Doctor Saleon

Doctor Saleon was a salarian geneticist who once worked on the Citadel before his illicit research turned him into a fugitive. He came to the attention of C-Sec investigator Garrus Vakarian, whose unfinished pursuit of the doctor later intersected with Commander Shepard.

The black market investigation#

A few years before he joined Shepard's crew, Garrus Vakarian was assigned by C-Sec to investigate black market trading on the Citadel, where he noticed a sharp increase in the sale of body parts. The investigators could not tell whether a lab was selling organs illegally or a killer was dismembering victims. Running a DNA check on a recovered turian liver, Garrus discovered that the supposed donor was still alive, and traced the trail to a man who had worked for Doctor Saleon.

When Garrus inspected Saleon's lab, he found no cloned organs and none of the machinery needed to grow them. Only after bringing in some of the doctor's employees for questioning did the truth emerge: during one interrogation, a subject began to bleed from fresh incisions all over his body. Saleon had been using his employees, who were poor and desperate, as living test tubes, cloning organs and growing them inside their own bodies before removing and selling them for a small cut of the profit. When organs failed to grow correctly, he left them inside the body, with grave consequences for the victim's health.

Flight from the Citadel#

When C-Sec moved to arrest Saleon, the doctor learned his operation had been discovered. He destroyed his lab, seized some of his employees, and fled the Citadel aboard his ship. Garrus wanted the station's defense forces to shoot the vessel down, but C-Sec overrode the order because the ship was too close to the station, and Saleon escaped. He afterward changed his name to Dr R. Heart, which Garrus described as his idea of a joke, and switched vessels, buying and equipping the MSV Fedele to carry on his research.

The MSV Fedele#

Garrus retained the transponder codes for Saleon's ship and brought the matter to Shepard, asking to come along when the Commander agreed to investigate. Boarding the MSV Fedele, Shepard's team found test subjects resembling Thorian Creepers wandering the cargo bay, and Saleon himself hidden in a compartment at the back. If Garrus was present, he recognized the salarian at once, though Saleon protested his innocence. Shepard could allow Garrus to execute the doctor or argue that arresting him would be the better course. Even when persuaded toward mercy, Saleon refused to be taken in, and he was killed in the firefight that followed.