Beckett normally liked puzzles; this was, in fact, one of the reasons he’d gone into forensic pathology in the first place. But like the infuriating sudoku games in the Saturday Times, this was one that he didn’t care for.
If this person really knows what I did… if they really know what my tattoos stand for, why not just go to the cops? Why send me hidden messages and goddamn body parts?
Beckett scowled.
The only reason that he could think of is that the mystery person wanted something.
But what?
Sure, Beckett had money, but not that much money. Besides, there was no indication of any sort of ransom.
He threw his hands up.
“Who are you? And what the hell do you want from me?”
The only answer was his own labored breathing.
Worried that Suzan would return shortly, Beckett took several deep breaths to calm himself and then deleted the image from his computer. Then he withdrew the first note from the top drawer of his desk. A brief comparison confirmed that they were indeed from the same person, but other than that, they provided no clues to their origin.
He put them both back in the drawer and was in the process of closing it when his phone buzzed. The noise was so startling that he slammed the door on his hand.
Only, he felt no pain.
His hand should have been throbbing, but when he looked down, he saw that the only finger that had been in jeopardy was his middle finger — the one that was missing.
Lawnmower accident…
Beckett lived in New York City for Christ’s sake; nobody had a lawn, let alone a lawnmower. The truth was, he’d been abducted by some cult who called themselves the Church of Liberation. They were the ones who had cut off his fucking finger and were intent on making him one of their final victims. In the end, Beckett had made the leader of the cult, Ray Reynolds, one of his.
Without thinking, Beckett brought his hand to his ribs and traced his tattoos through his t-shirt.
Then he shook his head and looked down at his phone.
You keep acting like a fucking dope fiend, and Mr. Organ Donor won’t be the only one who knows what you did… and who you are, he scolded himself.
He expected — and hoped — that the caller was Suzan, but when he looked at his phone, the message was from a number he didn’t recognize.
I know the cause of death.
The sight of another cryptic message made his blood boil and, without thinking, Beckett dialed the number.
When a male voice answered, Beckett didn’t wait for him to finish saying hello before he shouted into the phone.
“What the hell do you want from me? Why did you send me this shit?”
There was a short pause, and then he heard the man on the other end clear his throat.
“Dr. Campbell? It’s Grant… I just wanted to let you know that we’ve figured out the cause of death.”
Beckett inhaled sharply.
Grant? Who the hell is Grant?
“The cause of—” Beckett stopped midsentence.
Grant McEwing.
He’d completely forgotten about his residents back in the morgue. He took a deep breath.
“Shit, okay, everyone’s done?”
There was another short pause before Grant replied.
“We think… we think we got them all. There’s one that we’re not so sure about and there’s—”
“Yeah, I’ll be there soon. Nobody leaves until I get there.”
With that, Beckett ended the call and focused on the heart resting on the dry ice.
I know what you are… I know what you did…
Well, Beckett thought, his anger building again, I don’t know who or what you are, but I know what you did — and when I find you, you’re going to regret this.
When it came to the dead, Beckett liked a good mystery as much as the next forensic pathologist. But when it came to the living, it wasn’t a puzzle so much as a hunt.
A hunt for a killer who needed to pay for what they’d done.
Chapter 13
“All right, students. Let’s get this over with — I’ve got shit to do,” Beckett said as he stormed into the morgue.
He was happy to see that Maria and Pablo appeared to have overcome their illnesses, and the rest were more sprightly than they had been just an hour ago.
Ah, the healing power of learning.
Mostly, Beckett was just happy for the distraction from other, more pressing matters.
“All right, I’m going to start from left to right. First up, Taylor: what’s your cadaver’s cause of death?” Beckett asked as he made his way over to a man with shoulder-length blond hair that had been tied up into a bun. The resident was hovering over the body of a nude woman who looked to be in her 80s. “Come on, everyone gather around.”
Beckett waited for everyone to do as he’d asked, and when they were all surrounding the corpse, he turned to Taylor again.
“Taylor?”
“It’s Trevor,” the man replied. Beckett just blinked at him, and eventually, the resident continued. “My cadaver is an 80-year-old woman who appears to have died three or four days ago. I think—”
Beckett snapped his fingers.
“I asked for the cause of death, not the obituary. Let’s get this show on the road.”
Trevor’s face reddened and he lowered his gaze.
“Based on the excess cranial pressure and the sheer volume of clotted blood on the brain, she died from hemorrhage due to an aneurysm.”
“And why did you initially assume an aneurysm, Taylor? Tell me you didn’t dull my bone saw just on a hunch.”
The man used a pair of tweezers to lift the woman’s eyelids.
“Her eyelids were drooped and the bleeding in her brain was so massive that blood leaked into the orbit through the sphenoid bone.”
Beckett nodded.
“Good — you are correct. Now onto the next.”
Beckett strode over to the second cadaver, the morbidly obese man covered in coarse hair that had initially been given to Maria.
“And whose corpse is this?”
The man’s chest had been opened with a Y-incision and his rib cage spread wide, revealing his internal organs.
“This was mine,” Grant McEwing said and Beckett encouraged the man to continue.
“Our man died from acute hepatic failure likely due to cirrhosis from excess alcohol consumption and/or fat consumption.”
Beckett’s eyes drifted to the pale pink liver that was enlarged and covered in ribbons of yellow fat.
“Good, now—”
Beckett leveled his eyes at Grant McEwing and he observed the man closely.
What are the odds that they open the McEwing Transparent Unit on the same day that Grant McEwing starts his residency? To top it off, I get a liver delivered to my office, and his cadaver just happens to die of liver failure?
It was all one hell of a coincidence, one that Beckett intended to put to the test.
“Why did you choose liver failure and not heart disease?” Beckett said, pointing at the enlarged hard which was also covered in yellow fat. “How do you know he didn’t die of coronary artery disease? After all, home is where the heart is.”
Beckett focused on Grant when he said this last part, but the man remained stone-faced. Some of the other students gave him a strange look, but Grant seemed unperturbed.
“Well,” Grant continued. “This man would’ve undoubtedly died from cornea heart disease eventually given the plaque buildup in his arteries, but his liver gave out first. My cadaver had severe ascites and swelling of the lower limbs. He also had a tremendous amount of scarring around the hepatic artery. To be sure, I removed the heart and found that while the intima of all major arteries and veins were thickened, none of the lumens were occluded.”
Beckett quieted Grant by waving his hand.
Right, you passed the test… both of them.
Beckett had more questions, but feared drawing too muc
h attention or, worse, having his interest misinterpreted as a sort of favoritism.
“Okay, let’s keep moving.”
The next body was that of a man who had died from blunt force trauma to the skull, which had caused skull fragments to puncture his brain and cause bleeding. Cadaver four was a woman who had died from advanced lung cancer that had spread to several of her organs. The students got both of these two correct, but when Beckett approached the next body, the fifth of eight, he immediately knew that this was the one that they were having trouble with.
This came as no surprise; the residents never got this one right.
“All right, whose is this?”
A nervous looking man with a patchy beard and oversize spectacles spoke up.
“I don’t know the name; there was no—”
Beckett rolled his eyes.
“Not who the victim is, but which resident had this body. And, judging by the way it looks like you crapped your pants, I’m guessing it's yours. Now, tell me what you’ve got.”
The man cleared his throat and kept his eyes locked on the woman’s corpse in front of them as he continued.
“Well, I think she drowned… clearly, her hands are the way they are because she’d been submerged for some time,” the man said. As he spoke, he lifted the woman’s forearm. The skin on her hand was wrinkled and shifted awkwardly like a loose condom.
She had washerwoman hands, an extreme form of pruning that occurred when bodies were submerged for a prolonged period of time after death.
“And? Did she drown? Your confidence is overwhelming, by the way.”
The man hesitated before answering.
“I—I’m not sure. Clearly, she was in the water after death, but I can’t conclude that she drowned.”
“Why not?”
The resident indicated dark bruising on the woman’s back.
“The settling of blood… if she drowned, I would expect for her to float belly up. That would cause lividity to form in her stomach, not her back.”
“Only partly right. After drowning, most bodies sink, but once the bacteria in their stomach and guts start to party they rise to the surface. The limbs rotate downward, which effectively spin the body so that it rises back up. But in these cases, the head hangs down and lividity and blood pooling often occur in the neck and face, not the back.”
Beckett grabbed a scalpel and pressed down on the exposed lungs.
“See that? If she drowned, there would be evidence of significant pulmonary edema. You know when you’re wearing your best loafers and you step in a puddle? That squishy sound that happens with every step? That’s what her lungs would be like if she drowned. So, if that wasn’t the cause of death, what was?”
The smile now gone from patchy beard’s face, he looked to his colleagues for support. When no one stepped forward, Beckett grew frustrated.
“Look, I already told you guys this isn’t like medical school. You’re not competing with each other, you’re here to determine the cause of death. So, help poopy pants out here… how did this woman die?”
Eventually, Grant McEwing stepped forward.
“There is hemorrhaging around the eyes,” he said softly.
“Speak up, man! There are no secrets here…”
Except for maybe one…
Grant cleared his throat and when he spoke again, his voice was loud and clear.
“There is petechial hemorrhaging around her eyes, suggesting that she’s been strangled. I also noticed, even though we didn’t dissect her throat, some swelling there, which is consistent with strangulation.”
Beckett tilted his head and observed the woman’s pallid neck.
“Minimal swelling and bruising… what you are seeing is more likely a result of a hyoid bone fracture, which is jutting out. Congratulations, the cause of death is indeed strangulation.”
He offered Grant a curt nod and let his eyes linger for a moment longer. If it was Grant who was, for some fucked up reason, sending him these mysterious organs, he had a poker face that would give Chase Adams’s a run for her money.
“All right, onto the next.”
It took less than 10 minutes to finish with the remaining corpses, and Beckett was surprised to see that they’d guessed each cause of death correctly.
“Alright, that’s it for the day. Go home and get some rest or have a drink. Just no coke. See you back here tomorrow morning.”
“That’s it?” Marie asked. “It’s not even eleven yet.”
Beckett shrugged.
“Rest is super important. Rest, and a breath mint, Maria. Just a tip.”
Chapter 14
Beckett left the morgue and rushed back to his office. He was surprised that Suzan wasn’t there, but had more pressing matters to deal with. Even as his residents were telling him about their cadaver’s cause of death, his mind had been elsewhere, trying to come up with a way to figure out who the hell was sending him the organs and cryptic messages.
Once in his office, his attention returned to the heart in the organ transplant cooler. It was impossible to know when it had been removed, but it looked healthy enough. Yet the time between removal and viability for a heart transplant was in the order of six hours or less, and it had already been sitting on his desk for three or four.
He didn’t want to get anyone involved — not the cops, not the hospital — but Beckett was a doctor and he wasn’t oblivious as to just how valuable these things were.
“Shit,” he swore. Then, against his better judgment, he grabbed his cell phone and scrolled through his contacts until he reached ‘Lab Guy’.
A scratchy voice answered on the first ring.
“Lab Guy?” Beckett said, mostly because he couldn’t remember that man’s actual name. He could recite pretty much every bone and major vessel in the human body, but names continued to escape him.
“Dr. Campbell, is that you?”
“Yeah, it’s me. I think my TA brought you some organs yesterday — a heart and a liver? They were… uhh… misplaced or misdirected or something.”
“Yeah, I have them here. Based on the extent of tissue degeneration, both have been out of the body for at least 30 hours, which means that the heart is no longer viable. The liver, however, is still good for a day or two. You know, the strange thing is, organs are heavily coded because they go bad so quickly and when you have a donor, UNOS—”
“Yeah, okay, whatever. I’ve got another heart for you, but I’m thinking that it’ll only be good for a few more hours. What about the liver? Any way you can extend the viability?”
“Wait — another heart? What did he come from? How long ago was it removed?”
Beckett shook his head and closed his eyes.
“No idea. I’m thinking with his new hospital wing, things got all fucked up — I’m still looking into it. What about the liver? Can you stretch it out?”
“Yeah, we can perfuse it with a combination of antifreeze and glucose—”
“Okay Lab Guy, do what you can. And the heart is on my desk, see if you can’t send one of your minions to pick it up.”
Beckett didn’t wait for a reply; he hung up the phone and then quickly left his office.
***
The Lab Guy was right, of course. It was next to impossible for an organ to show up unintentionally on his desk. It wasn’t as if a low-level EMS guy just read the address wrong; all organs for transplant were registered through the United Network for Organ Sharing — UNOS — long before they were removed from the donor. These were… not from there.
And he knew that if he could figure out where they’d come from, he’d be that much closer to determining who had sent them.
This was Beckett’s third time visiting the McEwing Transplant Unit, which, in his estimation, was three times too many. And when he pressed the intercom button beside the door, he felt as if he were on a first name basis with the secretary who replied.
Only Beckett had a problem with names; the few that he could remember incl
uded his own and the ones that were represented by the tattoos on his ribs.
“Hi, I was here yesterday looking for Dr… uh… Singh? I have a couple of follow-up questions for him. My name’s Dr. Campbell, by the way.”
There was a pause that went on too long for Beckett’s liking.
Organ Donor_A Medical Thriller Page 5