Drained (Edgars Family #6) - Suzanne Ferrell Page 0,90

and giggled.

“Let’s start with the what,” he said as he went over to the thermostat and increased the room’s heat to about eighty degrees. He’d learned early on that cold temperatures slowed the circulation and therefore prolonged the blood harvesting process. Especially when your donors were naked.

And he needed them naked. The dirt and vermin in their clothes could contaminate his product and that just wouldn’t do.

“What am I doing?” He grasped the sewing scissors and slipped one sharp edge under the sleeve of the doctor’s dirty shirt at the cuff and sliced open the material all the way to the shoulder seam. “I am going to put you to good use. First, I’m going to shed you of the trappings and filth of the street. Next, I’m going to harvest all the blood from your body. Blood you’re not doing anything with but pickling it in alcohol.” He set the scissors on the surgical mayo tray stand beside the doctor’s head where the man could watch. Picking up the bottle of rubbing alcohol, he soaked a clean cloth with it. Then he cleaned the arm from top to bottom, removing any contaminants.

“Why?”

“Why am I doing this? Or why you?”

The doctor nodded.

“Let’s start with the second question first. Why you,” he said as he washed the arm a second time. Then tied a tourniquet above the elbow to make the brachial vein pop up for easy access. “Because you once were a productive part of society. A well-known and respected neurosurgeon. Now you’re nothing more than a pathetic drunkard, who would do anything for a bottle of cheap alcohol.”

He pulled the second tray closer and picked up the large bore IV needle, attached to the thick, slightly opaque tubing made for blood to flow through. “As for why I’m doing this? I’m reclaiming you, or at least the most useful part of you—your blood— for society.”

And he inserted the needle into the donor’s arm.

Carson watched the faces gathered around the conference table and the other police lining the walls as they all comprehended the problem as Brianna had just told them.

Shock.

Fear.

Anger.

A few people registered one or two, others all three. He understood. This was their city, their home. Their responsibility to protect.

“We need to get in touch with the local blood bank administrators,” the chief said, turning to the female officer beside him who already had her phone out. “Have them go through their files and check to see if any blood is in their system but not logged in through official channels.”

“Uhm, they won’t find any,” Kirk F said from his spot.

Everyone in the room turned to stare at the youngest member of the group. He swung his gaze to Aaron for permission to continue. The detective nodded.

“Yesterday, Aaron, er…Detective Jeffers had me visit the blood banks in the area. He wanted me to find out about the equipment they used and where they’d get them.” Kirk F tapped on his laptop. “While I was there one of the nurses told me how the blood was collected. They do it by gravity, letting the person’s heart pump the blood into the tubing and it drains down into the bag until it’s filled. About four hundred and fifty milliliters.”

“And this is important how?” one of the officers at the table said, his face barely hiding his condescension at the college student’s work.

Time to step in.

“Because knowing how the normal process and procedures of blood collection takes place, gives an idea as to the skills and knowledge base of our killer,” Carson said, then nodded to Kirk F. “What else did you learn?”

“When you donate blood, they first draw off a test tube of blood and it gets an identification number. That same ID number is connected to a label that goes on the bag of blood. When the blood is finished being collected. Both are sent to the laboratory and scanned into a computer that has the donor’s information on it.”

“So, if our guy has some way of getting the blood into the system, he could put his illegally harvested blood in with the legal stuff and no one would be the wiser,” one of the plain clothes detectives said.

“Surely, they’d know if there was a sudden increase in their supply?” the captain asked.

“Not necessarily,” Brianna said. “The U.S. uses approximately thirty-six thousand units of red blood cells every day. Add in the seven thousand units of platelets, ten thousand of plasma, that gives you around twenty-one million blood components