The Angel Maker

by Ridley Pearson

  “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.”

  At the top of the stairs they turned right down a corridor past scores of office cubicles.

  They walked and walked and walked, finally reaching Terkel’s enclosed office, where they took seats around a conference table. There was a Wipe-It bulletin board at the far end of the room, covered with math equations written in blue marker.

  Terkel sat across from Boldt, rather than taking a place behind his desk. Boldt appreciated the gesture. He said, “Joe tried to explain this to me. Maybe I had better hear it from you.”

  Boldt explained, “Six months ago, a hunter recovered some human remains in the Tolt River. We have been unable to locate the source—the burial site—despite some exhaustive foot searches. The rest of those remains are important to our investigation, to our possibly identifying the victim and therefore the killer. The man I spoke with offered to set up your computers to help predict where the bones might have dislodged from the bank.”

  “Joe Webster. That’s right.” He added, “There’s a book on this that might interest you,” Terkel said. “Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology. River movement. River meandering and material deposits. Sediment actually ‘cements’ together—if you will—and moves downstream as a whole. Our job is the quantitative determination of water flow. Tracking flows. Predicting the sedimentation process. Erosion, deposition.”

  Boldt was wondering what language this was. Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology? Nice bedtime reading. Terkel recited like a student, “Material eroded from one bank will deposit on the same bank one to two bars downstream. That’s two to four bends,” he informed Boldt. “And that’s a fact. That’s something we can bank on. Pun intended. That’s where the HEC computer can help us.” Terkel saw Boldt’s puzzled face. “HEC—the Hydraulic Engineering Center—runs the modeling computers.”

  “Maybe we should talk to them,” Boldt suggested.

  A few minutes later Boldt and Daphne were sitting alongside a Japanese woman, Becky Sumatara, staring at a color screen that offered a menu of choices. Joe Webster, a stocky man in his late forties, towered behind them.

  Becky Sumatara said, “When we received your request, we updated our Tolt model for current flow notes, slope, sediment size, distribution, and areas of erosion based on our present data. That’s what took us a couple of days. The updating is a lengthy process.”

  Boldt apologized, “When it comes to computers, I’m a techno-peasant.”

  The screen changed to a graphics aerial view of a map of King County. “Bodies of water, in all shapes and sizes, are represented by various shades of blue,” Becky Sumatara explained, her red fingernail pointing out the Sound, reservoirs and rivers, “depending on volume. The darker the shade, the more volume. Elliott Bay and Puget Sound are a deep navy, while some of the smaller creeks are almost white. You’re interested in the North Fork of the Tolt.”

  “Yes,” Joe Webster answered for Boldt.

  She dragged a blinking box to the area in question, bordering the box on Carnation, Monroe, Sultan, Skykomish and Big Snow Mountain. With two clicks of the mouse the screen filled with an enlargement of this area. “During enlargement, color reference is modified. You’ll see the Tolt is now navy and its various tributaries are lighter according to volume. Also,” she said with another click as the river, streams, and creeks turned various shades of red and pink, “we can view according to rate of flow—how fast the various volumes of water are traveling both in terms of quantity and”—the water all turned shades of green—”as regards land speed. All factors in erosion and flood control.”

  With the enlargement, a dozen smaller creeks had appeared. Daphne withdrew the topographic map from Boldt’s briefcase. The exact locations where the bones had been discovered were marked. Becky Sumatara studied the map with Daphne and then narrowed the computer’s target area yet again, creating a corresponding enlargement. “You’re up into Snoqualmie National Forest there,” she said, stepping the computer through maneuvers. “Rugged country.”

  “Yes.”

  “What does this tell us?” he asked.

  “We have two views of each stream flow,” she explained. “Aerial and lateral. This gives us a visualization of lateral erosion as well as a cutaway of stream bed depth. Using the computer, I can increase or decrease volume and rate of flow as well as access any date in the past for visualization. Unfortunately, we’ve set this up only for the Tolt’s stream bed profile, not the tributaries.”

  “The Tolt’s our baby,” Joe Webster said. “We have gravel moving one to two bars downstream. We’d like a look at those upper bars. That’s all.”

  “The high-water mark for the Tolt reservoir should give us a fairly reliable benchmark for checking downstream erosion.” She put the computer to work. Boldt felt some of the tension leave him. Finally, they were into it! On the left of the screen, she changed a date at the top of a table of numbers. The screen paused before redrawing.

  “I’m going to ask the computer to compare this projection with one a month prior. It will color-code areas of the most severe erosion, red to black, red being areas of greatest da
mage.” As she described all this, various images appeared and vanished. An arrow raced back and forth across the screen under her direction.

  “You must keep in mind that this is all speculation. Without field reports we can’t be sure of any of this. A fallen tree, a landslide, and we would have to start all over. This modeling is only as accurate as the data it’s fed.”

  “The data is good,” Joe Webster said defensively.

  Boldt looked on as Becky Sumatara pinpointed some river bends that were bright red. “The computer takes soil composition into consideration,” she explained, “which is one of the reasons it’s of value to us in a situation like this. You or I could look at a map and circle the tightest switchbacks a river makes, but erosion is dependent on composition, and it’s not uncommon for a stream to jump its banks on a straightaway where the soil is soft and relatively uniform. Stream beds generally make turns because the water encounters some form of natural obstacle, whether a rise in elevation, or a rock formation. A barrier. You could run your search party from turn to turn and never find this grave. My guess is that with flows like this, we’re going to see a stream bubble-out well away from the turns. Although Joe may be right about the upstream bars.”

  “I’d like to see those upstream bars, if we could. I’d like to start there,” Joe said.

  “One thing to keep in mind,” Boldt advised, “is road access. Our experience tells us that she would have been buried within a hundred yards of existing roads.”

  “That’s a grisly thought.”

  Daphne fiddled with the ungainly topographic map. “There are logging roads in this area, even some old homesteads.”

  Joe Webster said, “There were hiking trails until they closed them down. I remember all that a few years back.”

  Daphne indicated the logging trails, one eye straying to the screen anxiously. “This will help,” Sumatara said, referencing the map and comparing it to the screen. She made several small adjustments. The screen redrew itself each time. Boldt caught himself holding his breath again. As if from a descending bird’s-eye-view, the screen showed an increasingly magnified area with each new redraw. She pointed convincingly to the screen. “Here are the two upstream bars you’re after, Joe.” The upper curve of the river was a deep blue; the cutaway of the stream bank showed as a bright—almost neon—red, clashing with her nail polish. “It’s severely undercut,” To Boldt she said, “That’s why the search teams missed it.” She became distracted then, as the screen seemed to call to her. Again she worked the mouse. Again the screen redrew several times. “You’re lucky.”

  “How’s that?”

  “These most recent rains haven’t yet caused the Tolt to reach the high-water level marked last fall, which means there hasn’t been any additional undercutting.” Now her fingers flew through a volley of commands. Boldt looked over to see both Daphne and Joe Webster glued to the screen. “Uh-oh,” she added, punching keys furiously.

  “Becky?” Boldt asked, sensing from her sudden silence that they had problems.

  “You had better get someone out there quick,” she said, pointing once again to the screen. “The projected flow for the Tolt will pass that mark in less than forty-eight hours.”

  Daphne asked, “Would you mark the area for us, please?”

  But Becky didn’t seem to hear, still consumed with working the computer. “And there’s something else,” she said, the screen changing colors once again. “You’re wrong about the depth. About the grave being shallow.” She switched to a lateral view that depicted an overhang of brown earth and the animated blue of the river water well below it. “According to this, the undercut is at least six feet below grade—below the surface. Those bones were buried deep.”

  “He knows what he’s doing,” mumbled Boldt.

  “It is a doctor,” Daphne let slip, a look of horror on her face.

  “A doctor!” coughed Becky Sumatara.

  “You never heard that,” instructed Boldt. He looked Sumatara in the eye, then Joe Webster. “In fact, if it’s all the same to you … for the time being … you never heard word one of this. We can’t afford any rumors, any leaks.”

  Joe Webster nodded, suddenly a shade paler.

  Sumatara didn’t seem to hear. “There’s a doctor killing people?” gasped the woman, staring back into the glowing screen with its pulsing colors.

  The red no longer appeared neon. To Boldt, it seemed the color of blood.

  23

  Sharon Shaffer had a hard time thinking through the drugs. It was like trying to write with her left hand—she knew the letters that were supposed to appear on the page, but they never came out looking right.

  A car had arrived about an hour ago. It had left about forty minutes later. Forty minutes by her way of thinking.

  The man was in the kennel pen next to her. He had two fresh bandages. Seeing this, she felt sick to her stomach. The Keeper was a butcher.

  She didn’t remember her neighbor having been returned, although there he was, and the collapsible wheelchair The Keeper used to move them was folded up and leaning against the wall. She must have fallen asleep again. She kept nodding out this way, which was one of the reasons it was so difficult to measure any passage of time.

  She glanced to her right and literally jumped when she saw The Keeper in the pen next to hers. He had hold of her I.V. tube and was injecting a drug into the tube using a syringe. Separating the two of them was only the smallest amount of chain-link wire. Wire that would bite back if she so much as brushed against it. The intense look on The Keeper’s face terrified her.

  Felix, the biggest dog of the group, the alpha male, wandered freely in the center aisle. Pacing. Panting. Hungry and anxious. He was the sentry, the jail guard. He was there to prevent any chance of another intruder, any chance of escape.

  The Keeper said softly to her, “I’ve canceled my morning appointments, but I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  With the muzzle, she had no chance to respond. She was thinking, “Morning appointments!?”

  “When you awaken your right eye will hurt. It will be carefully bandaged. Under no circumstances are you to toy with this bandage. Do you hear me? Do you understand? Nod, if you understand. Good. Now you’re crying. Why are you crying? Do I scare you?”

  She nodded, though somewhat reluctantly.

  “Me? You needn’t be scared. Stop that crying. I’m a doctor.”

  She couldn’t. The more he said, the more terrified she was.

  “Please,” he said childishly.

  She wrestled with her emotions and brought herself under control. She was shaking now, the crying turned inside. She wanted to see him as insane, but she couldn’t. He seemed so professional in everything he did. So calculating. It made the chance of escape seem all the more distant.

  “You will cause yourself an enormous amount of pain if you cry later. Hmm? The saline in the tears. You understand? You must not allow yourself to cry. You must apply no pressure to this bandage, none whatsoever, so be careful how you place your head when you sleep.” He waited a moment and asked, “Are you listening?”

  She managed to nod her head yes.

  “Because of you—because of your cornea—some poor soul will be able to see again. Hmm? You will be giving someone the gift of sight. Can you imagine such a thing? A miracle is what it is, and without you, none of it would be possible. Hmm? How does that make you feel?”

  Like escaping, she thought. Now, more than ever, escape was all she could think of. The drugs he injected brought a hazy fuzz to her eyes. Would she ever see again? Would she awaken? She glanced one last time into the eyes of The Keeper.

  Perhaps, she thought, blindness wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  24

  Boldt had a dozen thoughts crowding his head while staring at his phone. Following a morning with his father, Miles had been dropped off with their neighbor Emma, who was becoming something of a nanny to the boy. The phone wasn’t exactly his, just as the coffee room wasn’t ex
actly his office, but until they assigned him a cubicle he used both as if they were his own. People now knocked before entering the coffee room. In practice, Boldt had a bigger office than Shoswitz.

  He was sitting in a fiberglass chair under a cloud of cigarette smoke left by a former visitor. Someone had stolen today’s date off the Gary Larson day-at-a-glance calendar, so Boldt had to keep checking his watch to remember the date. The trash can was filled to overflowing because to save money the offices were being cleaned only every other day and Saturdays.

  Unable to reach Dixie earlier by phone, Boldt had resorted to the newly installed electronic mail—asking a younger, more computer-literate uniform for help. He dictated a memo detailing his discoveries at both the Army Corps of Engineers and the details of his interview with Dr. Light Horse at the university, and suggested that Dixon follow up on some of Light Horse’s recommendations, which included examination and study of the surgical techniques used to close Cindy Chapman’s incision. With the push of a button, his memo—supposedly—flew across town, bleating like a lamb on some secretary’s screen.

  “Sarge?” John LaMoia called from across the room, a phone cradled between neck and chin. He waved some papers at Boldt. LaMoia, who was heading up the surveillance of Connie Chi, the BloodLines employee, was in an office rotation while other detectives watched their suspect. He was tall, with brown curly hair, and wore pressed jeans. He was a cocky, vibrant womanizer; everyone on the force liked him, male, female, uniform or suit. “The AMA printouts,” LaMoia said.

  Boldt crossed the room quickly, his own expectations increasing with every step. It was possible—in fact, more than likely—that the name of the harvester was somewhere on this printout. He took it from LaMoia. He scanned it quickly. And scanned. Page after page. His heart sank.

  La Moia had anticipated his reaction. He hung up and explained, “Six hundred seventy-five surgeons. Discouraging, to say the least. Last page,” he instructed. Boldt flipped forward. “By category it’s a little better. Any of them could probably train to do those harvests—that’s what I’m told—but if this guy is sticking with his specialty, then we’ve got thirty-one in thoracic, ten in urological. In general surgery we have,” he honed in to read, “sixty-eight; thirty-four at the U-Dub. I wrote a total there: one forty-three.”