Читать книгу The Legacy Enslaved - William Speir - Страница 10

Detective Jack Thrasher arrived at the clinic just as the sky began to lighten in the east. He was taking over the murder investigation of Wendy Mitchell and the three other women. The forensics team was already there, tearing the clinic apart and looking for evidence about the four murdered women and any other victims who might have been butchered by Dr. Black and his staff.

Jack entered the operating room just as the Medical Examiner staff placed Wendy’s remains in a body bag.

“Morning, Jack,” the senior Medical Examiner staff member said when he saw the detective enter.

“Bob, how’s the family?” Jack responded.

“Doing fine. Growing like weeds.” Pointing to the body bag, Bob added, “You catch the case?”

Jack nodded. “What can you tell me?”

“She died horribly. There’s no way to tell how many organs they had removed before she finally lost consciousness or died, but I can’t imagine anything like what she and the others went through tonight.”

“So she was conscious while it happened?” Jack shuddered at the implication.

“I’ll know for certain once we get her on the table, but it fits the M.O. of other cases like this that we’ve seen.” He pointed across the room, “They have gas, but I found no needle marks anywhere. We’ll take the gas cylinders and test them, but I’ll bet at least one of them is a paralyzing agent. Most drugs make the tissues unusable.”

“Do we have an ID on the victims yet?”

Bob nodded. “Crime scene techs found their personal belongings a few minutes ago. Cash is gone, but jewelry and everything else is being bagged as evidence.”

Jack dreaded making the notification to the families of these four women. It’s bad enough to tell them that a loved one died, but to have to tell them that they died like this…

“Call me when you’ve finished the autopsy,” Jack said.

“Will do,” Bob acknowledged.

Jack turned to leave the room. “Say ‘hi’ to Cindy for me.”

“Thanks, I will.” Bob finished prepping Wendy’s remains to load into the truck as Jack walked away.

Jack entered the lounge where the officers had detained Dr. Black and his staff.

“Howdy, Jack,” several of the officers said, recognizing him.

“Morning, fellows.” Jack gestured toward the medical staff. “Have they said anything?”

“Not a word.”

“Do we know where the van went after it left just before the raid?”

“Not yet, but the Intel Unit is reviewing traffic camera footage to see if we can get a license plate and a direction.”

Jack made a notation in his notepad app to follow up with the Intel Unit. “All right. Keep me posted. In the meantime, start transporting these butchers to jail and get them booked on murder charges. I want to talk to each of them once their lawyers arrive.”

“Will do.”

Jack spent the rest of the morning working with the Intel Unit’s video techs looking for traces of the van that left the clinic, and making the notifications to the next of kin of the four murdered women. That afternoon, he interviewed Dr. Black and his staff, but the lawyers gave the same answer to every question. “My client declines to answer that question.”

By the next morning, the video techs had located the van on traffic camera footage, but the license plate was a fake, and the van’s destination couldn’t be determined. Two days later, sheriff’s deputies found a van of the same make and model on a country road outside of town. It had been bleached and burned. There was no usable evidence that could point to who drove the van or where the driver had delivered the organs and tissues. It was a dead end.

The Medical Examiner confirmed that the clinic had used gas to paralyze the four women and that one of the gas cylinders from each operating room contained a paralyzing agent. “I also found a strange substance present in the blood drained from the women’s bodies, which was recovered from the operating rooms, and there was a high concentration of that substance in each woman’s esophagus. It’s still being tested.”

The Assistant District Attorney sat in on each of the initial interviews, and she reviewed the evidence from the clinic and the Medical Examiner’s findings. At the arraignment for Dr. Black and his employees, she insisted that they all be held without bail. The Judge agreed. She also informed the judge that since all of the defendants had participated in the commission of a felony that directly led to the murder of four women, she’d be seeking the death penalty for all of them. When the lawyers for the defendants protested, she announced that there’d be no deals for anyone unless he or she came forward and agreed to testify against the others.

The Grand Jury quickly handed down indictments for all of the defendants. The Assistant District Attorney gave the defendants a day to think about her offer before approaching the lawyers to see if anyone wanted to make a deal for a reduced sentence. Dr. Black and the other doctors who actually did the harvesting refused to say anything, but several of the nurses and techs agreed to talk. They described what happened to the men and women brought to the clinic, and they revealed how many people the clinic had harvested over the two-year period that Dr. Black worked with the human traffickers.

None of the defendants who were willing to testify in return for a reduced sentence knew who brought the men and women to the clinic to be harvested, nor did they know where the organs and tissues went once they left the clinic. Only Dr. Black knew that, and he wasn’t talking.

Jack Thrasher sat in the Lt. Grand Master’s office a week later. Alasdair Stirling, the Lt. Grand Master of the Order of the Saltire, and Maxwell Preston, the Chief Intervention Officer and Intervention Analysis Committee Chairman, listened as Jack informed them about his case against Dr. Black and the other employees of the clinic. Alasdair and Max’s faces couldn’t hide the horror they felt as Jack described how the illegal organ harvesting business worked.

“And ten to fifteen people a week were butchered and murdered at this clinic?” Max asked.

Jack checked his notes. “On average, yes.”

“And this is really happening in our city?” Alasdair asked.

“Yes, sir,” Jack replied. “And in many other cities around the country. I tried to do a search to see how many cases we’re talking about nationwide, but unless the harvesters are caught in the act, there’s no way to tell how many missing persons reports are tied to human trafficking, organ harvesting, or some other crime. The way they destroy the remains makes it next to impossible to know what has happened to their victims.”

Max tapped a stack of folders on the table next to him. “We’ve been performing interventions against human traffickers for years. Most of the cases involve importing or exporting boys and girls as sex slaves or as slave labor, but this is the first I’ve heard of organ harvesting being a form of human trafficking.”

“Homeland Security and the FBI have web pages on the subject,” Jack stated. “It’s relatively new, but with so many affluent countries experiencing aging populations as the baby-boomers get older, the desire for black market organs to satisfy the demand for transplant parts has never been higher. There just aren’t enough people voluntarily donating their organs to keep up with the demand, and it’s created a multi-billion dollar industry. That’s how they can attract otherwise reputable surgeons to do the harvesting, rather than backroom butchers working in unsanitary conditions.”

Alasdair leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. After a moment, he said, “The Order has come together before to tackle problems on national and global scales. The counterfeiting ring we brought down a few years back is one example. Il Nona twenty years ago is another, the President Sanborn affair, the Mancuso affair, on and on… Every country in which we have Commanderies has human trafficking problems. Yes, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry; yes, there are hundreds of players involved all around the world, making an intervention against them more like smoking out cockroaches than taking down a single criminal gang or enterprise. It’s a four-hundred-headed snake, and there’s always a new head ready to take the place of one that’s brought down. There are people involved in acquiring humans to traffic, transporting them to their destinations, distributing them once they arrive… not to mention those who handle the movement of money from one part of the supply chain to the next.”

Alasdair sat back up and looked at Max and Jack. “But just because human trafficking is big and involved and next to impossible to solve doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make every effort to take on these bastards. We may never fully eradicate this illegal activity, but we can chip away at it, making it less profitable and a less desirable activity to participate in.”

Max nodded slowly. Jack looked thoughtful.

Alasdair leaned forward. “Would you two mind leading the effort on this? I need you to pull together the information you have regarding human trafficking, and I need a series of proposals that I can take to the Grand Master. You can use the entire Intervention Analysis Committee to help, but I need it thorough, and I need it soon.”

Jack and Max agreed to Alasdair’s request.

“Very well, gentlemen. Jack, thanks for bringing this to my attention. Now we need to devise a plan for doing something about it.”

Jamie was surrounded. Two of her opponents feinted attacks from the left and the right, hiding the real attack coming from in front and behind.

Two men and one woman watched Jamie from above. “I think they have her this time,” one of the men commented.

“I doubt it,” the woman countered.

Jamie leaped in the air. It appeared that she was planning to do a spinning kick at the opponent on her left, but instead she made a quarter turn in the air and did a split kick that caught the opponents in front of her and behind her in their chests. No sooner had her feet touched the floor than she leaped up again, this time performing the spinning kick that caught the opponent to her left on the side of his head, sending him flying. She turned and faced the opponent to her right. When he changed his stance, she somersaulted forward and delivered several blows to his abdomen, sending him backwards.

“Told you,” the woman said.

“Lucky guess,” the man retorted.

Jamie continued attacking her opponents. They appeared off-guard and couldn’t organize any combined efforts against her. One by one, her opponents withdrew until only one remained. She and her final opponent were evenly matched – physically – but her unpredictable and aggressive style made it hard to put her on the defensive. The longer they fought, the faster she moved, until he could no longer fend off her repeated attacks. When he finally withdrew, Jamie stood straight and bowed to him before bowing to her other opponents.

“We’re running out of instructors who want to spar with her,” the dojo owner said to Emily as he looked down and saw Jamie’s opponents come forward to congratulate her on another great match. “They meet here every Friday night to plan how they’re going to fight her on Saturday mornings, and she still wins every match.”

Emily smiled and looked over at Tom, who had walked back to the center of the weapons training room above the dojo floor so he could finish stretching. “She’s a natural at fighting, that’s for sure.”

“If I were twenty years younger, I’d take her on, but at my age she’d probably kill me.”

“I know what you mean,” Tom said from the center of the room.

Students began arriving, and the dojo owner and Emily took their places. Jamie arrived a few minutes later. She was sweating, but she looked happy. She smiled at her parents, bowed to the dojo owner, and took her place with the rest of the students.

Tom and Emily had been coming to the dojo every Saturday morning for more than 25 years, and Jamie had been coming with them for 22 years – since she was three years old.

Jamie held a 4^th degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and had started teaching classes at the dojo on Wednesday evenings. Emily had developed her own style of weapons fighting over the years and had only recently given in to the dojo owner’s request to take on students and teach them her techniques. The dojo owner had been the first to learn Emily’s style, followed by Tom. Jamie had been next, and while she surpassed her father and the dojo owner, she still found it difficult to beat her mother.

More often than not, Emily used Jamie to help her teach the class, frequently having the students practice attacking Jamie and then explaining why Jamie defeated them.

Jamie knelt in the center of the room while Tom, Emily, and the other students circled her. The dojo owner acted as referee. Jamie was unarmed, which was her preferred way to start a match, but the students held a variety of weapons.

One of the students holding a bo, which was like a quarterstaff, attacked first. Jamie grabbed the bo, pulled herself to a standing position with it, and jerked it out of the student’s hands, causing him to lose his balance. She struck him with it in the center of his chest padding and then swung the bo to counter an attack from Tom, who was holding a wooden katana.

The students continued to attack, with Emily and Tom attacking only when Jamie was distracted. Tom managed to knock the bo from Jamie’s hands, but in a flash she somersaulted across the room to the weapons rack and selected a pair of katanas. She returned to the fight, attacking and fending off attacks from her parents and the other students until only she and Emily remained.

Both women held two katanas each, and the wooden swords were a blur of motion as mother and daughter strove for the victory. After several minutes of fighting, the dojo owner declared the match a draw. Jamie sat down as Emily explained why everyone else’s attacks had failed, and Jamie also commented on how she knew what to do to defeat her opponents.

After returning the equipment to the racks, the students collected their gear and walked down the stairs to the dojo’s main floor. Jamie walked up to Emily and gave her a hug. “You would’ve had me in another minute. I’ve never seen you fight that well with two swords.”

Emily smiled. “Thank you for saying that, but I’m afraid the best I can ever hope for with you is a draw.”

Tom walked up and joined them. “Are you two hungry?”

“Yes,” the girls said in unison.

“I have a tub of homemade chicken salad if you’d like to come back to my place,” Jamie offered.

“You don’t mind us being hot and sweaty in your nice townhouse?” Tom asked, grinning.

“No more than the other times you’ve come over on Saturdays, Dad.”

“Deal,” Emily said. “We’ll follow you back to your place.”

Jamie beat Emily and Tom back to her townhouse by several minutes. She had already taken the chicken salad out of the refrigerator, filled cups with ice, and set out several bottles of water and soda when Tom and Emily rang the doorbell. Even though they had keys to Jamie’s place, they never used them without Jamie’s permission.

Jamie opened her front door. “What took you so long?” she asked as Emily and Tom stepped inside.

“We’re not racecar drivers,” Tom joked.

She closed the front door and led them to the kitchen. “Mom, can you set the table in the dining room while I put my equipment away?”

“Sure,” Emily said.

Jamie ran upstairs with her dojo bag, and Emily moved Jamie’s mail off the larger of her two tables and placed it on the kitchen counter. She looked at the top envelope and recognized the Texas return address. It was from Steve. Looking at the envelope more closely, Emily realized that it was an invitation. She showed it to Tom.

When Jamie came back downstairs, Emily put the envelope down quickly. “I didn’t mean to snoop. I just saw that it was from Steve.”

Jamie just nodded and walked past her mother into the kitchen.

“It looks like an invitation,” Emily said softly, coming up beside her daughter.

Jamie took three plates from the cupboard.

“You’re not going to say anything?” Emily asked as Jamie reached for a bag of chips from the pantry.

“What’s there to say?” Jamie turned to face her mother. “It’s a wedding invitation. Steve’s getting married.”

“But you broke up months ago,” Emily pointed out. “Does it upset you that he moved on?”

Jamie shook her head. “That’s just it, Mom. I’m not upset at all, but part of me feels like I should be. It’s as if my relationship with him meant nothing, and you know that’s not true.”

“I know.” Emily helped Jamie take the food and dishes to the table. “The heart can do strange things to protect itself from getting hurt. This could be a coping mechanism. Or it could mean that you’re truly over him, and breaking up was the best thing for both of you.”

“I always believed that breaking up was the right thing. He was a great guy, but in the end, we each wanted things that the other person just couldn’t provide. I have no regrets, and I have no doubts, but I’d hate to think that I have no feelings left for him at all.”

“Are you going to the wedding?” Tom asked once they sat down.

Jamie smiled and shook her head. “No. What’s the point? His fiancé doesn’t need to meet me or know about me. I sent him a gift and wished him well, but that’s the end of it as far as I’m concerned.”

Emily nodded. “Don’t worry, Sweetie. You’ll find someone who can give you what you need, and then it won’t matter what you do or don’t feel about Steve.”

Jamie smiled at her mother. You don’t know how true that is, Mom. I have everything I need with Hunter. I adore him, and he adores me. I’ve never been so comfortable with a man before. Maybe I should go ahead to tell you and Dad about him, but I don’t feel like this is the right time. I don’t want you to think that Hunter is just a rebound boyfriend. He’s more than that. Much more.