Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop: 2 Bugman Novels in 1

by Tim Downs

  Lassiter dropped the cell phone on the carpet and leaned back in his recliner with a look of satisfaction. He set the paper on his lap and opened the sports page. As he scanned the headlines, his eyes drifted above the paper and focused on a mahogany plant stand near the doorway, supporting a leafy Boston fern.

  It was in perfect condition.

  The silver Porsche roared into a parking space in front of the Fox Chapel Yacht Club and killed its lights. Jack Kaplan turned to the beautiful young woman sitting silently beside him and smiled.

  “You know, Angel, when I saw you leaning up against that red Beamer the other night, I almost stepped out and helped you myself. I don’t know who first spotted you, but you were the perfect choice for this job. I mean the face, the dress, the body—baby, you are the total package. Looks to die for, you might say.”

  “I didn’t ask your opinion,” the woman said.

  Kaplan reached across and stroked her long, auburn hair. “I love this,” he said.

  She swung around and knocked his hand away. “Let me make something clear to you, Dr. Kaplan: This is a business relationship. I don’t like you, I don’t trust you, and I certainly don’t need your help. Have I made myself clear?”

  Kaplan thrust an imaginary dagger into his heart and twisted it. “You’re killing me, Angel. But then, that’s your specialty, isn’t it?”

  “One more thing: when we’re out of sight, don’t you ever touch me.”

  Jack looked her over once more and shook his head. “Your loss,” he said. “Are you ready? It’s showtime.”

  Kaplan stepped out of the car, fastened the top button of his sports coat, and moved around to the opposite side of the car. He opened the passenger door and extended his hand. Angel reached down at her feet and picked up a glossy black handbag and a bottle of champagne; she swung her slender legs from the car, then rose up to meet him, smiling and kissing him lightly on the cheek. They walked arm in arm down the sidewalk on the right side of the building, avoiding the glare of the streetlamps, heading directly for the marina and the wooden docks that projected into the river like gray piano keys.

  Behind them, a second car rolled to a stop beside the Porsche. Two men sat silently, watching Kaplan and the woman called Angel work their way down the pier toward the farthest slip.

  Nathan Lassiter turned to the driver. “I want to ride with Angel next time,” he said. “I just got divorced, you know. What does this look like to people?”

  Santangelo ignored him. “We’ll give them another minute,” he said evenly. “No sense crowding them.”

  Moments later, the two men emerged from the car and followed the same secluded path to the wooden quays lined with gently rocking sailboats, catamarans, and sport cruisers of all shapes and sizes—but none of them compared in size or luxury with the corporate yacht in the final slip, the seventy-foot PharmaGen.

  There were hearty laughs and eager handshakes as the last two men stepped aboard, completing the party of six. The bow and stern lines were quickly cast off, the PharmaGen’s twin diesel inboards gave a guttural growl, and Tucker Truett backed the yacht slowly out of the slip and into the darkness of the Allegheny River.

  As soon as the yacht passed out of range of the bright marina lights, the jovial pretense was dropped and the party fell silent. They traveled just over a mile upriver, to an isolated spot where Nine Mile Island and Sycamore Island lay side by side, dividing the river into three separate channels. They dropped anchor in the central channel, where the wooded islands blocked them from view from either bank.

  Julian Zohar stepped into the center of the group and cleared his throat.

  “Mr. Truett informs me we have refreshments tonight—please, help yourselves.” They took seats on the U-shaped leather sun bench—all except for Truett, who remained seated in the captain’s chair in the adjoining cockpit.

  “I don’t like this,” Santangelo said. “All of us meeting together is a risk.”

  “We’ve been over this,” Truett said.

  “I still don’t like it. I’ve got a lot to lose here.”

  “We’ve all got a lot to lose.”

  “Mr. Santangelo,” Zohar said calmly, “I wouldn’t take the risk of bringing this group together if it were not an absolute necessity. I am not simply a contractor handing out tasks to individual vendors. We’re creating this venture together, and we need to learn from one another.”

  “We never should have met in person,” Santangelo said.

  “I considered other means of bringing this committee together, but all of them involved equal or greater risk. Mr. Truett entertains a different group of people on this yacht almost every evening—who would notice one more assembly? I decided that our safest course of action was to ‘hide in plain sight,’ so to speak.”

  “I don’t like these people knowing who I am,” Santangelo said, gesturing to the group. “Knowing my name, knowing what I do for a living.”

  “You are Mr. Cruz Santangelo,” Zohar replied, “special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I am Dr. Julian Zohar, executive director of the Center for Organ Procurement and Education. If something goes wrong, we all know where to find one another, don’t we? I think that creates a certain incentive for loyalty, don’t you? We’ve all cast our lots together, Mr. Santangelo. Why not just accept it?”

  “This is old ground,” Angel said. “Can we get down to business?”

  Zohar nodded. “The first item on our agenda is to review our prior endeavor. We’re on a learning curve here, and it’s critical that we benefit from our mistakes and improve our performance with each effort. Mr. Santangelo, you control the first phase; let’s begin with you.”

  “The setup went off without a hitch,” Santangelo said. “I scouted the location for a week—it was perfect for us. Homewood is a war zone. In that neighborhood I could have fired an assault rifle without anyone raising a blind. One thing,” he said, looking at Angel. “Don’t cover your eyes—never look away. He saw you, remember? One break in character is all it takes.”

  “Sorry,” she grumbled. “I’m not a professional.”

  “Lady, you are now.”

  “I thought she was great,” Kaplan said. “You guys should have seen her, standing beside that car all helpless and pouting—Please, won’t somebody stop and help me? Man, a monk would have pulled over.”

  “That’s another thing,” Santangelo said, turning to face Kaplan. “If you ever crack another joke while we’re waiting for the target, I’ll kill you myself.”

  “Hey, lighten up.”

  “I will not lighten up,” Santangelo said, enunciating each word with icy precision. “You are undisciplined and unrestrained. I despise your sloppiness. It has no place in an operation like this.”

  “Take a valium,” Kaplan said. “Doesn’t the Bureau offer any therapy for ex-snipers?”

  Santangelo began to rise, but Zohar put a hand on his forearm and prevented him. “Mr. Santangelo’s comments merit consideration,” he said. “Discipline and precision play a crucial role for all of us. Dr. Kaplan, perhaps you would like to report next.”

  “Well,” Kaplan grinned, “doing the removal on-site was a real rush—but surgically speaking, it’s a risk. The ‘donor’ has no worries, of course—he’s a flatliner, thanks to the Terminator here—but there’s an increased risk of contamination of the organ. I transferred it into sterile ice as fast as I could, but—hey, kids, I’m doing surgery on the side of a road here.”

  “There are bigger risks,” Santangelo said, “like exposure. In our first attempt, I was out of there in two minutes. Kaplan did the removal at the other end.”

  “Very handy,” Kaplan said. “Not as much fun, but very convenient. I had the donor in one room, and the recipient in the next. I’ll bet that was the fastest kidney transplant on record.”

  “Now that we’re doing the removal on site,” Santangelo said, “there’s more of a chance of being spotted. There are more variables that are out of our contr
ol.”

  Zohar turned to Kaplan again. “Is there any way to speed up the procedure?”

  “Are you kidding? Not unless I reach down his throat and yank it out. This is still surgery, guys—I’m in and out in record time now. Nobody I know could do it faster.”

  Now Lassiter spoke up. “This is all a moot point. The first time, Santangelo and Angel drove halfway across town with an unconscious man in the trunk. What if they had a wreck? What if a cop pulled them over? And the surgical site was in a populated area, remember? Even late at night, sooner or later someone’s going to spot you lugging bodies in and out of your trunk. Besides, there’s the forensic side to consider. It’s always risky to move a body from the place where death occurs. There are ways to tell.”

  “I thought you were taking care of all that,” Santangelo said. “You cover the autopsies, don’t you?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Lassiter said. “We schedule these things when I’m on rotation, and only when our two boys are there to pick up the body—but there are police on the scene too, you know. The coroner has jurisdiction over the body, but the police have responsibility for the scene itself, and they collect their own forensic evidence. There’s always a chance that somebody will spot something.”

  “Dr. Lassiter is correct,” Zohar said. “We have no choice. Despite the potential risks, on-site removal is currently our best alternative. Mr. Santangelo, the onus is on you to find suitable locations and scenarios for these procedures. The last one seems to have served quite well.”

  “Angel and I are working on it.”

  Zohar looked at the group. “Suggested improvements for our next procedure?”

  Lassiter turned to Santangelo. “These things have got to look like accidental deaths,” he said. “You set the last one up to look like a drive-by shooting. That was acceptable, because our people don’t expect to find a perp in a drive-by—but in the future it’s got to look like an accident. A murder sets a whole different set of wheels in motion. We don’t want investigators sifting through the evidence, trying to find some nonexistent killer—that’s asking for trouble. And each scenario needs to be different; the police have people looking for crime trends, like serial killers and rapists. If you do two or three of these things the same way—even close to the same way—that raises a flag, and they’ll be all over it. I hope the FBI taught you better than that. We can’t afford that kind of screwup.”

  Santangelo narrowed his eyes.

  “There will be no ‘screwups,’ ” Zohar said, “simply because there can be none. We each need to do our job well, and we must encourage one another to do the same. Let me say again: This committee, this group, it’s more than an organization—we are a team. A family, that’s the way I like to think of it—we happy few, we band of brothers. We depend upon one another for our very survival. Think of this committee as a body; if one member suffers, we all suffer. It’s in the body’s best interest to make sure that each member contributes to the welfare of the whole.”

  There was the sound of a smaller boat approaching on the port side. Truett stepped to the railing, smiled, and waved as it passed. The rest of the group turned their faces away and waited until the drone of the engine disappeared into the night.

  Zohar leaned back in his seat again and smiled. “On a more positive note,” he said, “our previous client’s payment has been received in full, and the appropriate transfers have been made into each of your offshore accounts, as you can verify as of noon tomorrow. And on a personal note, I’m happy to report that both of our prior clients are recuperating quite nicely in the seclusion of their homes. My congratulations to the entire team.

  “Looking to the future, I’m pleased to announce that we are actively pursuing additional clients. Mr. Truett, I continue to be grateful for your organization’s ever-expanding population data. I’ll forward our potential clients’ medical information to you tomorrow. If you will compile the potential donor lists, we can discuss our final selections.”

  Truett nodded.

  “I suggest we spend our remaining time meeting as subcommittees. Mr. Santangelo, you and your team have donor scenarios to discuss. Why don’t you remain on deck and enjoy the evening? Dr. Lassiter, I have an issue I would like to discuss with you and Mr. Truett in the salon below.”

  Lassiter nodded nervously.

  Zohar smiled and looked at each member of the group. “The word committee comes to us from Latin,” he said. “Its original meaning was ‘one who has been entrusted’—one to whom something valuable was committed. That’s what this committee is: a group of people who share a great responsibility. This bold venture of ours has the potential to be enormously lucrative; may I encourage you all to constantly remember the responsibility we share. We are committed, my friends. Please don’t forget it.”

  Truett pulled the hatch door shut behind him and descended the handful of steps to the salon below. Dr. Zohar was already seated in the center of the L-shaped sofa, his legs decorously crossed and his folded hands resting lightly on one knee. Truett checked both the forward and aft staterooms, and glanced in both heads as well. Satisfied, he took a seat on Zohar’s left.

  Lassiter started toward the sofa himself, then reconsidered. The remaining seat placed him much too close to Zohar, and it blocked his view of Truett. The two men watched silently as Lassiter stepped back again, folded his arms clumsily, and leaned against the galley counter.

  “So?” Lassiter said as indifferently as possible. “What’s this all about?”

  Zohar said nothing for a full three seconds; the silence had the impact of an air horn. After three decades of impromptu appeals to bereaved and grieving families, Zohar understood the power of both speech and silence, and used both with surgical precision.

  “A problem has come to my attention,” he said evenly.

  “A problem? What sort of problem?”

  “A potential breach of security. I hate to bring this subject up … again.”

  “That wasn’t my fault!” Lassiter protested. “The first donor you picked was carrying a uniform donor card! When the coroner’s office reported the death, his organs were requested by your own organization! What was I supposed to do, release the body and let them find a kidney missing? That would have ended this whole project! The best I could do was to refuse to release the organs for forensic reasons.”

  “As you say, it was the best you could do—but your method attracted undesirable attention. That’s the last thing we want.”

  “Well, talk to your people about it. They requested the organs.”

  Zohar smiled. “Remember, Nathan, no one at COPE knows about this project of ours. Their business is to procure organs for people on the traditional transplant waiting list. I trained them myself, and they’re very good at it. I can hardly stop them from doing their jobs now. But as a result of that first little mishap, I have made two corrections to our system: I will no longer select donors who carry traditional donor cards, and whenever we select a donor for our purposes, I will personally contact the next of kin to ‘request donation’—and I will make certain that they decline. Those two steps should keep us from any further conflicts of interest with the traditional donor system.”

  “You’d better be right,” Lassiter said. “I bluffed my way out of that one; I can’t do it again. They’d be all over me—and like you said upstairs, I know where you live.”

  Truett began to speak, but Zohar gently placed a hand on his arm with a sideward glance, then turned back to Lassiter again.

  “The issue I wanted to speak to you about is a different matter entirely. It appears, Nathan, that you are once again attracting undesirable attention.”

  “What? How?”

  “As you so eloquently pointed out, the members of this committee depend upon one another—we live or die together. That kind of mutual dependency creates the need for a certain amount of accountability. In our case, the left hand must know exactly what the right hand is doing. For that reason, when
you agreed to join us, Mr. Truett took the liberty of installing a type of surveillance software on your computer, both at your home and at the coroner’s office. This software records every keystroke you make on your computer, and it reports the activity to us.”

  Lassiter opened his mouth to object, but Zohar raised his hand.

  “You were not being singled out, Nathan. We took the same measures with every member of the committee. It was a necessary precaution, as I’m sure you’ll recognize after proper reflection. You can see why this discussion needed to be held privately; you are the only member of our group who knows about this, and we’re counting on you to keep it in the strictest confidence.”

  Now Truett joined in. “Last week, Dr. Lassiter, we noticed some unusual activity on your home computer. It appears that someone did a very thorough search of your personal records.”

  Lassiter blanched. “Which records? What sort of a search?”

  “Everything, top to bottom. It was very careful, very thorough, very professionally done. Special attention was paid to your financial records.”

  “My ex-wife,” Lassiter hissed. “She’s looking for hidden assets.”

  Truett shook his head. “We don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “If it was your ex-wife, she had help. They even searched for steganography—files hidden within other files, like child pornography files sometimes are. Does your wife have that kind of computer expertise?”

  “Margaret? No way. E-mail and basic Internet, that’s her limit.”

  “Well, here’s the kicker, Dr. Lassiter: Before leaving, whoever it was installed another version of the same surveillance software that we use. They’re not just interested in your finances, they’re interested in your ongoing activities. Does that sound like your wife to you?”

  “But—if it’s not Margaret, then who? The IRS, maybe? Can you tell?”