Death Toll Rising

by Terry Keys

  Several of the men chuckled and quite a bit of the staleness left the room.

  I acknowledged each of the leaders from left to right. I also used it as a way to introduce them to Dr. Trinidad and maybe ease the tension. If that were even possible.

  “Of course, I am only joking. His shake is terrible,” I said, laughing. I introduced each man by name one at a time. After I was finished everyone in the room had the same how did he rattle off all of those names expression.

  “So tell us, Detective, how much longer before we can go back home?” Li Chi asked.

  “Mr. Chi, I wish I could give you a firm answer, but I’m afraid I can’t. I can tell you we’ve learned a great deal about who is really behind this, and we are closing in on them. That is actually what brings us here today. Raise your hand if you’ve had a dental procedure done over the last six months.”

  I watched as every man slowly raised his hand.

  “You can put your hands down. Each of you, including Mr. Yoshida and Mr. Awad, had a tracking chip installed in the implant you received that day.”

  The men gasped and stared at each other.

  “This cannot be true,” Chi said. “These are more lies.”

  “I’m afraid not,” I said.

  I took a chip out of my pocket. Then I removed a handheld scanner, turned it on, and ran the scanner over the chip. The resulting chirp caught everyone’s attention.

  “I’m willing to bet I’ll get the same sound if I run the wand across your cheek.”

  “How can you be so sure? How did you find out these things?” Badru Obiero asked.

  “Each of your dentists received a large sum of money days after your visits. By large sum, I mean millions, many millions, each. So no matter where we moved you, they would always be able to track your location, thereby effectively making it impossible to hide you. Which in turn would make America seem inept and maybe even complicit.”

  “I still am not convinced,” Chi said.

  I walked over to him, and he leaned back from me. I moved the chip locator close to his face and it beeped loudly. I then proceeded to go around the table.

  “Listen, this isn’t a circus act or some well-planned magic trick. The longer those devices remain, the more danger you are in.”

  The men seemed to understand that I was on their side—that America was on their side. But I couldn’t risk trying to get that message out to their countries right now.

  “So what is your plan?” Obiero asked.

  “Dr. Trinidad will remove the chips. He brought a local anesthetic, needles, extracting tools, and an array of gauze and bandaging. Detective DeLuca here has graciously offered to hang back and play nurse until all of the procedures are completed. The chips, once removed, will remain here, giving the impression that you too are still here. Then we will move you to a new secure location.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Egypt’s Antar Baba asked.

  I gave DeLuca and Dr. Trinidad some final instructions and set off. Clues were always left behind, and the warehouse where Paul was taken felt like a good place to start.

  Chapter 34

  The next morning I woke around five thirty a.m. and headed out. I hadn’t gotten in until after midnight the night before. With the stakes being so high, I’d have to sleep when this thing was over. I logged into my email. Nothing from Fingers, the FBI, or anyone else. I had a text from DeLuca letting me know the procedures were completed, and the next phase, moving the men to another secure location, was underway.

  The FBI was tracking the offshore accounts where the deposits had been made and had men surveilling the dentists we believed were involved. They were also taking pictures and gathering intel from Rokan Sheth’s hastily abandoned apartment.

  I wondered how deep into hiding Sheth would go now. Or would they try to strike again to send some sort of cryptic message to me?

  The morning sun already threatened to burn me as I stepped out of my truck. Ten feet in front of me stood the same chain-link fence I’d ducked in and out of the night before.

  Daylight often revealed things that the moonlight hid. I didn’t even know why I’d come back here or what I was looking for.

  We knew Rokan Sheth had been here. We didn’t have the identity of any of the other men involved. From the looks of it, this warehouse had been abandoned for many years. It was terribly rundown but also cleverly secluded. Outside of a stray homeless person or two, no one was coming around here.

  I walked inside the room where I suspected the men had been meeting. Other than a few crates, which had probably doubled as chairs, there wasn’t a damn thing here.

  As I reached down to open the door, I noticed that it was metal. Maybe someone had pushed it open after they turned the door handle. It was a long shot, but stranger things have happened. I’d brought a fingerprint kit with me just in case, and I used it on the door. I lifted a few prints which at this point could have been from any one of the dozens of cops that had been in and out overnight.

  I noticed that the window on the door itself was covered by a set of venetian blinds. And I was willing to bet that someone had either opened or closed them the night before. I opened the screwdriver on my keychain and carefully took the blinds down. If they hadn’t been used the night before, maybe some other time they had been. Another long shot but I was grasping for straws.

  Before I left the neighborhood I wanted to talk to people in the surrounding area. There were a few establishments that were close enough that maybe someone knew something. If Rokan and his crew were as smart as I’d guessed, every meeting had been at night, which meant limited recognition of cars and people every time they met.

  I spent another forty-five minutes making my way around the block, talking to any and every person I came across. No one had seen a thing.

  An hour later I was headed to Fingers’s lab, I’d just dropped off the blinds and the prints at the station that I’d lifted from the warehouse door.

  “Porter, I was just about to call you,” Fingers said as he let me in.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Come look at this. I’ve been searching chat rooms and various websites on these guys. They cover their tracks better than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

  “Everyone leaves bread crumbs. You told me that yourself.”

  “Yeah, but the bread crumbs they’re leaving are being buried by one hundred other bread crumbs that look just like them. They will make a mistake sooner or later, but as was the case with bin Laden, that later was years later.”

  I sat down in front of the monitor he was working from. “Well, we don’t have years here. What did you want to show me?”

  I watched in agony as what I guessed was El Printo himself beat up Rael’s daughter and then had his way with her. The video showed him slapping her around and then disrobing her before taking his own clothes off and waving his genitals for the camera to see.

  “These guys are freaking sick, Porter. That girl can’t be more than thirteen or fourteen.”

  “They have to show Rael what a huge mistake he made and prevent any others from doing the same thing he did. They’re probably hunting him too. The FBI has him in protective custody. But these guys have deep pockets; they’ve proven that. Rael will never be able to live without constantly looking over his shoulder.”

  “This video is all over the web, man. This guy’s going to see it. Someone will show it to him.”

  “Well, not everyone in the FBI is happy about him being here. Some of them would just as soon douse him with gasoline and set the guy on fire. Whole different world over there. Play it again.”

  We watched the video several times. I was trying to spot something, anything, I could use. But there was nothing. As smart as El Printo had been so far, I’m sure he’d watched it several times too for the same reason I was.

  “I am beginning to side with you on this bread crumb thing. They aren’t giving us much to go on. And if you think about it, American intelligence didn
’t bring bin Laden down. A mail courier who was tired of being tortured did.”

  “How many more times we have to watch this?” he asked me.

  “Take a break from it. For the first time ever, I’m actually hoping to see a video of an American captive. I just hope whenever they do upload a video, Paul is still alive when the streaming stops. Why don’t you spend some time looking for uploads on Paul. They aren’t going to sit back and not use this capture. It’s a carrot they have to dangle.”

  “I’m on it. That girl in the video sure is a fighter, isn’t she? I mean, don’t get me wrong; he slapped her around pretty good, but she kept on fighting.”

  “Well, let’s see. Her dad abandons them. Then she watches her mother get raped, and her brother’s get shot down in front of her. I’d say she’s got good reason to be a little on the hostile side.”

  “I guess you have a point.”

  “I have a few ideas I need to vet out down at the coroner’s office. Find me something I can use. Like I said, they won’t just sit back and not flaunt the fact that they got Paul.”

  Chapter 35

  I called Chief Hill and let him know that I was heading down to the medical examiner’s office. Everyone knew that Yoshida and Awad had been killed. We needed to find out how and then track down the source.

  Now that El Printo and his team would no longer be able to track the leaders, I wondered what their next play would be? Did they even have a plan B?

  As I pulled up to the ME’s office, I received a text from my wife, Miranda.

  “Miss you. Love you. See you soon.”

  I felt that all too familiar ache in the pit of my stomach.

  I missed my wife and kids too. Every time I became so enthralled in a case, I pondered how much longer I would continue like this. I’d missed so many little moments, so many precious moments that life had given us.

  The FBI was out in front providing security for the famous bodies that lay inside.

  “Hello, Detective Porter. My name is Julie Bergmand. I’m the ME who performed the autopsies on Mr. Yoshida and Mr. Awad.”

  “Good morning. Can you take me back to the bodies?”

  We walked past more hordes of FBI security to where Yoshida’s body lay.

  “So, Mrs. Bergmand, I’ve read the report. But tell me what we have here, in your own words.”

  “Dr. Bergmand,” she corrected me.

  She rolled out Yoshida’s body and pulled the cover off him. “Well, like my report said, Detective, not much. I didn’t find any scratches, cut, scrapes, or outward bruising. There was also nothing that suggested a fight or struggle took place. There were no elevated metabolites abnormal enough for me to even investigate. Other than the live video stream we all watched, I honestly can point to nothing that suggests he was indeed murdered.”

  “So you mean to tell me there isn’t one thing even slightly out of place here? So someone’s pulled off the perfect murder? That’s a scary thought, Doctor.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say perfect. But good enough to give us nothing to go on, yes. We have to know where to start looking and right now we don’t.”

  “What if he was poked or injected with something?” I asked.

  “First there’d be a puncture wound.”

  “But it’d be small, maybe small enough to be overlooked or mistaken for a pimple?”

  “I suppose a small enough puncture could be overlooked, yes. But there are other things. For example, I mentioned metabolites.”

  “You did. Metabolite levels change when something new enters the body, right?”

  “Yes. In laymen’s terms, metabolites are a by-product of the body’s metabolism. When something enters the body, like when you eat or receive an injection, your body’s organs start to break it down. We can look at those broken down substances and determine what was ingested or injected by the makeup of what’s left behind.”

  I nodded. “That’s a little more technical than I meant, but yeah, sure. So everything we put in our bodies leaves a metabolic trace?”

  “You got it.”

  “So let me ask this. If somebody could somehow create a poison that . . . let’s say, one that left no metabolic trace, they’d have the perfect murder weapon?”

  “Well, yes, sort of. It’s complicated.”

  “Why? It sounds simple to me,” I said.

  “Let me try a different approach If you eat a banana for energy before a workout, what does your body do next? I mean, how do you get any benefit out of it?”

  “Well, your body has to break it down into different chemicals it can use,” I said.

  “Precisely. So this perfect poison would have to work the same way. Once injected, your body would produce chemicals or metabolites, depending on what was introduced. In other words, something abnormal in the blood stream that we’d see.”

  “Unless what was introduced created a metabolite of something the body already produced. Then you wouldn’t know what to look for.”

  “Regardless of what was introduced, Detective, it would elevate something in the bloodstream to an abnormal level. Well. . .”

  I glared at her. “Well what?”

  “What do we know? We know this was murder. And whoever did this wanted us to think heart attack, see nothing else and stop looking, just like we did.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what happened here. Are there drugs that mimic heart attacks? Or make the heart stop, like . . .” I paused for a moment. “What about potassium chloride? Does it leave behind any metabolites? If they’d been injected with that could you tell?”

  “Well, there is a reason we use it in lethal injections—it works. I’ve never performed an autopsy on a body that’s been injected with it. And I’m uncertain a high enough dose could be administered in one injection.”

  “What would you see if it was used here?” I asked.

  “It’d look just like a heart attack. And there are levels of potassium and chloride already found in the bloodstream. During a heart attack, potassium levels shoot to a very high level.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, not just during a heart attack. Any time there is muscle tissue damage, high levels of potassium are released in the bloodstream. So, high levels of potassium aren’t something I’d be looking for. I’d expect them to be high.”

  “So that’d reduce you to finding an injection site?”

  “Yes, and maybe slightly higher potassium levels than Mr. Yoshida would have normally produced if he’d had a real heart attack. But without a baseline, that’d be impossible to know. One person’s body could release five hundred ml and another’s one thousand ml. But again, you’d need a large amount. I don’t think that’s what we have here.”

  “Doctor, I need you to think here. If all we have is heart attack. . . Pardon the bad pun, but getting to the heart of a murder is the key to solving it.”

  Chapter 36

  We covered Yoshida’s body and rolled him back into his vault. As I followed the doctor over to her computer, my cell phone chimed. It was a text from Fingers.

  “Good news and bad – they just uploaded a video of Paul. That’s the bad news. Good news is he is still alive. Call me.”

  I grinded my teeth.

  “You okay, Detective?”

  “Yes. Just got some disturbing news. I’ll need to get out of here soon. Okay. Tell me everything you know about heart attacks. I mean, they can’t all look the same, correct? We need to drill down and find out what caused these heart attacks.”

  “Correct, Detective. There are different types of heart attacks. Each has different characteristics. The number one leading cause of death worldwide in men and women is heart disease. In regard to heart attacks, the main types are STEMI, NSTEMI, a coronary artery spasm, and demand ischemia.”

  “And I take it you can tell which one a patient had by performing an EKG?”

  “Yes, we can. And . . .” The doctor’s eyes lit up, and she raced over to the autopsy reports she’d written up on Yosh
ida and Awad.

  “And what?” I asked.

  She put a finger up and kept scanning the reports. “I may have overlooked something,” she whispered.

  “What do you mean? Did these men die of a heart attack?”

  “They most certainly died of a heart attack. But now, after talking to you, I don’t think they died of the type of heart attack that I initially suspected. There is actually one more type of heart attack. Do you dive, Detective?”

  I frowned, and the look on my face must have been answer enough.

  “I take that as a no. Well, have you ever heard of decompression sickness?”

  “I may have heard of it, but I’m not exactly certain what it is or how it pertains here.”

  “When a person dives, hundreds of tiny air bubbles form in the bloodstream due to the pressure change. After a dive is complete, the diver is slowly introduced back to a lower pressure environment. Many divers have died when this process is hastened, regardless of whether or not a preexisting heart condition or other factors are present. It’s called an air embolism. It can even occur during medical procedures.”

  “So this air does what, acts as an artery clogger?”

  “Yes! The blood flow is blocked because the chambers of the heart are filled with air. We categorize this type of heart attack as PEA or pulseless electrical activity.”

  “How much air are we talking about here? More than a needle’s worth?”

  “You’re not going to like my answer.”

  “Let me decide that. How much air are we talking about?”

  “A typical U-100 insulin needle of air shot into a vein would be enough. And if it was done in the right place, it’d be pretty difficult to identify as the source, especially if you weren’t looking for it.”