McCabe turned away from the photos and looked through the windows behind Spencer’s head. Far in the distance, he could see the distinctive triangular shape of Mount Washington silhouetted in the last of the sun’s setting rays. ‘Pretty spectacular, isn’t it?’ Spencer said, hanging up the phone. ‘One of the rewards of being on the top floor.’
He pushed some papers into a folder, flicked on his desk lamp, and leaned back in his chair. The light accented the shadows of Spencer’s deep-set, nearly black eyes as they studied McCabe. ‘Sorry about the delay,’ he said. ‘Now, how can I help you, Detective?’
‘What do you know about Katie Dubois’s death?’
‘Not much. Basically what I read in the paper last week after her disappearance. Katie Dubois was a sixteen-year-old high school girl from Portland. She was a good athlete. A pretty blond. She vanished after a night out in the Old Port. Last night Tom Shockley told me she’d been murdered.’
McCabe stiffened. ‘How do you know Shockley?’
‘We go to the same parties. That’s where we were last night. At a fund-raiser for Kids with Cancer at the Pemaquid Club.’
The Pemaquid Club was a tony in-town watering hole for Portland’s rich and well connected. It was housed in an elegant redbrick Georgian mansion on the city’s West Side. McCabe doubted there were many cops among its membership rolls.
‘What else did he tell you?’
‘Not much. We were having a drink together at the bar when he got a call about the murder. I could only hear his end of the conversation, so I asked him what’d happened. He said the girl’s body was found in that scrap yard on Somerset. Naked. Cut up. Maybe raped. Then he took out his phone again and called you and left a message. He said you’d be running the investigation and that he had a lot of confidence in you. That’s it. All I know.’
‘Did you watch Shockley’s news conference this morning?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘What I’m about to tell you is confidential.’
‘I understand.’
‘Katie Dubois died because her heart was cut out of her body.’ As he spoke, McCabe watched Spencer’s face for signs of reaction. All he saw was a mild curiosity.
‘Removing the heart was the cause of death? It wasn’t done postmortem?’
‘No.’ McCabe told Spencer most of what Terri Mirabito had said about the cause and manner of Katie’s death, leaving out any mention of ligature or burn marks. Or of rape.
‘Dr. Mirabito’s right. Removing a heart is not that difficult. Not if you’ve got the proper tools – a scalpel, a reciprocating saw to cut the sternum, a retractor to spread the ribs. Pretty much any surgeon could do it, certainly any cardiac surgeon.’
‘Why do you think the murderer – whoever it was – might have wanted to cut out her heart?’
‘Me? I haven’t a clue. We both know there are all kinds of crazies in the world. I suppose some of them could be doctors. It was probably something sexual. From her picture, Katie was an attractive girl. People express their sexual fantasies in strange ways, but psychiatry’s not my field of expertise.’
‘You’re a transplant surgeon, right?’ asked McCabe. ‘You remove hearts for a living?’
‘Not exactly. I’m head of the transplant program here at Cumberland. The goal is to give people new hearts. In each case to save a life. That’s what turns me on. Harvesting – organ retrieval – is more often than not somebody else’s task.’
‘What’s it like? Cutting a heart out of a living human being? For a heart surgeon, is it simply all in a day’s work, or is it something somebody might get off on?’
‘You mean sexually?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know. I can tell you it’s never all in a day’s work. Even when you know the heart will be used to save another life. On one level, the human heart is nothing more than a muscle that works like a small pump. Weighs less than a pound. Only a little bigger than your fist. Yet it beats a hundred thousand times a day. Pumps a couple of thousand gallons of blood. Unless we go out of our way to screw it up, it will, most likely, keep on doing that every day for seventy, eighty, even ninety years, often without routine maintenance. Show me another machine that can do anything like that.’ Spencer sounded genuinely excited.
‘You said on one level. What’s the other level?’
‘The other level is spiritual. Ancient people believed the heart was the seat of the soul. Some of us still do. When I do remove a heart, sometimes I hold it in my hand for a minute or two knowing it will give new life to a dying patient. An extraordinary feeling. Today, though the legal definition of death is death of the brain, some people still believe the soul resides, at least partly, in the heart.’
‘Are you one of them?’
Spencer smiled. ‘That, Detective, is my secret.’
‘You’ll be doing a transplant tonight?’
‘Yes. I’m waiting for a heart to be harvested in a hospital in New Hampshire sometime this evening. When it gets here, I’ll be putting it into the body of a forty-five-year-old high school teacher with a wife and two children. Without the transplant, he’d be dead before the end of the year.’