Nobody's Child (Georgia Davis Series) (19 page)

G
eorgia had to keep a tight rein on her emotions over the next hour. She hadn’t wanted to consider the possibility that Chad Coe and the baby-breeding operation included the sale of body organs. Who in their right mind would? The notion that people could profit from selling the parts of a person, dead or alive, was monstrous. People who perpetrated that horror were just pretending to be human.

Still, like a suspicious lump that is undiagnosed, she couldn’t ignore it. Georgia and Nyquist took the elevator to the hospital cafeteria in the basement and snagged a table in the back. Nyquist went through the line and brought back vegetable soup, a chopped salad, and three rolls with butter. Georgia had no appetite. Once Nyquist downed a few spoonfuls of soup, she seemed more relaxed.

“Look,” she said. “I don’t care what happens to me anymore, but Christy—that’s my daughter—is in danger. I need help.”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning,” Georgia said.

Nyquist sat back. Her expression was one of embarrassment, even humiliation. “Okay. Here it is. I have a drug problem. They’re prescription drugs. Oxy, Vicodin, stuff like that. At first I was getting them from someone in the hospital, but they got caught and were fired.”

Georgia had a feeling she knew what was coming next.

“So I hooked up with some other people. But they kept hiking their prices, and it got to the point where I couldn’t pay. And then Chad Coe shows up at the grocery store one night and tells me he’s got a way out.”

“He already knew about your habit? And your debts?”

Nyquist nodded. “He said he understood. And it wasn’t really my fault. Lots of people get dependent on the stuff and run up huge bills. But the people he was working with would forgive the bills if I helped him out. In fact, he said, they’d even pay me money once the debt was settled.”

“Sounds cushy.”

Nyquist threw her a glance. “It wasn’t that simple. They…” She bit her lip. “There was one condition.”

“Coe told you this?”

“No. It was a couple of days later. Someone else. Don’t know his name.”

“What was the condition?”

“They said if I ever thought about throwing in the towel or telling someone about it, they’d take her.”

“Christy.”

She nodded. “At first I thought it was just an empty threat. You know, to scare me. But after a few months—it was last summer—I told them I didn’t want to do it anymore. It was too dangerous. I mean, if I was caught…” She let her voice trail off and sniffed. She was close to tears. “Anyway, a few days later, Christy wasn’t there when I got home from work.”

“They kidnapped her?”

She nodded again. “Someone came to the apartment and convinced Mrs. McCune—she’s an idiot, by the way—that he was my ex’s brother and that they had a date to go to the Kohl Children’s Museum.”

“Was it Coe?”

“I never found out.”

“Didn’t Christy put up a fuss?”

“Not at all. She thought she was going to see her daddy. They told her they’d get her ice cream. She was only too happy to go with them.”

Georgia nodded. “What happened?”

“They dropped her off before dinner. They really did take her to the museum, it turned out. I have no idea how. But she was fine. Happy, even. After she was asleep, I got a call. Someone with an accent.”

“Accent?”

“Russian. Or something. Anyway, they told me not to try quitting again, or she wouldn’t be coming back.”

“Jesus.” Georgia let out a breath. “Are you still—on the drugs?”

Nyquist didn’t answer. Which was answer enough. “So you’re into them for drugs, and now they’ve got you for your daughter, too.”

Her eyes rimmed with tears. “Can you help protect Christy? I’m desperate. I just don’t know how it got this far,” she sobbed.

Georgia knew, but now was not the time to remind her. “I might be able to help, but I need to know more.”

Nyquist ran a sleeve across her nose as if she was trying to pull herself together. “What?”

“Let me get it straight. You’re involved in an illegal organ transplant business?”

Nyquist nodded, slathered a roll with butter, and bit into it.

“How does it work?”

“It’s actually pretty simple. There’s this organization called UNOS. It’s kind of a consortium. Online.”

“UNOS? What does it stand for?”

“The United Network for Organ Sharing.”

Georgia pulled out her tablet and looked it up. UNOS had a contract with the federal government to run the country’s organ transplant system. Any hospital could join the website, which, according to UNOS, was updated 24/7.

“Is that true? It’s updated all the time?”

Nyquist finished her first roll and buttered a second. “Absolutely,” she said around a mouthful of bread. “Member hospitals log on anytime they need to know what organs are available, who’s got them, and most important, how fresh they are.”

“Fresh?”

“See, the most important thing in this business is time. Most organs don’t last long outside the body. Like hearts and lungs. They only last about four to six hours. Kidneys and livers can make it for about twenty-four hours with these new organ boxes they have. But after that you’re asking for trouble.”

“So you’d log on and see who needed what?”

“Right.” Nyquist polished off the second roll. “There’s a huge demand for transplants. Especially in the US. It’s probably ten to one.”

“Ten to one?”

“Ten organs needed for every one that’s available.”

Georgia reeled back. “That many?”

Nyquist nodded. “Some organs are supplied by family members. But when that’s not possible and a hospital needs an organ, they post it on UNOS. I check it a few times a day, and if I find something, I let Chad know. He takes it from there.”

G
eorgia swallowed. She’d thought Chad Coe was simply involved in a baby-breeding operation. Now he was running an organ transplant business too? How did they get the organs? She gulped air as it came to her. The mothers. A wave of nausea climbed up her throat, and it was all she could do not to bolt. Nyquist seemed to understand Georgia’s distress and stopped eating.

Georgia swallowed. She tasted bile. “So…,” she said slowly. “It’s your job to scout patients who need organs all over the country?”

“Oh no. UNOS divides the country up into regions. I only search from New Orleans to Minnesota. You know, the Midwest. A few months ago I found a woman who needed a lung in Texas, but that didn’t go so well. The lung failed on the way.”

Georgia didn’t want any details. “How often do you find someone who needs an—an organ?”

“Like I said, demand is much higher than supply. Traffic accidents, cancer, old age, things like that.”

“So what’s your best guess? How many do you come across? How often?”

“In the Midwest? Probably three or four a week. But Chad doesn’t supply them all.”

Georgia blinked. “What happens after you give the names to Chad?”

“There aren’t any names. Just hospitals. I don’t know how he finds out who the patients are.”

Georgia thought she knew. If he subscribed to the same private databases she did—and as a lawyer he could—he could identify individuals by studying their financial and medical records. People who required transplants in a specific area would run up sky-high bills from hospitals, clinics, and doctors. Coe could zero in and contact a potential patient. Pay them a visit, tell them about the service he offered. Like he did with the Glencoe couple.

Nyquist went on, seeming relieved to be talking about something other than her drug problem and daughter. “The thing is, when it comes to life and death, doctors—at least the ones I know—aren’t that picky about where the organ comes from. Most of what they call the ‘alternative solution’ happens in the OR every day.”

“Come on. You’re not saying that doctors knowingly transplant black market organs?”

“Of course not. They probably don’t know they’re black market. I mean, if someone—an administrator or a lawyer or someone like that—assures the surgeon everything is kosher, what are they going to do? They want to save lives. And they don’t have time to mull it over.”

“You’re talking about someone like Chad Coe?”

Nyquist nodded. “Then if the organ rolls up in an ambulance, and a guy in a uniform delivers it, has them sign a bunch of paperwork, and a lawyer already said it’s okay…” Her voice trailed off.

All of which the Russian mob could provide. Georgia shifted. UNOS was being used as a chop shop for human parts. Which meant her sister, Savannah, could be part of the mix. Were they planning to auction off her baby to the highest bidder and then kill
her
for parts?

“When did you go on Chad Coe’s payroll?”

Nyquist broke eye contact. “About nine months ago.” She stared at her soup. “At first, I just thought he was finding people who died in car accidents and things.”

“When did you figure out what was really going on?”

“When he was able to come up with the…” Nyquist faltered. “…the exact organ for whatever was needed on UNOS. It wasn’t rocket science.”

Georgia nodded. Coe and his cronies had offered Nyquist a way out of her troubles, as long as she didn’t have scruples. Which, apparently, she didn’t. At least at the start. Best of all, the business had the cachet—at least the appearance—of legality. To be fair, though, if Georgia had a critically ill family member and someone like Chad Coe showed up with a solution to her problem, as he had for the Glencoe couple, would she question how he’d come up with it?

“And now you want to get out, but you can’t.”

Nyquist nodded. A long silence stretched between them. Then the woman cleared her throat. “What’s going to happen? Am I going to jail?”

“Oh yeah,” Georgia said. “Especially after I call the cops.” She hesitated. “But before I make that call, you need to make your daughter disappear. As soon as possible. Send her someplace safe. And inaccessible.”

She looked up. “I have a sister in Minnesota.”

“Not good enough. If your sister has a phone, she can be found. Give her to someone who has no connection to you. Someone from your church, maybe. Your pastor might be able to help.”

“Do I have to?”

“If you ever want to see her again. You know who you’re dealing with. They don’t like loose strings. And you are a big one. Who knows? They might have been planning to move you ‘out of the way’ at some point anyway.”

Nyquist pushed her plate away, most of her salad uneaten. Anxiety spread across her face. “For how long? Christy, I mean?”

Georgia shrugged.

“Are you talking weeks? Months? A year?”

“I don’t know.”

“God, what if Christy doesn’t remember me? She’s only four.”

“Maybe you should have thought about that before you hooked up with Coe.”

Nyquist massaged her temples, her expression veering toward panic.

Georgia didn’t like the woman and couldn’t condone what she was doing. But by calling the cops, she was condemning an innocent little girl to a long time without her mother. She was on the right side of the law. So why was she often faced with shitty consequences? It wasn’t fair. She blinked rapidly.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s the deal. I’m going to give you the name of a good lawyer. I think she’ll help you. But you need to go to her office right away. Like, now. I’ll call and tell her you’re on your way.”

She scribbled Pam Huddleston’s number on a piece of paper and slid it across the table.

I
n her apartment Georgia pulled up a few articles about the black market in human organs. Organs Watch, a monitoring organization, estimated that more than fifteen thousand people a year were trafficked worldwide for their organs. Like the baby-breeding farms, most of the action was run by organized crime. But it was all overseas; aside from two articles, there was next to nothing about it in the US. One of the articles reported on clinics that sold organs to research facilities back in 1999. One company actually posted fees for various organs: a thousand dollars for a brain, five hundred for a heart, three twenty-five for spinal cords. At the time it was perfectly legal. The other story was about a Brooklyn rabbi who’d been part of an international transplant ring run out of Israel. That article called it an “unpunished public secret.”

She understood why there was scant coverage of the issue. Still, she bristled at the hypocrisy. The media would have a field day if they looked into it. In fact, the journalist who broke it might even win a Pulitzer. So far, though, they hadn’t. It was okay to write about human organ trafficking in Europe, Asia, or Africa, but, of course, no American would ever be that callous. Organ trafficking didn’t exist here.

Except, apparently, it did. A sanitized, well-regulated system of organ trafficking with enough cracks in it for people to be killed for their body parts. She started to pace around her apartment. Who made the decisions? On what criteria? And how much money was at stake? If a brain cost a thousand dollars fifteen years ago, how much would it be today? Add in cuts to middlemen like Nyquist, Coe, and Lotwin, the facilities in which the body parts were harvested, the people who transported the organs, and, of course, profit, and selling organs could be as lucrative as adoption. Possibly more.

She kept pacing. She’d made the right decision to send Nyquist to Huddleston. Huddleston would call the cops, and with what Nyquist knew, they could pick up Coe and Lotwin once Nyquist made arrangements to safeguard her daughter. She stopped. She should call O’Malley. Tell him that the murders of Bruce Kreisman, the pregnant girl on Route 173, and the drive-by in Evanston were probably connected.

But not today. She didn’t want the law showing up at the farm tonight. If they did, the guards might destroy any evidence of the operation, and that might include the girls. She needed to get there first. Examine the evidence. Find out if Savannah was there. Make a plan to get her out. And, hopefully, put her eyes on the boss of the operation.

G
eorgia drove out to Capron later that afternoon. Driving through Harvard, she passed Harmilda, the fiberglass cow in the middle of downtown that celebrated Harvard’s past glory as the “Milk Center of the World.” Then she drove through Chemung, a small town between Harvard and Capron on Route 173. The town was all clapboard houses and a church, except for the Harleys parked at the gas station. She passed a Ron Paul billboard, then a couple of cell towers.

As she drove into Capron, a dirty layer of snow covered the roads, fields, and trees. She passed small ranch houses, a trailer park, and more churches. How did all these churches survive? She drove past the Village Café, where she’d stopped for coffee before, then turned off the main road. She drove past the field with rusted farm equipment. Unlike the first time she’d come here, when she followed Zoya, it was still light, and no snow was falling.

Another turn took her to what she now saw was Nichols Road. On one side of the road was an open field with spindly twigs poking out of the snow cover. She couldn’t tell what the twigs had been but figured they were either corn or soybeans. The other side of the road was cut by a series of patchy driveways.

She spotted an ADT sign on the driveway Zoya had turned into and smiled. What good was an alarm this far from civilization? It would take hours for anyone to respond. She slowed about a hundred yards past and turned the Toyota around so she was facing the direction she’d come from. The driveway was now on her right. She parked at a sharp angle so that the hood of her Toyota was camouflaged in the brush but she still had a view down the road.

She spent the next two hours watching dusk turn everything purple, then black. She was bored, cold, and irritable. Staking out a farm on a cold February night wasn’t the worst assignment she could imagine, but it came close. Another three hours passed before a scrim of light swam toward her. Headlights. A car.

Although it had to be more than a mile away, she went on alert. Most people had the sense to stay home on a night like this. Unless they had important business. She put on her gloves, grabbed her baby Glock, and slid out of the Toyota. The beam of the headlights, sharper now that they were closer, would expose her at any moment. She plunged through the brush at the side of the road. It led to a dense but narrow stand of trees that edged the property and provided a natural boundary from the road. Just as the twin beams of light reached the spot on which she’d been standing, she thrust herself through the trees.

And heard the trill of a cell phone.