by Sam Bourne
Will was relieved; the guessing game was making him sweat.
‘My friend, Pat Baxter, was anaesthetized before he was killed. And his body is found minus one kidney. Put two and two together and what do we get?’
Will muttered almost to himself, ‘Whoever did this removed his kidney.’
‘Not only that, but that’s why they killed him. They wanted it to look like a robbery, a “break-in gone badly wrong” they’re saying on the TV. But that’s all a smokescreen. The only thing they wanted to steal was Pat Baxter’s kidney.’
‘Why on earth would they want to do that?’
‘Oh, Mr Monroe. Don’t make me do all the work here. Open your eyes! This is a federal government that has been doing experimentation with bio-chips!’ He could see that Will was not following. ‘Bar codes, implanted under the skin! So that they can monitor our movements. There’s good evidence they’re doing this with new-born babies now, right there in the maternity ward. An electronic tagging system, enabling the government to follow us from cradle to grave — quite literally.’
‘But why would they want Pat Baxter’s kidney?’
‘The federal government moves in mysterious ways, Mr Monroe, its wonders to perform. Maybe they wanted to plant something inside Pat’s body and the plan went wrong. Maybe the anaesthetic wore off and he began resisting. Or perhaps they put something inside his body years ago. And now they needed to get it back. Who knows? Maybe the feds just wanted to examine the DNA of a dissident, see if they could discover the gene that makes a real freedom-loving American and work to eradicate it.’
‘It does seem a little far-fetched.’
‘I grant you that. But we’re talking about a military-industrial complex that has spent millions of dollars on mind-control techniques. You know, they had a secret Pentagon project to see if men could kill goats, simply by staring at ‘em? I am not making this up. So it may be far-fetched. But I have come to learn that far-fetched and untrue are two very different things.’
Eventually Will steered Hill towards saner shores, seeking the biographical details of Baxter’s life that he knew he would need. He got some, including a back story about the dead man’s father: turned out Baxter Sr was a Second World War veteran who had lost both his hands. Unable to work, he had grown desperate; he could barely feed his family on his GI pension. Hill reckoned Baxter was a son who grew up resenting a government that could send a young man to kill and die for his country and then abandon him when he came home. When history repeated itself with Baxter’s own generation in Vietnam, the bitterness was complete.
That would do nicely, serving as the easy-to-digest, psychological key needed for all good stories, in newspapers no less than at the movies. The piece was beginning to take shape.
He asked Hill to take him to Baxter’s cabin. They used Will’s car, its engine revving as it climbed further up the rutted path.
Soon, Will could see colour — the yellow tape of a police cordon.
‘This is as far as we can go. It’s a crime scene.’ Will reached into his pocket. As if reading his mind, Hill added, ‘Even your fancy New York press card won’t get you in here. It’s sealed.’
Will got out anyway, just to get a feel. It looked to him like a shed: a bare log cabin, the kind a well-off family might use to store firewood. The dimensions made it hard to believe a man had made this his home.
Will asked Hill to describe the interior as best he could.
‘That’s easy/ his guide said. ‘Almost nothing in there.’ A narrow, metal-frame bed; a chair; a stove; a shortwave radio.
‘Sounds like a cell.’
‘Think military accommodation; that’ll get you closer to it.
Pat Baxter lived like a soldier.’
‘Spartan, you mean?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Will asked who else he should talk to; any friends, any family. ‘The Militia of Montana was his only family,’ Hill shot back, a little too fast Will thought. ‘And even we hardly knew him. First time I ever saw that cabin was when the police had me round there. Wanted me to identify which clothes were his and which might have been left behind by the killers.’
‘Killers, plural?’
‘You don’t think someone starts performing major surgery like that on their own, do you? They would have needed a team. Every surgeon needs a nurse.’
Will gave Bob Hill a ride back to his own cabin. He suspected that, though Hill’s office might have been basic, his house was elsewhere — and not nearly so spare as Baxter’s. The dead man was clearly an extreme kind of extremist.
They said their goodbyes, exchanged email addresses, and Will began the long drive on. Bob Hill was obviously a nut — DNA for dissidence indeed — but this business with the kidney was definitely strange. And why would Baxter’s killers have given him an injection?
He pulled off Route 200 to fill up the car and his stomach.
He found a diner and ordered a soda and a sandwich. A TV was on, tuned to Fox News.
‘… Dateline London now and more on the scandal threatening to topple the British government.’
There were pictures of a harried-looking Gavin Curtis emerging from a car to an explosion of flash bulbs and television lights.
‘According to one British newspaper today, Treasury records show clear discrepancies which can only have been authorized at the very top. While opposition politicians demand a full disclosure of accounts, Mr Curtis’s spokesman says only that “there has been no wrongdoing”…’
Without thinking, Will was taking notes, not that he would ever need them: Curtis’s chances of heading up the IMF were surely slim to non-existent now. Watching the pictures of Curtis being shepherded past the baying press mob — a classic ‘goatfuck’ as the TV guys called them — Will’s mind wandered onto trivial terrain. How come his car is so ordinary? This Gavin Curtis was meant to be the second most powerful man in Britain, yet he was driven around in what looked like a suburban sales rep’s car. Did all British ministers live so modestly — or was this just a Gavin Curtis thing?
Will called the sheriff’s office for Sanders County and was told that, for all the federal investigations and Unabomber inquiries, Baxter had no criminal record whatsoever. He had been under heavy surveillance, but it had yielded nothing: a couple of unexplained trips to Seattle, but no evidence of illegality.
He had never been convicted of anything. Will flicked back through his notebook. He had scribbled down all he could of the autopsy report, including the name at the foot of the document. Dr Allan Russell, Medical Examiner, Forensic Science Division, State Crime Lab. Maybe this Dr Russell would be able to tell him what Mr Baxter’s militia comrades had not. How had Pat Baxter died — and why?
CHAPTER NINE
Wednesday, 6.51pm, Missoula, Montana
He had got there too late; the crime lab was shut for the day.
No amount of cajoling could alter that fact; the staff had gone home. He would have to come back tomorrow. Which meant he would have to spend the night in Missoula.
He was briefly tempted by the C’mon Inn, if only because the joke was too good to resist. But Will realized, he could still tell people about it in New York: he did not actually have to stay there. So he played safe and checked into the Holiday Inn for a third night of room service, the remote control and a phone call with Beth.
‘You’re making this too complicated,’ she said, audibly getting out of the bath.
‘But it is complicated. The guy has a kidney missing.’
‘You need to see a medical history. Maybe — what’s his name again?’
‘Baxter.’
‘Maybe Baxter had a history of renal problems. Any reference to that or to dialysis or kidney trouble of any kind, and that will give you an explanation.’
Will was silent.
‘I’m ruining it, aren’t I?’
‘Well, if we’re talking news value, the choice between the death of an old man with a past history of renal failure and an attem
pted kidney-snatching is very close. But, yeah, you might be right: the kidney-snatching probably just edges it.’
Will was relieved they were back into banter mode. Several days now stood between them and the row; the wound seemed to be closing.
Thursday, 10.02am, Missoula, Montana
The next morning, Will was ushered into Dr Russell’s office. He saw it straight away, a certificate on the wall carrying an emblem Will recognized: an open book, inscribed with Latin words, topped off by two crowns.
‘Ah, you were at Oxford. Like me. When were you there?’
‘Several centuries before you, I suspect.’
‘That can’t be true, Dr Russell.’
‘Call me Allan.’
At last, a lucky break. ‘You know, Allan, I’m not even sure I’ll write about it for the paper, but this Pat Baxter business does intrigue me, I must confess,’ he began, as if settling down for an agreeable chat at high table. Will noticed his own English accent had become more pronounced.
‘Let me have a look here,’ Russell was saying, as he turned to his computer. ‘Ah yes, “Severe internal haemorrhaging consistent with a gunshot wound; contusions of the skin and viscera. General remarks: needle mark on right thigh, suggestive of recent anaesthesia”.’
‘Now, how are you defining “recent” there, Allan?’ Will hoped his tone was saying, Purely out of academic interest …
‘Probably contemporaneous.’
‘You see this, I have to say, is what intrigues me. Why would anyone anaesthetize someone before they kill them?’
‘Perhaps they were trying to reduce the victim’s pain.’
‘Do murderers do that? It makes no sense. Unless—’
‘Unless the killer was a medical man. Trained to give a shot before any procedure. Force of habit perhaps.’
‘Or if he wanted to do something else before the murder.
Perform some other operation.’
‘Like?’
‘Well, I understand that Baxter was found minus one kidney.’
Russell began to laugh, in a way Will struggled to find funny. ‘Oh, I see what you’re driving at.’ Russell was grinning.
‘Tell me, Will. Have you ever seen a dead body?’
Instantly, Will remembered the corpse of Howard Macrae, under a blanket on that street in Brownsville. His first. ‘Yes.
In my work it’s hard to avoid.’
‘Well, then you won’t mind seeing another one.’
It was not as cold as he expected. Will imagined a morgue to be a giant fridge, like those cold storage rooms at the back of large hotels. This was more like a hospital ward.
The orderlies were moving a gurney into a curtained-off zone which Will took to be the examination area. With not even a moment’s warning, Russell pulled back the sheet.
Will felt his stomach tighten. The body was stiff and waxy, a yellowish green. The stench was rancid; seeming to come his way in waves. For a second or two he would think it had passed, or that at least he had got used to it, and then it would strike again — inciting Will to empty his guts out on the floor there and then.
‘It can take some getting used to. Apologies. Now take a look at this.’
Will moved closer. Russell was gesturing towards something in the stomach area, but Will was transfixed by Pat Baxter’s face. The papers had run photos, but they were grainy — ‘grabs’ from TV footage mainly. Now he saw the weathered cheeks, chin, eyes and mouth of a man he would have identified as middle-aged, poor and white. He had a longish beard that, in a different context, might have looked elegant, even statesmanlike. (The face of Charles Darwin popped into Will’s head). But the effect here was to give Pat Baxter the appearance of a homeless man, one of the winos found sleeping by trash cans in a park.
Russell was pulling back the sheet around Baxter’s torso.
Will could tell he was trying to conceal one thing, probably the bullet wounds, and reveal something else. ‘Look closely.
Can you see it?’
Will leaned forward to see Russell’s finger tracing a line on the dead white flesh. That’s a scar.’
‘In the area of the kidney?’
‘I would say so.’
‘And that can’t be from that night, right? I mean, it takes ages to form a scar.’
Russell pulled back the sheet, stripped off his latex gloves and headed for a basin in the corner of the room. He began scrubbing, talking over his shoulder. He was enjoying this.
‘Well, of course, it’s hard to be certain, what with the severe trauma to the skin and viscera.’
‘But what’s your professional opinion?’
‘My opinion? That scar is, at the very least, a year old.
Maybe two.’
Will felt his heart sink. ‘So it didn’t happen that night? The killers didn’t take out Baxter’s kidney?’
‘I’m afraid not, no. You look disappointed, Will. I hope I haven’t spoiled your story’
But you have, arsehole, was Will’s first thought. All this chasing for nothing. Then he remembered what Beth had said on the phone last night.
‘There is one last thing that might help. Do you think we could check Pat Baxter’s medical records?’
Russell gave him a mini-lecture about patient-doctor confidentiality, but soon relented. Back in his office, he pulled up the file.
‘What are we looking for?’
The date Pat Baxter had his kidney removed.’
Russell paused, scanning the pages. Finally: That’s odd.
There’s no record of a kidney operation.’
Will perked up. He remembered Beth’s briefing on the phone last night. ‘Anything there about a history of kidney problems, any disease, any references to renal failure, dialysis, anything?’
A longer pause now. And then, with a hint of puzzlement, ‘No.’
Will sensed he and the doctor now had something in common. They were equally baffled. ‘Does the history speak of any medical problems at all?’
‘Some trouble with his ankle, associated with war damage.
Vietnam, apparently. Apart from that, nothing. I just assumed he was a renal patient who had to have his kidney out. This certainly appears to be a complete record. And yet there’s nothing about a kidney. I’ve got to admit, this has me foxed.’
There was a light knock on the door. A woman, introduced by Russell as the media relations officer for the crime lab, opened it.
‘Sorry to interrupt, Dr Russell. It’s just we’re getting a ton of calls on the Baxter case. Apparently, an associate of the deceased called a talk radio station today saying that he believed Mr Baxter was a victim of some kind of organ snatching plot?’
Bob Hill, thought Will. So much for his exclusive.
‘Sure, I’ll be with you in a minute,’ Russell said, his brow tensing.
Will waited for the door to close to ask what Russell would tell the press. ‘Well, we can’t give the most simple explanation, that Baxter had a history of kidney problems. Not now.’
It was Will’s fault: he knew too much. ‘We’ll think of something.
I’ll show you out.’
Will was pulling out of the driveway when he heard the pounding on his car window. It was Russell, still in his shirtsleeves and breathless.
‘I just got this call. She wants to talk to you.’ He passed his cell phone through the window.
‘Mr Monroe? My name is Gene vie we Huntley. I’m a surgeon at the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle. I saw the reports about Mr Baxter on the news and Allan has just explained to me what you know. I think we need to talk.’
‘Sure,’ said Will, scrabbling to find his notebook.
‘I’m going to need some assurances from you, Mr Monroe.
I trust The New York Times and I hope that trust will be repaid.
What I am about to tell you I vowed never to repeat. I only tell it now because I fear the alternative is worse. We can’t have people scaring themselves senseless about some organ snatching rin
g.’
‘I understand.’
‘I’m not sure you do. I’m not sure any of us do. What I ask is that you treat what I tell you with honour, dignity and respect. For that is what it deserves, Mr Monroe. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes.’ Will could not imagine what he was about to hear.
‘OK. Mr Baxter’s greatest request was anonymity. That was the one thing he asked of me in return for what he did.’
Will was silent.
Pat Baxter came to Swedish about two years ago. He had come a long way, we found out later. When he turned up, the nurses assumed he was an ER case: he looked like a bum off the streets. But he said he was in perfect health, he just needed to talk to a doctor in our transplant unit. He said that he wanted to give up one of his kidneys.
‘We immediately asked who he wanted to give the kidney to. Was there a sick child involved? Maybe a family member needed a transplant? “No,” he said. “I just want you to give my kidney to someone who needs it.” My colleagues immediately assumed that, frankly, there must be some mental health issues involved. Such nondirected operations are almost unheard of. Certainly the first one we had ever dealt with.
‘I sent Mr Baxter away. I told him this was something we couldn’t consider. But he came back and I sent him away again. The third time we had a long talk. He told me that he wished he had been born rich. That way — I remember his words — that way, he said, he might have known the pleasure of giving away vast amounts of money.
He said there were so many people who needed help. I remember, he asked me, “What does the word philanthropy mean? It means love of your fellow man. Well, why should only rich people be allowed to love their fellow man? I want to be a philanthropist, too.” He was determined to find another way to give — even if that meant giving away his own organs.
‘Eventually I concluded that he was sincere. I ran the tests and there was no medical objection. We even ran psychological tests and they confirmed he was of completely sound mind, totally able to make this decision.
‘There was only one condition, imposed by him. He swore us to complete secrecy, complete confidentiality. The recipient patient was not to know where his or her new kidney had come from. That was very important. He didn’t want that person to feel they owed him. And not a word to the press. He insisted on that. No glory.’