by Candice Fox
“How long would a patient expect to be on the organ recipient waiting list?” I asked.
“Anywhere between six months and four years. Most of our organs are recovered from cerebral vascular accidents—blocked blood vessels in the brain, strokes and the like.”
“What’s the actual process of organ transplant?” Eden asked. “You mentioned that it would be difficult, near-impossible, as a one-man job.”
The doctor drew a breath and puffed out his cheeks.
“It’s possible but it would be difficult, yes. Heart transplants, for example, are a five-hour procedure with a team of six. A person doing this alone in a chop shop, as they’re commonly called, could get by with a heart and lung machine, a monitoring system, a defibrillator and a hell of a lot of drugs. It would be risky. Things would be made easier for the survivable transplants by the fact that only one of the patients has to survive. Like I said, I think the man you’re looking for probably tried and failed a number of times before he got the technique right.”
“So it’s possible we’ve got recipients as well as donors in our body pile,” I told Eden. She looked downtrodden.
“What kind of drugs are we searching for here?”
“Anticoagulants, antiseptics, sedatives, anesthetics. Adrenaline. The real money shots would be the anti-rejection drugs. Various immunosuppressants. They’re not easy to get, even on the black market. A patient’s critical stage is just after the transplant operation, when the body fights the foreign organ because of the unfamiliar DNA. The anti-rejection drugs stop this process. Organ transplant recipients need to be on a program of anti-rejection medication for the rest of their lives.”
“We’ll need a list of the most common anti-rejection drugs and their manufacturers.”
“I’ll have my secretary print you one out.”
“Can you speculate about the sort of prices a recipient would be looking at?”
Again, Rassi shrugged.
“He could charge whatever he liked. Transplant tourism is rampant in China, encouraged by their lax medical consent laws and Mao’s barefoot doctor program. There are places in provincial China where you can get a kidney for ten grand Australian, but you run the risk of unskilled surgeons, money scams and disease. A well-organized, confident and discreet surgeon, operating out of your home country, with a record of success—forged or legitimate—could charge upwards of eighty grand.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“How do you put a price on life, Detective?” Rassi eyed me curiously. “If you had the money, would you play your hand on the waiting list?”
I didn’t answer.
We spoke for an hour or so, going back over the process of transplantation, the necessary materials and skills. It seemed to me, as I sat quietly calculating in my leather armchair, that the killer had outlaid a million or more on his setup costs alone. The profits of the business were mild in comparison, but unlimited. Rassi provided documented cases of transplant tourism operating in China, the Philippines and Pakistan. There was no reason, he concluded, that our killer could not be going global with his business. There was no reason why he wasn’t conducting a transplant operation every couple of weeks.
When we were ready to leave he pushed a bunch of papers towards us. I looked at a list of names followed by basic personal information.
“This is the organ transplant waiting list.” He nodded at the paper. “I could have waited for a warrant but, like I said, I’m leaving this afternoon and I’m the only one with the authority to release it. I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting the names of forty-nine patients who have taken themselves off the list before receiving an organ transplant in the last year.”
“Thanks.” I raised my eyebrows.
“Before you get excited, Detective, you won’t find that this is a comprehensive list of your suspect’s buyers,” Rassi told me. “When the need for a transplant is recognized the patient is added to the list automatically. It’s not unusual for patients to remove themselves from it. Some do so for religious reasons, as I mentioned earlier. Others feel that they’re too old, or too far gone, to be worthy of a transplant. Some seek alternative medicines to cure their disease. It’s a personal choice.”
“Okay,” Eden said as we drove off, folding the list out on her knee. “So we’ll start at the top?”
10
The cage was a cube with one-meter-square walls of iron bars, the kind that might be designed, Martina supposed, to house a large, vicious dog. The cage was placed a meter or so out from the wall of a large room with boarded-up windows. There were faded shapes of pictures that had once hung on the walls. She listened hard but heard no sounds. Not a voice, not a car. Nothing but the howling of unabated wind.
For the first two hours Martina had screamed for help. Now and then she burst into tears. The sounds she made, the moans and cries, were unfamiliar and frightening to her. For the next few hours she lay against the side of the cage and tried to think.
She went over and over the night out with George and Stephen, the laughing and the teasing, the Baileys shooters and the pulsating in her ears and chest as the music hummed through her. Oxford Street. Random police searches by the side of the road, homeless men aggravated, abusing the cops and struggling out of their gloved hands. Groups of young men brushing against her shoulders as she passed, poking their tongues between their fingers, simulating oral sex. George and Stephen rushing up the stairs of The Pleasure Chest, sword-fighting with meter-long dildos, grabbing her wrists and forcing her hands onto anal plugs, anal beads, penis rings. The shop owner scowling at them. Stephen reading a porno by the front windows, suggesting a threesome, pulling her hair. The cold night air as they spilled out into the street again. She had left the boys to meet Sascha at The Stonewall, where there were drag shows on the hour every hour and they let patrons dance on the stage. The strange thrill of being a straight girl here, the looks the girls gave her, her embarrassment. The last thing she remembered was the illuminated stairs leading onto the street from Arc Nightclub, the sound of her heels as she ascended them.
Martina chewed her lips. She had not drunk any of the water in the bowl in the corner of the cage, though she desperately wanted to. She closed her eyes so that they would not wander as they had earlier across the room to the open doorway, through the doorway and into the next room where she could see the edge of what she was almost certain was a table.
A steel table.
The kind one might find in an operating theatre.
The sound of footsteps broke her out of a sickly half-slumber. Martina rose up on her vomit-stained high heels, crouching absurdly against the door of the cage.
“Help!” she wailed. “Help me, please!”
A man stepped into view. Framed by the doorway, he seemed enormous, his broad shoulders taking in the width of the entrance, his head of cropped brown hair almost touching the top. He was wearing a white collared shirt that had been immaculately ironed.
“Stop yelling,” he said.
Martina swallowed a sob. He stood watching, as though waiting for her to say something, to promise she wouldn’t call for help. Deciding that no answer would come, the man walked towards her and crouched before the cage door. She watched through tear-blurred eyes as he took a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and pulled them onto his large smooth hands.
“There’s not a soul for miles around,” he murmured, his grey eyes downcast to his fingers. “No one’s going to hear you.”
“What do you want?” Martina cried. When he didn’t answer she felt a wave of rage rise up inside her. “What is this, you fucking creep?”
The man reached into the cage and swiped at her. Martina cowered, but there seemed nowhere to hide from his long arm. She howled as he wrenched her wrist through the cage, her shoulder slamming into the bars as he pulled the limb as far out as it would go. He sat and wrapped his arm around hers. She was helpless to tug at his shoulders and neck.
“Please! Please!”
&nb
sp; “I’m not going to hurt you, girl,” he said. The alcohol was cold in the crook of her elbow. Martina gagged as the needle bit her skin, her legs trembling under her weight.
“You’ve got the wrong person,” she sobbed. “My . . . my name is Martina Ducote. I’m a fucking bartender. I’m no one. I’ve . . . I’ve got nothing. I don’t . . .”
“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you used to do,” the man smiled, capping the syringe full of her blood. “If your records are right, you’re blood type AB negative, you don’t smoke and you’ve never had a heart problem. That’s all I need to know.”
He released her arm and stood, fitting the syringe into his pocket. Martina screamed as he turned his back to leave.
“What are you going to do to me? What are you going to do?”
Hades liked long-term staff. He got plenty of interest from youths at the dump—the work required little experience and it paid well, the perfect job for university students in summer or for high school dropouts wanting to build muscle in the sun. Now and then the local council tried to tempt him with benefits to hire mentally disabled people to work in the sorting center or to run the car-crusher, but Hades never took on any of them. He liked a worker he could get to know, someone he could draw in close enough so that they were aware, however vaguely, that they shouldn’t fuck with him. He made sure he knew where they lived, had spoken to their girlfriends or wives over the phone, had their medical records and was familiar with their cars. Hades liked a worker who could be influenced by the other workers around him, who would become one of the fold, steady under the pressure never to go against Hades, no matter what you saw or heard or the strange feelings you got alone in the darkest corners of the dump. Hades paid Christmas bonuses, birthday bonuses, Easter bonuses. He noticed everything—a change of cigarette brand, a new haircut, a limp, a rise or fall in motivation. He took care of dental bills, overlooked criminal records. He was a boss who was only ever present as a round silhouette by the door of his little shack on the hill, surveying everything for a moment or two, trusting that things were being done right. It was an ancient game. Hades had been playing it, in one form or another, all his life.
Greg Abbott and Richard English were new and this made Hades nervous. The two men came as a package deal from a contractor and seemed to want to keep to themselves—something that further unsettled Hades. They were younger than the other staff, louder and smoked a lot.
Eric, who often stalked the workers like a restless monkey, seemed to take an instant dislike to them. In the second week Hades had been forced to reprimand English for shutting Eric out of the staff parking shed and clipping him over the ear. Nobody told his boy where he could and couldn’t go. Nobody touched his son. Eric had no reason for wanting to hang around the parking shed, had never taken an interest in the place before. English had some kind of meat-head muscle car and was probably worried about it being scratched. Hades suspected Eric’s behavior was an attempt to piss English off. Eric seemed to have a special talent for understanding what people didn’t want him to do.
When Greg Abbott knocked on his door two months in, Hades was falling asleep watching the news, his bare feet on the cluttered coffee table. It was after working hours. He let the book he had been reading to Eden before she went to bed slide off his belly and onto the couch.
Hades put the hall lamp on and opened the door, throwing light on his guest and leaving his own face in shadow. Abbott was standing on the bottom step with a plastic shopping bag in his hand. He said nothing when Hades looked down at him.
“It’s seven,” Hades said. Abbott, freckled and sun-bronzed about his muscled torso, nodded and chewed his lip in apprehension.
“Have a chat?” the man asked.
“It’s seven,” Hades repeated.
“It’s important. It’s about Richard.”
Hades let Abbott stand there squinting in the light a little longer, right to the edge of an uncomfortable silence. Then he turned and trudged back down the hall.
Abbott closed the door. He took the chair nearest to it at the kitchen table, watching carefully as Hades went to the television and muted it. The old man sat in his customary chair and shifted the newspapers aside, clearing a space on the table. Abbott rifled in the shopping bag.
Two weeks earlier, English had fallen ill suddenly, an asthma attack or something. It had happened in the shed while he was in his car. English had gunned the engine and slammed into the car in front of him, pushing it into the staff lockers, buckling them in two. The young man’s windscreen shattered. Hades hadn’t checked what had happened exactly. He didn’t care and had been too irritated about the ruined lockers to bother. They were new. He never bought anything new. Hades had assumed he’d hear about English from Abbott at some point, probably seeking a loan to cover the damages to the car—or, if he was cheeky enough, workers’ compensation. He hadn’t expected it to come at night.
“What is this?” Hades asked, flicking his chin at the bag. “Late-night shopping?”
Abbott took a shimmering handful and spread it on the table. Hades looked at the thin fragments of glass. He could see the bends and warps of molding in some of the pieces. A sharp bulge and a tiny nib on a flat surface, like the nipple of a glass doll, a little blackened by heat.
“You know what this is?” Abbott asked.
“A broken lightbulb.”
“Two broken lightbulbs,” Abbott corrected. Hades felt the corner of his mouth tighten. Abbott was sitting there, across from him, motionless, expressionless, waiting for a reaction. Hades refused to give it. He folded his arms and began planning in his mind the violence he would enact if this stupid game continued. Abbott was a university type, he could see this now. They were always questioning and being open-minded and “thinking critically,” looking for ways to do things better. Letting people come to their own conclusions. Hades hated university types.
“One of these lightbulbs, I reckon, was your average-sized household bulb.” Abbott sifted through the glass carefully with a finger, isolating what was obviously the rim of the larger bulb. “The other was a smaller one—tiny, in fact, the kind you might find in an oven. It was small enough to fit inside the larger one. When I found these fragments, the rims of the larger and the smaller bulbs were sealed off with masking tape.”
“Fascinating.”
Hades kept his eyes locked on Abbott’s, not once taking in the glass.
“I found these glass fragments in Richard English’s car,” Abbott continued, dividing the pile of glass in half with gentle fingers. “There was more masking tape there too, which would have been used to attach the larger bulb with the small one inside to the panel behind the brake pedal. The first thing you do when you get in a car is put on the brake, right? English gets in, shuts the door, stamps on the brake and, crunch, there go the bulbs.”
Hades said nothing. Abbott sat back and waited. On the highway beyond the horizon, an ambulance was wailing. It reminded Hades of the sad howling of dingoes. Hades felt his temple ticcing and wondered if Abbott could see it on his leathery skin.
“You know what Yperite is?”
Silence. Hades waited.
“Its common name is mustard gas,” Abbott said, leaning back in his chair. “You take synthesized ethylene, which you can extract from barbecue gas bottles, and you mix it with refined chlorine, which you find in pool-cleaning chemicals. Nasty stuff, mustard gas. You breathe it in deep enough it’ll make Swiss cheese of your lungs. Kill you in minutes, if it’s strong enough.”
“You’re saying someone mustard-gassed your friend English,” Hades sighed, letting his head loll to the side.
“Got it in one.” Abbott nodded. “Not only did they rig this ingenious method of delivery, they also snapped the inside handles off the doors of Richard’s car and jammed the windows shut. When he put his foot on the brake he got a lungful of one of the most deadly vapors ever made. If not for his quick thinking in turning the car on and ramming it forward, which broke
the windshield, he’d be dead. Right now, they don’t know if he’s ever going to talk again. Burned a hole in his esophagus the size of a fifty-cent piece.”
“You got all this from glass fragments in a trash-filled car, some fucked-up doors and a busted window?” Hades shook his head slowly. “You oughta write penny mysteries.”
“Come on,” Abbott scoffed, “you know what your boy did, Hades.”
Hades had been smiling and looking at the floor, appreciating his own dry humor. Now his eyes widened and flicked to the man across the table. Abbott shifted a little in his chair, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“My boy?”
“Eric has been hounding us like a fucking dog for weeks. He plays with chemicals he finds around the dump all the time. Hades, you know he—”
“It’s Mister Archer to you, you little punk.” Hades panted, just once, feeling the air come hot and heavy against his tongue, thick with rage. “You’re saying my boy did this?”
“I—”
Abbott’s words faltered under Hades’ stare. The man stared at the table in front of him. In the bedroom, Hades could hear the children whispering, moving in their beds. He let the sound carry his mind away as he sat like a lion watching Abbott.
A generous silence lingered.
“You and English will receive your severance pay in the mail,” Hades said quietly. The sound of his voice made Abbott start. “I don’t recommend you come back here for your things.”
Abbott stood and Hades watched him rise. The glass sparkled on the tabletop in two distinct piles like shavings of ice. The younger man let the plastic bag settle on the chair he’d been sitting on and turned awkwardly towards the door. When he reached the threshold he turned back, seemed to consider something. Hades waited, tense.
