The Last Word

by Lee Goldberg

  The implication of that discovery for Mark went beyond the incrimination of Jesse and Susan. It meant that the killer was actively working to throw the investigators off track. The vial was definitely planted. But was it the killer’s intention all along to frame Jesse and Susan? Or was it a desperate move that was improvised to buy time?

  “Why would Jesse and Susan infect the patients they were treating?” Steve asked. “It doesn’t make sense. They’d have to be incredibly stupid.”

  “Or arrogant,” Ort said. “It wouldn’t be the first time doctors and nurses have killed their patients. You’ve caught a few yourself.”

  “We couldn’t have done it without Jesse and Susan’s help,” Steve said.

  “Who better to flush out a medical murderer than two health-care professionals with the same homicidal inclinations?” Ort asked, then motioned to his men. “Get them out of here.”

  “You’re going to regret this,” Steve said.

  “Don’t say a word,” Mark said as Jesse and Susan were led out by the two agents. “We’ll get you a lawyer and have you out on bail as quickly as possible.”

  Ort turned to Amanda. “You, too, Dr. Bentley. Stand up and put your hands behind your head.”

  “Who did I kill?” Amanda asked, getting to her feet and doing as he instructed.

  “No one as far as we know,” Ort said as the remaining agent patted Amanda down and handcuffed her. “Your crimes were committed against the dead. You’re under arrest for the illegal procurement and sale of organs and body parts.”

  “There was nothing illegal about the harvesting of organs from Wethersby and Adams,” Mark said. “Both patients were registered donors.”

  “Their organs were distributed by a reputable and legitimate biomedical company,” Amanda said. “Everything was done in strict accordance with federal law.”

  “These charges have nothing to do with Wethersby or Adams,” Ort said, “except that looking into those cases gave us the opportunity to dig deeper into the workings of your morgue.”

  “Then what is going on here?” Mark demanded.

  “We’ve been investigating Dr. Bentley for months,” Ort said. “We haven’t found any skeletons in her closet, but we’ve found plenty of PVC pipe.”

  “What are you talking about?” Amanda asked.

  “Deboning bodies and stuffing them with PVC pipes to cover your crimes. Ripping out eyeballs and selling them to the highest bidder. That sort of thing,” Ort said. “You’ve been gutting bodies and selling the organs on the black market for years.”

  Mark had been expecting the FBI to come after Jesse and Susan, but he was completely blindsided by these charges. There was never a hint of impropriety surrounding Amanda or the adjunct county morgue. As far as he knew, not a single complaint had ever been filed against her by any individual or agency.

  “You better have some damn good evidence to back this up,” Steve said, “or she and her lawyer will debone you.”

  “We’ve raided the mortuaries Dr. Bentley has been working with in this scheme and exhumed a dozen bodies,” Ort said. “It’s all over for her. The best thing she can do for herself now, and for the families of the dead, is to cooperate.”

  “Whatever case you think you have is built on lies,” Amanda said. “I’m innocent.”

  “And I’ll prove it,” Mark said. “That’s a promise.”

  The other agent led Amanda out, informing her of her rights on the way to the door.

  “You’re going to want to rethink that promise,” Ort said.

  “You obviously don’t know my father very well,” Steve said. “Or what he’s capable of.”

  “The evidence against all three of your friends is overwhelming and irrefutable,” Ort said. “Once it all comes out, you will be convinced that they’re guilty not only of the crimes that we’ve charged them with but also of betraying your trust.”

  And with that, Ort walked out.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Mark and Steve stood for a moment in shell-shocked silence. It was almost possible for them to believe that everything that had just happened had been a figment of their imaginations.

  There were no signs that Amanda, Jesse, and Susan had been there or that the arrests had ever occurred. The Men in Black were gone from the backyard. Even Jesse’s and Amanda’s cars were gone, presumably towed away for forensic examination.

  Mark didn’t know what Ort hoped to find in the cars. Drops of West Nile virus-infected blood on the dashboard? A cooler full of body parts in the trunk?

  This whole situation was unbelievable to him. And yet it had happened. Amanda, Jesse, and Susan were in FBI custody.

  The enormity of the situation was almost too much for Mark to grasp. Were the murders and the organ-theft ring related? Or was it just a coincidence that the two investigations converged?

  It had to be a coincidence, because Mark couldn’t see how or why the two cases could be connected. But coincidences always bothered him, and this one certainly would.

  He had to act. He had to do something. But where should he start? The obstacles in front of him at the moment seemed huge and insurmountable.

  Mark began by prioritizing his goals and considering the most immediate and efficient way of achieving them.

  “Forget what I said before about not being able to help,” Steve said, interrupting Mark’s thoughts. “The arrests have changed everything. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  Mark nodded. “Good. You can start by giving me the ownership papers to your restaurant.”

  Ort left Amanda sitting for hours in a windowless interrogation room at the federal building. She assumed he did it so she’d eat herself alive with anxiety and fear. But that only works if you’re guilty. And since she wasn’t, she was grateful for the solitude. It gave her time to calm down and think through her dire situation.

  Once she got past her anger, she was able to look at her predicament objectively and methodically, approaching it as if she were analyzing a crime scene or conducting an autopsy.

  The FBI believed she was using her morgue as a body farm, and according to what Ort had said at Mark’s house, they had the documents and the corpses to prove it.

  She didn’t doubt that someone was stealing the body parts, most likely the mortuaries that Ort had raided. In order for the scheme to work, the mortician would need detailed medical histories on each donor, as well as death certificates and consent forms indicating that the harvesting was authorized. Her signature would be the natural one to forge. And since she worked closely with many of the funeral homes in the area, getting copies of her signature on similar forms wouldn’t be difficult.

  While it was against the law to sell body parts for profit, the middlemen between the hospitals, morgues, and universities and the end users of the organs and tissues could charge “reasonable fees” to cover processing, storage, and distribution. But nowhere in the law did it define what was “reasonable” and what wasn’t.

  There was also very little government oversight of procurement companies—the “body brokers”—to make sure that they were receiving their body parts from legitimate sources.

  A human body, sold piece by piece, could be worth as much as $150,000 on the open market. A finger went for as little as $15, while a lower jawbone could bring nearly $4,000. Every body part had a price.

  The demand for body parts far exceeded the supply, so the black market thrived and proved irresistible to people with easy access to cadavers, like those who worked at funeral homes, morgues, and the willed-body programs at universities.

  If there were a hundred bodies involved, as Ort had suggested, then the funeral homes in the scheme were able to divvy as much as ten million dollars among themselves. Now that the FBI was on to them, the morticians were trying to make it look like Amanda was the criminal and they were the innocent victims.

  To make that work, they would need more than forged documents with her name on them. There would also have to be a money trail t
hat led to her. Amanda figured that they must have established some sort of offshore account in her name and regularly transferred money into it to make it appear that she was the ringleader.

  What Amanda wondered was whether she was simply the convenient fall guy or if the point of the scheme all along was to frame her for a crime she didn’t commit. If it was some kind of vendetta, someone had put an enormous amount of time and effort into it.

  Who had such a deep and abiding hatred towards her? Whom had she wronged so grievously?

  Amanda couldn’t think of anyone.

  So she decided that the frame wasn’t personal, only practical. She expected the morticians would even offer to testify against her to lessen their own sentences or obtain immunity from prosecution.

  Amanda had to admire their ingenuity, well aware that she was like a doomed fly marveling at the spider’s intricate and inescapable web that ensnared her.

  By the time Ort finally came to question Amanda, three hours after she was taken into custody, she may not have known the specific details of the case, but she had a pretty good idea exactly where she stood.

  Which might as well have been in front of a firing squad.

  Ort sat across the table from her and set a large file down in front of him. “Five months ago, a technician at MediSolutions in Phoenix was double-checking some of the medical history in the paperwork that came with a body part from your morgue,” Ort said. “He tried calling one of the doctors listed in the documents and discovered no such person existed. That was odd, don’t you think?”

  Amanda didn’t answer. Ort went on.

  “So he called some of the other doctors in the documents. They were either fictitious or, if they existed, knew nothing about the donor of the body part. So this technician checked other documents from your office and found the same problems. That’s when he called us.”

  Ort opened the file and passed some documents to Amanda. “Recognize these?”

  “They are standard forms,” Amanda said. “You can find them at any hospital or county morgue.”

  “But you can’t find them with your signature on them.”

  “That’s not my signature,” Amanda said.

  “It looks like your signature,” Ort said. “And our handwriting experts say that it is.”

  “They’re wrong,” Amanda said.

  “After we got that call from MediSolutions, we started looking into you. We discovered some interesting things. For instance, we learned that corpses were leaving your morgue gutted. Bones removed. Corneas removed. Muscle membranes removed. Just about everything was gone. The only way you could get away with that was if you were in collusion with funeral homes. We’ve exhumed several of those bodies. They were stuffed like scare-crows to make them presentable at funerals.”

  “I’m sure they were, because it was the funeral homes doing the gutting,” Amanda said. “The only way they could get away with selling the body parts to legitimate procurement companies was to include convincing documentation.”

  Ort didn’t acknowledge that he’d even heard her comment. Instead, he examined some of the papers in front of him.

  “In the last year, you’ve removed one hundred twenty-eight corneas from bodies in your morgue without prior consent. Isn’t that true?”

  “Sounds about right,” Amanda said.

  “You were paid three hundred thirty-five dollars a pair for those corneas,” he said.

  “The county medical examiner’s office was paid a small administrative fee,” Amanda said. “MediSolutions will sell those same corneas for thirty-five hundred dollars a pair to cover their so-called reasonable costs.”

  “You say that like someone who thinks she deserves a piece of the action,” Ort said.

  “I say that because the middlemen in the human parts supply industry are violating the spirit, if not the intent, of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act and the National Organ Transplant Act.”

  “Your righteous indignation would be a lot more convincing if not for your own actions,” Ort said. “Claudia Grauman, the funeral director at Shreibman and Sons in Glendale, has given us a sworn statement that on more than a dozen occasions you gave her corneas that she then sold to buyers in Europe, splitting the profits with you.”

  “She’s lying,” Amanda said.

  “Terence Winter, the funeral director at Schenck and Cardea in Chatsworth, has given us a sworn statement detailing several instances when you smuggled bodies of indigents and John Does out of the morgue to him, which he then sold to drug companies for the extraction of growth hormones and spinal membranes used in medications.”

  “He’s lying, too.”

  Ort sighed and closed the file. “Do you deny that you routinely remove body parts without prior consent?”

  “Under California law, I can remove body parts for medical training and other purposes after a reasonable effort has been made to locate family members and gain their consent,” Amanda said. “I have the authority and the obligation to remove pituitary glands, corneas, and a number of other body parts under the Health and Safety Code so that they may be used to benefit others.”

  “ ‘A reasonable effort’ is what?” Ort asked. “Twelve hours?”

  “According to the law, yes,” Amanda said. “But you already know that.”

  “Is there anybody watching over you to make sure you are actively using those twelve short hours to find family members and get their consent?”

  “No,” Amanda said. “There is not.”

  “In fact, you’re entirely on your own.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “So if you spent no time at all, nobody would know. You could just start cutting the moment the body comes in, particularly when the corpse is an indigent or a John Doe, and fill out the documentation with fraudulent times and dates.”

  “I don’t do that,” Amanda said.

  “But you do take body parts without consent from dozens of corpses every year.”

  “As I said before, I do so only as allowed by law,” Amanda said. “And not for personal gain.”

  “So how do you explain the three-point-seven million dollars wired to your Cayman Islands account over the last two years by your funeral home partners?”

  “The cost of doing business,” Amanda said.

  “So you admit they were paying you your cut?”

  “They were paying insurance. They were establishing a money trail so that if you ever stumbled on their scheme they could point the finger at me and save themselves.”

  “You expect me to believe that criminals would throw away three-point-seven million just to create the appearance that you were their ringleader?”

  “It was an investment,” Amanda said. “If they didn’t get caught, they could always come back and get the money later. They still can, if I go to jail and you let them walk with short sentences or total immunity.”

  “You’ve got this all figured out, don’t you?”

  “Not as well as they do,” Amanda said.

  “It wasn’t until the Community General morgue became an adjunct county morgue, and you were appointed as a medical examiner, that you had the opportunity to steal body parts with impunity,” Ort said. “Your new role gave you an endless supply of bodies and virtual autonomy to do with them as you pleased.”

  “The only thing you said that’s true is that I’m a medical examiner and Community General shares its morgue with the county,” Amanda said. “The rest is pure fiction.”

  “Dr. Sloan was instrumental in creating the adjunct county morgue at Community General and getting you appointed as a medical examiner, wasn’t he?”

  “The medical examiner’s office desperately needed additional manpower and morgue space,” Amanda said. “Mark found a simple, fast, and inexpensive solution to that problem.”

  “And a way to make some money,” Ort said.

  “For Community General Hospital,” Amanda said. “What are you getting at?”

  “A way for you to shave a deca
de or two off your prison sentence,” Ort said. “Testify against Dr. Sloan.”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t committed a crime and neither has he.”

  Ort stood up and gathered his papers. “Everyone else has turned against you to save themselves. He’s the only one who hasn’t. Yet.”

  The agent went to the door, opened it, and looked over his shoulder at her as he was stepping out.

  “Think about it,” he said.

  She did. And the conclusions that she reached terrified her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The law firm of Tyrell, Dinino, and Barer specialized in representing very rich people who committed very sordid crimes. The firm’s offices occupied three floors of a building at Wilshire Boulevard and Beverly Drive, the heart of wealth and power in Hollywood.

  Successfully defending actors, supermodels, rock stars, and professional athletes for brazen acts of violence and depravity had turned founding partner Arthur Tyrell into a celebrity himself. Tyrell was a big man—in stature, girth, and personality—who commanded and enjoyed attention, whether in front of a jury or television cameras. In fact, he’d been spending more time lately on Court TV than in court, much to the consternation of his partners.

  The problem was that much of Tyrell’s reputation was based on an almost unbroken string of courtroom victories, which he doubted he could sustain.

  It wasn’t that he’d lost confidence in his legal and persuasive skills, but he knew a big reason for his success was that most juries would let celebrities get away with just about anything, regardless of DNA, fingerprints, eyewitness testimony, or even a signed confession. It wasn’t the actor, singer, or quarterback on trial; it was all the unforgettable characters they’d portrayed, all the classic songs they’d sung, or all the incredible plays they’d made on the football field.

  But that was changing. Thanks to the explosion of tabloid journalism in print, on TV, and all over the Web, as well as ubiquitous celebrity “reality” shows, the public was beginning to realize that stars weren’t gods. The celebrities were just as lustful, jealous, petty, stupid, and greedy as everyone else, but they made a lot more money and were recognized on the street by strangers.