Page 126 of Gone Before Goodbye
“I insist on talking to the patient alone. If they say no, I flat-out refuse to do it. If I feel she is being coerced, I try to help her find a way out.”
“How?”
“First, I try to persuade the rich man in her life that he doesn’t want her to have bigger boobs.”
“Does that ever work?”
“Almost never,” Steve admits. “It’s like trying to convince a man he wants a smaller flatscreen.”
“What’s second?”
“I take a lot of photographs. I keep a lot of records.”
“Why?”
“Do you want to hear the ugly truth?”
“That’s always better than the pretty lies.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Steve says. “But let’s take your Nadia as an example. Nadia is a mistress to a rich man. The rich man wants her to have a larger chest. I don’t like it. You don’t like it. But there’s not a lot to be done in that case. So we just do it. But other times, well, the mistress is being discarded.”
Maggie swallows. “Discarded?”
“The rich man grows tired of her. If the girl is lucky, he just breaks it off, maybe gives her a few dollars. But sometimes—the rich man wants the woman to disappear.”
“I’m not following.”
“The world is about making a buck. We both get that, right?”
“Sadly, we do.”
“So if the rich man wants to get rid of the mistress and make a profit, what’s the best way to do that? You traffic the girl. Coming here is like turning in a leased car. They get her refurbished and send her back out.”
“Oh my God!”
“Or maybe that’s an inept analogy: They just do whatever they can to make their property more desirable. And we both know that a trafficked woman with bigger breasts or buttocks—”
“—is worth more,” Maggie finishes for him.
“Yes.”
They both stop and let that hang in the air for a moment.
“What do you do when you see that?” she asks.
“There’s a charity I can call. They’ll come to the back door. I try to get her to sneak out. But most of the time, well, the patients don’t want that. They think it will be okay. They’ll use their new body to get another rich man. So I keep their DNA on file. In case it’s needed for later.”
She shakes her head. “It’s a messed-up world.”
“Dark,” Steve agrees.
Silence.
Then Maggie says, “WorldCures used to have offices here.”
“Yeah, I know. On the lower level.”
“Can you take me down to see them?”
