“I have something you need to see,” Paula said when she called.
John put the cell phone down on the pile of UNOS records and printouts from Zack Weber’s computer, spread over his desk at home. Technically, he was on administrative leave and wasn’t supposed to have the boxful of material. In between hospital visits with Tommy, he pored over the medical records, tissue-typing data, and donor information, and it left him with a scab on his soul. Numbers, charts, and dispassionate clinical terms. The raw answers were there; the “who” and the “when” of the slaughter bled from the pages. The financial deposits into nameless accounts made a strong economic argument for Winnow’s dark enterprise, but the killer would be no help in determining what caused him to set out on this particular path of destruction.
A forensic analysis of the UNOS data revealed dozens of fraudulent transactions covering the trail of Winnow’s illicit organ harvest. Potential donors were purged from the data, and families watched as loved ones withered and died. A thick report lay open on John’s desk that contained a list of transplant patients with matching donors from a new round of blood testing. A thick circle was drawn on a single line of the report. John was a match for Tommy. Winnow had known all along and toyed with John, using Tommy as bait. Under his phone, the latest report from the medical staff provided an opinion about Winnow’s health and his prognosis. The words “persistent vegetative state,” “diminished neural activity,” and “hospice care” were underlined in thick, hard strokes. John’s pen had left a crease in the page three days ago.
John stood, grabbed his phone, and instinctively pulled the drawer open for his service weapon, only to find the drawer empty. He’d surrendered his firearm to the lieutenant when he went on administrative leave. He pushed the drawer closed harder than he needed. John closed his eyes and drew a deep breath, something that the department’s assigned trauma counselor preached as a “cleansing breath.” Cleansing, my ass, he thought. He made a quick phone call to Melissa at the hospital and let her know he’d join her and Tommy as soon as he met with Paula. John and Melissa didn’t see much of one another; they took separate shifts at the hospital. Avoiding John was easier for Melissa. She still took the blame for making the ten-thousand-dollar payment to Winnow and all the trauma that followed.
Paula asked him to meet her at the Layton farm. He’d seen the photos of the place after his last encounter with Winnow. He hadn’t paid attention to the forensic dig with the precise, squared sections, marked with a labyrinth of string. The entire interior of the barn was a checkerboard, and the pieces were bits of skull and fragments of long bone. Sifted, sorted, and bagged, all the human bits were gone, nothing left but residual negative energy that stained the worn barn wood.
John pulled his Toyota pickup off the main road and onto the driveway of the Layton farm. At the end of the drive, Paula sat on the trunk lid of a dark, unmarked police car, dangling her feet above the gravel. He parked the truck, and she hopped from the back of the sedan.
She didn’t greet him and she seemed preoccupied, hands shoved in her pants pockets, eyes avoiding his.
“What’s up?” John asked.
“I heard they are going to let Winnow walk on the criminal charges and send him to a hospice on a compassionate release.”
“I’m not really surprised. That way, the case goes away quick and quiet. No public trial, no splash back on city hall.”
“But a compassionate release? This guy needs release by lethal injection.”
John was done talking about what Winnow deserved. “What did you want to show me?”
She nodded. “Yeah, that. Come with me.”
The path to the barn door showed evidence of heavy foot traffic since the last time John had been under this roof. He wasn’t one who saw ghosts in the shadows, but this place held the psychic residue to challenge his skeptical beliefs.
As they crossed the threshold at the barn door, the smell was worse than he remembered. He winced.
Paula noticed his reaction. “It’s the digging. They turned over layer after layer of pig crap.”
“Where are the pigs?” John noticed the side barn door was open for extra ventilation, and there was no sign of the squealing animals.
“The county took them off to the rendering plant. With what they’ve eaten, the public health people didn’t want to run the risk of getting that into the food supply.”
The barn floor glistened with a sheen of moisture seeping to the surface from decades of livestock doing their business inside the wooden walls. Even in the darkened interior, holes pockmarked the dirt surface, a greater number than John had imagined. One hole, against the back wall, was bigger than all of the others.
“Wasn’t there a worktable along that wall?” John asked.
“Built over that hole there? Yeah, there was.”
“More body parts?”
“Hold on,” Paula said. She flicked the switch on a halogen lamp. “I asked the techies to leave this for us.”
“Whoa, that’s a deep hole. The pigs didn’t do that.”
“The pigs didn’t leave an entire body in that pit either.”
John followed a temporary walkway of plywood planks from the door to the edge of the large hole. “How’d they find anything in here? That’s got to be four feet deep.”
“Cadaver dogs. They passed over most of the small bits and went straight to that spot. They estimate the body’s been there for two years.”
John peered into the pit, and even though the remains no longer inhabited this hole, the image of a body covered in layers of grime and manure wasn’t hard to imagine. “Think we’ll ever find out who it was?”
“You’re not the only detective in the world, you know.” Paula had her hands on her hips and a smirk on her face. “Check this out. This is what I needed you to see.” She swiveled the halogen light so the beam settled on the back wall, four or five feet from the ground.
The barn wood was scarred and gray from nearing the end of its useful life. John rubbed his hand across the grain. Letters were carved into the old surface, long enough ago that they had darkened and nearly disappeared into the swirls and knots in the wood planks.
Two names, rough cut with a sharp implement: Patrick and Brice. Next to each name, dates were carved into the wood, like Gold Rush–era tombstones.
Patrick would have been twenty-eight years old if the dates meant that he died two years ago. The date next to Brice indicated birth two years ago, with no ending date.
“But that wasn’t Patrick Horn you found in that pit.”
Paula joined him by the wall and handed him a file folder. She’d had it with her the entire time, but John was too preoccupied with the place to notice. He cracked the file open, and the first document inside was an accident report from the car crash when a drunk driver had run Marsha Horn off the road.
“Suspect in that hit-and-run was one William Brice Winnow, a Skinhead gang member out of Stockton. The DA declined prosecution. It seems his blood samples for alcohol-level testing went missing.”
“That’s my signature on this report. I recommended the DA drop the case because of the missing evidence. This was around the time Carson was up to his dealings in the evidence room. Did you try to track—?”
“William Brice Winnow was reported missing a week after the accident.” She pointed at the pit. “Not anymore. We got a match on dentals.”
“You’re sure it’s him?”
“We got a DNA hit on the body too.”
“And it matched the dentals?”
“I’m talking about DNA on the body. We got a match for Patrick Horn on the guy’s body. There was some evidence of bodily trauma that made it look like the vic was strung up on those steel hooks in the barn.”
“The date on the report—it’s the same one carved on the wall,” John said.
“Sure is. Like our Brice was born that day.”
John lowered the file. “Winnow said Patrick Horn was weak, and look at what he’s become.”
“He became Brice Winnow. Patrick Horn died two years ago after his mother’s accident. He got revenge on her killer and assumed a new identity,” she said.
“Winnow told me I could have prevented this. He blames me for letting his mother’s killer go free.”
“There is nothing you could have done. When did all the organ harvesting start?”
John hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the pit. “I bet it started right there. It would be impossible to prove, but Winnow had a sore spot for old man Layton. He claimed his stepfather showed him how to do it. I thought he was talking about butchering hogs, but I think he meant this.”
“Neither one’s gonna say anything. Layton’s dead, and Winnow is in a coma. We were right about the blood bank, by the way.”
“What’s that?”
“The blood bank. That was the connection between all the victims. Mercer, Johnson, Travis, even Cardozo—they all went there. Johnson and Mercer donated plasma for money; Cardozo tried to donate, but his blood tested HIV positive; and Travis—”
“Got a call to donate because of his AB-positive blood type.”
“Makes you wonder if Winnow made that call,” she said.
Paula switched off the halogen light, plunging the barn into shadow. Something dark moved in the corner. For a moment, John had a vision of the trapped souls of those once buried in the place.
Paula was on the phone when John emerged from the barn behind her. She glanced up. “Yeah, he’s here with me. Hold on.” She handed the phone to John. “It’s the lieutenant.”
“Penley.”
“I wanted to give you a heads-up, before you hear it on the news.”
“Yeah?”
“Brice Winnow died at South Valley Memorial.”
“How?”
“The hospital spokesman said something about brain swelling. He died fifteen minutes ago. But get this. Winnow was a registered organ donor. And he’s a match for the Cardozo girl.”
“That’s a fitting end. Can’t say that I’ll miss him,” John said.
“Me neither. Just wanted you to know. Give Melissa a hug from me,” Lieutenant Barnes said.
“Will do.” John disconnected the call and handed the phone to Paula.
The pager on John’s belt vibrated. He glanced down at the display, gave a slight nod in recognition, and switched it off. “Everything okay?” Paula asked.
“Everything is fine. That was the transplant center confirming Tommy’s and my surgeries tomorrow.”
“I’m so happy Tommy is healthy enough for the transplant. Everything he’s been through—everything you’ve been through to make it happen . . .”
“That’s what you do for your kids—at whatever cost.”