Cruz rose and got each of them a glass of water. “Did anyone notice what you were doing?”
“No one said anything at the time, but – but now I think there must’ve been all kinds of questions and rumors flying around.” She took a deep drink of water, wiped her upper lip with her fingers. “Why was I examining all inmates? Was I looking for something specific? Was I trying to upset the system, make trouble?” She frowned. “Nothing from admin, though, which surprised me.”
“Were you getting routine evaluations?”
“Just one, about three months into the job. That was it, nothing else.”
“Did you find anything concrete, something you could take to the CDCR board?” Cruz asked.
Frankie looked serious and disturbed, her porcelain face like a doll’s ready to crack, her wide gray eyes turbulent and angry, her mouth a thin, tight line. “Yes, I did. When I had a large enough sample, I noticed an unusually high number of abdominal surgical scars among the inmates. Statistically speaking.”
Cruz was confused. What the hell did that mean? He stomped down his impatience, letting her tell the story her own way.
Noting his perplexity, Frankie continued, “A statistically high number of inmates at Pelican Bay have had an organ removed – appendix, gall bladder, but probably a kidney.”
“That’s ... irregular?”
“Let me explain it this way: you have fifty friends, random people not related to each other. Out of the fifty, over twenty of them – that’s forty percent or more – have had a kidney, gallstone, appendix removed.”
“That’s a lot, but why? How?”
“I don’t know, but someone in the prison is performing abdominal surgeries on prison inmates. While a few of the scars are old, too many of them are recently performed.”
Cruz shoved back in his chair, astonished. “You can tell by looking at the scars?”
Frankie nodded.
“Could it be a coincidence?”
“No, not possible, statistically speaking. While these men are incarcerated they’re having some kind of surgery that appears to be unnecessary.” Frankie troubled her bottom lip. “I can’t tell which organs are missing – there’s no surgical record – but they’re not vital ones, or the patient would die. Probably a kidney.”
“Shit,” Cruz exclaimed. “What’s going on at that prison?”
“I don’t know,” Frankie confessed, “but it scares the hell out of me.”
“We’ve got to take this to Slater,” he muttered. “Right away. It might be tied to our murders here in the county.”
Chapter 46
He’d been expecting the order for more merchandise, but still the shock of it rumbled through his body like thunder. He needed a good stiff drink. He reached for dependable old Jimmy Bean, and poured himself a shot, neat.
Did the men he supplied have any idea how hard his part of this ungodly bargain was? Slicing through human flesh and removing delicate organs without damaging them? The skill and delicacy of the blade? The surgeon-like precision of each stroke?
Keeping them viable, packed in ice, the timing of communication and delivery? Hoping they could use the merchandise, that the blood types matched? A dozen important details.
So far, they’d taken the organs regardless, so he speculated they had a wide customer base. Wealthy-beyond-belief people who could bypass hundreds of names on a donator list and soar straight to the top. Or a lot of filthy rich someones who could hire rogue doctors willing to perform an operation on the down-low for an insane fee.
It was as risky for them to distribute as it was for him to procure, but they must have a large force of thugs to execute their work, while he was the solitary person slicing and dicing the general public. At least he thought he was the only one.
He grunted mockingly, on his way to being stinking drunk.
He’d gotten smarter about the procedures. More selective at choosing the “client,” and more wily about the surgeries themselves. He was no board-certified surgeon, of course, but he knew how to remove major organs. The trick was not damaging them.
There was no real concern about the patient dying under the knife, however. He snorted, sluicing whiskey up his nose. He fell into a fit of coughing as he grinned at the irony.
Nonetheless, the greater the risk, the higher the profit. And he was very pleased with the profit. How many, though, before he turned a profit for himself?
“Do you have a gun?” Cruz asked, thinking wildly of the invasion, and Cole Hansen upstairs and no help at all. His filthy clothes in the dumpster, no longer staining Frankie’s pristine bed linens.
“What?”
He didn’t like the fact that they hadn’t called emergency services, but if they took him to a hospital, they’d be required to report a bullet wound to the police.
“We don’t want that kind of scrutiny until we know who we can trust,” Frankie had explained.