“Don’t shoot,” he finally managed.
“I’m not going to shoot,” Kate said. “I don’t even have my gun drawn. Do you need water, or something? Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay,” Stott said. “You just scared the bejeezus out of me. Who are you? What do you want?”
“I’m Special Agent Kate O’Hare, FBI.” She slapped a piece of paper down on his desk. “This is a warrant giving us full access to your concierge wing.”
“We don’t have a concierge wing,” Stott said.
Kate leaned in close, locking her intense blue eyes on him. “Six obscenely wealthy and desperate patients flew in today from all over the country. They were picked up from McCarran airport by limos and brought here. Upon arrival at your private concierge wing, they each wired one million dollars to St. Cosmas’s offshore bank account and immediately jumped to the top of an organ waiting list.”
“You can’t be serious,” Stott said. “We don’t have any offshore bank accounts and we certainly can’t afford to rent limos. We’re teetering on bankruptcy.”
“That’s why you’re conducting off-the-books transplant surgeries using illegally acquired organs that you bought on the black market. We know those patients are here and being prepped for surgery right now. We will lock this building down and search every seralpha { text-align: justify; list-style-type: shyeingle room and broom closet if we have to.”
“Be my guest,” Stott said, and handed the warrant back to her. “We aren’t doing any transplant surgeries, and we don’t have a concierge wing. We don’t even have a gift shop.”
Stott no longer looked scared, and he didn’t look like he was lying. Not good signs, Kate thought. He should be in a cold sweat by now. He should be phoning his lawyer.
Eighteen hours earlier, Kate had been at her desk in L.A., tracking scattered intel on known associates of a wanted felon, when she’d stumbled on chatter about a certain financially strapped Las Vegas hospital offering organ transplants to the highest bidder. She dug deeper and discovered that the patients were already en route to Vegas for their surgeries, so she dropped everything and organized a rush operation.
“Take a look at this,” she said, showing Stott a photo on her iPhone.
It was a medium close-up of a man about her age wearing a loose-fitting polo shirt, soft and faded from years of use. His brown hair was windblown. His face was alight with a boyish grin that brought out the laugh lines at the corners of his brown eyes.
“Do you know this man?” she asked.
“Sure I do,” Stott replied. “That’s Cliff Clavin, the engineer handling the asbestos removal from our old building.”
Kate felt a dull ache in her stomach, and it wasn’t from the Jack in the Box sausage-and-egg sandwich she’d had for breakfast. Her gut, flat and toned despite her terrible eating habits, was where her anxieties and her instincts resided and liked to communicate with her in a language of cramps, pains, queasiness, and general malaise.
“Cliff Clavin is a character on the television show Cheers,” she said.
“Yeah, crazy coincidence, right?”
“What old building?” she asked him.
He turned to the window and pointed at a five-story building on the other side of the parking lot. “That one.”
The building was an architectural artifact from the swinging ’60s with its lava rock accents, big tinted windows, and a lobby portico topped with white gravel.
“That was the original hospital,” Stott said. “We moved out of there a year ago. We built this new one to handle the demand for beds that we wrongly anticipated would come from …”
Kate wasn’t listening. She was already running out the door. The instant she saw the other building, she knew exactly how she and those six wealthy patients had been duped. The man in the photo on her iPhone wasn’t Cliff Clavin, and he wasn’t an engineer. He was Nicolas Fox, the man she’d been pursuing when she’d stumbled on the organ transplant scheme.
Fox was an international con man and thief, known for the sheer audacity of his high-risk swindles and heists and for the obvious joy he took in pulling them off. No matter how big his scores were, and he’d had some huge ones, he kept going back for more.
Kate had made it her mission at the FBI to nail him. She’d come close two years ago, when she’d discovered Nick’s plot to plunder a venture capitalist’s twentieth-story Chicago penthouse of all his cash and jewels at the same time that the self-proclaimed “King of Hostile Takeovers” was ge collection of golden idols.”