A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

  In the main bedroom the bed has been made and there are no clothes on the floor, not like her house, where clothes pile up next to the bed over the course of the week. She goes through his drawers. Everything is neatly folded. On the wall is a framed black-and-white poster of a kid looking beyond the window of a house out towards a hill where trees are being felled. On the adjoining wall above the drawers is a framed photograph of Vincent standing next to Simon Bower, a river next to them, a cooler with a fishing rod leaning across it by their feet. They’re each holding up a fish. She can’t think of many men who would have photographs in their bedrooms of their friends, and she wonders if the connection between Simon and Vincent was more than just a friendship. She looks at the photograph. Both men are smiling, and in this moment the camera hasn’t captured who these men really are beneath the surface. Wouldn’t it be great, she thinks, if one day technology advances to the point where you could put a photograph like this into a scanner and it would strip away the masks the people in it are wearing? She wonders if the photo was taken by a camera with a self-timer, or if a third person took it, then wonders if that third person was at the railway line today.

  In the office there’s an out-of-date computer sitting on a desk that looks old but has been lovingly restored. There’s a wooden captain’s chair with leather upholstery. She turns on the computer and sees right away it’s going to take time to boot up. Perhaps it’s as old as the desk. She heads down to the Room of Obsession. It smells like sweat. This room is so different from anything else here, it’s like it should be in a different house. Perhaps Vincent Archer is a different person when he’s in here. In a house full of straight edges and elegant curves, the articles pinned to the wall could have been clipped from the newspaper by a four-year-old. Vega looks over the newspaper articles about Ruby Carter, surer than ever that Vincent had something to do with her disappearance. She searches for other pieces of jewelry that might be hanging from the walls but finds none.

  Her phone beeps. The message she sent earlier has gotten a response. She’s been sent a photograph of the murder weapon. It’s a match to those she saw in the kitchen. Vincent Archer brought it with him.

  She goes back into the office. The computer has warmed up. There’s no password, and she has instant access to Vincent’s email. It’s a pathetic affair. His inbox shows messages from his parents, work, a couple of carpentry newsletters that he’s signed up for, emails from his bank, his insurance company, one from his dentist saying it’s that time of the year again. There are emails from a dating website that Vincent signed up to a year back but never finished completing his profile for, as if he got bored or distracted or nervous. There are emails from Simon, but they’re mundane. They talk about catching up to go fishing, or for a drink, or to go and catch a movie. The emails don’t mention any conflicts with other people. There are no references to Ruby Carter. No references to Andrea Walsh. She clicks the icon to look for new messages, and two come through, one from the mechanic about his car, and the other another carpentry newsletter that promises subscribers tips on how to make the perfect jewelry box for Mother’s Day.

  She minimizes the email screen. There are photographs saved on the desktop of Vincent fishing, laughing, drinking. There are photographs of this house being renovated, and Simon is in some of them. There are other pictures with a few other faces in them, group events that look like summer barbecues with his family.

  Her phone beeps again. Another text. This one saying Vincent Archer’s prints have been run against those on the parking chit used immediately before and after Erin was thrown from the rooftop. The prints are a match. It also says Joshua’s prints have been run against the rock that killed Vincent Archer. Those prints are not a match.

  In the Room of Obsession, she stares at the wall. She is missing something, she’s sure of it. Something important. The dots are here somewhere—she just can’t connect them.

  She gets out her cell phone. She calls the hospital and is transferred to Dr. Coleman, who is still in her office.

  “What can I help you with, Detective?” Coleman asks.

  “Tell me,” Vega says. “What exactly are your thoughts on cellular memory?” After a few seconds of silence, she thinks Coleman might have disappeared. “Doctor? Are you still here?”

  “I’m here,” Coleman says. “Listen, I think it’s probably better if you come and see me. There are some things I need to tell you.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  Outside the window is a darkening city. This time of the year, it’s light until almost eight o’clock, but every day moving forward a few minutes of sunlight will be shaved off until the city is on the other side of its June winter. It’s this time of the year when Dr. Coleman often regrets not having done more with her summer.

  Only now she has other regrets to focus on.

  There’s a knock on her door, and a moment later it opens.

  “Dr. Coleman?”

  “You must be Detective Vega,” Toni says. “Please, take a seat.”

  The detective must be around her age, Toni thinks. She’s attractive and muscular and right now she also looks tired. It’s been a long day for everybody.

  “Can I get you a drink?” Toni asks.

  “No, thank you.”

  “You mind if I have one? I think I need it.”

  “Go ahead.”

  From her bottom drawer she pulls out a hipflask of gin. She pours some liquor into a glass. From a small fridge in the corner of her office, she takes out a bottle of tonic and adds a couple of splashes to the gin, along with some ice cubes. She hated gin when she was younger. She always thought of it as an old man’s drink. Jesse drank it, though. Because Jesse drank it, she drank it too, near the end, when his life expectancy went from months to weeks. She sips at her drink, remembering what it was like back then, while restraining herself from gulping it down now. Vega says nothing, and Toni knows she is waiting her out.

  “In a lot of ways,” Toni says, staring into the glass, “it’s hard to know where to start.”

  “How about at the beginning?”

  “The beginning,” Toni says. “I guess that’s as good a place as any.” She takes another sip. She knows what she wants to say, but isn’t sure how to say it. “What you need to know is that we thought we were doing a good thing. Did you know that Ben had a brother?”

  Vega shakes her head.

  “His name was Jesse,” she says. “He died. It was a little over ten years ago. They were twins.”

  “He’s never mentioned him.”

  “It hit him hard. He came back from overseas to be with him, and Jesse . . . Jesse lasted almost five more years with the heart he had. It was awful. Watching somebody close to you slowly dying when there’s nothing you can do. He was on a waiting list, of course he was, but waiting lists are long. They teach you in school about supply and demand. It’s an economic thing, but it’s a medical thing too. There are more people needing organs than there are people giving them up, and then you have to be compatible too. Have you ever lost anybody close to you?”

  “My parents,” Vega says.

  “Then you know what it’s like. How’d they die? Were they sick?”

  “It was a car accident,” Vega says. “My dad, he liked to drink. He’d get behind that wheel so drunk he could barely see. It caught up with him. I was young at the time. They were too. I’ll be the age they were when they died in a couple of years.”

  “I’m sorry,” Toni says. “People often wonder if it’s better to lose a loved one quickly or slowly. With Jesse it was slow, and the stages of grief that came with him dying bounced from acceptance to denial to hope. He was so sick all the time, and he was on the waiting list but . . . but there are always people on the waiting list. Hope strung out is still hope, but it feels like hell. In a way, Jesse died well before his last heartbeat. He knew. You could see it in his eyes.”

  “You knew them, didn’t you, back then,” Vega says.

  She nods. “I used to d
ate Ben. Truth is, he broke my heart. This was back before Jesse got sick.” She laughs softly and gently shakes her head. “It was twenty years ago. I can’t believe it’s been that long. The thing is . . . about a year after he left, I started seeing Jesse. It wasn’t romantic, nothing like that. It could have been. Jesse loved me, and in a way I loved him too, but he wasn’t Ben. In the beginning I used to allow myself to see him as if he were, because they were so similar, and after all, they were twins. It was stupid, of course. I wanted him to find a nice girl, but whenever he did he’d want me to meet them, and right away they could tell there was something between us. I think that’s why he always made the introductions—it was a way of sabotaging his own love life. When he got sick, I cried almost every night for him. I would have done anything to have saved him, but what could I do? What could anybody do?”

  She takes another sip. The office is quiet. Vega is watching her. She seems aware that whatever it is Toni wants to say, she hasn’t gotten there yet.

  “It felt like a hole was ripped in my chest when he died, and Ben . . . he was in so much pain I thought . . . Well, for a while there I thought we were going to lose him too. He kept asking how it could have happened. They were twins, they were designed the same way, one couldn’t get sick without the other getting sick. He stuck to that notion for a long time. How could his heart beat strong when Jesse’s had failed, and at such a young age? It didn’t matter what you said to him. He blamed himself. It was stupid, but he did. He had classic survivor’s guilt. In the end he turned that blame to the system that had let Jesse down.”

  She takes another sip. Her drink is half gone.

  “ ‘Bad people are doing all kinds of shit in this city while good people are dying when their organs get tired.’ Those were his exact words when they came to see me. He’d been a cop for a few years by then, and as you must know, you see a lot in those first few years.”

  “Not just the first few years,” Vega says, “but that’s when it’s the most shocking.”

  “The thing is, Jesse got sick around the same time Mitchell’s sister died. Her name was Myra. She was Joshua’s biological mother. It was a brain embolism. Nothing anybody could have done. So she died, and of course Joshua’s dad had died not long before that. Then Jesse got sick and between Ben and Mitchell there was all this loss. Nothing could have been done for Joshua’s parents, but Jesse could have been saved, if the resources had been there. That’s why Ben said it, that line about good people dying because their organs got tired while bad people keep doing what bad people do. I’m not sure if it was Ben’s idea, or Mitchell’s, and I’m not sure if they knew either. I think it’s one of those places conversations can go on days where things are dark. But the conversation did go there, and they came up with a plan, and they brought that plan to me.”

  She pauses and takes a drink. Vega is studying her.

  “You’ve already figured it out, haven’t you?” Toni says.

  “I still need you to tell me,” Vega says.

  She finishes her drink. She can feel her mind starting to swirl. When was the last time she ate?

  “It was a victimless crime—that’s how they put it, and I was willing to buy it. After all, there were no victims. They needed somebody to adjust the donor records of those killed during the commission of a crime. Such a simple thing, and it was simple. Somebody is fleeing from the cops and their car hits a tree, then why not use the organs that survive the crash to save somebody else? Somebody breaks into a house to steal something or rape somebody and they cut their arm on the broken window and bleed to death, why not give their heart to somebody like Jesse? The waiting list is so clogged, Detective, you have no idea, and this wasn’t going to solve that, but it would make a difference.”

  “And you went along with it.”

  “What you have to understand is how much I missed Jesse, and how much I missed the person Ben used to be. I know you see a lot of hurt, Detective, but so do we. Every day somebody in a hospital dies. These corridors are haunted by the ghosts of those we could have saved if we’d had more time, or more resources, or more people willing to donate their organs. So yes, I went along with it.”

  “But you’re an eye surgeon,” Vega says.

  “One who they could trust, and one who could connect them with others who could also be trusted. I knew the risk, but I also knew the rewards.”

  “How many others are involved?”

  “I’m not going to tell you,” she says.

  “You have—”

  “No, I don’t have to.”

  “Any medical examiners involved?”

  “No. Not that I know of.”

  “What do you mean not that you know of?”

  “I mean this was Ben and Mitchell’s thing. If they involved other people outside this hospital, I don’t know who they might be. But it’s unlikely, because they wouldn’t have needed one to be involved. Once the donor records are altered, any medical examiner looking at the bodies should expect those organs to be missing.”

  “Those missing organs might also hide cause of death,” Vega says. “So when you say it’s unlikely they needed a medical examiner involved, it’s also just as likely they did.”

  Toni doesn’t say anything.

  Vega leans back in her chair. “I should have said yes to that drink.”

  “I can still make you one.”

  She shakes her head. “Why are you telling me any of this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want me to arrest you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You don’t think I will, because you know if I arrest you, then I have to arrest the others too, including Ben.”

  Toni twirls the base of the glass around on the desk, watching the ice slowly melt. “Maybe that’s what we deserve.”

  “There is no maybe about it. But arresting you . . . it tarnishes Mitchell Logan’s memory. Every case he and Ben ever worked on will be reopened and examined because they’re corrupt cops who—”

  “They’re not corrupt.”

  “I don’t think you get to make that judgment, Doctor.”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “So, again, I ask you,” Vega says, “why are you telling me this?”

  Toni sips at the water that’s now in the bottom of her glass. How to explain? She isn’t sure.

  “You look like somebody who wants to be punished,” Vega says. “Is that it?”

  “Yes,” she says. “A boy is dead because of us. Ben has been critically injured, stabbed by another innocent boy, and it’s all because of us. That’s why I’m telling you.”

  Vega starts to say something, but stops. Her eyes widen. She leans back and slowly nods. Toni can see the pieces all fitting into place. “The ambulances,” Vega says.

  Toni takes another sip of her drink. She should make a fresh one, but she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to numb herself for the accusations that are about to come. She says nothing and lets Vega carry on.

  “It’s why they arrived so quickly when Mitchell and Simon were killed, isn’t it? It’s why the bodies were gone before the rest of us even arrived.”

  Toni doesn’t say anything. It’s taking all of her strength not to turn away and stare out the window. She faces the detective. She has to.

  “It’s why Mitchell and Ben went in without backup,” Vega says. “Why they didn’t share their lead. Why they were armed. Simon Bower was shot in cold blood out of revenge, but if he hadn’t been, he still would have died that day anyway. There was an ambulance waiting around the corner to whisk the body away to be harvested, only neither of you foresaw Mitchell being hurt. Did somebody need some organs that day, Doctor?”

  “It wasn’t like that. It’s not like they called the day before. We’d get the news after it had happened, and we’d be scrambling to make use of the organs, but that’s the way it always is, no matter where the organs come from.”

  “It was premeditated,” Vega says.
>
  “I never knew that for sure,” Toni says.

  “Because you didn’t want to know. You were happy to turn a blind eye,” Vega says.

  “All I knew is that sometimes bad people, really bad people, get killed, and it’s okay, isn’t it, if their deaths can save others?”

  “Let me ask you something,” Vega says. “You ever ask them why the ambulance got to the scenes so fast?”

  “No.”

  “No,” Vega says. “You didn’t ask because you didn’t need to. You knew what was going on.”

  “It wasn’t like that in the beginning,” she says.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t. But where does it end? You have a sweet little child who needs a new heart, so then what? Ben goes out there and executes the next bank robber or wife-beater or shoplifter he finds?”

  “It’s not like that,” Toni says.

  “That’s exactly what it’s like. I ask you why you’re telling me this, and you say a boy is dead because of you. It means you’ve figured it out. These are the consequences of everything you all put into action years ago. It’s why you think you deserve to be punished, and you’re right—you do. If Simon doesn’t die that day, then Vincent doesn’t get angry. He doesn’t go looking for revenge. He doesn’t track Joshua down and kill an innocent schoolboy in the process. He doesn’t toss Erin off a roof.”