Page 246 of Nyx

We wait, but it only takes him a few minutes to find the next puzzle piece.

"False labor," Max says. "But she left before they could go over the discharge paperwork."

"Video?" Kincaid asks.

"Just this," Max says, and we once again turn our attention to the screen.

We all watch as a nurse wheels Traci out of the hospital. They take the sidewalk toward the open parking area. The woman helps Traci get into the back seat of a car, but instead of returning to the hospital with the wheelchair, she leaves it in the parking lot and climbs into the front seat. It drives out of the lot.

Max moves from one camera to the next, cussing when he pauses one and zooms in on the sedan, revealing it doesn't have a front or back license plate.

"Fuck," Shadow grunts.

"Double fuck," Max growls as the screen fills with an autopsy report. "They were supposed to fucking call me."

"What are we looking at?" Shadow asks.

"The initial autopsy doesn't mention children, but there was a large incision on her abdomen," Max explains. "Holy shit."

"What?" Shadow asks.

"Her organs were gone," Max answers. "Kidneys, liver, heart, lungs, pancreas."

"She was gutted?" I asked, none of this making any fucking sense to me.

"Harvested," Signal says, drawing everyone's attention. As a military surgeon, he'd know more about this sort of thing than anyone else in the room. He keeps his eyes on Max. "Surgical removal?"

"Yeah. It looks that way according to the report."

"So the goal was to take the babies, but they ran into complications and just took everything viable?" Shadow asks.

"Unlikely," Signal answers. "Organ harvesting takes precision. Organs have such a small window of viability after extraction. They would've had to have recipients lined up. Surgical teams waiting for them to arrive. It had to have been a lot of people. If they didn't have someone waiting for each of those organs, I don't think that they would've been removed. It would've been wasted effort. The chance of this just being a fluke is highly unlikely."

"An organ trafficking ring?" Kincaid mutters. "Just fucking great."

"I can't identify the nurse," Max says. "I've run her face through their employee database, and she's not showing up."

"A traveling nurse?" Slick asks.

"Possibly," Max says. "But they have traveling nurses logged as well. Hold on."

Kincaid paces at the front of the room while waiting for the next piece of information.

"There's a gap between all the records from the date of hire, their first shift, and submission into the system for identification purposes."

"How many nurses are we talking about?" Shadow asks.

"Three that I can tell who have been hired recently but are using temporary access passes."

"Check the roster of nurses who helped with Traci's care that day," Signal suggests.

"Already on it," Max says. "Shit. All those nurses are accounted for with their information in the system."

"Could she be wearing a disguise? Looking different on that day from what she looked like when they could've put her in their system?" Signal asks.

"The only way for that to be possible," Max begins. "Is if she wore a prosthetic nose or chin or something like that. My facial recognition software is very high tech."

"But it isn't impossible?" Kincaid counters.