Most evenings in the Penley home consisted of frantic meal preparation and homework before settling into a mellower pace. Melissa loaded the last of the dinner dishes into the dishwasher with Tommy’s help before he went to finish his homework. Kari avoided eye contact with her mother and kept her head bent over her cell phone, thumbs pecking away on the keyboard at a speed that signaled the teen’s world was out of balance—again.
John came in the front door, opened the closet, took off his jacket, and hung it on a hook. On the floor, he noticed a remote-control airplane kit that he had promised to put together with Tommy. One more thing put off. How many more chances would he squander?
“I have a plate warm in the oven for you. Wasn’t sure when you’d be here,” Melissa called out.
John strolled into the kitchen past a sulking Kari, who tapped away at another text message. “What’s up with her?”
Melissa gave him an eye roll, an exact duplicate of the expression Kari worked like a world-class artist. Kari could execute a dozen variations of the eye roll. A roll one way meant exasperation, while another warned of a dark, hormonal storm on the horizon. This one was definitely of the latter variety.
John used a dish towel to pull the hot plate from the oven and pulled back the foil. He carried the dish to the counter next to Melissa and tilted his head toward Kari.
“She’s been texting her friends since she got home. Something about a new school dress code. I haven’t seen anything from the school about one.”
Molten, cheesy strands hung from John’s fork to the enchilada on his plate. He maneuvered the forkful and let it cool. “Figures that Kari and her fashion police would be the first to discover the plans to quell their freedom of expression.”
“Can you imagine Kari and her friends in uniforms?” Melissa said. “I think I’ll volunteer that day so I can watch the fireworks.”
John polished off his enchilada and rinsed the plate in the sink. He leaned back against the counter, snaked an arm around Melissa’s waist, and exhaled.
“What? I know that sigh,” she said.
“I got a call from the bank today. They won’t approve our loan. We don’t have the equity in the house that we did a couple of years ago.”
Melissa swiveled around and faced him. “They didn’t even approve a loan for a smaller amount? I mean, nothing? We needed that to cover Tommy’s expenses. What are we supposed to do now?” Her eyes misted over.
“We’ll figure it out,” John offered.
“That second mortgage on the house was our best option.”
“It was the option we wanted, but it’s not the only one we have.”
“The social worker and financial advisor at the hospital ran the numbers for us. After the insurance pays their part, we’ll have over a hundred thousand dollars in medical costs. That doesn’t include the antirejection medications that Tommy will need for the rest of his life.”
“I might be able to cash out my retirement accounts.”
“That won’t be enough,” she said.
“We’ll find a way to make it happen. We still have that list of foundations that the hospital gave us.”
“I never thought we’d have to take donations from charity.”
“Me neither. How do you think it makes me feel that I can’t provide for my family? If it takes swallowing some pride and asking for help to get Tommy what he needs, I’ll do it.”
Melissa nodded. “If that’s what it takes.” Eager to change the course of the conversation, Melissa called out to Kari, “Did you finish your homework?”
“Almost,” Kari said while she tapped out another text.
“Put the phone away and get to it,” Melissa said.
Kari strode off to her room and announced her displeasure with a thud of her bedroom door.
“Exactly like her mother,” John said.
Melissa grabbed a dish towel from the counter and snapped John’s thigh. “Better watch yourself,” she said before setting off across the kitchen.
John grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator and briefly laid it across his forehead to act as a cold compress against the tension headache that threatened to burst from behind his eyes. “When did life get so complicated?”
“It makes you appreciate all the small things,” Melissa said.
“Thank you, Zen Master.”
“Quit being a smartass and go see if Tommy needs help with his homework. He has a science test tomorrow.”
John found his son tucked behind the family’s laptop computer in the office. The boy navigated the web browser through page after page of search-engine results until he settled on a link that promised a study guide to photosynthesis. The guide, posted on his science teacher’s resource web page, included last year’s test answers.
“Isn’t that cheating?”
“No. If Mrs. Brown didn’t want the test out there, she wouldn’t have posted it,” Tommy said as he clicked the link.
“Shouldn’t you study the material instead of the test answers?”
“It doesn’t matter; I know that stuff anyway. This is like checking my work. I’m getting the right answers.”
“Oh yeah? Let’s see.” John swiveled the laptop away from Tommy and started peppering him with questions from the test. After ten straight correct responses, John said, “Okay, you know this stuff. But tell me—how did you find this website?”
“That’s easy. The answers to anything are out there, if you know where to look. Mrs. Brown always says, ‘Science is fun,’ even though it sucks. So I typed in science is fun and my teacher’s name into a search box and found it.”
John looked at the screen. The title of the page was “Science Is Fun” by Emily Brown. Smart kid. “That’s enough studying for the night. Get ready for bed.”
“Okay, Dad. Thanks for helping me.”
Tommy started out the door and paused, his brow knit in a serious expression.
“Dad?”
“Yeah, Tommy?”
“What’s it like when you die?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you die. What happens? Does it hurt?”
“Why are you asking?”
Tommy shifted against the doorframe and broke eye contact with his father. He stared out the window as a car passed by, and after a pause, said, “I heard Mom and Dr. Anderson talking the other day. Mom said if I don’t get my kidney transplant, I could die.”
John felt his stomach grow cold. “You are going to get your surgery, and you’ll feel better than ever.”
“What if I don’t? Am I gonna die?”
“Don’t worry about that. You’re gonna be fine,” John said with as much reassurance as he could muster. It wasn’t only for Tommy.
Tommy nodded and disappeared down the hallway, his stooped shoulders and floor-bound gaze broadcasting his insecurity and fear.
John closed his eyes, tipped back his head, and let loose a breath he didn’t know was trapped in his chest. A nine-year-old boy should not have to ask about what happens when you die. Kids that age are supposed to run, play sports, and not have a care in the world. It wasn’t fair, and John couldn’t do a damn thing about it. He felt helpless.
Tommy’s words replayed in his mind: “The answers to everything are out there, if you know where to look.”
John pulled the wireless keyboard over, used the mouse, and brought up a search engine. A cursor blinked in a blank white box, awaiting his command. He typed in the words black-market organ transplant and hit the enter key.
“Down the rabbit hole, John.”
Transplants were, as Dr. Kelly had said, big business; eight billion dollars spent on organ research, preservation, and procurement, all in the name of extending life. John’s Internet search confirmed what he already knew—that megahospitals, big-pharma, and insurance companies were the real gatekeepers of organ-transplant transactions. “Transaction” was the correct term because money, bundles of it, changed hands at each turn in the process. At the end of the day, everyone made a profit except for the patients. Those lucky enough to survive and receive a transplant found themselves mired in debt for the rest of their days.
John drilled deeper into the darker corners of transplants, where a husband in India sold his wife’s kidney and where the harvested organs of Chinese prisoners went to the highest bidder. Humans were worth more dead than alive. Spare parts. Urban legend mixed with threads of authentic desperation. One truth among the stories captured a common theme—if you have enough money, all waiting lists disappear as long as you don’t ask questions.
Black markets in human organs thrived in India, Asia, and Eastern Europe, where the accounts of the “donations” smelled of extortion and abuse. Few of the thousands of links tracked back to North American sources. An intact body was worth up to two million dollars when parsed out to those who waited in the shadows.
John plucked his cell phone from his pocket and dialed. After a single ring, Paula’s voice, shrouded within a veil of sharp, off-pitch noise, responded.
“What the hell is that?”
“Oh, I was listening to Yanni, sorry. Let me turn it down.” A moment later, the sound retreated. “Okay, I’m back.”
“Yanni? Seriously? No wonder you have no social life.”
“It’s after midnight, partner. I’m entitled to some downtime,” she said.
John checked his watch, surprised at how much time had gotten sucked away while he probed the dark reaches of the web.
“How did we find the warehouse?”
“What do you mean?” Paula said. “Guzman told us he and Cardozo picked up deliveries from the place. And your CI, Jimmy Franck, called in the tip about a sacrifice.”
“I guess what I mean is, why were we allowed to find it? The killer made sure we’d find the place, complete with a personally autographed body part.”
“You think?”
“Hey, I mean we’re good, and we would have found it eventually, but he wanted it found now,” John said.
“The killer wanted us to know he’s killing gang members—for parts?”
“I did a quick search and found dozens of websites that claim they can get around the transplant waiting lists. I can’t get over the idea that the killer could be trolling these transplant lists for desperate buyers.”
“What aren’t you saying, John?”
“I want to draw him out.”
“If he gets wind that we’re baiting him, we might lose him.”
“You saw the message he left for me. He thinks he’s untouchable. He might be right if we don’t change tactics.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“We look at who received transplants. Tomorrow we hit the UNOS network and pull the data for people who got a transplant and didn’t have to wait long.”
Silence was all he heard from Paula’s end of the connection.
“Paula?”
“Are you certain that Tommy’s long wait for a match isn’t coloring your judgment?”
“I can’t say it hasn’t. If anything, what we’ve gone through with Tommy points out that transplants are a system with rules and boundaries. And with any system, some people don’t think the rules apply to them.”
“You’re talking about thousands of records to sift through. That’s if we get a judge to ignore the confidentiality of medical records and give us a warrant. We need more than a theory that someone was able to cut in line and get a transplant.”
“The link is there. I know it.”
“Maybe, but we have to find a way to get there without individual patient records.”
“We’ll figure it out tomorrow morning when we talk with Trisha Woods at Central Valley Hospital.”
“The contact Dr. Kelly gave us.”
“You want me to swing by your place and pick you up?” he asked.
“Sure. What time?”
They agreed on a time and hung up. John went to flick the computer monitor off, and his hand hovered over the power switch. A new e-mail message flashed on the screen and drew his attention. The subject line simply asked, “Waiting list too long?”
John clicked on the link, and a software file downloaded a Tor Internet browser. He’d seen this kind of anonymous Internet browser before when he worked a child pornography case. The Tor browser allowed fully anonymous, untraceable communication on the dark web, the Sodom and Gomorrah of cyberspace. A plain screen appeared without the banners, menus, and advertising that usually infected the Internet. The screen resembled an old-fashioned green-screen computer terminal with a blinking cursor parked in the upper-left corner. Pale-green letters spelled out Log In.
He typed in organ and pressed enter, but nothing happened. He tried the words transplant, waiting list, and kidney, all with the same lack of response from the web guardian. John shifted in his chair, mulling over the thousands of possibilities that would open this portal. He picked up his cell once more, this time flicking though photos he’d taken of the kidney delivery at the old ice plant. Maybe the series of random letters and numbers under his name on the tag wasn’t so random.
John held his phone next to the screen, typed in the combination of letters and numbers exactly, and pressed the enter key. John ran his mouse across the screen and nothing happened. Another dead end.
As John prepared to give up and kill the power to the computer, the screen suddenly changed. The cursor blinked and moved as words flowed onto the display.
Welcome. How may I help you? The cursor blinked on a new line below the words, waiting for a reply.
“I’ve got you now, you son of a bitch.” He tugged the keyboard toward him, poised his hands over the keys, and tapped a response. Who is this? He hit the return key and waited.
You may call me the Broker, came the reply after a few seconds.
John sat upright, decided to play along, and typed. What kind of broker?
The kind that gets things done. How may I help you?
Transplants? John typed.
Donor or recipient?
Recipient, John replied and waited.
The letters scrolled out the next question. Are you on the waiting list?
Yes. I don’t want to wait any longer, John replied, thinking of his son.
You should allow the waiting list to take its course.
I’ve done that. Can you help me or not?
John waited. After a long pause, the reply spilled onto the screen. I may be able to move things along. I will extract information from your medical records so that I can expedite the process for you.
A cold ball of lead formed in John’s stomach. The conversation teetered on the edge of all ethical boundaries, and yet nothing damned the person on the other end of the connection. Using his son’s medical condition as a cover was a new low, but John needed to press the Broker for more information to get the killer to give up a vital piece of information that would bring him down.
Where do you get the organs? John pressed the return key.
Donors, of course. They don’t grow on trees, which brings me to my fee for expediting this process. Ten thousand, up front.
How do I know you can do what you say? John typed.
You don’t. Call it a leap of faith.
John waited, not sure of his approach.
New words scrolled out onto the screen while John watched. Contact me when you are serious.
The lines of the discussion disappeared from the monitor, leaving no trail that it had ever occurred. The lone, blinking cursor was all that remained on the screen. John tapped out a message on the keyboard. I’m in. What information do you require to get started?
His question held vigil on the screen. Not a single word response came from the other end of the computer connection.
The Broker was gone.
A twinge of panic surged, and John refreshed the screen.
I need your help, John typed.
There was a long pause with nothing but the blinking cursor, thumping in time with John’s heartbeat, and then it sputtered to life.
Patient’s name?
John entered Tommy’s name.
Transplant center?
Central Valley Hospital, John responded.
Send full payment to this account. A long string of letters and numbers followed the demand.
John saved a screenshot of the information and closed the laptop cover as if a virus would ooze from the screen and infect his family.
But in truth, it already had.