Final Edge s--4

by Robert W. Walker

  The 1956 police reports proved sketchy as Lucas's eyes scanned over the aged paper and the old script. There was a record of the detectives having talked to the parents, but a reading between the lines spoke of a bigoted-or at least jaded-police force that had written them off as shiftless niggers whose lifestyle had brought the tragedy down around young Yolanda's head. Unofficially, the dead child's parents were at very least negligent, having allowed a live- in uncle to send the nine-year-old out after dark for cigarettes and coffee. She made it back with the grocery bag, and was allowed to play out back of the house as a reward. The child then disappeared from their backyard, skirted by an alleyway, and she was returned later, dumped on the doorstep of a home a block over. The numbers on the two homes corresponding as they did-1214 Denton- Yolanda's home-to 1214 Denby Street-home of startled neighbors who'd discovered Yolanda's body and called police-nagged at Lucas, tugging like a fish on a line. He pictured the startled neighbors trying to explain to a desk sergeant over the phone what lay on their front steps, this before the days of 911 emergency dialing.

  One of the original detectives felt the killer had confused the two addresses on his return. If this were true, then the killer couldn't have been a long-time resident of the neighborhood, like the girl's uncle, who had a record of burglaries, or the neighborhood dirty old man, or the pair of teens brought in for questioning. In fact, Yolanda's killer might be a total stranger to the area, and so not likely known in the area. Somebody would notice a stranger in a close-knit community, or someone new to the block, but how close-knit was this area in 1956? Was there a welcome wagon lady in the area who might know of anyone recently moved in, and if so, was she still alive for questioning? Not likely on both counts.

  Lucas wondered about the possibility of a recently released sex offender taking up residence at a time when news of such releases was not divulged to the public. He thought of pursuing such a record, lost to time. What prison would he begin with, Huntsville? It was the nearest, but hardly the only one in the state.

  An aged black man had been hauled in for questioning, a man who lived a few doors down. Sixty-two-year-old Jacob Perry, a man with a record for attempted molestation of a minor, was known for hanging about the schools and parks of Jacinto, always with an eye on the local children, but the detectives could not shake his alibi. He'd gone into the hospital that weekend for a hip replacement. Besides, reasoned Lucas from the standpoint of fifty years of police growth and hindsight, since the "dirty old man" was well versed in the terrain, he would have known the child's address and not confused it with a corresponding number a block away.

  "Unless he was suffering from Alzheimer's," Lucas told himself now.

  A pair of young thugs from the neighborhood were also questioned, Donnell Knight and Rory Billings, both of whom knew the neighborhood intimately. The detectives on the case reasoned the boys might have deliberately dumped the girl's sexually molested, tortured, and brutally beaten body on the wrong doorstep to throw suspicion away from themselves, but by the same token, police interrogators deemed the young men stupid and sloppy, seemingly contradicting their own findings. And it had been Lucas's experience that, despite popular novels and films glorifying the evil genius of killers such as Hannibal Lecter, ninety-nine percent of murderers were far too stupid to know how to divert attention away from themselves, and in practice, when they tried, it created a net thrown over themselves. In this case, the two boys' families alibied for them and they too were released.

  Lucas read on. A year passed without any breaks in the case, and the thin little emaciated murder book traveled from upstairs to here, the dungeon of dead case files, and here it had remained all these years for Lucas to regard as one of thousands that deserved special heed. He didn't know why it deserved his care now, but it did. Maurice Remo had jumped in on it, when it arrived on his desk, the same desk Lucas sat at now, and the great Remo had not been able to crack the case either. In fact, Remo appeared to have given it short shrift, but he did write some marginal notes indicating that he, like Lucas, ruled out the girl's uncle, the old man, Perry, and the two boys as the killer based on the known evidence. Remo's signature on a routing sheet hinted at more information, perhaps a second volume to the investigation, but Lucas could find no additional tombstone in the paper cemetery he called home.

  Maurice Remo was likely in a Florida retirement community by now, if not passed away Lucas pushed the file to a corner of his desk, as if the gesture would put an end to its nagging him; he firmly told himself that pursuing it would only be a waste of time.

  In an effort to escape Yolanda Sims, he got on the phone and called upstairs to Chang's lab, anxious now to learn anything new about the god awful packages forwarded to Meredyth and him. When he located Leonard in his morgue, he asked, "Anything you can tell me about last night's findings at my and Meredyth's place?"

  "Blood and serum tests show it's all from same body as I suspected. DNA typing is ongoing. Will take more time. Pretty sure now we have a young female, somewhere between seventeen and twenty-nine or thirty…healthy tissues, all of it."

  "Then it's either from a murder victim or materials stolen from some medical facility, likely a morgue."

  "So far as I can tell you, we here can account for all human tissues and organs, nothing missing or stolen."

  "So far?"

  "I have Dr. Lynn Nielsen doing the work, investigating two weeks of intake and output, paperwork to burial, and what's remaining in our freezer units. Of course, most of the bodies we process go either to one of the potter's fields or into the hands of family, and in turn into the care of a local mortician who preps 'em for funeral and burial services. Along that route, any number of people might have absconded off with body parts, especially if it's a close-lid affair."

  "With missing eyes, I should hope so."

  "News out of Florida has been full of unscrupulous morticians, but I don't know of any who's packaged up body parts and forwarded them to police personnel, do you?"

  "No…no, that's a new wrinkle, Leonard."

  "So far, Dr. Nielsen has found no discrepancies to indicate anyone stole anything from us," Chang reiterated. "They don't call me No Waste for nothing, Lucas."

  "I always thought that referred to your slim waist. Doc."

  "Both, I'm told. Of course, you know, Lucas, the parts could have come from another lab, morgue, or medical school."

  "And you found no indication of cause of death, no toxins, no disease?" Lucas asked.

  "No, nothing points to cause of death. Eyes show none of the microscopic hemorrhaging, no telltale signs of strangulation in the tissue. Nor do any of the tissue cuts show any sign of toxins or disease."

  "A perfectly healthy woman without a name or a face." Lucas leaned back in his chair, his weight making it squeal. "What's our next step, Leonard?"

  "Well, on the chance the human materials were stolen from someone's care, I took the liberty and contacted every hospital in the state with its own morgue where autopsies can be legally performed by trained pathologists. The number is considerably smaller than you might think. Only a few counties still allow hospital morgues to perform autopsies, and even these must be affiliated with a medical school or with the city or state Medical Examiner's Office."

  "That's a good thing, isn't it?"

  "Better reporting of suspicious and unknown cause of death, yes."

  "I guess the number of funeral parlors in and around greater Houston is too astronomical to begin to contemplate. And I doubt anyone's going to phone in to tell us they've lost a pair of eyes, teeth, and four slices from a cadaver's abdominal organs."

  As usual, Leonard did not always follow Lucas's sarcasm. He flatly replied, "Not all morgues have responded yet, but so far, none admit to having lost any human tissue whatsoever on the scale we are talking about here."

  Lucas momentarily wondered if Chang meant to imply that there was an acceptable scale of medical waste and tissue loss in most hospitals, that this was chalked
up to the cost of doing business. "Any way to get help from the teeth?" he asked.

  "Absolutely, yes. DNA from the marrow is being matched to DNA from the organ parts. And if we find someone to match teeth to, then they will be of great benefit."

  "My money's on it all coming from the same body…same person."

  "I told Dr. Sanger this is my suspicion too."

  "She called you?"

  "Stopped by."

  "Then she's in her office?"

  "I suspect so by now, yes."

  "Thanks, Leonard. I'm going to interface with Missing Persons. See if anything pops there."

  "Pops?"

  "Matches, makes any connection."

  "Ahh, I see…yes. But first you may want to speak with Dr. Purvis, our expert forensic ophthalmologist. She knows a lot more about eyes than I do, so I left the eyes with her."

  "Purvis, sure. I'll do that."

  "Oh, and by the way, Lucas, Kim and the kids keep asking me to have you over again. You were a big hit with my girls."

  "Yeah, I'd like that sometime soon, Leonard. Say hello to the kids and your beautiful wife for me."

  Lucas hung up and called Dr. Catrina Purvis. She could only add in a painfully strident voice that the eyes were in need of correcting, that the owner would have worn a serious prescription with more than one prism. "She could not have worn contacts. Somewhere there's a pair of relatively thick, certainly expensive glasses gone missing. She would have worn them everywhere."

  "You can tell that from dead eyes?"

  "With today's technology, yes."

  "Thanks, that helps, Doctor."

  Lucas then telephoned Sergeant Stan Kelton at the front desk, asking if Meredyth Sanger's day doorman, Stu, had either called or come into the precinct. Kelton had not heard from the man. Lucas suggested he call Meredyth, get the number, and strongly urge Stu to come down to help with a composite on the delivery person. Kelton, who knew only what was the buzz about the case, agreed to take care of the matter. "And call Jack Tebo to come in and do the same. He spoke to the delivery person who showed up at my place." Lucas gave him Tebo's number.

  Lucas hung up and then opened his computer, logging on and going to the MP files. He scanned for recent missing females-recent disappearances, females between the ages of seventeen and thirty, according to Change's estimates of age, gender, and the freshness of the stolen human tissues.

  Just then Meredyth came through his door. The Cold Room was open to any and all detectives and personnel who might have a vested interest in a Cold Case, and consequently, the door was opening and closing all the time. Lucas's focus was on his computer, and he assumed whoever had entered would sign for anything they'd come for, be it a hard copy file or a floppy disk. Lucas kept working.

  Meredyth reached her hands out to him, taking his shoulders in her grasp, causing him to flinch in surprise. "Hey, Wolf Clan man, it's only me," she said, soothing him, refer-ring to his clan name. "God, you're as tense as I am over this thing, aren't you?" Then seeing the array of photos of young women on his screen, she half-joked, "What're you delving into here, a lonely-hearts-dot-com singles match website?"

  "Missing Persons files, Mere. They're on-line now, and I'm trying to match what we know of the body parts to anyone on this list," he said, pointing to the screen. "Look at them, all sizes, shapes, ages-the missing souls of a nation." He typed in Texas, narrowing the field. Houston and vicinity narrowed it. Finally, he called for a fifty-mile radius from downtown Houston. With each new request, the numbers of the missing dwindled, allowing more focus. When he narrowed his search by age, the files and corresponding photos came up fast and furiously. There were nine people missing. He then limited search parameters to only those missing in the last seventy-two hours.

  Seven files and photos remained. Lucas had to click on the photo to go into each file.

  Lucas began the process, taking each in alphabetical order, unsure what he was looking for beyond those beautiful sea-blue pupils he'd seen on Meredyth's carpet. "We can rule out all but the blue-eyed missing," he said, asking the computer to comply, and this narrowed the number to four. He then narrowed them to girls wearing corrective lenses. "Catrina Purvis tells me whoever belongs to the eyes, she had a serious prescription with prisms."

  "Really? She's good."

  "Jane Doe was a four-eyes. Wore them everywhere."

  This latest entry narrowed his search to three remaining young women. Meredyth looked on with interest. The youngest MP was nineteen, a Helga Muncie, the oldest at twenty-eight, a woman named Mira Lourdes, and the third a girl of twenty-one named Irma Nance. "Any one of them might have once carried those eyes and teeth in her head," said Lucas. "Or else none of them have any connection to the wayward eyes."

  "Oh, the wayward eye is a restless eye," sang out Dave Casey as he passed by. "Everybody's heard, Lucas, about your encounter last night."

  "That thrills me, Dave. How's the Conroe case going?"

  "Plodding along."

  Lucas returned his gaze to the screen, staring at the photos of the three remaining possible victims, all of whom had disappeared without a trace. He tried to will himself to recognize the eyes. Helga's looked close, Mira's looked closer, and Irma's looked closest. Then, on a second go- round, they all looked closest. "No way to tell from the photos. For one, the glasses they wear obscure the eyes."

  "Stare long enough and all you see are the eyes," Meredyth muttered, still holding his shoulders.

  He clicked on the photo of Helga Muncie, opening the first of the three files. "This'11 take some time."

  She looked at her watch. "I've got a group session upstairs I've got to be at, and then I've got to get uptown." She looked around, saw no one else at the other desks in the room was watching, and pressed a kiss to the back of his neck. "Let me hear from you if anything should click."

  "Will do, but it may take some fieldwork. Only so far a computer screen will take you."

  "Keep me apprised, will you?"

  "Sure thing." He patted her hand on his shoulder, but his eyes remained on the screen as he began reading the first file.

  Lucas didn't recall seeing Meredyth leave, and he took each of the MP files in turn, studying them in order with an eye to eliminating his search further, but instead, he had to hold Helga's file in abeyance. Perhaps it had been Helga's eyes.

  One by one, he read through the details of each story, the information supplied by family members, friends, coworkers about the missing person, nothing but shining accolades. No one in any of the three cases had the slightest notion how their loved one or friend could simply vanish, but in each case they had.

  When he looked up again from the computer files, it was nearing two in the afternoon, and he hadn't eaten. His research had focused in on how much trouble each girl had with her eyes. Unfortunately, all three had serious sight problems and eyewear. Still, he felt good that he'd been able to narrow his search from hundreds to only these three.

  Lucas again called Chang. "I've narrowed my search from reported missing persons cases that might match the unusual circumstances of our case down to three, Leonard."

  "Fantastic."

  "From these three, I'm going to obtain dental records on each, and we'll get your pal Davies to see if any of them are a match with the teeth found at Meredyth's." Dr. Thomas Phillip Davies, the forensic orthodontist Lucas referred to, had already extracted DNA from the teeth for Chang.

  "Wonderful idea. Good work. I've already provided the teeth for Dr. Davies, so when time comes, let us know."

  "Thanks again." Lucas hung up and then he called upstairs to Meredyth's office, hoping to catch her and update her on his progress, but he was informed that she'd left for her private practice and could be reached there in an hour. He decided to get a bite to eat and call her afterward.

  He ran a hard copy of the three files he thought could be a match to the eyes and teeth. He'd spend the afternoon obtaining the dental records he required, knowing it would be tough to
get these, as all three files indicated dental records had not been forwarded for any of them. He wondered how common an oversight this was in Missing Persons, and made a mental note to ask Jana North about this.

  Now, unfortunately, it was left to him to locate first permission and then the actual dental records for each young woman. He must make the request via the next of kin, and had to impress upon them how urgent his need was. Such a request would trigger fears in family members, and since they didn't know him, they would be doubly wary, slowing him with questions, getting their hopes up, as well as arousing misgivings, old doubts, regrets, and fears. Dental records usually meant a match with a corpse if a match were to be made at all.

  He knew at this stage he must involve Detective Jana North, Missing Persons. She had done most of the work of logging on all the MP files in the COMIT system. He knew her well and trusted her. She'd be an asset in going after the dental records of each of the girls Lucas proposed investigating. Certainly, she had far greater experience in dealing with anxiety-ridden, bereaved loved ones than most of the cops at the precinct put together. He rang her number.

  "Have you had lunch yet?" he asked Detective North.

  "Matter of fact I haven't, why?" replied Jana. "What'd you have in mind?"

  "I haven't eaten either, and I have some cases to go over with you. Meet me at Crazy Calories in ten minutes?"

  "I've been seeing your turkey track on the COMIT-MP interface. Something cooking?"

  "You found me out."

  "Has it to do with rumors I've been hearing about you and Dr. Sanger being targeted by a mad mailer sending packets of body parts?"

  "You're well informed. Try to keep a secret around here."

  "Make it fifteen minutes and you're on. See you at Crazy's."

  Lucas strapped on his gun and put his Wellington overcoat on, going for the door. He called out to other detectives who manned Cold Case desks in the room that he was out for the day, 'Tracking leads," he announced.