Roger sat down heavily on his couch, dropped his phone on the cushion beside him, and held his head in his hands. He couldn’t believe they were going to go ahead with the harvest with the authorities so close.
***
Lloyd was waiting for Sonya when she arrived at the agreed upon meeting place—a small ethnic restaurant on the other side of the city.
“Are you okay?” he asked, walking toward her as she climbed out of her car.
She nodded and went willingly into his open embrace.
“Are you sure that was necessary?” she asked him. “You do know that a lot of families live in that neighborhood and the fire might spread, right?”
He shrugged. “It was the best way to get rid of any evidence left behind and they wouldn’t have anything else to trail you with. Moving buildings seems to be one of the smartest things the team has done lately. Even if they have Miles, he won’t know where to look for anyone but you. He knew the address to the building, which they could find some evidence in, but it still won’t give them anything that will lead to anyone or the new place. The fire gives us a clean break.”
“Yes, you’re right,” she said, looking around her, paranoid.
“I thought you said you weren’t followed,” Lloyd said, frowning and looking around too.
Sonya sighed. “I wasn’t. I just…I don’t know. Things have been really weird today.”
“How so?”
She shrugged. “I thought I saw someone I harvested in Los Angeles at the hospital, but how could that be possible?” She ended with a nervous laugh.
Lloyd thought about it for a moment and shrugged off her confusion as nervous tension.
“So, anyway, I can’t go back to my place because it’s too warm for me now,” Sonya joked. “Can I stay with you? I definitely can’t stay with Jennings…”
“No, babe,” Lloyd said, “you can’t stay with me. Butch knows where I’m staying and I really don’t want him to find you there alone if I have to go do something. I think you should stay with Roger.”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Roger is the most logical choice after you. I can’t go to a hotel. They have to have a picture of me by now and might start circulating it.”
“Damn,” Lloyd said. “I didn’t think of that. We better get this harvest done fast, before Jan sees your mug on TV or something.”
“We can hope she has disconnected the TV by now, since they’re moving tomorrow. But even if she hasn’t, I’m sure she’s too busy to be watching TV and the kids are probably watching all kid shows. We should be okay.”
“I hope so,” Lloyd said. “Call Roger and see if he minds having a roommate so we can get you settled somewhere for the night.” He held out a new cell phone and opened his other hand to receive her old one. “I’ve already programmed in the contacts you’ll need.”
She smiled ruefully, traded in her cell phone, and called Roger.
Chapter Forty-Two
Detective Jones was waiting at the entrance of the manufacturing area when David arrived. She had her arms crossed and she was leaning on the front fender of her car, facing the street. He assumed she was positioned that way so she could see him coming.
He pulled the car up next to hers, killed the engine, and climbed out.
“I didn’t know you were coming—thank you for meeting me here,” he said, before she had a chance to say anything. “In a matter of just hours we’ve managed to lose two suspects. It’s a great day, isn’t it?”
“What?” she said, frowning and standing up straight.
“But we’ve managed to nab an accomplice,” he said. “Oh, that reminds me…did you get someone out to the other address I sent to you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I haven’t heard back from them yet. What is all this about?”
“I’m trying to say I’m not mad at you, or your officer colleagues—I’m just frustrated,” David sighed and said. “We’re on the right track.” He looked around them and at the buildings nearby. “Have the officers found anything suspicious? Do we know who owns any of these properties?”
Jones shook her head. “They’re all foreclosed on by a local bank. The officers looked around, but didn’t find anything that threw up any flags. I wanted to see what you wanted to do before we pushed further.” She shrugged.
“I was hoping they would have found something,” David said, sighed, and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “Let me see if Croce has gotten any information out of the morgue accomplice we arrested—if he knows which building they were operating in, that would save us a lot of time.”
Croce answered on the second ring.
“Yes?” she said, knowing it was David.
“Did you interrogate the prisoner yet?” he asked. “We have no idea what building we need to look for. If you could get an address out of him it would be great.”
“Yes,” she said. “I just happened to get that address from him.”
“Can you text it to me?” he asked.
“Coming your way in just a second,” she said, and they ended the call.
“Good news,” he announced to Jones. “They got the address of the building from the morgue accomplice. Croce is texting it to me.”
As he finished speaking his phone announced the arrival of the text; he showed it to Jones.
They climbed into their cars and drove down the road to find the exact building they’d been looking for. There was nothing special about it and nothing looked out of place.
“How do we know if the guy was telling the truth?” Jones asked as she climbed out of her parked car. “There’s nothing here.”
“Let’s take a quick look around and see if we notice anything,” David suggested, advancing toward the building.
He walked up the ramp and headed toward the only door visible from the parking lot. There was a cinder block sitting beside the door that had left scrape marks on the concrete around it like it had been moved multiple times. He also noticed that there was a new looking latch for a padlock screwed to the door.
“You might want to come take a look,” he called out to Jones, only to realize she was already right behind him. He smiled sheepishly for having yelled in her face. “Sorry. Look.” He pointed to the marks on the concrete and at the door.
Jones’ cell phone rang and she pulled it out of her pocket to answer it.
“Okay,” she barked, and frowned. “Just go back to the precinct for now. There’s not much you can do until you get a detailed report from the fire department.”
David turned to her and raised his eyebrows in question.
Jones sighed. “The address you sent me for the woman…well, the patrol checked it out. The place has burned to the ground.”
“Damn!” David exclaimed, balled his hands into fists, and slammed them against his legs. “We’re so fucking close, but we can’t get our hands on them—it’s like they’re a step ahead of us at every turn.”
He pulled out his cell phone and called Croce.
“Hey, send out a forensic team to the building,” he said before she could say more than hello. “Oh, and did you send a couple agents out to the woman’s house?”
“Yes, but the place had been set on fire,” she said, confirming what Jones had just told him.
“See if you can put some pressure on the fire department to get us any information they can as fast as they can. And lay on that morgue weasel hard. We need to find these people before they take off and we lose their trail. Call me if anything new turns up.”
Jones watched him while he spoke. She knew he was right and he was handling everything well. Just standing within five feet of him she could feel his excitement and his frustration—it radiated off of him like emotional heat.
“Do you think they’ve given up on their plans for this weekend and taken off?” Jones asked as soon as he’d ended the call. “Or do you think they’ve moved shop someplace else?”
David rubbed his forehead with his fingers and took slow deep breaths,
trying to think.
“Logically, since we’re so close, I would expect them to flee,” he finally said, looking at Jones. “But if the medical examiner doesn’t know much, they’ve moved base, and the woman has covered her tracks well—which she has so far—they might be bold enough to think they’re fine to go ahead with their plans.”
Jones nodded in agreement.
“But if they are going ahead with their plans,” he continued like he was simply thinking out loud and not talking to another person, “I would expect things to happen tomorrow. We’re close and they know we’re close. They would only risk staying if they figured we couldn’t find them and stop them in time.”
“This is frustrating,” Jones said. “What can I do—we do—to help the FBI before they get away? I know you need the manpower and fast.”
“I guess the only thing we can do right now is try to find where they might have moved their operation…or watch places around the city where they might try to pick people up—they’ll need bodies if they’re going to have a ‘sizable amount of organs’,” David said with a shrug. “Talk to your Captain and see if your patrols can start doing searches of every abandoned building in the city. And I guess we should release the woman’s photo, since we can’t have someone watching every single bar and nightclub in the city.”
“Searching buildings is going to take a while,” Jones said, frowning and looking around. “Do you have a decent picture of the woman? Can you have someone send it over? Or are you guys going to handle the media release?”
“Yeah, we have a couple good pictures now and I have a guy that can do it. You guys focus on the buildings and see if you can keep cars patrolling close to bars and clubs once it gets dark.” He paused, thinking for a moment about how they could target their search for the building better to save time. “Have them start looking at buildings on the other side of the city in the remotest locations possible. They’re too smart to have set up anything close to here or anything that would be easy to find.”
“Do you want me to wait here with you for the forensic team? Or head out and get the search started?”
“Go ahead and get the search started—we’ll be battling for enough daylight to get any decent search time today,” David said. “I’m fine here on my own—it’s not like they’ll come back to kill me or anything.” He laughed. “If your Captain has any issues, have him call me.”
“Okay.” Jones turned and headed back down toward the parking lot. She yelled, “Good luck!” right before climbing into her car and driving away.
***
While David waited outside the building for the forensic team, he called Limmon to check in and have him release the woman’s photo to the press to warn any bar goers to beware of her. The call took a few minutes, but he didn’t mind. He couldn’t risk going in the building and contaminating the evidence.
They arrived by van within thirty minutes after the end of his call with Limmon, who promised to relay everything to Croce once she was out of her second interrogation with Miles.
Before entering the building, David had them dust the door for prints. He knew that most people would think to wipe off the handles of a door, but usually wouldn’t think to wipe down the entire door surface. No one thought anything of pressing their hand to a door to push or hold it open, and that’s what he was hoping to find—an entire hand print. Finger prints were great, but sometimes they were only partials, and with a hand print they would have a chance at five prints and a palm.
Once the outside of the door was done, they did the same to the inside; they found a total of two palms and ten partial prints.
Forcing himself to stay calm and focused—he wanted to speed back to the office and run the prints right that second—he led the way inside.
Together, the five of them—four members of the forensic team and David—traversed every inch of the building. There was plenty of evidence someone had been there. The basement in particular was of interest to David, and he ordered the team to be very thorough; the strong scent of bleach assured him that someone had been trying to cover up some kind of organic evidence.
Sure enough, they found blood—most of it had been contaminated by the cleaning agent, but there were still some small “splatters” around the large area where the bleach had been applied.
As soon as they found evidence of the blood, David whipped out his cell phone and called Croce and Jones to let them know they weren’t wasting their time at the building.
Both sounded excited and Croce said she would let the lab know—there would be a rush put on all the evidence the team brought back.
Chapter Forty-Three
Butch didn’t remember much when he woke up late in the afternoon. After he’d left the new building, he’d gone back to his motel room, took a couple of pain killers―with beer―and had gone to sleep. Now he was awake, aching, and in a foul mood. He wanted to rip Roger a new ass for attacking him the way he had, and basically handing him his ass. He wasn’t used to being on the losing end of a fight and he didn’t like how it felt.
He groaned as he climbed out of bed and headed for the bathroom. When he looked at himself in the mirror and saw his swollen, bruised face, he vowed he would kill Roger, right along with Lloyd. He’d do it for free though, just because he wanted the sucker-punching-bastard dead.
The thought of murdering the two men brought a smile to his face, and Butch blanched with pain as his swollen lip split and started to bleed.
“Both you bastards will pay,” he said, staring at himself in the bathroom mirror while blood dripped from his face into the sink.
***
When David finally made it back to the Pittsburgh FBI office it was starting to get dark. They’d sent out the woman’s photo to all the local news stations, had the lab working double time on all the stuff they’d found in the abandoned factory, and there were still officers out looking for a new building the team might have set up in.
Limmon had put a trace on the nurse’s cell phone, but that hadn’t turned up anything. He figured she’d been smart enough to have dumped it. Hell, for all they knew she’d burned it up with the house and had gotten a new burner phone to use.
David felt like he was caught in a hurricane. There was so much going on, but he was helpless to harness any of the energy around him into anything he could use. The only information he had at his fingertips was the meager information they’d gotten out of the medical examiner. He knew the names of the team members and how many of them there were. They had: Sonya the nurse; Jennings the doctor; Roger and Jack as the muscle; and Lloyd as the fence.
He knew that most of the names wouldn’t do him any good, since they were common first names. “Jennings” was the one that jumped out at him. He’d had Limmon search local medical directories to see if they could find a doctor with the last name of Jennings. He knew it might not be the doctor’s real name, but it was worth a try.
While he waited for any information to turn up and for the lab results to come in, David watched Miles’ interrogation video—Croce had done a great job—and went over the Housen case file again. He couldn’t help but feel like he was missing something and he was determined to figure out what it was.
***
Roger glanced up at the clock on the wall when he woke up on the couch. He noted the time was close to seven and frowned. Sitting up and stretching, he looked around; Sonya still hadn’t arrived. He picked his cell phone up off the coffee table, where he’d laid it earlier, and was even more confused when he noticed there were no messages. Instantly he assumed something was wrong, but he didn’t know what to do. If she’d been caught by the FBI he didn’t want to text her and have them trace it back to him, but he also needed to know if she was all right.
Jennings came to mind, but he made a disgusted noise and shook his head at the thought of talking to him. Lloyd was the next best option. He didn’t know how, but Lloyd always seemed to know where Sonya was and how she was doing.
He sent a
text to Lloyd and got up to move around a bit. As he stood, he heard a car pull into his driveway. He rushed over to the window and carefully pulled the blind down just enough to see who it was; his heart was racing from anxiety, but logic told him that if it were the authorities, there would be more than one car.
He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that the car was Sonya’s. Releasing the blind, he rushed to the door leading into the garage. He pushed the button on the wall that opened the main garage door.
He watched her pull in and then pressed the button again, to close the big door and block them from prying eyes. He waited there for her to kill the engine and open her car door.
“Where the hell have you been?” he snapped, stepping out into the garage with his bare feet. “I’ve been worried sick.”
As she opened her mouth to speak, his cell phone rang and he jumped, realizing he still held the device in his hand. He held up his hand, indicating she should wait as he answered it.
Sonya huffed and watched Roger. She realized—a little too late—that she should have called or messaged him and told him what she’d planned on doing before she came to his house.
She listened to Roger as he spoke into the phone and garnered that he’d called Lloyd to check up on her.
He quickly ended the call after barking, “She’s here now. Thanks for calling me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said right away without being prompted. “I should have let you know where I was.”
Roger continued to stare at her with an expectant expression on his face.
She sighed. “I decided to stake out Jan’s house for a bit to see if the FBI or anyone showed up there. No one seemed to be watching her house—other than me.”
“You could have been seen,” he scolded, and dragged his free hand through his already messed up hair. “You were all over the afternoon news and I was worried sick when I woke up and you weren’t here.”
Nurse Blood (The Organ Harvester Series Book 1) Page 27
