by Chris Mooney
Marie smiled when his grimy, shaky hand clutched the bottle. He nearly cried out in triumph.
Rico cracked open the cap. He had started to roll on to his back when she said, ‘You need to sit up and drink it … Here, let me help you … There, isn’t that better? Now drink it slowly, or you’ll throw it up … That’s better. Take your time.’
All the while Rico sipped it, crying, Marie knelt behind him, rubbing his bony back and reassuring him that his mother was waiting upstairs to take him home. When Rico tilted his head back to drain the last of the liquid, she wrapped a rope around his throat.
Rico didn’t have the strength to mount a fight. When his arms went limp, she kept twisting the rope. She had to make sure his brain was deprived of oxygen for just a few more seconds.
Marie had no intention of killing him. She just needed him unconscious. Strangling required more effort, but it was much easier than trying to administer an injection. She had tried that with the first few, and every time they saw the needle it triggered some sort of adrenalin reserve. They fought back and screamed. She wanted them to sit still; too much of the sedative in their weakened condition could potentially stop the heart.
Finally, Rico slumped to the floor. She didn’t require Brandon’s help with this part; she could easily lift Rico herself.
Cradling Rico in her arms, Marie stood and carried him out of the room, the length of rope tapping against her thigh.
21
Gary Corrigan had changed into medical scrubs and wore green neoprene surgical gloves that ran all the way up his forearms. A clear plastic shield protected his face.
Marie placed Rico on the operating table. She removed the rope, along with his clothing, and stepped back to give Corrigan room to work.
Corrigan rubbed a swab of surgical spirit against the crook of Rico Herrera’s elbow. Next he inserted the IV, taped the line down and then began scrubbing and washing away the filth and grime covering the teenager’s bare chest. Water sluiced over the edges of the operating table and ran into the floor drains.
Next came the Betatine. Corrigan swabbed the iodine-coloured liquid over Rico’s chest, picked up a scalpel and made what he called a ‘midline incision’. It started at the suprasternal notch and ended at the pubis. Corrigan had studied a new and rapid technique for multiple organ harvesting that allowed the organs to be cooled in situ using cold intra-aortic and intraportal infusates. The surgery would take no longer than sixty minutes.
Marie found it difficult to stand still. A fevered rush always gripped her at this stage. There was so much to do, so many decisions to make. She needed to maintain patience and calm in the midst of this exciting yet draining emotional storm.
Harvesting organs to fund their operation had been Brandon’s brainchild. He had come up with the idea early on, when their financial resources were extremely limited, back when they were storing the children in the small basement of their home. With the families scattered all over the country, they could afford to take only one child at a time. Driving to a particular state and staying at hotels, the endless days spent watching the family and waiting for the perfect moment to abduct the child and disappear without getting caught – all of this required a significant investment of capital, and it had to be paid in cash because money didn’t leave a visible trail.
And the costs didn’t end once the child was locked away. There was the constant feeding for months and sometimes years at a time. The vitamins, fruit and vegetables needed to keep the child reasonably healthy. The constant monitoring to make sure the child didn’t escape, the unexpected illnesses that always cropped up – colds and stomach flus that required trips to the drugstore; infections that demanded antibiotics. The third child they abducted, Anthony Jacobs, had a life-threatening asthma condition that necessitated using the Internet to purchase enough inhalers to last an entire year.
Then came the return trips to abduct the parent. More costs, more time spent having to save up money, the maddening and seemingly endless waiting … until Brandon told her how they could sell organs to fund their operation. Unbeknownst to her, Brandon had been methodically researching the idea – and he had already made contact with an ‘organ broker’. This man was part of a global network consisting of other organ brokers who represented people who either wanted or needed to bypass the traditional organ waiting lists. Buyers were lined up all over the world, and they were willing to pay a premium, in cash – especially for young, healthy organs.
Brandon’s idea had proved to be extremely lucrative. They purchased the building of a former printing press, which allowed them to abduct and store multiple children and their parents for long periods of time. They paid off the loan for Washington Memorial Park, and Brandon lavished her with gifts. They could afford to do anything they wanted, anything in the world.
Marie inspected the coolers. There were five. Each one would house a separate organ – heart, lungs, liver, kidneys and pancreas. The Custodiol HTK solutions were ready. Everything appeared to be in order.
She glanced at her watch. It was almost noon. She checked Corrigan’s progress. Another forty minutes and the harvest would be finished. She could meet the buyers at one thirty. They had flown in last night. Right now they were staying at hotels near the airport, waiting for her call. Marie took out her phone.
Brandon walked back into the room. He joined her and, noticing the phone in her hand, said, ‘I already called the buyers.’
‘When?’
‘After I picked up Corrigan. Once he’s finished, you can head to the office. I know you’re anxious to get there.’
‘What about Ted?’ Ted Keller was the funeral home’s assistant director.
‘I sent Ted home for the day,’ Brandon said. ‘You’ll have the place all to yourself.’
This was Brandon’s way of apologizing for being such an idiot to her at the cemetery.
Tears stood in her eyes. Marie remembered her make-up and, not wanting the mascara to run, tilted her head back and blinked them away.
‘Thank you.’
She kissed him. Deeply.
Then Marie hugged him fiercely. She could see Corrigan removing Rico’s heart.
‘I love you.’
‘I love you too,’ Brandon said. ‘Come home as soon as you’re done.’
22
Marie rolled the gurney across the funeral home’s basement suite of dull white walls and grey linoleum flooring. The adrenalin rush from the past few hours had departed, leaving in its wake a bone-crushing exhaustion. Still, she felt relaxed. The funeral home was empty, and she had the rest of the afternoon to herself.
The crematorium had three separate ovens. She pushed the gurney up against the middle door. Rico’s carcass had been wrapped and stored inside one of the long, cardboard boxes the funeral home used to put corpses awaiting cremation. She opened the door and slid the box inside the chamber. After she locked the door, she ignited the burners. The process would take thirty minutes.
Marie left for her office, aware of a new feeling worming its way through her: sorrow. She felt a sense of loss, always, at this stage. Each death brought her one step closer to the completion of her life’s purpose – her life’s mission.
Fortunately, she had discovered a way to remember each child and parent. To keep them alive in her heart and mind until the moment she gasped her last, dying breath.
She unlocked the office safe and from the top shelf removed a large velvet jewellery box. It contained the necklace she’d worn while visiting Theresa Herrera. She never wore it here at work, just at home and when she visited the grieving parents.
The gold necklace was very elaborate, made up of eleven diamonds of various colours, each one a different shape and carat size. There were three empty settings. She wondered where she should put Rico.
The funeral-home business had brought her into contact with a vast array of companies offering specialized services for honouring the dead. The last decade had produced a rush of companies that creat
ed certified, high-quality diamonds from cremated remains, or a lock of hair. These lab-created diamonds had the same molecular identity, brilliance, lustre and hardness as the natural stones sold at any posh jewellery store. She had done business with several of these companies over the years, all under different names, and yet each and every time she visited their websites she was overwhelmed by the choice. There were cuts, degrees of clarity and sizes to consider – and colours. She had five to choose from: colourless, blue, red, yellow and green. Which colour was Rico?
The answer came to her immediately: red. It had taken a long time to break his fiery resolve – and that temper! He had fought her at nearly every turn.
Now she had to choose the cut and the clarity. She turned to her computer and logged on to one of the websites. She scrolled through the pages, thinking.
When she couldn’t come to a decision, she checked her watch. Twenty-two minutes had passed. She rose from her chair, and on her way back to the oven ducked inside a room to put on a face shield and apron to protect her from the intense heat.
Opening the crematorium door, she saw Rico’s skull in the blaze of fire. She used a T-shaped iron rod to break it down into smaller fragments. She did the same with other, larger bones and then returned to the computer.
An hour passed and she still couldn’t come to a decision.
No matter. The inspiration would come to her eventually. When it did, she would fill out the paperwork and put eight ounces of Rico’s ashes, along with a money order, into the post. Another packet of ashes would be mailed out to the exciting new company she had just discovered. Sacred Ashes specialized in placing cremated remains inside rifle cartridges, shotgun shells and handgun ammunition, custom-made to any calibre.
Marie carried a 9-mm handgun in her handbag when she visited the parents. Until Colorado, she had never fired it inside a home. She did, however, use it frequently inside the printing press.
The moment she’d discovered Sacred Ashes, the idea of incorporating the cremated remains of her previous guests inside her handgun had struck her with such intensity that she shook for nearly an hour. It was as though she had been granted a dark and magical power to summon the dead from their graves (or, more appropriately, their incinerated ashes, all of which she had kept) to carry out an execution.
And it had given her a power. Approaching the cages with the handgun raised, she could recall, even now, the thrill of watching the look of terror in each parent’s eyes as she rattled off the names of the dead loaded in her gun clip. Each time she fired a round, she felt lighter. Better.
Marie had placed three orders, with many more to come. The boxes of ammo were tucked inside the safe.
Marie had one regret: she wished Theresa Herrera had known the name associated with the bullet that had killed her. Wished the woman could have died with the knowledge.
Marie returned to the oven. The bone fragments had cooled. She picked up a long, metal broom with a brush made of high-carbon stainless-steel bristles and hummed a Spanish lullaby as she carefully swept Rico into a steel catcher at the front of the crematorium door. She switched to a normal paintbrush with a wide head to collect the finer fragments and then transferred everything into a crematorium pan.
Marie inspected the debris and, finding no metal, carefully dumped the fragments into a special processor. As the motorized blades pulverized Rico’s bones to ash, she decided to honour Rico with a 1.5-carat, emerald-cut red stone. The $25,000 diamond would be the centrepiece of her necklace.
23
Ali Karim’s plane touched down at an airport located near the southeastern corner of Alabama. Established in 1941 by the US Army Corps to train additional airport personnel for the Second World War, the Dothan Regional Airport was still used primarily by the military, but it also serviced one major commercial airline carrier and accepted all types of general aviation aircraft.
Airport operations were conducted inside a wide, ranch-shaped building with a brick face and a sloping grey roof. The interior was immaculately clean and accommodated a fair number of local retail and dining options. Fletcher stepped up to the Hertz counter and presented Robert Pepin’s driver’s licence and credit card to the clerk. Half an hour later he was seated behind the wheel of his rental – a Ford Explorer with its own GPS system. The town of Dunbar was an hour’s drive.
He had visited Alabama once, when the FBI’s Birmingham field office had asked the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit for assistance in the case of a fifteen-year-old girl who had been abducted from her bike. While reviewing the case details and working up a profile to give to local law enforcement, the girl’s mother had confessed to murdering her only child. Her new husband had been lavishing too much attention on his comely stepdaughter. The mother had killed her daughter out of jealousy.
Birmingham acted as the state’s cultural capital, and was stocked with historic buildings, museums, botanical gardens, art galleries, ballet companies and symphony orchestras; the town of Dunbar, however, consisted of small, practical homes sprinkled between rambling meadows and dense forests. Despite the bright sunshine, the area had a haunted feel, as though the homes had been deserted. He passed no cars and saw no people.
Sacred Ashes, the company that specialized in adding cremated remains to shotgun and firearm cartridges, operated out of a brown-painted ranch with a sagging front porch. It was nearly identical in size and structure to the handful of ramshackle homes built haphazardly along Old Gracey Road, a long, meandering street carved through a seemingly never-ending maze of brown fields populated with ancient longleaf pines and spruces. The only advertisement for the company came in the form of adhesive gold letters placed on a new black mailbox mounted near the front door. The house contained no garage or carport. A pair of dirt roads wrapped around each side of the house and ended in an ample and currently empty dirt lot covered by a mat of brown pine needles.
Fletcher parked his Ford Escape rental on a trail in the woods where it wouldn’t be seen from the main road. He collected the backpack holding his equipment and set off to find a place to conduct surveillance.
The edge of the woods led into a wide-open field of tall yellow grass that bent and swayed in the cooling afternoon wind. Hidden behind a tree, Fletcher unzipped the backpack and pulled out a laser mike. His broken ribs prevented him from lying on his stomach. Wearing a pair of headphones, he sat near an area of thick brush and aimed the laser mike at the windows.
Twenty minutes passed, without any sound or movement of any kind.
Then a phone rang inside the house. The company’s answering machine picked up, and a woman with a thick, backwoods accent left a message. She had two sons, and, while both were avid outdoorsmen, they used different firearms. The mother was hoping it was possible to have their daddy’s ashes split between shotgun shells and pistol rounds. She wanted to negotiate a price.
Fletcher pulled out his field glasses and studied the back of the house. When he finished, he took out his phone and called Karim, who was waiting inside the plane and helping his assistant, M, as in the letter, research information on Sacred Ashes.
The company had been open for less than a year, Karim said. The two men who had started it had taken out a second mortgage to purchase the 1,200-square-foot ranch home in Dunbar. They had also taken out a sizeable personal loan to buy the ammo supplies and equipment needed to modify gun cartridges. In the light of their debt, the owners had elected not to quit their steady, full-time jobs in Midland City, where both men also lived.
Fletcher thought about the house. At the moment it was empty. And Midland City was over an hour’s drive from Dunbar. He wondered if the two owners had elected to take Sunday afternoon off to spend time with their wives or girlfriends.
M, Karim said, had uncovered some useful information concerning the house itself: there was no alarm system, as far as she could tell.
But that doesn’t preclude the existence of one – or some other type of security, Fletcher thought. He thanked Kari
m, hung up and powered off his phone. Field glasses in hand, he searched the area. Assured that he was alone, Fletcher stood and tucked the field glasses into his jacket pocket. Then he tied his backpack to the top of a tree limb. There was no need to bring it with him. The tools he needed were packed inside the tactical belt hidden underneath the bottom edges of his windbreaker. He moved out of his hiding spot and jogged across the field.
Fletcher reached the back door, his broken ribs throbbing. He unzipped his jacket and removed a device that looked like an ordinary smartphone from his tactical belt and moved it around the door’s edges. The light remained green, the signal that the house did not contain a security system. He put the device away and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. Using standard lock picks, he opened the door.
Since the house had no basement, the formal living area, shaded by cheap plastic blinds, had been transformed into a workshop. He found the usual assortment of equipment and tools needed to modify wildcat cartridges, all of which were neatly organized according to calibre on a series of metal shelving units resting against the walls. He opened a random box of 9-mm rounds and removed a bullet.
The cartridge was an identical match to the empty one he’d collected in Colorado.
There was one other interesting item in the room: a folding table holding FedEx and UPS mailing envelopes and small cardboard boxes. Two were open. They both contained human ashes sealed inside clear Ziploc bags.
Tucked underneath each box and envelope was a set of three stapled sheets. The first page was a computer form generated by the company website. It contained the requester’s contact information, the decedent’s information, type of ammo requested, packing and shipping preferences and a box for additional comments. The second sheet was a signed contract agreeing to the type of ammo requested and cost; the third, a copy of the deceased’s death certificate.
