“It’s you.” Winnow collapsed forward, held up by a heavy chain, an ugly puppet in the dark.
FORTY-ONE
The ambulance doors opened the moment the vehicle pulled beneath the awning of the hospital entrance. Black gun barrels appeared from both sides of the open doors. FBI operators in full tactical gear, vests, and helmets emblazoned with the HRT logo of the fed’s elite hostage rescue team trained their weapons on the occupants.
The EMT in the ambulance shrank back into a corner with his arms held high. John wasn’t surprised by the show of force. As soon as the feds had found out Winnow still had a pulse, they’d sent in the tactical team. John moved slowly, not offering the HRT gunmen any excuse to shoot.
“Got him,” one of the operators called out.
John noticed Special Agent K. Lincoln, decked out in a tailored, tight ballistic vest that looked more like a corset than a piece of personal protective equipment. Next to her, two camera crews from local news stations televised the takedown.
The television camera panned toward the back of the ambulance, where hospital staff swarmed to help the EMTs unload Tommy.
Someone from one of the news crews shouted, “Where is the killer?”
Once the first-question barrier shattered, reporters jostled for the best camera angles, and the air filled with a mass of adverb-laden mush. No single question was discernible in the fray, but a few words pierced through: “letdown,” “snipe hunt at Raley Field,” and “FBI failure.”
The cameras turned on Agent Lincoln, and the rehearsed speech announcing the capture of Brice Winnow wasn’t going to help her now. Color drained from her face as she struggled against the jostling media. “We recovered the boy, and the killer is in custody—that’s all that matters,” she said as she retreated inside the hospital doors.
HRT shielded John and Tommy’s gurney from view. They pressed through a sliding-glass partition into the emergency room. Moments later, a second gurney with an unresponsive Winnow rolled into the room. A second team of medical staff attended to his injuries.
“Thanks for keeping him at a distance,” John said.
An HRT operator nodded. “We’re glad you got your boy back.” The HRT members left the room, and John glimpsed Melissa standing near the nurses’ station. Her face was red and blotched from sobbing. Their eyes met, and her shoulders fell in relief. Melissa came to John and hugged him while a medical team examined Tommy.
“I thought I lost you both,” Melissa said.
“We need to talk.” John took her by the elbow and led her to an isolated corner of the emergency room but still within view of the doctors tending to Tommy.
“I know what you did,” John said in a tired voice.
Melissa’s lips tightened. “John, you’re exhausted. Let’s talk about all this later.” She turned to leave, but John took her arm and pulled her back to him. “You’re hurting me.”
John hadn’t realized how hard he clamped onto her arm, and he let go. He stepped closer and said, “I know about the ten-thousand-dollar payment.”
Her eyes hardened. “At least I did something. Why didn’t you?”
“You can’t make deals with these people.”
“We’re just supposed to sit and pray something good happens? That’s not enough.”
“Where did you even get the money?”
“I borrowed it from my sister.”
“Why would you do this?”
“I couldn’t see my son get passed over on the transplant list again. It’s not right. He deserves a chance.”
“It almost got him killed. Don’t you get that? It’s the black market.”
“I couldn’t just stand around and wait for him to die, John.”
“Hey, guys,” Paula said. The couple hadn’t noticed Paula approach or the stares from hospital workers within earshot. “Keep it down, would ya?”
“I tried to tell you when Tommy’s transplant fell through. I couldn’t,” Melissa said.
“How’s Tommy?” Paula asked.
“They’re checking him out now. He’s gone through hell,” John said.
“I’m glad you’re both back. When you disappeared from the ice plant, I thought you—you had me worried.”
“You and me both. How did you find me?”
“Like you figured. Winnow only had so many places he could hide. I went back to the live camera feeds. I caught Winnow digging something up in the barn, and then just a few minutes later, he was with you on the wine-cave camera. They had to be in the same place—at the Layton farm.”
The curtain from around Tommy’s bed split open, and a doctor joined them.
“Mr. and Mrs. Penley, I’m Dr. Philips, the emergency attending—”
“How is he?” John asked.
“Tommy is in serious condition. He’s dehydrated, his kidney function is bad, and the surgical incision shows signs of severe infection.”
“Can we see him?”
“Yeah, come with me.”
A groggy Tommy lifted a hand. “Hi, Mom.”
Melissa went to her son and stroked his cheek. “I’m so sorry, baby.”
“I’m not a baby.”
“I know, I know.”
“We’ve started a course of antibiotics for the infection, pumped a couple liters of fluid in him, and we’ll need to get him on dialysis as soon as possible. I’ve notified Dr. Anderson, and he’s arranging for in-room dialysis in light of what happened.”
“But he’s gonna be okay, right?” John asked.
“Your son is in serious condition, Mr. Penley. The next few hours will be critical. If we can beat back the infection, he’s got a chance of pulling through.” The doctor looked at John’s lacerated scalp. “We need to get this taken care of too.”
“Thanks, Doc,” John said.
“We’ll get him moved out of the ER and into a private room as soon as one opens up. Mrs. Penley, get some rest. He’s going to need you for the long haul. Meanwhile, Mr. Penley, you come with me, and I’ll get a couple of sutures in that mess.”
With Tommy settled into a room, the activity quieted and left John and Melissa with uncomfortable silence. The common bond between them—their children—pried them apart. They sat on opposite sides of the room, each with the burden of a broken promise. They had failed to keep their children safe. Evidence of their failure lay on the hospital bed. John stood and pulled aside the blinds. First light was a few hours away. John felt as dark as it was outside. Melissa wasn’t the target of his anger, but she was in the room. That kind of anger cuts through silence, and it cuts deep.
“Say what you have to say,” Melissa said.
“What’s left to be said?”
“That is exactly how we got here. You won’t say anything. You don’t tell me what’s going on, and you keep it all bottled up inside until something rotten escapes.”
“I’m only trying to keep you safe.” He rubbed the stubble of the stitches on his scalp.
A knock at the door announced a uniformed officer. The officer extended his hand when John approached. It was Officer Tucker, Stark’s younger partner. He had Kari with him.
“I’m glad to see the boy back.”
“Me too. Thanks for picking up Kari,” John said.
“Detective Newberry said my life depended on it.”
“She has people skills.”
“I’m sorry. If I’d done a better search of that ice plant, this might not have happened. We could have gotten Winnow sooner, and he wouldn’t have been able to take your son.”
John shook the younger officer’s hand. “Winnow was two steps ahead of us the entire time. There was nothing you could have done to change that. We got Tommy back, and that’s what matters most. Winnow’s out of moves now.”
“Winnow got his,” Tucker said.
“He’s in a coma. They don’t know if he’ll regain consciousness.”
Tucker waved at Tommy when he entered the room. “How ya feeling, buddy?”
“Tired.”
“I’m not surprised after what you went through.”
“Thanks again, Tucker,” John said.
Tucker nodded and left the room.
Melissa gave her seat by the bed to Kari and walked over to John.
“This is all my fault. I’m so sorry. I should have trusted you.”
“Trust is a bridge that goes both directions. It doesn’t matter which side gets burnt—it makes the bridge impassable. I should have shared what I’d found with you. I thought I was shielding you from the pain, but all I did was cause more.”
“Is that man still out there?” Tommy asked. The boy’s eyes were puffy and yellowed.
“He’ll never bother you again.”
FORTY-TWO
“I have something you need to see,” Paula said when she called.
John put the cell phone down on the pile of UNOS records and printouts from Zack Weber’s computer, spread over his desk at home. Technically, he was on administrative leave and wasn’t supposed to have the boxful of material. In between hospital visits with Tommy, he pored over the medical records, tissue-typing data, and donor information, and it left him with a scab on his soul. Numbers, charts, and dispassionate clinical terms. The raw answers were there; the “who” and the “when” of the slaughter bled from the pages. The financial deposits into nameless accounts made a strong economic argument for Winnow’s dark enterprise, but the killer would be no help in determining what caused him to set out on this particular path of destruction.
A forensic analysis of the UNOS data revealed dozens of fraudulent transactions covering the trail of Winnow’s illicit organ harvest. Potential donors were purged from the data, and families watched as loved ones withered and died. A thick report lay open on John’s desk that contained a list of transplant patients with matching donors from a new round of blood testing. A thick circle was drawn on a single line of the report. John was a match for Tommy. Winnow had known all along and toyed with John, using Tommy as bait. Under his phone, the latest report from the medical staff provided an opinion about Winnow’s health and his prognosis. The words “persistent vegetative state,” “diminished neural activity,” and “hospice care” were underlined in thick, hard strokes. John’s pen had left a crease in the page three days ago.
John stood, grabbed his phone, and instinctively pulled the drawer open for his service weapon, only to find the drawer empty. He’d surrendered his firearm to the lieutenant when he went on administrative leave. He pushed the drawer closed harder than he needed. John closed his eyes and drew a deep breath, something that the department’s assigned trauma counselor preached as a “cleansing breath.” Cleansing, my ass, he thought. He made a quick phone call to Melissa at the hospital and let her know he’d join her and Tommy as soon as he met with Paula. John and Melissa didn’t see much of one another; they took separate shifts at the hospital. Avoiding John was easier for Melissa. She still took the blame for making the ten-thousand-dollar payment to Winnow and all the trauma that followed.
Paula asked him to meet her at the Layton farm. He’d seen the photos of the place after his last encounter with Winnow. He hadn’t paid attention to the forensic dig with the precise, squared sections, marked with a labyrinth of string. The entire interior of the barn was a checkerboard, and the pieces were bits of skull and fragments of long bone. Sifted, sorted, and bagged, all the human bits were gone, nothing left but residual negative energy that stained the worn barn wood.
John pulled his Toyota pickup off the main road and onto the driveway of the Layton farm. At the end of the drive, Paula sat on the trunk lid of a dark, unmarked police car, dangling her feet above the gravel. He parked the truck, and she hopped from the back of the sedan.
She didn’t greet him and she seemed preoccupied, hands shoved in her pants pockets, eyes avoiding his.
“What’s up?” John asked.
“I heard they are going to let Winnow walk on the criminal charges and send him to a hospice on a compassionate release.”
“I’m not really surprised. That way, the case goes away quick and quiet. No public trial, no splash back on city hall.”
“But a compassionate release? This guy needs release by lethal injection.”
John was done talking about what Winnow deserved. “What did you want to show me?”
She nodded. “Yeah, that. Come with me.”
The path to the barn door showed evidence of heavy foot traffic since the last time John had been under this roof. He wasn’t one who saw ghosts in the shadows, but this place held the psychic residue to challenge his skeptical beliefs.
As they crossed the threshold at the barn door, the smell was worse than he remembered. He winced.
Paula noticed his reaction. “It’s the digging. They turned over layer after layer of pig crap.”
“Where are the pigs?” John noticed the side barn door was open for extra ventilation, and there was no sign of the squealing animals.
“The county took them off to the rendering plant. With what they’ve eaten, the public health people didn’t want to run the risk of getting that into the food supply.”
The barn floor glistened with a sheen of moisture seeping to the surface from decades of livestock doing their business inside the wooden walls. Even in the darkened interior, holes pockmarked the dirt surface, a greater number than John had imagined. One hole, against the back wall, was bigger than all of the others.
“Wasn’t there a worktable along that wall?” John asked.
“Built over that hole there? Yeah, there was.”
“More body parts?”
“Hold on,” Paula said. She flicked the switch on a halogen lamp. “I asked the techies to leave this for us.”
“Whoa, that’s a deep hole. The pigs didn’t do that.”
“The pigs didn’t leave an entire body in that pit either.”
John followed a temporary walkway of plywood planks from the door to the edge of the large hole. “How’d they find anything in here? That’s got to be four feet deep.”
“Cadaver dogs. They passed over most of the small bits and went straight to that spot. They estimate the body’s been there for two years.”
John peered into the pit, and even though the remains no longer inhabited this hole, the image of a body covered in layers of grime and manure wasn’t hard to imagine. “Think we’ll ever find out who it was?”
“You’re not the only detective in the world, you know.” Paula had her hands on her hips and a smirk on her face. “Check this out. This is what I needed you to see.” She swiveled the halogen light so the beam settled on the back wall, four or five feet from the ground.
The barn wood was scarred and gray from nearing the end of its useful life. John rubbed his hand across the grain. Letters were carved into the old surface, long enough ago that they had darkened and nearly disappeared into the swirls and knots in the wood planks.
Two names, rough cut with a sharp implement: Patrick and Brice. Next to each name, dates were carved into the wood, like Gold Rush–era tombstones.
Patrick would have been twenty-eight years old if the dates meant that he died two years ago. The date next to Brice indicated birth two years ago, with no ending date.
“But that wasn’t Patrick Horn you found in that pit.”
Paula joined him by the wall and handed him a file folder. She’d had it with her the entire time, but John was too preoccupied with the place to notice. He cracked the file open, and the first document inside was an accident report from the car crash when a drunk driver had run Marsha Horn off the road.
“Suspect in that hit-and-run was one William Brice Winnow, a Skinhead gang member out of Stockton. The DA declined prosecution. It seems his blood samples for alcohol-level testing went missing.”
“That’s my signature on this report. I recommended the DA drop the case because of the missing evidence. This was around the time Carson was up to his dealings in the evidence room. Did you try to track—?”
&nb
sp; “William Brice Winnow was reported missing a week after the accident.” She pointed at the pit. “Not anymore. We got a match on dentals.”
“You’re sure it’s him?”
“We got a DNA hit on the body too.”
“And it matched the dentals?”
“I’m talking about DNA on the body. We got a match for Patrick Horn on the guy’s body. There was some evidence of bodily trauma that made it look like the vic was strung up on those steel hooks in the barn.”
“The date on the report—it’s the same one carved on the wall,” John said.
“Sure is. Like our Brice was born that day.”
John lowered the file. “Winnow said Patrick Horn was weak, and look at what he’s become.”
“He became Brice Winnow. Patrick Horn died two years ago after his mother’s accident. He got revenge on her killer and assumed a new identity,” she said.
“Winnow told me I could have prevented this. He blames me for letting his mother’s killer go free.”
“There is nothing you could have done. When did all the organ harvesting start?”
John hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the pit. “I bet it started right there. It would be impossible to prove, but Winnow had a sore spot for old man Layton. He claimed his stepfather showed him how to do it. I thought he was talking about butchering hogs, but I think he meant this.”
“Neither one’s gonna say anything. Layton’s dead, and Winnow is in a coma. We were right about the blood bank, by the way.”
“What’s that?”
“The blood bank. That was the connection between all the victims. Mercer, Johnson, Travis, even Cardozo—they all went there. Johnson and Mercer donated plasma for money; Cardozo tried to donate, but his blood tested HIV positive; and Travis—”
“Got a call to donate because of his AB-positive blood type.”
“Makes you wonder if Winnow made that call,” she said.
Paula switched off the halogen light, plunging the barn into shadow. Something dark moved in the corner. For a moment, John had a vision of the trapped souls of those once buried in the place.
Paula was on the phone when John emerged from the barn behind her. She glanced up. “Yeah, he’s here with me. Hold on.” She handed the phone to John. “It’s the lieutenant.”
At What Cost Page 27
