A tall, graceful woman in her fifties answered. She looked at me pleasantly, then at Ryan and something shifted subtly in her, like a doe picking up a feral scent in the woods.
“I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I need a moment with Dr. Stayner.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“No. But it’s an emergency.”
“But he’s not on call.”
“It’s not a medical emergency. Please-is it Mrs. Stayner?”
“Yes. I’m Mrs. Stayner.”
“Please tell your husband Jonah Geller is here and that I have to speak to him.”
“Will it take long? We have to leave in an hour to pick up friends and then we’re going out for the evening.”
“The sooner you call him, the sooner we’ll be out of here.”
“All right, just a minute. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t invite you in.” Whether I minded or not, she closed the door and locked it. About forty seconds later, Charles Stayner opened it. He was wearing a casual gentleman’s weekend outfit: tan corduroy pants, a navy V-neck sweater and a white turtle-neck under it. Polished loafers, even in the house.
“Mr. Geller,” he said, extending his hand. “And you are?”
Ryan said, “Giulio.”
“I think my wife mentioned we don’t have much time-”
“Neither do I, Doctor. My partner’s been kidnapped.”
“That’s awful. Terrible. But why come to me?”
“Because it was Sean Daggett who took her.”
His face went taut fast, but not fast enough to conceal the flash of fear he felt at that name.
“I know everything,” I said. “The organ ring. The secret operations. That’s what David was running from, isn’t it?”
“Please, keep your voice down.”
“Tell you something else, Chuck. Carol-Ann Meacham is dead. She was murdered last night.”
“Are you serious?”
“Beaten to death and dumped in a park. The police haven’t released her name yet but my partner was watching her house. Someone lured her out with a phone call and killed her to keep her quiet. First David, now her. How safe do you feel, Chuck? Geez, I hope no one followed me here.”
His eyes darted up the driveway to the road, as if to scope it for more cars.
“Invite us in. Now. You tell us what we need to know, we leave, and you go on your double date.”
“The other option,” Ryan said, “is you cancel on medical grounds.”
“Are you threatening me?” Stayner hissed, his face growing red. “Geller, I can’t believe you brought this thug to my-”
His voice cut off as Ryan bunched his sweater and turtle-neck collar tight in one first. “This thug happens to love that girl too, Doc, so cut the shit and ask us in.”
He had Johnnie Walker Black in his study. He poured himself a drink and diluted it slightly from a jug of water in a beer fridge. He didn’t offer one to Ryan or me, which meant one less thing to throw in his face.
“This isn’t what you think,” he said.
“What do I think?”
“That I’m in this for money. I’ve never made a penny, not one. Everything he pays me I give to the hospital.”
“Guess what?” I said. “I don’t care. All I need from you is a way to find my partner.”
“Are you sure it was him?”
“I saw it with my own eyes. And if he hurts her, Doctor, you’re going to pay with everything you have. Now start with David. Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He hasn’t contacted me since he disappeared.”
“Not even once.”
“No.”
“That means he didn’t trust you. If you were really his friend and beloved mentor, he would have. It gets me thinking. Maybe you were the one who sold him out, told those thugs where to find him.”
“Never!”
“What happened to Mr. Patel?” I asked. “What went wrong?”
He looked stricken and sank down onto a couch that faced a wall unit lined with books on medicine and science and ethics, the scheming hypocrite.
“Two things,” he whispered.
“Speak up.”
“Are you recording this?”
“No, you asshole, just speak up.”
“Two things went wrong. The first was that David was there at all. You don’t imagine for a minute that I would have asked him to join this-this team I was forced to put together.”
“Forced?” I snorted. “That’s your story?”
“It is.”
“You never take money?”
“I take it,” he said. “But if you check the records at our foundation, you’ll see twenty-five-thousand-dollar donations made anonymously after every surgery.”
“Anonymously,” I said to Ryan. “What bullshit.” I actually believed Stayner but didn’t want him to know it. A man doesn’t become a world-class surgeon without being a control freak. I wanted him worked up. That’s when things slip out.
“It’s true. Daggett has a son, Michael, who has chronic kidney disease. Nephritis, to be precise. Michael needed a transplant and nothing was materializing. Daggett came to me about a year and a half ago, when Michael was twelve, and told me he wasn’t going to watch his son die waiting for the organ bank to call. He had found a willing donor who was a good match and he wanted me to do a private transplant. I told him, of course, that I couldn’t help him, that he was out of line to even approach me. Then he showed me these.”
He went behind a walnut desk and opened the centre drawer. He took out an envelope and slid out half a dozen photos of the same boy whose photo was on his desk at work: in shorts and a T-shirt chasing a Frisbee in a schoolyard; in a school uniform getting into a car; entering the very house we were in.
“That’s my son Devin,” he said. “He’s sixteen. He has his first driving lesson Monday.”
“I get it,” I said.
“No, you don’t.” He took out a second envelope and tossed it to me. I opened it to find half a dozen grisly crime-scene photos of bodies hacked and shot to death, digitally altered to include his son’s face on each body.
“I threw my guts up when I saw these, Geller. My son is every bit as precious to me as Daggett’s is to him. What could I do? He made me assemble a team of people I thought would go along with it. They’d get ten thousand cash apiece for a few hours work. I’d get twenty-five. He’d cover all the costs.”
“How did you find this team?”
“I’ve been in Boston since medical school,” Stayner said. “I know everyone in medicine here. And I know who has a hard time making ends meet. Boston is an expensive place to live. The taxes are high. Certain practitioners have alimony payments, kids in private school. I knew who could use an extra ten grand in cash. For obvious reasons I did not include David. No matter how desperate he was for money, I knew this was beyond his principles.”
“And you and this team performed the surgery on Michael Daggett.”
“Yes. The week of Christmas before last. The hospital had acquired a clinic in Framingham that had a wing under construction. It was deserted. We set up a sterile unit there one night and extracted the kidney from the donor and transferred it into Michael. We were gone before anyone arrived the next day.”
“Did you know anything about the donor?”
Stayner looked into his glass. It was empty. He looked at the Johnnie Walker, then set his glass down and looked for something else to do with his hands. “I didn’t want to know. And I didn’t want him to see me, so I insisted he be sedated before I arrived.”
“Do you know if he is alive and well today?”
“There’s no reason to assume otherwise,” he said. “A couple of days of post-operative care and he was discharged.”
“So how did it get from helping Daggett’s kid to an ongoing thing?”
“How do you think? He’s a natural predator. Not schooled in any way but clever as a wolf. It didn’t take him long to see the profits in this
could be immense. Just consider the demographics. There are thousands of people in or close to Boston who need transplants, eighty per cent of them kidneys. If you’ve done the research I suggested, you know the supply is desperately short. And some of those thousands, as in any sample that size, are very wealthy people. Important people. More so here than in most cities.”
“And Daggett’s helping them jump the line.”
“Milking them for a fortune is what he’s doing. Funny thing is, I know half of them. They’re lying there under sedation and I see people I know from one of the clubs, boards, conferences, charity things I do. Politicians, bankers, new money, old. Daggett is finding them and using me as his cash cow.”
“Are they still done out in Framingham?”
“No. He set up a clinic in a defunct mortuary he bought in Mattapan.”
“A mortuary.”
“It works. There are ambulance bays if his donors are being brought in anesthetized. Prep rooms that serve perfectly well as operating theatres. You don’t need much for laparoscopic surgery. We use one room for extraction, one for transplant.”
“I want the address.”
“I’ll write it down.”
“You say David wasn’t involved in any of this.”
“The night of Mr. Patel’s donation, the assistant surgeon I’d been using got into an accident on the way to our facility and broke his wrist. The surgery couldn’t wait, so I drafted David in for just that one night. He was the only one I could find on the spot with the skill to take it on.”
“How did you get him to agree?”
“I know a few things about Judaism, even though I’m not Jewish. You can’t help but pick it up in this field. I knew that saving a life is considered a sacred duty. So I didn’t tell him the true circumstances until he arrived at the facility. Then I pressed him on the life-saving part until he agreed to do it. I made him take the money and keep it until he decided what to do with it. I thought everything would be okay, he’d throw the money his parents’ way …”
“But Mr. Patel died.”
Stayner nodded. “Normally, a living donor goes through extensive pre-transplant protocols. A thorough examination, medical history, genetic counselling, blood work, everything. We knew Mr. Patel was the right blood and tissue match for our recipient.”
“Courtesy of Carol-Ann.”
“Yes. Unfortunately, he was allergic to the anesthetic we used and he suffered an episode of malignant hyperpyrexia-or hyperthermia if that’s more familiar to you.”
“No.”
“Well, it’s something we normally would have flagged in genetic testing, but Daggett forces us to cut those corners.” He decided to refill his glass now, drank half down and said, “Please understand I fought against organ racketeering in India for years. I railed against it at conferences until the government there banned it. I’ve tried to prevent it all my career and this bastard gangster has made a complete joke out of it. Stuck me right in the middle. I love my son too. I never would have gotten involved in it if it weren’t for him.”
“Save it, Doctor. Where does he live?”
“Daggett? I couldn’t tell you. Somewhere outside the city. But I know he has an office in town. He told me once if I didn’t keep doing what he wanted, he would take my son up there and throw him off the top.”
“The top of what?”
“Williams Wharf.”
CHAPTER 24
We drove past the USS Constitution into the crowded North End and came to a driveway that served three six-storey condo buildings that faced the harbour. They were red brick with large art deco windows. Daggett worked up top of the middle one, Williams Wharf. We entered the private drive and came to a dead end where short concrete pillars linked by chains were set to block off a plunge into the water, accidental or otherwise. The back end of the building extended right to the pilings at the water’s edge. The views from any floor would be totally unobstructed.
As soon as we got out of the car, a uniformed security man exited the building and asked if he could help us. I got my digital camera off the floor of the car and said we were going to take a few pictures. He said okay but stayed there, arms crossed across his chest, as I struck a few touristy poses against the harbour backdrop, looking around the complex as Ryan snapped away with a flash that was nowhere near up to the job, but I doubted the guard would know that. On the right the driveway circled around to the lobby entrance; on the left it sloped deeply toward a door to an underground garage.
We traded places and I took four pictures of Ryan, letting him look around. Then we waved to the security guard and got back in the car. He unleashed one arm to wave back, then refolded it and continued to watch us until we had turned around and headed back out to the street.
“No way he has Jenn in there,” I said. “Not with that security.”
“He could have direct entry from the garage.”
“Still. It’s too public a place. Other tenants below. Cameras over the lobby and garage entrance.”
“I saw.”
“Which also means it’s impossible for us to get in. We’re not going to fool anyone pretending to deliver flowers or pizza.”
“I used to hang around the North End with the locals when I did business here,” Ryan said. “There’s a couple of places up the corner we can watch from. We’ll see if he comes in or out.”
“If he does,” I said, “then what? This isn’t much of a place for a gunfight.”
“Few places are. But they still happen.”
We found an Italian cafe called Troppo that promised more of everything, including endless coffee refills. We took a window table and spent an hour eating dishes Ryan ordered, though I barely took note of what I ate. We watched fine vehicles enter and exit the driveway into the Wharves. We kept a running track of European, Asian and American luxury sedans, hybrids, crossovers and SUVs. We debated the plural of Lexus.
We didn’t see Sean Daggett come or go.
“These Irishmen,” Ryan said, “they’re crazy fuckers, you know that. In New York, back in the day, half of them weren’t even five-foot-seven, a hundred and fifty pounds, they still gave the families a run for their money. Pound for pound the most fearless guys out there, they’d go in anywhere blasting. The Gambinos, among others, used them for certain hits and muscle jobs because it was better to have them with you than against you.”
The waiter came and asked if there’d be anything else. A line was forming past the door and the table was in demand. We couldn’t drink any more coffee or water so we paid up and walked back to the car in darkness.
Halladay’s Funeral Home was in a Mattapan neighbourhood called Wellington Hill. It sounded Colonial or British but was all twenty-first-century urban blight. Half the stores were boarded up and the bus shelters advertised great deals on new foreclosures. The elderly clutched their purses and belongings tightly and put what little threat they could into the thrust of their canes. Single men gathered in tight-moving knots under canopies as a light rain drifted through.
The mortuary was surrounded by white hoarding with a gated entrance. The front half was two storeys and covered with light stucco. The back half was a long one-storey brick extension. Through the fence I could see two cars near the front door, none in the expansive lot on the west side. Signs on the hoarding said an application to turn the facility into a night club was before the zoning board. Graffiti was scrawled here and there denouncing the proposed club. As we cruised down the street we saw posters calling for a residents’ meeting to stop the zoning application.
“He’s smart,” I said. “He buys a place that suits his purposes, applies for a usage the residents don’t want, and it can sit tied up for years while he makes a fortune off it.”
“Think Jenn is in there?”
“Even if she is,” I said, “we’re not ready to storm it.”
“We’re all we got.”
“Do you know anyone in Boston?”
“No one I’ve seen in ye
ars. Back in the day, mind you, I came a few times. My old crew back home was hooked up with the Patriarcas. I mingled with them a few times.”
“Anyone you could ask for help?”
“There’s one guy here I got out of a jam. He might be a chip I can cash.”
“Think he’d accept an invitation to a gunfight?”
“Him personally, no. But he might know some guys who would. When do we need them?”
“Soon as you can.”
“Anything we can do in the meantime?”
“Go see our congressman.”
Back in my hotel room, I showed Ryan a page I had found and bookmarked during an earlier search. The architect who redesigned McConnell’s house had posted photos and a video tour of the outside on his website. “It’s on Louisburg Square,” I said. “Steps from the historic State House in the heart of Beacon Hill. The one with the black shutters and the Stars and Stripes fluttering bravely in the wind.”
Ryan took a look at the four storeys of solid red brick, the black shutters and trim. “Must have cost a fortune, that location.”
“It did,” I said. “Fortunately his wife has one, because it was way beyond his means. He took a few hits in the House when they bought it, got razzed about living off the avails of his wife while pretending to understand the common man, yada yada. I want to be there by nine, nine-thirty, approach him as he’s leaving for church.”
“How do you know he goes to church?”
“An Irish politician in Boston? I’ll bet you breakfast I can find an image of him toting a Bible in under one second.”
It took 0.63 seconds to come up with photos of the congressman and the heiress entering a historic church downtown, not far from where Rabbi Ed Lerner was striving to open his shul.
“What time do Catholics attend church on Sunday?” I asked Ryan.
“Ask someone who goes. Hey, zoom in on this corner,” he said, pointing to the lower left.
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