“Good one.” He smiled mirthlessly, then went back to his briefing. “There are roughly thirty thousand organ transplants every year in the U.S.—kidneys, hearts, lungs, liver, pancreas.”
I couldn’t resist tweaking him. “Me, I’m on the list for a brain transplant,” I deadpanned. This time he didn’t even pretend to smile. Instead he fired back, “And who could be more deserving?” I had to laugh; he’d skewered me with my own joke. Price shot him a reproving look, though, so he got back to business. “Right. Of the thirty thousand organs transplanted, about three-fourths—roughly twenty-two thousand—come from deceased donors.”
“Kinda hard for a living donor to give somebody a heart,” I pointed out. Now Price shot the reproving look at me. “Sorry,” I said. “Please go on. I’ll quit interrupting.”
“Thanks,” he said. “As you probably know, the demand for donated organs far exceeds the supply. Over a hundred thousand people nationwide are on the waiting list for organ transplants; some of them will die before a matching donor is found for them. Almost half the kids who need transplants never get a matching donor in time.”
For once I had a legitimate reason to interrupt. “There was a movie about that a few years ago, wasn’t there? About a dad who takes everybody in a hospital hostage so he can force them to give his son a new heart?”
“Right.John Q, I think it was called. Kinda hokey, especially at the end, but they did a decent job of dramatizing the parents’ anguish. So the point I’m making, in a roundabout way, is that the wait for an organ can be agonizing but the organ-transplant process itself—matching needy recipients with suitable donors through the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network—is meticulous and rigorous. The donor and the recipient are scrupulously documented. It’s illegal in the U.S. to buy, sell, or trade human organs for transplant. In short, human organs are closely monitored. That’snot the case, though, with other forms of human tissue.”
My stomach rumbled again, and I wished he hadn’t just spent five minutes making a point that was really no more than throat clearing set to words. “You’re talking now about corneas, tendons, and so on.”
“Corneas, tendons, ligaments, blood vessels, skin, bone,” he itemized. “There’s very little oversight, especially in terms of where those tissues come from. The same is true, with all due respect, to donated bodies.”
I felt my anxiety ratcheting up once more. Years before, a brief but intense political controversy had erupted when a Nashville television station reported that the bodies of low-income Vietnam veterans were being treated disrespectfully at the Body Farm. Nobody had told us that those particular men had been veterans; when we found out, we offered to send their bodies back to the Veterans Administration or to family members for military burials. A handful of state legislators proposed curtailing our postmortem research, but then a bunch of district attorneys rushed to defend the importance of our forensic work, so the storm blew over. I’d considered that issue long since dead, but perhaps it had merely been hibernating. I looked Price in the eye. “Is the FBI concerned about where we get our bodies for the Body Farm?”
“Not at all, Dr. Brockton. We have the utmost confidence in your program and in your professional and personal integrity. We’re here because we hope you can help us bring down some people who are not as honest and ethical as you are.”
“And how could I help you do that?”
She hesitated, but only for a second, and when I heard what she had to say, I wished she’d hesitated longer. I wished she’d hesitated forever, in fact. “By selling some of your bodies,” she said. “On the black market.”
I stared from Price’s face to Rankin’s. They stared back impassively. Finally I said, “That’s unethical. Probably illegal.”
“That’s the point,” she replied. “That’s why we want you to do it.”
“I’m sorry to be slow on the uptake,” I said. “I don’t, as a general principle, set out to break federal laws. What, exactly, are you asking me to do? And why?”
“We’d like you to help us run a sting,” she said. “We’ve been building a case against a tissue bank—a company that receives bodies and then distributes the organs and tissues for transplants and medical research. The company’s based in Newark, New Jersey; it’s called Tissue Sciences and Services.”
“Did you say it’s a company? I thought all tissue banks were nonprofit organizations.”
Price shook her head. “No, it’s definitely a for-profit company. Emphasis on ‘profit.’ We have strong evidence that Tissue Sciences engages in fraud and conspiracy to obtain bodies and body parts, then profits illegally when it resells the cadavers or various tissues from them.”
“So if you already have strong evidence, why not go ahead and bust them?”