The Last Word by Lee Goldberg

Author:Lee Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-22T00:22:49.089000+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Mark and Steve stood for a moment in shell-shocked silence. It was almost possible for them to believe that everything that had just happened had been a figment of their imaginations.

There were no signs that Amanda, Jesse, and Susan had been there or that the arrests had ever occurred. The Men in Black were gone from the backyard. Even Jesse’s and Amanda’s cars were gone, presumably towed away for forensic examination.

Mark didn’t know what Ort hoped to find in the cars. Drops of West Nile virus-infected blood on the dashboard? A cooler full of body parts in the trunk?

This whole situation was unbelievable to him. And yet it had happened. Amanda, Jesse, and Susan were in FBI custody.

The enormity of the situation was almost too much for Mark to grasp. Were the murders and the organ-theft ring related? Or was it just a coincidence that the two investigations converged?

It had to be a coincidence, because Mark couldn’t see how or why the two cases could be connected. But coincidences always bothered him, and this one certainly would.

He had to act. He had to do something. But where should he start? The obstacles in front of him at the moment seemed huge and insurmountable.

Mark began by prioritizing his goals and considering the most immediate and efficient way of achieving them.

“Forget what I said before about not being able to help,” Steve said, interrupting Mark’s thoughts. “The arrests have changed everything. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

Mark nodded. “Good. You can start by giving me the ownership papers to your restaurant.”

Ort left Amanda sitting for hours in a windowless interrogation room at the federal building. She assumed he did it so she’d eat herself alive with anxiety and fear. But that only works if you’re guilty. And since she wasn’t, she was grateful for the solitude. It gave her time to calm down and think through her dire situation.

Once she got past her anger, she was able to look at her predicament objectively and methodically, approaching it as if she were analyzing a crime scene or conducting an autopsy.

The FBI believed she was using her morgue as a body farm, and according to what Ort had said at Mark’s house, they had the documents and the corpses to prove it.

She didn’t doubt that someone was stealing the body parts, most likely the mortuaries that Ort had raided. In order for the scheme to work, the mortician would need detailed medical histories on each donor, as well as death certificates and consent forms indicating that the harvesting was authorized. Her signature would be the natural one to forge. And since she worked closely with many of the funeral homes in the area, getting copies of her signature on similar forms wouldn’t be difficult.

While it was against the law to sell body parts for profit, the middlemen between the hospitals, morgues, and universities and the end users of the organs and tissues could charge “reasonable fees” to cover processing, storage, and distribution. But nowhere in the law did it define what was “reasonable” and what wasn’t.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.