The Angel Maker

by Ridley Pearson

  “With a name like Clarence, you should be grateful,” LaMoia advised him.

  “The database?” Boldt reminded. “The laptop. Did you print up the database for us?”

  He handed Boldt a sheet of paper. The database looked like a spreadsheet, a grid of rows and columns. There were seven columns and had they been titled across the top, which they were not, Boldt guessed they might have been labeled, DATE, NAME, (?)FILE NUMBER, ADDRESS, PHONE NUMBER, BLOODTYPE, (?). The rows were created by the names of the donors, listed alphabetically. “The minute we had this list, we faxed it down to BloodLines for comparison. According to them, what distinguishes ours from theirs—in terms of layout—is the addition of a new column—the last column over—which contains as yet unexplained four-digit numbers. This column is unique to this laptop database; that is, there is no such column in the BloodLines database. The other distinguishing feature is that the date column—far left—has also been modified so that only a small percentage of the records now contain a date. They should all be dated.

  “It is sorted alphabetically by the donor’s name,” he continued. “What’s interesting is that if a name has a date, it also has an entry in this new column. There are twenty-eight such dated fields.”

  “Twenty-eight?” Boldt asked, flipping forward.

  “It’s the donor list,” Daphne speculated. A silence hung over the room. Daphne broke it. “Is Sharon on there?”

  “Twenty-eight donors,” Boldt repeated, looking ahead on the list. How many dead? How many victims of electroshock? He spotted the name. “She’s on here,” he confirmed.

  Daphne went a sickly pale and excused herself from the room.

  Boldt fought his stomach.

  LaMoia killed the Coke.

  Watson toyed with his glasses nervously.

  Boldt waited for Daphne’s return. She didn’t look much better.

  He ran down the column of names, calling out: “Blumenthal, Chapman, Shaffer, Sherman, Walker: They’re all here.” He felt it as both a nauseating moment of reality and a major moment of triumph—the extra care they had taken with Maybeck had proved worth it.

  He noticed for the first time that the date alongside Sharon Shaffer’s name was not a date in the past, but was for two days from now: Friday, February 10.

  “Lou?” Did it show that easily? Or was it her? She always seemed to know his thoughts.

  In less than forty-eight hours, Sharon Shaffer would be cut open. According to Dr. Light Horse, it was likely to be a major organ. There would be no time to organize a task force, no time to sort through a list of three-hundred-seventy veterinarians. They would have to force every lead they had. Every suspect. Sharon Shaffer’s life had a burning fuse attached to it now. Look for the good, he reminded himself—they were too tired to take a setback like this. “Accentuate the Positive”—it was one of those songs occasionally requested in a piano bar. He missed The Big Joke; he wondered how Bear was doing with the IRS.

  “She’s alive,” he said. “Sharon Shaffer’s alive.”

  “Lou?” she asked again, sensing something wrong. He slid the printout over to her, pointing to the date. He watched as her eyes glassed up.

  A confused LaMoia asked, “But that’s good, right?” Daphne slid the sheet to him, and he too fell silent.

  “What did I miss?” Watson asked.

  Boldt inquired, “What do these four-digit numbers mean?”

  “I can tell you what we ruled out,” Watson explained. “We know it’s not phone numbers. Not social security numbers. Not zip codes.”

  “But what is it?” Boldt asked angrily. “What are they?” Watson leaned away from him sheepishly.

  The coffee room’s phone rang. Boldt answered it. He listened. He said to the receiver, “Can’t you just tell me?” He paused. “I’m on my way.” He hung up.

  “What’s up?” Daphne asked.

  “Dixie’s got something.”

  Boldt turned the car into the back of the Harbor View Medical Center and started hunting for a parking place. Five minutes later, two blocks away, he found one across from the Lucky Day Grocery.

  He climbed out of the car. A student cycled past him on a mountain bike. The tires splashed street water onto Boldt’s shoes and onto a section of newspaper that was stuck to the pavement. A display ad for an American Airlines special to Hawaii looked up at him. This meant something. He studied it more closely. It was the airplane in particular. And then it occurred to him. He unlocked the car, so nervous with the keys that he dropped them. When he finally got inside, he shoved the key into the ignition, turned it to battery power, and punched in the cellular’s security code.

  He dialed the downtown office and asked to speak to Daphne. She had to be paged. Boldt was losing patience when he finally heard her voice. He said immediately: “They’re flight numbers. The extra numbers in the database are flight numbers.”

  There was a long pause as she processed this. A woman bought a newspaper outside the Lucky Day Grocery. He added, “They had to connect these organs to specific flights in order to get them to their destination in the allowable time. It all had to be arranged in advance—the timing just right.”

  “A courier!” she said.

  “Track down those flight numbers. See if we’re right. Move it to the top of your list.”

  “Don’t spend all day over there,” she cautioned.

  “You know Dixie,” he said. “When he makes a discovery, he tends to drag it out a litte.”

  “A little?” She did know Dixie.

  “I’ll try to hurry it along.”

  The medical examiner’s offices are in the basement of the Harbor View Medical Center. The ceilings are low, the windows rare—and then just half-windows looking out at the sidewalk. The hum of computers, the active ventilation and fluorescent lights, the percussion of typewriters, and the electronic purring of telephones were the only sounds as Dixon led Boldt into a back room, where the excavated skeleton was now laid out on a stainless steel slab.

  “It’s a damn good set of remains,” Dixon announced. “All but the teeth. We’re missing the lower mandible. Several teeth in the upper jaw were chiseled out. He used a screwdriver, maybe. He didn’t want us identifying her. I like that,” Dixon said. “That means he had something to hide. That kind of effort always makes me all the more determined.” He pointed to what remained of the rib cage. “He cut ribs six and seven,” he leaned closer, “here and here, immediately above the abdominal cavity. We got a nice set of tool markings off the butt end of number six.” He handed Boldt a set of black-and-white lab photos just like those he had showed him at Jazz Alley, only with today’s date, February 8, photographed into the upper right corner. The upper set of magnified tool markings was labeled Peter Blumenthal. The bottom set, Jane Doe. The tool markings matched.

  Dixie continued, “A liver procurement, a liver harvest, is one of the most difficult surgeries there is. Extremely technical. It’s not uncommon for the procuring surgeon to do what’s called a radical harvest.” He demonstrated using the skeleton. “You take far more tissue than you need, leaving all the connecting vessels intact. The transplant surgeon then does the actual harvest.”

  “Dead or alive?” Boldt asked in a whisper. “Would the victim have been dead or alive?”

  “Prior to surgery, I can’t say.” Dixon looked at the gaping hole in the rib cage. “But after this technique,” he said, “definitely dead.”

  Dixon crossed the room, returning with several jars that he placed under the harsh light. He talked quickly. “The next piece of the puzzle we went after was timing. In order to identify her we need to know as precisely as possible when she died—when she was buried,” he corrected himself, “in order to match her with missing persons for the same period.” He asked Boldt, “How are you with bugs? Larvae? Maggots? That sort of thing?” Before Boldt answered, Dixon said, “I hate it when people toss their cookies in these little rooms.”

  “I’ve never been a real fan of maggots.
And I hate things with lots of legs. Can we speed this up?”

  “You’ll live.” Dixon frowned and pointed to the jars. “These are courtesy of our entomologist who helped out.” Each was labeled, but Boldt wasn’t wearing his reading glasses. “Forensic entomology is an exploratory field,” he warned. “The courts have not made it clear exactly where they stand, but thankfully that’s Bob Proctor’s problem. Tissue decomposition is the first thing you look for when trying to date remains. Lacking any tissue, as in this case, we turn to bugs—insects living and dead. Graves within graves.”

  Dixie drummed on the lid of the first jar. “We found a breeding colony of woodlice on the bones. They feed off a fungus that grows only on bone. It takes woodlice two years to establish a breeding colony.”

  “Two years?” Boldt asked, thinking he had a date. Pushing.

  Dixon raised a finger. He tapped the second jar. “We also discovered a past infestation of phorid fly maggots, a close relative of the coffin fly. The phorid fly consumes decaying flesh. We’re estimating the weight of the deceased, judging by skeletal size, at between one-hundred-ten and one-hundred-forty pounds. At that weight, it would take the phorid flies no less than two years, no more than three, to consume her.” Boldt felt himself blanch. “Woodlice will not coexist with phorid flies, so we add the times together: two plus two—four to five years, minimum. To further substantiate this estimate, we have evidence of a beetle that would not attack the body for at least three to four years after burial.”

  “So we can safely say that she was in the ground at least four years, maybe as long as five?”

  “Correct.”

  Dixie hoisted the third jar to eye level and said, “Meet the blue bottle fly. The blue bottle lives above ground and lays eggs in decaying flesh. These eggs form larval cases that house pupae that grow to adult blue bottles. I discovered ten such cases—blowfly puparia—in the soil samples. No colony of blue bottle, just ten such larval cases. Lack of a colony is important. The body was exposed to air long enough for the blue bottle to deposit its eggs, but not long enough to form a colony. That means her body remained above ground for three to four days prior to burial. Whoever buried her has a strong stomach—that’s consistent with a veterinarian—and he had to have someplace to keep a decaying body for at least four days that didn’t raise suspicion.” He added, “And that’s not easy; she wasn’t pretty by the time she went in the ground.” Dixon asked, “You okay?”

  Boldt said, “A four-year-old homicide with an unidentified victim? It’s interesting stuff, Dixie, don’t get me wrong, but it’s an investigator’s nightmare, and like I said, I’m pressed for time.”

  Dixon encouraged, “Would I drag you over here for bad news? I can give you bad news over the phone. Would I waste your time?”

  He waved Boldt out of the room and led him through the offices to a distant storeroom that had recently been converted into an office.

  A video camera atop a tripod was aimed at a skeletal skull that sat on a pedestal in front of a backdrop of white oaktag. To the left, within range of the camera, photographs of women had been tacked to the wall. Boldt said, “Missing persons.”

  “Yes,” Dixie acknowledged.

  Dixie switched on the computer screen. “Caucasian women aged eighteen to twenty-six. All nearly the same height. All went missing not less than four, not more than five years ago. All remain missing to this day.” He added as a caveat, “All but one.” That awakened Boldt. Gooseflesh raced up an arm and tingled his scalp. The screen was divided in half. To the left was a freeze-frame of this same skull. “It’s a new technology developed by the Brits we’re calling Cranial Imaging. It isn’t infallible; it may not even hold up in our courts, but it knocks months off of clay reconstruction. We superimpose properly sized images of the missing person’s photographs on top of the skull and look for a perfect fit. Remember, all eleven went missing during a six-month period four years ago. That’s where the entomology helped us.”

  Dixon took control of the computer’s mouse. “On the left is a frontal of the skull recovered from the river site. On the right, a frontal of one Peggy Shulte.” She was an average-looking woman. Not glamorous, not taken to fussing over her looks. “Miss Shulte went missing in the Tolt River area two years ago, not four. The county police suspected these were Shulte’s remains, but: Voilà!” The photograph of Peggy Shulte overlapped with the skull, but the fit was bad, the shape of the head all wrong. Dixon made several adjustments attempting to improve the fit. “No matter how we work this,” he explained in an excited voice, “we just can’t make them fit. See? There’s no way that this skull we dug up belonged to Peggy Shulte.”

  Boldt inched his way up to the edge of his chair. We tear people’s lives apart right down to the bone, he thought, all in an effort to explain their deaths. “Who is she?” he asked impatiently.

  Dixon snapped his head away from the screen. Light flashed from his excited eyes. Once again, he worked with the keyboard and mouse. The photograph of Shulte disappeared, replaced by a different, even more innocent face. She had a number below her face. How many missing each year? Boldt wondered, knowing that it was so many that the police and FBI flushed their active files after twelve months to make room for the new. Too many for milk cartons. You counted these people—mostly young women—in graves.

  Sliding the color photo over the skull, Dixon said, “She was number eight of eleven.” Remarkably, the two images—the face and the skull—joined like a hand inside a glove. Dixon described the fit in technical detail, his finger spitting static sparks as he touched the screen. Boldt wasn’t listening. This picture was indeed worth a thousand words: one and the same woman. Dixon concluded proudly, “This woman went missing while working in the Seattle area fifty-one months ago—which fits our window of time. Furthermore, her dental records, faxed to us this morning, show fillings in the exact same uppers that had been chiseled out from our victim’s remains. This guy would have been smarter to knock out a few other teeth as well. As it is, in a roundabout way he’s actually helped us to identify her.”

  “By knocking out a few teeth? How so?”

  “By knocking out the same nine teeth.” Dixon pointed at him. “I knew you would ask me about this. Picky, picky. But I’m prepared for you.” He fished a piece of note-paper out of his chest pocket. “I called a mathematician friend at the U-Dub—asked him the probability of the same nine teeth, and only nine teeth, having had dental work. You ready for this?” He slipped on some glasses and read: “One in twenty-eight million, forty-eight thousand, eight hundred. Ergo: Odds are there’s only one of her in this city.” He added, “Lou Boldt, meet Anna Ferragot.”

  “Anna,” Boldt said, leaning forward. He placed a hand on Dixon’s back. “Always a thorough bastard, aren’t you?”

  “Goes with the turf.” Dixon pressed his face close to the screen. In a tired but proud voice he said, “The harvester kept you around for four days and then buried you—why? He harvested your liver—for whom? Can you help us? Did you know your killer? Was he a stranger?”

  Anna Ferragot’s photo showed her to be an attractive young woman with sandy hair and gentle eyes. Boldt said, “I bet you thought we had forgotten all about you.”

  “Guess again,” said Dr. Ronald Dixon.

  36

  Elden Tegg hugged his wife and kissed her hello. Despite his ongoing concerns, he felt calm. He would not allow himself to lose control. That was for the little people. When he began to feel unstable, he fought against it and overcame it. Strength was everything.

  “I like your haircut,” Peggy told him. “It’s better for the party.” Her eyes sparkled. He knew what this party meant to her. Even a few days earlier, it had still seemed important to him on some level. But now?

  For the past few years, every cent of his share of the harvest money had been donated to the city arts—dance and music mostly. Large sums of money. It made him feel even better about the work. Save lives and give something back to society
. What could be better?

  This money from the heart harvest was something altogether different. He was at a crossroads now, an intersection of past and future where the present took on a dreamlike, transitional quality. There was so much money at stake: hundreds of thousands of dollars. Enough to buy him a practice if placed in the proper hands. His past and present—the interdiction of the police—pushed him toward this future now as surely as the wind pushed a sailboat toward untraveled waters. There were calls to be made, plans to be finalized. A future set in motion. With each step forward, his present identity slipped further behind, as if he had divided into two people and could actually see his former self receding in the distance. Growth is change, he reminded, steeling himself for the immediate challenges that lay ahead. This woman, this house, this existence, belonged to that other man now, a person he hardly knew at all.

  She said something to him, but he missed it. He was thinking. Maybeck had called the office with the message that the “truck was fixed.” It meant that the laptop was taken care of. Good news in itself. But not enough to convince him that things would work out. Change was in the wind. A quick exit was called for. All predicated on the harvest taking place.

  He snagged a few pieces of leftover New York steak and tore off bites with his teeth, carefully brushing at his beard for errant food particles. Beards could be dirty and foul if you did not groom properly.

  “Have you decided a menu?” he asked, attempting to be that other man, the other Elden Tegg he planned to leave behind. He didn’t care about the menu; he cared about the disposal of Michael Washington’s body, but he had a role to play—certain attitudes were expected of him.

  “It’s being catered. Remember? Same people as the animal benefit. Nothing to worry about,” she informed him. “I’m handling the flowers, that’s all. They’re taking care of everything else.”

  “And the kids?”

  “What about them?” she asked. She was a nervous creature. He found it irritating.