Nurse Blood (The Organ Harvester Series Book 1)

by Rebecca Besser

  “I’m awake—what?”

  “I found it!” he exclaimed excitedly. “I found out where Jennings has been keeping all the money.”

  “Oooo, where?” she asked eagerly.

  “Banks, under his wife’s name,” he said. “You’re going to be Jennings’ wife when they open, so you better dress pretty.”

  Sonya laughed. “Oh, I’ll dress really nice. I have to look amazing while we stick it to him.”

  He grinned broadly. They had a good start on taking care of the old bastard and they both knew it.

  “I’ll come by to pick you up around seven—we have a long drive,” he said, glancing at the clock, realizing it was 3:45 in the morning. “Sorry to wake you up so early, babe.”

  “I don’t mind being woken up by you…I just wish it wasn’t over the phone,” she flirted. “Why don’t you make it up to me? Come over and help me fall back to sleep?”

  “I would, sexy,” he said, “but I have a lot to do between now and then. You have to have an ID, don’t you?”

  “I guess,” she whined playfully. “I’ll see you in a bit. Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  With a wistful sigh, Lloyd got to work making Sonya the identification she would need to get the money from the bank.

  ***

  Butch watched the TV in his cheap motel room, drinking warm beer. He didn’t like having to stay at a motel, but he didn’t know what else to do. Lloyd’s “hole” wasn’t equipped with an extra bed or anything else he needed. Hell, the place didn’t have a TV and he didn’t have any interest in a computer unless he was surfing for porn.

  Images flashed across the small, out-of-date screen, but he wasn’t paying attention to them. All he could think about was Sonya and all the things he could do to Lloyd before he killed him.

  He’d spent the evening going through the hardware stores in the area, buying various items at each one so his purchases wouldn’t be too large or noticeable.

  He glanced at the bags in the corner of the room, mentally going over everything he’d bought, believing he had what he needed to make Lloyd’s death a living hell.

  “It’s gonna be your funeral, Lloyd,” he said, laughed, and finished off his beer before throwing the empty can across the room at a trash can in the open sink area; he missed and it landed on the filthy, bright colored carpet.

  Jennings had called earlier, saying they would need his help to move all the harvesting equipment to the new building, which was fine with him—he didn’t have anything else to do while he waited for the big event.

  He stood, belched loudly, and retrieved another beer from the box sitting on a small table in the corner. He cracked it open and downed half of it before returning to the bed, this time to think about how he was going to spend his one million dollars after the kill.

  He fell asleep with a smile on his beer slick lips, and dreamt about the possibilities of his future.

  ***

  Roger couldn’t sleep so he’d decided to go for a drive. He stared out the windshield of his truck as he drove around town. Everything was getting out of control and he didn’t know which way to turn. Lloyd and Sonya were going to kill him, but had changed their minds. Now the three of them were going to kill Jennings, but Jennings had hired Butch to kill Lloyd. The only person who didn’t have someone plotting on their life was Sonya, which he found amusing because he knew she would kill any of them in a heartbeat if she had to. He suspected that even Lloyd would be in danger if she was in the wrong mood.

  The urge to cut and run was strong. He’d been so tempted to pack up his few belongings and disappear that it had led to his early morning drive.

  He needed the money from the harvest to make his dreams come true, so he knew leaving would be a bad idea, and there was no guarantee the others wouldn’t catch up with him later and kill him then. He wondered if he should plan some killing of his own and get away clean, leaving no one other than Peter who would ever know what he’d been up to for the last few years. The problem was, killing wasn’t really his thing—he preferred to leave that to Jennings and Sonya since they didn’t seem to have a problem with it.

  His thoughts continued to swirl and twist around each other as he contemplated his past. It was one of the reasons he hadn’t even tried to sleep. He still didn’t know if he could help harvest the children because his conflicting emotions had him in knots trying to figure out what he should do.

  He’d never thought of what they did in the purest of senses, but he knew they were saving many lives by sacrificing one, and while the figures were in his head it was okay. Just the thought of killing a child that was so full of promise, of healthy life, seemed like a rape of nature—an abomination.

  Despite his feelings, he knew no one else on the team would listen to him, so it would be senseless for him to talk about it with them. He determined to just steel his nerves, get through it, go his own way after, and never look back.

  By the time he headed for home, the sky was warming into tones of purple and pink and the world was waking up. It was a pure, fresh moment and clarity came to his mind for one blinding second.

  What they were going to do was wrong and greedy.

  Tears pricked his eyes and his throat tightened as he watched parents telling their kids bye at bus stops, sending them off to school along his route home.

  How am I going to get through this? he wondered as he pulled up to his small house.

  He sat in his truck and wept until the helpless feeling left him, and then he went into his house to get ready to help Jennings move the harvest equipment to a new building.

  ***

  Jennings awoke bright and early just as the rays of the sun were peeking over the tree line in the distance. He watched it through the kitchen window as he filled the coffee pot at the sink.

  “It’s going to be a great day,” he said aloud, and smiled.

  Inside Jennings’ head, a soft feminine voice responded, telling him the job would be over soon, and that indeed made the world a wonderful place.

  “I couldn’t agree more, my love,” he said, dumping the water into the coffee maker. “Did I tell you I hired someone to kill Lloyd?”

  The voice responded with a gleeful squeal and he imagined a warm embrace from his loving wife, even pausing in his coffee making actions to turn and embrace air.

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” he said. “I’m going to take a shower—save me some coffee.”

  He left the kitchen, smiling happily, knowing he was doing the right thing for himself and his wife.

  ***

  “Okay,” Sonya said, climbing into Lloyd’s car in a smart light gray pants suit. “Where are we going?”

  “To the bank,” Lloyd said. “You look really nice.”

  She smiled sweetly and nodded.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Want me to tell you what I’m wearing under this suit?” She waggled her eyebrows.

  Lloyd took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You better not tell me,” he said. “I need to concentrate on what we’re doing.”

  “What are we doing?” she asked.

  “We’re going to the bank and you’re going to be Mrs. Jennings,” he said. “You’re going to transfer funds to a new bank account, which I set up last night. There’s a safe deposit box too, but I don’t know that we’ll be allowed near it without the key…you’ll have to pretend you lost it and see.”

  “Sounds…interesting,” she said. “Whose name is the new account in?”

  “Well, its set up as a company account…” he said, and grinned, “…L&S, Inc.”

  Sonya laughed and shook her head.

  “Brilliant,” she said. “Why am I transferring the money there? I mean, they’re bound to ask…”

  “You don’t have to tell them,” he said. “Just act all pissed because it’s your money and you don’t need them getting into your business.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” she said. “Do you think they’ll alert Jennings to the
transactions?”

  “That, I don’t know,” Lloyd said, frowning. “He could have alerts and updates from the bank going directly to his phone for all I know, but by then I’ll have the money transferred into another account and it won’t matter.”

  “How are you going to do that?” she asked. “Where are you going to be while I’m being Mrs. Jennings?”

  He glanced over at her briefly before returning his eyes to the road.

  “I’m going to be in the car watching the money on my laptop and talking to the bank with the new account on the phone,” he said.

  “Will that work?” she asked with a frown. “I mean, will they just transfer that much money that fast?” She paused. “How much money is it, anyhow?”

  “I’m taking care of things,” he said. “Just focus on being Mrs. Jennings. It’s a lot of money—grab the folder lying behind my seat.”

  Sonya reached behind his seat and lifted a light beige folder from the floor. She opened it and examined the contents. Instantly, her eyes went wide and she glanced at Lloyd with her mouth open.

  He laughed at her awed expression.

  “That’s a lot of money,” she finally muttered, returning her eyes to the papers she held in front of her while Lloyd drove. “Did he steal all of this from us?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m assuming he makes a good bit being a doctor, and that he or his wife came from money.”

  She nodded and kept reading.

  “So, we’re just going to waltz in there and take all this?” she asked.

  “He won’t need it when he’s dead,” Lloyd said.

  “No, he won’t,” she whispered.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  With a list of all the Pittsburgh hospitals in his hand and his laptop in his shoulder bag, Agent David McCoy strolled through the door of the FBI office as soon as they opened. He knew there wouldn’t be a bunch of people at the office yet, but he wanted to be there to get a jump on the day. Once he got settled, checked the woman’s picture, and the searches Limmon had set up for him, he planned to call Detective Jones and see if she could help get an officer undercover as someone who was seeking human organs for black market trade. From the research he’d done on harvested organs, he knew they had an extremely limited shelf life, so he was banking it might be hard to get them all sold before they went bad, which meant another fence might be appealing if there were a lot of organs to move. He hoped there weren’t, but he’d seen the volume of missing persons cases that were filed within weeks of each other.

  He didn’t have any trouble getting through security. Again, he was on the list of expected guests. He did take the guest pass offered to him this time, since he planned to be working there for a while and he wanted to be able to walk in and out of the building any time he pleased.

  When he reached the floor of the office building he’d been directed to, he wasn’t surprised to see it was fairly vacant.

  One woman, sitting at her desk, spotted him and came over to greet him. She was somewhat short, had auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail, and looked to be in her early thirties. She wore a pair of black tailored slacks and a dark blue V-neck t-shirt that matched her eye color.

  “Hi,” she said, holding her hand out to him. “I’m Agent Croce. You must be Agent McCoy. We’ve been expecting you.”

  “Yes,” he said, shaking her hand and smiling. “That’s me. I’m sorry I didn’t stop by yesterday—I had some things to take care of elsewhere.”

  “It’s not a problem,” she said. “We’ve received the case file and interview video you had the police send over. We’ve also received some information from the Memphis field office for you.”

  “Great,” he said. “I was hoping everything would be here when I arrived. I wanted to get here early so I could look over things and form a plan of attack.”

  “Which is why I’m here early,” she said, smiling. “I’ve been assigned to assist you while you’re here and help you find anything you might need. We’ve set you up in the conference room—I hope that’s okay.”

  “Sounds good,” he said. “I’m not picky.”

  “Okay,” Croce said. “Let me grab a couple things from my desk and I’ll show you the way.”

  David waited while Croce collected a laptop, pen, and a couple of case files. Once she had what she needed, she smiled at him and nodded in the direction of the far wall before walking that way. He took the hint and followed her.

  The conference room they had him set up with was modest in size; it would accommodate his needs just fine. There would be enough room for the three of them—once Limmon arrived—to each have a section of the table to work on.

  “I hope this will work…” Croce said. “This is our smallest conference room. If there’s not enough space I can see about moving to a larger one.”

  “No,” David said, “this is perfect. Agent Limmon, from Memphis, will be joining us sometime and it will be plenty of space.”

  Croce frowned. “I hadn’t heard about Agent Limmon coming for a visit.”

  “I asked for him last night when I was notified that they’d found the woman’s picture,” David said, hanging his shoulder bag on the back of a chair before sitting in it. “He’s the one who set up the internet searches for me in Memphis. He knows exactly what I’m looking for and he’s great with a computer.”

  “He sounds like a valuable associate,” Croce said with a laugh. “I’m okay with a computer, but I’m better in the field.”

  “I guess that makes you my hospital search partner then,” David said, showing her the list he’d made. “Do you know of any hospitals that aren’t on this list?”

  “No…” she said, looking it over, “…but I can do a quick search and double check it for you if you’d like.” She sat down in the chair beside David and opened her laptop without waiting for his reply.

  “Please do,” he said, turning to pull his own laptop out of his shoulder bag. “What’s the Wi-Fi password?”

  She smiled and quickly wrote it on the top of the hospital list for him before returning to her search.

  David was on the internet and checking his email and the search results when she announced it was a complete list.

  There had been no hits on the woman’s picture yet, which didn’t surprise him because the picture was worse than he’d hoped. But it was still a picture they hadn’t had before so he didn’t get upset over it. He quickly sent an email to Limmon to have him add searches for street and security footage around the bar where Housen had gone missing. He was hoping they’d get a clearer picture from a new and known location.

  “So…what’s the plan?” Croce asked when he stopped typing.

  “First, we need to get a warrant for all morgue paperwork for the last month, for every hospital,” David said.

  “Why? What are we looking for?” Croce asked, frowning and looking at the list again.

  “I’m fairly sure we’re looking for a team of medical professionals who are kidnapping people and killing them for their organs,” David said. “The first logical place to look is at the local morgues to see if anyone there is helping them.”

  “Wow,” Croce said. “You really think that’s happening? That’s messed up.”

  “Nothing else makes sense,” he said, and shrugged. “I’ve asked the local police to send someone undercover, putting out feelers for human organs. While they’re doing that, I plan to go from morgue to morgue and check out their paperwork to make sure there’s nothing fishy.”

  “It might take a little while to get the warrants,” she said. “I’ll call the director and see if he can get a judge to sign off on them fast.”

  “Okay,” he said. “After that, we’ll map out a route to take so we can hit most, if not all, of the hospitals once we have the warrants in hand.”

  She smiled and pulled her cell phone from her pocket to make the call.

  David planned to make sure Croce was up to speed with everything that was going on and
familiar with the case files they were looking into while they waited for the warrants. They would start with Daniel’s—ground zero of his investigation. He just hoped he could hold himself together while he shared the news aloud, for the first time, that he believed his twin brother was dead.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Lloyd was waiting in his car when Sonya came casually walking out of the formidable beige stone building of the bank. She stopped and casually played with her cell phone for a few moments before she slowly walked out into the parking lot and toward the car. He chuckled, knowing she was putting on the calm cool act of a rich woman who didn’t give a shit about anything.

  “How’d it go?” he asked as she opened the passenger’s door and slid into the seat beside him.

  She gave him a look that said: Duh!

  He laughed.

  “Everything went well, as you know,” she said, buckling her seat belt. “How’d things go for you?” She nodded to the laptop that was closed and standing between their seats.

  He grinned. “Everything went great. Got everything transferred as soon as it came in—it took some fast talking though. They wanted to hold everything for twenty-four to forty-eight hours, but I convinced them otherwise. I had to threaten to take my business to another bank in a fit of rage before they’d consented. They did say they were putting a trace on the accounts though, for a while, to make sure nothing strange was going on, which I agreed to. I plan for Jennings to be dead before he knows what we’ve done.”

  Sonya laughed.

  “You’ve thought of just about everything, haven’t you?” she teased, and leaned over to kiss him. He kissed her back.

  “We’d better get going,” he said, ending the kiss and tucking a stray strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “We have a long drive ahead of us.”

  “But being rich makes me horny,” she complained, stuck out her bottom lip, and blinked her big green eyes at him.