by Grant Pies
Carter sat on the train, staring at his phone the entire way until he made it back to the motel. The Do Not Disturb sign hung on the outside of the door. He walked in, half hoping that Sam would be there. He wasn’t. It was just as he left it, sperm donor records and police photos spread around the room.
Carter sank into the seat in front of his laptop. The screen blinked to life. Carter scratched his head, took his coat off, then pulled out his small notepad, flipping through the last few pages. He traced the investigation backwards, from Jasmine Broderick, to BioLife, to James Miller, to Bridgeport Cryobank.
BioLife … it was tied to Bridgeport and James Miller. So he searched the public records for corporate filings, business ratings, lawsuits, liens, judgements. One thing came back, a civil lawsuit from ten years ago.
IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS
MUNICIPAL DEPARTMENT, 2ND DISTRICT
Strauss Kirkman,Case No. 2009-MD-989765
Plaintiff
Biolife, Gold Coast Metals,
Kinnan Plastics, Powersource USA,
Opensource, LTD., HGWSR, LLC,
Brookfield Assoc., and Bayside Advisors,
DefendantsMay 29, 2009
_______________________________________/
CIVIL COMPLAINT
Plaintiff alleges:
Plaintiff lives at 45 Craft Rd., Chicago, IL 60601.
Defendants collectively occupy the property located next door to Plaintiff, at 43 Craft Rd., Chicago, IL 60601.
Ownership in the above property currently resides with Kinnan Plastics, however all entities that occupy the building have, at various times, had ownership in the property since 2005. Therefore, Plaintiff has enjoined all parties to the case.
Defendants failed to trim a tree on their property. The branches of the tree hung over to Plaintiff’s property. On April 5, 2009, the tree fell into Plaintiff’s roof.
As a result, the structure was damaged. An estimate of repairs is attached as Exhibit 1.
Plaintiff sues all Defendants for the full cost of repairs. Because of the intermingling of ownership of the property, all Defendants are joint and severely liable for the resulting damage.
He ran a search for Strauss Kirkman, hoping to discuss the case with him. Scrolling, Carter found only one document – an obituary.
Strauss Kirkman, 60, died Saturday, August 8, 2009, from heart complications.
Strauss was a lifelong Chicago resident. He worked as a train conductor, until retiring in 2007. He is survived by his younger brother, Ronald, who lives in Hawaii …
Another dead end – literally – only three months after filing the lawsuit. Next, Carter searched the house owned by BioLife and the other businesses. The public records came back with a sale. Kinnan Plastics, the current owner in the mess of corporate incest, had sold the residential house to a married couple. The deed was dated one week after Strauss Kirkman’s death. After the sale, the businesses all relocated to the building Carter and Sam had visited.
Carter’s head pounded, and his eyes pulled down. He needed coffee, but more so, he needed sleep. He slapped his cheek and pulled his eyes open wide.
A week after Strauss’ complaint was filed, the defendants filed an answer. It was basic, doing the bare minimum of denying all allegations of the complaint. The final document in the docket was a form dismissal filed by the court. Case is dismissed due to Plaintiff’s failure to appear at scheduled hearing on August 7, 2009.
“Fucking assholes…” Carter mumbled, wondering if Strauss’ death so near to the filing of the lawsuit was pure coincidence.
At the bottom of BioLife’s filed answer was a name of an attorney, David Rosin. Carter jotted his name down in his notepad, then searched the name along with the words ‘Chicago’ and ‘attorney.’ This led to a picture of an old man on a business networking site. He was thin to the point of looking frail, but his face was stern. His current occupation was listed as general counsel for a company called Accenture.
According to Accenture’s own website it developed “innovative solutions to improve the way the world works and lives. With expertise across more than 40 industries, Accenture delivers transformational outcomes for the individual, the country, and the world.”
So many words to say nothing at all. The website was peppered with bullshit corporate quotes that meant nothing to Carter, like “Tomorrow’s solutions for today’s problems.”
Down at the bottom of the website was a link to the corporate board. Carter scrolled through the pictures, mostly old men in blue suits and red ties. One occasional woman. At the bottom was a picture of the President and CEO of Accenture. William Blair.
He was younger than most of the others on the board. Carter had him pegged at about fifty, but with his tan and good posture, he could pass for mid-forties. One thing stood out to Carter. He looked closer at the pixelated picture, leveling his eyes with William Blair’s. It was difficult to be certain, but the pupil of the right eye looked misshaped. Like it had melted and was spreading into the other parts of his eyeball.
Part Three
Blueprints for the Black Market
Accenture was headquartered in The Loop, Chicago’s business district, but when Carter reached the building it was lifeless. No main entrance. No large revolving door. It was a solid stone building forty stories high with only narrow slivers of glass for windows. Carter had seen county jails that looked more inviting.
He stood across the street, shoving the last bite of a chilidog into his mouth and wiping his hands off on his jacket. He pulled his phone out and scrolled through an article he’d found about William Blair. It was an interview from three years ago in The Economist titled “Heart Land: The Last Frontier in Healthcare. William Blair’s Hope for the Future.”
… The research I’ve overseen at Accenture gives me hope for the future, the article quoted Blair. I am a scientist first and CEO second. Sometimes the science is the limiting factor, while other times it is the financing that holds a project back. What I seek to do with Accenture is eliminate both barriers and let the hope I’ve seen in our research blossom.
Our healthcare system is broken, Blair continued as Carter scrolled. There is no money in the cure, only in the medicine. When I started Accenture, no one was doing the research we are doing now. The pharmaceutical companies were happy with simply treating disease, not eliminating it.
Carter looked up at the building. He held his phone to his ear like he was talking, but with his thumb he snapped several pictures of the gray building. He paced and turned around, getting pictures at different angles. He walked around the block to view the building from the other side, but all sides looked the same. The only thing about the building that stood out were the number of cameras mounted to the outside, three of them at each corner, all pointing in different directions. No blind spot left unwatched.
At the back was a ramp that led down to an underground parking garage, at least two stories deep from what Carter could see. A metal gate covered the entrance. Carter continued to fake talk on his phone while snapping more photos.
Two vans, dark midnight blue, pulled up to the back of the building, and Carter turned abruptly so his back was to them. His heart pounded. Was one of these the van he’d rolled out of during the attempted kidnapping at the Bridgeport Cryobank?
The vans barely had to slow down as the metal gate rolled up and let them into the underground garage. They disappeared into the dark structure. It was something that pulled at Carter, some gut feeling that if he didn’t go now then he would never have the chance again. So, without hesitation, before he even knew he had done it, Carter shoved his phone in his pocket and ran towards the gate. Just before it closed, he rolled underneath and found himself on the inside of the garage.
His heart raced and pounded deep in his chest. He stuck close to the walls, but knew there were cameras somewhere watching him, recording him. He only hoped no one was watching live, and that the images would be backed up to some server,
checked only after the fact.
He circled down a ramp a short distance until the garage opened up to a large flat lot of at least a hundred dark blue vans. He crouched behind a parked van and watched men in blue jumpsuits with pistols strapped to their thighs climb out of the vans that had just pulled into the garage. Carter reached back to his waistband for his gun but came up empty.
“Shit,” he whispered. Somehow his heart beat even faster. He pulled out his phone and snapped more pictures of the men. His fingers shook as they tapped the screen.
This was the third time in seven days that Carter had broken into a place, but this felt different from Orcheck’s house and the sperm bank. Those times he had at least part of a plan. He glanced back at the metal gate trapping him inside. There was a large red button on the wall with a sign that read ‘press for emergency exit.’ He wondered if it even worked.
Staying low, he moved from one van to another, getting closer and closer to the men. One man opened the back of a van and pulled out large metal crates, while the other men retrieved a cart from somewhere else in the parking garage. They placed the crates on the cart and wheeled them towards a bank of elevators nearby.
He took pictures of the crates, zooming in on the biohazard stickers on each box. The men loaded the crates onto an elevator. As the doors closed, he ran up and watched what floor they stopped at. Twenty. He called the elevator down and hid behind the vans until the doors opened again, making sure no one else had rode back down. He stepped in the empty elevator, keeping his head down, not looking at the camera in the corner. As if it made a difference. As if he blended in.
Figuring he wouldn’t want to get off on the twentieth floor to encounter the men with pistols, he took the elevator up to the nineteenth. It was an expansive floor, likely meant to house cubicles, offices, and supply closets. Instead, small refrigerators stacked on each other stretched in lines across the entire space. No people in blue jumpsuits. No people with pistols. No people, period.
Carter shivered, and cold air puffed out of his mouth. He thought back to the cold air blowing on Maxim Muratov’s servers. It must have been forty degrees. He hugged himself and rubbed his arms for warmth.
At the far end of the office he saw a glass wall blocking something from the rest, separating it, quarantining it. Ignoring the rows of refrigerators for now, he made his way to the glass wall, still hugging his body for warmth. With each step he made out more and more of what was on the other side. Hospital beds.
He walked past the lines of cold storage units, fixated on what, or who, was beyond the glass wall. A person? Multiple people? He took two more cautious steps forward.
There, laying in the hospital beds was a row of five people. Each person appeared unconscious, and had a tube stretching from one arm to a humming machine, while another tube attached to an IV bag was stuck in their other arm.
The body closest to the glass wall was a man. Presumably nude underneath the hospital sheet, his body was covered in what Carter could only guess were tumors. One large lump stuck out from the man’s stomach and dozens more covered his arms and neck. His face was misshaped from the multiple growths, stretching and pulling at his skin.
Carter swallowed and clenched his teeth shut, trying to keep his chilidog down. The woman in the next bed was even worse. She laid naked on the hospital bed, uncovered. Large patches of her skin were missing, exposing muscle tissue in her thighs and biceps. The skin on her hands was gone, not cut away but more like it had evaporated. The exposed bones in her fingers were bright white.
Carter gagged and bent over, one hand still pressed on the glass, the other covered tight over his mouth. A cold sweat covered his body. There was a bitter taste in his mouth.
He stood up, pressing his back against the glass. He took two deep breaths and closed his eyes. The image of the biohazard stickers on the crates flashed through his mind, and he began to worry that he may be in danger just standing in the building. Maybe there are no people on this floor for a reason, he thought.
He took his phone out of his pocket and dialed Sam as he moved towards the rows of refrigerators. No signal. He let out a long sigh and worked his way through the lines of cold storage, taking pictures but not knowing what he was taking pictures of.
The refrigerators on his right were labeled ‘A+.’ Further down, he found stacks labeled A-, then B+ and B-. He walked up and down each row, like he was at a grocery store, shopping for a frozen pizza. O- and O+. AB- and AB+. Hesitant, Carter reached a hand out and opened one of the units. Inside were vacuum sealed bags. He took a picture then picked up the frozen package.
“What the hell?” he mumbled, cold visible air wafting from his mouth with each word.
It felt like frozen meat. He brushed ice and condensation off to reveal what looked like a kidney. It was shaped like a large bean, dark red. It fit inside his hand. His legs felt weak.
On the underside of the package was a barcode and a label that read Age: 15; 110 pounds; Origin: Haiti. August 28th, 2020. Only three days ago. Carter’s hand shook, but he managed to lift his phone and snap pictures of the organ.
There were eighty or so other refrigerators stretching across the nineteenth floor. Carter glanced down at the kidney in his hand, the cold seeping into his palm until his hand began to ache. There could be five hundred kidneys on this floor alone.
He heard Sam’s voice in his head. Leave! This is not your job to do!
The elevator across the room dinged, and the doors slid open. Carter ducked down, pressing his back against the cold storage units. He dropped the frozen kidney and his phone into his jacket pocket, and softly shut the freezer door.
Peeking through the small gaps between refrigerators, he saw two men in white scrubs, gloves up to their elbows, and headgear with a sheet of plastic covering their faces. A small part of Carter was relieved to see other people on this floor. At least he knew there was nothing contagious up here.
“B9?” one of them said.
“B9,” the other man confirmed, as they walked up and down the rows of refrigerators. Carter looked at the refrigerator in front of him. It was labeled B1. Next to that was B2.
He scurried across the rough carpet, rounded a corner, and pressed his back flat against a refrigerator labeled C20 just as one of the men said, “Here. B9.”
He peeked around the corner to see the two men rummage through the freezer. One held a tablet in one hand, and some sort of scanner gun in the other, like something you’d see at the check-out aisle of a store. The other man picked up the kidneys one at a time and held them out for his partner to scan. The gun beeped and the tablet lit up.
“How about this one? Dated five days ago.”
Nodding, the man with the tablet said, “Yeah. Grab that one, and clear out anything more than thirty days old while you’re at it.”
The other man set the acceptable kidney along with several others in a large cooler.
“Take that down to ten and then the rest go to the incinerator. I’ll meet you back on twenty.”
Carter snuck his phone around the corner and snapped a picture of the men. Drafting a message to Sam along with the picture, he typed the address and the name ‘Accenture,’ then pressed send. Nothing. The message failed to send. He shoved his phone back in his pocket, cursing himself for ducking under the metal gate.
The men closed the freezer door and walked back to the elevator. Soon, Carter was left alone once again, surrounded by boxes of organs and five people with either more or less biological material than the average human.
Carter slowly stood and looked around, wrapping his arms around his body and holding his coat tight. He spotted a door to a stairwell in the corner of the room. A rush of warm air enveloped his body as he jerked the door open, and he stood there a moment to thaw out.
Sam’s voice again, Get out of there! He looked down at the flights of stairs leading back to the garage and gripped the railing, frozen by indecision and the cold air from the nineteenth floor.
He lunged up the stairs to the twentieth floor. Sam’s voice still screamed at him to leave. He pulled his phone from his pocket, still no signal.
He stopped at the door to the twentieth floor and opened it only a sliver. Peeking through the crack, he couldn’t see any men with pistols. He swung the door open and stood in the middle of a large empty hallway. Directly across from him was a small supply closet. Inside, he found a box of spare scrubs and threw a large doctor’s gown over the rest of his clothes. He walked swiftly, pretending he was supposed to be there.
Carter reached a section of the hall where one wall was occupied by a large window with a laboratory on the other side. Scientists in white scrubs injected organs with some solution, then dropped them in bags filled with liquid. Other white-clad workers vacuumed air from the bags and pressed barcoded stickers against them. Carter walked briskly past the organ assembly line, trying to act like all was normal.
A voice came from behind him. “Sir?”
Carter stopped, and every muscle in him tensed. The voice was soft, the voice of a young woman, speaking with a touch of hesitant hope, like she didn’t want trouble, but knew it was inevitable. “Sir?”
Carter didn’t turn. The words of the old lady who lived across from Rose flittered across his mind. “It’s safer to not be a witness.” He knew there was no talking his way out of this. His heart thudded inside his chest, and his hands trembled. Now all Sam’s voice said was I told you so.
He took off down the hall, sprinting. From behind, Carter heard the woman repeat herself. “Sir?” Her voice still holding out hope that this wasn’t what it was.