Ridley Pearson - The Angel Maker

Watson entered and took a seat in a chair over by Daphne. His glasses were filthy. He needed new blades in his electric razor his face looked like an old weed patch. He adjusted his glasses and said, "I won't bore you with the details."

"Good," Lamoia said, intimidating the man.

Watson looked a nervous wreck. His domain was wires and cathoderay tubes. He didn't take to a meeting like this.

Daphne advised him, "Don't worry about John. He has a testosterone problem."

"To every problem, a solution," Lamoia chimed in, trying to stare her down. "Not in your wildest fantasies." She stared back. "Watson?" Boldt asked. When people came under too much stress, it found strange ways of manifesting itself. "That's not my name, you know," he complained. "With a name like Clarence, you should be grateful, " Lamoia advised him. "The database?" Boldt reminded. "The laptop. Did you print up the database for us?"

He handed Boldt a sheet of paper. The database looked like a spreadsheet, a grid of rows and columns. There were seven columns and had they been titled across the top, which they were not, Boldt guessed they might have been labeled, DATE, NAME, FILE NUMBER, ADDRESS, PHONE NUMBER, BLOODTYPE, (?). The rows were created by the — names of the donors, listed alphabetically.

"The minute we had this list, we faxed it down to Bloodlines for comparison. According to them, what distinguishes ours from theirs-in terms of layout-is the addition of a new column-the last column over-which contains as yet unexplained four-digit numbers. This column is unique to this laptop database; that is, there is no such column in the Bloodlines database. The other distinguishing feature is that the date column-far left has also been modified so that only a small percentage of the records now contain a date. They should all be dated. "It is sorted alphabetically by the donor's name," he continued. "What's interesting is that if a name has a date, it also has an entry in this new column. There are twenty-eight such dated fields."

"Twenty-eight?" Boldt asked, flipping forward. "It's the donor list," Daphne speculated. A silence hung over the room. Daphne broke it. "Is Sharon on there?"

"Twenty-eight donors," Boldt repeated, looking ahead on the list. How many dead? How many victims of electroshock? He spotted the name. "She's on here," he confirmed.

Daphne went a sickly pale and excused herself from the room.

Boldt fought his stomach. Lamoia killed the Coke. Watson toyed with his glasses nervously. Boldt waited for Daphne's return. She didn't look much better.

He ran down the column of names, calling out: "Blumenthal, Chapman, Shaffer, Sherman, Walker: They're all here." He felt it as both a nauseating moment of reality and a major moment of triumph the extra care they had taken with Maybeck had proved worth it.

He noticed for the first time that the date alongside Sharon Shaffer's name was not a date in the past, but was for two days from now: Friday, February 10. "Lou?" Did it show that easily? Or was it her? She always seemed to know his thoughts.

in less than forty-eight hours, Sharon Shaffer would be cut open, According to Dr. Light Horse, it was likely to be a major organ.

There would be no time to organize a task force, no time to sort through a list of three-hundred-seventy veterinarians. They would have to force every lead they had. Every suspect. Sharon Shaffer's life had a burning fuse attached to it now. Look for the good, he reminded himself-they were too tired to take a setback like this. "Accentuate the Positive"-it was one of those songs occasionally requested in a piano bar. He missed The Big joke; he wondered how Bear was doing with the IRS. "She's alive," he said. "Sharon Shaffer's alive."

"Lou?" she asked again, sensing something wrong. He slid the printout over to her, pointing to the date. He watched as her eyes glassed up.

A confused Lamoia asked, "But that's good, right?" Daphne slid the sheet to him, and he too fell silent. "What did I miss?" Watson asked.

Boldt inquired, "What do these four-digit numbers mean?"

"I can tell you what we ruled out," Watson explained. "We know it's not phone numbers. Not social security numbers. Not zip codes."

"But what is it?" Boldt asked angrily. "What are they?" Watson leaned away from him sheepishly.

The coffee room's phone rang. Boldt answered it. He listened.

He said to the receiver, "Can't you just tell me?" He paused.

"I'm on my way." He hung up. "What's up?" Daphne asked.

"Dixie's got something."

Boldt turned the car into the back of the Harbor View Medical Center and started hunting for a parking place. Five minutes later, two blocks away, he found one across from the Lucky Day Grocery.

He climbed out of the car. A student cycled past him on a mountain bike. The tires splashed street water onto Boldt's shoes and onto a section of newspaper that was stuck to the pavement. A display ad for an American Airlines special to Hawaii looked up at him. This meant something. He studied it more closely. It was the airplane in particular. And then it occurred to him. He unlocked the car, so nervous with the keys that he dropped them. When he finally got inside, he shoved the key into the ignition, turned it to battery power, and punched in the cellular's security code.

He dialed the downtown office and asked to speak to Daphne. She had to be paged. Boldt was losing patience when he finally heard her voice. He said immediately: "They're flight numbers. The extra numbers in the database are flight numbers."

There was a long pause as she processed this. A woman bought a newspaper outside the Lucky Day Grocery. He added, "They had to connect these organs to specific flights in order to get them to their destination in the allowable time. It all had to be arranged in advance-the timing just right."

"A courier!" she said. "Track down those flight numbers. See if we're right. Move it to the top of your list."

"Don't spend all day over there," she cautioned. "You know Dixie," he said. "When he makes a discovery, he tends to drag it out a little."

"A little?" she did know Dixie. "I'll try to hurry it along."

The medical examiner's offices are in the basement of the Harbor View Medical Center. The ceilings are low, the windows rare-and then just half windows looking out at the sidewalk. The hum of computers, the active ventilation and fluorescent lights, the percussion of typewriters, and the electronic purring of telephones were the only sounds as Dixon led Boldt into a back room, where the excavated skeleton was now laid out on a stainless steel slab. "It's a damn good set of remains," Dixon announced. "All but the teeth. We're missing the lower mandible. Several teeth in the upper jaw were chiseled out. He used a screwdriver, maybe. He didn't want us identifying her. I like that," Dixon said. "That means he had something to hide. That kind of effort always makes me all the more determined." He pointed to what remained of the rib cage. "He cut ribs six and seven," he leaned closer, "here and here, immediately above the abdominal cavity. We got a nice set of tool markings off the butt end of number six." He handed Boldt a set of black-and-white lab photos just like those he had showed him at jazz Alley, only with today's date, February 8, photographed into the upper right corner. The upper set of magnified tool markings was labeled Peter Blumenthal. The bottom set, Jane Doe. The tool markings matched.

Dixie continued, "A liver procurement, a liver harvest is one of the most difficult surgeries there is. Extremely technical. It's not uncommon for the procuring surgeon to do what's called a radical harvest." He demonstrated using the skeleton. "You take far more tissue than you need, leaving all the connecting vessels intact. The transplant surgeon then does the actual harvest."