The Corpse Wore Stilettos

by MJ O'Neill

  “I’m really not in the mood, Marshall.” I turned around to face him. His body twitched, and he shuffled from one foot to the other. His wide eyes looked like they might pop out of his head.

  “I read the paper. I’m sorry you had a rough night.” He looked over his shoulder, probably to make sure no one was around. “But you have to come with me.”

  DC had left early to take his cats to their shrink appointment with Kimi. Thankfully, Dr. Jaffe had worked only a short day today. Henry and Sam were working a suicide with Dr. Hawthorne, and Meg had finished up and headed home to get ready for shopping later. I mentally growled at Marshall’s invasion of my first quiet moment all day.

  “Even if my night had been stellar, there aren’t enough handbags in all of Italy to convince me to go anywhere with you.”

  “Babe, I’m wounded.” He brought his hands to his heart. “But seriously, you have to come with me.” He started pulling on my arm. “I have something for you.”

  I jerked my arm away and wiped the grease from where he had touched me. “All right, I’ll come with you. But we don’t need to touch.”

  Marshall continued to look around as we moved through the hospital.

  Instinctively, I looked over my shoulder too. “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m making sure we aren’t followed. You aren’t exactly inconspicuous in those things.” He pointed at my lovely Stuart Weitzmans, the most comfortable heels for work, in my opinion.

  “It’s not like I can go barefoot. These floors are filthy.” We went up two flights of stairs—making me even happier I’d chosen the Weitzmans for today—through a nurses’ station and to a long hallway of patient rooms.

  Marshall stopped in the middle of the corridor. “We’re here.”

  “If by ‘here’ you mean a janitor’s closet, then yes. What are we doing at a janitor’s closet?”

  Marshall looked around again as he knocked on the door. “They prefer the term ‘custodial engineers.’” He tapped a code on the door, alternating long and short knocks three times.

  “That’s not the right code,” a husky voice said from behind the door.

  “Open up. It’s us.” He pressed his face tightly against the door as he spoke and breathed heavily, as if the person on the other side had X-ray vision.

  “How do I know it’s you if you don’t know the code?”

  “Max, open up before someone sees us.”

  A click of the lock sounded, and a crack opened in the door, allowing a sliver of light to illuminate the pitch-black inside. The light reflected off the plastic of Big Max’s knee brace. Marshall went in, pulling me along.

  “Why are we meeting Big Max in a dark jan... custodial engineer’s closet?” I batted Marshall’s hand away and began looking for a light switch.

  “Hey, how does she know it’s me? You said she couldn’t figure out it was me if we met here.”

  A hand groped the back of my leg near the bottom of my skirt. “Move your hand, Marshall, or something bad is going to happen to you.”

  A loud crash sounded behind me, and Marshall yelped.

  “Get off me, dude,” Max cried as I turned on the light.

  “What in the blazes is going on here?” I asked.

  Marshall sat tangled on the floor with Max’s knee brace and a stray mop bucket. “Max has some information that could help you, but he was afraid to say anything.” Marshall rolled back and forth on the floor, trying to get enough momentum to push up.

  “If it’d been anybody but you, Kat, my lips would be sealed. But I figure I owe you after what you did for me, not reporting me for what we was doing. That would have been my third offense. I would have lost my job. Plus, you helped me get fixed up.” Big Max patted his leg brace. “If the information would help you, it was the least I could do.”

  “Aw, that’s so sweet of you, Max.”

  “Yeah, yeah, he’s a gumdrop.” Marshall’s voice strained as he pushed himself onto all fours then stood. “Now, can we please get on with this before someone walks in and wants to know why the three of us are in a broom closet?”

  “That night you found me and Tilani doing the deed down in the morgue? That wasn’t our first visit that day. We’d been in there earlier.”

  “Dude, impressive,” Marshall said.

  “Did you see something when you were there?” I could use a break. A bunch of strange clues were all I had to go on in figuring out who might be a backstabbing murderer. When I threw in the new information about Burns possibly being tied to Gillian’s murder and my dad maybe being mixed up with the mob, I was more confused than that time I had tried to make my own at-home facial.

  “Mostly it was hard not to see it,” Max said. “The two of them were arguing pretty loud. I was afraid they were gonna come to blows and I’d have to come out of hiding to break it up. Which would have been unfortunate, since I didn’t have any pants on.”

  “Trust me,” I said, “no one wants to see that. Were you able to hear what they were arguing about?”

  “I heard the whole dang thing. This skinny know-it-all guy threatened this big biker guy that if he didn’t make the call, he was going to tell everyone the biker guy’s secret.”

  “He said ‘make the call’?” My voice cracked.

  “Yeah, like, you know, a call to Dr. Hawthorne that maybe someone we all know and love is on the take.”

  Marshall made a kissy face at me. My stomach turned.

  “Did he actually say the call was to Dr. Hawthorne?”

  “No, and that’s when it got heated,” Max said. “The biker guy came at the other guy and put a choke hold on him with one hand. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was one fell swoop. The biker was on him like white on rice and, with one hand, had him lifted in the air. Told him if he breathed one word of anything, he’d end him.”

  “The biker’s obviously Winston,” Marshall said. “The other guy, I’m not sure if it’s Jaffe or Henry.”

  “Henry would make sense, given what Wiggins told us. But Sam and Jaffe were going at it pretty heavy today. Did the guy look more like Beaker from The Muppets or more like Fozzie Bear?” I asked Max.

  “Definitely Beaker. He had a long skinny head.”

  “Jaffe!” Marshall and I said in unison.

  As we left Max to head back to the morgue, Marshall reminded me no less than six times that he had now delivered on his end of the bargain, so I needed to show up with bells on for bowling on Thursday. When he hit attempt number seven, I finally shouted at him that if he said one more word about it, I’d stuff a bowling ball up any number of available orifices. Marshall finally got the hint and left.

  Since the disappearance of the body, I’d felt like the whole world had spun upside down. I sat at the morgue computer desk and took a deep breath. I took out my lucky pink feather pen that matched my notebook and reviewed my list. In addition to the notes on the prostitute who didn’t look like a prostitute, and notes about Burns and his team, I added all the new information about my potentially nefarious coworkers:

  Victor: A maybe-crazy stalking Russian body-napper with a weird creepy crush on me.

  Dr. Jaffe: Gambling addict with angry godfather who was also head of the country’s largest defense contractor. Why had he exploded at the mention that he might be mixed up with Joy? Was it related?

  Henry: On the take from the morticians. At least 3 grand a month. Where does the money go? Threatened by parking lot lady with the bad Mary Janes.

  Sam Allen Winston: Fight with Dr. Jaffe about a secret call. Was it about me? If not, what was it about?

  And I still hadn’t quite absorbed the possibility that my daddy could be mixed up in all of this. At the very least, Gillian seemed to have the same clue my grand had that somehow ran through the mob. It just didn’t seem possible that Clarke Waters had any more of a connection to the mob than watching Goodfellas. Maybe the clue was somehow linked to the misunderstanding that had landed him in jail in the first place. If I could find
the information Gillian had, it could help get him out.

  I hadn’t quite figured out what, if anything, I’d tell Burns about the “missile launch codes” and my dad. If he had investigated my dad’s case, maybe he had something that could clear him. On the other hand, he could also freak out and conclude my dad had something to do with Gillian’s murder, and then Burns might go back on our deal. Without his help, I didn’t see how I would get out of the suspension. Maybe it was better if I didn’t tell him about my dad.

  After all, Burns hadn’t felt it necessary to tell me about the mysterious Covana and his possible connection to Gillian’s murder. If I didn’t tell Burns about my dad, I’d only be leveling the playing field. Of course, thanks to Fletcher Reid, I now knew one of Burns’s secrets, so the playing field wouldn’t quite be level. Plus, my indecisiveness had the side effect of making me a bad liar.

  But I did have a slew of new clues to share with him. And as a bonus, maybe he could help me with my Victor problem. I’d agreed to go back and help with a sketch of the man who had stolen the body to see if they could identify him. With a first name now, maybe they could.

  Plus, it would be nice to talk to Burns again. He was such a study in contrasts—poetry-reciting, orphan-saving Fred Astaire on the one hand, gun-toting, secret-keeping special ops guy on the other.

  Also, I had made a date with Meg for shopping later. Given the current state of my bank account, and the fact that the feds had all of our credit cards, seeing Burns had become a necessity. He was, after all, the party sponsor. Whether I wanted to or not, keeping in good graces with one’s sponsor was a party-planning necessity. I’d just have to try to avoid any conversation about my dad.

  As Master Tahkaswami would say, “A journey to confidence begins with a single tenuous step.”

  Chapter 12

  When the Bumpit-wearing Stepford receptionist had said that Burns was unavailable, I’d had mixed feelings. The whole drive over, I’d gone back and forth about what I would say to him. By the time I pulled into the parking lot, I still hadn’t figured it out. So I was relieved when Neutron finally appeared to collect me.

  “Let’s get started,” Neutron said and led me to a set of chairs in front of a giant computer monitor.

  I watched as he pressed several buttons and typed a bunch of strange lines into the computer. Neutron looked much more confident behind his computer screen than he had in DC’s greenhouse, shooting at a wayward plant.

  He pulled up a computer software program that gave me a series of choices for facial features like eye color, eye width, and facial hair then asked me to look at the drawing and make recommendations by feature, like “make the nose bigger.” The program was almost exactly like the one my friend Kate Simmons’s plastic surgeon had used to show her what her new face would look like.

  By the time we were done, the picture on the monitor looked exactly like the body snatcher, evil gaze and all. Even his picture gave me chills. In DC’s defense, the man did kind of look like a Russian Tom Cruise.

  “That’s it. That’s amazing. I always thought an artist had to come and do that.”

  “These days, software can do amazing things. This is the program the FBI uses for sketching terrorists and kidnappers.”

  “You stole the program?”

  He smiled big. “It’s more like borrowing. Now let’s see if we can find your guy in one of the federal databases with their facial recognition.” He typed more strange lines of code.

  “Why do people call you Neutron?”

  “It’s my hacker name. Ya know, the glasses, Jimmy Neutron and all. My real name is Harold, but no one named Harold gets taken seriously as a hacker. I’m a very good hacker.”

  “Is that how you met Burns?”

  “Sort of. He sprang me from the psych ward after a hack gone bad.”

  “Is that a good thing? Did you need to be there?”

  “Maybe a little but not enough to worry about seriously.”

  “Did you hack anyone good?”

  “I sent Chief Justice Roberts a lifetime supply of Viagra using a credit card number I stole from a retail site.” He typed more lines then pushed the enter key. Pictures and records zoomed across the screen.

  “Did he need Viagra?”

  “I don’t know. But I thought someone important should know how easy it is to steal credit card numbers. Someone stole my mom’s and ran up this huge bill, and the company wouldn’t help her. The courts ruled against her. So I thought if I proved a point, it would help.”

  “At least they didn’t put you in jail.”

  “I think the judge thought it was funny. So he sentenced me to community service and a psychiatric evaluation. When Burns heard about my story, he helped get my mom’s credit card fixed and hired me as lead tech here.”

  “Do you like working here?”

  “I know we look a little crazy from the outside, but we’re family here. Burns has a knack for recognizing hidden talent, and while he’s not the emotional type, he takes care of his own.”

  The computer made a loud bing, and a mug shot with a dossier popped up next to the computer drawing. His photo was even more ominous.

  “And we have a winner,” Neutron said, printing the profile of the man I had identified, Victor Chentinko, aka The Chin.

  “I was shot at by a body part?”

  “Ha. No, this is all Russian mob. Rap sheet a mile long.”

  “So I was right. But what does the Russian mob have to do with any of this?”

  “It’s weird, really. The Russians tend to stay out of the prostitution game. It’s just not their thing.”

  “What is their thing?”

  “Smuggling, drugs, gambling. Anything with a heavy money component where they don’t have to worry about the product running off or flipping out. I suppose it could have something to do with human trafficking, but that seems like a stretch. A lot of the dead girls were local girls who’d been around for a while. A lot of them had regulars. These don’t seem like snatches gone wrong or girls trying to escape a ring. The pieces just don’t fit right for that. The Russian trafficking operations tend to be more hit-and-run. They don’t like to stay involved. This seems like something else.”

  Great. I’d spent weeks trying to convince everyone my family wasn’t involved with the mob, and now here I was, potentially involved with the mob. It seemed the only thing I had gotten right while defending my dad was that it wasn’t the Italian mob.

  “I’ll start running background and let Burns know we have something. He’s with a donor.” Neutron pushed some buttons, and the picture of Chentinko started reproducing itself on the nearby printer.

  Before too long, Burns emerged through the fake door of the conference room. Today he wore an exquisite pinstriped suit. He looked like he could own Wall Street and was just as dangerous in a suit as he had been as a lumberjack.

  Burns took in the images of Chentinko on the screen before he said anything. “It looks like you’ve made some progress since we last talked.”

  “I just don’t get why he’s stalking me.” Even the photos of Chentinko were enough to make me shudder.

  “Stalking you? Who?” Burns looked alarmed.

  “Chentinko,” I said, pointing at his eerie mug shot. “He called me. And sent me flowers. Said I looked beautiful in my dress last night and that we’ll be meeting soon.”

  “He sent those to your house?”

  “Yes. And called on my personal cell. I assume it’s information that someone from the morgue gave him.”

  He walked over to a phone on the conference room table and dialed. “I need a full package for Kat. Car, home, work. She sneezes, I want to know.” He hung up.

  “What are you doing? I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.” I didn’t even believe me when I said it. I was quite sure he didn’t either. He smiled at my effort.

  “We made a deal, remember? You collect information, and I provide security better than the police could. There’s a bo
dy-snatching murderer running around. This is me upholding my end of the deal.”

  Burns moved closer to me. “Any idea why Chentinko has taken a liking to you?”

  “I have no idea. He said it was because I’ve gotten in his way, but that doesn’t really explain his weird affection. Maybe he thinks we’re soul mates because we both like expensive shoes.” And perhaps he thought we were connected because of something with my dad. But I wasn’t ready to share that with Burns yet.

  “Maybe he has a thing for sexy morgue workers.”

  “Sexy?”

  He took another step closer, and my pulse quickened.

  “Funny, loyal, smart, great dancer. He might be a psycho, but you did look beautiful last night.” He ran his hand through my hair. The warmth of the touch was mesmerizing. His breath warmed the side of my neck as he leaned in.

  And then the door opened. Burns stepped back slightly. The cold rushed in, filling the space between us. Neutron strolled through, head down and focused on some new electronic gizmo. He returned to his computer.

  Burns put his hands in his pockets. “When I saw in the paper this morning how your night ended, I thought you might have your hands too full on the home front to bother with our pesky Russian problem.” His teasing lightened the mood.

  I grinned. “I was a bit preoccupied trying to decipher what ‘Covana’ could mean.”

  Without lifting his head up from his computer, Neutron looked over the top of his glasses at Burns, then at me, then back at Burns as if he were watching a tennis match.

  Burns moved to the cabinet for water. “And how is Fletcher Reid?”

  “How do you know I got it from Fletcher?”

  “Because he’s the only other one who knows about it. We didn’t even tell the police,” Neutron said then went back to typing on his computer.

  “Why did he tell you?” Burns asked. He leaned against the cabinets and drank.

  “He thinks you’re dangerous.”

  “Do you think that?”

  “Twenty-nine million people visited emergency rooms last year for ‘accidents.’” I didn’t know what I believed. “Do the police have any other leads on Gillian’s murder?”