04.Final Edge v5

by Robert W. Walker

  "What are we going to do?"

  "Call in help." Lucas got on the phone and arranged for two police raids, one on the funeral home, the other on the courthouse. Both required no warrants, as Lucas cagily called each in to Stan Kelton as an Imminent Threat Response Team circumstance. One push of a button sent these search-and-seizure emergency-response units out to a location. The teams responded to terrorist and biohazard threats, bomb scares, and hostage situations. These teams included armed men with tactical training, a CSI unit for gathering evidence, and a public relations team to stave off the press. The teams went into instant action when ordered out, but the go-order must be based on hard evidence. On his say-so, his responsibility, Lucas Stonecoat meant to lock down a place of business and a county courthouse annex building. He felt a flutter in his heart at the power of it all, and the uncertainty of what would happen. It'd be hell to pay with Captain Lincoln if they found nothing.

  He made a second call, informing Jana North that he needed her to coordinate the effort at Morte de Arthur's, and she immediately agreed to oversee the raid there.

  "Come on, let's get over to the courthouse," he said to Meredyth when he got off the phone. "Maybe we'll find the rest of Mira Lourdes."

  They rushed for Lucas's car and the courthouse. Along the way, over the sound of the siren, Meredyth bitterly said, "A finger here, a finger there. This could go on indefinitely—for as long as they have body parts to scatter."

  "You perhaps should stay here in the car. Let me handle this part myself."

  "No...no, I'll stay with you, if you don't mind."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Lucas, this little bitch isn't going to get to me."

  "That's the spirit." He'd placed his strobe light on top of his unmarked car. The police-band radio was alive with the activity of the simultaneous raids. Lucas imagined the mortification and distress his order would create in Giorgio and Carlotta's funeral parlor, and the curiosity and fear they would soon arouse at the courthouse.

  "This disturbed, distorted, screwed-up take she has on her being abandoned, put up for adoption, pawned off to foster homes as she sees it, Lucas, it all provides her a sick motive to seek out a twisted revenge for all the wrongs she perceives people have done her. And me? I am the last of those women involved who placed her at the orphanage."

  "You, Orleans, her mother, all three of you are on this record," Lucas said, holding up the document Lauralie had duplicated for them.

  "And Lourdes? What was she to Lauralie?"

  "A mere pawn in her game," mused Lucas.

  "She wants to kill me slowly, slower than she did her mother or Sara Orleans. They died too easily and quickly for her liking. For me she has a different plan, an appalling purpose, as if she's mailing pieces of herself."

  "The team's here, waiting for orders to move in," he said as they pulled around to the rear of the courthouse, the entrance to the low-lying wing housing the county clerk's department and Child and Family Services, and below these offices, the archival records.

  A man in full body protection and an ITRT patch on his arm and back—head of the Imminent Threat Response Team—introduced himself as Elliot Andrews. "Lietuenant, these the two we're looking for? Armed and dangerous?" Andrews held up photos of Lauralie Blodgett and the man known only as the Ripper.

  "That's right, but I want your team ready for anything, and I want every nook and cranny searched."

  "You suspect a bomb?"

  "Anything's possible."

  "We've got a canine unit. They can sniff out just about anything."

  'Trained on cadavers? We might find body parts left by the suspects."

  "Oh, I see. This has some connection to the Post-it guy, right!" Andrews immediately responded, getting on his radio and ordering the dogs to be guided into the building ahead of the men. He repeated Lucas's search orders to his men. Lucas wondered how Jana North's team at the funeral parlor was managing. He trusted that she had a capable man like Andrews and a strong CSI team at her location.

  Lucas and Andrews, with Meredyth tentatively following, paced themselves to remain behind the men leading the dogs into the courthouse annex.

  THE D0GS, LARGE German shepherds, and their handlers, split off, one guided into the archives downstairs, the other taking the main floor. There were two floors overhead yet to secure. Andrews had the security guard named Roy on hand to point out all exits and entrances to the annex, including a service elevator only maintenance and security had access to, the one he'd escorted Meredyth onto earlier today. A second exit that opened on the main concourse of the courthouse itself. The lockdown meant no one could go in or out. Already people were clamoring to get past the exits, cell phones aflutter. Others jammed in hallways. People plastered to windows, looking out over the lot at the police activity. Loved ones had already begun showing up, jamming the courthouse parking lot, vehicles circling buzzard-fashion in search of parking, anxious to see their relatives unharmed. A police perimeter pushed them back, along with the news media.

  Inside, the sound of the dog in the basement, sending up a barrage of agitated barks and howls, sent Lucas, Andrews, and Meredyth racing down toward the archives. The dog had alerted on something.

  At the foot of the stairs, along this corridor to the archives, the dog stood, ears erect, agitatedly dancing about, yipping excitedly. His handler fed him a beef jerky cube from his hand as a reward, and they pulled back, allowing Elliot Andrews in. Lucas and Andrews, guns drawn, nodded at one another. Andrews so forcefully tore open the dark oak-wood door that it swung into the marbled wall, creating a reverberating blast down the corridor and up the stairs, and this, combined with the stench of blood let free, gave Lucas the feeling of a fleeting soul that'd been trapped inside where the body of an unrecognizable man lay in a pool of blood, his thrown-away tie, trousers, and half-tom-away white shirt stained with blood.

  The walls—flecked with blood—told the story of multiple stab wounds.

  "Dear God," muttered Andrews, turning his head away from the mutilated facial features after Lucas, crouching, lifted the chin and turned the eyes upward from the heap of clothing and flesh at their feet. "Who is he?"

  Meredyth looked past Andrews now and screamed. "It's Byron! My God, it's Byron!"

  Lucas made out the features and nodded to Andrews. He also held up Byron Priestly's wallet, his license and credit cards intact. He rifled for his keys and found them in the bloody pants.

  A police woman alongside Meredyth had caught her from falling when her knees had buckled, and she'd led her to a nearby bench. Meredyth sobbed openly.

  Lucas looked across at her, his heart feeling the pain of her anguish. She had broken it off with Priestly, but they had been friends for a long time. They had been talking marriage at one time. This shocking development could send her into a complete spiral, he feared.

  Byron had been viciously torn apart in the confines of the small shoulder-width cubbyhole, and no one had heard his screams here just off the archives where Meredyth had been working that morning. Everything seemed now to move in slow motion as Andrews radioed for an at-ease and called Lynn Nielsen to bring in her CSI team, informing her over the secured channel that a body had been found at his location. Someone brought a thermos of hot coffee down to them, and Lucas sat quietly holding Meredyth's hands in his.

  After doing an initial assessment of Priestly's body, Dr. Lynn Nielsen came to them. "Your friend Byron has been stabbed in the gut so many times that without cleaning the wounds thoroughly and viewing them under the lights at my lab, it is impossible to say how many times he was stabbed, but one thing is certain, whoever did this truly hated the man. It looks like a crime of passion, one of those estranged relationships in which one party snaps and can't seem to stop at inflicting only one wound or even three.

  This is in the neighborhood of twenty-five, possibly more stab wounds, plus the afterwards mutilation to the eyes, nose, mouth...and we found something peculiar stuffed down his throat."
>
  "What is it?" asked Lucas.

  She held up a clear plastic bag. "Rosary beads."

  Meredyth said nothing; she could only stare at the onyx string of beads.

  To Lucas they looked like the symbol for the passage of days into night, nights into days in an old Cherokee pictograph—a string of beads. "Was Byron a practicing Catholic?" he asked Meredyth.

  "About as much as I was, but no...he didn't carry a rosary with him, and no, I never gave him any as a present. I've never seen this rosary before, and I resent your implication, Dr. Nielsen, that I had anything to do with Byron's murder... except as...due to our proximity...anyone being close to me in the least, she's targeted. You're in danger too, Lucas, perhaps far more than I am."

  "He had no advance warning, Mere, but I do. I know what those two maniacs look like, and I'm hunting them down."

  Nielsen had begun to apologize, saying she hadn't meant to imply that Dr. Sanger had any part in Priestly's murder. Meredyth ignored her, continuing to speak to Lucas. "While Lauralie and Crazy Joe are hunting you."

  "Whoever killed him, he, she, or they did it with a maniacal ferocity. I believe in the lab, we will find wounds in which the knife blade—a large one—will have exited the back. That's how much energy the Ripper—if this proves to be the work of the Post-it Ripper—put into the effort. It would have left the killer breathless, disarrayed, perspiring, and bloody but for the apron and the cleanup she did inside. There's a sink in there and lots of soap, and a stack of maintenance aprons, caps, hair nets, rubber gloves."

  "She donned the maintenance uniform for him," said Meredyth. "Caught up to him, asked him for some help inside the closet—something on a shelf perhaps. She lured him inside, teased him as she put on the apron and gloves, the paper hat and hair net."

  'Teased her way into his pants," added Lucas. "Explains the discarded tie and trousers."

  "And when he most expected gratification, she stabbed him."

  "No outcry alerting anyone."

  Nielsen said, "He may well have gone into immediate shock, unable to call out—"

  "—then came the ratcheted knife strokes, machine-gun fashion," said Lucas. "It all fits."

  Nielsen said. "Killed by someone who had a personal connection, someone who had either hated him greatly or was driven to such an emotional pitch that after the first several stab wounds, he or she could not stop a wild violence against him. Like the killer of Yolanda Sims, whoever did it was emotionally involved, deeply so." She looked at Meredyth where she sat sobbing still. "Could this Lauralie have been sleeping with your friend?"

  "Anything's possible. But I don't think so. He was just weak when it came to an overture by any female."

  "I know a few men like that," Nielsen said sarcastically, trying to elicit a smile but failing.

  "Don't you see? She'd like nothing better than to have me on trial for murdering Byron, to put me through that ordeal. To see me disgraced, my life in a shambles. Every-one I ever cared about either dead or scurrying to put as much distance between me and himself as possible. Putting my friends and family through a humiliating time. She wants you to indict me for Byron's murder—I was here at the time of his murder! I have the classic three necessities for a D.A. to put me away—motive, means, and opportunity. I knew the man, detested him, have complained of being stalked by him, been seen arguing with him right outside in the lot the morning of his death not twenty feet from where I sat behind those doors without an alibi."

  Lucas added, "It's the work of that cunning bitch we've told you about, Dr. Nielsen. She wants it to look as if he were butchered by her in a fit of rage. But Meredyth doesn't do rage."

  "If this is her work, she's done a good job pointing the finger at you, Dr. Sanger, if you can so incriminate yourself—with your own assessment. I urge you to say no more that someone might take as self-incriminating. Besides, liking you as I do, I would not wish to be called to the stand against you to say yes and nod to words taken out of context."

  "In other words shut my mouth?"

  Nielsen nodded, and then spoke to Lucas. "Now, Lieutenant, as to this sort of disfigurement to the face..."

  "Yes?"

  "Speaks to the kind of rage between estranged lovers as well, so my advice stands."

  "Disfigurement is what this maniac does," said Lucas. "It's why we call him, her—the two of them—rippers— mutilation murderers."

  "I understand, of course. I was just pointing out—"

  "It looks on the surface very bad, we know," countered Meredyth. "And having been arrested on a weapons charge the same afternoon, well..."

  "Technically speaking, you weren't arrested," he said. "You were detained and transported but not booked."

  "All the same, multiple witnesses saw the incident."

  "Your clever Lauralie was wise enough to have left no calling card or telltale signs of herself behind this time," Nielsen said. "A few toes, teeth, or fingers belonging to Mira Lourdes, left in or around the body here, that would insure it was she and her friend who hacked Mr. Priestly up."

  "Only the damn rosary," lamented Lucas. "Only the damn rosary."

  "That butchering bitch," muttered Meredyth. "Don't you see, the rosary is her calling card. She wants no mistaking this; she wants me to know she can hurt me at any time. That no one around me is safe either."

  Elliot Andrews was standing nearby, picking up as much of what was being said as possible, when his radio crackled into life. He answered it and carried it to Lucas. "For you, your captain."

  Lucas accepted the radio Andrews held out to him, Lincoln's ranting voice coming over even before he put it to his ear. His shouting focused on the chaos and phone calls caused by the raid on the courthouse. "I want to know if it's been worth it all. What've you netted there?"

  Lucas relayed the gruesome find and informed Lincoln that it was connected to the Mira Lourdes murder, and that the CSI unit at the annex would be here well into the night collecting evidence. Lincoln was placated for the moment, but he wanted to be kept abreast of things, finishing with, "We'll red-ball this APB we have out on this Blodgett woman and her friend, Lucas. Shame what's happening. Give Meredyth my best, and we need to talk in full as soon as possible."

  Lucas kept hold of the radio and returned to Meredyth on the bench. She was sipping at a cup of coffee now, a slight shiver escaping her.

  "Lincoln's changing the APB on Lauralie Blodgett to a Code Red BOLO."

  "Be on the lookout for a witch on a broom?" she muttered. "Then Gordon understands what's going on?"

  "He's standing behind you one hundred percent. Mere, we'll get her, now that her likeness is plastered everywhere and she's a Code Red. Her wading pool is growing ever smaller. Only wish we knew what she and Crazy Joe are driving."

  "A vehicle description, hell, a Texas driver's license...it would all be good. Meantime, we're being led around by the nose by a child mental case playing lethal games."

  Lucas got back on the police radio and called Lieutenant Jana North at the funeral parlor raid. The sound of chaos came over the line before she finally came on. "What the hell's going on there? Sounds like a riot."

  "We've cordoned off a wake here."

  "A wake?"

  "We didn't have any choice. It was in the open coffin."

  "What was in the open coffin?

  "A pair of disembodied arms, one missing a right hand."

  He listened attentively to the details of her report, replying with a series of yeses, and finally he said, "See to it no one disturbs the scene before your CSI unit can process it."

  "You ever try that with a roomful of irate loved ones? Dr. Patterson's got his hands full, and he's on the run."

  "Christ, they sent out Frank with an ITRT unit?"

  'Told me he volunteered when he heard it had to do with the Ripper case, even said something about how you and he were close, Lucas. How he wanted to help in any way possible."

  "Weasel knows I fingered him and some others for this nasty b
usiness when I thought it was all a tasteless joke."

  "Bad blood between you guys, heh? You'll have to tell me about it some evening over drinks."

  "He lost some vital evidence on a case of mine once. Cost me." He then said, "Jana, you may's well know that Meredyth and I...that we are seeing each other, and that for the time being at least, we're seriously...together."

  "Then I take it drinks are out."

  "Yeah, drinks are out."

  "I'd better go. The natives are getting restless here. You're right about Frank. He's managed to antagonize the owners, the wake crowd, and I suspect the dead woman in the coffin."

  "Sounds like Patterson."

  "The crowd is made up of some pissed-off Mexicans. Talk to you later."

  Lucas tossed the radio back to Andrews. He said to Meredyth, "They've found something at the funeral home."

  "Do I want to know what it is?"

  "A pair of arms, one severed at the wrist, missing a hand. Presumed by Frank Patterson as those of a young woman. I think we can presume Mira Lourdes."

  "Where were the arms found?"

  "In one of the caskets about to be wheeled out for public viewing with one of Giorgio's masterpieces of makeup inside—a regular Ripley's Believe It or Not event—a body within a casket freshly wrapped in yellow crime-scene tape. North is waiting for Frank Patterson to finish up the CSI work there. 'Fraid Nielsen and the team'll be here a great deal longer."

  "And in the meantime, what do we do, Lucas?"

  "Meanwhile, I'm taking you outta here. Come on."

  "Byron was a jerk, Lucas, but he didn't deserve this. My God...what am I to tell his mother, Agnes? His sister? Hell, I dare not go near them. We've got to end this thing, Lucas. We must and soon. What can we do?"

  "We go back to Lincoln with everything we know, everything we suspect, everything we suspect we know about Lauralie Blodgett, including your run-in with her here, and the near run-in at the convent school."

  "She used him, Lucas, to locate me. Following his movements...perhaps seeing him leaving my apartment, she and her boyfriend must have tailed him in their search for me, and where was I? Hiding from it all out at the ranch, Lucas. She'd been watching his movements to locate me. Thank God my parents are out of town, out of harm's way."