Page 39 of Twisted Empire

His mouth twisted. His gaze lifted to meet mine. We stared at each other in silence for a long moment.

“No one needs to find out you told us anything,” Beckett put in. “We’re not going to spread the word. And if we have our way, the only people who’d retaliate will be out of the picture soon regardless.”

I wasn’t sure which of us convinced him more, but after another several seconds of hesitation, Dr. Evancho sighed. He stepped back. “Fine. Come inside, but please, let’s make this quick.”

“Nothing would make me happier,” Beckett said. “But I hope you’ll understand that we have some company just to make sure weallstay safe.”

A couple of his people lingered in the shadows around the house to keep watch. Three others trooped inside along with me, Beckett, and the Vigil guys. The doctor led us into the living room just beyond the front hall. As soon as he stopped, Beckett’s three men gathered around him with menacing glowers.

Dr. Evancho cringed. “Don’t hurt me. I’m cooperating. I—I never even wanted to be a part of this. I’m not some criminal mastermind.”

Beckett eyed him, folding his arms over his chest. “Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. What didn’t you want to be a part of?”

The doctor’s eyes flicked over all of us. “The—the organ transplants. That’s what you’re here about, isn’t it? I can’t imagine what else—”

He fell silent at Logan’s nod.

“How did the man who brought you on make you get involved if you didn’t want to be?” Dexter asked.

Dr. Evancho wrung his hands in front of him. “It was under duress. I made a mistake when I was a lot younger than I am now, when I’d first started out at my practice. He took advantage of my lapse.”

Slade raised his eyebrows. “What kind of mistake?”

The doctor looked away. “I skimmed some money out of the clinic. I didn’t think anyone would realize, but the wrong people found out and used it to threaten me. If I hadn’t done what they asked, they’d have exposed the crime, ruined me and my ability to provide for my family—my son was only a baby…”

I was torn between sympathy and revulsion that he’d let his initial weakness propel him into a much greater crime. “You helped with the transplant operations and—”

“No,” Dr. Evancho broke in urgently. “No, I never touched a single patient, I swear it. I wouldn’t have let it go that far. I only—they asked me to help them falsify records to cover for the patients they’d taken on. That’s it. Just paperwork.”

Just paperwork. Paperwork that’d helped cover up hundreds, maybe even thousands of organs illegally obtained and transplanted over the years. That’d allowed so many lives to be destroyed while Doom’s Seed made his money. My teeth gritted.

“Do you know any of the other doctors who were involved?” Beckett asked.

Dr. Evancho shook his head. “I have no idea who else those people brought on. They kept every part of their system totally separate so that there wasn’t much chance of any of us turning on them.” He looked down at his hands. “That’s why I’m not sure I can do anything for you. I hardly know anything.”

Dexter glanced at us with a grimace. He was the best at reading people for lies, and he obviously believed this man was telling the truth—there wasn’t anything more we could get out of him.

In terms of what he could tell us with his words, anyway. I stepped ahead of the guys, waiting until the doctor met my gaze again.

“We’re trying to take those people down for good. We’ve already put together a lot of the pieces, but we don’t have as much concrete evidence as we need to prove our case where it matters. If you have anything you used back then when you were working for them—real records or other references that we could use to prove the ones that the hospitals have now were faked—that could make a huge difference.”

His gaze darted briefly to the side. I was pretty sure he was thinking about something he did have that we could use. But he simply twisted his fingers together, a quiver passing through his stout body. “I’m not sure…”

“This is your chance to make up for the harm you helped carry out,” I reminded him. “Even if you never hurt anyone directly, you contributed—you bear some of the responsibility. Don’t you want to dosomethingto fix that?”

Dr. Evancho exhaled shakily and then lifted his head. A trace of determination had come into his eyes.

“I’ve been holding on to that guilt for a long time. It’s been years since I last did anything for those people, but… I believe I do have the original files that I based my falsified ones on. You could use the originals to prove that some of the other records copied data in patterns that are clearly artificial. You’d have to pull the fake records from a lot of different hospitals to prove the repetition, though.”

“That’s not a problem,” Logan said. “Where are the original records?”

“Let me—let me see if I can dig them up.”

“Thank you.” Beckett motioned to his men. “You go with him in case he needs any assistance.”

He said the last word with a little wryness. Mostly he wanted to make sure the doctor didn’t betray us somehow, I was sure. We wouldn’t want him slipping off and coming back with a weapon.

The doctor hustled out of the room with Beckett’s people at his heels. As their footsteps creaked into the basement, Slade cocked his head.

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