He would help Milla find Pavón, because she would keep trying anyway and she would be safer with Diaz. But even more important, Pavón was a link to the head of the snake. If he kept following the little fish, eventually he would find the big fish.
People were dying in Juarez, and all over the state of Chihuahua. That in itself wasn’t unusual. Some of these were the work of the serial killer. But more and more bodies were being found with the organs removed, and that didn’t fit the pattern. Different killing methods were used. Some had been shot, some had been stabbed, some had been strangled. In a few horrible cases, evidently the organs had been removed while the victims were still alive, though he hoped they were at least unconscious when the process began. The victims were both male and female, mostly Mexican, though three of the unfortunates, like Paige Sisk, had been tourists. The bodies were found in different parts of Juarez, carelessly dumped as if they were no longer of any value. And they weren’t.
How much was a heart worth on the black market?
A liver? Kidneys? Lungs?
People on transplant lists died every day, waiting for an organ to become available. What if some of those people had money, though, and didn’t want to wait? What if they could put in an order for, say, a heart, from a donor with a particular blood type? What if they were willing to pay millions? What if the donor not only wasn’t willing, but wasn’t dead?
Easy. Make the donor dead.
Diaz’s job was to find whoever was behind this. Not the peons, the grunt soldiers like Pavón—and he was far from the only one—who kidnapped the victims. There was likely a central place where the organs were removed and refrigerated, then immediately transferred to the waiting recipient, but he hadn’t located it yet. He might be wrong; the organ removal could be carried out wherever it was most convenient at the time. What was needed other than a cutter and some coolers of ice?
Whoever was doing the actual organ removal had to have some training, so that the organs weren’t damaged. Perhaps not a doctor, but at least someone with a level of medical expertise. Diaz thought of the unknown person as “the Doctor,” though. Kept things simpler in his mind. The Doctor might be the head of the gang; who else was in a better position to know about the transplant lists, who was on it, and who had enough money to privately arrange for an organ?
On Friday night, behind the church in Guadalupe, he’d watched the transfer of what he was sure was another victim. It might even have been the Sisk girl. The presence of two other people watching the transfer had been a hindrance, especially when the woman started to blow the whole scenario wide open by attacking. He’d admired her guts, if not her brains, but he’d had to stop her. The last thing he wanted was for Pavón and his cohorts to know someone was onto them; they would become more careful, and that much harder to trace.
Taking care of the woman had cost him precious seconds, and he’d lost them. He’d known the person he jumped was a woman because of the curls sticking out from under the cap, and her general shape, as well as the slenderness of her arms and hands. From his vantage point, and with his own night-vision device, he’d watched the two from the moment they arrived. The guy was pretty good at ghosting around, the woman less accomplished but still competent.
He didn’t know what they were doing there, but it was obvious they weren’t part of Pavón’s gang, so he didn’t intend to harm them, even though just by being there they were fucking him up. He’d have other chances with Pavón; it was the victim who wouldn’t have another chance. He could have intervened and maybe saved that one person, but he’d have had to kill probably three of the men and there was no guarantee the one remaining would tell him anything, or even know anything to tell him. Until he had seen which car left with the victim, he’d had no idea whom to follow.
He’d had a tip about that meeting behind the church. Then Milla had received a tip telling her that he would be there. Who could have known other than the person who had tipped him off? And who the hell was it? His caller had been female; a man had called Milla. What was going on? Was it coincidence that they were both sent to the church in Guadalupe at the same time, or deliberate?
He didn’t believe in coincidences. It was safer that way.
11
It was almost nine o’clock when Susanna Kosper pulled into her driveway and punched the button on the garage door opener. Even before the door slid up and she saw the other parking bay was empty, she knew Rip wasn’t home yet, because the big, cream stucco house was dark. When Rip was home, the house was lit up like downtown; he turned on the lights in every room he entered, then forgot to turn them off again when he left.
More often than not, now, Rip wasn’t home when she got home. And even when he was, he barely spoke.
Twenty years of marriage were going down the drain, and she didn’t know how to stop it. They had so much in common that she wasn’t quite able to grasp how they could drift so far apart. They both loved their careers, and they enjoyed the healthy salaries they pulled down. Even though her malpractice insurance rate had skyrocketed, along with that of every other ob-gyn in the country, together they did very well.
She had once gone through a scare when she thought they might lose everything they’d worked so hard for, but she had been doubly cautious about money since then, and her caution had paid off. Their house was a showplace, they had healthy retirement funds, and Rip made no pretense of not enjoying their success. They liked the same movies, the same kind of music; they voted the same way most of the time; they even liked the same college football team, the Ohio State Buckeyes. So what had gone wrong?