Enter Evil

by Linda Ladd

  “I’m being prodded at gunpoint at the moment, Khur-Vay. Anything you can do about that?”

  Khur-Vay wasn’t dressed like a belly dancer anymore. She was dressed more like me in a black T-shirt and black jeans, or in her case, black denim capris. She was barefoot. I had on my hightop Nikes, in case I stepped on a snake. She looked at the man behind me, whoever the hell he was, and then she said, “Yang Wei. She’s okay. I know her. She’s a police officer.”

  My polite and prodding companion came into view, and showed me his rather lethal-looking gun. He had my weapon in his other hand. He said, “If I give this back, you won’t shoot me or arrest me, will you?”

  Well, ha ha, and aren’t you a card? “I’ll do my best to restrain myself, but it won’t be easy.”

  Grinning, but warily, he came forward and handed over my weapon. Then I saw that he was Asian, a real tall, thin guy with long black hair tied back in a ponytail, and I don’t mean pulled back low on the neck like hippies do but fastened up high with a rubber band like little preschool girls wear theirs. He didn’t have a pink ribbon on it, though.

  “Thanks a million, Yang Wei,” I said, and meant it. He could’ve just shot me and asked questions later. That’s the way most of my enemies do it. Except for Young or Collins or whoever was killing people out at Oak Haven. They’d probably make me shoot myself.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Nobody said anything for a moment, then Khur-Vay said, “How did you find me?”

  “I’ve got a knack for that sorta thing.”

  “You must. I thought I was secure here.”

  “Secure?”

  The second woman hadn’t said a word, but then she stood up, too, and the twinkling lights illuminated her face. I realized she was crying. I realized she was Li He.

  Khur-Vay immediately noted my shocked-out-of-my-gourd expression, I guess, because she said, “Yes, it’s Li He. She’s been here with me all along.”

  I said, “I’ve been looking for you, Li He. So have your parents, the Springfield police, and lots of other people.” I was pissed that she’d been hiding out here, but on the other hand, I was also relieved to see with my own eyes that she wasn’t the blackened victim in that awful oven. Now she was a person of interest who could answer a whole bunch of my questions.

  “Sit down, Detective,” said Khur-Vay. “I’ll pour you some lemonade and then I’ll tell you why I’ve been hiding Li He out here.”

  “That sounds like a plan.” I glanced at Yang Wei, slid the Glock back into my holster, and then I sat down at the table with the two women. Yang Wei melted away into the night to catch some more trespassing detective types. He was pretty stealthy, I’ll give him that. People can’t usually sneak up on me. I’m glad he’s on my side, whatever side that is.

  Khur-Vay said, “Actually, I’m glad you’re here. I hated lying to you at the studio. What I’m going to tell you is strictly confidential. You do understand that, right?”

  “Wrong. Nothing’s confidential in my investigation, unless I decide it is.”

  “I believe you will agree, once you hear my story.”

  Li He kept up the sobbing. It made me wonder why, but I had a feeling I was about to find out.

  Khur-Vay bustled around, pouring me some lemonade, then refilling her glass and Li He’s. She pushed a plate of date shortbread cookies in front of me, the consummate hostess. “Help yourself.”

  I took one because I’m polite, too, and a little hungry, and not under the fear of death anymore. “Okay, let’s hear it, Khur-Vay, or should I say, Sharon, why’d you lie to me and why is Li He out here in hiding?”

  “She’s in hiding because she doesn’t want to go back home to Beijing. Yang Wei and I are helping her evade the Chinese authorities. They’ll eventually come looking for her when they realize she’s not coming back.”

  “And you are doing this why?”

  “Yang Wei’s a Chinese national who defected here from a basketball exchange program years ago. He helps others escape and gets them asylum, and I’m talking about the ones who aren’t given clearance to immigrate by the government.”

  “And how did a little belly dancer like you get involved in all this?”

  “Mikey.”

  “Mikey Murphy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were his girlfriend once upon a time. That correct?”

  “Yes, for a while until I left the state and went home.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “I went back to Dyersburg because of this guy I thought I wanted to marry, but when we broke up, I came back here and started my studio in Branson. Mikey came to me and asked me to help his new girlfriend stay in the United States.”

  “Why you?”

  “Because I already knew her through the studio.”

  I turned to Li He. “Why couldn’t you apply for immigration?”

  She sobbed out the answer while dabbing at her tears with a black paper napkin imprinted with a white yin/yang symbol. She looked even smaller in person than in her pictures. “Because they won’t let me stay. I’ve been trained since I was three years old to perform with my parents in the show and they consider me a commodity. I have to go back home.”

  “Mikey could’ve gone over there. Things are different now between our two countries.”

  Khur-Vay said, “Mikey was going to, but then he decided that he didn’t want to live in China.” Hesitating and giving a long look at Li He, she went on, “And she can’t go back. She’s pregnant.”

  Okay, now I began to understand. “Mikey’s baby?”

  “Yes,” sobbed Li He. “And then somebody killed him.”

  “There, there, sweetie,” Khur-Vay said to Li He. She patted the girl’s back, then turned to me. “Li He is only nineteen. That’s not old enough to get a marriage certificate in China. Girls there have to be twenty. Men have to be twenty-two. Without a marriage certificate, she can’t get a birth certificate. If she returns to China when she’s supposed to, and that’s before her baby’s born, she’ll either have to sell it or have an abortion or pay a huge fine. That’s how they do things in China. Mikey was going to pay the fine, but now he’s dead and she’s left with no one to help her.”

  “So she’s gonna just disappear here in the States?”

  “That’s right. Yang Wei has a network set up, sort of like the old Underground Railroad but in the Asian American community. Mikey was gonna sell his pizza place and join her somewhere after the baby was born and they’d stopped searching for her.”

  I said to Li He, “And your parents don’t know the truth?”

  More crying. “No, they’ll get in trouble if the immigration officials find out they know where I am. But now Mikey’s gone and everything’s gone wrong, and I’ll be all alone here.”

  Khur-Vay put her arm around the tiny girl’s shoulders. “No, you won’t, Li He, you won’t, either. Yang Wei’s getting you into a good family, who’ll help you start over. Nobody will know who you are or where you are. Nobody will take your baby away.”

  All this was fine and dandy, except for one thing. Who was the girl in Mikey’s oven?

  I asked those questions, eliciting more distress in my companions. Li He said, “I think it might be my roommate, Mel. I can’t get hold of her since it happened.”

  And neither had we. “Why do you think it was her?”

  “Because she told me that she and Mikey had found out some stuff about a doctor at Oak Haven when they were patients up there, and she was afraid.”

  “Which doctor?”

  “She didn’t tell me. I was already in hiding out here, and I couldn’t take a chance being on the phone with anybody. Mikey, either. I didn’t get to say good-bye to him.” More sobbing commenced.

  “Then you don’t think either one of them killed themselves?”

  “Oh, no, Mikey would never do that to me. We were going to get married as soon as he could sell Mikey’s Place and join me.”

  Khur Vay said, “We’re not s
ure the other victim is Mel. We’re hoping it’s not. Do you know who it is yet?”

  “No, but my partner’s checking that out as we speak. He needs to know all this.”

  Moving away from the patio, I pulled out my cell and dialed up Bud. He answered on the second ring, and I spoke in a low voice, watching Khur-Vay and Li He so they wouldn’t take off on me. Khur-Vay was now talking on her cell phone, too.

  “Where are you, Bud?”

  “I’m outside Mel Baxter’s parents’ house, and they don’t know where the hell she is. She wasn’t supposed to be here, there wasn’t any cousin’s wedding, and they haven’t seen or heard from her in two weeks. And get this, they adopted her from China when she was fifteen and she’s been in treatment at Oak Haven.”

  “I think she’s our vic in the oven.”

  “Could be, I guess.”

  “And if she is, we’ll need proof for the lab. Can you go back in and ask her parents if she’s got a toothbrush or hairbrush we can take in as evidence? Buck’s gonna need that ASAP.”

  Bud said, “What put you on to her?”

  “Maybe the fact I’m sitting here looking at Li He, very much still alive and kicking?”

  “No shit. Where’d you find her?”

  I told him the story without much detail, mainly because I didn’t have much detail.

  Bud said, “I’ll get right on it. I should be home in say, two and a half, three hours.”

  We hung up, and I rejoined the ladies, who had been talking together in anxious tones. They weren’t yet wringing their hands but were close to it.

  Khur-Vay looked at me. “We’ve gotta get Li He out of here tonight. It’s no longer safe. If you found us, somebody else can, too.”

  “You’re telling a sworn police officer that you’re hiding an illegal immigrant. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Please. She’s going to have a baby. She doesn’t want to give it up.”

  I’d heard about the One-Child Policy that China had adopted several decades ago, but I hadn’t heard all the legal details before. I wasn’t about to turn the girl in. Khur-Vay knew it, and I knew it.

  Khur-Vay added sugar to the pot. “Maybe I can help you find out about those doctors and what Mikey and Mel knew about them. I’ll help you, if you’ll help me.”

  “How can you help me?”

  “I know a lot about Mikey that other people don’t know. We went together. He trusted me. Didn’t he come to me for help with Li He, even though we broke up a long time ago?”

  Now that made sense. It occurred to me then that she or Li He might know something about Mikey’s mysterious key. I pulled it out, still in the plastic evidence bag, and showed it to them. “Do either of you know what this unlocks?”

  Li He leaned forward, examined it, and then shook her head. Her face was sorrowful, her cheeks wet with tears. I had a feeling she’d been crying for a long time. “I do not know. Orchid might have known.”

  “Who’s Orchid?”

  “That was Mel’s name when she lived at the clinic. Some of the patients went by fake names. The ones that wanted to keep their identities secret.”

  That explained some of the weird names I’d seen at the tops of Dr. Young’s and Dr. Collins’s files. “Did Mikey have a special name up there?”

  “No, he just went by Mikey. He didn’t care if people knew who he really was. Everybody got to choose what they were called.”

  “I see.”

  Khur-Vay was examining the key. “I don’t recognize it, either.” Frowning, she seemed reluctant to speak her next words but finally got them out, “But I know a place he used to go to. He stored some of his furniture and stuff there when his parents kicked him out of the house.”

  Excited and not hiding it, I said, “What place? Where is it?”

  “It’s an old warehouse and boat dock on the Finley River. His grandparents owned it, I think, and left it to him. Mikey said rumrunners used to unload liquor out there during Prohibition. I helped him move his stuff in. He locked it up when we left. Maybe that’s what this key goes to.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Where exactly is this place?”

  “It’s not far away. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes from here. You go right by this restaurant called the Riverside Inn and over a little narrow one-lane bridge, then it’s a little past there, on a gravel road that turns to the left.”

  “You willing to show me?”

  “Yes, if you’ll let me get Li He packed and out of here. I want Yang Wei to take her to another safe house tonight. It won’t take long to get her ready.”

  “Okay, but make it quick.”

  Khur-Vay and Li He went inside the house. Minutes later, Khur-Vay was back outside with a fresh pitcher of lemonade and a plate of fried pies, still the hostess with the mostest. She filled up my glass and then returned to the house. I drank the lemonade and wished she would hurry up. I wondered where Black was and tried to figure out what the key I was holding might uncover. Evidence for multiple first-degree murder warrants, I hoped. I reached for my phone to call Black but stopped when Yang Wei materialized out from underneath the dark trees.

  He had on a black cotton tunic and pants, Chinese style, probably trying to look like a ninja warrior when he creeped around in the dark. He joined me at the table, deciding he liked my company, after all, I guess. He just sat there, silent and unfriendly. So did I. I could be as silent and unfriendly as the best of them.

  “I think someone at that clinic killed my sister. Her name was Lotus,” he said suddenly, and dare I say it, unexpectedly.

  “You don’t say.”

  “I am very serious. I have always believed it.”

  “Who?”

  “I cannot prove it, but he was known as Tee at the time. He was a patient then, but I don’t know what happened to him. I only know that she slit her wrists in the bathtub not long after he arrived. It was very bloody.” His facial expression did not alter with those words, but I could see the pain in his eyes before he looked away.

  The gruesome scene he had just described brought back a terrible trauma from my own past, a mental image I quickly tried to shut down. All this was coming together. I was getting very close to the truth but couldn’t quite get a handle on it yet.

  “What did this Tee guy look like?”

  “He was a big kid, athletic, brown hair, big smile, friendly. I know he had something to do with what Lotus did. I know it in here.” Dead serious now, he looked deep into my eyes again and put his palm over his heart.

  That description sounded an awful lot like Collins, now didn’t it? And by God, if it was him, I was going to prove it. But Happy Pete and Young also fit that description, to a lesser degree, maybe, but they fit. I needed to look through those clinic files again. Most of them had included photographs of the patients. Maybe Yang Wei could identify this Tee guy for me. At this point, I’d take any help I can get. If Yang Wei was right about his sister’s death, somebody affiliated with Oak Haven Clinic had been manipulating kids to commit suicide, and maybe for years. And now I was so hot on his trail my feet were getting scorched.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Look over there, Claire, there it is, the Riverside Inn. Mikey said it used to be a speakeasy back in the twenties.”

  On first name basis now, Khur-Vay was pointing off to my left, where a long white structure that looked like it might have been a motel in days gone by was spread out a little lower than the roadbed. Lights spilled out all the windows, and lots of cars were packed together on the asphalt parking lot. The place must have a good menu.

  “They have the best fried chicken in the universe,” said Khur-Vay, as if on cue.

  “That’s pretty good chicken,” I said, but to be fair, I haven’t sampled any from Mars or Jupiter, so there you go.

  “Just follow the road around, then go over the bridge.” Khur-Vay was getting real chatty now, nervous, even, but I couldn’t blame her. We both were dealing with dangerous people playing dangerous head games here. No telli
ng what we were going to find in that deserted warehouse of Mikey’s. I shuddered to think. Hopefully, it would just be a lot of incriminating evidence that would nail the killer big-time.

  The bridge was an old iron single-lane kind, and it spanned the Finley River just on the other side of the restaurant. It was too dark to see the water below us, but it was probably up and running high because of the recent flooding in the area. I could hear the rush of the current as I navigated slowly across the narrow bridge and hoped no oncoming traffic showed up at a high rate of speed. One-lane bridges were few and far between in this day and age and for good reason, too. I wondered why this one had been left behind in the march of progress. “How much farther, Khur-Vay?”

  “Not too much, I think. It’s been a long time, and I was only here that one time. I hope I can still find it. The road we want turns off to the left and then curves back toward the river. I think it finally comes out at the warehouse a couple of miles upstream from the bridge.”

  The belly dancer’s chatter was going nonstop now. I drove along the deserted blacktopped road, way out in the sticks now, my headlights flashing on the dense, dusty green brown brush and tree trunks along the sides of the road. When I suddenly began to feel funny, I hit the brake. I felt dizzy and sluggish, like my mind was suddenly slowing down. When I tried to blink that strange sensation away, it didn’t go anywhere. I pulled off the road onto the shoulder and shoved the gearshift in park.

  “What’s wrong? Why are you stopping?” Khur-Vay was saying in a voice that seemed to spiral down my ear canals like a slow-moving funnel cloud.

  Looking over at her, I tried to wake up and blink her face into one image instead of two. “I feel sick. It came on really fast.” My hands were going limp, my muscles like jelly, and then I realized this was not some little dizzy spell. This was a drug effect. A drug that Khur-Vay had given to me, probably in the lemonade. Oh, God, she was part of this mess; she’d drugged me.