by J. D. Robb
“Tell me who hurt you, Louise.”
“I called her in, let it rip. Next thing . . . caught me off guard. Never thought . . . Jan. Faithful nurse. Go get the bitch for me, Dallas. I can’t kick her ass until I can stand up.”
“I’ll get her for you.”
“Get all the bastards,” she mumbled, then drifted off.
“She was coherent,” Eve said to Feeney, hardly aware she still held Louise’s hand. “She wouldn’t have been that coherent if there was brain damage.”
“I’d say the lady has a hard head. Jan?” He took out his memo pad. “Nurse at the clinic? I’ll pick her up.”
Eve slid her hand away, shoved it into her pocket as she battled impotence. “Will you let me know?”
His eyes met hers over Louise. “First thing.”
“Good. Great. I’d better get out before I’m tagged.” She stopped with her hand on the door. “Feeney?”
“Yeah.”
“Peabody’s a good cop.”
“That she is.”
“If I don’t get back, ask Cartright to take her.”
His throat closed, so he swallowed hard. “You’ll be back, Dallas.”
She turned, met his eyes again. “If I don’t get back,” she said evenly, “ask Cartright to take her. Peabody wants Homicide, she wants to make detective. Cartright can bring her along. Just do that for me.”
“Yeah.” His shoulders slumped. “Yeah, okay. Goddamn it,” he muttered when she’d slipped out the door. “Goddamn it.”
Roarke gave her the silence he thought she needed on the drive home. He was certain, in her mind, she was riding with Feeney and Peabody, standing beside the door of Jan’s apartment, issuing the standard police order and warning.
And because she’d need to, kicking in the door.
“You could use some sleep,” he said when they were home and inside. “But I imagine you need to work.”
“I’ve got to do this.”
“I know.” The hurt was back in her eyes, the weariness back in her face. “I’ve got to do this.” He drew her into his arms, held her.
“I’m okay.” But she wallowed in him, for just a moment. “I can deal with whatever happens as long as we close this one out. I couldn’t accept whatever I’ll have to accept if we don’t put this one away.”
“You will.” He stroked a hand over her hair. “We will.”
“And if I start to sulk again, just slap me around.”
“I do so enjoy beating my wife.” He closed his hand over hers and started upstairs. “Best to use the unregistered equipment. I’ve had a unit working on searching for buried records at the lab. We may have hit.”
“I’ve got the disc Louise made. I didn’t give it to Feeney.” She waited while he uncoded the door. “He didn’t ask for it.”
“You’ve chosen your friends well. Ah, hard at work.” He glanced at the console, smiling slowly as he scanned the readouts from his scan of the lab at the Drake. “And it appears we’ve found something. Some interesting megabites of unregistered, unaccounted-for data. I’ll need to work on this. He’ll have covered this well, as he did his own log, but I know how his mind travels now.”
“Can you run this on the side?” She handed him the disc. When he popped it into a secondary unit, then sat down at the main controls, she frowned. “Pop the Friend information on one of the screens. And I guess you want coffee?”
“Actually, I’d rather a brandy. Thanks.”
She rolled her eyes and went to retrieve it. “You know, if you’d bring in some droids instead of leaving everything to that tight-assed snot Summerset—”
“You’re moving perilously close to sulking.”
She clamped her mouth shut, poured brandy, ordered coffee for herself, and sat down to work with her back to him.
She studied the data on Westley Friend’s death first. There had been no suicide note. According to his family and closest friends, he had been depressed, distracted, edgy during the days before his death. They had assumed it was due to the stress of his work, the lecture tours, the media and advertising schedule he kept to endorse NewLife products.
He’d been found dead in his office in the Nordick Clinic, at his desk, with the pressure syringe on the floor beside him.
Barbs, she mused, eyes narrowed. The same method as Wo.
There were no coincidences, she told herself. But there were patterns. There were routines.
At the time of his death, she read, he had been heading a team of prominent doctors and researchers involved in a classified project.
She noted with grim satisfaction that Cagney’s, Wo’s, and Vanderhaven’s names were listed as top team members.
Patterns, she thought again. Conspiracies.
Just what was your secret project, Friend, and why did it kill you?
“It goes deep,” Eve murmured. “It goes long, and they’re all in it.”
She turned back to Roarke. “Hard to find a killer when they come in bulk. How many of them have a part in this or knew and turned a blind eye? Close ranks.” She shook her head. “And it doesn’t end with doctors. We’re going to find cops, politicians, executives, investors.”
“I’m sure you’re right. It won’t help you, Eve, to take it personally.”
“There’s no other way to take it.” She leaned back on the desk. “Run Louise’s disc, will you?”
Louise’s voice slid out. “Dallas, looks like you owe me five hundred K. I can’t say I’m positive what—”
“Mute that, would you?” Roarke picked up his brandy and worked the keyboard one-handed. “It’s distracting.”
Eve gritted her teeth, hit mute. This taking orders crap,she decided, had to stop. The sudden thought flashed that they might reinstate her but bust her down to detective or uniform. She barely resisted lowering her head to the console and screaming.
She took a deep breath, then another. Then focused on the monitor.
I can’t say I’m positive what it all means, but I have some theories, and don’t like any of them. You’ll see from the records that follow that regular calls have gone out from the main ’link here at the clinic to the Drake. While we might contact some department there on occasion for a consult, there are too many, too often, and all from the main ’link. Rotation doctors use this office ’link. Only nurses and clerical staff use the main regularly. There are also calls to the Nordick in Chicago. Unless we had a patient who had used that facility and whose records would be there, we would have little reason to contact an out-of-state. Possibly, in rare cases, to reach a specialist. This same principle applies to the centers in London and Paris. You’ll find only a few calls there.
I’ve checked, and the contact numbers for each facility are the organ wings. I’ve also checked the logs here for who was on duty when these calls were made. There’s only one staff member whose schedule fits the time frame. I’m going to have a little chat with her after I file this. I can’t think of an explanation she can come up with that’ll satisfy me, but I’m going to give her a chance before I call the cops.
I assume, when I do, I’m to keep your name out of it. How about a bonus? We won’t call it blackmail. Ha ha.
Get these murdering bastards, Dallas.
Louise.
“Didn’t I tell you just to get the data?” Eve mumbled. “What the hell were you thinking, hotshot?”
She glanced at her wrist unit, calculated that even now Feeney and Peabody would be hauling Jan’s butt into interview. She thought she would cheerfully give up a decade of her life to be inside that room and in charge.
No sulking, she reminded herself and began to scan the ’link logs when the one beside her beeped.
“Dallas.” She frowned as she saw Feeney’s face. “You get Jan into interview already?”
“No.”
“You’ve picked her up?”
“More or less. She’s about to be bagged and tagged. We found her in her apartment, dead and still fresh. Whoever took her out did it
fast and neat. Single blow to the head. Prelim time puts it less than thirty minutes before we got to her door.”
“Hell.” Eve closed her eyes a minute, shifted her thoughts. “That puts it under that same amount of time after Louise regained consciousness. Defensive wound indicated she’d seen her attacker and could identify.”
“Somebody didn’t want Jan to talk.” Feeney pursed his lips, nodded. “Follows.”
“That puts it back at the Drake, Feeney. Wo’s out. We need to find out where the other doctors on the short list were in that hour period. You’ve got the security discs and logs from Jan’s building.”
“Peabody’s confiscating right now.”
“He wouldn’t have done it himself. He’s not stupid. You’re going to find a droid, six two, two ten, Caucasian, brown and brown. But somebody had to activate and program.”
“Droid.” Feeney nodded. “McNab hit something interesting when he scanned for data on the self-destruct units. Senator Waylan headed the subcommittee that studied their military uses.”
“I have a feeling he won’t be running for another term.” She rubbed her fingers over her eyes. “Check the logs for security droids at the Drake. Wake up McNab. He could run a systems check on them if you can get a warrant for it. Even if the program was wiped, he’d find the lag time. When you’ve . . .”
She trailed off, snapping back. “Sorry,” she said in a careful voice. “Just thinking out loud.”
“You think good, kid. Always have. Keep going.”
“I was going to say that in some of the research I’ve done, I found that Westley Friend’s self-termination used the same method as Dr. Wo, and they were both—along with some of our other cast of characters—involved in some classified project at the time of his death. It seems a little too neat. Someone might want to suggest to Morris that he consider that dose was forcibly administered.”
“It was her pin found on scene.”
“Yeah, and it was the only mistake in this whole business. That’s a little too neat, too.”
“Smelling goat, are you, Dallas? Scapegoat?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m smelling. Be interesting to find out how much she knew. If I had access to her personal logs . . .”
“I think I’ll just wake up McNab, keep the boy busy awhile. You stand by.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
When the transmission ended, she picked up her coffee and got up to prowl. It had to go back to Friend, she decided. Revolutionary new implant that made certain hot areas of organ research obsolete. Meaning end of funding, end of glory for those heavily involved in those areas.
“What if a group of doctors or interested parties continued and restarted research on a covert level?” She turned to Roarke, grimaced when she noted he was manning the keyboard. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. I’ve got his pattern now. It’s nearly routine from here.” He glanced up, pleased to see her focused, restless, edgy. That, he thought, was his cop. “What’s your theory?”
“It’s not one rogue doctor,” she began. “Look at this little operation. I can’t do this out on my own. I’ve got you, with your questionable skills. Feeney, Peabody, and McNab, sliding under regs and procedure to feed me data. I enlisted a doctor on the side. I’ve even got Nadine running research. It’s too big for one cop—and a cop working outside the system—to handle alone. You need contacts, fillers, assistants, experts. There’s a team, Roarke. He’s got a team. We know he had the nurse. My best guess is she fed him data on patients, the kind that use the clinic or make use of the medi-van service. Sleepers, LCs, dealers, chemi-heads. Dregs,” she concluded. “Vessels.”
“She contacted someone with possible donors, let’s say.” Roarke nodded. “Every business needs a good inside track. And this appears to be a business.”
“She passed data straight to the labs. Her contact with the outside centers could have, likely was, for verification of a hit. She’d be what you’d call middle management, I guess.”
“Close enough.”
“I bet we find she has a nice nest egg stashed. They’d pay well. We know their lab man had to be Young. Every business needs a geek, right?”
“Can’t run one otherwise.”
“The Drake’s enormous, and our geek was pretty much in charge of the organ wing. He’d know just where to stash outside samples. And he had a medical license. He’d be the likely candidate to assist the surgeon, to bag the sample, to transport it back to the lab. That’s two.”
She crossed to the AutoChef, getting more coffee. “Wo. Politics and administration. A skilled surgeon who enjoyed power. Former president of the AMA. She knew how to play the game. She’d have high connections. But obviously, she was also considered dispensable. Maybe she had a conscience, maybe she was getting nervous, or maybe they just sacrificed her to throw the investigation off the scent. It worked for Friend,” she mused. “He wouldn’t have been pleased, do you think, if he’d discovered this rogue research conspiracy. It would have cut into his profits, his glory. There go the lecture fees, the big banquets in his honor, the media hype.”
“Only if what they’re doing, or hope to do, works.”
“Yeah. They’re willing to kill to make it work, so why not take out the competition? It used to be organ building. Louise sort of explained it in the initial report she did for me. They took tissue from a damaged or defective organ and built a new one in the lab. Grew them in molds so the tissue’d take the right shape. That solved the rejection problem. You used the patient’s own tissue so the body’d accept it and tick along. But it takes time. You just don’t grow yourself a new, happy heart overnight.”
She walked back to the console, eased a hip on the edge, and watched him work as she talked it out. “They do that kind of thing in vitro. You got like nine months to deal there. You can grow the bad part back or repair it.
“Then Friend comes along,” she continued. “Building and brokering organs has been the thing. It’s tough to grow them for anyone over—I forget—like ninety because of the timing and the age of the tissue. Takes weeks to grow a new bladder and you’ve got to do molding and layering and stuff. A lot of work, a lot of money to order one up. But Friend comes up with this artificial material that the body accepts. It’s cheap, it’s durable, and it can be molded to order. Mass-produced. Applause, applause, let’s all live forever.”
He glanced up at that, had to grin. “Don’t you want to?”
“Not with a bunch of interchangeable spare parts. But anyhow, he gets carried through the streets, the crowd roars and throws buckets of money and adulation at him. And the guys doing organ building and reconstruction research are shoved right out into the cold. Who wants to hang around peeing in a diaper while their new bladder’s growing in some lab when they can pop into surgery, get a new, improved one, and be peeing like a champ inside a week?”
“Agreed. And that manufacturing arm of Roarke Industries thanks the full bladders everywhere. But since everyone’s happy this way, what good will this little group of mad scientists prove by continuing their work?”
“You keep your own,” she said simply. “Medically, it’s probably some major miracle—regeneration—like the Frankenstein guy. Here’s this half-dead, messed-up heart. Not gonna tick much longer. But what if it can be fixed, completely, like new? You got the part you were born with, not some piece of foreign matter. The Conservative party, which includes Senator Waylan, would dance in the street. Plenty of them have artificial tickers, but they like to stomp around every few years and talk about how it’s against the rules of God and humankind to prolong life by artificial means.”
“Darling, you’ve been reading the papers. I’m so impressed.”
“Kiss my ass.” And it felt good to grin. “I’m betting when Nadine gets in touch, she’ll tell me Waylan stands against artificial life aids. You know, the ‘if God didn’t give it to you, it’s immoral’ line.”
“NewLife routinely deals with protests fr
om natural-life groups. I imagine we’ll find the senator supports their stand.”
“Yeah, and if he can make a few bucks running interference for a group who promises a new medical and natural miracle, so to speak, so much the better. It would have to be a quick procedure. It couldn’t be risky to the patient,” she went on. “They’d never outdo the implant unless what they do is as convenient and as successful. Business,” she said again. “Profit. Glory. Votes.”
“Agreed, again. I’d say they’ve been working with animal organs up until recently. They must have reached a level of success with that.”
“Then they moved up the evolutionary scale. Kept low on it from their viewpoint. Scum, as Cagney put it.”
“I’m in,” he said mildly and had her blinking.
“In what? In? What’ve you got? Let me see.”
Even as she dashed around the console, he ordered data on-screen. When he pulled her neatly onto his lap, she was too distracted for even a token protest.
“Neat as a pin,” she murmured. “Names, dates, procedures, results. Jesus Christ, Roarke, they’re all there.”
Jasper Mott, October 15, 2058, heart sample successfully removed. Evaluation concurred with previous diagnosis. Organ severely damaged, enlarged. Estimated period until termination, one year.
Logged as donor organ K-489.
Regeneration procedure begun October 16.
She bypassed the rest, focused on her case, her first victim, Snooks.
Samuel M. Petrinsky, January 12, 2059, heart sample successfully removed. Evaluation concurred with previous diagnosis. Organ severely damaged, arteries brittle and clogged, cancer cells stage two. Sample enlarged, estimated period until termination, three months.
Logged as brokered organ S-351.
Regeneration procedure begun January 13.
She skimmed down the rest, out of her depth with the medical jargon. But the last line was easily understood.
Procedure unsuccessful. Sample terminated and disposed of, January 15.
“They stole three months of his life, then failed and tossed his heart away.”