“No problem,” Marvin said.
Laurie thought for a minute, while she absently chewed on her lower lip. She knew she was missing something. “I have an idea,” she said suddenly. “Maybe you should describe to me the exact sequence you go through when a body leaves here.”
“You mean everything that happens?” Marvin said.
“Please,” Laurie said. “I mean, I have a general idea, but I don’t know the specifics.”
“Where do you want me to start?” Marvin asked.
“Right from the beginning,” Laurie said. “Right from the moment you get the call from the funeral home.”
“Okay,” Marvin said. “The call comes in, and they say they’re from so-and-so funeral home and they want to do a pickup. So they give me the name and the accession number.”
“That’s it?” Laurie asked. “Then you hang up.”
“No,” Marvin said. “I put them on hold while I enter the accession number into the computer. I gotta make sure the body has been released by you guys and also find out where it is.”
“So then you go back to the phone and say what?”
“I say it’s okay,” Marvin said. “I tell them I’ll have the body ready. I guess I usually ask when they think they’ll be here. I mean, no sense rushing around if they’re not going to be here for two hours or something.”
“Then what?” Laurie said.
“I get the body and check the accession number,” Marvin said. “Then I put it in the front of the walk-in cooler. We always put them in the same place. In fact, we line them up in the order we expect them to go out. It makes it easier for the drivers.”
“And then what happens?” Laurie asked.
“Then they come,” Marvin said with another shrug.
“And what happens when they arrive?” Laurie asked.
“They come in here and we fill out a receipt,” Marvin said. “It’s all got to be documented. I mean they have to sign to indicate they have accepted custody.”
“Okay,” Laurie said. “And then you go back and get the body?”
“Yeah, or one of them gets it,” Marvin said. “All of them have been in and out of here a million times.”
“Is there any final check?” Laurie asked.
“You bet,” Marvin said. “We always check the accession number one more time before they wheel the body out of here. We have to indicate that being done on the documents. It would be embarrassing if the drivers got back to the home and realized they had the wrong corpse.”
“Sounds like a good system,” Laurie said, and she meant it. With so many checks it would be hard to subvert such a procedure.
“It’s been working for decades without a screwup,” Marvin said. “Of course, the computer helps. Before that, all they had was the logbook.”
“Thanks, Marvin,” Laurie said.
“Hey, no problem, Doc,” Marvin said.
Laurie left the mortuary office. Before going up to her own she stopped off on the second floor to get a snack out of the vending machines in the lunch room. Reasonably fortified, she went up to the fifth floor. Seeing Jack’s office door ajar, she walked over and peeked in. Jack was at his microscope.
“Something interesting?” she asked.
Jack looked up and smiled. “Very,” he said. “Want to take a look?”
Laurie glanced into the eyepieces as Jack leaned to the side. “It looks like a tiny granuloma in a liver,” she said.
“That’s right,” Jack said. “It’s from one of those tiny pieces I was able to find of Franconi’s liver.”
“Hmmm,” Laurie commented, continuing to look into the microscope. “That’s weird they would have used an infected liver for a transplant. You’d think they would have screened the donor better. Are there a lot of these tiny granulomas?”
“Maureen has only given me one slide of the liver so far,” Jack said. “And that’s the only granuloma I found, so my guess would be that there aren’t a lot. But I did see one on the frozen section. Also on the frozen section were tiny collapsed cysts on the surface of the liver which would have been visible to the naked eye. The transplant team must have known and didn’t care.”
“At least there’s no general inflammation,” Laurie said. “So the transplant was being tolerated pretty well.”
“Extremely well,” Jack said. “Too well, but that’s another issue. What do you think that is under the pointer?”
Laurie played with the focus so that she could visually move up and down in the section. There were a few curious flecks of basophilic material. “I don’t know. I can’t even be sure it’s not artifact.”
“Don’t know, either,” Jack said. “Unless it’s what stimulated the granuloma.”
“That’s a thought,” Laurie said. She straightened up. “What did you mean by the liver being tolerated too well?”
“The lab reported that Franconi had not been taking any immunosuppressant drugs,” Jack said. “That seems highly improbable since there is no general inflammation.”
“Are we sure it was a transplant?” Laurie asked.
“Absolutely,” Jack said. He summarized what Ted Lynch had reported to him.
Laurie was as puzzled as Jack. “Except for identical twins I can’t imagine two people’s DQ alpha sequences being exactly the same,” she said.
“It sounds like you know more about it than I do,” Jack said. “Until a couple of days ago, I’d never even heard of DQ alpha.”
“Have you made any headway as to where Franconi could have had this transplant?” Laurie asked.
“I wish,” Jack said. He then told Laurie about Bart’s vain efforts. Jack explained that he himself had spent a good portion of the previous night calling centers all over Europe.
“Good Lord!” Laurie remarked.
“I’ve even enlisted Lou’s help,” Jack said. “I found out from Franconi’s mother that he’d gone off to what she thought was a spa and came home a new man. I’m thinking that’s when he might have gotten the transplant. Unfortunately, she has no idea where he went. Lou’s checking Immigration to see if he’d gone out of the country.”
“If anyone can find out, Lou can,” Laurie said.
“By the way,” Jack said assuming a teasingly superior air. “Lou ’fessed up that he was the source of the leak about Franconi to the newspapers.”
“I don’t believe it,” Laurie said.
“I got it from the horse’s mouth,” Jack said. “So I expect an abject apology.”
“You’ve got it,” Laurie said. “I’m amazed. Did he give any reason?”
“He said they wanted to release the information right away to see if it would smoke out any more tips from informers. He said it worked to an extent. They got a tip which was later confirmed that Franconi’s body had been taken under orders from the Lucia crime family.”
“Good grief!” Laurie said and shuddered. “This case is starting to remind me too much of the Cerino affair.”
“I know what you mean,” Jack said. “Instead of eyes, it’s livers.”
“You don’t suppose there’s a private hospital here in the United States that’s doing undercover liver transplants, do you?” Laurie asked.
“I can’t imagine,” Jack said. “No doubt there could be big money involved, but there is the issue of supply. I mean, there’s seven thousand plus people in this country waiting for livers as it is. Few of these people have the money to make it worthwhile.”
“I wish I were as confident as you,” Laurie said. “The profit motive has taken over American medicine by storm.”
“But the big money in medicine is in volume,” Jack said. “There are too few wealthy people who need livers. The investment in the physical plant and the requisite secrecy wouldn’t pay off, especially without a supply of organs. You’d have to postulate some modern version of Burk and Hare, and although such a scenario might work in a B movie, in reality it would be too risky and uncertain. No businessman in his right mind would go for it, no matter how venal.”
“Maybe you have a point,” Laurie said.
“I’m convinced there’s something else involved here,” Jack said. “There are just too many unexplained facts from the DQ alpha nonsense to the fact that Franconi wasn’t taking any immunosuppressant drugs. We’re missing something: something key, something unexpected.”