No Mercy Page 2

  For a moment, Ben was too stunned to say anything. What his wife had just told him was so implausible that he felt the urge to argue with her, to tell her that she was being ridiculous. Wintersville was a quiet midwestern town of about five thousand inhabitants. The town’s occupants were mostly middle-income conservative families who presumably preferred the sort of small-town life that could be enjoyed here. Golfing, fishing and hunting were popular pastimes, and in early December folks came out for the annual Christmas parade. Tax evasion, shoplifting and the occasional drag race along Kragel Road were the most hardcore criminal activities this town had seen over the past decade. After four years in Pittsburgh, it was one of the things that had initially attracted him. He had decided a long time ago that he did not wish to fall asleep to the sound of sirens. As for the murder of a high school child on his way home from school, it was simply not the type of thing that happened here. Ever.

  ‘They won’t release the victim’s identity until after the family has been notified,’ he heard himself reply numbly. ‘That’s how it’s done.’

  Susan came to him then, putting her arms around him tightly. She was trembling, Ben realized, and he hugged her back. He felt sick to his stomach, and his legs were wooden and uncertain beneath him. He was thankful at that moment for someone to hold on to.

  His wife looked up at him, and for a moment it seemed as if she was uncertain how to proceed, as if she was struggling with a decision that only partially involved him. Then her eyes cleared and seemed to regain their focus. ‘Honey,’ she said, her voice just above a whisper, ‘we’ve got to find Thomas. I’ll feel better once he’s home. They would’ve canceled the game, don’t you think? Or at least phoned the parents to let them know what was happening?’

  Ben thought this was probably true. Whose number had they given the school as an emergency contact, anyway? He separated himself enough from his wife to place his briefcase on the hood of the car, fumbling with the latch. ‘Where’s Joel?’ he asked.

  ‘Inside,’ she replied. ‘I picked him up from Teresa’s on the way home.’

  Ben swung the case open to reveal a haphazard array of documents and medical journals. He reached inside one of the interior pockets and retrieved the phone. The digital display indicated that he had two new messages. He flipped the cell open and punched the button to access voice mail. The first message turned out to be from Susan, asking if he had heard from Thomas, and imploring him to call her as soon as possible. The second message was from Phil Stanner, Thomas’s baseball coach.

  ‘Ben, this is Coach Stanner,’ the recorded voice announced, and Ben felt a wave of dread rising within him. He put the phone on speaker so that Susan could hear.

  ‘Listen,’ Phil’s voice floated up to them from the phone’s tiny speaker. ‘You’ve probably already heard, but someone was killed this afternoon in the woods close to the school. The police have the whole area cordoned off, which is making it difficult to get into and out of the school parking lot. All after-school activities have obviously been canceled. Thomas is fine, and I’ve got the entire team here with me in the gymnasium. We’re asking parents not to come up to the school to pick up their kids, but instead to wait at the designated bus stop where their child is usually dropped off after school. Buses will be bringing students home starting around six-thirty p.m., but kids won’t be let off of the bus unless there’s an adult there to meet them. Thanks for your cooperation. If you have any questions, you can contact the school, but even with four people answering phones, the lines have been pretty tied up this afternoon, so don’t call unless you have to.’

  The message ended and Ben closed the phone and placed it in his front pants pocket. Susan’s hand was covering her mouth, and she looked up at him with a mixture of relief and sadness. Her other arm had wrapped itself protectively around her waist. It was 5:52 p.m. Ben put an arm around his wife’s shoulders, pulling her body against him. He looked up at the large bay window that marked the front of their house. It offered a limited visual portal into their family room, and he could just make out the top of Joel’s head, his familiar brown cowlick arching upward like an apostrophe, as he sat on their couch watching television – hopefully not the news, Ben thought.

  He kissed the top of Susan’s head, wondering if even at this very moment there was a Sheriff’s Department cruiser pulling into someone’s driveway. In his mind, he could see it clearly: the car rolling slowly to a stop, two uniformed officers stepping out and making that long, awful walk to the front door. He imagined them ringing the doorbell and listening to the sound of shuffling feet approaching from the foyer just beyond, a small voice calling through the closed door: ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Sheriff’s Department, ma’am.’

  A momentary pause, followed by the sound of the voice, already afraid, calling out to someone deeper inside of the dwelling: ‘They say it’s the Sheriff’s Department.’

  A man’s voice, descending down the interior stairs: ‘Well, what do they want? Jesus, Martha, open the door!’

  The sound of the dead bolt sliding back within its metallic housing. The door slowly swinging open to reveal a man and a woman, roughly the same age as Susan and himself, standing just inside the open threshold and looking out onto the cold, gray world and the unfortunate messengers standing in front of them. In this image he has conjured, the couple suddenly appear frail beyond their given years, as if this moment itself has weakened them. In a timorous glance, they take in the grave faces of the two unwelcome men standing before them, who have arrived with news the parents do not want to hear, and whose expressions carry within them all of the information that really matters: I’m terribly sorry. Your boy is gone. He was left dead in the woods, and he lies there still while we try to figure out who might have done this to him. He will never walk through this door again.

  In that moment, standing in their own driveway with familiar gravel beneath their feet, Ben offered a silent prayer of gratitude – God forgive him – that he and his wife had not been selected at random to receive that horrible message. It was a prayer of relief and thankfulness for the safety of his family, and a prayer of compassion for the ones who waited even now for the messengers to come.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ he whispered to Susan, and the two walked up the steps together.

  Chapter 3

  An hour later, the three of them stood on the sidewalk, impatiently awaiting the arrival of the Indian Creek High School bus. A block to the east, the sound of passing vehicles could be heard as they traveled along Canton Road on their way north toward Route 22. Beside him, Susan fidgeted restlessly. Ben shared the sentiment. A recorded message from the high school baseball coach, after all, could only go so far in placing a parent’s mind at ease.

  Ben glanced at his watch. It was seven o’clock. Shouldn’t the bus be here already? he wondered. Perhaps not, considering the traffic and events of the day. Rounding everyone up and making sure that all of the kids were accounted for would take longer than expected. Some of the parents would just now be arriving home from work, and there would be no one waiting to receive the kids at certain stops. It could be another hour, he realized.

  Dusk was already beginning to settle upon the neighborhood. In another forty minutes they’d be standing here in the dark. Under the circumstances, he reflected, it was probably not the best plan the school could have come up with; a bunch of families standing around outside in the dark waiting for their kids to be dropped off while somewhere out there a psychopath roamed the streets. He thought about returning home for the car, even though they lived only two blocks away. He didn’t want to leave Susan and Joel standing here alone, however, and he was afraid that if they all went back together the bus would arrive during the time they were gone. Instead, they waited, watching their shadows grow long and lean as the sun continued its rapid descent toward the horizon.

  Something the size of a large cicada moved against Ben’s upper leg with a soft buzzing sound, startling him. He nearly cried
out, but in a moment it was gone. He shuddered involuntarily, imagining its crunchy, crackling exoskeleton flitting up against him.

  Suddenly, it came again, nestling up against his right thigh with a muffled burring noise. He leaped backward. ‘Shit! What was that?’

  Susan looked over at him inquisitively, eyebrows raised. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘A giant bug just hit me in the leg,’ Ben advised her. ‘Twice!’

  No sooner had he uttered these words than he realized two things. The first was that he had just cursed in front of his highly impressionable eight-year-old son, who would now most assuredly walk around his home, his school, and the local playground for the next week yelling ‘Shit!’ at the top of his lungs. The second was that the flying cicada creature that had struck him – twice! – in the right thigh was nothing more than his own cell phone, which he’d left on vibrate in his front pants pocket. Feeling now like a complete idiot, he reached into his pocket and brought out the phone.

  ‘Shit! That’s no giant bug, Dad. That’s your phone,’ Joel pointed out enthusiastically.

  ‘Thank you, Joel,’ he said, looking at the phone’s digital display, which simply read: ‘CO.’ It was his assistant calling from the Coroner’s Office, which meant that the body was either on its way to the CO, or it had already arrived and would soon be ready for autopsy. In a case such as this, they would expect him to perform the autopsy tonight. Answering this call would be the beginning of a long, unpleasant evening.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Susan said with a smile as he glanced in her direction. ‘You’d better answer your cicada.’

  Ben flipped the phone open, and took a few steps away from his wife and son. ‘Yes, hello,’ he said.

  ‘Dr S,’ the voice on the other end spoke excitedly. ‘It’s Nat.’

  ‘Hey. What’s up?’

  ‘You heard about that kid they found dead in the woods this afternoon, I guess. The one who was stabbed to death?’

  ‘Yeah. We heard.’

  ‘Well, the cops have finished with their crime scene investigation and they’re releasin’ the body to us. I’m about to head over there to pick him up right now.’

  ‘Okay. Just give me a call when you get back to the office and everything’s ready.’

  ‘Sure, Dr S. No problem. But, hey. There’s a lot of reporters settin’ up outside the CO with their camera crews ’n’ stuff, you know. Body’s not even here yet and they’re startin’ to gather round like they’re expecting an Elvis sighting or somethin’. I mean, this is a big case for us, don’t you think?’

  ‘Nat, listen to me.’ Ben kept his voice as calm and as clear as he could. He spoke slowly, hoping that by maintaining his own composure he could exert some positive influence on his overenthusiastic assistant. He doubted that it would do much good, but at least it was worth a try.

  ‘Yeah? What d’ya need me to do?’

  Take two Valium and call me in the morning, Ben thought to himself. Instead, he said, ‘You’re right about this being an important case.’

  ‘Sure ’nough,’ Nat exclaimed. ‘Murder like this – in cold blood and all – ain’t somethin’ you see round here every day. That’s for sure.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ben replied. ‘It’s not something we see around here every day. It’s big news in a small town, and those reporters are going to want some footage and a nice ten-second sound bite for the eight o’clock news.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth. Things are about to get a lot more interesting round here. It’s gonna be a regular three-ring circus.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Ben agreed. ‘But right now we have a job to do. It’s an important job. A boy was murdered today. He’s lying on the ground surrounded by yellow police tape. And somewhere out there is a family whose son won’t be returning home tonight. Now, our job is to gather as much information as we can about how he died, and the evidence that we have is his body. If we do our job carefully and professionally, we might find something that will help the police track down his killer.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Nat agreed excitedly. ‘Wouldn’t that be somethin’? You think they’d want me to testify in court?’

  ‘Maybe. But I can tell you one thing for sure. If we let our emotions get the best of us – if we allow ourselves to be distracted and start thinking too much about the reporters and the police and the eight o’clock news – well, then we’ll screw it up. We’ll miss something, or allow a break in the chain of custody, or jump to some conclusion that we’ll regret later. But by then, it will be too late.’

  ‘Too damn late,’ Nat agreed seriously. His voice was quieter now, more subdued, and although Ben could still detect a hint of the earlier excitement just beneath the surface, the boy’s tone was held in check now by something of even greater significance: a sense of sobering responsibility. He could picture his young assistant standing in the lab’s small office with the phone held tightly in his right hand, the adrenaline-laced muscles of his body filled with purpose and ready to act. Nathan Banks was a good kid. At twenty-two, he was a bit young for the job of pathologist’s assistant. But Ben had known him for most of the boy’s life, and he was also friends with Nat’s father, who’d been flying for United Airlines for the past eighteen years and, as a commercial airline pilot, was away from home more often than not. Nat had taken an early fascination with the Coroner’s Office. He’d started volunteering there at the age of sixteen, helping Ben mostly by preparing and cleaning instruments, attending to certain janitorial duties and the like. But Nat also enjoyed watching and eventually assisting with the autopsies Ben performed. His mother, Karen, had given her hesitant permission, although she’d expressed some reservations to Ben about the interest her son had taken in the field. One afternoon she’d shown up at the office and had asked Ben with a worried look if he thought it was normal or healthy for a sixteen-year-old boy to want to spend his days working around dead people. Ben, who had entered medical school at the age of twenty-six, but who had volunteered both in his local hospital’s emergency department as well as at the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office since the age of eighteen, explained to Karen that her son’s interest in the work was probably nothing to worry about. It might even serve as a potential career someday, he’d suggested, and over the next two years Nat had slowly been allowed to assume a more hands-on role in the autopsies Ben performed. Eventually, he became skilled enough to be a real asset in the lab, and when Nat graduated from high school Ben had offered to turn his volunteer position into a paid one. Nat had enthusiastically accepted, and he had been working there ever since.

  ‘What you and I have to decide,’ Ben now said into the phone, ‘is whether we want to be part of the three-ring circus, or whether we want to act like professionals and focus on the job in front of us. You can do either one, Nat, but you can’t do both. What I need to know from you now is how you want to handle it.’

  ‘Well, let’s do our J-O-B,’ his assistant replied. ‘Don’t sweat it, Dr S – I’ve got your back.’

  ‘That’s what I needed to hear.’ Ben glanced back at Susan and Joel, who were standing on the sidewalk in the gathering darkness. ‘Listen, I’ve got something I need to do before heading over there. You think you can go pick up the body and give me a call on my cell once you get back to the CO?’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘And if the reporters want a few words from you for the evening news, what are you going to tell them?’

  ‘I’ll tell them, “No muthafuckin’ comment!” Excuse my French. We’ve got a job to do.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Ben smiled, feeling a modicum of levity for the first time since arriving home that afternoon. ‘I’ll see you in a little while.’

  ‘Over and out,’ Nat saluted, and terminated the connection.

  ‘Over and out,’ Ben sighed to himself as he returned the phone to his pocket and turned back to his wife and son. A moment later, he heard the sound of an approaching diesel engine, and as it rounded the corner they
were silhouetted in the headlight beams of the approaching bus.

  Chapter 4

  Fifty minutes later, Ben found himself sitting in the darkened interior of the Honda as he headed east toward the Coroner’s Office. A tentative drizzle had begun to fall from the sky as his family had walked home together from the bus stop, and by now it had progressed to a steady drumming that pattered the car’s rooftop insistently with its heavy, hollow fingers. A light fog clung to the ground, and Ben was forced to negotiate the dark, rain-slickened streets slowly and with exceptional caution. He’d habitually turned on the radio as he started the car, but most of the local stations were running news of the murder, and the more distant ones that he could sometimes pick up on clear days were reduced to static in the mounting storm. He flipped the knob to the off position and decided to simply concentrate on driving.

  Thomas had stepped off the bus that evening to the warm embrace of his relieved and grateful parents, and to the boundless questions of his spellbound younger brother. As it turned out, Thomas didn’t have much more information on the identity of the victim or the details of the crime than his parents had already received from Phil Stanner. This stood to reason, since the police were remaining tight-lipped until after they’d had a chance to notify the victim’s family.

  What was clear from the moment Thomas stepped off the bus to join them was that he regarded the day’s events with a certain quiet thoughtfulness that Ben had not anticipated. He spoke very little during the walk home, and let his family’s questions wash over him without much comment. Ben wondered whether his son might be in a mild state of shock, or simply trying to wrap his mind around the idea of a violent attack so close to home and school. Ben felt that children of Joel’s age tended to regard death as an obscure and distant entity, far removed from their own daily lives and therefore relatively inconsequential. This view seemed to change as children entered their teenage years and began to explore and sometimes even to court this previously intangible eventuality. Popular movies often romanticized the notion with blazing shoot-outs among beautiful people against an urban backdrop at sunset, or titanic ships that slowly sank in the freezing Atlantic while lovers shared their final fleeting moments together aboard a makeshift life raft only buoyant enough for one. This was not the type of death that Ben encountered as a physician. He supposed it could be described as many things, but mostly his experience with death was that it was impersonal, and seldom graceful.