Harvest

by Tess Gerritsen

  “Then let’s not screw it up, okay? Someone in there could recognize you. That would certainly tip them off. Do you want to risk that?”

  She sank back. Katzka was right. Goddamn it, he was right. He hadn’t wanted her to come along on this ride in the first place, but she’d insisted. She’d told him she could drive here on her own, with or without him. So here she was, and she couldn’t even walk into the building. She couldn’t even fight her own battles anymore. They’d taken that away from her, too. She sat shaking her head, angry about her own impotence. Angry at Katzka for having pointed it out.

  He said, “Lock the doors.” And he stepped out of the car.

  She watched him cross the street, watched him walk into the shabby entrance. She could picture what he’d find inside. Depressing displays of wheelchairs and emesis basins. Racks of nurses’ uniforms under dustcovers of yellowing plastic. Boxes of orthopedic shoes. She could imagine every detail because she had been in shops just like it when she’d purchased her first set of uniforms.

  Five minutes passed. Then ten.

  Katzka, Katzka. What are you doing in there?

  He’d said he was going to ask questions, that he would try not to tip them off. She trusted his judgment. The average homicide cop, she decided, was probably smarter than the average surgeon. But maybe not smarter than the average internist. That was the running joke among hospital house staff: the stupidity of surgeons. Internists relied on their brains, surgeons on their precious hands. If an internist is in an elevator and the door starts to shut prematurely, he’ll stick in his hand to stop it. A surgeon will stick in his head. Ha, ha.

  Twenty minutes had gone by. It was after five now, and the anemic sunshine had already faded to a gloomy dusk. Through the window crack, she could hear the continual whoosh of cars on Martin Luther King Boulevard. Rush hour. Up the street, two men with biceps of heroic proportions came out of the gym and lumbered to their cars.

  She kept watching the entrance, waiting for Katzka to emerge.

  It was five-twenty.

  The traffic was beginning to thicken even on this street. Through the flow of cars, she caught only intermittent glimpses of the front entrance. Then, suddenly, there was a gap in the traffic and she was looking straight across the street as a man emerged from the side door of the Amity building. He paused on the sidewalk and glanced at his watch. When he looked up again, Abby felt her heart kick into a gallop. She recognized that face. The grotesquely heavy brow. The hawklike nose.

  It was Dr. Mapes. The courier who’d delivered Nina Voss’s donor heart to the operating room.

  Mapes began walking. Halfway up the street, he stopped at a blue Trans Am parked at the curb. He took out a set of car keys.

  Abby looked back at the Amity building, hoping, praying for Katzka to appear. Come on, come on. I’m going to lose Mapes! She looked back at the Trans Am. Mapes had climbed inside now, and was fastening his seat belt. He started the engine. Easing slightly away from the curb, he waited for a break in the traffic.

  Abby cast a frantic glance down at the ignition and saw that Katzka had left his keys dangling there.

  This could be her one chance. Her only chance.

  The blue Trans Am pulled into the street.

  There was no time left to think it over.

  Abby scrambled into the driver’s seat and started Katzka’s car. She lurched into traffic, eliciting a screech of tires and an angry honk from another car behind her.

  A block ahead, Mapes glided through the intersection just as the light turned red.

  Abby squealed to a stop. There were four cars between her and the intersection and no way to get around them. By the time the light turned green again, Mapes could be blocks away. She sat counting the seconds, cursing Boston traffic lights and Boston drivers and her own indecision. If only she’d pulled away from the curb earlier! The Trans Am was barely in view now, just a glint of blue in a river of cars. What the hell was wrong with this light?

  At last it turned green, but still no one was moving. The driver in front must be asleep at the wheel. Abby leaned on her horn, releasing a deafening blast The cars ahead of her finally began to move. She stepped on the accelerator, then let up on it.

  Someone was pounding at the side of her car.

  Glancing right, she saw Katzka running alongside the passenger door. She braked and hit the lock-release button. He yanked open the door. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Get in.”

  “No, first you pull over—”

  “Get the fuck in!”

  He blinked in surprise. And got in.

  At once she goosed the accelerator, and they shot through the intersection. Two blocks ahead, a flash of blue streaked rightward. The Trans Am was turning onto Cottage Street. If she didn’t stay right on his tail, she could lose him in the traffic coming up. She swerved left across a double line, raced past three cars in a row, and screeched back into her lane just in time. She heard Katzka snap on his seat belt. Good. Because this could be one hell of a wild ride. They turned onto Cottage.

  “Are you going to tell me?” he said.

  “He came out the side door of the Amity building. The guy in the blue car.”

  “Who is he?”

  “The organ courier. He said his name was Mapes.” She spotted another break in traffic, made another passing swoop into the left lane, then back again.

  Katzka said, “I think I should drive.”

  “He’s heading into the traffic circle. Now which way? Which way’s he going . . .”

  The Trans Am looped around the circle, then cut away east.

  “He’s heading for the expressway,” said Katzka.

  “Then so are we.” Abby entered the traffic circle and peeled off after the Trans Am.

  Katzka had guessed correctly. Mapes was heading onto the expressway ramp. She followed him, her heart ramming her chest, her hands slick on the steering wheel. Here’s where she could lose him. The expressway at five-thirty was like a bumper car ride at sixty miles an hour, every driver a maniac intent on getting home. She merged into traffic and spotted Mapes way ahead, switching to the left lane.

  She tried to make the same lane change, only to find a truck muscling in, refusing to yield. Abby signaled, nudged closer to his lane. The truck only tightened the gap. This had turned into a dangerous game of chicken now, Abby veering toward the truck, the truck holding fast. She was too pumped up on adrenaline to be afraid, too intent on keeping up with Mapes. Behind the wheel, she had transformed into some other woman, a desperate, foul-mouthed stranger she scarcely recognized. She was fighting back at them, and it felt good. It felt powerful. Abby DiMatteo on fucking testosterone.

  She floored the accelerator and shot left, right in front of the truck.

  “Jesus Christ!” yelled Katzka. “Are you trying to get us killed?”

  “I don’t give a shit. I want this guy.”

  “Are you like this in the OR?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m a real fucking terror. Haven’t you heard?”

  “Remind me not to get sick.”

  “Now what’s he doing?”

  Up ahead the Trans Am had switched lanes again. It peeled to the right, onto the turnoff for the Callahan Tunnel.

  “Shit,” said Abby, cutting right as well. She shot across two lanes and they entered the cavelike gloom of the tunnel. Graffiti whipped past. Concrete walls echoed back the grinding of tires over pavement, the whoosh-whoosh of cars slicing the air. Their reemergence into the gray light of dusk was a shock to their eyes.

  The Trans Am left the expressway. Abby followed.

  They were in East Boston now, the gateway to Logan International Airport. That must be where Mapes was headed, she thought. The airport.

  She was surprised when, instead, he rattled across a railroad track and worked his way west, away from the airport. He headed into a maze of streets.

  Abby slowed down, gave him some space. That surge of adrenaline she’d felt during the fr
antic chase on the expressway was fading. The Trans Am wasn’t going to get away from her in this neighborhood. Now her challenge was to avoid being noticed.

  They were heading along the wharves of Boston’s Inner Harbor. Behind a chain-link fence, rows and rows of unused ship’s containers were stacked three deep like giant Legos. And beyond the container yard was the industrial waterfront. Against the setting sun loomed the silhouettes of loading cranes and ships in port. The Trans Am turned left, drove through an open gate and into the container yard.

  Abby pulled up beside the fence and parked. Peering through a gap between a forklift and a container, she saw the Trans Am drive to the foot of the pier and stop. Mapes got out of his car. He strode onto the dock, where a ship was moored. It looked like a small freighter—a two-hundred footer, she estimated.

  Mapes gave a shout. After a moment, a man appeared on deck and waved him aboard. Mapes climbed the gangplank and disappeared into the vessel.

  “Why did he come here?” she said. “Why a boat?”

  “Are you sure it’s the same man?”

  “If it isn’t, then Mapes has a double working at Amity.” She paused, suddenly remembering where Katzka had just spent the last half hour. “What did you find out about the place, anyway?”

  “You mean before I noticed someone stealing my car?” He shrugged. “It looked like what it’s supposed to be. A medical supply business. I told them I needed a hospital bed for my wife, and they demonstrated some of the latest models.”

  “How many people in the building?”

  “I saw three. One guy in the showroom. Two on the second floor handling phone orders. None of them looked very happy to be working there.”

  “What about the upper two floors?”

  “Warehouse space, I assume. There’s really nothing about that building worth pursuing.”

  She looked past the fence, at the blue Trans Am. “You could subpoena their financial records. Find out where Voss’s five million dollars went to.”

  “We have no basis on which to subpoena any records.”

  “How much evidence do you need? I know that was the courier! I know what these people are doing.”

  “Your testimony isn’t going to sway any judge. Certainly not under the circumstances.” His answer was honest—brutally so. “I’m sorry, Abby. But you know as well as I do that you have a whopping credibility problem.”

  She felt herself closing off against him, withdrawing in anger. “You’re absolutely right,” she shot back “Who’d believe me? It’s just the psychotic Dr. DiMatteo, babbling nonsense again.”

  He didn’t respond to that self-pitying statement. In the silence that followed, she regretted having said it. The sound of her own voice, wounded and sarcastic, seemed to hang between them.

  They said nothing for a while. Overhead a jet screamed, the shadow of its wings swooping past like a raptor’s. It climbed, glittering in the last light of the setting sun. Only as the jet’s roar faded away did Katzka speak again.

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” he said.

  She looked at him. “No one else does. Why would you?”

  “Because of Dr. Levi. And the way he died.” He gazed straight ahead at the darkening road. “It wasn’t the way people usually kill themselves. In a room where no one will find you for days. We don’t like to think of our bodies decomposing. We want to be found before the maggots get to us. Before we’re black and bloated. While we can still be recognized as human. Then there were all the plans he’d made. The trip to the Caribbean. Thanksgiving with his son. He was looking ahead, expecting a future.” Katzka glanced sideways, at a streetlamp that had just flickered on in the gathering dusk. “Finally there’s his wife, Elaine. I often have to talk to surviving spouses. Some of them are shocked, some of them grieving. Some of them are just plain relieved. I’m a widower myself. I remember, after my wife died, that it was all I could manage just to crawl out of bed every morning. But what does Elaine Levi do? She calls a moving company, packs up her furniture, and leaves town. It’s not the act of a grieving spouse. It’s what someone does when they’re guilty. Or they’re scared.”

  Abby nodded. It’s what she’d thought as well. That Elaine was afraid.

  “Then you told me about Kunstler and Hennessy,” he said. “And suddenly I’m not looking at a single death. I’m dealing with a series of them. And Aaron Levi’s is beginning to look less and less like a suicide.”

  Another jet took off, the scream of its engines making conversation impossible. It banked left, skimming the evening mist now gathering over the harbor. Even after the jet had vanished into the western sky, Abby could still hear the roar in her ears.

  “Dr. Levi didn’t hang himself,” said Katzka.

  Abby frowned at him. “I thought the autopsy was confirmatory.”

  “We found something on toxicology. We got the results back just last week from the crime lab.”

  “Something turned up?”

  “In his muscle tissue. They found traces of succinylcholine.”

  She stared at him. Succinylcholine. It was used every day by anesthesiologists to induce muscle relaxation during surgery. In the OR, it was a vitally useful drug. Outside the OR, its administration would cause the most horrible of deaths. Complete paralysis in a fully conscious subject. Though awake and aware, one would be unable to move or breathe. Like drowning in a sea of air.

  She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. “It wasn’t a suicide.”

  “No.”

  She took a breath and slowly let it out. For a moment she was too horrified to speak. She didn’t dare even consider what Aaron’s death must have been like. She looked through the fence, toward the pier. Evening fog was forming over the harbor and starting to drift in wispy fingers across the waterfront. Mapes had not reappeared. The freighter loomed, black and silent in the fading light.

  “I want to know what’s on that boat,” she said. “I want to know why he’s gone there.” She reached for the door.

  He stopped her. “Not yet.”

  “When?”

  “Let’s drive up a block and pull over. We can wait there.” He glanced at the sky, then at the fog thickening over the water. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  21

  “How long has it been?”

  “Only about an hour,” said Katzka.

  Abby hugged herself and shivered. The evening had turned even colder, and inside the car, their breaths fogged the windows. In the mist outside, the distant streetlamp gave off a sulfurous yellow glow.

  “Interesting you should put it that way. Only an hour. To me it feels like all night.”

  “It’s a matter of perspective. I’ve put in a lot of time in surveillance. Early in my career.”

  Katzka as a young man—she couldn’t picture that, couldn’t imagine him as a fresh-faced rookie. “What made you become a policeman?” she asked.

  He shrugged, a blip of shadow in the gloom of the car. “It suited me.”

  “I guess that explains everything.”

  “What made you become a doctor?”

  She wiped a streak across the fogged windshield and stared out at the boxy canyons formed by ships’ containers. “I don’t quite know how to answer that.”

  “Is it such a difficult question?”

  “The answer’s complicated.”

  “So it wasn’t something simple. Like for the good of humanity.”

  Now it was her turn to shrug. “Humanity will scarcely notice my absence.”

  “You go to school for eight years. You train for another five years. It has to be a pretty compelling reason.”

  The window had fogged up again. She wiped her hand across it and the condensation felt strangely warm against her skin. “I guess, if I had to give you a reason, it would be my brother. When he was ten years old, he had to be hospitalized. I spent a lot of time watching his doctors. Seeing how they worked.”

  Katzka waited for her to elaborate. When she didn’t, he said sof
tly, “Your brother didn’t live?”

  She shook her head. “It was a long time ago.” She looked down at the moisture glistening on her hand. Warm as tears, she thought. And for one precarious moment she thought she might shed real tears. She was glad Katzka remained silent; she did not feel up to answering any more questions, not up to reviving the images of the ER, of Pete lying on a gurney, the blood splashed on his brand new tennis shoes. How small those shoes had seemed, far too small for a ten-year-old boy. And then there’d been the months of watching him lie in a coma, his flesh shrinking away, his limbs contracting into a permanent self-embrace. The night he’d died, Abby had lifted him from the bed and had sat rocking him in her arms. He’d felt weightless, and as fragile as an infant.

  She told Katzka none of this, yet she sensed he understood all he needed to know. Communication by empathy. It was not a talent she’d suspected he possessed. But then, there were so many things about Katzka that she found surprising.

  He looked out at the night. And he said: “I think it’s dark enough.”

  They stepped out of the car and walked through the open gate, into the container yard. The freighter loomed in the mist. The only light aboard the vessel was a weirdly greenish glow from one of the lower portholes. Otherwise the ship seemed abandoned. They walked onto the pier, passing a tower of empty crates stacked on a loading pallet.

  At the ship’s gangplank they paused, listening to the slap of water on the hull, to the myriad groans of steel and cable. The shriek of another jet taking off startled them both. Abby glanced up at the sky, and as she watched the jet’s lights lift away she had the disorienting sensation that she was the one moving through space and time. She almost reached out to Katzka for a steadying grip. How did I end up standing on this pier, with this man? she wondered. What strange chain of events has brought me to this unexpected moment in my life?

  Katzka touched her arm, his contact warm and solid. “I’m going to look around on board.” He stepped onto the gangplank. He’d taken only a few paces toward the vessel when he halted and glanced back up the pier.