Chapter 13 Levi
THIRTEEN
Levi
I was halfway through a stale precinct coffee when Tess Calloway found me.
The bullpen was crowded with layers of noise, and the flickering shitty lights did nothing for the headache pressing behind my eyes.
I needed to keep writing the reports that were required, and of course, that was when my brain dragged me right back to him—Doc’s mouth on my throat, whispering that he already knew every weakness I had.
Not now. I shoved the memory down hard, the unwelcome heat of it cutting sharply through the cold precinct air.
It was a flash of last night I didn’t want—Doc’s voice low in my ear.
“You wreck me, detective.”
It twisted something in my gut, complicating everything, burning under my ribs where fear and want mixed too easily.
Frank was somewhere chasing down warrant language, so it was just me down at the lower end of the office when Tess stepped up to my desk with a face like thunder.
“What did he do now?”
She glanced over her shoulder. “Stanton? Nothing, he’s a perpetual asshole.” She huffed. “I can’t wait until he retires. I bet you’re happy he’ll be going with all his snide shit about your dad.”
I shrugged. “I get where he’s coming from. He trusted my dad. And when the shit hit the fan, a lot of that kicked back on him. Without what happened, he’d probably be the one in the cozy office giving orders now.”
She paused a moment, seemed hesitant. “You know they’re talking about putting us together after him and Frank retire?”
“I know.”
“Stanton said it was career suicide being attached to the name Rosen.”
“You think it is?”
“Nope. You’re a good detective, Rosen, and with my brains and your beauty, we’ll make a kick ass team.”
I grinned up at her. “Agreed.”
She visibly relaxed, tension dropping from her shoulders, and I changed the subject before we got all mushy and shit.
“How did the cyber tip work out?” The Cave had left a trail for the cyber team here to find the tip on a location for the older Dr. Dryden-Wells, the one who’d signed a patient out AMA, with said patient vanishing.
He’d retired five years ago, but then he, too, had dropped off the radar until Caleb found him.
“We visited him in a care home out in Glendale. Registered under the name Michael McCluskey. Early onset dementia.” Tess scratched the back of her neck, uncomfortable.
“He didn’t give us much, and boy did that piss Stanton off.
” She threw me a wry smile—yeah, we shared the same opinion of Stanton and his bigoted views on race, sexuality, gender, and everything in between, and dealing with the elderly was probably on that list too.
I’d lucked out being partnered with Frank, although my partner did explain way back that it was never intended for me to be partnered with Stanton.
The asshole didn’t want the queer son of a fucking bad cop who’d fucked everyone over, anywhere near him.
His words, apparently.
She sighed heavily. “Poor patient was rambling about birds pecking out livers or something.”
“You mean like Prometheus?”
“I have no idea, but hell, I’m surprised you know that story.”
I gestured at myself. “Not just a pretty face,” I deadpanned.
“Anyway, he wasn’t coherent. Honestly? I hate that we even bothered him. But an anonymous tip is an anonymous tip.”
I felt a twinge of guilt that it was the Cave who’d pushed the cops that way, but something about both of the Dryden-Wells surgeons got my back up.
“I just—look, I don’t think this lead’s going anywhere.” She hesitated, then added, “Wish we could’ve left the old guy alone. He looked… lost. As if he were halfway in a different reality.”
I nodded, jaw tight. I hated that part of the job sometimes. The parts where, as cops, we stirred up pain only to watch it fall flat.
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-Orduna.”
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-Orduna. 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.
Thousands of 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, entitled The 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.