Hot Lights, Cold Steel Read online

Was this a pattern? A killer luring hookers out on fake out calls and nabbing them? “What was her name? The other girl?”

  “Bambi. Working name. Don’t remember her real name. Black chick.”

  “Who’d she work for?”

  “Sally Workman. Goes by Miss Sally. Operates out of the Bel Aire Motel. Out off the Ardmore Highway. Rents a room for her office. Been there for years.”

  “Maybe I’ll stop by and see her,” I said.

  “We’ll both go. Of course, if Furyk finds out, he’ll string me up by the balls.”

  “You going to tell him?”

  “Not likely.”

  “Then there you go,” I said.

  T-Tommy nodded. “Better get in there so I can hold his hand through this.”

  “I’ll go see Miranda.” I gazed out across the lot. “Not looking forward to this.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll give Liz a call and see when we can hook up with her.”

  CHAPTER 24

  FRIDAY 3:39 P.M.

  MIRANDA’S SOBS RIPPED A HOLE IN MY GUT. I KNEW I COULDN’T FACE this alone, so I’d taken the chicken way out. I’d called Claire, thinking having a woman here might soften things a bit. Miranda sat on the bed in her hotel room, Claire next to her, one arm around Miranda’s shoulders.

  “I have to see her,” Miranda said.

  I pulled the chair away from the desk and sat, getting down to her level so I could look her in the eye. “No, you don’t.”

  “But . . .”

  “But nothing.” The image of Noel’s mutilated corpse flashed in my head. “I told you what happened. Remember her as she was.”

  I had told Miranda everything. The surgeries. The burial. The pigs. I blurred the details but left nothing out, knowing she’d discover the details soon enough. This was a story the media would devour. That was another reason I wanted Claire here. If she broke the story, she could round off the sharp edges.

  Miranda buried her face in her hands, and her shoulders convulsed.

  “I’ll handle everything,” I said. “Arrange to have her taken back home.”

  “No,” Miranda said, the tissue she held wound tightly around a finger. “I can’t let you do that.”

  “Consider it done. You have enough to deal with right now.”

  She sighed and began sobbing again. After a minute or so, she sniffed back her tears and said, “When?”

  “As soon as Coroner Dreyer gives the go-ahead. Should only be a day or so.” I motioned to Claire, signaling her to follow me.

  She stood, and we stepped out into the hallway and moved away from the door.

  “This is going to be your story, right?”

  “What do you think?”

  It was a stupid question.

  “Me doing the story isn’t what I’m worried about,” Claire said. “It’s you. Don’t make it personal.”

  “It is.”

  “I know. Just don’t let that muddy the water.”

  “That’s how you drive the snakes out of the swimming hole. Churn things up. Make them nervous. A slug like this will leave a slime trail. It’s just a matter of finding it.”

  “Be careful. I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.”

  Me, too. “I’m meeting T-Tommy over at the medical center. We’re going to chat with Liz Mackey. She has an hour between cases.”

  “About what?”

  “You want to go? I’ll tell you on the way.”

  “Okay.”

  We returned to the room. Miranda seemed to have pulled herself together. Sort of. After she assured me she didn’t need anything, I told her that T-Tommy and I were going to begin turning over rocks to see what crawled out.

  “We’ll find whoever did this,” I said.

  Miranda stood and hugged me. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She sat down on the bed again. “I have so many calls to make. My boss. My attorney. Funeral arrangements.” She glanced around the room as if searching for something. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “I’ll help you,” Claire said. “I have to do a quick interview, but I should be back in an hour, maybe less.”

  CHAPTER 25

  FRIDAY 4:11 P.M.

  CLAIRE AND I CLIMBED INTO MY PORSCHE, AND I FIRED UP THE ENGINE. I called T-Tommy and told him we were on the way over to the medical center. I then dialed Rosalee Kennedy’s number and was surprised when she herself answered. I told her about Crystal and Noel. Not the details, just that they were both dead. She seemed neither surprised nor saddened. She did mumble condolences of sorts.

  I asked, “You know Sally Workman?”

  “Everybody knows Miss Sally.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Runs a string of low class girls out of a cheap motel. That about says it all.”

  “The Bel Aire?”

  “If you know, why’re you asking?”

  “She a competitor?”

  “Hardly. She picks up the rejects.”

  “Girl named Bambi?” I asked. “Would she be one of the rejects?”

  “You do get around, don’t you?” Rosalee laughed, and when I didn’t respond, she went on. “Yeah, she worked for me. Maybe a year ago. Black girl. Beautiful. Got a habit and waltzed off with four grand of my money. You know where she is?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. What’s her real name?”

  “The one given to her by her alcoholic asshole father and her whore mother?”

  “I take it you’ve tried to find her?”

  “Four large is four large,” she said. “Name’s Marlene Johnson. From Phoenix. Don’t waste your time on her family. She’d never go back there, and they don’t give a rat’s ass. She’s probably off to the big city. Atlanta. Miami. New York. Who knows?”

  “Thanks, Rosalee.”

  “You find her, tell her to bring me my money.”

  “They found the fucking bodies,” Rocco said to Lefty and Austin. “Alejandro and Eddie fucked up.”

  “Shit,” Lefty said.

  “Our friend isn’t going to do Alejandro until when?” Rocco asked. His knuckles whitened as he gripped the edge of his desk.

  “Tomorrow night. Preparations are under way.”

  “Why not now?”

  “I told you. He’s got to work on that gadget of his. I don’t understand all that shit. Anyway, he said Saturday night at the earliest.”

  “So it could be even longer?” Rocco asked.

  Lefty shrugged.

  Rocco swiped a hand over his balding pate. “This could screw everything up.”

  “Maybe not,” Lefty said. “We’re heading over there now. Make sure things are moving along.”

  “Don’t let this lead back here,” Rocco said.

  Lefty stood. “It won’t. There’s no Eddie. Soon there’ll be no Alejandro. After that, we’re clean.”

  “Unless they find the others,” Rocco said. “That could blow this thing up.”

  “What are the odds of that?” Austin asked.

  “Odds are for fools. What if Alejandro and Eddie fucked up all of them?”

  “We’ll have a chat with Alejandro,” Lefty said.

  “And what? Move them all? To where? Better to let things lie.” Rocco sighed and picked up a cold cigar from his ashtray, clamping it between his teeth.

  “Alejandro is the only one who knows where the others are,” Austin said. “Might be better to know that before he goes down. Just in case.”

  “Maybe crank up the cover plan?” Lefty asked.

  Rocco shook his head. “Only as a last resort.”

  CHAPTER 26

  FRIDAY 4:39 P.M.

  T-TOMMY MET US INSIDE THE MAIN ENTRANCE OF THE HUNTSVILLE Memorial Medical Center. The eight-story, nine-hundred-bed, tertiary care facility had a strong association with the massive University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Medicine, where I had labored for nearly four years.

  A receptionist sat behind a desk along one wall of the spacious lobby. She smiled as
we approached.

  After I told her we had an appointment with Dr. Liz Mackey, she called for an escort and motioned that we should sit in a bank of chairs across from her desk. We did.

  While we waited, I gave Claire the details of our visit with Drummond and Cooksey. She took notes in her special shorthand, scratches that only she could decipher, and shook her head more than once. She also said, “You’re shitting me,” a couple of times. I wasn’t. Wished I was, but bizarre was bizarre no matter how you packaged it.

  As I finished, a friendly young woman appeared, introduced herself as Monica Walters, and led us to the elevators. On the third floor, we followed her into the doctors’ lounge near the entrance to the hospital’s surgical suites.

  “Coffee and donuts,” Monica said, indicating a corner table with a coffeepot and two boxes of Krispy Kremes. “Help yourself. We have soft drinks, too.”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “I’ll let Dr. Mackey know you’re here.” She left the room.

  T-Tommy poured a cup of coffee and grabbed a donut.

  A minute later, Liz came in. She wore blue surgical scrubs beneath a white coat, short blonde hair peeking from the edges of her surgical cap. A mask dangled around her neck. We hugged and said all the hellos and how-are-yous, and then Liz said she had only a few minutes. Crazy day. Her third open-heart surgery coming up.

  “We’ll make this short,” I said. “We need to know about this new minimally invasive surgery.”

  She nodded and waited for me to go on.

  “What we say here isn’t for public consumption,” I said. “Not yet, anyway. Okay?”

  “I understand,” Liz said.

  “The corpses of two nineteen-year-old women were found this morning. Buried in a rural wooded area. The autopsies showed that both had had several procedures. All done by this method. Appendix, gallbladder, a kidney removed. They apparently didn’t need any of them.” I spread my hands on the table. “The procedures were done a few days apart. Over about a week.”

  “Did they die from surgical complications?” Liz asked.

  I shook my head. “Dr. Cooksey said all the procedures were perfect. Her word. Doesn’t know the cause of death yet.”

  Liz stared at me, apparently trying to take it all in. “I’m not sure I understand. Are you telling me that over a few days, two young women had several buttonhole procedures, all done correctly, yet they died and were buried out in the boonies?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why? Who?” she asked.

  “That’s what we want to know. Maybe some crazy doctor. Maybe some hospital trying to dump its mistakes.”

  “Patients don’t just disappear. Too many people involved. And a surgeon couldn’t do a bunch of unnecessary procedures on a nineteen-year-old without making some waves.”

  “So,” Claire said, “that brings us to who’s capable of doing this stuff, and why is it done?” She flipped her notepad open.

  “Let me answer the why first,” Liz said. “Dub already knows all this, but you might not. It’s called minimally invasive since we make small incisions instead of the long ones of the past. If we can do the procedure through a small incision, the patient suffers less pain, fewer complications, and heals much faster.”

  “What surgeries are done this way?” Claire asked as she scribbled.

  “Everything from coronary bypass surgery to gallbladders to appendectomies.”

  “What’s the actual procedure?”

  “We make three or four incisions, an inch or two long, and insert cannulas through each opening and into the body. Through the abdominal wall and into the abdominal cavity for an appendectomy or gallbladder or any of the other abdominal procedures we do. We then pass fiber-optic lights and cameras and specially designed instruments through these tubes and work that way.”

  T-Tommy wiped donut sugar from his hands with a napkin. “How big are these tubes?”

  Liz held up her thumb. “About this size.”

  “How do you get a gallbladder or a kidney out through something that small?”

  Liz smiled. “A gallbladder, once you remove the bile juice and any stones that might be inside, collapses into nothing. Like a deflated balloon. Kidneys we simply cut into smaller pieces and remove them a chunk at a time.”

  “Sounds tricky,” Claire said.

  “Can be.”

  “Can any surgeon do this?” T-Tommy asked. Liz laughed. “Only the good ones.”

  I smiled. “Most of this is after my time. What’s the training program for this?”

  “It’s part of virtually every surgical training program now. Surgeons who have been out in the real world for several years can go back for a two- to three-week training session, then work with a surgeon who already has the skills and get up to speed fairly quickly.”

  I nodded. “Besides you, do any other surgeons on staff here do this stuff?”

  “I think a dozen at last count. Two of our older surgeons went down to Birmingham for training. A couple of the other guys and I have been working with them. They’ll be credentialed soon.”

  “Anyone at any other hospitals in the area?”

  “A few.”

  “Other than the tools you use, does it require any other special equipment?” Claire asked. “I mean, do patients undergoing this type of surgery need any special stuff afterward?”

  “Fact is, they need less. The hospital stay is typically much shorter.”

  “Can it be done at any hospital?” T-Tommy asked. “Or maybe at one of those small surgical centers?”

  “If the procedure can be done by any technique at the facility, then it can be done this way. For example, any hospital could do an appendectomy this way, but only a hospital equipped to do open-heart procedures could do those regardless of the technique.”

  “This may sound odd,” I said, “but could you do it in a basement or a garage?”

  “Not a very sterile environment,” Liz said.

  “If you want the victim to survive,” I said. “Maybe death was the real purpose.”

  Liz raised an eyebrow. “You mean like some psycho killer?”

  “Perhaps. But if so, this guy isn’t just some off-the-shelf psycho. The skill and equipment used on these young ladies aren’t found in some back alley or crack house.”

  “So you’re thinking this is some doctor gone awry?”

  “Awry is being a shade on the kind side,” I said. “Whoever did this split from the family tree a long time ago.”

  “Amen,” T-Tommy added.

  “The world’s full of psychos who thrill kill. We’ve hunted down a couple ourselves.” I looked in T-Tommy’s direction.

  “I ain’t never seen anything quite like this,” T-Tommy said. “Only good thing is that the skill needed here shrinks the suspect list more than a little.”

  “Besides an MD or a med student, who else might be able to do this?” I asked. “A nurse? Medic? Vet?”

  Liz drained her coffee cup, walked to the coffeemaker, and refilled her cup. She leaned against the counter. “Not likely. If these surgeries were indeed perfect, then the person who performed them has surgical skill and experience. Can’t pick that up from a book. Or TV.”

  “What if it isn’t a doctor or a med student,” Claire said. “What if he’s in another area of the medical industry?”

  Everyone looked at her, waiting for her to continue.

  Claire laid down her pad and pen and laced her fingers, resting them on the table. “I have a friend who’s a technical rep for a pacemaker company. When the doctor puts in a pacemaker, she goes into the operating room and helps with testing the pacer. She told me that she had seen so many pacers done she could do one herself by now.”

  Liz nodded. “So the question is, could someone learn to do this type of surgery simply by watching?”

  “Exactly,” Claire said. “I assume you have manufacturers’ reps in the OR when you’re using their equipment.”

  “Sometimes. When it’
s something new and we need to learn the nuances of a particular piece of equipment. Once we get comfortable, the reps disappear until they have another product to sell.”

  “Do you think a rep could learn to use this equipment while watching you and other surgeons?” Claire asked.

  Liz paused, stared into the cup of coffee she held, and then said, “I don’t see how. The real work goes on inside. The rep couldn’t see that.”

  “Just a thought,” Claire said.

  “I mean, it’s possible. But if the surgeries on these two girls were as skillful as you described, he’d have to practice on animals or cadavers beforehand. Couldn’t just up and do it.”

  I hadn’t thought of that before. Of course, whoever did this would have to practice. Doctor or not. “Let’s say he did. Where would he get cadavers?”

  “There are several companies that supply them. When people donate their bodies for medical research, this is where they go. They then sell them to equipment manufacturers and medical schools where they are used in research and teaching.”

  “Easy to get?” T-Tommy asked.

  Liz shook her head. “Very tightly regulated. You have to show why you need the corpses, what you are going to do with them, and account for each and every one.”

  “They could be stolen,” T-Tommy said.

  “Anything can be stolen,” Liz said. “Including bodies, I’d suspect.”

  “Or bought,” Claire said. “Remember the stolen body parts ring at UCLA a few years ago?”

  “That shook up the entire industry,” Liz said.

  T-Tommy finished his coffee, crushed the cup, and tossed it into a nearby trash can. “Working through these hollow tubes sounds tedious.”

  “And backbreaking. Standing there, hunched over, both arms working.” Liz smiled. “If I can ever convince the administration to buy one of the new robotic machines, I can sit down on the job.”

  “Robotic?” Claire asked. “You mean like ‘Danger, Will Robinson’?”

  Liz laughed. “Not exactly. Robotic is actually a misnomer. A surgeon still does the work; he just doesn’t stand over the patient or use his hands. At least not for the actual surgery. Let’s say he wants to take out a gallbladder. Just as with the buttonhole technique, he’ll first make a few small incisions in the abdomen, slip in the cannulas, and pass through the lights, cameras, and instruments he’ll need. The difference is that he then sits across the room at a console, which has a monitor that displays the images. He uses handles to operate. His assistants will change out instruments as needed. A scalpel, a cautery, a staple. Whatever the procedure calls for. Sure saves the back.”