hard up for money, cuts a deal.

Arrangements are made; the surgery takes place. They're paid up and returned to the streets. What if a person like Cindy Chapman gets cold feet once she looks around her and sees the reality of what she's gotten herself into? If you're the harvester, what then? You take the kidney anyway-you've probably already promised it somewhere-but you make damn sure your donor won't remember anything about it." She let the idea hang there. "You don't like it," she said. "It makes sense," he admitted. "It doesn't mean I have to like it."

"So okay, let's say I'm right. Then why did they take Sharon?"

she asked. "Except for her past, except for her Bloodlines connection, she doesn't fit the donor profile at all: She's not broke, she's not out on the street, she's not desperate. At this point, she's even a few years older than the rest of them."

He didn't want to tell her about Dr. Light Horse's theory that Sharon might have been taken for a custom procurement. If they were after a major organ, then Sharon was most likely already dead. "And what have they done with her?" she added.

Boldt was spared giving an answer. He turned into the driveway of the Army Corps of Engineers and searched out a parking space.

The Seattle district office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers occupied an enormous brick structure a few miles south of the city on Marginal Way.

Boldt was hoping that as Dixie had suggested these bones might offer them a chance to identify the harvester. Locating the rest of the bones was the first, and most important, step in that process. The homicide victim was the last living witness to the crime and could tell an investigator much more than the murderer believed possible.

The receptionist greeted Boldt and Daphne warmly and made a quick phone call announcing their arrival. A few minutes later, a wiry man in his mid-forties bounded down the stairs and extended his hand, introducing himself as Harry Terkel. He had bright, enthusiastic eyes, and a lot less hair than Boldt. He wore khakis, black Reeboks, and a plaid shirt without a tie. He lacked the nerd pack of pens in his pocket that Boldt had expected of an engineer., He shook hands with Daphne and motioned upstairs. "I'll lead the way. it's kind of a maze."