‘Yes. I’ll let you know as soon as I do. It’ll be a while, but I’ll try to hurry the lab along as much as I can.’
9
Saturday. 6:00 P.M.
McCabe’s cell phone rang on the return trip from Augusta. ‘This is McCabe.’
‘Sergeant McCabe? This is Dr. Spencer. Phil Spencer. My wife said you called?’
‘Yes, Dr. Spencer, I was hoping you could spare me half an hour.’
‘Hattie said you wanted to talk to me about the Dubois girl,’ said Spencer. Without waiting for a response, he continued. ‘I’m not sure how I can help, but I’ll be happy to talk with you. I keep an office in the hospital, in the Levenson Heart Center. It’s one of the luxuries the hospital affords me. If you can come up in an hour or so, say seven o’clock, I can spare you some time. I should warn you, though, I may have to run out midconversation. I’m waiting on a harvest.’
‘A harvest?’
‘Yes. We’re harvesting a heart. For a transplant. Or, more accurately, a surgeon in New Hampshire is harvesting a heart.’
‘You call removing a heart “harvesting”?’ McCabe found the term a little creepy.
‘Yep. Organ recovery is more politically correct these days, but I’ve said harvesting for fifteen years, so I guess I always will. Anyway, once I get word the heart’s on its way, I won’t have much time to talk.’
McCabe glanced at his watch. Five after six. He could make it by seven if he drove straight through to the hospital. ‘See you at seven,’ he said.
It was a warm, pleasant evening, and he drove with the Bird’s retractable hardtop down, catching as much of the sunset as he could. There wasn’t much traffic, and he picked up his speed, taking 95 to 295. He reached the Congress Street exit for the hospital with time to spare.
He pulled the Bird into the crowded visitors’ parking lot and headed for the hospital. An oversized revolving door led into the main lobby. Spotting an information desk manned by elderly volunteers, McCabe lined up behind a gaggle of other visitors and, as he waited, studied the comings and goings of a wounded humanity. An old woman, legs wrapped in bandages, hobbled painfully toward a bench, where she sat heavily. A girl, no more than fifteen, perhaps as young as Casey, rode in a wheelchair, a dazed expression on her face, a newborn in her arms. An aide was pushing the chair toward the exit. A middle-aged couple, the girl’s parents, McCabe supposed, walked behind. White-coated students and residents scurried importantly around them, stethoscopes stuffed in pockets, badges pinned to chests.
Finally an elderly woman sporting a fluffy halo of white hair smiled up from behind the desk. ‘May I help you, sir?’
‘I’m here to see Dr. Spencer. Dr. Philip Spencer.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said. Her tone suggested Spencer was someone she held in high regard. ‘Dr. Spencer’s office is in the Levenson Heart Center in the Harmon Wing. Is he expecting you?’
‘Detective Michael McCabe.’ He opened his badge wallet. ‘Yes, he is expecting me.’
She phoned to announce McCabe’s arrival. She nodded, apparently to the person at the other end of the phone, and looked up again. ‘Walk down this hall as far as you can go, take a left, and then your first right. Take the elevator to the seventh floor. You’ll see the sign for the heart center. They’ll direct you from there. Shall I draw you a map?’
‘No, thank you, ma’am. I can remember your directions.’
McCabe found Spencer’s office without difficulty. At seven o’clock on a Saturday evening no assistants manned the outer office, but Spencer’s door was open. McCabe poked his head in and gently knocked. Philip Spencer was on the phone. Smiling, he waved McCabe in and directed him to a wing chair at the side of his mahogany desk. Covering the bottom of the phone, he mouthed the words, ‘Just take a minute.’
McCabe nodded and sat down. The furniture was conservative and expensive. Standard issue, he supposed, for senior executives of every stripe including, it seemed, the medical stripe.
Spencer looked even younger than McCabe expected and handsome enough to play a doctor on TV as well as in real life. He was tall and slender, his straight dark hair beginning to turn gray. His face and manner exuded WASP breeding. His deeply tanned skin suggested a lot of time spent either outdoors or in tanning salons, and McCabe didn’t see him as a tanning salon kind of guy. He was dressed in surgical scrubs.
McCabe glanced around. There was nothing out of place. The items on Spencer’s desk were precisely arranged. Medical journals on the coffee table were stacked in date order, no untidy edges sticking out. Photographs of Spencer, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, lined one wall. In several he was wearing scrubs, as he was today, standing with people McCabe assumed were grateful patients, happy to be leaving the hospital alive, new hearts beating, their leases on life, at least for the moment, renewed. In one photo Spencer was dressed in black tie and flanked by former president George H. W. Bush, Barbara Bush, and Maine’s Senator Olympia Snowe. A banner behind them indicated they were celebrating the twenty-year anniversary of the Levenson Heart Center.
To McCabe, the most interesting of the photos showed Spencer, maybe ten years younger, dressed in climbing gear, posing for the camera with a group of three other men all about the same age. A hand-lettered sign in front of them read DENALI SUMMIT. ALT: 20,320 FEET. WE MADE IT! Three of the climbers were smiling proudly into the camera, but Spencer’s face was turned away. He was standing second from the left, his eyes focused on the man standing next to him. McCabe thought there was something unexpected about Spencer’s expression. He couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
He scanned the rest of the framed photos. Interestingly, there were no shots of the doctor’s wife. None of family vacations. None of Spencer children, if any such children existed.
McCabe turned away from the photos and looked through the windows behind Spencer’s head. Far in the distance, he could see the distinctive triangular shape of Mount Washington silhouetted in the last of the sun’s setting rays. ‘Pretty spectacular, isn’t it?’ Spencer said, hanging up the phone. ‘One of the rewards of being on the top floor.’
He pushed some papers into a folder, flicked on his desk lamp, and leaned back in his chair. The light accented the shadows of Spencer’s deep-set, nearly black eyes as they studied McCabe. ‘Sorry about the delay,’ he said. ‘Now, how can I help you, Detective?’
‘What do you know about Katie Dubois’s death?’
‘Not much. Basically what I read in the paper last week after her disappearance. Katie Dubois was a sixteen-year-old high school girl from Portland. She was a good athlete. A pretty blond. She vanished after a night out in the Old Port. Last night Tom Shockley told me she’d been murdered.’
McCabe stiffened. ‘How do you know Shockley?’
‘We go to the same parties. That’s where we were last night. At a fund-raiser for Kids with Cancer at the Pemaquid Club.’
The Pemaquid Club was a tony in-town watering hole for Portland’s rich and well connected. It was housed in an elegant redbrick Georgian mansion on the city’s West Side. McCabe doubted there were many cops among its membership rolls.
‘What else did he tell you?’
‘Not much. We were having a drink together at the bar when he got a call about the murder. I could only hear his end of the conversation, so I asked him what’d happened. He said the girl’s body was found in that scrap yard on Somerset. Naked. Cut up. Maybe raped. Then he took out his phone again and called you and left a message. He said you’d be running the investigation and that he had a lot of confidence in you. That’s it. All I know.’
‘Did you watch Shockley’s news conference this morning?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘What I’m about to tell you is confidential.’
‘I understand.’
‘Katie Dubois died because her heart was cut out of her body.’ As he spoke, McCabe watched Spencer’s face
