At What Cost

by James L'Etoile

  The crime-scene techs were going to take hours to sort out the human bits from the collection of waste in the barn muck. After the hogs were moved to an outside pen, little yellow flags dotted the slop where the hogs had trampled on seven pieces of human remains.

  “Layton claims he doesn’t know where Patrick Horn is or where he lives. I’m not buyin’ it. He’s not telling us everything,” John said to his partner as they headed back to their sedan.

  “No kidding? Like how a lab supervisor like Marsha Horn marries a hog farmer?”

  “The old man has a better online dating service than you.”

  “He’s protecting the boy.”

  John reached the driver’s door, pulled it open as a thought crystalized. “Zack Weber was trying to protect someone too.”

  “Think it was Horn?”

  John shrugged and climbed into the car. His shoes flaked pig waste on the floorboard. “Oh man.” He swiveled in the seat and banged his heels on the doorframe. Layton was right—the dried crap-plaster cracked right off.

  John closed his door, started the car, and glanced at the crop of yellow markers inside the barn door that kept sprouting. “How would someone ever think of dropping body parts in there?”

  “I didn’t know pigs did that—I mean, eat everything. My bacon obsession just took an ugly turn.” She turned in her seat. “What Layton said, about his kid helping butcher the pigs—you’d have to know what you’re doing with a knife, right?”

  John pulled out onto the main road and headed back toward the city. “Weber was afraid of someone. I thought it was Winnow, but it could be this Horn kid.”

  “Winnow’s a bureaucratic ass. Could you see him getting his manicured hands messy with pig slop?”

  John chuckled at the thought. “Still, I don’t know why Winnow took such an interest in Zack Weber’s legal problems.”

  “True.”

  John shot a glance at his watch. “We have enough time to swing by Zack Weber’s place before I need to get back to the hospital.”

  She nodded.

  Twenty minutes later, John and Paula pulled up to the curb in front of a midtown Victorian-era home, repurposed into four small apartments. Zack Weber had left his basement apartment for the last time that morning. Using the key taken from the dead man’s personal property, John unlocked the single dead bolt and pushed the heavy basement door open against its hinges.

  The recently deceased Zack Weber kept a clean, orderly apartment. The morning’s breakfast dishes sat in a drying rack next to the sink; laundry in a cheap, blue plastic basket awaited the trip to the Laundromat; and unread mail sat in a neat stack on the small kitchen table. Zack had left a grocery list on the refrigerator door, listing tortillas, tomatillos, and chili peppers for a Mexican dinner that would never happen.

  John was not one who believed in the paranormal. He didn’t have spirit guides lead him through his cases, yet the places where the dead once called home communicated. A home too tidy, all loose ends taken care of, sometimes meant the dead knew their end was approaching, or perhaps a well-planned suicide. Zack Weber’s apartment gave John the vibe that Zack had intended to return. He had left his apartment without intending to take his own life today.

  Both of the detectives donned latex gloves and moved deeper into the dead man’s home.

  “John, take a look in here,” Paula called out from the narrow hallway that led to the rear of the apartment.

  John passed a bathroom on the right and found Paula in a single bedroom at the end of the hall. A mattress sat on the floor, with sweat-stained bedsheets collected in a wad at the foot. Paula stood at the opposite wall where four flat-panel computer monitors were arranged in a two-by-two cluster over a cheap put-it-together-yourself desk.

  “Check this out,” Paula said, then wiggled a computer mouse.

  All four monitors came to life. The top two scrolled line upon line of indecipherable computer code while the bottom-right monitor displayed a video feed from a hospital security camera. The bottom-left monitor held a list of names, medical data, blood types, and contact information. The header at the top of the last screen bore the logo and label of the United Network for Organ Sharing, UNOS.

  “So much for their secured system. He hacked their server,” John said.

  “Look at the patient record,” Paula said.

  John stepped forward, hunched down, and stared at the monitor. He touched a gloved fingertip on the place where his son’s name was displayed among matching patients.

  “Zack Weber accessed the transplant list. He was the one on the inside.”

  Paula moved toward the desk, stood next to John, and looked at the details on the monitors. She cocked her head to one side and said, “He made the changes to the organ-donor data to make certain that Tommy got that kidney.”

  “He bumped two others to put Tommy on the top of the list,” John said, studying the list of names.

  “Weber did all this?”

  “Changing the waiting list is only half of the work. This doesn’t tell how the kidney got into the system in the first place. Weber was the technical mind in the deal . . .”

  “And Daniel Cardozo was the muscle,” she added.

  “Links to the network, disappearing one by one.”

  John stepped back from the bank of computer monitors and pinched the bridge of his nose. He turned to a bookcase lined with medical textbooks, some of which bore a University of California–Davis medical school bookstore stamp along their spines. A dozen volumes on human anatomy, autopsy procedure, and organ transplant took up an entire shelf. A well-worn text on bioethics lay on its side, lacking the sheen of dust found on the rest of the collection. Next to it, a small photograph in a hammered copper frame occupied a central place.

  John picked up the photo from the shelf, eyes drawn to two young men: Zack Weber and Brice Winnow, dressed in white smocks with the UC Davis logo emblazoned over the breast pocket.

  “Dr. Anderson said Zack was booted from medical school for changing grades for his friends. I think we just found one of them.” John held the photo out for Paula.

  “Brice Winnow went to medical school?”

  “He must have gone to law school after he got the boot from medical school.”

  She looked around the room and said, “That is the only photograph in the place.”

  “It kinda explains the attachment Winnow had with our boy Zack,” John said.

  John weighed the frame in his hands. It was cheap, but the placement of the photo on the shelf was special. He put the photo aside and grabbed the bioethics text, its cover worn thin from heavy use. He thumbed through the volume, and halfway through, a small, rectangular object fell out of a hole cut into the pages. The black thing rattled onto the wooden floor.

  John stooped over and picked it up, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s a wireless camera.”

  John placed the camera on the bookshelf and examined the spine of the book. A small, circular hole provided a concealed hiding place for the lens. “Why would Weber install a camera to watch what he was doing? He was too smart to do anything that would incriminate himself like that.”

  “Why does anyone get a nanny-cam? They want to see what others are doing when they’re not home,” Paula said.

  Paula sat at the desk and pulled the computer keyboard toward her.

  “What are you doing?” John asked.

  “That kind of camera doesn’t have much of a range. I’ll bet he accessed the feed from here,” she said while tapping the keyboard.

  “Shouldn’t we wait for the techies to do that?”

  “Just because you don’t know what side of the keyboard to use doesn’t mean I don’t.”

  The camera feed of the hospital flickered and disappeared, leaving a blank screen for a moment. Another keystroke and a menu popped up on the monitor. An obscure list of words filled the menu box on the screen.

  “Riverside, Ice Man, Book, Terminal View, Farm, Wine Cave.” Paula
recited some of the items from the screen.

  “He has an entire network of camera feeds?” John asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Paula scanned down the list of random words and phrases. She took the mouse and moved her right hand, causing the pointer to hover over one of the items—Terminal View. She clicked it.

  The monitor snapped back to the view of the hospital above the UNOS computer.

  “The computer terminal,” she said.

  She moved the mouse to the menu item labeled “Book” and clicked on that one. The screen flickered, and a new scene appeared. Paula saw her face in the monitor and realized it came from the small camera John had plucked from the spine of the book. She picked up the small wireless camera from the bookshelf and rotated it, changing the view on the computer monitor as it moved.

  “Who did Weber think would use his computer?” John said.

  “He had to have a reason. I bet he set this up to record to a hard drive.”

  John edged closer to the screen. “Click on Ice Man.”

  She did, and the screen showed the abandoned ice plant where the refrigerators and the gift-wrapped kidney were found.

  “Go to Farm.” John pointed.

  She clicked on the Farm menu item, and an image of the interior of the pig barn blossomed on the screen. Crime-scene technicians rolled a ground-penetrating radar unit, one that looked like a large lawn-fertilizer cart, over the barn floor.

  “I’ll be damned,” Paula said.

  “Try Riverside,” John said.

  Paula clicked, and the barn disappeared, replaced by a darker vision—a smaller, murky space with a stainless-steel table reflecting the light from a single fixture that hung from a wooden ceiling beam.

  Paula moved the mouse and clicked on the Wine Cave menu item. The monitor displayed racks of old, cobwebbed wine bottles from floor to ceiling. In the very center, a large piece of paper was attached to the rack. It held a message.

  Paula enlarged the message.

  Detective Penley,

  We should talk. Nine tonight, online. You know where to find me.

  “You know where to find him?” Paula asked.

  John steadied himself on the edge of the desk. A wave of nausea swept through him and threatened to buckle his knees. “Oh my God, what have I done?”

  “What is it, John?”

  John pointed at the message on the screen. “I’ve talked to him.”

  “Who? Who is he?”

  “Online, I was online. I started poking around for our investigation. Then I found this website. It needed a password to get in.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I had the password.”

  Paula squinted at him, clearly not following.

  “The kidney at the ice plant, the tag had that series of numbers and letters at the bottom, remember?”

  She nodded.

  “That was the password. He gave it to me.”

  “What happened, John?”

  “I tried to make contact and lure him out. I logged in and told him what I wanted. Then he demanded payment to move Tommy up the list. I stopped at that point.”

  “Then how come Tommy got moved up?”

  “He did it so he could give Tommy a freezer-burnt piece of crap, because I didn’t play along.”

  “There has to be more to it. Why Tommy? Why you?”

  “Like I said, I didn’t follow through.”

  “Of all the families on the transplant list, how many of them were cops investigating his kills? He knows you,” she said.

  “I told you, I fucked up and connected with him on the dark web.”

  “It’s more personal than an Internet hookup. You think you’ve ever run across this guy before?”

  “I’d remember someone targeting gang members and parting them out. If he did it to get to me, it worked.”

  “Since he led us to the ice plant, he’s cut off anything that ties back to him. He distracted us while he reorganized his business.”

  “He watched us from the beginning. He wanted us at the ice plant. He left some remains there so Jimmy Franck would call it in, then got rid of them before Stark and his partner showed up. It was all designed to get me there at the ice plant to get a gift-wrapped present. He’s led me on, daring me to buy a transplant for Tommy, and who knows, he may have manipulated the delays, getting the other surgeries postponed.”

  “Manipulated.” Paula stepped back to the bookshelf and took stock of the various medical texts arranged on the shelf. “How would he get the information on where we were with the investigation?”

  “Inside source. Who knew about the case, and who wanted regular updates about the status?”

  “The lieutenant’s handled all of that, kept us out of the line of fire. He’s been briefing the media, the city council, and the mayor’s office. You don’t think it’s the lieutenant?”

  “No. Not Tim. But that briefing information had to be the way the killer knew what we were doing.”

  Paula paced and turned back to her partner. “Councilwoman Margolis was his pipeline, and you saw how quick she was to get us banned from city hall and her pet, Winnow.”

  Paula moved back to the computer and used the mouse to click on the Riverside menu item. The strangely lit room returned to the screen, but the table now held a small object, illuminated by the eerie glow. It was a small stuffed animal dressed like a soccer player.

  “What?” Paula said.

  “Oh God, no.” John reached for his cell phone. He stabbed out Melissa’s cell number. “That’s Tommy’s. That’s the stuffed animal, the one you brought for him.”

  Melissa answered after the second ring. “Hi, John. Everything okay?”

  “Where’s Tommy?” The urgency crept into his voice.

  “He’s still in dialysis,” she said.

  “You aren’t with him?”

  “No, they said I should go get a cup of coffee.”

  “Melissa, go. Go now and find Tommy.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m out in the lobby near the dialysis unit. If there was a problem, they—”

  “Melissa! Stop! Go get Tommy now.”

  “You’re scaring me, John.”

  “You need to go find Tommy.”

  “All right, I’m going.”

  John heard background noise as Melissa entered the unit. She spoke to someone there, but John couldn’t hear the conversation. The tone and volume of the speech quickly changed into a rapid, urgent chatter.

  “Melissa, what’s happening?”

  There was no direct response from the other end, but the background noise grew in intensity.

  “Melissa?”

  “John, John, something’s happened. They can’t find Tommy,” she said, nearly breathless.

  “What do they mean, they can’t find him?”

  “He’s not where he’s supposed to be. The dialysis station is empty. Tommy’s not there. They said he must be out for a test or something. I don’t know, John, this isn’t right. Something’s happened.”

  “I’ll be right there,” John said, then hung up. He turned to Paula, his face ashen. “He has Tommy.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Paula guided the police cruiser back to the hospital from Weber’s midtown apartment. She wasted no time with traffic lights or stop signs that blurred in the crosstown race.

  John called the hospital and managed to convince a low-level security manager to lock down the hospital with the report of a missing child.

  Paula fishtailed to a stop at the hospital entrance, where three Sacramento Police units blocked the access points to the hospital lobby, another blocked the parking lot exit, and a California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer roamed through the parking structure.

  Frustration showed in the faces of patients who were kept from appointments inside. Nurses from the emergency room performed a triage of sorts at the entrance door, advising those who sought care to wait or directing them to another hospital emergency room.

 
; Paula and John left the sedan in the drive and made for the entrance. A young uniformed officer was about to block their advance when Lieutenant Barnes stepped into view.

  “John, Paula, this way,” the lieutenant called out.

  “Where’s Melissa?” John said.

  “I have her in the security office looking at video. I’ve asked for a BOLO with Tommy’s description, we have the entire hospital locked down tight, and we have a five-block perimeter in place.”

  Lieutenant Barnes led John and Paula through a set of doors and set off down a hallway.

  “What do we know?” John said.

  “Tommy went into the dialysis unit and didn’t come out. There are three exits out of the unit that don’t dump into the lobby. The nurse with him was not a regular employee. He was a registry nurse, someone they call in when they need to cover a shift.”

  “Did they get an ID on the nurse?” Paula asked.

  “Not yet. They only said he came from the registry. No one remembers working with him before.”

  “Did we get a view of him on any of the security cameras?” John said.

  “Working on it,” Barnes said as they reached the security offices.

  A uniformed officer nodded at the lieutenant but avoided eye contact with John. John knew a missing child was painful, the kind of searing ache you want to keep from creeping into your life at any cost. Don’t look directly at it and it won’t burn you.

  The lieutenant held the door for John and Paula. They entered a room teeming with frantic people, a stark contrast to the Zen fixtures and life-affirming artwork on the walls. The serene, calm space had transformed into a madhouse of loud-talking cops and blame-shifting hospital employees. John located Melissa in the center of the storm, hovering over a man who flicked switches at a bank of security monitors.

  She leaned in and watched the screens replay security footage of the moments before Tommy disappeared. There was no glimpse of Tommy or the nurse who had wheeled him into the dialysis unit, just like the nine times she had scoured the video before this one.

  Melissa sensed John before he said anything and slipped an arm around his waist. She leaned into him. John felt the quiver of her body against his. “There’s no view that shows Tommy leaving the unit or who took him.” She turned into her husband, buried her face in his chest, and sobbed.