The way her lips parted around the tube, you could tell she’d give good head. Pretty features on her, nice straight nose. Good skin. Shiny blonde hair and not a dye job. Ten to one she was blonde down there too. And there was something about blonde pussy that seemed sweeter, cleaner, pinker than any other kind.
The other guy on duty, John Callahan, had to keep watch out by the door that led to the parking bay. There was a buzzer that controlled the garage door itself. No one got in without stopping and looking into the security camera so Callahan could check them in, log them in his book. But there’d be no action tonight: Monday was the night. That’s what Sean had told them.
So who would know if he took a peek? Nothing wrong with that, not in this situation. She wasn’t sick or dead, just on a drip. He’d never been with anyone like her. Not even close.
It made him think of all the ones who had walked away from him in bars or at parties. Whose eyes had kept roaming, hunting, as he’d tried to get their attention, whose relief he could feel when they spotted someone they knew and could say excuse me. Sometimes not even that.
His hands moved quietly to her breasts and hovered over the gown, as close he could to the cloth without touching it. This was no ordinary pair. Too bad Sean wasn’t doing titty transplants, these would be worth a fortune. His hands whispered over her nipples lightly, as if he were a true lover of hers, and he felt their perfect size and shape, wishing she could be awake but still strapped in.
He was so hard just from touching her, he knew he would ache like hell if he didn’t resolve this. And there was a way this could still be good. Conscious, unconscious, she could still lie there and take it.
He went out in the hall and called, “John?”
“Yeah?” Good. His voice coming from his post out by the door.
“You hungry for dinner yet?”
“No way, man. Lunch was only three hours ago.”
“Okay, guess you’re right. Let me know when you’re ready.”
Beautiful. John was where he should be. Sean was on his way somewhere. No one else was expected. It was just him and the girl, down in whatever depths the drug had taken her to.
They would spend two weeks every summer south of the Pinery on Lake Huron, the Raudsepps up from the farm, the McKenzie side over from Stratford, where they had their restaurant and souvenir shop. The families rented adjacent cabins and the cousins ran up and down the beach the entire time, in the water or up through the scrub and trees at the top, never getting tired, it seemed. They’d play Frisbee in the water, or monkey in the middle or Marco Polo, it didn’t matter. It was being with family that counted.
She loved the water best of all. More than the volleyball games, hacky sack, castle building; more than bonfires, marshmallows or the breathtaking sunsets that streaked the sky with purple, orange and pink; more than the corny songs on guitar or the board games in the musty front room of the cottage. Always the first one into the water, our Jenn, always the last one out, lips blue and gooseflesh raised. Their farm was hot in the summer and always buzzing with flies. In the water, she was free of heat and flies, of the heavy smell of manure. Sometimes she’d just float like a starfish with her head pointing at the horizon and she could see the sunset like that, upside down.
Floating.
Something bumping against her, almost like an eel inside her thigh. Probably one of her cousins-Eric, was her bet-reaching in there with that big foam noodle he needed to hold onto when the water got deep.
She wanted him to stop so she could get back to floating and watching the sunset, weightless, careless-how many more days was it until they had to go home?
CHAPTER 30
In the past few days, it seemed, I’d spent all my time in the studies of men who were supposed to be doing good in this world. A rabbi, a doctor, a congressman. Learned, righteous men in their studies, getting people killed. Now I was in Stayner’s again while Ryan went to Lugo’s to fill out his deadly list.
“You have to understand,” Stayner said, “nothing like this was supposed to happen to David. Daggett told me all along he wanted David to assist in the surgery Monday. If David got in touch, I was supposed to reassure him of that.”
“You sure he never did?”
“Never. Not a word after our last conversation.”
“But why would Daggett kill David if Dr. Reimer hasn’t healed yet?”
“But he has.”
“What do you mean?”
“We met Thursday. I’m not saying he’d be ready to lead such a procedure, but as far as assisting, his injuries had sufficiently healed.”
“Did you tell Daggett that?”
Stayner hesitated, losing some of his assertiveness. “He asked. I answered. That’s how it works with Sean Daggett.”
“Didn’t you realize what that meant? You made David expendable.”
“How was I to know you’d lead them to him? Don’t project your guilt onto me, Geller. It’s your fault he got killed. And it was up to you to keep your partner from being grabbed, not me!”
He was leaning against his desk, legs crossed at the ankles. I came at him fast from his right. He pushed off and moved instinctively toward the wall where his family photos hung in black frames. I squared up with him, crowded him against the wall and drove my left fist through the drywall next to his ear. Two family photos slid down and crashed against the floor, the glass shattering loudly. Plaster dust fell like snowflakes into his finely combed hair.
“That’s me projecting,” I said.
“Jesus Christ, you’re crazy!”
“If I hit your chest that hard,” I said, “I could stop your heart.”
I heard footsteps outside the door and his wife’s voice calling, “Honey? Is everything okay?”
“Tell her,” I said.
Stayner was shaking; whether in fear or anger was his business.
“Everything’s fine,” he called. “Just me being clumsy.”
“Are you sure?” she said.
“Please, Gwen, leave me alone. Everything’s under control.”
“Don’t you wish,” I said in his ear.
“It was the media that did me in,” Stayner said, once his wife had left the house on an errand he encouraged her to run.
“That’s original.”
“It’s true. When our transplant program marked its fiftieth anniversary a couple of years ago, we made all the local papers. The Herald ran a feature on me and my role in shaping the program. Sean Daggett got it into his head that I was the only man to help his boy.”
“How did you get Carol-Ann involved?” I asked.
“Rather easily. She’s one of those women who hit forty and realize they’re as likely to get blown up by a terrorist as they are to get married. So she wanted the one other thing that would provide security, and that was a house. She’d bent everyone’s ears about it around the department. She wanted a foreclosure she could fix up, with tenants to help pay off the mortgage. She jumped at the chance to make some cash.”
“How did it work?”
“We ran Michael Daggett’s blood and tissue samples against all the ones she’d collected to date. Matches don’t have to be perfect,” he said. “But the better they are, the fewer anti-rejection drugs the patient has to take, which means a lighter toll on the body. We isolated eight matches in the Greater Boston Area that were more than acceptable. Three were discarded immediately because of age or health concerns. Of the remaining five, I’m told, Daggett found one who responded to whatever offer he made.”
“You sure it wasn’t at gunpoint? Was the donor even conscious when he was brought in?”
“I told you before, I don’t know. I only entered once he had been prepped.”
“For all you know he could have been disposed of after the surgery.”
“That wasn’t my understanding,” he said. “I was told he was a willing donor.”
“How long before Daggett approached you again?”
“About three months. He
told me he had found someone else who needed a kidney and didn’t trust the system to provide one in time. Of course, this person also happened to have the money to obtain one illegally. Daggett found out what these surgeries cost in hospitals and charged him double. Half a million. And then he told me we were in business. Anyone who left the team would be killed. If I tipped anyone off, my son would be killed. He would pay us the same amount as before-ten thousand per team member, twenty-five for me.”
“How many have you done?”
“We’ve averaged one surgery a month, so about fifteen so far.”
“That’s more than enough to know the place inside out. So here’s what you’re going to do: sit down with a pad and sketch every inch of Halladay’s, every door, window and chimney. Write down who’s usually there the night of a transplant by way of security. Who packs a gun.” I moved in closer, advancing slowly, never taking my eyes off Stayner’s, backing him up until he was angled over the harvest table, his palms on the table to support him. “You’re going to show us how you get in, how the others get in. Are you usually patted down when you get there? Does anyone check your equipment? What does Reimer look like? Would they recognize him with a mask on? Come on, get writing. You’re such a Harvard genius, write it down.”
His arms were shaking from the strain. His elbows quivered and the table shook. An apple fell out of a basket of fruit and rolled along the table to the far end, where it dropped onto the floor.
“Quit crowding me and I’ll do it.”
“This isn’t crowding. Crowding will be if anything happens to Jenn because you left something out.”
I let him up. He stood up straight and brushed at his shirt. Smoothed back his hair, his hands still trembling. He got scrap paper and pencils out of a kitchen drawer and set them on the table. “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “there’s a very good chance your friend is still alive.”
“Why?”
“The fresher tissue is when you transplant it, the better. And as in your supermarket, fresh is always better than frozen. I can’t assemble the team twice in two days, so if Daggett is sick enough to do this to her, it will be tomorrow night, either before or after Mrs. McConnell’s surgery.”
“Insist it be done after.”
“You don’t insist with Daggett.”
“This time you do. Tell him you’re not feeling well, you have to do the McConnell transplant first. Tell him it doesn’t matter if the woman dies, so you’d rather do her after, when you’re tired.”
“He’s greedy enough to buy that,” Stayner said. “Okay, I’ll try it. The least I can do is buy you that time for her.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised by the fact that Stayner could draw; he was a meticulous man and good with his hands. But his renderings of Halladay’s Funeral Home from a range of perspectives were excellent. He started with a street view, placing the mortuary on Wellington Hill Street with two other properties on each side. Then filled in the front and rear entrances with all doors and windows.
He talked me through the procedure in five-minute blocks of time from the team’s arrival, through the set-up, scrubbing and surgery itself: the swift laparoscopic removal of the organ; the stapling and suturing of the donor while the organ sat on ice; the insertion of the organ and the stapling and suturing of the recipient. The diseased kidney was not removed but left in to wither and die. Done sequentially, it took four to six hours, assuming no bleeding, misfired staples or other complications.
Stayner told me security during a transplant was usually limited to four men. The day shift and night shift would simply overlap for the duration.
“What about Daggett? Does he usually come?”
“He attended Michael’s, of course, and the first half-dozen or so. Then he seemed to lose interest. It’s more sporadic now.”
“When he does come, is he alone?”
“Never. He always has that hulking friend of his. Kieran.”
“Kieran’s out,” I said. “Jenn took him out before Daggett grabbed her.”
“Then he’ll have someone else,” Stayner said. “Daggett is never alone.”
He made a list of all his team members and the equipment they typically brought in with them for each procedure. “We don’t leave much at Halladay’s. Even with their security, you don’t want to leave anything of value in that neighbourhood.”
“Which means we can hide a gun in your stuff. I don’t suppose you’re handy with a pistol.”
“Not even if it were filled with water.”
“Any of your team?”
“Please, we’re surgeons.”
“Don’t get huffy,” I said. “You did plenty of damage by agreeing to Mrs. McConnell’s surgery.”
“Daggett forced me to-”
“Save it. Lerner could only bring the deal as far as you. You took it to Daggett. He didn’t know about it until you volunteered, knowing McConnell would pay ten times what you’d been throwing back. And that extra step helped get David killed.”
“You’re determined to blame that on me.”
“It’s that or punch more holes in your walls.”
CHAPTER 31
Rabbi Ed let me into the house, wearing a cabled grey cardigan over a white Oxford shirt and black jeans. As he turned to shut the door, I went straight to the dining room table. I wanted no more of closed, quiet rooms filled with the leathery smell of old books full of high ideals. I wanted to be in the open with him, and with Shana if she chose to be part of this. And wasn’t that going to be fun?
The rabbi used a dimmer to fill the afternoon light in the dining room with a soft yellow glow. Shana was across the butcher-block island in the kitchen, dressed in jeans with a white blouse and a man’s suit vest over it. I smiled at her but could tell how forced it felt; she did too, I guess, because she didn’t smile back. But she did offer coffee. I said yes and she started putting a pot together, measuring out dark grounds from a Starbucks bag she took from the freezer.
“It’s terrible news about David,” Rabbi Ed said. “I’m simply heartbroken for his parents. They sound like wonderful people. I was so hopeful this was going to turn out right.”
“It hasn’t turned out so bad,” I said.
“What? How can you say that? David is dead. Your partner is being held hostage.”
“For you, I meant.”
He drew back as Shana looked at me with anger. She said, “That was totally inappropriate.”
“You got everything you wanted out of the deal,” I said to him. “McConnell would make sure you got federal funding. Urban renewal, that’s his thing. Zoning problems would go away. His wife would make a personal contribution to the capital campaign once she got the new kidney you lined up for her.”
“I know this has been an upsetting day for you,” he said in a soothing voice, the one he probably used to counsel his flock.
“You spent your life telling the truth, Rabbi,” I said. “So you’re not a very good liar. You said David never told you anything about the organ trade the night he was here.”
“That’s right.”
“But Mrs. McConnell’s operation was lined up the next day.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“You’re the only link between all the players. You put the congressman and Stayner together. David had already told you about this, hadn’t he? During one of your confessional tete-a-tetes.”
“I told you I wasn’t prepared to discuss that.”
“He told you about the illegal operation he’d been dragged into and the death of one of the donors.”
“Jonah,” Shana said, “unless you can prove all of this I think you should just stop the wild accusations. This is our house you’re in.”
“Such a nice house,” I said. “Such a warm house. Built by such a warm-hearted man. A builder and a ribbon cutter, a pillar of Brookline. They ought to paint a mural of him on Harvard Street.”
“I said stop.”
“Let him stop me,�
� I said. “Tell me which part isn’t true, Ed. David is dead, there are no more confidences to keep.” I looked at Shana; she glared at me, her fists clenched tightly at her sides.
He took a deep breath, as if a man of his girth needed to fill himself with more air than most. “What are you, thirty-three, thirty-four years old?”
“Close enough.”
“What do you know about building a shul like Adath Israel? Yes, I cut the ribbons and broke the ground. From a small shul to an expanded one to a second building. I founded the day school, the men’s choir, the adult education program, the youth basketball club. For twenty-five years, there was virtually nothing in that building I did not initiate or bring to life.”
“So why quit?”
“I didn’t plan to. I thought I’d stay there until I retired. But it was time to build a new complex. We had outgrown the old one. It had always been a patchwork affair-one building here, one there, with a walkway connecting them, which could, by the way, fall apart any day. Through a developer I know, up came an opportunity to acquire land in a good location nearby and build the kind of synagogue Brookline should have: a new sanctuary and admin wing, a bigger school, more gym and childcare space. There were naming opportunities galore. Fantastic plans another friend of mine drew up for nothing. And the board of directors turned it down. They said it was the wrong time to build, what with the economy bouncing around like a basketball. I argued the opposite. Workmen were out of work. Materials were cheap. The land was there at a buyer’s price. They said no, no, no. It was too expensive. The timing was bad, it sent the wrong message, the naming opportunities might not be there-every excuse. And after twenty-five years, all the battles, Jonah, the joy, of course, the opportunity to do a lot of good, but the grief too, to have endured all that and be turned down by these pishers? That was it. I took a leave of absence, during which I looked at other opportunities, and came up with the idea of the Shul on the Hill. That’s why I left.”
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