Dreaming Death

by Heather Graham

  “How is your dad?” he asked her.

  “He and Mom are both fine, thank you. The two of them are retired, I’m out of the house, so they’ve bought a camper. They’re off now in Yellowstone, I believe.”

  “Your father is a good man,” he said. “Amazing that he made it to the trial.”

  “And now, Dr. Lawrence,” Keenan said, “someone is killing vulnerable women—and others. We believe that there’s more going on than a killer who enjoys killing. We believe that they’re being murdered for their internal organs, and that all these organs are going out on the black market. You were a transplant surgeon. We’re looking to find out if there was anyone you knew back then, someone who maybe dropped out of the field completely, who might be behind this.”

  Dr. Lawrence frowned thoughtfully. “That was the whole thing with McCarron. He was bitter over the lists. Said they weren’t fair. I can’t begin to tell you what goes into the lists, and how a person just might match if there is a chance for an organ to survive. Such an operation—killing people randomly for their organs—is crazy. You would—well, frankly, you’d waste so many.”

  Keenan shrugged. “This killer may not care about waste. Seriously, what is just one kidney worth on the black market? A half million or more, right?”

  “What price do we put on human life?” Lawrence asked softly. “For most of us, lists and playing by the rules are the lot that life has cast us. But ask yourself—if you were incredibly wealthy, and you knew you were going to die without a new heart in a few years, wouldn’t you pay anything?” Lawrence asked.

  “I honestly don’t think that I could ask another person to die so that I might live,” Keenan said.

  “Oh, well, I agree!” Lawrence said. “I’m just explaining to you how there is a market for opportunities that are under the table and beyond the lists.”

  “Was there anyone back then who made you suspicious?”

  “McCarron. He wanted to shape the entire way the hospitals handled things. He was bitter. His cousin fell down the list because he’d been drinking. McCarron pointed to all the movie stars during those years who drank like fish, some of whom mysteriously acquired new livers. McCarron was a monster of his own kind. I don’t think he minded getting his hands dirty, but he thought he was above everyone else, or at least that other people were of lesser value.” He paused and shrugged. “Someone killing street people and hookers? If McCarron was alive now, I’d say, right there, there’s your killer. But McCarron is dead. I was there—right there—at his execution.”

  “McCarron is dead,” Stacey said. “But I was hoping you might remember something from the trial that might point to someone else taking over his empire. Or, even forgetting the trial, you might know something about someone who was interested in transplants when you were working or since. Any hints of someone not entirely aboveboard.”

  He shook his head. “Medicine moves on. Everything is better now than it was just a few short years ago. Transplant is still a specialty, and a sad specialty. When you give a healthy heart to someone dying of heart disease, you know that someone else died. Often young people. Cut down in accidents. Dying far too young...” He shrugged. “It’s not that I haven’t lost patients since I moved in a different direction. Medicine is magic in a way, but not all-powerful magic, and sometimes there’s just no way to cheat death. But I don’t think about the fact that someone else died. Unless it was a donated kidney. That can be beautiful. Watching someone who received a kidney from the loved one who donated it... Wow! That’s a feeling. And partial liver transplants—to imagine that a liver will regenerate, if not scarred—is amazing as well. There are no partial heart transplants, yet, not that I know about. Lungs...yes, left, right. But despite all that, most of the time, someone has died. Now, I just fight for life. For the lives of my patients.” He looked at Stacey again. “I’m not meaning to be rude, but what made you think that anything from so long ago might be relevant?”

  “Billie Bingham was at the McCarron trial,” Stacey said. “She was the killer’s last victim.”

  Lawrence frowned and then shrugged. “The courtroom was always filled. The judge wanted all the proceedings to be open. McCarron was guilty of so many crimes. Drug running, money laundering—and the murders that came along with it. I saw programs on his talks with FBI interviewers when he was trying to get a stay of execution. He killed, or ordered to be killed, so many people. It’s not surprising that anyone was there in the courtroom, really.”

  “She was there. And she’s now among the dead,” Stacey told him. “Do you know of anyone else at the time who was following Dr. Vargas’s work—or perhaps someone who was angry with Anderson, perhaps believing he pushed them into filling out donor cards—and then watched someone die who wasn’t high enough on a list or didn’t qualify for a transplant?”

  “There’s hundreds—probably thousands—of people out there who are angry because someone couldn’t receive a transplant. Another reason that, with Dr. Vargas gone, I just wanted out,” Dr. Lawrence said. “And I don’t know anything about the donor lists. I don’t want to know anything about the lists. Give me a ruptured appendix any day.” He shrugged. “I can get you some names of other doctors who were interested in Dr. Vargas’s work and expertise at the time. If that will help.”

  “Anyone back then who didn’t get the transplant they needed?” Keenan asked. “A case that stood out?”

  “They’d be dead now,” Lawrence said dryly.

  “Sorry,” Keenan said. “I meant, could there be anyone who needed a transplant and wasn’t high enough on a list—but is alive now.”

  He shrugged. “Not that I know about. Anyway, I will help you the best I can. McCarron was a monster. It’s a good thing he’s dead. He killed, though, because someone failed him or...”

  His voice trailed. For a moment, he looked as if he felt he had spoken too much.

  “Well, his brother needed a transplant. Didn’t get it. That’s what his motivation, according to the prosecution. And to think... Well, I was so desperate to save Dr. Vargas... Anderson, too, but I didn’t touch Anderson where he lay at the foot of the stairs, just Vargas. I was a doctor; I knew that his neck was broken. I still... I wanted to save him.”

  “Understandable,” Keenan said. “Well, we’re very grateful for any help you can give us.”

  “Of course. I’ll get you names. Do I email you?”

  Keenan handed him a card. “That would be great. But this was a two-hour trip in traffic. Could you just scribble down anything you can think of? We’ll be out in the car.”

  Lawrence looked aggravated for a moment, then shrugged. “Sure. I’ll get you what I can think of now. You don’t have to sit in the car.”

  “We’ll be on the porch. Enjoy the beauty out here,” Keenan said.

  Henry Lawrence stood with a shrug. “Sure. I guess you don’t get a lot of grass and trees back up there in the old District of Columbia.”

  “Some,” Keenan said pleasantly. “We’re in Georgetown—it’s nice. But nothing like this.”

  Lawrence strode to the front door and opened it for them. I’ll do my best,” he said.

  Keenan and Stacey walked out.

  “Had to try the swing,” he told her.

  “It’s very pretty. Of course we must try it.”

  They sat together on the swing, not quite touching.

  “It is beautiful here,” she said. She pointed across the road. There was a small cemetery there, filled with old and broken gravestones and funerary art, angels with chipped wings, obelisks at odd angles, and other pieces of memorial art. It was overgrown and fenced in; no longer active, Keenan thought, and somehow both historic and charming where it sat beneath the darkening sky.

  The house was surrounded on both sides by trees; to one side, there was a little copse with pretty benches. Large pots with flowering plants were set next to the benche
s.

  “Pretty, pretty place,” Keenan murmured.

  “Yes, Dr. Lawrence has created a very nice home for himself.”

  “So, what do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think at all, really,” she said. “Every step of a person’s life has an influence on them. I guess Vargas was like a superhero to Dr. Lawrence. I know the whole situation back with the McCarron case had an influence on me.”

  “Right. You became an agent, ready to fight for truth and justice.”

  She cast him a grin.

  “Stacey, you took it all and turned it into something good. I’m serious,” he told her.

  “Well, since I’ve just begun, I’m hoping! But Dr. Lawrence didn’t turn his back on medicine—he’s still a good doctor. He wouldn’t be working at the hospital if he wasn’t.”

  “But he did know all about transplants.”

  “Well, they can’t be doing the transplants legally,” Stacey said. “You don’t think that a man who gave an oath to save human lives can be doing this?”

  “Stacey, a medical doctor must be doing this. That’s the only way for a transplant to work—and it’s sketchy at that. An experienced doctor has to be doing this.”

  “I don’t know—I don’t know!” she said. “He was so bereft over Dr. Vargas! How could he have turned that into...killing people to maybe or maybe not save others?”

  “The human condition is that sometimes sickness, evil or whatever sinks in. I’m not saying this man is guilty of anything. I’m just saying we can’t rule him out yet.”

  “A lot of people came to that trial. I know it’s still a stretch that it can be related.”

  “You weren’t at the trial, but you watched every minute of it. Your father was a key in the prosecution’s case against McCarron. Yes, a stretch, but it does seem that it’s all related. McCarron’s trial, Billie—and illegal transplants now.”

  She nodded. “I guess I’m playing devil’s advocate. I do keep feeling that, somehow, it is connected. But it’s hard to see Vargas as...as the madman in my dreams!”

  “Let’s see this list he’s giving us,” Keenan said.

  “Right,” she murmured. But she had stopped listening to him. She was frowning intensely.

  “Stacey?”

  She looked at him.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “I could swear...there was a whisper.”

  He sat still, listening. Dr. Lawrence inside, talking to his housekeeper? No, all he heard was the wind.

  “What did you hear?” he asked her.

  She shook her head, as if confused, and then stood, walking down the path toward the street just a few feet.

  He followed her. Closed his eyes. Was it the power of suggestion? Or did he really hear it? First, it sounded like one voice. Soft, pathetic.

  “Please...don’t go.”

  Stacey looked at him. “Yes?”

  The sound got louder.

  Now, it was almost a chorus. A chorus of the dead. And he was sure he heard it.

  “Help!”

  “Please.”

  “For the love of God!”

  “It’s the cemetery,” he said. “I’ve found the dead usually are fonder of hanging around places they enjoyed in life. We can go over there...”

  “We have to wait for Dr. Lawrence to give us his list. And there’s a wall and a gate, and it looks like it’s locked.”

  “Stay here. I’ll just cross over to the front,” Keenan told her. Then he spun and gave her a serious look.

  “What?”

  “Do not go back into that house. Do not go back in there without me!”

  She nodded.

  He strode quickly down the driveway, hurrying across the street.

  It was a true country road: there was no traffic.

  The wall that surrounded the cemetery was about waist-high; he could easily leap it. The gate advised with iron writing above the iron bars that he had come to Mount Hope. The date beneath was 1777.

  He had a feeling that many graves within would be those of Revolutionary War soldiers—maybe Confederate troops and their loved ones had been buried there as well.

  But a plaque advised that the cemetery was owned and operated by the Catholic Church, and that tours were allowed through arrangements with the parish. A phone number was listed as well.

  Keenan had no problem with the idea of jumping the wall—easy enough to say that he had heard someone in distress from within.

  But he paused outside.

  The voices were gone.

  “Hello?” he said quietly. “I’d like to help.”

  Nothing.

  Then he heard something like a snort of disgust. “Not there, genius!”

  He turned, realizing that the cries they’d been hearing weren’t coming from the cemetery.

  They were coming from the charming little copse next to the house. The outdoor sitting area with benches and large ceramic pots with flowering plants.

  He started back across the street, and looking over at Stacey, he saw that she had made the same realization.

  She was starting in that direction.

  The door to the house opened, and Dr. Lawrence appeared.

  “I have my list,” he told them, and he frowned, looking at the two of them.

  “Thank you!” Stacey said, making a quick turn.

  Dr. Lawrence handed her the list. “There it is—take it. And please! I will greatly appreciate it if you would be kind enough to get the hell off my property!”

  Fifteen

  To Stacey’s surprise, Keenan smiled at the doctor who was spewing anger at them now. He wanted them gone; he wanted to be left alone.

  Keenan just nodded and headed to the car.

  Worried, Stacey went quickly after him.

  “Get in. Let’s go,” he said.

  “What? We can’t! I didn’t just hear something, I saw a man. He hasn’t been dead for centuries or even decades—the T-shirt he was wearing was from a band that’s only a few years old. Keenan, there are dead people—newly dead people—back there somewhere—”

  “And Dr. Lawrence asked us to get off his property. Without a search warrant, anything we find will be thrown out of court. Don’t worry, I’m not leaving. Well, we are leaving. We’re driving down the street and out of his sight. I’ll call Jackson, and he’ll get a warrant.”

  “Can we get a warrant at night like this? Keenan, those cries...that man...”

  “Yes, the one who called me a genius for trying the cemetery first.”

  “You did see him.”

  “Perfectly.”

  “You’ve been far more suspicious of Henry Lawrence than me,” she said. “But, Keenan, could he have buried those missing men—if they were murdered for their organs—on his own property? How stupid would that be?”

  “Incredibly stupid. But he is a respected surgeon. Stacey, I don’t know. What I do know is that he wanted us gone. And that he did do transplants. He could have known Billie back during the trial. She was in the seats watching, day after day. And he was there, testifying.”

  “He...can’t be such a monster,” Stacey said. “But then, someone is. We need to get back there now. But what will you say that can call for a search warrant?”

  “That I heard screams.”

  “They won’t find anyone. The dead were screaming.”

  “Yes. But Raina didn’t go with Axel. We’re going to get her and one of her cadaver dogs down with us when we have the warrant. The dogs will hone right in on a human body. And we will find out what has gone on here.”

  He pulled off the side of the road to make his calls back to headquarters.

  “We have to wait,” Keenan told her when he was done. “Jackson promised that he’ll
have a warrant for us within a few hours. They’ll notify the local police, and he’ll be here himself with Raina and one of her pups. She has the one dog that has been her pet forever that she adores, but she’ll bring the German shepherds she’s been working with for the DC police force—she’s working with two dogs she seems to think have something special.”

  “Like we have something special?” she asked him dryly.

  He smiled. “Dogs already use their instincts better than we do. Anyway, not to worry. We’ll hover close. And they will get here with a warrant—traffic will have died down. It really won’t be long.” He sighed. “Wish we had someone else to keep an eye on the house. We could eat. Sit down in a restaurant with plates, maybe a massive steak or...”

  Stacey laughed. “Don’t get started; we have to stay here.”

  “For two hours,” he said wearily. “In the car. Well, it’s not like I haven’t done the waiting and watching thing often. I just wish...”

  “What?”

  “That there was one more of us. We could get that steak.”

  “There isn’t one more of us,” Stacey said. “So, we sit. My angle is somewhat blocked by that stand of pines. Can you see the front of the house?”

  “I can. I’ll know if he comes or goes. Through the front, at least.”

  Stacey leaned back in her seat, as he was doing. He looked relaxed.

  She knew his attention was on watching the house.

  “If Dr. Lawrence is the killer, it can’t be just him. There was a woman involved, we know that now,” Stacey said. “Well, we’ve known that this can’t be a one-man enterprise, anyway. But...he’s all the way out in the country here. Are any of the women who are connected capable of doing this? Battle-Ax Agnes Merkle, for one, and then, the two wronged wives, Cindy Hardy and Sandra Smith. We can also try talking to Peggy Bronsen again, but the vibe I got when Agnes was talking about her was that the secretary was really jealous of the younger woman. Peggy is very attractive. If Smith is a womanizer, he may well have found her appealing—and asked her into his office more than Agnes.”

  “Peggy never said that he assaulted her or ever acted inappropriately.”