“I can’t believe you came back here over
that,
” Doug moaned. “I mean, I didn’t think you were serious.”
“I’m always serious. Once you get to know me better you’ll realize that.”
“So are we doing the kitchen table again?” he asked resignedly.
“Well now, I don’t suppose that’s necessary, if you promise to behave.” Stella didn’t bother to point out the fact that she’d come unarmed, seeing as this was a friendly call. “I’m not here to bust your chops. I just needed a medical expert for a few questions I have about a … case I’m working on, and I thought of you. Seemed a shame to let that expensive education of yours go to waste.”
“I should have you talk to my dad,” the young man said glumly. “He seems plenty happy to let it all go down the drain, won’t even consider the bigger picture.”
“Oh, lemme guess, you asked him for money.”
“Well yeah, after you-all came out and scared the shit out of me the other day, I’ve been trying to get Benton’s cash together.”
“Oh … I don’t know if I’d be in any kind of terrible rush over that.”
“But Mrs. Hardesty, he doesn’t seem like the second-chance type, not like you are.”
“Don’t go tryin’ to butter me up. I’m here ’cause I got to find out about something, and I got a couple of things I need to say first.”
“Yeah?”
“How about if you make some of that French drip coffee before we start?”
That seemed to energize the young medical student. He set down his sandwich and offered her a chair—at the same table where he’d been so unceremoniously shackled—and started lining up supplies. Stella watched with fascination. First he filled an electric kettle with water and plugged it in. Then he took a brushed-aluminum canister out of the freezer and set it on the counter. Finally he took a fancy lidded glass carafe from the cabinet.
“Humor me here,” Stella said. “Just what the hell are you doing there?”
Doug glanced at her in confusion. “Making coffee, like you said.”
Stella had to admit that the aroma was heavenly, but if she ever started carrying on this way in her own kitchen, say for Chrissy or Jelloman or Goat or Noelle, she was liable to get laughed out of her own house. Only Sherilee, with her perfect manners, might let her slide.
Something to think about.
“Here’s how this is going to work,” Stella said. “I’m going to ask you a question that might or might not, depending on how curious you are, get you to wondering. Your job, though, is not to put your own what-ifs or whys into the picture. Just tell me what I need to know, and when I’m done, you forget all about this conversation. We clear?”
“Yeah.”
“So what I want to know is, how you could go about killing a man without leaving any marks on him. This would be a … let’s say a man in his fifties, average height, stocky. I’m not sayin’ that a CSI team couldn’t figure it out, just tell me about a situation where the average onlooker wouldn’t be able to tell. No marks on the body, no bruises, cuts, that sort of thing.”
Doug raised his eyebrows. “Well … all kinds of ways, really. Suffocation, that would be the easiest, though depending on if the guy was conscious, you’re nearly always going to have a lot of fighting back and I guess that would leave marks. You’d have to ask a forensic guy—”
“I don’t have a forensic guy. I have you.”
“Yeah, all I meant was if you wanted to ask about victim behavior and what, ahhh, self-harm and so forth might result. But sure. I see what you’re saying. So, suffocation, strangulation, depending on what was used. A cord, wire, whatever, that’s gonna leave a mark … Now you could inject or inhale a poison, ingest it, absorb it through the skin. All kinds of possibilities there, depending what your … uh … your hypothetical person could have on him or be forced to consume.”
“Just give me a for instance or two.”
“Well, if this is a street drug setting, you got your GHB, though that can involve vomiting and convulsions … Barbiturates are good. Tricyclics, if you take enough. Really, there’s lots of options.”
Stella felt her spirits deflate. It wasn’t going to be simple—it might not even be possible ever to know how Benton was killed.
“Gimme a sec here to think.”
She half-watched Doug puttering with his fancy supplies, pouring a cup of the heavenly-smelling brew into a cup that looked like a talented third grader had made it in ceramics class and forgotten to glaze it before firing. It had probably been made by aboriginal craftspeople somewhere, which Stella could appreciate, except it was just so ugly. Still, when Doug handed it to her and she inhaled the fragrant steam, she no longer minded.
“Damn, this is a hell of a cup of coffee.”
Doug beamed with pride. “Thanks, Mrs. Hardesty.”
He really wasn’t such a bad guy, Stella thought, relenting. Just irresponsible and immature. What was it with today’s young people—they refused to grow up, to accept responsibility, until later and later in their lives. Stella couldn’t imagine being nearly thirty and still calling home to be floated for loans. Noelle and Chrissy, both roughly the same age as Doug, had been providing for themselves—ineptly at times, scraping by and relying on elbow grease and the ingenuity of desperation—for a decade. Maybe a little hardship—the very thing every parent, including Stella, worked so hard to shield her children from—was actually the secret to reaching adulthood.
Maybe getting caught with the on-the-side scalpel job was actually the best thing to happen to Doug. Having the fear put in him, the threat of losing everything he’d worked for—maybe that was what would now make him a little more grateful, make him take his life a little more seriously.
Stella took a sip of the hot brew and smiled. She was glad to be a part of the young man’s education. “Okay, so I hear you saying you couldn’t really detect a poisoning, not as a, what do you call it, lay observer. Anything else? Any other ways you could off someone, maybe a little more creatively?”
Doug thought, extending his legs and crossing them at the ankles, his hands clasped behind his head. “Well, there’s compression. They used to torture people by putting stones on their chests until they couldn’t breathe.”
Chest compression.
Something clicked in Stella’s mind. “Could a really tight shirt—I mean a really,
really
tight-fitting shirt do the trick?”
Doug frowned. “Probably not on its own. Although if the person was already having trouble getting enough air into his airways—like if he was having an allergic reaction—then sure.”
“What kind of allergy?”
“Well, any, really—pollen, ragweed, dust mites…”
Stella stared into the swirling black mists of her cup. Natalya, if she really had been responsible for Benton’s death, obviously had not done it herself, since she’d been out with Chip at the time his corpse was delivered to the door. Of course, she could easily have paid someone to drop him off, after engineering the simplest of “accidents.” By Chip’s admission, Benton had been wearing a ManTee—but how could she find out if he had allergies? She couldn’t very well ask Natalya without provoking her suspicions.
“You’ve been real helpful, Doug,” Stella said, getting up from the table, anxious to follow up this new direction.
“Sorry I couldn’t do more. It’s a tough question.”
“Yeah, I know. I just thought it was worth checking into. But hey—” She picked up her half-f mug and toasted him with it. “It wasn’t an entirely wasted trip.”
Out in the car, she dialed Alana. It was a risk—if she was the real killer, this line of inquiry might tip her off that Stella was getting close, but maybe then she’d get nervous and give herself away.
“I’m on a rehearsal break,” Alana said after Stella apologized for calling so late. “What do you need? Has Benton turned up yet?”
“’Fraid not, but I’m helping Natalya sort out her health insurance.”
“Which my idiot brother is no doubt paying for.”
“Well, that’s the problem, actually. She’s switching to private coverage, but since she’s still legally married, she has to list Benton as an alternate insured, and there’s a few things on the form we need to check off. She could wait until he turns up, but if we get this in before the new policy period, it’d save Benton some cash.”
“Yeah? What do you need to know?”
“Okay, let’s see … smoker?”
“No, which she could have told you—”
“I’m just being thorough. History of heart disease?”
“No.”
“Allergies?”
“Dander and feathers—severe.”
Bingo.
“Okay, I think that’s all I need for now. Have a nice rehearsal, hear?”
Alana hung up without saying good-bye.
Chapter Twenty-four
It was nearly eight o’clock by the time she got back to the house. The windows were dark, as she had hoped they would be; with Natalya and Chip off to dinner, Stella could search the house without raising suspicion. She didn’t really expect to find a hidden cat or duck that had been used to send Benton into the allergic fit that killed him, but you never knew what you’d turn up when you went looking.
Stella dug in her purse for Chip’s spare key, which was attached to a key chain bearing another of his Gamblers Anonymous tokens. She’d barely picked it out from the disarray in the bottom of the bag when a movement from the left caught her eye, a flash of white against the brown brick of the little recessed entryway.
A year ago Stella had made a grave miscalculation and gone to meet an informant in a dark, isolated area without sufficiently checking out her surroundings. She’d had time in the hospital afterward to stew and regret and reconsider sufficiently that she’d taken precautions to make sure such a thing never happened again. Specifically, she asked her Shaolin kung fu instructor, a certain Mr. Hou who owned a Chevy dealership in Independence, to teach her a few effective responses to use in situations where an attacker had the advantage.
Mr. Hou did a brisk business turning over Silverados and Impalas, but his true passion was the martial arts he’d learned as a boy five decades earlier in Changzhou. Stella had never met Mrs. Hou, because her husband’s basement studio had a separate entrance for his students—if there were any; she’d never seen anyone else coming or going from the house. She had met Mr. Hou when a former client, Marjorie Peng, had made the introduction as payment for Stella’s services. Marjorie was Mr. Hou’s niece, and the only reason she hadn’t engaged Mr. Hou himself to take care of the ex-boyfriend who’d cleared out their checking account and dislocated her shoulder was that Mr. Hou, who was nearly seventy, had been on crutches at the time after suffering a fall.
Mr. Hou had defied his doctor’s expectations and recovered from his injuries, and soon returned to his daily two-hour workouts. During the months he’d spent on crutches, he barked orders at Stella until she was panting with exertion only to demand, in his broken and nearly incomprehensible English, that she approach his chair so that he could demonstrate hits that left her nearly doubled over with pain and surprise, all while seated.
When he was back on his feet, he was a terror.
Which was why Stella made the hour-long drive every couple of weeks for a lesson. In between, she practiced her “homework” as zealously as she could without an actual attacker to approach her from the left or right or behind. Her friend Jelloman Nunn had set up a couple of stinky old punching bags from his fighting days in her garage, and Stella did her best to imagine that they were the bloodthirsty members of the Chinese triads that Mr. Hou had battled in his youth, and beat as much of the crap out of them as she was able.
All of which was terrific preparation for when the hooded figure, all five foot eight of him, came charging out of the corner where he’d been hiding and tackled her. Or rather tried to tackle her, because Stella spun and met him with her rake fist. The man had miscalculated on a number of fronts, judging from the lackluster speed and force of his attack, and Stella’s fist, her fingers folded and rigid in classic leopard form, easily connected with his throat, dropping him to the ground, where he made a strange bleating sound and clawed at his neck, kicking his feet and rolling against the brick.
Stella rubbed her knuckles—she’d have a hell of a bruise tomorrow for sure—and stared at the man in disbelief. Either the jerk had unscrewed the porch light or Chip and Natalya had neglected to turn it on before they left, but enough light from inside streamed out the narrow window that flanked the door that Stella could see that the fellow was wearing a too-big sweatshirt with a furry sort of hood cinched up around his face. Light glinted off his mouth, and Stella saw that he had metal on his front teeth. With his fur-trimmed hood, he looked like a supersized Christmas elf who’d been snacking on tinsel.
Whatever he was, Stella didn’t have a whole lot of time to lollygag about before he became a threat again. Though short, he looked young and strong, and those were two distinct advantages he held over Stella.
She left him gagging for air and jogged back to the Impreza, where some of her own advantages were stored. Popping the trunk, she rooted through her Tupperware containers and was back on the porch by the time the young man had made it to his hands and knees, sucking air like a gutted coyote and trying to crawl toward the street.
“Don’t waste your breath,” Stella said. “Oh. Ha. No pun intended, sorry. You’ll be okay, best just not fight it. Only we don’t want folks wondering what you’re doing crawling around like you want to play horsie on the front lawn, now do we?”
She kept up a steady chatter as she worked. First she put a Ked-clad toe to the guy’s rib cage and gave him a gentle shove, enough to land him on his back like a stuck beetle. Then she got the front door open. She cuffed the guy’s hands temporarily in front of him with a pair of metal cuffs—really, she preferred the plastic for just about everything, but this was only temporary and she didn’t see the point in wasting a set of the disposable ones—and suggested he come on in the house.
He declined.
Stella sighed.
“I know you ain’t feeling so hot right now,” she said, “but if you don’t make a bit more of an effort to get on in there, I’m about to—well, hell.”