“I don’t know. He hasn’t contacted me since he disappeared.”
“Not even once.”
“No.”
“That means he didn’t trust you. If you were really his friend and beloved mentor, he would have. It gets me thinking. Maybe you were the one who sold him out, told those thugs where to find him.”
“Never!”
“What happened to Mr. Patel?” I asked. “What went wrong?”
He looked stricken and sank down onto a couch that faced a wall unit lined with books on medicine and science and ethics, the scheming hypocrite.
“Two things,” he whispered.
“Speak up.”
“Are you recording this?”
“No, you asshole, just speak up.”
“Two things went wrong. The first was that David was there at all. You don’t imagine for a minute that I would have asked him to join this-this team I was forced to put together.”
“Forced?” I snorted. “That’s your story?”
“It is.”
“You never take money?”
“I take it,” he said. “But if you check the records at our foundation, you’ll see twenty-five-thousand-dollar donations made anonymously after every surgery.”
“Anonymously,” I said to Ryan. “What bullshit.” I actually believed Stayner but didn’t want him to know it. A man doesn’t become a world-class surgeon without being a control freak. I wanted him worked up. That’s when things slip out.
“It’s true. Daggett has a son, Michael, who has chronic kidney disease. Nephritis, to be precise. Michael needed a transplant and nothing was materializing. Daggett came to me about a year and a half ago, when Michael was twelve, and told me he wasn’t going to watch his son die waiting for the organ bank to call. He had found a willing donor who was a good match and he wanted me to do a private transplant. I told him, of course, that I couldn’t help him, that he was out of line to even approach me. Then he showed me these.”
He went behind a walnut desk and opened the centre drawer. He took out an envelope and slid out half a dozen photos of the same boy whose photo was on his desk at work: in shorts and a T-shirt chasing a Frisbee in a schoolyard; in a school uniform getting into a car; entering the very house we were in.
“That’s my son Devin,” he said. “He’s sixteen. He has his first driving lesson Monday.”
“I get it,” I said.
“No, you don’t.” He took out a second envelope and tossed it to me. I opened it to find half a dozen grisly crime-scene photos of bodies hacked and shot to death, digitally altered to include his son’s face on each body.
“I threw my guts up when I saw these, Geller. My son is every bit as precious to me as Daggett’s is to him. What could I do? He made me assemble a team of people I thought would go along with it. They’d get ten thousand cash apiece for a few hours work. I’d get twenty-five. He’d cover all the costs.”
“How did you find this team?”
“I’ve been in Boston since medical school,” Stayner said. “I know everyone in medicine here. And I know who has a hard time making ends meet. Boston is an expensive place to live. The taxes are high. Certain practitioners have alimony payments, kids in private school. I knew who could use an extra ten grand in cash. For obvious reasons I did not include David. No matter how desperate he was for money, I knew this was beyond his principles.”
“And you and this team performed the surgery on Michael Daggett.”
“Yes. The week of Christmas before last. The hospital had acquired a clinic in Framingham that had a wing under construction. It was deserted. We set up a sterile unit there one night and extracted the kidney from the donor and transferred it into Michael. We were gone before anyone arrived the next day.”
“Did you know anything about the donor?”
Stayner looked into his glass. It was empty. He looked at the Johnnie Walker, then set his glass down and looked for something else to do with his hands. “I didn’t want to know. And I didn’t want him to see me, so I insisted he be sedated before I arrived.”
“Do you know if he is alive and well today?”
“There’s no reason to assume otherwise,” he said. “A couple of days of post-operative care and he was discharged.”
“So how did it get from helping Daggett’s kid to an ongoing thing?”
“How do you think? He’s a natural predator. Not schooled in any way but clever as a wolf. It didn’t take him long to see the profits in this could be immense. Just consider the demographics. There are thousands of people in or close to Boston who need transplants, eighty per cent of them kidneys. If you’ve done the research I suggested, you know the supply is desperately short. And some of those thousands, as in any sample that size, are very wealthy people. Important people. More so here than in most cities.”
“And Daggett’s helping them jump the line.”
“Milking them for a fortune is what he’s doing. Funny thing is, I know half of them. They’re lying there under sedation and I see people I know from one of the clubs, boards, conferences, charity things I do. Politicians, bankers, new money, old. Daggett is finding them and using me as his cash cow.”
“Are they still done out in Framingham?”
“No. He set up a clinic in a defunct mortuary he bought in Mattapan.”
“A mortuary.”
“It works. There are ambulance bays if his donors are being brought in anesthetized. Prep rooms that serve perfectly well as operating theatres. You don’t need much for laparoscopic surgery. We use one room for extraction, one for transplant.”
“I want the address.”
“I’ll write it down.”
“You say David wasn’t involved in any of this.”
“The night of Mr. Patel’s donation, the assistant surgeon I’d been using got into an accident on the way to our facility and broke his wrist. The surgery couldn’t wait, so I drafted David in for just that one night. He was the only one I could find on the spot with the skill to take it on.”
“How did you get him to agree?”
“I know a few things about Judaism, even though I’m not Jewish. You can’t help but pick it up in this field. I knew that saving a life is considered a sacred duty. So I didn’t tell him the true circumstances until he arrived at the facility. Then I pressed him on the life-saving part until he agreed to do it. I made him take the money and keep it until he decided what to do with it. I thought everything would be okay, he’d throw the money his parents’ way …”
“But Mr. Patel died.”
Stayner nodded. “Normally, a living donor goes through extensive pre-transplant protocols. A thorough examination, medical history, genetic counselling, blood work, everything. We knew Mr. Patel was the right blood and tissue match for our recipient.”
“Courtesy of Carol-Ann.”
“Yes. Unfortunately, he was allergic to the anesthetic we used and he suffered an episode of malignant hyperpyrexia-or hyperthermia if that’s more familiar to you.”
“No.”
“Well, it’s something we normally would have flagged in genetic testing, but Daggett forces us to cut those corners.” He decided to refill his glass now, drank half down and said, “Please understand I fought against organ racketeering in India for years. I railed against it at conferences until the government there banned it. I’ve tried to prevent it all my career and this bastard gangster has made a complete joke out of it. Stuck me right in the middle. I love my son too. I never would have gotten involved in it if it weren’t for him.”
“Save it, Doctor. Where does he live?”
“Daggett? I couldn’t tell you. Somewhere outside the city. But I know he has an office in town. He told me once if I didn’t keep doing what he wanted, he would take my son up there and throw him off the top.”
“The top of what?”
“Williams Wharf.”
CHAPTER 24
We drove past the USS Constitution into the crowded North End and came to a driveway that served three six-storey condo buildings that faced the harbour. They were red brick with large art deco windows. Daggett worked up top of the middle one, Williams Wharf. We entered the private drive and came to a dead end where short concrete pillars linked by chains were set to block off a plunge into the water, accidental or otherwise. The back end of the building extended right to the pilings at the water’s edge. The views from any floor would be totally unobstructed.