Oksana helped her niece onto the surgical table, murmuring reassurances in a foreign tongue. Kateryna was young—maybe twenty-five—with fresh-faced prettiness.
"When was the surgery?" I asked, pulling on gloves.
"Tuesday. Last Tuesday." Oksana wrung her hands. "At Brighton Medical Center. Free clinic for new immigrants. They said gallbladder removal, routine, she'd be fine in few days."
Brighton Medical Center. My hands stilled for a moment before I forced them to continue their examination. The same hospital where the enforcer had been shot three nights ago. The same hospital he'd clearly been investigating when someone put a bullet in him.
"I need to see the incision sites," I told Kateryna in Ukrainian, keeping my voice gentle. "Can you lift your shirt?"
She nodded, wincing as she pulled up the hem of her t-shirt. I expected to see the typical laparoscopic incisions for gallbladder surgery—four small cuts, each less than an inch, placed strategically for camera and instrument access. They were there, neat and healing normally.
But there was also something else.
A larger incision along her right flank, maybe four inches, partially healed but angry red at the edges. The placement was wrong for gallbladder access. Wrong for any abdominal surgery except—
My blood turned to ice water in my veins.
"Kateryna," I said, keeping my voice carefully neutral, "did they tell you they were removing anything besides your gallbladder?"
She shook her head, confused. "Just gallbladder. Why? Is something wrong?"
I palpated her abdomen, feeling for the familiar landmarks. Liver edge where it should be. Spleen normal. But when I pressed deeper on the right side, searching for the inferior pole of the kidney, there was nothing. Just empty space where an organ should be.
I moved my hands to her back, palpating from behind. The left kidney was there, normal size and position. The right side—nothing. A void where there should have been the distinctive firmness of renal tissue.
They'd taken her kidney.
The room seemed to tilt for a moment. I gripped the edge of the table, forced myself to breathe normally. Kateryna was watching my face with growing alarm, and I couldn't afford to panic her. Not when she was already fighting infection, already traumatized, already victim to something so evil I wanted to scream.
"The surgery was more complex than they told you," I said carefully. "There are signs of additional procedures. Did you sign consent forms?"
"Many papers," Oksana answered for her. "All in English. They said standard forms, sign here, here, here. Kateryna's English is not good yet."
Of course. Target the vulnerable. The ones who couldn't read what they were signing, couldn't advocate for themselves, couldn't hire lawyers when they woke up missing pieces.
I forced my hands to stay steady as I examined the surgical site more closely. The technique was professional—clean margins, proper layered closure. This wasn't some back-alley hack job. This was done by someone with real surgical training, someone who knew exactly how to extract a kidney while making it look like a complication of routine surgery.
"Is bad?" Kateryna asked in halting English, tears starting to spill down her cheeks. "I am dying?"
"No," I said firmly, switching back to Ukrainian. "You're not dying. You have an infection at the surgical site, but we can treat that. I'm going to give you antibiotics, strong ones. The infection should clear within a week."
I didn't tell her about the kidney. Couldn't figure out how to explain that she'd been harvested like a crop, that someone hadsold a piece of her for probably a hundred and fifty thousand dollars while she lay unconscious, trusting them to heal her.
I prepared a syringe of ceftriaxone, same antibiotic I'd given the enforcer. As I administered the injection, I thought about him again. Maybe he'd known what was happening at Brighton Medical. Had tried to stop it. Had nearly died for it.
Or maybe he was involved. Maybe he was the cause of this.
"Take these twice a day for ten days," I told Oksana, handing her a bottle of amoxicillin. "Every pill, even if she feels better. If the fever gets worse or she develops severe back pain, take her to Brooklyn Methodist, not Brighton Medical. Understand? Not Brighton Medical."
"Why not Brighton?" Oksana asked, sharp despite her panic. "Is where they did surgery."
"Because Brighton Medical is where this happened," I said quietly. "And they might try to finish what they started."
Understanding dawned in Oksana's eyes. She pulled Kateryna against her chest, murmuring prayers in her home language while her niece wept without fully understanding why.
After they left, I stood in my empty clinic, staring at the examination table. Somehow I knew that the enforcer was involved. I just didn’t know which side he was on.
I had to do something.
