Module E, Professional Visits Room Five, had two seats for cops and lawyers on one side of a molded plastic table and one on the other side for the inmate. Four blank walls. It was smaller than a two-bunk jail cell. McMichael stood with his back to the windowed door. Jimmy Thigpen, down on hands and knees to inspect the table bottom, rose with a grunt and a shy smile.
"We're secure," he said. "Unless they've got a mike in the heater vent."
"They can't use anything you say here in court, Jimmy. You know that."
"They can use it a few other places, though."
"I've got a deal for you, straight from Gerald Dale's office. Simple, straightforward, a good one for you."
"Oh?"
"Everything you know about the organs- the Axelgaards, Bland, the people at the Mexico end and the people stateside. Everything you know about Pete Braga. You give me the basics right now and fill in the details later in sworn depositions, Jimmy. Dale will give you immunity, if he likes what he hears."
Thigpen looked at him matter-of-factly. "But you can't file on me in any of that border stuff. Everybody's dead, and you never saw me do a thing."
"Victor did."
Worry crossed Thigpen's face as he tried to guess the weight of Victor's testimony. "What about my money?"
"Asset forfeiture. You lose it."
Thigpen smiled his boy's smile. McMichael noted that he had put on even more jailhouse weight. His shirt was tight on him around the middle.
"Drop the grass and the solicitation?"
"No."
In fact, Dale had given McMichael the solicitation charge to bargain with.
"I've been in here for forty-five days, Tom."
"It all goes toward your time."
"Naw," said Jimmy. "I'll talk to walk."
"I want everything about those runs."
"Drop the women and dope, Mick."
McMichael nodded. "The women, okay. But you're stuck on the dope, Jimmy. It's our way of saving a little face. And making sure you don't get back into law enforcement."
"What's my guarantee?"
"You don't get one."
Thigpen studied McMichael, then nodded, his smile coming back faintly. He sat on one of the small benches. "I came into it late, when I got the job from Pete. Before, they were using a van. But if something went wrong with the schedules the van would be easy to search."
"In case you didn't get Martin Axelgaard as the inspector."
"Right."
"How'd you get started?"
"I got talking to Mason one night. We knew each other from the cop golf league. When I told him about taking the new cars down to TJ for budget leather, well… one thing led to another. Pete didn't care that I brought Mason along. To Pete, he was just another tough cop keeping the cars secure."
"Where did the organs come from?"
"Just from poor people. Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador. Places like that."
"How much were they worth?"
"We paid three hundred and fifty each. Only marked them up to a grand to undercut the Indian suppliers. That made us about a hundred thousand profit if we got twelve coolers' worth. The first five or six runs, it was less. The first time, we only had twenty-four and half of them went bad. Then we got the hang of it. The trick is this packing solution they invented at the University of Wisconsin. Viaspan. They had to be perfect organs- you couldn't sell a bad one. Young teenagers have the best."
"What was Bland's job?"
Thigpen shook his head. "He was just shaking us down. Pete ratted to Bland when Victor said something that made him curious. Pete hired a private eye, who followed us down and back. Stupid. They all figured drugs. Bland had us cold. I had to do something so I offered to cut him in. Said he'd think about it. I was surprised he took the deal. But it was a lot of money for doing nothing."
"How much?"
"Twenty thousand a week. He didn't actually do anything except bullshit Pete for as long as he could. He got Pete to believe they were working an interagency sting. And the sting was taking time."
"When Bland couldn't stall him any longer, what did he do?"
Thigpen shrugged. "The second I heard about Pete, I figured Bland for it."
"He never said anything about that?"
"Not to me, but I was in here, Tom. Maybe to the brothers."
McMichael thought of Sally Rainwater, sitting in the women's jail out in Santee. "Do you have any evidence at all that he killed Pete?"
"No. But I heard his wife might make it. She might know some things."
McMichael imagined questioning Mitzi Bland as to her husband's role in the murder of Pete Braga. Barbara Givens's early questions- asked as the doctors were shooing her out of the ICU- had led Barbara to believe that Mitzi knew something about her husband's second career. McMichael wondered what Mitzi had thought about putting the revolver in her robe pocket. I did what you told me to, hon. McMichael didn't look forward to interviewing Mitzi Bland. Another task of low order, he thought, another homicide shitpile to dig through.
"Who's this Dr. Morese?"
Jimmy's mouth hung open. "You got him, too?"
"Our helos forced him down on Imperial Beach."
Thigpen looked crushed, as if Morese were somehow infallible or superhuman.
"French Canadian," Thigpen said. "A medical doctor but didn't like medicine. Went into funeral homes, selling off parts mail order, but now he's got contacts at the hospitals and universities all over the world. Most of the things went over to the Middle East, is what I heard. We were competing with the Indian suppliers, like I said. Ours were cheaper and hardly any HIV or hepatitis. Better stuff."
Stuff, thought McMichael. Parts. Units. Items. Merchandise. Product. "How did you get the people at Diaz Leather into the loop?"
"Money, Tom. How do you think?"
McMichael could feel his anger rising. "Did Bland kill Courtney Gonzalez?"
"I don't know for sure, but it makes sense. Victor- well, you know Victor. No telling what he'd say. He's just a boy."
"Then why didn't Bland kill him, too?"
"Beats me. Maybe he had a soft spot for Victor, like I did."
It made no sense to McMichael that Bland would silence Angel but not Victor, soft spot or not.
"But why did you keep taking Victor down to TJ with you?"
"At first it was to implicate him, keep Pete off our backs. After Pete got it, though, they wanted Victor close. No reason to leave him out, maybe making him mad, and him getting Charley Farrell or Patricia involved. They figured that as long as he was happy he wouldn't be telling any tales."
"Charley know?"
Thigpen shook his head. "Just us, and for a while, Pete."
"Patricia?"
"No."
"Garland?"
Thigpen shook his head again, this time with an air of annoyance. McMichael looked hard into Jimmy's eyes, saw no contrition at all.
"Jimmy, you picked on people so poor and desperate they'd sell parts of their bodies for three hundred bucks?"
"Three fifty. That's a lot of money in some places."
"You ever meet one of them?"
Thigpen looked puzzled. "No. Why?"
"How could you do that?"
"Nobody made them sell. It was their choice. I heard the facilities were real clean, it was easy."
"What facilities?"
"Mobile unit. Drove around village to village, like a bookmobile."
McMichael pictured it: some broken-down paramedic van limping down a dusty village road, leaving a wake of dazed and wounded villagers a few hundred dollars richer. The postop care was probably fantastic.
"I'd send you down for all of it, if it was up to me."
Thigpen looked surprised. "At least you get to hang Bland. Even though he's dead."
"I'd rather hang you."
Thigpen shrugged and looked away. "Yeah. I let a lot of people down."
"You got Rawlings killed."
"I just drove the damned truck, Mick."
"And Bland and the brothers and two San Ysidro cops. And Mitzi, with her insides torn apart, maybe paralyzed, maybe won't even make it."
"I do feel bad," he said sincerely.
"And you cut open all those people for parts."
"They made money. And look at all the good people we saved. Kidneys, man- God gave us two so we could help each other out. It's not all bad, and I just drove. I wasn't out there with the damned scalpel."
McMichael pushed off the wall and backhanded Jimmy hard in the face. Jimmy looked back at him with wet eyes and a red cheek and McMichael hooked him in the side and put him down. Thigpen curled into a ball, gasping. Then he made a breathless shriek that didn't sound fully human.
"Kidney shot," said McMichael. "But don't worry, you've got two of them."
Charley Farrell called just before noon to say he had found no additional wine-colored SUV's sold or leased in the last year. "Sorry," he said.
"Thanks for trying."
"That was one heck of a shoot-out at the border, according to the news."
"It was grim."
"How many died?"
"Five."
"And that captain."
"Rawlings, yes."
A moment of respect.
"Well. Detective, I don't know if this helps, but Garland Hansen- that's Patricia's husband- he checked out an Expedition a few months back, drove it a while, then turned it back in, early January. It was Bordeaux red- Detroit's idea for a paint name. Those dealer demos don't show up on the lease or sale books. So, maybe talk to him."
"He turned it in when?"
"See here… January the fourth. Saturday."
"Why so soon?"
"He picked up a rock or something, shattered out the window. Said he didn't want the car back because the seats weren't comfortable and the mileage was lousy."
Or maybe she was sitting in a car, passenger side. The driver just reached out and bap, bap.
"Which window?"
"Right side, front."
Garland, thought McMichael- anxious husband of Patricia, soon to lose half of the community property in a divorce, and all of what might come to him and Patricia after Pete's death. Garland- unhappy in life, seeing his company failing and his wife packing her bags. Garland- alleged protector of Victor, but protecting him from what? A dangerous woman?
"Give me the VIN on that car, Charley. And the date Garland took it home."
He called Patricia next, under the pretense of clarifying some of the probate terms of her grandfather's will. He asked if she was going ahead with the divorce proceeding, which she was. In fact, she was moving some things out of her and Garland's house this morning, while her husband was up in San Francisco on business.
"Need a hand with the heavy stuff?" McMichael asked.
"I could use that," she said. She gave him the address, told him she'd be there in an hour, offered to buy lunch. "I'm really sorry to hear about your captain and all that bloody business at the border. And really thankful it wasn't you who caught a bullet, Tom."
McMichael told Hector he was going to help Patricia move some things, then signed out of the Homicide/Robbery/Special Investigations Unit. He walked past Captain Don Rawlings's closed door, which was completely covered in sheets of black construction paper. Rawlings's nameplate showed through a box cut from the paper. On the floor was a flower arrangement- orchids wrapped around a gnarled branch, black rocks in a black ceramic bowl, some tufts of greenery showing through the rocks.
Look what thirty-four years gets you, thought McMichael. He touched the paper with his palm.