“So when do I meet this kid?”
“They’ll sleep until noon, I bet,” Chip said. “I told Natalya to stay with Luka and get some rest. He’s gonna start school in the summer session, but he’s only been here a month, so for now he pretty much stays out late and sleeps all day.”
“Natalya’s okay with that, is she?”
“Aw, she’s just happy he’s making friends with the local kids.”
“The stayin’-out-late kind don’t much seem like the sort she might like him to consort with.”
“Oh, but it’s different in Russia, she was telling me, the kids, they hang out all night. It’s no big deal there, and we’re trying not to change too much at once for him, we’re just going slow, a little at a time.”
“Hmmmm.” Stella had seen how vigorously and strenuously Sherilee had to object and interfere and threaten and punish to make Todd adhere to his curfew, and had in fact helped her enforce it on more than a few occasions. Chip’s plan didn’t sound very promising, but she didn’t guess she needed to be giving parenting lessons to Chip, especially since it wasn’t exactly resolved yet that he was going to need them. “So, seein’ as they’re not getting up anytime soon, what do you say we go see this crooked doc of yours? Find out if he knows anything about Todd?”
“Med student. He’s not a doctor yet. That’s a two-year specialty they got there. This guy was still in his first year.”
Stella shook her head in disgust. “I wouldn’t let anybody near my face with a knife or a giant needle, not unless they’d been trained up good. Not for any amount of money.”
“Well, the money was kind of important. Benton was a world-class cheapskate, even after he hit the big time.”
This was news to Stella. “What big time?”
“I didn’t tell you? That’s what makes this so damn ridiculous. Benton is rich.”
“If he’s so rich, why did he have to go shopping for girls overseas? In my experience a big wallet’s all it takes to attract the interest of all kinds of ladies.” In fact, Stella had had a few clients who wished they’d taken more time to consider just how enjoyable it was to have a platinum Visa if the price of it was marriage to a man who caused you all manner of suffering when you weren’t shopping.
Still, for rich men, it seemed like there was always another gal waiting for the opportunity to drape herself on his arm, no matter how homely, crass, or otherwise unappealing he was. And though Stella figured she hadn’t seen Parch at his absolute best the evening before, she’d say he was no worse than average looking.
“He wasn’t rich when they got together. That’s been pretty recent, ever since he sold the ManTees patent to the LockeCorp folks.”
“Man-
what
?”
“ManTees. Support garments for gentlemen? He pretty much invented ’em. Well, him and a friend of his from work.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not entirely following. Is this like those wraps for folks that got a hernia?”
“No, Stella, it’s like, you know those Spanx they sell for ladies?”
Stella was intimately familiar with the Spanx product line, having relied on it to mold some of her bumpier parts into appealing shapes before all the Bowflex and jogging kicked in and accomplished that naturally. She was still on the curvy end of her recommended weight range, and occasionally a special garment called for a little extra support, which was why she owned a drawer full of midthigh shapers and slimming camis and bodysuits and shaping panties.
Still, she considered this sort of thing the domain of women. “So you’re sayin’ men put these on so they don’t have to suck in their guts?”
“That’s the idea. Benton had one on when we, uh, found him, in fact. Benton and his friend, they work for this company that makes specialty fabrics, and they figured out some sort of new kind of stretchy cloth in their free time, and then they had the idea to make it into these T-shirts and underwear and so forth. They had some sort of partnership, and they were putzing around trying to get some local jobber to start producing them. Then I guess they both kind of lost interest, is what Natalya told me, until one day they got contacted by a company who wanted to buy ’em out. So Benton sold the patent, and got a giant check for it. But did that loosen up his purse strings any? No ma’am,” Chip said, shaking his head woefully.
“Well, cheap’s not usually a good enough reason to get killed over,” Stella said. “Come on, let’s go see the bastard who you figure did it.”
* * *
Fortified with a
tankard of coffee, Stella and Chip set out to look for Todd. Stella hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours, but her fears for Todd, combined with all that caffeine, had her feeling wide awake.
Their first stop was the clinic where Chip worked, so he could get the medical student’s home address. Since regular classes didn’t meet on Saturday, he thought he could get into the lab without running into anyone. Stella drove, and he gave directions through the sleepy town. They passed the same churches, strip malls, and humble neighborhoods that Stella had seen for the first time in the dead of night. Luckily the day was warm and it was no hardship to keep the windows down—or more accurately the
window,
singular, since the one on the passenger side no longer existed.
“This here’s the hospital,” Chip said, as they arrived in front of an imposing clot of buildings featuring a big square limestone main structure and any number of added-on bits in a variety of architectural styles, making the whole thing look like a LEGO play set designed by a drunk and hostile modernist.
Chip directed Stella around to the back. As she pulled into a parking space, Chip cleared his throat nervously. “Listen, Stella, how about you just wait for me in the truck.”
“No thanks. I’m more of a hands-on type when I’m working.”
“I get that, but—look, I got to prepare you a little. It’s kind of hard on folks that haven’t seen this sort of environment before.”
“You told me you take care of the labs, right? Trust me, sugar, I’m not one to be put off by the sight of a mop or a bucket.”
“Well see, Stella, ever since I got promoted I got some more … specialized type duties. I had to take a training course. They even sent me down to Madison for a couple of days, put us up in a Holiday Inn and all, had to learn all kinds of shit and pass the certification tests. What it is is, nowadays you got your infectious disease concerns, your fears about bacteria outbreaks, your resistant microbes, you can’t have just a regular Class One custodian in there. Not to mention all the red tape with the disposal. You need a specialist.”
“So let me get this straight, you’re cleaning up after a bunch of med students and all the messes they make with their lab projects.”
“Yeah … but Stella, they work on actual
cases.
”
“So what do they do, get some volunteer in there, knock ’em out and everyone stands around the table in their white gowns and shit taking notes while the professor does a nip and a tuck?”
Chip pursed his lips. “Uh … yeah. Something like that. But it’d just be easier if you’d stay here.”
“Look, just trust me, okay? I’m not going to faint on you or anything.”
Chip sighed heavily as he led the way to a homely-looking concrete structure attached to the backside of the University Hospital like a barnacle. No-nonsense metal letters screwed into the sides of the building spelled out
BOBERG CLINIC.
“They’re doing a special weekend seminar today. The lab manager probably already has it set up. Only this isn’t strictly kosher, me bringing you here, so if we see anyone, let me do the talking, okay?”
Chip took a heavy set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. Inside, the building was cool and chemically smelling, with an odor somewhere between a dentist office and the Ace garden center. A neat glassed-in announcement board featured want ads for house sitters, roommates, lost puppies, yoga classes, massage therapy. They passed a nook housing a row of glowing vending machines.
Chip paused in front of a wide set of doors, searching his large key ring for the right key. “Now like I said, Stella, you might want to, like, brace yourself a little here. You haven’t seen—”
“Whyn’t you let me worry about what I’ve seen and not seen, Chip,” Stella said gently. “I’ve been around things you can’t even imagine. Besides, I’m going to be fifty-one to— uh, soon.”
Tomorrow. She was going to be fifty-one years old tomorrow, and rather than spending it at home with Noelle and her beauty treatments, and a special lunch with Chrissy at the China Paradise followed by a gallon of pistachio ice cream, and possibly even a little further exploration into BJ’s amorous intentions, she was going to be stuck up here in the middle of Wisconsin. Even if the door opened to reveal not just Todd but Benton’s killer holding an
I DID IT
sign, there was no way she could turn around and make the drive all the way home today, not without some sleep.
So, best case scenario, she’d spend her birthday driving home with a pain-in-the-ass teenage copilot. No cake, no gifts, no birthday nooky—only a sore ass from sitting in the driver’s seat, all swollen up from the road food and coffee.
Worst case … well, the worst case was so much worse. She’d tracked down a kidnapped child once before, when the mob had snatched up Chrissy’s son, Tucker, and she’d had to go down to the shore of the Lake of the Ozarks and fight off a slew of Kansas City mobsters to get the little boy back. But in that case the abductors wanted the child for themselves, and he was an adorable flaxen-haired blue-eyed angel of a baby, too. Todd was none of those things—he was a foul-mouthed noxious-smelling slouch-spined big-footed clumsy oaf of a teenager who made about as good a first impression as a mutt who’s been rolling in roadkill. She adored the boy as though he were her own, but that had been after several years of him growing on her. His kidnappers didn’t have that advantage, and if they didn’t much care for his sass mouth and defiant attitude, well, what then?
“It’s just that most people don’t realize—” Chip tried again, hanging on to the door and blocking the view of the room inside with his body.
“I
said
I’m fine,” Stella said, a little more testily than necessary, and pushed past him.
And stopped dead in her tracks.
Inside the room were half a dozen long tables, about the size of the buffet tables on which they served Sunday doughnuts at Calvary United Methodist, but a little sturdier looking, with sinks at either end and cabinets below and stools tucked neatly underneath. On top of the tables’ pristine white surfaces were aluminum trays like you might use to cook lasagna, lined up true and square, four to a table.
Nestled on top of the trays were human heads.
“Oh holy fucking mother of…” Stella stammered, feeling her stomach pitch and roll, bile burbling up and threatening to send her heaving into the aisles between the neat rows. “Those are … oh my God…”
“They’re sterile,” Chip said hastily, “and they came here voluntarily. These are all voluntary donors, Stella, and it’s all very regulated.”
“I, uhhh…” Stella swallowed hard, and then swallowed again, gripping Chip’s arm tightly to ward off the dead faint that was threatening to overcome her. He wrapped an arm around her, clucking softly to himself; perhaps he had a right to be a little peeved at her, since she had refused to listen to his warnings.
The heads, which might well have been every bit as regulated as Chip said, ranged from an odd and not very lifelike shade of grayish-pale to various tints of unnatural brown—and they stared back at her with expressions that ranged from boredom to disappointment to, in one case, what appeared to be eager anticipation, as though the gentleman couldn’t wait to experience the procedure for which he’d been brought here. Any spine bones or nerve endings or blood vessels or what have you were tucked discreetly out of the way. Their hair was uniformly short, buzzed military style, leading Stella to suspect that they’d received a postmortem trim in preparation for their next adventure, one in which efficiency was valued over fashion. After all, when one was studying the finer points of face renovation, it was probably pretty important not to have hair hanging in front of one’s canvas, so to speak.
“What are they about to do to these, anyway?”
Chip went to the instructor desk in front and consulted a clipboard. “Blepharoplasty,” he said. “Eye lifts. ’Course, that’s just to start. After that they’ll be doing subperiosteal lifts. Those go pretty deep, so that’ll pretty much take care of this bunch.”
“They do more than one … thing to them?”
“Oh yeah, you don’t want to waste a chance like this. By the time they’re done, these heads will have had the works. Which is fine since they go from here to incineration.”
Realization dawned on Stella. “These heads get incinerated?”
“Well, yeah, I mean it’s sterile and you can’t beat it for mass reduction, plus there’s a shitload of regulation on infectious waste—”
“No, what I mean is, if you’re the one who bags them up for transport to the crematorium or whatever … well, I suppose it woulda been easy as pie for you to grab you an ear offa one of them. What’d you do, wait until there was an ear that looked like yours, slice it off with a pocketknife?”
Chip had the good grace to blush. “It wasn’t like that, Stella,” he said. “They were learning otoplasty—that’s ear pinning—and this one went kind of wrong. The kid went way too far with the cartilage scoring. That ear was barely attached by the time he was done. It wasn’t any big deal for me to take it the rest of the way off.”
“Weren’t you worried that it wouldn’t match?”
“An ear’s an ear, Stella, especially when it’s dried out some. Plus I pierced it and put my old earrings in, which wasn’t any big deal because Natalya’s been after me to get rid of them anyway. That’s all Dad and Gracellen noticed, I bet, was my earrings, especially since the tissues were probably starting to break down something serious by the time the box got there.”
“I’da known,” Stella said, with conviction. “If it was my Noelle. I’d know her ear anywhere.”
How many times had she touched her daughter’s ear, traced its shell-like edges with a fingertip, counting the freckles, wiping away baby shampoo, cleaning gently with a Q-tip? Dabbing the lobes with rubbing alcohol after taking Noelle to get them pierced on her twelfth birthday? Stella had held Noelle’s hand tightly in the little shop in the mall and squeezed her own eyes shut when the gal positioned the needle gun. She’d given Noelle her first pair of diamond earrings, tiny little sparklers for a high school graduation gift—she’d saved up the extra grocery money for over six months for those, and Noelle still wore them.