In her apartment Georgia pulled up a few articles about the black market in human organs. Organs Watch, a monitoring organization, estimated that more than fifteen thousand people a year were trafficked worldwide for their organs. Like the baby-breeding farms, most of the action was run by organized crime. But it was all overseas; aside from two articles, there was next to nothing about it in the US. One of the articles reported on clinics that sold organs to research facilities back in 1999. One company actually posted fees for various organs: a thousand dollars for a brain, five hundred for a heart, three twenty-five for spinal cords. At the time it was perfectly legal. The other story was about a Brooklyn rabbi who’d been part of an international transplant ring run out of Israel. That article called it an “unpunished public secret.”
She understood why there was scant coverage of the issue. Still, she bristled at the hypocrisy. The media would have a field day if they looked into it. In fact, the journalist who broke it might even win a Pulitzer. So far, though, they hadn’t. It was okay to write about human organ trafficking in Europe, Asia, or Africa, but, of course, no American would ever be that callous. Organ trafficking didn’t exist here.
Except, apparently, it did. A sanitized, well-regulated system of organ trafficking with enough cracks in it for people to be killed for their body parts. She started to pace around her apartment. Who made the decisions? On what criteria? And how much money was at stake? If a brain cost a thousand dollars fifteen years ago, how much would it be today? Add in cuts to middlemen like Nyquist, Coe, and Lotwin, the facilities in which the body parts were harvested, the people who transported the organs, and, of course, profit, and selling organs could be as lucrative as adoption. Possibly more.
She kept pacing. She’d made the right decision to send Nyquist to Huddleston. Huddleston would call the cops, and with what Nyquist knew, they could pick up Coe and Lotwin once Nyquist made arrangements to safeguard her daughter. She stopped. She should call O’Malley. Tell him that the murders of Bruce Kreisman, the pregnant girl on Route 173, and the drive-by in Evanston were probably connected.
But not today. She didn’t want the law showing up at the farm tonight. If they did, the guards might destroy any evidence of the operation, and that might include the girls. She needed to get there first. Examine the evidence. Find out if Savannah was there. Make a plan to get her out. And, hopefully, put her eyes on the boss of the operation.