by James Hayman
‘Keep going,’ said McCabe.
‘I’m a cardiac perfusionist. Until last year I worked at the university hospital in Montpellier in France, specializing in cardio-thoracic transplant procedures.’
Transplant, thought McCabe, Spencer’s assurances that it couldn’t be done ringing in his ears. It was a fucking transplant. ‘Heart transplants?’ he asked.
‘Yes, and heart/lung transplants.’
‘Were you involved in the murder of Katie Dubois?’
‘No. Not directly, but I believe I know how she was killed and why.’
‘And by whom?’
‘Unfortunately not.’
‘Was she killed to harvest her heart for a transplant?’
‘I have no proof of that. In fact, I’ve never laid eyes on Katie Dubois. But yes, that is my suspicion.’ The glow from the dash lit her face from below in a green light that accented the natural sadness of her expression.
‘Tell me what you know.’
‘I can’t. Not until I know I am safe.’ She looked at him. ‘I want immunity from prosecution.’ Headlights approached from the opposite direction. McCabe slowed the Bird and eased a little over to the right to give the car, an SUV, more room to pass on the narrow road. Sophie Gauthier bent down and shielded her face with her arm as the lights from the oncoming vehicle swept over them.
‘Who are you hiding from?’ he asked.
‘There are people who I’m sure would kill me if they knew I was talking to you.’
McCabe glanced at Sophie and then at the clock on the dash with its old-fashioned hands. Fifteen minutes since he’d called Maggie. She’d be at his apartment by now. Casey would be safe. He’d have heard if there’d been a problem.
‘It’s a little premature to be discussing immunity,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you have to offer. I don’t even know exactly what you’re supposed to have done. Besides, I’m just a cop. It’s up to the prosecutors, not the police, to discuss immunity or plea bargains. I can make a recommendation, but that’s all it will be. A recommendation.’
McCabe downshifted and pushed the Bird hard through a tight curve. Driving fast on back roads was usually a pleasure. Sophie Gauthier’s body lurched against his.
By now, McCabe figured, if anybody was following, he lost them long ago. He pulled over to the side of the road and killed the lights. ‘Listen,’ he said, turning to face her, ‘we’re all alone here. Nobody is listening, and I need to know more if I’m going to help you. Just tell me what you know about Dubois and what you suspect. I’m not recording the conversation. I haven’t read you your rights. Did you ever hear the expression “he said, she said”? That’s all this is. No matter what you tell me, all you have to do is deny you ever said it.’ McCabe knew the reality wasn’t quite that simple, but he needed information fast and this woman had it. ‘Once I know what you know,’ he continued, ‘if you really do need protection, it can be provided.’
He guessed Sophie Gauthier was debating how much she was willing to risk. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ she asked.
‘Just crack the window,’ he said. She looked puzzled. ‘That means open it. A little.’ She did.
He waited while Sophie performed what seemed a practiced ritual of delay. She fished around in her small shoulder bag and found her cigarettes. She tapped one out. She returned the pack to the bag and pushed in the car’s electric lighter. She waited for the pop. Finally she lit the cigarette, took a deep drag and exhaled the smoke. A strong familiar scent filled the car. ‘Gauloises?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Do you want one?’
‘No. I don’t smoke anymore. They remind me of when I was a student in New York. We thought smoking French cigarettes was cool.’
‘Young people are silly about things like that,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed.
For a while neither of them said anything. ‘Alright,’ she said finally, ‘I will tell you what I know. As I said, I am French. I am an operating theater perfusionist. That’s the person who operates a machine that keeps a patient alive by circulating and oxygenating the blood during thoracic surgery, including transplants of either the heart or of the heart and lungs. I was trained and, until about six months ago, worked at the Hopital Edouard des Toussaints in Montpellier. It’s a major cardiac center. We do many transplant procedures there. Edouard des Toussaints is one of two transplant hospitals in southwestern France. The other is in Toulouse. Anyway, I took my training there and afterward became a member of the staff.’ She paused as if waiting for him to ask a question. He didn’t, so she continued.
‘Transplant operations can be long and tiring,’ she said. ‘You never know when one is going to start because you are never sure when a heart will become available. So you’re more or less always on call.’
‘It’s the same over here,’ said McCabe.
‘I’m sure it is. Anyway, after an operation, before going home, whatever time it was, I usually stopped in at a small cafe near the hospital to have a glass of wine or sometimes a Pernod and water. Sometimes I’d also have something to eat. Last year, about this time, three or four times in a row, I saw the same man there, sitting at the bar. He was a good-looking man. Early forties. Tall. Dark hair. Expensive clothes. He wore a closely cropped gray beard.’
McCabe wondered if Spencer ever had a beard. If there was a picture of him anywhere with a beard.
‘Always he sat alone. Like me. Though not so tired as me, I think. Sometimes he’d be drinking wine. Sometimes whiskey. It was easy for me to tell he was not French. I thought English or possibly American. I thought perhaps he was visiting a relative who was in the hospital for a long stay. I’m divorced, and he seemed interested, so we struck up a conversation that lasted several hours. After that we saw each other two or three more times in the cafe. Once we went elsewhere to dinner.’
‘Did you become lovers?’
‘Yes, but I don’t think his heart was in it. I think he may be homosexual. Or maybe not. As a woman who attracts quite a few men, I could tell he was more interested in what I did at the hospital than in me as a woman.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘Mostly my job. How much experience I had. What kind of equipment we used.’
‘Did that surprise you?’
‘At first, yes, but when I asked him about it, he said what he did for a living was sell medical equipment. Including heart-lung machines. That’s what he said he was doing at the hospital, a business deal.’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘Yes. I had no reason not to. He knew a lot about the machines.’
‘Did he tell you his name?’
‘He told me his name was Phillipe Spencer.’
‘Philip Spencer?’ McCabe felt a surge of adrenaline. Here it was. Falling right into his lap. The corroborating evidence Burt Lund was pushing for.
Sophie sensed his excitement. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Let’s just say I know the name.’ He was sitting with a witness who could directly link the sonofabitch to an illegal transplant. Not perfect, but a hell of a lot better than a pair of Bruno Magli shoes. Why would Spencer use his real name, though? Why not Harry Lime or some other alias? It didn’t make sense. Yes, it did. Simple. The passport. He was traveling in a foreign country. He didn’t have the time, or maybe the means, to get himself a phony. Still, why give her the name? No. It didn’t make sense. Then again, lots of things that don’t make sense turn out to be true.
McCabe watched her light another Gauloises. With her Jeanne Moreau face, her accent, and the strong smell of the cigarettes, McCabe was beginning to feel like he had somehow landed in the middle of a Truffaut film himself. Tirez sur le Detective?
‘What happened next?’ he asked.
‘Phillipe somehow found out, or maybe he already knew, that I had money problems. I’m sure that’s why he approached me. I make a good income as a perfusionist in France — not as much as one would make here in the States, but still quite a lot. But I
have expensive tastes, and I indulge them. I was carrying a lot of debt at high interest. So when he said he could offer me an assignment that would pay very well, I was interested in hearing more about it. I asked what it was, and he said there was an opportunity for me to take part in a transplant operation in America. I asked him why he’d want me to travel all the way from France when there were already many perfusionists in America. It quickly became clear that this was to be an illegal operation. He wanted me because of my financial problems and, I suppose, because I have no contacts with the medical or legal authorities in America.’
‘Did he tell you who the patient was?’
‘No, not by name. He just told me that a very rich man in his eighties was dying of end-stage congestive heart failure. He wanted a new heart but couldn’t qualify for an approved program because of his age. Phillipe said he’d located a resource that could obtain hearts outside of normal channels. I told him I had no interest in breaking the law and even less in going to jail. He said there was no danger of that. He said he and his friends had performed a number of these operations in the past and no one was any the wiser.’
‘Is that the word he used, friends? Not colleagues? Or associates?’
‘I think so. Yes. I’m quite sure it is. Is that important?’
‘I don’t know. It might be. What happened next?’
‘This conversation didn’t occur all at once. It took place during the course of two or three meetings.’
‘I understand.’
‘Even though he said there was very little risk, I told him I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to be involved in anything illegal, and given the shortage of healthy hearts for transplant, I didn’t believe it was ethically right to deprive someone younger of the chance for a normal life to help an old man who’d soon die anyway.’
‘Did he accept that?’
‘He seemed to.’
‘What changed your mind?’
‘Money. Avarice overcame both scruples and discretion. In our final discussion he told me that for one operation, one day in the operating room, he would deposit a hundred thousand euros in a numbered account in my name in the Cayman Islands. That’s a hundred thousand euros for one day’s work plus a couple of days’ preparation and travel. That’s more than I make in a year. Even so, I didn’t say yes right away. I went back to my apartment and looked at the pile of unpaid bills on my table.’
‘Sounds familiar.’
‘Then I drank a bottle of wine and went out and had sex with an old friend I hadn’t seen in a year.’
‘Lucky friend.’
She ignored the comment. ‘The next morning I called Phillipe at his hotel and told him I would take part.’
‘And you did?’
‘Yes. That was three operations ago. The third was last week. It never occurred to me until the Dubois girl’s body was discovered that they might actually be killing people to harvest their hearts.’
McCabe’s mind was racing. Two more transplants. Two more harvested hearts. Whose hearts? Two more young blond female athletes? Where were the bodies? Buried under a golf course like Elyse Andersen? What about Lucinda Cassidy? He was jumping too far ahead. He forced himself to slow down.
‘What made you think that’s what they were doing?’ he asked.
‘Timing. We performed a transplant Wednesday afternoon. Katie Dubois’s body was found Friday night. Then over the weekend, news reports said her heart had been cut from her body. I didn’t know for sure if there was a connection, but it seemed likely. When I saw you at the funeral, I decided I would talk to you.’
‘When were the other two operations?’
‘The first was late December last year, a week or so before Christmas. The second this spring, April sometime.’
‘Do you know the name of the hotel Spencer was staying in?’
‘Yes. The Hotel du Midi in Montpellier.’
‘When he was staying there?’
‘November last year. I’m not sure of the exact dates. I left my diary behind in France.’
McCabe took out his cell and hit Tom Tasco’s number.
‘Detective Tasco.’
‘Tom? It’s Mike McCabe. I’m in the car, and I can’t talk long. Do me a favor and check if Philip Spencer stayed at the Hotel du Midi in Montpellier, France, spelled M-O-N-T-P-E-L–L-I-E-R, last November. If so, try to get the exact dates he was there. Maybe the local gendarmes will cooperate and check it out. If not, go through Interpol.’
‘What the hell was he doing in France?’ asked Tasco.
‘Can’t talk about that now. See if you can get any background. Where he flew from and to. Airline and flight number. Anything else that seems pertinent.’
‘Gotcha.’
McCabe hung up and turned back to Sophie. ‘You said you’d performed three of these operations including the one, when? Last Wednesday?’
‘Yes. In the afternoon.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No. The way it works is I arrive in Boston a day before the surgery. I’m picked up at Logan by a driver and taken to a hotel. A different hotel each time. This time it was a Ramada Inn near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I check in — ’
‘Using your real name?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who makes the reservation?’
‘I do. Phillipe calls me and tells me to book a flight and gives me the name of a hotel. He also gives me the name of a car service. I book them as well.’
‘Who pays?’
‘I do. With my Visa card.’
‘Okay, so you checked into the Ramada Inn on what day? Tuesday?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘It’s the same each time. I stay in my room. My meals are sent up. A man calls. Not Phillipe. It’s a voice I don’t know. This time I was told to be ready by five o’clock on Wednesday morning. I was picked up and taken to the surgery site.’
‘That’s the phrase he used? Surgery site? Not hospital? Not OR?’
‘The man said surgery site.’
‘Who picked you up?’
‘A driver. I was made to wear a blindfold the whole time we drove until I entered the building.’
‘Could you see anything at all?’
‘No.’
‘How long did you drive?’
‘About four hours.’
Four hours. Maximum radius from Portsmouth about two hundred and fifty miles, give or take. That covered a lot of territory. He needed more to go on. ‘Try to think back,’ he said. ‘I want you to close your eyes and, in your mind, put yourself back in that car. Can you do that?’
She looked at him, not sure where he was leading. ‘Yes. I can try.’ She closed her eyes.
‘Describe the trip for me as best you can remember from the time you started off.’
‘I got in the car. The driver closed the door and got in himself. He closed his door. We drove out of the hotel parking lot.’
‘Did you turn left or right?’
She thought about that for a moment. ‘Left. Then we drove a little way, a minute or two. Stopped and waited for a moment.’
A stop sign, thought McCabe. Or a traffic light. ‘While you were stopped, could you hear cars passing in front of you?’
‘Yes, but only in one direction, left to right.’ Her eyes were still closed. She was doing well. ‘Then we turned right and joined the flow of traffic. We drove for a little while, went around a curve and then onto a big road. The driver accelerated fast as we went onto it. A motorway, I think it must have been. I could hear us passing cars and trucks to our right. Sometimes they passed us to our left. We drove on that road for a long way.’
I-95, McCabe thought. The guy was driving carefully. Center lane. Not too slow. Not too fast. Probably doing sixty-five. Smart. Why attract attention? ‘Were you still on the big road when the sun came up? That would’ve been around six fifteen or so. You would have bee
n driving about forty-five minutes. Could you feel its warmth on your face?’
Again she thought before speaking. ‘Yes.’
‘On your left side or right side?’
‘Right side. I hadn’t thought about that before. We must have been traveling north. It got warmer as we went along.’
He wondered about the tolls. ‘Did the driver slow down or stop at all while you were on the big road? Like for a tollbooth?’
‘Yes. I think he must have had a bowl of coins on the seat next to him. I could hear them jingling just as we slowed. Then he opened his window. I could hear it go down and feel the air on my face as we slowed to a stop. I suppose he threw the coins in a basket. Then we accelerated fast again.’
Exact change lane. Made sense. No E-ZPass records. No toll takers to notice a woman in a blindfold.
‘How long did you stay on the fast road, the motorway?’
‘Several hours. I can’t be sure of the time.’
‘How many times did you go through a toll? Where you could hear the change rattle?’
‘Three times.’
McCabe thought about the pattern of tollbooths along the Maine Turnpike. ‘After the third toll — this is important — did you start going fast again like on a motorway, or was it more like you were on smaller roads? You know, stops, turns, stuff like that.’
‘We stayed on the motorway only a little longer, maybe five minutes.’
McCabe thought about that and guessed they’d stayed on 95 and probably gotten off around Augusta.
‘How much longer did you drive after you left the motorway?’
‘A while. More than an hour. Maybe two. We seemed to be going pretty fast with some stops. A two-lane road, I think. I could hear the whooshing sound of traffic coming the other way. Also, several times the driver pulled out suddenly to pass, accelerated fast, and pulled back in suddenly. The last few miles felt like a poorly maintained road. With many bumps.’
A couple of hours on secondary roads from Augusta. Max of what? Seventy-five or eighty miles. Progressively smaller roads at the end. That narrowed things down a bit. ‘Any sense from the position of the sun or anything else what direction you were traveling in?’
‘No.’