Fond, he thought, mulling over the euphemism they had now for so long substituted for the word love—the real feeling they held for one another. He kissed her head where it lay on his shoulder, taking in the smell of her perfumed hair. He kissed her a second time, realizing she was completely oblivious to him. "I love you, Meredyth Sanger. Do you hear me? I love you."
She squeezed his thigh, letting him know that she had indeed heard the endearing words. "I love you too, you dumb Cherokee. I've always loved you."
"You're awake?"
"Not really, but I will remember this in the morning...."
"We're almost home," he informed her, changing the subject.
"I can't wait to hit the bed."
"I hear you."
"You don't happen to have any peyote on you, do you? Maybe some stashed in the car?"
"Are you nuts? This is a police car."
"Hmmm... just wishful thinking."
"How 'bout some of that stockpile of brandy or wine in your cellar?"
"Dad's cellar... but I'm sure we can find something to agree upon."
She lapsed into silence for a few moments, then spoke again. "Lucas."
"Yes, dear?"
'Tell me again why you pursued the fifty-year-old case of Yolanda Sims."
"Somebody had to do it."
"No, seriously...tell me why. What power on earth led you to it in the first place?"
"I don't know really...it's a mystery. I was so fixated on finishing the transfers, you know, from hard copy to disks. Had all my people working down in the CC room overtime, weekends, Sundays, and racing through, when Donovan lifts a box and tilts it coming down from the ladder, and this murder book slips out and hits me in the eye. The photos of the girl littered the floor. Later, when I could see better, I opened the file up, thumbed through it, was about to hand it back to Bill when I decided to just hold on to it for a while."
"But why did you pursue it?"
"Maybe it was just for me; maybe I'd sleep better at night knowing I at least tried after looking into that little girl's eyes. Her death photos didn't do it, but that one full head shot of her alive, smiling, her eyes intense...it just told me I had no choice."
"That's what I love about you wild Texas Cherokee tough-guy types, that streak of intense empathy, that big heart. It's a rare man who cares as much as you do. There's not enough like you in this world."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
She lifted her lips to his, kissing him as they turned onto the long, winding dirt road leading up to her family home. In the distance, the first rays of the sun blinked over the horizon.
"Parents still in France?"
"Right, but even if they weren't, they hardly ever come out to the old place anymore. They're kinda sorta down to the one house now over in Clover Leaf. Closer to the action, shopping, theaters, and my condo."
"We've made it. We're here."
"At last," she replied. "Home... safe...perchance to sleep."
"I think it was perchance to dream, Mere."
"I'll settle for sleep this time round. What about you? You must be as exhausted as I am."
It had been an emotionally and physically taxing twenty-four hours, and Lucas knew that he too, laying his head on a pillow, would be instantly out. "Brandy and bed and your embrace?" he suggested.
"Sounds good to me...sounds very good to me."
THE CHOKING ODOR of last night's French-fry grease permeated the all-night, all-you-can-eat, empty-of- customers M&M Cafe, the lone waitress and cook sleepwalking through a routine of gearing up for the coming rush of their usual crowd here on Route 4. The local morning crowd, Lauralie Blodgett imagined, would be trickling through the doors within the hour; what passed for a rush . hour here, twenty-odd miles from any road that might take her to the Interstate and escape. Escape did not appear promising, not from here.
She thought of the effect the deaths of Dr. Sanger's lover and her parents would have on her, how the woman would suffer for the rest of her days. The thought sustained her.
Lauralie Blodgett sat in the booth that looked out on the parking lot and her BMW, trying to enjoy a quiet moment over a plate of home cooking—meat loaf, tumip greens, mash potatoes, and gravy—and sipping at a Coca Cola, when the brown police cruiser pulled into the spot alongside what had been Arthur's car. The two policemen were laughing over something, one shoving the other as they climbed from their cruiser. In the trunk of the BMW lay the plastic-wrapped half corpse of Mira Lourdes.
She pictured flirting with the two officers in their Smokey the Bear hats—state troopers. She imagined smiling, nodding, blinking, and pawing catlike at them the way men couldn't resist. She searched her brain for an explanation about the car, should they suspect it stolen or wanted in connection with the Ripper crimes. She imagined one officer captivated with her, while the other insisted she pop the trunk to display her cargo, and their subsequent shocked reactions. They'd be catapulted from their obscurity to national fame just by virtue of having stumbled upon her at their local watering hole, the heroes of Harris County.
"That'll be the day that I die," she muttered, and the heavily made up blonde-wigged waitress looked over in her direction, only to see the two state troopers beyond the window in the faded twilight.
"Maury! Troops've landed! Put on two double cheeseburgers and fries!"
"What?" Maury called back from the kitchen. "What you say, Mary?"
"Del and Nolan're here! Troops're here!" shouted the waitress, her manner telling Lauralie that the troopers were regulars who apparently came to the M&M diner routinely each dawn.
Lauralie's mind raced with concern about the police, watching them intently, while the answer to a puzzle played out in her head as well. Mary and Maury. She put it together with the M&M on the big neon sign outside; that waitress and cook must be the M and M who owned the place. Simultaneously Lauralie listened to the TV news anchors on the tube in an overhead corner. She reveled in having created so much chaos, fear, and wonder, and she was pleased with the coverage up till now. In fact, she had fed on the power of knowing she alone was in control of this situation the press had dubbed the Post-it Ripper killings. The TV news and talk shows were now talking about it virtually twenty-four hours a day. The talk show hosts and anchormen and women ghoulishly picking over Mira Lourdes's bones, trying desperately to put her death together with various police raids across the city of Houston and last night's raid on the farmhouse. Reports praised police work in raids that had netted information that connected the murdered Dr. Arthur Belkvin to the Ripper case and the fugitive, Lauralie Blodgett. They then flashed her school photos on the screen along with a hot-line number. The TV cut back to a roomful of commentators and armchair profilers, expectant and anxious, awaiting the next chapter in the story that Lauralie was writing. One even had a chart of which parts of the Lourdes body remained to be delivered to authorities, and which had already been severed. They didn't have her heart. Lauralie felt certain that Dr. Meredyth Sanger must understand the significance of the hearts she'd left on display at the farmhouse.
She only half-heard the TV now, her attention on the two cops coming through the door as one stopped and pointed back at the car beside their cruiser. "Two News has learned that two high-ranking officials with the Houston PD to whom the Ripper has communicated..." The two policemen made tentative steps back toward the lot and began inspecting her car, moving about it like a pair of flies, curious and growing more so.
"The killer in this case does not fit any of our normal typologies when it comes to serial-killer profiling," came the voice of a so-called FBI expert on the TV over the counter.
From her booth, Lauralie pointed to the TV and said, "I know more about that shit than anyone on the planet."
The waitress looked more closely at Lauralie now, studying her features as if trying to place her. "Yeah? Really? You don't look old enough to know a lot about crime fighting."
"I know more than that idiot profiler, more than
any newscaster, more than anyone in law enforcement, more than all the damned politicians and religious leaders! More than even God himself if only there was a God, which I have never particularly relied upon, Mary."
The waitress unconsciously touched her name tag and recalled giving the young woman her name when first waiting on her. "You shouldn't say such things about God, honey."
"Mary, Mary, quite contrary, Mary, Mother of God... no, I don't hold faith in the Exalted One, despite or because of the years I've spent behind the black gates of Hell."
Mary stared at the stranger, trembling now, giving herself away in the eyes and wavering lower lip. They both realized in the same instant that Mary had recognized Lauralie's likeness as the woman law enforcement wanted for questioning. Considered armed and dangerous. The waitress's eyes moved off Lauralie a moment too late, going to the big plate-glass window, determining where the two troopers had gotten off to.
The TV news anchor was again relaying the story, with video, of an isolated farmhouse on Old Hazard Creek Road in Waller County, not terribly far from here, where the mutilated body of one Dr. Arthur D. Belkvin, a veterinary doctor and instructor at the Dean King School of Veterinary Medicine, was found in a commando-style raid by police—in an apparent failed attempt to locate Belkvin and an accomplice alive. The raid was the culmination of a week-long missing persons investigation in which authorities knew the missing woman had already been killed since her chopped-up remains had been mailed piece by severed piece to several high-ranking police officials in Houston.
"Liars!" Lauralie shouted at the TV. "They were only sent to the famous forensic shrink Dr. Meredyth Sanger and to her lover boy Lieutenant Lucas Stonecoat, and that's all. So why don't they name that bitch, huh? She's the cause of all this."
Mary, frozen in place, said nothing and did not move. Again Lauralie stared up at the TV to see her yearbook photos displayed.
"I got what I wished for, Mary. Finally...wanted." She laughed. "Wanted by everybody now...hell of a price on my head, you know that, Mary? Mary, Mother of God, you think you'd like to collect on that bounty, Mother dear?" Lauralie again laughed.
Maury called from the kitchen, saying, "'Nough yammering out there, Mary. Burgers'll be up in five!"
"If you want to stay safe, get down behind the counter, Mother Mary," Lauralie told her as she snapped open her purse, tilted it in Mary's direction, and flashed the muzzle of a gun lying within. The muzzle looked like the head of a snake to Mary, but she knew what it represented.
Lauralie had seen the activity of police vehicles going for the farmstead as she had filled the gas tank at a Mobil station on the main artery leading to her and Arthur's "sugar shack" as she'd called it. She had waited at a careful distance, watching as slowly the raiders came away, leaving the area. One car in particular, belonging to Lieutenant Lucas Stonecoat, she had followed to this vicinity, noting where the shrink and the cop had turned off, approving of the location.
"I can't stop them from knowing they've located Arthur's car," she told herself aloud, "but I can stop them from calling it in."
"What's that, honey?" asked the waitress, trying to bolster some courage in her heart and some feeling in her knees. Pretending ignorance and failing miserably. The heavyset blonde's makeup had melded with the grease here, her pores shining. "Did ya want something else? Some coffee maybe?" She lifted the steaming pot and took a step, coming out from behind the counter, when Lauralie lifted the 9mm Glock from her purse, causing Mary to drop the coffee on the counter and duck. The explosion of the coffee urn sounded like a gunshot inside the empty diner. Outside, the two state troopers snatched out their weapons.
She wasn't yet ready for capture. She pulled the trigger of the 9mm she'd purchased from Clive's Gun Emporium, two blocks distant from the orphanage, the day she walked out of Our Lady. The first shot exploded the plate-glass window dropping the closest trooper, his body slamming into the pebbled drive, his feet twitching in his boots. The exploding shards of glass had dug into the second trooper's face and eyes while he pulled off a single shot, narrowly missing Lauralie's head, hissing by her .ear. Her second shot created a bloody hole in the other trooper's chest as he fell back on the hood of the BMW, instantly lifeless, his body slumped down to the grille, where he appeared merely to be in a slumped repose.
Maury had come racing in from the kitchen, had grabbed Mary by the arm, and was guiding her out the door behind the counter, rushing for a rear exit. Lauralie calmly stood, shouldered her purse, and walked around the counter, almost slipping on spilled coffee, going for the couple, her weapon smoking in her hand.
As she made her way to the rear of the M&M, Lauralie imagined Meredyth Sanger lying in the crook of Lucas Stonecoat's arm right now, sleeping blissfully under the canopy of safety she enjoyed, while she, an orphaned child without home or family or loved ones, was engaged in killing people she did not even know in her effort to make Sanger feel fear and self-loathing for her part in all of this. Lauralie meant to shatter Dr. Sanger's every conscious and perhaps unconscious moment of well-being and comfort, whatever it took.
She'd narrowly escaped the farmhouse raid, thanks to a sixth sense that police had zeroed in on Arthur. She suspected it had unraveled because Arthur had babbled on too long with the realtor lady when they'd rented the farmhouse. This, along with the likeness in the newspaper, made Arthur a liability, and adding to her growing dislike of Arthur and his touch, she'd had to listen to his increasingly constant nagging about her motive for hating Meredyth Sanger, until finally she'd simply had enough.
Lauralie moved down the narrow passageway and examined the kitchen, searching for where Maury had taken his waitress bride. She yanked open the freezer door, her gun pointed at the frozen, hanging carcasses of beef. East Texas elk, and buffalo. She recalled seeing elk stew and buffalo burgers on the menu. She rushed from the kitchen, back into the shoulder-width corridor, going for the rest rooms.
No one in the women's room.
No one cowering in the men's room.
Back to the grimy cave of the corridor, and she flashed on a momentary thought that wily Maury had gotten past her and rushed out the front. Not likely.
She looked past stacks of boxes—food and vegetable crates—to a blue door in the rear. Gone out the back, Jack, she thought, going for the door.
She heard a motor trying unsuccessfully to turn over just the other side of the blue rear door. As she pushed past boxes and cartons in her way, her sleep-deprived brain struggled to keep on task—on Mary and Maury—part of her saying, To hell with them...let them go... let them live to tell the tale of her great marksmanship... while another part of her mind drifted back to Arthur and the way she had left him at the farmhouse. At least I gave the dog man an everlasting home, a fucking stomping ground he can haunt unendingly, his very own personal eternal habitat, she thought, recalling how much she had liked the old place, and how he had completely spoiled it for her. Aside from killing Arthur—something she'd known she would do from the beginning—Lauralie had had to abandon the farmstead prematurely, before she was finished with her original plans. There remained a lot to carve up and forward to Dr. Sanger. But as in all things, one opportunity lost meant another found. Lourdes's entire bloated lower portions, like the racked carcasses in Maury's freezer, presented the largest and most shocking image Lauralie had imagined possible. Her next move against Sanger and Stonecoat necessitated that she wrap with care the rest of Mira Lourdes's body and transport it here.
She stood at the rear of the restaurant now, throwing up her arms and the gun to protect her eyes from stone and gravel spitting up at her from the barking tires of Maury's red Dodge pickup as it roared from the rear lot, ramming into a Dumpster and dragging it along with it. Lauralie leveled the gun, feeling a slight admiration for the M&M couple for making it this far.
Aiming for the back of Maury's head, his chef's hat still on, Lauralie steadied the gun with both hands and fired. The bullet zipped through the rear window, cr
eating a little hole in both the window and the back of Maury's white hat, coloring it red, and opening up a gaping hole on the exit side, blood and brain matter all over the dash and dripping down the steering wheel as the truck plunged into a bank of public phones that now crumpled and jammed below the truck's demolished grille.
The red pickup held in place, its horn sent out a cry like a wounded, trapped animal. Only Mary, jammed in behind the passenger-side airbag, had any mobility left, should she leap from the disabled vehicle.
Lauralie looked around. Cars whizzed by on Highway 41 fronting the M&M Cafe. No one had pulled in, and no one had paid any heed to the scene at the diner.
Lauralie heard Mother Mary whimpering within the confines of the cab as she neared the disabled vehicle. Let the woman live. Think of the horror she now has to live with, if you let her live, Lauralie's head told her.
"No...not a time to take chances now..." she answered her doubts. Not until I make Sanger's life not worth living... not until I kill her man and maim her for life.
Again she leveled the gun, watching the stunned, blubbering Mary struggling against the duel problems of
Maury's weight and her imprisoning air bag, which had bloodied her face on impact. Her wig lay half on, half off her head. She tore with both hands at the ballooned air bag.
"Let me get that for you, honey," shouted Lauralie, firing into Mary's head, the bullet exiting and exploding Mary's brain and the air bag simultaneously.
Since the troopers had not acted quickly enough, no one would know that the random killings here had anything to do with Lauralie Blodgett, she reasoned.
She dropped the smoking gun back into her purse. "And they say there's no such thing as a free meal," she joked, stepping lively now for the front of the cafe and her car. Passing the dead trooper sitting upright against her grille, she suddenly felt a pair of icy hands wrap around her ankle. The dead trooper had reached out and latched on, but he hadn't the strength, and she flicked her ankle, freeing it, coming away with a bloodstained stocking.
04.Final Edge v5 Page 36
