Elden knew it, just as she did. They both did their best to police their supplies, but Elden never called Donnie on it unless he caught him in the act, and then he barely slapped his hand. A strange relationship existed between those two that she would never understand; why Elden would tolerate a man like that was beyond her.
She soaped and shaved the black man's side. Elden helped her to roll him over and she continued the procedure on his back.
"I made all the necessary arrangements," he said. "That is, Maybeck did," he corrected her. "You'll be back by this evening. I've written it all down." He hurried over to the work area and returned with a note written in his own handwriting, not Donnie's. Donnie could barely write at all. Elden never made the flight arrangements. "You'll meet Juanita at the gate. The regular flight to Rio. Same as always."
"All right," she said, accepting the itinerary from him; but it felt wrong. Everything about this felt wrong. Was it just her? she wondered-expectations carried over from their encounter Saturday night? "Now then," he said from over by the sink. He doused his hands in antiseptic and then snapped on a pair of surgical gloves. He turned his back to her to have her tie his mask in place, which she did. "All set?"
"I'm worried about you," she said softly to his back. She placed her hand gently on his shoulder. It was something she could never say while facing him.
There was a long, heavy silence in which she could hear the deep breathing of the man on the table behind her. She heard the plastic ceiling crinkle as it warmed. Neither she nor Elden was breathing. What she had said had stopped them both.
Finally his head bobbed slightly. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs completely, and said in a ghostly whisper, "It's him I'd worry about." The way he said it frightened her. "Elden?" His voice returned; he reminded her, "The patient always comes first."
L L They rose above the city, climbing an on-ramp at the end of Columbia that connected to the viaduct, then headed south toward the docks and Boeing Field. You could see the next wave of rain out over the water, hanging above the stunning green of Bainbridge Island-a mare's tail stretching down, a light gray mist feathered beneath charcoal clouds. If you didn't mind rain, it was a beautiful sight. If you minded rain, you didn't live here in February and March. Boldt turned on the wipers to fend off the spray from a van ahead of them.
Daphne crossed her legs and leaned over to check the speedometer.
"I don't like driving fast," Boldt explained. "That's an understatement," she said. "At first I thought there was something wrong with this thing." She had asked to come along with him at the last second. Boldt had warned her it might be a long meeting, but she had persisted. He'd been wondering when she would tell him whatever it was that couldn't wait.
Finally, his patience ran out. "So what's up?"
"I hate being wrong," she complained. "It doesn't come easy."
"You, wrong?"
"I had that talk with Cindy Chapman. I wanted to run Agnes Rutherford's descriptions of the two men by her-the grating voice, the bad breath. There are tricks you can play with the mind. Subtle ways to make it safe for a person to remember something they would rather not remember." Boldt asked, "Where the hell is the toxicology report on Chapman?
The blood workup? "Are you interested in this or not?"
"Go ahead."
"She remembers Sharon and me tending to her at The Shelter. She's very clear on that. I worked with her on the events before the surgery. Could she remember being abducted? Could she remember faces, voices, surroundings? A week before, a day before, an hour before? As it turned out, you were right about the money." She added, "That's what I mean about my being wrong. I was convinced you were wrong about that."
His hands were sweating against the wheel. He rolled down the window for some air. "They paid her for the kidney?" he asked. "It was a business arrangement. They offered her five hundred dollars." "Five hundred?" he asked incredulously. "I thought the going rate is fifteen thousand. That's quite a mark-up." "And there's no proof she ever received it."
"Well, it fills in a few blanks," he admitted. "It helps to explain why we never received any formal complaints against the harvester. If you're a teenager and you've cut a deal to sell your kidney, you don't turn the guy in. It also means there were-are-probably a lot more donors than we know about. The lucky ones lived to spend their five hundred. it may also explain the use of the electroshock."
"I don't think so," she interrupted.
"Not the electroshock. Dixon's three victims-Blumenthal, Sherman, and the other one, Julia Walker, showed no sign of electroshock. If a few days had passed, that might be more easily explained, but in at least two of the cases-the deaths caused by hemorrhaging-those bodies would have been seen by the medical examiner rather quickly, wouldn't they? And that would indicate that those victims did not show signs of electroshock." "You have something going," he said. "I can hear it in your voice."
"What if only the dissenters receive the electroshock the real serious memory blocking? What if you're right about there being a lot of others? A runaway, hard up for money, cuts a deal. Arrangements are made; the surgery takes place. They're paid up and returned to the streets. What if a person like Cindy Chapman gets cold feet once she looks around her and sees the reality of what she's gotten herself into? If you're the harvester, what then? You take the kidney anyway-you've probably already promised it somewhere-but you make damn sure your donor won't remember anything about it." She let the idea hang there. "You don't like it," she said. "It makes sense," he admitted. "It doesn't mean I have to like it."
"So okay, let's say I'm right. Then why did they take Sharon?" she asked. "Except for her past, except for her Bloodlines connection, she doesn't fit the donor profile at alclass="underline" She's not broke, she's not out on the street, she's not desperate. At this point, she's even a few years older than the rest of them."
He didn't want to tell her about Dr. Light Horse's theory that Sharon might have been taken for a custom procurement. If they were after a major organ, then Sharon was most likely already dead. "And what have they done with her?" she added.
Boldt was spared giving an answer. He turned into the driveway of the Army Corps of Engineers and searched out a parking space.
The Seattle district office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers occupied an enormous brick structure a few miles south of the city on Marginal Way.
Boldt was hoping that as Dixie had suggested these bones might offer them a chance to identify the harvester. Locating the rest of the bones was the first, and most important, step in that process. The homicide victim was the last living witness to the crime and could tell an investigator much more than the murderer believed possible.
The receptionist greeted Boldt and Daphne warmly and made a quick phone call announcing their arrival. A few minutes later, a wiry man in his mid-forties bounded down the stairs and extended his hand, introducing himself as Harry Terkel. He had bright, enthusiastic eyes, and a lot less hair than Boldt. He wore khakis, black Reeboks, and a plaid shirt without a tie. He lacked the nerd pack of pens in his pocket that Boldt had expected of an engineer., He shook hands with Daphne and motioned upstairs. "I'll lead the way. it's kind of a maze."
At the top of the stairs they turned right down a corridor past scores of office cubicles.
They walked and walked and walked, finally reaching Terkel's enclosed office, where they took seats around a conference table. There was a Wipeit bulletin board at the far end of the room, covered with math equations written in blue marker.
Terkel sat across from Boldt, rather than taking a place behind his desk. Boldt appreciated the gesture. He said, "Joe tried to explain this to me. Maybe I had better hear it from you."