Ridley Pearson - The Angel Maker

"Well, it fills in a few blanks," he admitted. "It helps to explain why we never received any formal complaints against the harvester. If you're a teenager and you've cut a deal to sell your kidney, you don't turn the guy in. It also means there were-are-probably a lot more donors than we know about. The lucky ones lived to spend their five hundred. it may also explain the use of the electroshock."

"I don't think so," she interrupted.

"Not the electroshock. Dixon's three victims-Blumenthal, Sherman, and the other one, Julia Walker, showed no sign of electroshock. If a few days had passed, that might be more easily explained, but in at least two of the cases-the deaths caused by hemorrhaging-those bodies would have been seen by the medical examiner rather quickly, wouldn't they? And that would indicate that those victims did not show signs of electroshock." "You have something going," he said. "I can hear it in your voice."

"What if only the dissenters receive the electroshock the real serious memory blocking? What if you're right about there being a lot of others? A runaway, hard up for money, cuts a deal. Arrangements are made; the surgery takes place. They're paid up and returned to the streets. What if a person like Cindy Chapman gets cold feet once she looks around her and sees the reality of what she's gotten herself into? If you're the harvester, what then? You take the kidney anyway-you've probably already promised it somewhere-but you make damn sure your donor won't remember anything about it." She let the idea hang there. "You don't like it," she said. "It makes sense," he admitted. "It doesn't mean I have to like it."

"So okay, let's say I'm right. Then why did they take Sharon?" she asked. "Except for her past, except for her Bloodlines connection, she doesn't fit the donor profile at all: She's not broke, she's not out on the street, she's not desperate. At this point, she's even a few years older than the rest of them."

He didn't want to tell her about Dr. Light Horse's theory that Sharon might have been taken for a custom procurement. If they were after a major organ, then Sharon was most likely already dead. "And what have they done with her?" she added.

Boldt was spared giving an answer. He turned into the driveway of the Army Corps of Engineers and searched out a parking space.

The Seattle district office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers occupied an enormous brick structure a few miles south of the city on Marginal Way.

Boldt was hoping that as Dixie had suggested these bones might offer them a chance to identify the harvester. Locating the rest of the bones was the first, and most important, step in that process. The homicide victim was the last living witness to the crime and could tell an investigator much more than the murderer believed possible.

The receptionist greeted Boldt and Daphne warmly and made a quick phone call announcing their arrival. A few minutes later, a wiry man in his mid-forties bounded down the stairs and extended his hand, introducing himself as Harry Terkel. He had bright, enthusiastic eyes, and a lot less hair than Boldt. He wore khakis, black Reeboks, and a plaid shirt without a tie. He lacked the nerd pack of pens in his pocket that Boldt had expected of an engineer., He shook hands with Daphne and motioned upstairs. "I'll lead the way. it's kind of a maze."

At the top of the stairs they turned right down a corridor past scores of office cubicles.

They walked and walked and walked, finally reaching Terkel's enclosed office, where they took seats around a conference table. There was a Wipeit bulletin board at the far end of the room, covered with math equations written in blue marker.

Terkel sat across from Boldt, rather than taking a place behind his desk. Boldt appreciated the gesture. He said, "Joe tried to explain this to me. Maybe I had better hear it from you."

Boldt explained, "Six months ago, a hunter recovered some human remains in the Tolt River. We have been unable to locate the source-the burial site-despite some exhaustive foot searches. The rest of those remains are important to our investigation, to our possibly identifying the victim and therefore the killer. The man I spoke with offered to set up your computers to help predict where the bones might have dislodged from the bank." "Joe Webster. That's right." He added, "There's a book on this that might interest you," Terkel said. "Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology. River movement. River meandering and material deposits. Sediment actually 'cements' together-if you will-and moves downstream as a whole. Our job is the quantitative determination of water flow. Tracking flows. Predicting the sedimentation process. Erosion, deposition."

Boldt was wondering what language this was. Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology? Nice bedtime reading. Terkel recited like a student, "Material eroded from one bank will deposit on the same bank one to two bars downstream. That's two to four bends," he informed Boldt. "And that's a fact. That's something we can bank on. Pun intended. That's where the HEC computer can help us." Terkel saw Boldt's puzzled face. "HEC-the Hydraulic Engineering Center-runs the modeling computers."

"Maybe we should talk to them," Boldt suggested.

A few minutes later Boldt and Daphne were sitting alongside a Japanese woman, Becky Sumatara, staring at a color screen that offered a menu of choices. Joe Webster, a stocky man in his late forties, towered behind them.

Becky Sumatara said, "When we received your request, we updated our Tolt model for current flow notes, slope, sediment size, distribution, and areas of erosion based on our present data.

That's what took us a couple of days. The updating is a lengthy process."

Boldt apologized, "When it comes to computers, I'm a technopeasant."

The screen changed to a graphics aerial view of a map of King County. "Bodies of water, in all shapes and sizes, are represented by various shades of blue," Becky Sumatara explained, her red fingernail Pointing out the Sound, reservoirs and rivers, "depending on volume. The darker the shade, the more volume. Elliott Bay and Puget Sound are a deep navy, while some of the smaller creeks are almost white. You're interested in the North Fork of the Tolt."

"Yes," Joe Webster answered for Boldt.

She dragged a blinking box to the area in question, bordering the box on Carnation, Monroe, Sultan, Skykomish and Big Snow Mountain. With two clicks of the mouse the screen filled with an enlargement of this area. "During enlargement, color reference is modified. You'll see the Tolt is now navy and its various tributaries are lighter according to volume. Also," she said with another click as the river, streams, and creeks turned various shades of red and pink, "we can view according to rate of flow-how fast the various volumes of water are traveling both Q V in terms of quantity and"-the water all turned — "as regards land speed. All factors shades of green in erosion and flood control."

With the enlargement, a dozen smaller creeks had appeared.

Daphne withdrew the topographic map from Boldt's briefcase. The exact locations where the bones had been discovered were marked. ji Becky Sumatara studied the map with Daphne and then narrowed the computer's target area yet again, creating a corresponding enlargement. "You're up into Snoqualmie National Forest there," she said, stepping the computer through maneuvers. "Rugged country." ' Yes."

"What does this tell us?" he asked. "We have two views of each stream flow," she explained. "Aerial and lateral. This gives us a visualization of lateral erosion as well as a cutaway of stream bed depth, Using the computer, I can increase or decrease volume and rate of flow as well as access any date in the past for visualization. Unfortunately, we've set this up only for the Tolt's stream bed profile, not the tributaries."