A Bad Day for Mercy (8 page)

“Do you know how many muscles and nerves there are around the mouth?” Chip demanded in a tone of outrage.

“This doctor, he only has done the eyebrow before, the wrinkle, but Benton tell him go ahead. When this happen Benton find him after school one night, tell him he turn him in and he will
never
be doctor.”

“Oh, he was a medical
student,
” Stella clarified. “So your husband threatened to tell the AMA or whatever.”

“Which is how
this
happened,” Chip sighed, ignoring Stella’s comment and gesturing at the partial corpse with the meat fork.

“You mean, Benton threatened to report this guy so he … what, whacked him? And left him for you here to take care of?”

“He want to make it look like I am killer. Shut up two birds with one rock. Benton is dead and now he think I am too scare to talk.”

“How exactly did he kill him, anyway?”

Natalya shrugged. “I don’t know. He is just dead.”

“What, you mean there weren’t any marks on him? No injuries or wounds?”

“Nothing,” Chip agreed, “and since we stripped him down I had a chance to check him out, you know, all over.”

“Well, couldn’t he have died of, I don’t know, a heart attack or stroke or something? I mean, if he came to your door, it might have been just really bad timing. Say he wanted to talk to you, but you guys are out, he’s ringing the bell, he’s frustrated, getting madder and madder, blood pressure going through the roof—”

“No, it wasn’t like that,” Chip said. “He didn’t just fall in a heap or whatever. He was sort of folded up with a couple of Hefty bags laid on top to cover him up.”

“Hefty bags … huh.”

“Sloppy, right? He could’ve at least used a sheet or something. These medical students—I can’t stand ’em,” Chip interjected. “Most of them, they just go through life expecting other people to clean up their messes.”

Stella’s confusion was deepening. “Uh, you know a lot of medical students?”

“I
work
with them, Stella,” Chip said in an aggrieved tone. “I guess I know what I’m talking about.”

“Chip works in Boberg Clinic, at St. Olaf’s Hospital. Is how we met.” The look of consuming devotion was back on Natalya’s face.

“Wait, you were there when Benton brought her in?” Stella asked. “For the, uh … unofficially sanctioned procedure?”

“No,” Chip said with contempt. “He did that at his place. Stole the supplies he needed or bought ’em black market or something.”

“We go to his house late at night,” Natalya added. “Very late, no one there but us.”

“Then how did you…”

“After Benton threaten him, I am still like this?” She touched her fingertip to her swollen mouth. “It was even worse then, and I think, I will go by myself, I will ask what can be done. I think maybe can be fixed, I can be nice instead of mean, convince better. So I go very early in morning, one day when Benton is on business trip. I take his car and park outside clinic. I think I will see each person go inside until I see right one.”

“I was getting off my shift, and I see this beautiful lady all alone in her car in the parking lot. It wasn’t even light out yet. So I went to see if everything was all right.”

“We have love at first sight,” Natalya added helpfully.

“She was crying, so I took her to Dunkin Donuts.”

“He buy me coffee and fat-free blueberry muffin, he ask me where am I from, he is so easy talking!”

“Okay, okay, I get the picture,” Stella cut her off. She’d been subjected to these sorts of stories before—only she had a more cynical view than most, having seen how badly some relationships ended up after equally promising beginnings. “So you meet, you start dating—”

“No, no date, we have to sneak. Benton is very, ermmm … he is having terrible jealousy.”

“But we found ways, like when he had to travel for work. After a month or so we knew we had to be together. So I went to Benton’s office and told him I was going to marry her no matter what, but he—” Chip glared at the leaking mess as though the man wanted to start up the argument again. “That’s when he threatened me. Said if he couldn’t have her, no American man would, and he’d send her ass right back to Russia.”

“Could he do that?” Stella asked dubiously.

Chip’s face darkened with fury. “Stella, if you knew the half of it—why, the way the immigration law’s written they might as well just stand at the border waitin’ for Cupid to fly overhead and shoot him right down like a, like a damn
duck.
The American government—it’s coldhearted as hell.”

“Residency permit says I must reside in country for two years after marriage,” Natalya said dolefully. “Two years anniversary is July 4, that is only six weeks away, but—”

“Bastard said unless I covered all his costs since the first day he went scrolling through the LovelyBrides site on the Internet and came across Natalya, he was going to report her before the anniversary. They can deport her then.”

“That’s where he got that number?” Stella asked. “The thirty thousand?”

“That’s what he said. What with the lawyer he got to help them get the K-1 visa, and all the flights back and forth, and the wedding itself and all the—”

“No, no, I understand, it adds up.” Stella’s clients’ tales of woe occasionally included visits to attorneys they didn’t stand a chance of affording, attorneys whose hourly rate could feed their kids for a week or buy a set of tires. “What I don’t understand is, why couldn’t you just marry her right quick? She leaves him, gets a divorce,
bam,
next day she marries you. With no downtime, she wouldn’t really have a chance to get illegal again, at least not for very long, would she?”

Chip’s murderous scowl deepened. “Well, you’d think that, wouldn’t you. Problem is, Benton had such a bug up his ass he wasn’t gonna let that happen. He was going to see this one old golf pal of his, a judge down at the county seat, and withdraw his residency petition and have them come after Natalya before we could do a damn thing about it.”

“I have friend, Yuliya, from home,” Natalya said wistfully. “This happen to her. She and I join LovelyBrides at same time, she is meeting man from Oklahoma. In six month time passing, husband divorce her. Lawyer tell her, she can file petition to stay here while pursue permanent status, but—” Natalya made a slicing motion across her neck—presumably to indicate deportation and not something worse.

“So your girlfriend’s ex wanted cash?” Stella turned to Chip. “I assume from what you’re saying that your, uh, financial position hasn’t improved any?”

“I’m not gambling, if that’s what you mean,” Chip said, rooting in his pocket and producing a key chain. He flipped it over to expose a circular bronze medallion stamped with a telltale triangle design, which he proudly showed Stella. “Six months in recovery, I go to meetings.”

“Well, that’s, uh, marvelous,” Stella said. “Seriously, Chip, big props to you on that. Still, I’m guessing it’s been a little difficult to build up the old bank account with the, ah, entry-level employment…”

Chip nodded. “I had to work my way up. Got on at St. Olaf’s doing janitorial, but I been there almost a year now and I got promoted twice, and now I work in the Boberg Clinic.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s affiliated with the University of Wisconsin, like an extension program they run up here at the hospital. They got a bunch of specialty residencies they do up here. Like, if you’re a med student who wants to go into plastic surgery, once you’re done with your regular surgical residency, you can come up here and put in a couple of years at the Plastic and Reconstructive Clinic.”

“That’s where you work?”

“Yup. What my job is, is I clean and stock all the surgical labs, and one of them is where they do the cadaver practice. Which is how I got the
ear
and—” Chip stopped midsentence, holding up a hand for silence. “Did you hear that?”

Natalya sniffed the air like a bloodhound, her brow knit anxiously.

“I didn’t hear nothing,” Stella said. “What-all are you worried about?”

“I don’t know, just jumpy, I guess,” Chip said. “Thought I heard something out front, probably just a car going by. I wish I could just keep chattin’ and all, Stella, but I really think I ought to wrap this up.”

But Stella was already headed for the front door, gun in hand.
Todd
was out there. She’d locked the truck, sure, but the idea of a killer roaming around outside—even if it was only a pansy-assed medical student, as Chip said—didn’t sit well with her.

She burst out of the house and the profanity died on her lips as she saw that the truck’s passenger window had been shattered, the door standing open on a pile of glass that sparkled in the first golden rays of dawn.

Chapter Eight

“Shit, shit, shit.”

Stella cradled her head in her arms on the kitchen table, beyond caring that only moments earlier Natalya had been giving it a final going-over with the Windex, removing any traces of the carving and packaging operation.

Chip had left a little while earlier with the neatly wrapped pieces of Benton Parch loaded in the trunk of his car, a beat-up Hyundai Sonata with rust pocking its lower panels. Chip’s plan was to dispose of the dead man in a variety of Dumpsters all over town, and Stella had to admit she couldn’t come up with any better ideas. Sure, she could have advised Chip to weight the packages down and toss them in silty farm ponds, or cut holes in drywall or pour concrete in basement floors, but the truth was that all that extra trouble, in Stella’s experience, rarely bought you any more peace of mind than just using the Dumpster for its intended use—disposal of rubbish. The odds of the cops finding something you no longer wanted—say, a gun wiped of prints but a little too familiar to the fellow you’d been waving it at earlier in the day—once you’d wiped it clean and wrapped it in aluminum foil and bubble wrap and newspaper and packing tape and stuck it inside a Green Foods bag—were approximately zero. It just went to the dump, like every other crazy thing folks threw out every day.

After Chip left, Stella had made a tour of the neighborhood, armed and angry and desperate to find Todd, but turned up nothing but a few bleary folks staggering out their front doors for a jog or to pick up the paper.

She was disgusted with herself: She’d managed to lose Todd before they’d been in town for even an hour—and he wasn’t just lost, he’d been stolen, possibly by a cold-blooded killer … although Stella was having trouble figuring out what an inept medical student who hoped to be a plastic surgeon could possibly want with a fourteen-year-old boy. Stella knew she had to call Sherilee, and soon, but she hadn’t yet come up with the words to explain how she had lost the boy she’d sworn not to let out of her sight. Given the ear thing, it was unforgivable that she had left him alone at all—severing and slicing and murdering were all cues that great care should have been taken, and yet she’d been careless.

The sight of the body—well, that had been startling, of course. Stella had seen a number of dead bodies in the course of her career, not even counting Ollie. She’d even seen things that were at least as alarming as the sight of half a torso: A mummified woman with her desiccated skin stretched taut over her skeleton had been every bit as gruesome … and the unfresh corpse she’d encountered during her most recent case, dead long enough to be showing signs of petrification—if Stella had to choose, she would say that was worse. At least today’s fella had been newly deceased—he didn’t even have a foul smell yet.

The important thing, though—the only thing that mattered at the moment, especially since Chip was definitely still attached to both his ears and was not, as far as she could tell, missing any of his other parts—was Todd.

“Tell me one more time,” she demanded, fixing Natalya with her most focused, get-down-to-business gaze. “Think real, real hard. Who would be in your neighborhood at this time of the morning?”

“Like I am telling, is only newspaper deliver car. Exercise people…”

“Tell me about the neighbors.”

Natalya shrugged. “I do not know neighbors. I am come here only daytimes until few weeks ago. Never for night, only during day when Benton is at work.”

A cheery trill sounded from the direction of the counter, and Natalya fetched a cell phone. She squinted at the display, and her face fell slightly.

“Hello?”

Stella heard a male voice speaking rapidly, but she couldn’t make out the words.

“What? What? Who is this?” Natalya demanded, the color draining from her face. The voice on the phone escalated, and suddenly Natalya dropped the phone on the floor and bolted from the room. Instead of running for the door, she raced down the hall toward the back of the house.

“Natalya,” Stella called after her, but the woman didn’t even slow down. Stella followed her down the hall, but Natalya had a head start; she flung open one of the bedroom doors and started shrieking in Russian in the direction of the bed, where—Stella was startled to see—a figure lay with the covers over its head.

The doorbell rang.

Stella froze, practically paralyzed by the chaos all around her. “I better get that,” she said. “Todd’s out there—”

“Do not answer door,” Natalya pleaded. “Now they are after Luka!”

Stella had no idea who Luka was, but she sprinted back to the front of the house, crouching low in the living room, even though the drapes were drawn tight and no one would be able to see in no matter how hard they peered. She went to the adjoining dining room and parted the drapes just far enough to peep through.

Cops.

There was a cop car parked behind BJ’s truck. One uniformed officer was crouched next to the broken window, examining the pile of shattered glass. The other stood at the door, a rotund fellow with his hands clasped behind his back, rocking back on his heels.

Stella’s mind raced. She should tell them about Todd, get them to call it in, get them on the job. The dead body was gone; Natalya had disinfected and wiped every square inch of the place; there was little risk of them finding anything amiss inside the house. She raced back to Natalya.

“It’s the police, Natalya. I’ve got to let them in.”