Final Edge s--4

by Robert W. Walker

  Both Bert the cameraman and his friend on the FBI dive team laughed at their colleague, Bert saying, "She got you good, Al."

  She continued to survey the nude corpse, her gloved hand and eye now down to his scarred knees-recent bruising-and next she noticed the deep brown, tobaccolike stains under all his toenails. She took scrapings and efficiently put these into a vial, safely tucking them into a valise on a strap she'd placed around her neck. Finally, she said, "All right…we're needing to come at this in a fresh venue."

  "Whataya make of what happened to this guy, Doc?" asked the third diver from shore now.

  "Obviously, someone's cut his throat. Presumably Blodgett."

  "That little woman?" erupted one of the divers, and this started a cacophony of disagreement.

  "I saw her pictures! You're right. Skinny as a coyote."

  "No bigger than a hen."

  "The guy had almost two hundred pounds on her."

  "Okay, gentlemen. I want the boat upended like the one we dragged into shore already, one with all the bullet holes." This boat had already been examined and photographed.

  "Why're we turning the boat over with him in it?" asked the one named Al.

  "I don't need or want the worms in the body bag, gentlemen, so let's upend the boat and feed the fish, shall we? We'll then float the man to the pier and lift him out there. I can better examine him once he's been…ahhh, baptized."

  They reluctantly did as instructed, flipping the rowboat after some effort and spilling its contents out into the lake. The divers gently guided Kemper's floating body, facedown, to the pier. His plunge and short swim to the pier had dispersed the worms, and it had the added virtue of cleansing the wound that had killed him.

  They lifted Kemper's body from the water, as the news chopper did another flyby, further grating on Nielsen's nerves. Kemper lay now faceup on the weathered dock, but the body bag, so patiently awaiting his arrival till now, suddenly flew off and into the lake on the other side of the berth, caught up in the whirlwind of the chopper as Nielsen climbed the ladder from water to platform.

  "Kee-rist!" she shouted up at the chopper pilot, waving him off. "In Sweden we'd have shot those fools from the sky by now."

  The body bag was retrieved, and the 2NEWS bird backed off while Lynn Nielsen leaned in over Kemper's throat for a closer look. She was unaware that the newsman overhead was shooting close-up footage of her lanky, curvaceous body now, and the divers too sat back and appreciated her statuesque beauty kneeling in over the corpse, the wet suit stretched to its limit. Nielsen's own attention was on the remaining, clinging worms that had stubbornly come along for the ride, burrowed as they were in the eye sockets and the gaping neck wound.

  She again identified a small but deep gouge at the center of the throat other than the critical wound that had emptied the man's blood. There'd been no blood in the bottom of the boat, curiously enough, only cold, clear water, and of course the feasting worms. He'd been killed elsewhere and dumped in the green boat crudely carved with the Brody names- Myron, Lorene, Candice. The worms remained a mystery.

  From the angle of the deadly jugular slash, Nielsen surmised that the killer was perhaps two and a half to three feet taller than Kemper-impossible, she could hear Chang saying-unless Kemper was kneeling at the time he was caught from behind and his throat cut right to left. Was he made to grovel on his knees perhaps?

  There were other questions as well. For the slight Lauralie to have attacked so large a man and gotten his inert body down to the lake, she'd have had to have some sort of help, but Belkvin was out of the picture, long since dead. Had she lured a new boyfriend into her web, some local dupe she'd met at the M amp;M Cafe perhaps, to do her bidding? Had one of the Farnsworth boys fallen under her charms, only then to be murdered along with his brother? Perhaps she had even tempted both young men. She seemed to have an uncanny, near-supernormal power over men.

  "Bag 'im, gentlemen." Nielsen stood and turned to face the lawn and the driveway, the house on the knoll. She saw Chang directing some guy in a cherry picker from his standing position atop the shed. She lifted a perfunctory wave in his direction, seeing that he was staring back at her now. Her eyes then went to the lawn, where the unevenly cut grass had been trampled by officers from the county, ATF, and FBI. She saw men smoking cigarettes, leaning against trees, cowboy boots resting on black valises, men and women in ball caps and Stetsons, some in uniform, others in jackets pulled over white shirts and ties. The overall effect was of a bizarre Norman Rockwell painting: a crowd of picnickers stepping over a pair of corpses, the bodies acting as focal point in the composition. Other than gabbing and biting on pipes, cigars, and cigarettes, these people on the lawn and standing around the vehicles in the drive looked as if they were doing nothing. She guessed most were standing about discussing the weekend college ball games. These thoughts wafted through her head, when suddenly it struck her. She knew how Lauralie had killed Kemper.

  The lay of the grass coming toward her, creating a near- imperceptible path, screamed in her head; the lawnmower had made this errant path down to the docks. The more she stared at it, the clearer the picture came into edgy focus. She now recognized the faint little dirt and mud trail along the pier boardwalk, a trail they'd managed to trample over-the evidence that the mower had been guided with Kemper still sitting astride the cushion, with her knife at his throat while she straddled the back.

  She heard the unmistakable sound of the body bag zipper closing on Kemper, plunging the body into darkness. "Hold on a minute." She returned to the body and slipped the zipper down far enough to investigate the neck wounds once again, zeroing in on the more tentative jab that had aroused her curiosity; seeing it again, almost lost in the puckering folds of the larger tear, she knew what it meant.

  She closed Kemper from her sight again. "Okay, thanks. You can get that waiting van down here and put him aboard for the trip back to Houston."

  She walked out to the end of the pier and back, giving her theories time to percolate in her head. Once Lauralie had forced Kemper down to the pier, she had him flank the boat she'd come across the lake in. Once the mower was aligned alongside the boat, she slit his throat, and he bled out over the wheel of the mower. The pool of blood would be found on the floorboard of the same big red Toro that everyone had treated as an obstacle, stepping around it all morning long up at the house where Lauralie had left it beside the lawn truck.

  Nielsen pictured the events in her mind. Lauralie didn't want to shoot the gardener, knowing she'd never be able to drag his body from sight, and she didn't have to leap from the bushes to take him by surprise. With the noise of the mower, she might easily have stalked up from behind and stabbed him in the back, but as it was, she had to completely reach around him to cut his throat from left to right, and besides, she wanted him to strip, she wanted his clothes. Of course, it was an easy matter to cut the hefty man's throat after charming him out of his pants and into giving her a ride on his great big red mower. She had simply presented herself to him in those same tight-fitting jeans and that low-cut blouse she'd died in, the same outfit that had perhaps charmed the Farnsworth boys into dropping their guard as well…maybe…

  Lauralie had stepped up to Kemper as he was mowing the grass, introduced herself as someone visiting from across the lake, and seductively talked him into a ride into the trees, where she convinced him to make love to her. Once she'd gotten him to drop his uniform, she showed her true colors, likely pulling a gun on him, the one used at the cafe. She ordered him back onto his mower in the buff. Once at his rear, Kemper no longer enjoying his luck, she suddenly put the knife to his throat and dug it in deeply- the initial wound-making certain he knew she meant business. She then ordered him to drive down to the pier. When he hesitated, she pierced his skin even deeper with the first cut, drawing blood.

  After this, Kemper played along, doing as instructed, pleading for his life perhaps, wondering what she wanted perhaps. On stopping the mower halfway down the pier a
s ordered, he had no idea what she wanted. She stood up on the back of the mower guard, and keeping the razor-sharp knife at his throat, with the extra strength that standing over him provided, Lauralie thrust the knife into his jugular and dragged it across his throat.

  Kemper immediately slumped forward over the wheel, his blood flowing down into the mower well at his feet, much of it soaking into his toenails. It was no simple matter, but from there, she managed to push his body from its sitting position on the mower to roll onto the dock and into the boat-surely almost toppling it over given his size and girth. He landed faceup to the heavens, his surprised eyes open along with his mouth and the gaping wound in his throat.

  Nielsen began peeling off the wet suit, garnering stares from the men again. As she did so, she watched the body of the hapless, unlucky gardener, who had succumbed to Lauralie's lies and wiles, being carried unceremoniously to the waiting coroner's van.

  Lillian Weist, an evidence tech intern, had come bounding down from the house. "I got some info on the guy in the boat."

  "Kemper, yeah," replied Nielsen.

  "How'd you know his name?" Lillian asked, clutching the form in her hand, all the blanks filled in. "It took me all morning to get all these facts."

  "His truck. It's on his truck, Lil."

  She scrunched up her nose and face in the universal facial expression that asked others to agree with the idiocy of its owner. "Duhhh," she said. "I got most of this from papers in his glove compartment, but didn't think to read the truck logo. Anyway…talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kemper normally arrived and did his work in the A.M., but yesterday he came in the P.M. He'd visited a family friend in hospital and had lunch with his wife at the hospital cafeteria before arriving here. Had he been on his usual schedule, he'd've been long gone before this lunatic's arrival."

  Nielsen began verbalizing her theory of precisely how Howard Kemper met his end, telling Lillian, but also gathering the interest of Bert and Al. Young Lillian and the two men listened to her story with skeptical silence, Lillian nodding and struggling to stay with her, while the nodding of the men implied a condescending unwillingness to believe she could possibly know such details.

  Nielsen stared up the lawn toward the mower. She could prove her theory at the mower. There she would find the evidence of the man's blood in the well of the mower bed. Evidence only inches from one FBI man who this moment stood leaning up against the Toro, blissfully unaware of its importance.

  "What about his clothes?" asked Bert.

  "Yeah, what became of his clothes, Dr. Nielsen?" asked Al.

  Lillian provided the answer, pointing to the form in her hand. "Clothes were found beside the front exterior steps leading up to the Sanger home, discarded and bloody- particularly the lap area and the pants legs."

  Dr. Nielsen had their rapt attention as she detailed her theory, anxious to air it, to test its validity in her own ear. When she finished, Bert, busy putting his camera and lenses away, replied, "All right, say you're right about the clothes, the mower ride onto the pier, dumping his body from mower direct to boat without tipping the damn thing over…" Al and the others leaned in to hear this. "It still doesn't explain how the damn worms got into the freaking boat with him, does it?"

  Al jumped in, still smarting from having been burned by her. "Yeah, how do you explain the worms?"

  She breathed deeply, shaking her head. "I don't know yet."

  "They didn't just jump in on their own," added Bert, snapping his camera case closed. "Must've been hundreds of them," he told Lillian.

  "A thousand or more," said Al to the intern. "You had to see it to believe it. Feeding on his eyes and inside his wounds."

  "The worms were night crawlers, big reds," said Bert. "Good for fishing."

  Al agreed. "Kind you buy at the bait and tackle."

  "That's it, bait," said Dr. Nielsen. "Explains the water at the bottom of the canoe too."

  "I don't follow you," replied Lillian.

  "Someone's cooler fuU of frozed worms," she said, her accent showing doubly on the misspoken word for "frozen."

  "Frozed? Frozed?" asked Al, poking Bert, and together they laughed.

  Ignoring the men, Nielsen stepped to the boathouse door and scanned the interior. Lillian trailed curiously after. The two women had stepped inside just as the van carrying Kemper's body backed over the mower trail Nielsen had earlier photographed. She pointed out the wall of rods and reels hanging in the boathouse, and below it an empty Styrofoam cooler lying on its side, the lid inches away. A discarded blanket lay half in the water off the litde boardwalk. The motorboat that filled most of the space was up out of the water on davits.

  "No expense spared here," said Lillian, lifting the lid of an electrically powered metal icebox, the wall unit. A handful of dead, dried-up earthworms lay at their feet.

  The men poked their heads into the boathouse just in time to see Lillian drop the Styrofoam cooler down into the wall unit, a perfect fit. "This is a storage cooler for bait- worms," she said.

  "Now we know where the night crawlers came from," said Nielsen.

  "Yeah, they were frozed in here and thawed out in the boat," joked Al badly. "So, you saying she threw in the worms for sport?"

  "Explains how they got there."

  Nielsen now glanced across the lake at the activity of men and women going in and out of the Brody house. She wondered how Dr. Frank Patterson was doing there. It had irked her that Patterson should get the plum assignment, the house with three bodies to grid, while she was put on a dead gardener in the boat. After all, she had been on the Post-it Ripper case with Leonard from the "get-go," as the Americans liked to say, but when push came to shove, seniority had won out. Still, even though Frank was the As-sociate M.E., and she was a mere Assistant M.E., Patterson, unlike her, had not been involved on the case from the "get-go." No matter how she turned it in her mind, Lynn felt cheated.

  Bide your time, she kept telling herself. Your time will come.

  She then chided herself for daring to think she had problems; her problems were small potatoes compared to what Meredyth Sanger must be going through right now. She allowed a silent prayer to escape her for Meredyth, and for Lucas, one that would also suffice for his departed soul, should that be the case. Aside from being colleagues in a sense, the pair had become her new friends as well. How was Meredyth to cope? Lynn knew how desperately the woman loved Lucas. It must be so hard on her.

  She started up the incline toward the house, working her way toward Leonard Chang even as she put her cell phone to her ear, having dialed him, but her eyes remained fixed on the mower. The Blodgett body apparently had been successfully plucked from the windmill by the cherry picker, and Chang was escorting the body, now on a stretcher, toward an ambulance. Nielsen didn't want to be distracted, but Lillian, trailing after her, still waved the form she'd come with originally. "You'll need this for your final report, Dr. Nielsen."

  Nielsen had already filled a spiral book with observations, comments, notes, measured distances, maps, thumbnail sketches of the pier in relation to the boat, and an explanation on how it was impossible to get a true triangu- lation of where the body was discovered since there was no fixed position, the boat having wandered about on the lake. What had alerted authorities in the first place were the birds coming and going from the boat, their beaks full with what Bert called red beauties. Still, she knew about the thousand and one trivial little details needed to fill in all the blanks on all the damn forms waiting back at the office, and even inconsequential items-say a victim's Social Security number or his mother's maiden name-would be called for, delaying the proceedings unless the information was accessible.

  At such a time she'd be thanking God for Lil's standard form. She thanked Lillian and took her report, laying it into her notebook just as Chang came on the line.

  "Lynn, good! You've finished up with the Kemper body, have you?"

  "And you with the Blodgett body?"

  "
Some truly curious details forming up here at the house. Meredyth tried to save Blodgett's life even after all this."

  She countered, "I am dying to hear all about it, but it doesn't compare to the bizarre story I have for you, Leonard."

  "Then you have answers, good!"

  "Answers, yes. Meet me at the lawn mower."

  "The lawn mower? All right…on my way down."

  Reaching the driveway and the mower, she saw Chang rounding the back of the ambulance where he'd left Blodgett's body in its black bag. After the niceties, and questions about where they might find a bite to eat, she laid out how the gardener had died, and she walked him over to the mower, and pointing, showed him the coagulated blood at the bottom of the well beneath the wheel. It was there, and so were some distinctive shoe prints-small, feminine ones. "She drove the mower back to here, her feet wading in Kemper's blood. By time he was bleeding out, he was barefoot. The first giveaway was the dried blood I found under his toenails but nowhere else."

  "Impressive," he replied. "Perelli! Got any film left in that camera?" Chang pointed to the blood pool imprinted by a pair of unique shoe prints, while Nielsen went to the ambulance and tore away one of Lauralie's shoes from her feet. She returned with it, and the match was clearly visible. "A matched pair," she said.

  "A match made in blood," Chang replied.

  Lil stood staring, learning, soaking up things, and realizing she wanted very much to work more closely with Dr. Nielsen.

  Chang suggested they retire to the Brody house. They took the road that meandered around the lake, disappearing amid the tall sentinels of the pine forest. Along their way, they passed the spot where men in FBI and ATF wind- breakers dealt with the BMW found nestled in the trees just beyond the Brody house.

  Dr. Frank Patterson. in white shirt and tie, stood now over the bodies at the foot of the basement stairs in the Brody home, his gloved hands going to his aching back. He'd been bending over the dead family for forty minutes now, assessing how each had died, their relative positions, relative ages, and searching for any additional bruises or obvious marks. Hands tied, the three bodies had been dumped here in the basement as if hurled down the stairs, but the gunshots had all occurred at the top of the stairwell. There the blood spatters, along with brain matter, along with gunshot residue, painted the unfinished wall with enough crazy art to call it a Jackson Pollock painting.