The Cutting

by James Hayman

  ‘Did he tell you who the patient was?’

  ‘No, not by name. He just told me that a very rich man in his eighties was dying of end-stage congestive heart failure. He wanted a new heart but couldn’t qualify for an approved program because of his age. Phillipe said he’d located a resource that could obtain hearts outside of normal channels. I told him I had no interest in breaking the law and even less in going to jail. He said there was no danger of that. He said he and his friends had performed a number of these operations in the past and no one was any the wiser.’

  ‘Is that the word he used, friends? Not colleagues? Or associates?’

  ‘I think so. Yes. I’m quite sure it is. Is that important?’

  ‘I don’t know. It might be. What happened next?’

  ‘This conversation didn’t occur all at once. It took place during the course of two or three meetings.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Even though he said there was very little risk, I told him I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to be involved in anything illegal, and given the shortage of healthy hearts for transplant, I didn’t believe it was ethically right to deprive someone younger of the chance for a normal life to help an old man who’d soon die anyway.’

  ‘Did he accept that?’

  ‘He seemed to.’

  ‘What changed your mind?’

  ‘Money. Avarice overcame both scruples and discretion. In our final discussion he told me that for one operation, one day in the operating room, he would deposit a hundred thousand euros in a numbered account in my name in the Cayman Islands. That’s a hundred thousand euros for one day’s work plus a couple of days’ preparation and travel. That’s more than I make in a year. Even so, I didn’t say yes right away. I went back to my apartment and looked at the pile of unpaid bills on my table.’

  ‘Sounds familiar.’

  ‘Then I drank a bottle of wine and went out and had sex with an old friend I hadn’t seen in a year.’

  ‘Lucky friend.’

  She ignored the comment. ‘The next morning I called Phillipe at his hotel and told him I would take part.’

  ‘And you did?’

  ‘Yes. That was three operations ago. The third was last week. It never occurred to me until the Dubois girl’s body was discovered that they might actually be killing people to harvest their hearts.’

  McCabe’s mind was racing. Two more transplants. Two more harvested hearts. Whose hearts? Two more young blond female athletes? Where were the bodies? Buried under a golf course like Elyse Andersen? What about Lucinda Cassidy? He was jumping too far ahead. He forced himself to slow down.

  ‘What made you think that’s what they were doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Timing. We performed a transplant Wednesday afternoon. Katie Dubois’s body was found Friday night. Then over the weekend, news reports said her heart had been cut from her body. I didn’t know for sure if there was a connection, but it seemed likely. When I saw you at the funeral, I decided I would talk to you.’

  ‘When were the other two operations?’

  ‘The first was late December last year, a week or so before Christmas. The second this spring, April sometime.’

  ‘Do you know the name of the hotel Spencer was staying in?’

  ‘Yes. The Hôtel du Midi in Montpellier.’

  ‘When he was staying there?’

  ‘November last year. I’m not sure of the exact dates. I left my diary behind in France.’

  McCabe took out his cell and hit Tom Tasco’s number.

  ‘Detective Tasco.’

  ‘Tom? It’s Mike McCabe. I’m in the car, and I can’t talk long. Do me a favor and check if Philip Spencer stayed at the Hôtel du Midi in Montpellier, France, spelled M-O-N-T-P-E-L-L-I-E-R, last November. If so, try to get the exact dates he was there. Maybe the local gendarmes will cooperate and check it out. If not, go through Interpol.’

  ‘What the hell was he doing in France?’ asked Tasco.

  ‘Can’t talk about that now. See if you can get any background. Where he flew from and to. Airline and flight number. Anything else that seems pertinent.’

  ‘Gotcha.’

  McCabe hung up and turned back to Sophie. ‘You said you’d performed three of these operations including the one, when? Last Wednesday?’

  ‘Yes. In the afternoon.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘No. The way it works is I arrive in Boston a day before the surgery. I’m picked up at Logan by a driver and taken to a hotel. A different hotel each time. This time it was a Ramada Inn near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I check in –’

  ‘Using your real name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who makes the reservation?’

  ‘I do. Phillipe calls me and tells me to book a flight and gives me the name of a hotel. He also gives me the name of a car service. I book them as well.’

  ‘Who pays?’

  ‘I do. With my Visa card.’

  ‘Okay, so you checked into the Ramada Inn on what day? Tuesday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘It’s the same each time. I stay in my room. My meals are sent up. A man calls. Not Phillipe. It’s a voice I don’t know. This time I was told to be ready by five o’clock on Wednesday morning. I was picked up and taken to the surgery site.’

  ‘That’s the phrase he used? Surgery site? Not hospital? Not OR?’

  ‘The man said surgery site.’

  ‘Who picked you up?’

  ‘A driver. I was made to wear a blindfold the whole time we drove until I entered the building.’

  ‘Could you see anything at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How long did you drive?’

  ‘About four hours.’

  Four hours. Maximum radius from Portsmouth about two hundred and fifty miles, give or take. That covered a lot of territory. He needed more to go on. ‘Try to think back,’ he said. ‘I want you to close your eyes and, in your mind, put yourself back in that car. Can you do that?’

  She looked at him, not sure where he was leading. ‘Yes. I can try.’ She closed her eyes.

  ‘Describe the trip for me as best you can remember from the time you started off.’

  ‘I got in the car. The driver closed the door and got in himself. He closed his door. We drove out of the hotel parking lot.’

  ‘Did you turn left or right?’

  She thought about that for a moment. ‘Left. Then we drove a little way, a minute or two. Stopped and waited for a moment.’

  A stop sign, thought McCabe. Or a traffic light. ‘While you were stopped, could you hear cars passing in front of you?’

  ‘Yes, but only in one direction, left to right.’ Her eyes were still closed. She was doing well. ‘Then we turned right and joined the flow of traffic. We drove for a little while, went around a curve and then onto a big road. The driver accelerated fast as we went onto it. A motorway, I think it must have been. I could hear us passing cars and trucks to our right. Sometimes they passed us to our left. We drove on that road for a long way.’

  I-95, McCabe thought. The guy was driving carefully. Center lane. Not too slow. Not too fast. Probably doing sixty-five. Smart. Why attract attention? ‘Were you still on the big road when the sun came up? That would’ve been around six fifteen or so. You would have been driving about forty-five minutes. Could you feel its warmth on your face?’

  Again she thought before speaking. ‘Yes.’

  ‘On your left side or right side?’

  ‘Right side. I hadn’t thought about that before. We must have been traveling north. It got warmer as we went along.’

  He wondered about the tolls. ‘Did the driver slow down or stop at all while you were on the big road? Like for a tollbooth?’

 
‘Yes. I think he must have had a bowl of coins on the seat next to him. I could hear them jingling just as we slowed. Then he opened his window. I could hear it go down and feel the air on my face as we slowed to a stop. I suppose he threw the coins in a basket. Then we accelerated fast again.’

  Exact change lane. Made sense. No E-ZPass records. No toll takers to notice a woman in a blindfold.

  ‘How long did you stay on the fast road, the motorway?’

  ‘Several hours. I can’t be sure of the time.’

  ‘How many times did you go through a toll? Where you could hear the change rattle?’

  ‘Three times.’

  McCabe thought about the pattern of tollbooths along the Maine Turnpike. ‘After the third toll – this is important – did you start going fast again like on a motorway, or was it more like you were on smaller roads? You know, stops, turns, stuff like that.’

  ‘We stayed on the motorway only a little longer, maybe five minutes.’

  McCabe thought about that and guessed they’d stayed on 95 and probably gotten off around Augusta.

  ‘How much longer did you drive after you left the motorway?’

  ‘A while. More than an hour. Maybe two. We seemed to be going pretty fast with some stops. A two-lane road, I think. I could hear the whooshing sound of traffic coming the other way. Also, several times the driver pulled out suddenly to pass, accelerated fast, and pulled back in suddenly. The last few miles felt like a poorly maintained road. With many bumps.’

  A couple of hours on secondary roads from Augusta. Max of what? Seventy-five or eighty miles. Progressively smaller roads at the end. That narrowed things down a bit. ‘Any sense from the position of the sun or anything else what direction you were traveling in?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘At the end of the journey, when you got out of the car, think back to what your senses told you. Put yourself back in that place. Sound. Smell. The feel of the ground under your feet.’

  Sophie rummaged in her bag for another cigarette. She lit it and inhaled deeply. She considered his question, her eyes open. ‘I think we were in a wooded area. I could smell pine trees. The ground was soft.’

  ‘Could you smell the sea? Or hear seagulls? Or other birds?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. As I was led toward the building, we were climbing up a rocky area. I tripped once or twice. He held me up. When we got to the building, he opened a door. Just inside the door we went down three rather long flights of stairs. Thirteen steps each. I was careful to count them because I still couldn’t see. He held my arm and told me when we reached the last step.’

  Three times thirteen. Thirty-nine. Thirty-nine steps down from the ground level. Thirty-nine steps? Another deliberate movie reference, this time to an early Hitchcock classic? Or was he just being silly? Flights of stairs typically had thirteen steps. Okay. Thirty-nine steps down to what? A basement? An underground surgical center? Somewhere in the woods. With an operating room, a recovery room, dressing rooms. Maybe a prison for the victims.

  Sophie began remembering again. ‘I was led to a small room, no bigger than a closet, really.’

  ‘How do you know it was small?’

  ‘That’s where I finally took off the mask. I was directed to change into a set of scrubs. I was told to put on a surgical mask and cap before leaving the OR. Then I scrubbed up. There was a sink and antiseptic soap in the room. I didn’t see the others until we were all in the OR.’

  ‘Could you see the surgeon’s face?’

  ‘No. Not really. He entered the room wearing a surgical mask and goggles. So did the assistant surgeon and the anesthetist. Everybody else wore standard surgical masks at all times. We used no names. Each of us was assigned a code name, which was used in the OR. Mine was Catwalk.’

  ‘Any significance to the name?’

  ‘None that I’m aware of.’

  ‘How many people in the room?’

  ‘Six. The surgeon. An assistant. A nurse-anesthetist. Me. Two other nurses. A very small team for a transplant. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to handle it, but the surgeon was very skilled.’

  ‘Did you talk to the others?’

  ‘Only to communicate what was necessary during the operations. No names were used. We kept our masks on until we left the building. We were told this was for our own protection.’

  ‘It was the same team each time?’

  ‘No. One of the nurses changed.’

  McCabe considered the size of the team for a moment. That made it a fairly wide conspiracy. A lot of people involved. A lot of possible leaks.

  ‘The team – men or women?’

  ‘Both surgeons were male. The nurse-anesthetist was female. One of the other nurses was a man, one a woman.’

  ‘You said one was replaced.’

  ‘A female nurse replaced a female.’

  ‘How could you tell there was a change if you were all wearing masks?’

  ‘The new one was shorter, fatter. The voice was different.’

  ‘Was Spencer one of the doctors?’

  ‘I don’t know. He might have been. Right size. Hard to tell about the voice. He didn’t say much.’

  ‘How about the other surgeon?’

  ‘He seemed more slender. Slightly shorter.’

  ‘You were paid a hundred thousand euros for each operation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who were the patients?’

  ‘They were all nameless old men. I assume they were all rich.’

  They sat silently for a while, Sophie smoking, McCabe thinking.

  29

  Tuesday. 10:00 P.M.

  The bullet from the sniper’s rifle traversed the five hundred yards separating it from its intended target faster than the speed of sound. For this reason, McCabe saw the windshield fracture and blood explode from Sophie Gauthier’s left arm a millisecond before he heard the crack of the shot. Expecting a second shot, he pushed Sophie down onto the seat and started the Bird’s engine. He slammed the gear lever into first, spun the wheel hard left, and floored the accelerator, making the Bird’s ancient innards howl with pain. It occurred to him Sophie was alive only because she’d leaned to the right to flick a cigarette out the window just as the shooter pulled the trigger. Chain-smoking, for once, saved a life.

  McCabe pushed the big Ford V8 for all it was worth, and the Bird shot forward. On a straightaway, nothing less than a Corvette was likely to catch them. On a winding road in the dark, escape was less certain. In the rearview, McCabe saw headlights flick on several hundred yards behind, then start moving fast in their direction. The shooter was following. He must’ve seen that he missed and wanted to finish the kill. Still, it’d been a hell of a shot, even with a night-vision scope. McCabe glanced at Sophie. The bullet had struck an artery, and blood was spurting out of her upper arm in a pulsing arc.

  Without saying a word, Sophie pressed her right thumb against a pressure point above the wound. The blood that had been coming out in spurts now flowed more slowly, but not slowly enough. She was lying down on the seat. She’d slipped her head onto his lap. She held her arm across her body. She was shivering, probably with shock, perhaps with cold. He leaned over and switched on the heater. He needed to get her to a hospital. He could drive her there. The bullet had punched a hole in the windshield and there was some spidering of the glass, but he could see through it well enough. The problem was that if he was driving he couldn’t apply pressure to the wound, and she’d soon be too weak to do it herself. If he couldn’t help, she’d bleed to death.

  Option two was to lose the shooter, pull over, and call for help. He had no way to communicate from the Bird other than his cell. Steering with one hand, he punched in 911 with the other. ‘Officer needs backup. This is Detective Sergeant Michael McCabe, Portland PD. I’m being chased and shot at by a sniper with wheels,’ he shouted. ‘I need an ambulance. I have a wounded civilian in my ca
r. Gunshot wound. Arterial bleeding.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Taylorville Road heading toward Bucks Mill. Meet me there. I’m going to try to lose the bad guy.’

  For the moment at least, they were on their own. ‘Try to focus,’ he said. ‘I figure our friend’s about twenty seconds behind us, maybe less. If I can lose him, I’ll be able to help you. In a minute I’ll be turning fast into a side road. I’m killing the lights before we turn. We’ll be moving fast, so brace yourself as best you can. When we make the turn, I’ll pull up on the shoulder to the left. I’ll get out of the car. When I do, stay low. Keep applying pressure to the wound. I’ll help as soon as I can. Do you understand what we’re doing?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was a guttural whisper. She looked pale. Precious seconds passed. The turn was coming up fast. There were some trees that would provide cover. He glanced in the rearview. The shooter was still following, maybe two hundred yards behind. ‘We’re turning now,’ he said.

  McCabe killed the lights, braked, downshifted, and turned hard, almost blind, to the left. The Bird skidded into a ninety-degree-plus turn. McCabe adjusted, hit the accelerator, narrowly missed a tree to his left, and shot forward onto the side road. He pulled onto the left shoulder and killed the engine.

  As he jumped from the Bird, he saw the blackened silhouette of an SUV roar past the turnoff. The car’s lights disappeared for a moment. If they kept going, McCabe could help Sophie. If not, he had to be ready for the worst. He opened the Bird’s trunk and pulled out the Mossberg. Through the trees he saw the lights of the SUV stopping and then reversing. The shooter was coming back. Sophie was losing strength, blood oozing out. The SUV backed past the crossroads, turned left, and surged forward.