The Central City follow-up takes longer than I want it to.
The clinic where Kessler works is private and small and its patient records are protected. We can't compel access without a case directly connected to her practice, and what we have is an eleven-year-old disciplinary file and a supervisor connection that isn't clean enough to build a warrant on.
Renee goes a different way. She contacts the Central City medical board and requests Kessler's current license status and any disciplinary notations since her Gotham revocation. That's public record. It takes three days and gives us a clean license with one notation: a complaint filed two years ago by a former patient, resolved without action.
The complaint is accessible through the board's public record. Renee requests it.
The complaint describes a procedure Kessler performed at the clinic that the patient felt was inconsistent with what they'd been told to expect. The language is vague in the specific way patient complaint language is vague when the patient doesn't know the technical terms for what happened to them. But one phrase stops me.
Modifications not discussed in the pre-operative consultation.
I read that twice.
"That's the same language," I say.
"It's close." Renee has both documents open. "The review board used modifications. The patient used modifications. Eight years apart."
"The complaint was resolved without action."
"Central City medical board ruled it a communication failure. The procedure itself was within acceptable parameters." She closes the complaint. "But the procedure is what I want to know about."
She calls the Central City medical board directly that afternoon. She explains that we're investigating a case with a Gotham connection and asks whether the board can tell her what category of procedure the complaint involved without disclosing protected information.
The board officer she speaks to is careful. But careful has a limit when a Gotham detective is asking directly.
The category: surgical modification of nerve pathways.
I sit with that.
Nerve pathway modification. Not organ removal. Not cosmetic work. The kind of procedure that changes how a body works rather than what it looks like. Done without full disclosure to the patient. Done by a woman who learned her surgical technique under a man who was revoked for performing experimental procedures without consent.
"He's not harvesting organs," I say.
Renee looks at me.
"The victim profile. The extended holding time. The cot and the light switch on the outside." I write it on the notepad. "The procedure requires the subject to be alive and stable throughout. You can't modify nerve pathways in someone who isn't functioning."
"What's the purpose."
"I don't know yet. But someone is paying for it." I look at the notepad. "Someone who wants a specific modification and can't get it through legitimate channels."
Renee is quiet for a moment. Then she picks up the phone and calls the ME.
She asks whether the biological material recovered from the Tricorner drain is consistent with nerve tissue.
The ME calls back in two hours. Yes, among other things, consistent with nerve tissue. She'd flagged it in her detailed notes but hadn't foregrounded it in the preliminary because the volume of other material had led her toward the organ harvesting assumption.
The assumption everyone made, including us, because it fit the frame we brought to the scene.
I look at the five names on the board.
Five men who survived long enough to be operated on. Who were held, maintained, used as subjects. What came after the procedure is still unknown. What happened to them after whoever ran the facility was finished with them.
Gerald Munn was disposed of in the Tricorner unit. The others are still missing.
Still missing. Not necessarily dead.
I write that down and don't know whether it's hopeful or worse than the alternative.