The In Death Collection 06-10 (96 page)

She clamped her mouth shut, poured brandy, ordered coffee for herself, and sat down to work with her
back to him.

She studied the data on Westley Friend’s death first. There had been no suicide note. According to
his family and closest friends, he had been depressed, distracted, edgy during the days before his death. They had assumed it was due
to the stress of his work, the lecture tours, the media and advertising schedule he kept to endorse NewLife products.

He’d been found dead in his office in the Nordick Clinic, at his desk, with the pressure syringe on
the floor beside him.

Barbs, she mused, eyes narrowed. The same method as Wo.

There were no coincidences, she told herself. But there were patterns. There were routines.

At the time of his death, she read, he had been heading a team of prominent doctors and researchers
involved in a classified project.

She noted with grim satisfaction that Cagney’s, Wo’s, and Vanderhaven’s names
were listed as top team members.

Patterns,
she thought again.
Conspiracies.

Just what was your secret project, Friend, and why did it kill you?

“It goes deep,” Eve murmured. “It goes long, and they’re all in
it.”

She turned back to Roarke. “Hard to find a killer when they come in bulk. How many of them have a
part in this or knew and turned a blind eye? Close ranks.” She shook her head. “And it doesn’t end with
doctors. We’re going to find cops, politicians, executives, investors.”

“I’m sure you’re right. It won’t help you, Eve, to take it
personally.”

“There’s no other way to take it.” She leaned back on the desk. “Run
Louise’s disc, will you?”

Louise’s voice slid out. “Dallas, looks like you owe me five hundred K. I can’t say
I’m positive what—”

“Mute that, would you?” Roarke picked up his brandy and worked the keyboard
one-handed. “It’s distracting.”

Eve gritted her teeth, hit mute.
This taking orders crap,
she decided,
had to stop.
The sudden thought flashed that they might reinstate her but bust her down to detective or
uniform. She barely resisted lowering her head to the console and screaming.

She took a deep breath, then another. Then focused on the monitor.

I can’t say I’m positive what it all means, but I have some theories, and don’t like any of them.
You’ll see from the records that follow that regular calls have gone out from the main ’link here at the clinic to the
Drake. While we might contact some department there on occasion for a consult, there are too many, too often, and all from the main
’link. Rotation doctors use this office ’link. Only nurses and clerical staff use the main regularly. There are also calls to
the Nordick in Chicago. Unless we had a patient who had used that facility and whose records would be there, we would have little
reason to contact an out-of-state. Possibly, in rare cases, to reach a specialist. This same principle applies to the centers in London
and Paris. You’ll find only a few calls there.

I’ve checked, and the contact numbers for each facility are the organ wings. I’ve also checked the logs here for
who was on duty when these calls were made. There’s only one staff member whose schedule fits the time frame. I’m
going to have a little chat with her after I file this. I can’t think of an explanation she can come up with that’ll satisfy
me, but I’m going to give her a chance before I call the cops.

I assume, when I do, I’m to keep your name out of it. How about a bonus? We won’t call it blackmail. Ha
ha.

Get these murdering bastards, Dallas.

Louise.

“Didn’t I tell you just to get the data?” Eve mumbled. “What the hell were
you thinking, hotshot?”

She glanced at her wrist unit, calculated that even now
Feeney and Peabody would
be hauling Jan’s butt into interview. She thought she would cheerfully give up a decade of her life to be inside that room and in
charge.

No sulking, she reminded herself and began to scan the ’link logs when the one beside her
beeped.

“Dallas.” She frowned as she saw Feeney’s face. “You get Jan into interview
already?”

“No.”

“You’ve picked her up?”

“More or less. She’s about to be bagged and tagged. We found her in her apartment, dead
and still fresh. Whoever took her out did it fast and neat. Single blow to the head. Prelim time puts it less than thirty minutes before we
got to her door.”

“Hell.” Eve closed her eyes a minute, shifted her thoughts. “That puts it under that
same amount of time after Louise regained consciousness. Defensive wound indicated she’d seen her attacker and could
identify.”

“Somebody didn’t want Jan to talk.” Feeney pursed his lips, nodded.
“Follows.”

“That puts it back at the Drake, Feeney. Wo’s out. We need to find out where the other
doctors on the short list were in that hour period. You’ve got the security discs and logs from Jan’s
building.”

“Peabody’s confiscating right now.”

“He wouldn’t have done it himself. He’s not stupid. You’re going to find a
droid, six two, two ten, Caucasian, brown and brown. But somebody had to activate and program.”

“Droid.” Feeney nodded. “McNab hit something interesting when he scanned for
data on the self-destruct units. Senator Waylan headed the subcommittee that studied their military uses.”

“I have a feeling he won’t be running for another term.” She rubbed her fingers over
her eyes. “Check the logs for security droids at the Drake. Wake up McNab. He could run a systems check on them if you can
get a warrant for it. Even if the program was wiped, he’d find the lag time. When
you’ve . . .”

She trailed off, snapping back. “Sorry,” she said in a careful voice. “Just thinking out
loud.”

“You think good, kid. Always have. Keep going.”

“I was going to say that in some of the research I’ve done, I found that Westley
Friend’s self-termination used the same method as Dr. Wo, and they were both—along with some of our other cast of
characters—involved in some classified project at the time of his death. It seems a little too neat. Someone might want to
suggest to Morris that he consider that dose was forcibly administered.”

“It was her pin found on scene.”

“Yeah, and it was the only mistake in this whole business. That’s a little too neat,
too.”

“Smelling goat, are you, Dallas? Scapegoat?”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m smelling. Be interesting to find out how much she knew. If I
had access to her personal logs . . .”

“I think I’ll just wake up McNab, keep the boy busy awhile. You stand by.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

When the transmission ended, she picked up her coffee and got up to prowl. It had to go back to Friend,
she decided. Revolutionary new implant that made certain hot areas of organ research obsolete. Meaning end of funding, end of glory
for those heavily involved in those areas.

“What if a group of doctors or interested parties continued and restarted research on a covert
level?” She turned to Roarke, grimaced when she noted he was manning the keyboard. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. I’ve got his pattern now. It’s nearly routine from here.”
He glanced up, pleased to see her focused, restless, edgy. That, he thought, was his cop. “What’s your
theory?”

“It’s not one rogue doctor,” she began. “Look at this little operation. I
can’t do this out on my own. I’ve got you, with your questionable skills. Feeney, Peabody, and McNab, sliding under
regs and procedure to feed me data. I enlisted a doctor on the side. I’ve even got Nadine running research. It’s too big
for one cop—and a cop
working outside the system—to handle alone. You need contacts, fillers,
assistants, experts. There’s a team, Roarke. He’s got a team. We know he had the nurse. My best guess is she fed him
data on patients, the kind that use the clinic or make use of the medi-van service. Sleepers, LCs, dealers, chemi-heads. Dregs,”
she concluded. “Vessels.”

“She contacted someone with possible donors, let’s say.” Roarke nodded.
“Every business needs a good inside track. And this appears to be a business.”

“She passed data straight to the labs. Her contact with the outside centers could have, likely was, for
verification of a hit. She’d be what you’d call middle management, I guess.”

“Close enough.”

“I bet we find she has a nice nest egg stashed. They’d pay well. We know their lab man had
to be Young. Every business needs a geek, right?”

“Can’t run one otherwise.”

“The Drake’s enormous, and our geek was pretty much in charge of the organ wing.
He’d know just where to stash outside samples. And he had a medical license. He’d be the likely candidate to assist
the surgeon, to bag the sample, to transport it back to the lab. That’s two.”

She crossed to the AutoChef, getting more coffee. “Wo. Politics and administration. A skilled
surgeon who enjoyed power. Former president of the AMA. She knew how to play the game. She’d have high connections.
But obviously, she was also considered dispensable. Maybe she had a conscience, maybe she was getting nervous, or maybe they just
sacrificed her to throw the investigation off the scent. It worked for Friend,” she mused. “He wouldn’t have
been pleased, do you think, if he’d discovered this rogue research conspiracy. It would have cut into his profits, his glory.
There go the lecture fees, the big banquets in his honor, the media hype.”

“Only if what they’re doing, or hope to do, works.”

“Yeah. They’re willing to kill to make it work, so why not take out the competition? It used
to be organ building.
Louise sort of explained it in the initial report she did for me. They took tissue from a
damaged or defective organ and built a new one in the lab. Grew them in molds so the tissue’d take the right shape. That
solved the rejection problem. You used the patient’s own tissue so the body’d accept it and tick along. But it takes
time. You just don’t grow yourself a new, happy heart overnight.”

She walked back to the console, eased a hip on the edge, and watched him work as she talked it out.
“They do that kind of thing in vitro. You got like nine months to deal there. You can grow the bad part back or repair it.

“Then Friend comes along,” she continued. “Building and brokering organs has been
the thing. It’s tough to grow them for anyone over—I forget—like ninety because of the timing and the age of the
tissue. Takes weeks to grow a new bladder and you’ve got to do molding and layering and stuff. A lot of work, a lot of money
to order one up. But Friend comes up with this artificial material that the body accepts. It’s cheap, it’s durable, and it
can be molded to order. Mass-produced. Applause, applause, let’s all live forever.”

He glanced up at that, had to grin. “Don’t you want to?”

“Not with a bunch of interchangeable spare parts. But anyhow, he gets carried through the streets,
the crowd roars and throws buckets of money and adulation at him. And the guys doing organ building and reconstruction research
are shoved right out into the cold. Who wants to hang around peeing in a diaper while their new bladder’s growing in some lab
when they can pop into surgery, get a new, improved one, and be peeing like a champ inside a week?”

“Agreed. And that manufacturing arm of Roarke Industries thanks the full bladders everywhere. But
since everyone’s happy this way, what good will this little group of mad scientists prove by continuing their
work?”

“You keep your own,” she said simply. “Medically,
it’s probably some major miracle—regeneration—like the Frankenstein guy. Here’s
this half-dead, messed-up heart. Not gonna tick much longer. But what if it can be fixed, completely, like new? You got the part you
were born with, not some piece of foreign matter. The Conservative party, which includes Senator Waylan, would dance in the street.
Plenty of them have artificial tickers, but they like to stomp around every few years and talk about how it’s against the rules of
God and humankind to prolong life by artificial means.”

“Darling, you’ve been reading the papers. I’m so impressed.”

“Kiss my ass.” And it felt good to grin. “I’m betting when Nadine gets in
touch, she’ll tell me Waylan stands against artificial life aids. You know, the ‘if God didn’t give it to you,
it’s immoral’ line.”

“NewLife routinely deals with protests from natural-life groups. I imagine we’ll find the
senator supports their stand.”

“Yeah, and if he can make a few bucks running interference for a group who promises a new
medical and natural miracle, so to speak, so much the better. It would have to be a quick procedure. It couldn’t be risky to the
patient,” she went on. “They’d never outdo the implant unless what they do is as convenient and as successful.
Business,” she said again. “Profit. Glory. Votes.”

“Agreed, again. I’d say they’ve been working with animal organs up until recently.
They must have reached a level of success with that.”

“Then they moved up the evolutionary scale. Kept low on it from their viewpoint. Scum, as Cagney
put it.”

“I’m in,” he said mildly and had her blinking.

“In what?
In?
What’ve you got? Let me see.”

Even as she dashed around the console, he ordered data on-screen. When he pulled her neatly onto his lap,
she was too distracted for even a token protest.

“Neat as a pin,” she murmured. “Names, dates, procedures, results. Jesus Christ,
Roarke, they’re all there.”

Jasper Mott, October 15, 2058, heart sample successfully removed. Evaluation concurred with previous diagnosis. Organ
severely damaged, enlarged. Estimated period until termination, one year.

Logged as donor organ K-489.

Regeneration procedure begun October 16.

She bypassed the rest, focused on her case, her first victim, Snooks.

Samuel M. Petrinsky, January 12, 2059, heart sample successfully removed. Evaluation concurred with previous diagnosis.
Organ severely damaged, arteries brittle and clogged, cancer cells stage two. Sample enlarged, estimated period until termination, three
months.