Then she cleared her throat. “But we did get something else, not that Stanton was gonna share it until the morning meeting. Another ID has come in on some remains in the dumping site.” She tapped the folder in her hand. “Victim is Ignacio Beltrán-Orduña.”
I leaned back, letting that settle. The name meant nothing—and I knew every bastard my father had helped slip past arrest or a prison door.
“Ignacio would’ve been fifty this year. Filed as missing out of Sonora—unsolved. Ran his name through databases, got a single hit on cartel affiliation.” That pulled me forward. “Last seen crossing north with cartel runners. Guns, drugs, no sniff of organ trafficking, but we forwarded it all to H-STOC, and the ball is in their court now as to whether they share information.”
Not the first time cartels had been pulled up, but the hairs rose at the back of my neck. My phone buzzed in my pocket as Tess walked away, and I tugged it out, half expecting it to be Doc, because fuck if I could get my brain to work right.
Caleb:Call me
I didn’t even bother calling him to ask what he wanted. I glanced at the clock—an hour until the end of my day stuck here doing admin—and I clocked out with the excuse of a headache and instead headed to the Cave.
Caleb was half-buried in screens, coffee gone cold beside him. The light from his monitors cast a ghostly pallor over his face. I was here because I couldn’t sleep, unsettled, thinking about Doc, about the case, and all the morally gray things I’d done in the last few weeks alone.
“What do you have for me?” I asked.
“I’ve got a coroner update on a new ID,” Caleb said without looking up.“Ignacio Beltrán-Orduña. We’re deep diving on him now. Chest-opening, rib-cracking, internal organs-stealing violence on the parts of the remains they’ve managed to isolate. Ignacio was ID’d through a titanium fixation plate in his left clavicle, the serial number still intact despite the damage, traceable back to the hospital that implanted it.”
“Let me guess, St. Patrick’s.”
“Yahtzee. And something that will take a bit longer for your colleagues to figure out? The orthopedic surgeon’s name, which has been redacted from the paper records with a black pen—amateurs—is Dr. Oscar Dryden-Wells, i.e., Dryden-Wells senior.” Caleb threw me a knowing look. “I’m seeing a pattern here.”
I nodded. “I’m assuming you didn’t stop there.”
Caleb grinned, in his element. “Nope. I pulled out all surgeries and consults attributed to Oscar Dryden-Wells, and—get this—he’s been cutting for over thirty years. Thousandsof cases. But when I filtered for the window that matches the remains we’re finding, late 90s into the early 2000s? Things get interesting.”
“Like?”
“We’ve got the usual stuff—orthopedic repairs, family photos with kids whose bones he fixed, grateful parents hugging him. All clean. All routine. And then there’s this… side list. Pro bono cosmetic work—at least, that was what he labeled it. Except surgeons don’t call it that, and none of it lines up with hospital-funded charity cases.”
“Off books?”
“Kind of. I narrowed it down to twenty-three patients. Eleven of them? Ex-cons with morally dubious characters. All of them signed out AMA. Spread over five years. And every single one of those AMA discharges corresponds to a nice chunk of unaccounted-for money showing up somewhere it shouldn’t. I’ve traced what I can, but I’m flagging it for Lyric; he’s a genius at digging up the buried parts.”
I let out a low whistle. “You think Dryden-Wells senior pretended to work on them, then sold them off for parts?”
“Yep.”
“What’s the betting those names get IDs in the dumping ground?”
Caleb didn’t miss a beat. “I’d take that bet.”
“And what do we have on those specific eleven?”
He gestured to a new board, up next to our dirtbag board, entitledThe Case of the Dumped Bodies, featuring Levi.Asshole. There was a list of names, color-coded, none of which meant anything to me.
“Two MC, five LA gang, four unknown affiliation, all eleven had done time.”
“So, our surgeon takes on pro-bono cases, puts these people under, and then moves them on for parts to… whom exactly?”
“That’s where it gets interesting.” Caleb scrolled to another screen and pointed at it. “South of the border,” he said, and sat back in the chair. “Rich people who need spare parts—think enclaves with money to burn. Places like Polanco in Mexico City, San Pedro Garza García in Monterrey, and the gated cliffside estates around Los Cabos. The kind of neighborhoods where cash buys anything, no questions asked.”
“Who moved the parts?”
“I’ll give you one guess which cartel paid Dryden-Wells.”
Fuck.
Águilas.
