“I did,” Poremba said. “This is more of a homemade deal. Something I did on vacation.”
Now she understood where this was headed, why she wasn’t in the office.
“I think we call that inadmissible,” Kristy said.
“It’s not illegal to rent a home,” Poremba said, “and set up a recording device to pick up birdsong. Do you know anything about birdsong?”
“Not a thing.”
“I’ve started birding. It’s about the only activity I do these days that isn’t directly involved with the very worst people on the planet. Las Vegas is an excellent place for birding.” He paused. “Summerlin alone has over three hundred species of birds. Did you know that?”
“I hope to never know that.”
“You can see why one might rent a home and train a camera on the surrounding foliage. If one were very into birding. Which I am. Scroll to page 63.”
Kristy did. There was a photo of a van marked LifeCore pulling through the front gates of the mortuary, time-stamped 9:02 a.m., another time-stamped 12:19 p.m., another at 4:17 p.m., another still at 9:45 p.m. “What am I looking at here?”
“LifeCore is a tissue bank,” Poremba said. “They use the mortuary to harvest organs and tissue for donation.”
Something began to tickle at the back of Kristy’s mind.
“That’s illegal?”
“No,” Poremba said, “that’s legal.”
She kept scrolling. Ran into pages of invoices. That didn’t seem right. Kristy knew well enough about the black market for major organs—the urban legend of coming to Las Vegas and waking up without a kidney wasn’t started out of the blue. At a different time in the late 1990s, Russian and Chinese gangsters had set up chop shops in the desert, using call girls as the lure for young, healthy men with good bones and organs. It was some horror-movie shit, but it was true. These invoices were from companies all over the country, plus some overseas. That couldn’t be right. These people couldn’t be so stupid as to put their criminal enterprise on paper . . . and then, it appeared, pay taxes on it. Or maybe that was the way to do it. Pay taxes, hope no one notices. “These bills and invoices to third parties, what are those?”
“LifeCore can’t sell body parts per se, but they can charge for the harvesting, storage, prep, cleaning, delivery, everything but the actual human form,” Poremba explained. “They can then pay the funeral home for their time and work.”
“Who is their white market?” she asked.
“Companies that make surgical implants. Plastic surgery supply companies. Hospitals doing major transplants. All the way down to companies that make wigs from human hair.”
Kristy pulled the wig from her head. Looked at the label: “Made with real human hair. Product of India.” The company’s name was Enchanted Hair Enhancements. She’d paid a grand for it, online. She dropped it into her purse.
“Dental offices?” Kristy asked.
“Of course,” Poremba said.
“Shit,” she said. “Okay, where does it all fall apart?”
“Say X company needs a bunch of good femurs, but so does Y company, because maybe they have a government contract, putting soldiers back together. LifeCore goes out to bid for their harvesting services, and suddenly it’s a competitive situation. Who is willing to pay the most for good, clean, young femurs? Could be a plastic surgery operation jumps in, too, and then they start offering performance bonuses.”
“That happens?”
“That happens. You get us five hundred good donors, we’ll pay you an additional $5,000 per donation. Maybe $10,000. Maybe $15,000 for some really good corneas. Tissue bank wants to make money, they need volume. Because the regulation is on the tissue bank’s side, not the supplier’s side. Supplier can sell almost anywhere once they’ve turned a donation into some other product. Cadaver bones for hip replacements can be sold overseas, as long as they come from a legitimate firm. So they need bodies. But the fact is, that’s all mostly legal. Unethical, but mostly legal.”
Kristy whistled. “How’d you get on this?” she asked.
“We busted an outfit out of New Jersey called BioSciTech that was suspected of funneling money to Al-Qaeda.”
“Were they?”
“They were Muslim. At this point, it’s enough to get a warrant,” Poremba said. “Plus their visas were out of date and so now they’re in Gitmo getting waterboarded twice a day, so who knows.”
“We’re about a week from them opening camps, Lee.”
Poremba said, “What do you think Gitmo is?”
Kristy was Jewish and her whole family had been military, her father teaching them that they were fight-in-the-streets Jews, not hide-in-the-attic Jews. It was an important distinction even today. What she saw happening to Muslims in the country had her worried. The mob always came for the weakest part of the social order, and Muslims were already fairing horribly. Two mosques in Las Vegas had been burned in nine months. This thing at the Commercial Center wasn’t going to make life any easier, for anyone.
Kristy kept clicking. More photos. More invoices. A transcript of a recording, all of it redacted. Oh boy. “What’s the organized crime nexus?”
“BioSciTech was getting bodies from some shady figures, including the Russian mob, who were robbing funeral homes and cemeteries and university research labs, going in at night and cutting out whatever it was BioSci needed. They’d retrofitted a warehouse, turned it into a giant freezer, filled it with body parts. Sound familiar?”
“Oh my god,” Kristy said. “How’d it get found?”
“They hired a janitorial service,” Poremba said.
“No.”
“Seventy-two-year-old Guatemalan lady walked into the police station with a bag of human heads,” Poremba said. “Thing about BioSci, the guy who ran it, he was smart. He had a for-profit side and also a nonprofit, moving body parts for research and educational purposes, which isn’t regulated. So while he’s in Gitmo, his sister, she’s still running the nonprofit business, and we can’t touch her because instead of moving parts to transplant firms, she’s selling spines to Harvard for medical research. They don’t have the same volume as they had before, but for the research and education, it’s about quality, not quantity, and they’ve got a nice deal going with a funeral home in the good part of town. High-class skin.”
“I’m gonna tear that pink sticker off my license. No one gets shit off of me.”
“I already did,” Poremba said.
“How’s LifeCore involved?”
