*** CHAPTER ELEVEN ***
Late in the afternoon, while the snow continued to fall, Eve sat alone in her office and read over Louise's simple translation of the medical data that had been gathered.
Basically, artificial organs—the process initially discovered by Friendly and his team and refined over the years—were cheap, efficient, and dependable. The transplant of human organs was not. It was necessary to find a match, to remove from a donor a healthy specimen, to preserve and transport the organ.
The building of organs from the patient's own tissues was more advantageous, as there was no risk of rejection, but was costly in time and money.
With current medical knowledge, human donors were few and far between. For the most part, healthy organs were harvested—donated or brokered—from accident victims who could not be repaired.
Science, according to Louise, was a two-sided coin. The longer we were able to preserve life, the more rare human donors became. More than 90 percent of successful transplants were artificial.
Certain conditions and diseases could be and were cured, leaving the patient with his original organs in good repair. Others, too far progressed and most usually in cases of the poor or disenfranchised, left the organ too damaged and the body too weak for these treatments. Artificial replacements were the only course of treatment.
Why take what was useless? Eve asked herself. Why kill for it?
She looked up as Roarke came in. "Maybe it's just another mission, after all," she began. "Just one more lunatic, this one with a highly honed skill and a personal agenda. Maybe he just wants to rid the world of those he considers beneath him and the organs are nothing more than trophies."
"There's no connection between the victims?"
"Snooks and Spindler both had connections to Canal Street, and that's it. There's no other link between them, or to hook them to the victims in Chicago and Paris. Except when you look at what they were."
She didn't need to bring up the data on Leclerk to refresh her memory. "The guy who bought it in Paris was a chemi-head, late sixties, no known next of kin. He had a flop when he could pay for it, lived on the street when he couldn't. He used a free clinic off and on, playing the system to get his social program meds when he couldn't buy a fix. You have to submit to a physical if you want the drugs. Medical records indicate he had advanced cirrhosis of the liver."
"And that's what links them."
"Liver, heart, kidneys. He's building a collection. It comes out of a health center, I'm sure of it. But whether it's Drake or Nordick or another one altogether, I don't know."
"Maybe it's not only one," Roarke suggested, and Eve nodded.
"I've thought of that. And I don't like the implications. The guy I'm looking for is highly placed. He feels protected. He is protected."
She pushed back. "He's educated, successful, and organized. He's got a reason for what he's doing, Roarke. He was willing to kill a cop to protect it. I just can't find it."
"Kicks?"
"I don't think so." She closed her eyes and brought the image of each victim into her head. "There was no glee in it. It was professional, each time. I bet he got a thrill out of it, but that wasn't the driving force. Just a happy by-product," she murmured.
He leaned over, tipped up her face, scanned the bruises. "It's beating you up. Literally."
"Louise did a pretty decent job on me. She's not as annoying as most doctors."
"You need a change of scene," he decided. "A distraction so you can come back to this with your mind clear on Monday. Let's go."
"Go? Where?" She gestured to the window. "In case you haven't noticed, we're getting dumped on."
"So why not take advantage of it?" He tugged her to her feet. "Let's build a snowman."
He surprised her, constantly, but this time, she simply gaped. "You want to build a snowman?"
"Why not? I'd thought we'd fly out, spend the weekend in Mexico, but…" Still holding her hand, he looked out the window and smiled. "How often do we have an opportunity like this?"
"
I don't know how to build a snowman."
"Neither do I. Let's see what we come up with."
She did a lot of muttering, came up with alternate suggestions that included mindless sex in a warm bed, but in the end, she found herself bundled from head to foot in extreme climate gear and stepping out into the teeth of the blizzard.