No Mercy. John Burley

       Chapter 1

      Although it was Friday evening, Ben Stevenson found the traffic along Sunset Boulevard heading west out of Steubenville particularly heavy during his commute home. Dr Coleman’s case had finished earlier than expected, and the last specimen of Mrs Granch’s partial thyroidectomy had been sent to the lab at 4:40 p.m. The surgically resected margins had been clear of cancer cells, and he’d placed a call to the OR.

      ‘OR Three,’ the circulating nurse’s voice answered at the other end.

      ‘Marsha, this is Dr Stevenson. Can I speak with Dr Coleman, please?’

      ‘Oh, hello, Dr Stevenson,’ she replied. ‘One moment – I’ll put you on speaker.’

      There was a brief pause, then Coleman’s voice, sounding slightly distant and metallic over the speakerphone. ‘How does it look, Ben?’

      ‘Margins are clear, Todd,’ he replied. ‘Looks good from my end.’

      ‘All right,’ the surgeon responded. ‘That’s all I’ve got for you today. I’m closing now.’

      Closing. That was welcome news on any day, but particularly on a Friday when your eldest son’s high school baseball team was scheduled for a game. Thomas had started the season as a center fielder, but the strength of his arm had drawn the coach’s attention and Thomas had quickly proven to be an even greater asset on the mound. Tonight was his turn in the pitching rotation. The game was scheduled for a 6 p.m. start time, and Ben did not intend to miss it.

      He spent the next ten minutes closing up the lab. When he was satisfied that everything was in order, Ben grabbed his jacket, locked the door behind him and headed for his car. Pulling out of Trinity Medical Center’s parking lot, he flipped on the XM radio and began to hum along with the Beatles, as John Lennon proclaimed, ‘Nothing’s gonna change my world.’

      He passed John Scott Highway, and now the traffic began to slow as he approached Wintersville. Ben had moved his family to this small town from Pittsburgh thirteen years ago. He’d met Susan during medical school at Loyola University in Chicago. They’d graduated together, and had both managed to secure residency positions at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He’d trained in pathology, while Susan had pursued a program in family practice. At the end of their first year, they married – a small ceremony attended by immediate family and a few friends. They’d spent the following week hiking and kayaking through a good portion of upstate New York – Susan’s idea, actually – before returning to the exhausting, gut-wrenching grind of medical residency. The week had suited their needs perfectly, providing unhurried time to spend exclusively with one another, far removed from the constant demands and commotion of residency. It had felt good to exercise their bodies, which had already started to become soft with neglect. The fresh air and vibrant green foliage had rejuvenated their senses, and they’d talked with excitement about their plans for the future. Nights had been mostly cloudless, as he recalled, and they’d made love under the stars nearly every evening before retiring to the thin, nylon shelter of their tent. Ben had finished the week with more than a few mosquito bites on compromising areas of his body. Susan had come away from the week pregnant, although they would not realize it for another six weeks. Thomas was born nine months later.

      That had been a difficult time for them, so early in their marriage. Medical residency was not the ideal time to try to raise a newborn, of course, and the hospital didn’t lighten the already exhausting work hours simply because there was a crying three-month-old infant at home to attend to. Neither of them had family in the area, and Susan simply couldn’t bring herself to turn Thomas over to day care after her very brief maternity allowance had ended. Ultimately, she’d decided to take a year off to spend with the baby, which, in retrospect, had turned out to be the right choice for all of them.

      Canton Road slipped by on his right, and Ben realized just a little too late that he probably should’ve turned there to detour around some of this congestion. Sunset Boulevard, which had now become Main Street, was the primary connector between the towns of Steubenville and Wintersville, small midwestern flecks on the map, lying just west of the Ohio River. Fifty miles to the east was Pittsburgh, and approximately 150 miles to the west was Columbus. Aside from a parade of small towns with equal or lesser populations, there wasn’t much else in between. Certainly not enough to warrant traffic like this – one of the reasons they’d decided to leave such cities as Chicago and Pittsburgh behind them in the first place.

      Must be an accident, Ben thought. A bad one from the looks of this backup. Inconvenient and frustrating, of course – and for one guilty moment he resented its presence in yet another way. An accident causing this much of a standstill could mean fatalities. And that often involved a coroner’s investigation, which meant he might be making a trip to the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office this evening or, by the latest, tomorrow morning to perform an autopsy. Great. Absolutely perfect, he thought to himself, and immediately felt another pang of guilt. Life as a small-town pathologist meant one-stop shopping when it came to coroner investigations. There was him, and then there was the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office and Forensic Lab in Pittsburgh, fifty miles to the east. But he had known that, he reminded himself, when he’d signed on to the job here.

      The Beatles had yielded to The Band, who were sailing off into the first stanza of ‘The Weight’ – an ominous sign, Ben thought. He switched off the radio. Traffic had slowed to a crawl and he could now see the entrance to Indian Creek High School just ahead on the right. This seemed to be the source of at least some of the congestion. He could identify two police cruisers, an ambulance and a news truck in the school’s parking lot. On the right-hand shoulder, two cars had pulled off the road to exchange insurance information, apparently the result of a low-speed rear-end collision caused by a little rubbernecking. The drivers were involved in a heated discussion, and a sheriff’s deputy approached to intervene before things escalated further.

      Up ahead, the traffic dissipated, and Ben accelerated slowly toward home. There was still enough time to make Thomas’s baseball game, although things would be a little tighter than he’d initially anticipated. He flipped back on the radio and smiled to himself. The Band was finishing the final chorus, and just like that, ‘The Weight’ was over.

       Chapter 2

      The first thing Ben noticed as he approached the house was that Susan had beaten him home, her gray Saab already parked in their driveway. He pulled in behind her, got out, and retrieved his briefcase from the trunk. Having heard him drive up, his wife had stepped out of the house and was walking down the front steps to greet him. Even after all these years she was still beautiful, Ben thought, with dark black shoulder-length hair and chestnut eyes he had difficulty looking away from. Her tall body had remained slim and agile, despite the two children she had carried. And although Ben himself was of similar athletic build, the years, he felt, had taken a harder toll on him, the responsibilities pulling steadily at the corners of his eyes, his brown hair now speckled generously with strands of gray. He smiled up at her, but the smile faded as she drew nearer.

      ‘Tell me you’ve spoken with Thomas this afternoon,’ she entreated, her hands clutching at the sides of her dress.

      ‘Why? What’s wrong?’ he asked, his mind automatically flipping through a list of the most catastrophic possibilities. Something was very wrong indeed, he realized as he studied her features. Susan was afraid – but she was much more than that; she was on the brink of hysteria.

      ‘There’s been a death at the school,’ she blurted out. ‘One of the high school kids, they think.’

      Ben looked at her, dumbfounded. ‘What?’

      ‘Someone was killed this afternoon,’ she advised him. ‘Initial news reports said it was one of the high