The Recipient (32 page)

Casey lowered her arm, maintaining her grip on the crowbar as she listened for signs of life.

Satisfied that there were none, Casey stepped into the darkness.

She had failed to notice that, on the door frame, a small, green LED began to flash silently.

Casey moved deeper into the house. Like the yard, it seemed that this place had become little more than a storage facility. Through the sunroom from which she'd entered, Casey found herself in a living/dining room. Like the car, much of the furniture had been covered with sheets. The air was stale and tinged with the odour of rodent urine.

Beyond a hallway entrance, Casey stopped to run her finger along an exposed side table, tracing a line through a layer of dust. Particles were swept up into the air where they danced in the beam of the smartphone light.

A number of photo frames stood on this side table. Casey bent down to inspect them. One showed a portrait of a couple, roughly the same age as Casey's parents, posing together. The man appeared European, possibly Italian. Dressed in a shirt and tie, he bore a warm smile as he held the hand of his partner: an attractive, stately woman with cropped hair and angular features. Casey's eyes lingered on her face. She thought she saw something familiar. Eventually, she drifted across the accompanying photos. The same couple appeared in several more frames, this time posing with two children—a boy and a girl. Again, Casey saw something familiar in the subjects there, but she couldn't determine what it was. Leaning in, her eyes drifted over the faces of the children. The boy had shock of ebony curls framing a button nose and a beaming smile. The girl beside him, with long, black hair tied back from her face, bore a pensive expression as she clutched the hand of the woman who held her lovingly close.

Casey squinted in the half light, her eyes gravitating towards the boy in one of the pictures.

Who is that?

A shard of glass from the broken sunroom door suddenly dropped and smashed on the floor behind her, causing Casey to jump. She wheeled around, blinking furiously, expecting the worst, but no one appeared to be there.

Turning away from the photo frames she looked ahead, noting the front door of the house at the end of the hall and a staircase on her left. Approaching the stairs, Casey cast the light through doorways on both sides of her: one that led into a bedroom, another to a sitting room. Like the living area, the furniture that occupied them was covered.

At the foot of the stairs, she cast the light up into the gloom, hesitating, cocking her head, listening for any signs of life. All she could hear was her own breathing.

Gripping the crowbar tighter, she ascended as quietly as she could up the stairs, pausing at the top and sweeping the beam left and right.

To her right, at the end of the hall, a door was slightly ajar. She headed towards it, angling the light's beam downwards. On her right was another open door and, as she regarded it, she stopped. Her nostrils twitched as a fragrance touched them—a fragrance that seemed familiar.

Resting the crowbar on the door, she nudged it and peered around it into the darkness beyond. It was a master bedroom whose window looked out onto the front garden. Slipping inside, Casey noted a king-sized bed. It had been made up with sheets and a quilt.

The bedding had been kicked back as though someone had risen from it but had neglected to make it. Casey lowered the crowbar to the floor and ran her hand across the rumpled bed. The sheets were creased as though someone had been sleeping in it.

The fragrance she'd caught earlier was stronger here. It was coming from the bed. Casey racked her brain trying to place it. It was definitely masculine, an aftershave perhaps. She couldn't put her finger on where she'd encountered it before.

Looking up and around, Casey noted a wardrobe, and a table and chair with a man's suit jacket draped over it. Unlike the covered furniture elsewhere in the house, these were completely uncovered, yet not dusty.

Her skin prickled.

Someone has been here. And recently.

She backed out of the room and focused on the door at the end of the hall. Fingers of tension crept up her spine, bringing with them a sense of urgency.

Approaching the door, she pushed it open and directed the light into the room.

And gasped.

The room was a home office, a study—and it had been thoroughly trashed.

There was a desk that sat before a large window. Its drawers had been removed and up-ended. An accompanying chair lay on its side before it. To her left, Casey saw a large bookcase whose entire collection had been dumped in a large pile on the floor. A filing cabinet beside that had been similarly trashed. Its drawers were hanging precariously; papers and folders spilled from them.

Setting the crowbar down, Casey stepped over the mess and shone the light at the desk.

Several folders from the filing cabinet had been set down here and were laid open as if someone had been reading them. Underneath one of these folders, Casey spied the edge of a newspaper and she lifted it out from underneath.

An entire portion of the front page had been cut from it. She examined the date on the masthead. It was the edition from two days ago. Playing the light across the desk before her, Casey searched around until she looked up at the window. The missing front page had been taped to the glass. Her eyes fell across the fiery wreck of a burning car and her stomach plunged.

Josephine Catea's car.

Placing the light down, Casey returned to the file folders on the desk. The contents of the papers inside were incomprehensible to her at first but, as she picked up a sheet from one of them and began reading its contents, Casey began to recognise terms on the page. Blood results, physical examination, immunisation profile.

She frowned.

She picked up another sheet from an adjacent folder and scanned its contents, seeing similar terminology contained within it.

She picked up another.

And another.

It was the same.

What were these medical reports?

Though it had the air of officialdom, something about the piece of paper told Casey that this wasn't something that had been produced by a government agency. Retrieving the phone and holding it up in her hand, she sifted through more sheets of paper until she found one that had a logo printed on it. She brought it close.

Elyria Medical Services.

Directing the light down, she examined the discarded papers on the floor. On every loose page she saw there, Casey found the same medical terminology printed on them.

And then she noticed something else.

Picking up another page, she examined it and found a series of numbers printed; numbers she recognised.

SX801244

Saskia's scrawled note flashed in her mind's eye and her breath left her all at once.

Casey dropped to her knees and sifted through the pile, checking to see if any more sheets contained the same number on them.

She found one. Then two more. Then another two.

Setting the phone down on the chair and angling it so she could see, Casey examined the pages, noting their page numbers and sorting them accordingly until she was looking at a complete report.

It was headed: Preliminary Medical Examination - IMA Candidate No. SX801244, Flaxley Park Immigration Detention Facility.

Casey's pupils dilated. Her blood turned to ice.

Through her burgeoning shock, Casey quickly read through each page, searching for the name of the candidate and the person who had examined that candidate.

The candidate's vital statistics were featured on the first page. Age: 22 years (approx), Gender: female, Country of Birth: Sri Lanka.

Casey noticed at various points throughout the report someone had scrawled notes in red and circled portions of the printed information. She read through one section, containing what appeared to be a blood profile, toxicology screen, liver and kidney function. These last two had been circled and notes made to one side.

“No apparent history of drug use. Kidney function excellent. Liver function excellent…”

The last line of the note had been underlined.

“Ideal candidate for procurement. As per instructions, refer for follow up with Sonmez to arrange for inbound client. Recommend repatriation to the chamber…”

A creeping horror suffused Casey and she felt her chest begin to tighten. She read the last lines again and again, not trusting her own eyes that what she was reading was actually there.

“Ideal candidate for procurement…Follow up with Sonmez …
Recommend repatriation to the chamber…”

Fresh tears stung her eyes as she struggled to read on. The name of the candidate did not seem to appear anywhere on this page nor anywhere else.

But the examiner's name did.

Dr. M. Davich.

“Jesus,” Casey whispered raggedly.

Her eyes drifted back to the scrawl beside the blood results and the mention of Sonmez.

“
Sonmez
,” she sounded the name out loud.

Something about it seemed familiar to her, as though she'd heard it before. But she could not recall where.

Shaking her head, she read through to the last page, only to find that it finished in mid sentence.

The report was incomplete.

Casey searched the floor around her, looking to see if she had missed a page. She picked up what looked to be a fragment from another report but she couldn't see an identifying number on it. Picking up the phone, she cast the flashlight across the room and into the corner where a bin stood in the corner. An electronic contraption sat on top of it.

It was a paper shredder.

Casey scrambled across to it and lifted the shredder component off of the bin and peered down into it. It was filled with ribbons of A4 paper.

She pulled out a handful of the paper, even though she knew what it was.

Shining the light back at the newspaper report stuck to the window, Casey felt sick.

They know,
she thought.

Whoever it was, they knew and now they were trying to cover it up.

Flipping her phone over, Casey brought up her home number and dialled it.

Lionel answered almost immediately. His voice was plagued with worry.

“Casey. What on Earth are you doing?”

“I found the car, Pa,” Casey said, trying to contain her emotions, while keeping her voice low. “We were right. Arbelside Avenue is it. This is the place that Saskia was visiting.”

There was silence at the other end of the phone.

“There's more, Pa. I've found a lot of stuff here…papers. Records.”

“What sort of records?” Lionel asked urgently.

“Medical records,” Casey choked, holding up the document she'd collated in her hand. “There is a whole bunch of them here but someone has started shredding them. I think they know somebody is onto them.”

“Wait a second…
medical
records,” Lionel countered breathlessly. “I don't understand.”

Casey adjusted her grip on the phone and fought back her tears, her grief and her anger.

“Okay. The file numbers that Saskia wrote down; I think they were for asylum seekers that were being held at Flaxley Park Immigration Detention Facility. Each of them were given medical examinations on arrival by a private contractor called Elyria Medical Services.”

“Okay,” Lionel said. “That's not uncommon for private contractors to provide assessment services for the government.”

“I've found reports for at least two of those file numbers here. I'm guessing that the rest of them are here too.”

“But what on Earth would they be doing there? In a private residence?”

Casey dropped her head and began to shake. Tears fell on the papers in her hand.

“Pa, there's writing on the reports. Handwritten notes.”

“What kind of notes?”

“They were screening these candidates…these particular candidates.”

Lionel gulped as Casey's voice trailed away. He could sense her anguish.

“What, Casey?” he urged her. “What is it?”

Casey sat up straighter. “Organ harvesting,” she said finally. “Someone wanted these people's organs.”

The import of her words did not strike Lionel immediately. Within the silence that followed, a horrible realisation began to dawn on him and he felt his legs buckle. He reached out and grabbed the back of the sofa.

“Casey,” he stammered. “Is there a name on the report? Can you see a name of a doctor or specialist?”

Casey nodded, flipping back to the first page. She directed the light beam at it, squinting as she scanned the name she had found earlier.

“Davich,” she said.

“
Marco
Davich?” Lionel queried.

Casey nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

“Our dead Marco Davich,” Lionel muttered, trying to comprehend what Casey had in front of her.

“Elyria Medical Services has a dead man working for them,” Casey said softly.

“So who is the impostor?”

“I don't know. There's a name scrawled in the notes. I think it's a name at least. Somebody named Sonmez. But I can't see…” She held the report up again, examining the logo for Elyria Medical Services at the top of the first page. “Pa, I've seen this Elyria Medical Services logo before,” Casey squinted in the light from her phone. “In fact, it looks
way too
familiar.”

“Elyria Medical Services,” Lionel repeated.

His eyes narrowed as a flash of recognition passed through him. A fragment of a memory registered and he focused on it, trying to recall where he had encountered it before.

“I think I have, too.”

“Casey, get out of there now. I'm going to call Whittaker.”

“No, wait,” Casey countered sharply. “We should contact Prishna instead. I've already thrown her a bone and—”

Suddenly, a loud bang followed by the smashing of glass downstairs cut Casey off. She whipped her head up, dropping the phone. It bounced on the cushioned surface of the chair, coming to rest with its flashlight beam pointed at the ceiling.