Authors: Rex Burns
To get whole organs—baby organs—instead of just the tissue, you needed a whole child, not just the bits and pieces vacuumed out during an abortion. A seven-or eight-month-old fetus, alive in the womb, organs already formed and working, heart a rapid thump through the stethoscope, and then a cesarean, a quick cut for the desired organ—transport it to the waiting patient, and everybody’s happy. Except the mother, but then her organs and bones and flesh could turn a tidy profit, too. You only needed a pregnant woman that no one would miss.
“How do we get inside the Antibodies building, Bunch?”
“Uh huh. I figured you might want to do that.” We both thought of what we had seen: a compact building whose windowless brick wall faced the street through the heavy chain-link fence that guarded the grounds. “Right now, I’d say we go in through the roof. But you can bet your Aunt Hetty’s long johns they’ve got some humongous protection around that place.”
P
ERCY
A
HERN WAS
an ex-Secret Service agent. I had been assigned to work with him when I finished up at Bellesville, and that year’s tour had been the best of the lot. After serving his twenty, he—like a lot of ex-agents—set up his own investigation business; but his was in New York, where business was considerably better. We kept in touch—he did favors for us there; we did favors for him in the Rocky Mountain region. We both liked the arrangement better than going through the World Association of Detectives directory. For one thing, we trusted each other’s work; for another, if the favor didn’t involve a lot of time or overhead, it was done for free—a consideration more important some times than others. This was not one of the others. I called him and left a message on his tape recorder for any information on Empire State Hospital and their request for an Rh null donor. Please expedite if possible.
Bunch, too, had a telephone call to make and I listened while he asked the health service if Sid Vicious had shown any signs of rabies. Hanging up, he smiled. “We can pick him up. He’s clean as a hound’s tooth!”
“It’s a relief to me, too, Bunch. I wouldn’t want you chewing my shin.”
“I wouldn’t chew that soup bone if I did have rabies. Nobody else would, either.” He patted his thigh. “It was my leg the dog went after: quality and quantity in massive portions.”
I gave him advice on what to do with his massive portions, and we spent an hour or so getting the gear organized for the evening’s excursion. When I locked the office for the day, I swung downtown to the Denver Public Library and wandered through the medical section to do a little light reading. The University Medical Center library would have more texts, I knew, but they would probably be both too technical and too narrowly focused. What I wanted was an overview in layman’s language of the transplant technology and especially its business side.
I found almost nothing on the business aspect, but was luckier with the medical. One tome let me know that the total number of organ transplants rose to a hundred thousand in 1988 while the estimated number of new people awaiting transplant each year hovered around thirty-three thousand, and that only about 10 percent of the year’s cadavers provided organs. A more technical book pointed out that the success rate on liver transplants from cadavers was 80 percent in the late 1980s, while the success rate on liver transplants from living donors was 95 percent. One text testified that the two principal aims in transplant surgery were to minimize the genetic distance between recipient and donor and to suppress the recipient’s immune rejection mechanism. The first area was one of genetic classification and matching rather than modification: select the best donor (a young healthy twin, if you were lucky), then compare the tissues of donor and recipient to find the closest match. The chapter went into greater detail about the methods and codes used to classify various kinds of tissue, and the several ways to type blood. It offered tables of probability of success based on various combinations. Rh null didn’t show up on any of the tables.
In the area of immune rejection, the history of the development of various chemicals to overcome the body’s rejection of foreign objects was detailed and buttressed with panels of statistics. In recent years, the discovery of cyclosporin A increased organ transplant success dramatically. However, no one agent seemed to be totally effective. So combinations of prednisone, Imuran, antilymph serum, monoclonal antibodies, and cyclosporin A provided a pharmacology that approached 90 percent effectiveness even in using cadaver grafts. The rate went up when the donor was alive. Unfortunately, the cost of medications was quite high, adding to the expense of already costly operations. It had reached a point, in fact, where economics was superseding medical considerations as the determinant of who would or would not receive a transplant.
The article ended in a plea for more research, recently cut back by government belt-tightening, and that led to the next book, one which focused on areas of medical exploration. One dramatic area was the transplantation of cells from a normal brain to brains that had lost the capacity to generate certain chemicals, and I recalled what Bunch had told me from his interview. Such diseases as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s showed short-term favorable reaction when chemical-producing cells were transplanted as islets; however, the long-term results tended to be negligible as the diseased brain gradually killed off the new cells and the disease reasserted itself. Research on why the transplanted cells died had been slowed by the government prohibition on using fetal tissue. Other similar research also affected by the prohibition included islet-cell transplant for certain types of diabetes and even some forms of trauma effects. Areas in which exploration was only in the beginning stages were the search for the chemical causes and cures of such psychological disorders as schizophrenia and severe depression, and the use of animal organs for xenograft transplant to human recipients. Recently, a genetically engineered protein was discovered to kill transplant-attacking cells in mice, offering hope of a cheaper, more effective way to overcome the body’s rejection system.
I didn’t find much on fetal tissue transplants or on the clearinghouse business. But the information I did find supported what Bunch had reported, and led to the same conclusion about the possibilities for major profit by private scientific laboratories, especially those who might ignore the NIH prohibition.
What it boiled down to was a tremendous industry of research, application, and development that promised unimaginable benefits for tens of thousands of diseased people. It also showed a very expensive and often ill-governed process involving many, many people in public and private institutions, not all of whom would be in it for purely altruistic reasons. In fact, several major drug manufacturers here and abroad were investing millions in the chemical areas of transplant research, in the hopes of making billions in return. Reputations for the researchers and vast profits for the sponsors were there to be won, and because of this there was a temptation not to look too closely at the means of achievement.
The hours hunched over the library table had made me stiff, and I stopped at the health club to stretch and work up a sweat on the lifting machines and to jog around the track until the manager flicked the lights to tell the few remaining clients it was closing time. Then I drove over to an Italian restaurant in the Highlands neighborhood where Bunch would be waiting.
Little Pepina’s was one of the few restaurants in Denver that always gathered a late-night crowd, and I had to search among the talking, eating faces for Bunch. Finally, he raised an arm from across the room and I worked my way over.
“Calamari to start with.” He dished a spoonful onto my waiting plate from the hot crockery bowl. “Then the pasta.” Between mouthfuls he told me that we were set for our visit to Antibodies. “Everything’s in the van. Got your stuff?”
I nodded, mouth full.
“Something else I figure we should do too.”
“What’s that?”
“Put the squeeze on Mrs. Chiquichano.”
“Why? And how?”
“ ‘Why,’ because I figure she’s the lead to Matheney. Think about it, Dev. She provides the raw material, Matheney buys it. But he’s sitting on a cushion; he’s a respected surgeon, lives in a nice house, pays a lot of taxes, has important friends, and so on. He’s not going to spill a thing, not unless we’ve got a clear case against him. Chiquichano’s the weak link.”
“She might not know what Matheney wanted those people for. Hell, even we don’t know that for certain—we’re just guessing.”
“I’ll put money on our guesses, Dev. I want her to tell us she took money for those people—and who she took it from.”
“Right. What we do is go up and ask her, she says yes, then we start to squeeze. Come on, Bunch!”
“Maybe it’ll take a late-night chat. Just the three of us in a cozy, secluded spot.”
“You want to break her kneecaps, that it?”
“It might not hurt if she thinks that.”
I shook my head and drained my wineglass. “She’d laugh at us while we did it and sue us for assault afterward. No, if we want to threaten that woman, we’ve got to have some ammunition to do it with. And to make it worth her while to cooperate.”
A string of spaghetti snaked into Bunch’s pursed lips with a slight sizzle, and he nodded and mopped his plate with a wad of bread. “Yeah. She’s a tough old buzzard, that’s for sure.”
Later, after we’d changed into our ninja outfits of dark clothes and tennis shoes, Bunch eased the van across the jolt of railroad tracks and into a shadow cast by the corner of one of the warehouses that dotted the manufacturing district. Across a ribbon of black that was the bed of the South Platte River, South Denver’s lights formed a curtain of glare against the eastern sky. Only occasional street bulbs gleamed dully among the buildings surrounding Antibodies Research, and here and there the splash of security lights illuminated walls and doorways. We had driven slowly past the small building three or four times from different directions, and now we’d walk around the perimeter fencing before we attempted to get in.
Bunch, a carefully muffled tool kit in a belt pack around his waist, led the way through the shadows. I carried the small satchel and followed. We located the gates and, watching for the stray patrol car that might cruise the neighborhood, traced out the tall fence with its strands of gleaming razor wire spiraling along the top. Bunch looked for any electronic sensors that could make the fence hot, but Antibodies apparently believed in wire alone. A heavy brass padlock held the small gate shut, and Bunch worked the tumblers in the dark, feeling his way with the pick and spring. When it clicked open, we eased through and listened for the sound of night watchmen. Only the steady whisper of distant cars speeding along elevated 1-25 and, in the warm darkness, a motorcycle winding up through the gears a block or two away. Bunch led me to a corner of the building where the shadows were deepest, and I fished the grapple and line from the satchel. It took two tosses, both achingly loud despite the electric tape wrapped around the metal shafts, before the hooks caught firmly on the edge of the flat roof.
“You think they have a night guard?” I asked.
“Naw. Place this small, maybe part of a large security patrol—check the fences, rattle the doors, respond to alarms. That should be it.” He tugged hard on the line. “You ready?”
“Go ahead.”
I held the line taut while he walked up the side of the building, pulling himself hand over hand up the rope. His large shadow slid out of sight and I heard the tiny crackle of pea gravel against the sky. In a couple minutes, he was back to wave me up. I followed, feeling the ache of my shoulder start again under the strain of the climb. At the top, I paused a minute to work my shoulder around and ease the tightness; then I pulled the line up and coiled it ready at the roofs edge.
The top of the building was a small plateau in the dimness, broken here and there by vent pipes and, near the middle, by a block that should house the stairway. Two or three skylights lifted like small glass tents, and one of them glowed faintly.
“Somebody’s inside, Bunch.”
He tiptoed over to peer through the glass, pulling on his rubber gloves. Then he crept back. “It’s from the lobby. Maybe they do have a security team.”
“Goddamn it, Bunch—”
“Hey, maybe they don’t, too. Relax, it’s in man’s nature to take chances.”
“Man’s nature can be behind bars, too.”
“ ‘When a spider plunges from a fixed point to its consequences, it always sees before it an empty space where it can never set foot, no matter how it wriggles.’ “
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Kierkegaard, literary type. Kierkegaard in the middle of the night on an empty roof. And we’re about to take the leap of faith.”
“Christ, Bunch, just do it. Don’t try to think—just go ahead and do it.”
“That’s what Kierkegaard says.”
We walked as lightly as possible to the roof door. From there we could see the back of the building and the delivery and storage compound sheltered by its walls. Near the rear entry, pale in the gloom, a closed white van sat nosed against the landing.
“Bunch, what kind of vehicle did Nestor get into?”
He looked over the edge where I pointed. “Yeah. A white van. With Colorado plates and no windows. Just like that one.”
“I think we’ve detected something.”
“It’s about goddamn time.”
The roof door was locked. Using his penlight, Bunch traced along the crack of the door and spotted, at the top, the coppery glint of a contact that would register an alarm if the door opened. He threaded a piece of aluminum foil around it and completed the circuit by taping it to the door’s metal frame. Then gingerly he picked the lock and the door swung out stiffly, its hinges making a muted groan despite the penetrating oil I’d squirted into them. We left it open and groped down black stairs into the chemical-smelling breeze that lifted from the building’s interior.
We were after records, primarily, but we also wanted pictures of equipment that might support our suspicions and provide evidence for a warrant if needed. Exactly what we would do if it was needed, I wasn’t sure. But that was one of those bridges that could wait. Right now, we had several thousand square feet of unfamiliar building to search in the dark, and with a possible security guard lurking somewhere. Bunch, a gliding shadow of thicker darkness ahead, pressed open a fire door at the end of the stairs, and we were in a long hallway that stretched into gloom. Wordless, we turned toward the front of the building and the offices.