04.Final Edge v5

by Robert W. Walker

  The remark felt like a dagger plunged in her own chest, Meredyth thought, wondering if Chang, like others in the know, was beginning to consciously or subconsciously blame her for the string of deaths. She held a handkerchief over her nose, battling the odors, struggling to stabilize a sudden nausea and dizziness threatening to overtake her. Nielsen belatedly handed out scented surgical masks and gloves for them all.

  "You all right, Dr. Sanger? You look a bit green. Want to go back out for air?" asked Jana. "We can try again later, after Chang finishes up."

  "No...no, I want to see this through." She fought to compose herself as Steve Perelli appeared, chanting the single word damn-damn-damn over and over with each frame he shot.

  Using a video camera, Perelli filmed every conceivable angle of Belkvin's body and the severed heart—lying in the crook of his folded arms. Then Lynn Nielsen pointed Perelli to the jar Chang had replaced on a nearby shelf, and she said, "Get a couple of shots of this, Steve."

  "Should've filmed the dogs before you had them carted off, Dr. Chang," commented Lucas. "Juries respond nastily to dog killers."

  Chang and Nielsen were again speculating on where they might find Arthur's genitals. "I bet you a day's wages, we'll find them in his mouth," Nielsen wagered, and using a tongue depressor, she began searching the throat. "Hmmm... damn, not here."

  "I'll take the hole in the chest. They're stuffed in to replace his heart," guessed the evidence technician Ted Hoskins, who now carefully cradled the hefty little rotary saw in his gloved palms, cautious not to touch either the blade or the grip. "I'll take this out to the van... dust it for prints."

  "My bet...the dogs," said Chang thoughtfully, removing his protective helmet, seeing it was useless to keep the crime scene from contamination with so many curious onlookers tramping through. He was a slightly built, slender man, and his protective suit, far too large for him, made him look the part of an escaped balloon from a Macy's parade.

  "The dogs' what?" asked Nielsen.

  "Whataya bet we find the genitalia in the dogs' stomach contents when we autopsy them?"

  "Is that your final answer, Doc?" asked Hoskins. "She fed his penis and balls to the dogs."

  "Won't know for a sure thing until we autopsy the greyhounds, but with this woman, I would not put it past her to have done so—after liberally packing the flesh with rat poison." Chang held up an empty yellow and brown container of D-Con.

  "One wicked bitch," Hoskins said with a moan.

  Lucas said, "I'm going to have a look at the back rooms." He eased down the cave like corridor to the back bedrooms to the sound of circling aircraft beating overhead. The police chopper had come in low again, assisting the men in the woods in their search. Lucas's gloved hands found the dust in two smaller rooms undisturbed, but the master bedroom had been used by the deadly couple. A duffel filled with men's clothing and a few toiletries lay at the foot of an unmade bed, and the bathroom showed signs of use—a bar of soap in the dish, a jar of Mennen Skin Bracer, a Bic razor, hairpins, a nail file, an eyeliner brush, wrappers in the trash can. Windows had been opened to air out this single bedroom alone, the sashes doing battle with the cobwebs. Someone had wiped clean the surfaces of the furniture, a faint whiff of lemon and Clorox in the air.

  When he returned to the others, Lucas suggested Nielsen dust the right rear room for fibers and hairs in the bedding. "Maybe some DNA from the stains. Looks like another love nest for our happy couple. Other rooms are untouched." He held up his hands to display the dirt and grime clinging to his plastic fingertips. "No need wasting your time there."

  "Thanks, Detective, that cuts out a lot of wasted effort," Nielsen replied.

  Lucas watched only for a moment as Chang and Nielsen, using high-intensity flashlights, searched the enormous cavity in Arthur's chest and abdomen. "Thank God for small favors," Chang said. "She only removed the heart."

  "She seems to have left in a hurry. Had to know someone would eventually recognize Arthur from the sketch, his students, people at the clinic, his neighborhood."

  Lucas, hearing Jana North and Meredyth conversing in the kitchen, where they'd migrated, joined them. When he entered, Jana was in mid-sentence. "...doing that to a man she presumably had some use for!"

  "In psychiatric terms, emasculating a man says as much about the woman as it does the man," replied Meredyth. "I'm sure it had great symbolic and cathartic meaning for her."

  "Imagine what she'd do to a man she had no use for."

  "It would appear his usefulness came to an abrupt end, unless his missing parts show up on my doorstep tomorrow."

  "She's got balls, as they say...literally," Lucas said, following up on Meredyth's remark.

  Jana laughed at the black humor and erupted with a cop joke of her own. "Like a bad blues song. We'll call it, 'What I Lost for Love.'"

  Meredyth silenced the laughter, saying, "For God's sake, the man lost a lot more than his dick. He lost, Jesus, everything he had in this world, not just his life. He lost his reputation...his career...friends, family, colleagues, and finally, after all the emotional and psychological emasculation, she performs a physical emasculation on him. Poor deluded devil probably thought she loved him."

  Chang, overhearing from the other room, called out, "Mercifully, he was dead when she emasculated him. Can't say the same for the blade going through his chest."

  "That's gotta be some consolation to Arthur," Lucas dryly called back. Lucas had learned to take Leonard Chang at his word. He knew no one who made better forensic judgments with the naked eye. Chang had showed him on earlier occasions how he could determine which wound of several was first, second, and third in order of coloration and blood loss.

  Lucas focused now on the large floor-model freezer unit, seeing that it not only dominated the kitchen area, but that it had been examined already—presumably searched immediately for any sign of Mira Lourdes's remaining parts. An overhead bare bulb lit the old kitchen. Looking down into the cavernous, ice-walled unit, they saw that the frosty bottom was littered with bits and pieces of what appeared to be flesh, blood, and fluid stains. One section looked like the spoilage of an upturned rainbow snow cone, save the colors were muted reds and browns.

  The sound of Perelli's camera filled the kitchen now as he too had discovered the freezer unit. Steve did a pirouette about the freezer, creating his video record of the exterior and interior of the thing. "Chang damn sure has his work cut out for him," he said to Lucas.

  "You got that right." Lucas then asked Meredyth, "Seen enough?"

  "Where the hell is Lauralie, Lucas?"

  "Not in Mexico."

  "Agreed. Yeah... she's not finished in Texas yet, is she?"

  The question made Jana North stare at Meredyth and then at Lucas.

  Outside, the discordant barking and howling of search dogs fashioned a counterpoint to the whirring of the police chopper.

  Jana asked, "Are you saying. Dr. Sanger, that she's taken what's left of Mira Lourdes with her? That she intends more surprises and packages?"

  "Through Christmas if she can. That'd be my guess, Detective."

  Lucas sensed some tension between the two women.

  "We should hold judgment, give the dogs time to determine that," cautioned Jana.

  "They won't find her, Jana," Lucas said.

  Meredyth added, "Lauralie still has her...what's left of her, that is."

  "We don't know that for sure, Meredyth." Jana had gone to her and placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing, but Meredyth pulled away, stepping to the far side of the room.

  Meredyth looked across the top of the now-closed freezer unit and into Jana's eyes. "Arthur Belkvin's posed body, his exposed heart, and his private parts notwithstanding, Lauralie is still on a mission."

  "A mission?" asked Jana.

  "A quest as obsessive as any crusade, as mad as any religious fixation," replied Meredyth, her voice calm. "The fixed, tightly packed, impenetrable idea to end what she has begun. And that adds up to my li
fe—or the destruction of my peace for the rest of my life. And she meant for us to find two hearts here instead of one. It was no mistake, her leaving Mira's heart on a shelf, his on his sleeve. It's how the bitch views us, Lucas, me and you—my heart on a shelf and yours in your hand. Her cunning little assessment of our relationship."

  "You really give her too much credit, Meredyth," Jana replied to this. 'Tell her, Lucas. Go on, tell her."

  "Perhaps you are overstating it, Mere."

  "She took time enough to pose her boyfriend in that grotesque manner with his spirit guides—his animals."

  "Okay, so what?" he asked.

  "What is it you Cherokees believe in? Anima—the sacred spirit of animal guardians—the anima in man, the bear, the wolf, the fox, the turtle—all manifestations of the Great Spirit, all spirits put here to guide mankind."

  "What does any of that have to do with—"

  "Lauralie knows all about you, Lucas, and your heritage, the culture of the First People, and your penchant for blood vengeance on any who take the life of a family member. She knows you often make decisions based on passion, the heart."

  "You're reaching, Mere."

  "Am I? She also knows me, Lucas. All things Meredyth. For instance, she knows how long now I have put my heart on hold...like a heart in a jar on a shelf put safely up, out of harm's way. So for me, she left Mira's heart."

  "I'm sorry, Dr. Sanger," said Jana, "but this all sounds just a little too far out there for me, and I've seen some strange shit in my eleven years on the force. Couldn't it just be that she rushed outta here just ahead of our coming and in her haste simply forgot Mira's preserved heart? I mean, it looks to me as if she'd prepped it for her next mailing to you."

  "I thought you suspected that would be Arthur's balls," countered Meredyth.

  They stood clearly sizing one another up now. "Did I say that, or was that Lucas's line?" asked Jana.

  "Lauralie meant for us to have two silent non-beating hearts, Lucas," Meredyth said to him. "One male, one female...one for you, one for me."

  Lucas went to her and put an arm around her, saying, "Enough. I'm taking you home." He pointed to the nearest exit, the kitchen door that looked out on the rear of the property where on the map the creek bottom ran. Standing open to the night, the door represented a welcome escape from this hell. "Come on. What do you say?"

  She stared at the shattered creaking door that seemed to breathe in and out, swaying in response to the wind created by the hovering chopper—a breeze that eddied about the frame, marred by a torn screen door, partially ripped away, clinging to a single hinge. The black exterior of forest beyond the door made up a horizon that enveloped this horror house on all sides. The shadows created by men and dogs searching the grounds appeared in, and as quickly disappeared from, the rectangle of the door frame. The cloudless, onyx sky and the freedom of it beckoned Meredyth to step out, to dare the at-hand darkness of the Texas night, to abandon the safe walls of the brightly lit kitchen where, for days now, Mira Lourdes's remains had lain in cold storage. Meredyth had a quick sense of it, the need to act on her courage or to lose it entirely, here and now.

  Under Lucas's guiding hand, she moved toward the door. All the true darkness in the world had come to visit this once-peaceful, uneventful farmstead, coloring it with the evil hues of dark spirits now haunting its deep corners, closed doors, cupboards, nooks, and crannies. While Lucas had been off examining the back rooms, Jana and Meredyth had braved with flashlights the grim darkness of the root cellar, a cubbyhole of a basement below the kitchen. Meredyth felt the cold fingers of the earth in the cellar close round her soul again now, the long fingers of tainted banshees saturated with the odor of mold and mildew that had washed the cellar's stone walls with a luminescent green.

  Once a benevolent home, the farmstead was now forever stained by the violent danse macabre of Lauralie's insanity. The evidence of evil promenading in shadow-box fashion here would soon fill a murder book fleshed out with Perelli's film tape and Chang's observations, but the stains on the floors, the walls, the curtains, the very DNA of the two dead here, and the one who walked away would remain indelibly on this house no matter the amount of ammonia and bleach used to combat it. The ugly dark dye of evil this way had spread, Meredyth thought, and its palpable presence remained inside the farmhouse, as if on a phantom plane, yet here too on this quantifiable plane, reaching out to the living with ghostly fingertips that scratched the ethereal nerves of angels.

  But worse than having turned this old farmstead into an eternally dark interior place, was the darkness let loose on the exterior world from here—as if spirited away on a black-hearted demon's back. She should have seen it while hovering over the chimney below, how the evil had swept up and out the chimney on a spectral beast. Worst of all was the darkness lurking free now, outside somewhere, and going by the name of Blodgett... Lauralie Blodgett.

  Meredyth went ahead of Lucas, stepping through the doorway and out into the night air, breathing deeply of its clean purity, reclaiming it as her right, and daring the dark to descend upon her. Courageous, defiant girl, she told herself, remembering her father's words once when she had had to get stitches in her knee for a terrible gash.

  "She's out there someplace, Lucas, with all that pent-up hatred and rage toward us all," she quietly said, sensing him beside her as she searched the darkness.

  Lucas, his hand on her shoulder, replied, "You can't see it for the helicopter light, but just beyond is a harvest moon...the stars. Light in the firmament."

  "Lucas, I want to look beyond tonight, beyond this case, and I want to make a future with you. I want to share your heart, and for you to share mine."

  "Who knows what irony Lauralie has wrought, that she has inadvertently brought us closer than we have ever been before. All stemming from her hatred and lunacy. Ironic."

  "She hates everyone she perceives has let her down, and all men have failed her miserably, as did we all, miserably. As far as she's concerned, all men are interested in only one thing, gratifying what's between their legs. So her emasculating Arthur is classic behavior; it fits with her worldview of currying favor with men for sex. But this thing with the hearts, I tell you, that runs even deeper. Her own heart has been turned to stone."

  "Yet she was a child born of passion,"

  "At least we see her coming. We understand her somewhat. Arthur didn't have a snowball's chance in Hell." She began walking toward the front of the house, Lucas at her side. "This dark in her soul, Lucas, it's a real black place, an abyss like the one the Biblical monster Abbaddon crawled up from. She's filled with this inky blackness. And she's out there someplace in the world lying in wait for us."

  Six hours and too many cups of coffee to count later, Chang and company shut down the crime scene, and everyone left the farmstead while it was still dark, leaving yellow police-line tape over the doors and windows.

  Chang had the two dogs transported to his lab along with Belkvin's body. Still the man's genitals had yet to be found. The two hearts were placed in separate coolers, each labeled and numbered. Each was also initialed with the supposed name of the owner: ADB and ML.

  Meredyth and Lucas had remained until the end, and with the APB that had been placed on Arthur Belkvin's BMW and on Lauralie Blodgett, they felt relatively sure that someone somewhere soon must spot the vehicle and/or its occupant and call in for the reward.

  Yawning, tired, headachy, Meredyth now lay her head on Lucas's shoulder as he drove for her ranch home. They had informed Captain Lincoln that since he intended on turning the case over to the FBI, they were taking some time away. Jana North could play host to the FBI, Lucas had told the captain, who, not wishing for any argument, had agreed. "You two have done a remarkable job of taking the case to first and goal, Lucas," Lincoln summed up in football terms. "Time others carried the ball into the end zone."

  "Lauralie's the one who'll select the end zone. Captain. Watch out for her."

  "She's eluded us, I'll giv
e her that," Lincoln replied, "but not for long now. I think it's a good idea, you two stepping back, getting out of harm's way for the time being. Take a trip; get out of Texas altogether for a time. You are her primary target, Meredyth. Makes sense your not wanting to be a sitting duck here. When she learns she can't find you, she'll become frustrated, and she'll make a hasty, foolhardy move, and we'll be ready for the misstep."

  The agreement was that any further packages arriving for either Lucas or Meredyth, either at their homes or at the precinct, would be handled by the FBI.

  Lucas yawned again, needing oxygen to the brain. He feared he'd fall asleep and run off the road. He flicked on the car radio for music or a talk show to keep awake. It was miles yet to Meredyth's getaway. She'd fallen asleep on his shoulder altogether now.

  A pair of headlights roared up behind him and around the car at a good twenty miles an hour over the limit, a sporty-looking expensive car, but he let it pass without thought. No way was he going to get involved with a speeder, and to get on the horn, he'd have to wake Meredyth off his shoulder. Besides, the sun would soon be up, and he wanted a bed and sleep, not a police station and paperwork to fill out.

  Another pair of headlights came up on the rearview, but this driver remained at a safe, sensible distance, maintaining the limit.

  CHAPTER 18

  LUCAS STONECOAT BREATHED in deeply, taking in the dawn air as it streamed in through the window of the moving vehicle. As they passed below a covered bridge, he smelled the aged, gray wood and the pleasant greenery that graced the banks of the little river below. He had memorized the way to Meredyth's home away from home. He could see the shimmering edges of the lake in the distance, the waning moon creating diamonds along the lake's placid surface. He made out the beginnings of acres of white rail fencing that seemed to move with the grass and the rolling hills. He soon made out the stand of trees around the main house, and beyond this the stables. He thought of Yesyado, the thoroughbred horse he'd ridden the last time he was here. He thought of their excursion in the canoe, and their lovemaking on the bank. He had grown so fond of Meredyth.