Cutting Edge

by Robert W. Walker

  One of the assassins worked to decapitate Little's head, with its bulging eyes and grimacing teeth, necessarily causing a great gout of blood in the process. The blood ran in many small rivers over contours of the rental car, and several unusual dents across the hood of the car were left where the meat cleavers had done their work.

  A passing motorist's lights momentarily shone on them, but the driver, speeding at well over sixty-five, didn't give them a thought beyond the minimal, Car trouble... glad it's not me....

  Meanwhile, Timothy Little's feet, hands and head were bagged in two separate large plastic Hefty bags. These were thrown into the back of the van as one of the assassins climbed in.

  The other two climbed into the cab, the engine still running. Cigarettes were lit, great breaths of relief were taken, and finally a cheer went up among them. It had been a job well-timed and well-executed. Helsinger I would be proud.

  With a last look at Little's now limbless torso sprawled across the hood of his midnight-blue, regal-looking rental, a shining steel shaft sticking straight up into the air from his chest, the other shaft still in the car, the black-hooded killers congratulated one another, one taking credit for the direct hit on Timothy's heart.

  They then disappeared down the highway toward Rogue River, leaving the silence of night and the body behind them. Only the absolute stillness and Timothy's mangled remains, sliding down the hood now, were left when the raccoons came to investigate the pungent odor left in the wake of the passing humans.

  TEN

  Lucas Stonecoat looked up, thinking he had heard someone quietly snooping at the door to the Cold Room, but there was no one there. The room had filled with dark men, hunched forms, gargoyles—all shadows. He glanced across the room at the cubed and barred single window, finding it had been painted vermilion on this side, black on the other.

  Night had come on and he hadn't been aware of it, so enthralled had he become in some of the other files Dr. Meredyth Sanger had checked out of the Cold Room over the past two weeks. Apparently, she had already run a computer check on cases involving arrows and had done the research, casting out many an archery accident to find these cases where an arrow was used with deadly intent.

  He hadn't gotten very far into the other files Meredyth had logged out when he realized he'd put in overtime. Neither Kelton nor Lawrence would appreciate him putting in for overtime his first day on the job, not after all the paperwork he'd already cost them with his field trip to the Texaco station.

  Lucas had lost track of time, and his black coffee had turned to cold mud while he had scanned the month's roster to locate the ID numbers of other files borrowed on Meredyth Sanger's name. Except for the dust kicked up and the allergy itch running along the canals of his nose, he effortlessly found these ancient files as well, long forgotten by all but a lone police shrink, and now him.

  The dust was not so thick or undisturbed on these folders, making it obvious they'd recently been fanned and scanned. He piled them atop one another, four in all, and placed them into a battered briefcase he'd been using for his classes. Not bothering to log the fact, not wanting to leave the kind of tracks Dr. Sanger was leaving in her wake, he pushed the files into his case, intending to study them overnight. Switching off the light, he limped from the exit of his monastic hole in the wall, his leg killing him from having sat so long in one position.

  Locking up, he turned to the service elevator and waited for the damned pachyderm to come get him.

  More coffee, Stonecoat told himself, pouring the last of the pot, long cold, into his cup. Instead of going to class as he should have, Lucas had spent a restless and long evening with the remaining files, holed up in his bare apartment in an effort to follow in Meredyth Sanger's curious footsteps along the convoluted trail she had blazed. He was trying his damnedest to punch holes into her reasoning and the stubbornness with which she had come down this path in the first place. But he wasn't having much luck in doing so.

  He paced what little space remained here for him to walk, what with the files strewn about the floor, along with boxes yet to be emptied since his move. He was using unopened boxes as chairs and tables for the moment, as he'd taken the unfurnished apartment with the desire and design that he would decorate in a manner suiting him self. So far his interior decorations amounted to a handful of prints of noble Indian faces and early tribal life, which adorned the walls along with an authentic Cherokee blanket his aunt had sent him during his convalescence in Dallas. Lucas had moments before risen with some difficulty from the floor, where he'd been splayed out for an hour now, going over the final papers of the final file he'd taken from the Cold Room. He didn't own a table, so the papers were spread across boxes.

  Going for the refrigerator, which was owned by the super, along with all the other appliances in the flat, he located a cold Coors and drank long and deeply, savoring the cool feel of the liquid and its bite as it slid familiarly and easily down his throat. Earlier, he'd ordered Pizza Hut's complete spaghetti meal, along with a small pizza, and what remained of the pizza sat on one edge of two unopened cardboard boxes that he'd been meaning to get to but was now using as a makeshift tray table in his nearly empty flat.

  The chief features of the place were the hardwood floor, the poster bed he'd bought for the bedroom, and a pair of first-model Colt .45's he'd hung in a special place above his bed. Lucas hadn't had the time required to do the place up right. And if he followed Sanger down the primrose path she wanted him to take, there'd be less time than ever to pursue personal interests, such as making a suitable home for himself, fishing, boating, diving or hunting. One of the allures of Houston was its proximity to the ocean on the one hand and to good hunting grounds on the other. Houston itself had very few lures. It was, like all cities its size, an abominable place to be if you were poor, a lovely place to be if you were rich. But within a two-hour drive, out beyond the last development, Lucas knew he could find the trail ways of his ancestors alongside those of Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, Austin, and Travis. He could canoe through a primeval swamp, angle for a free crab dinner or go sailing. There were ferries to ride to distant destinations, beaches to walk, and quiet country roads to drive. There were horse farms and sugarcane mills in every direction. It just took a little effort and looking to find sea-rimmed marshes and wilderness trails. And despite all of his physical problems, Lucas Stonecoat had dedicated himself to returning one hundred percent to the man he once was, a man who loved the outdoors and the open prairie.

  He continued to pace, to think, and to become angry all over again at the circumstances closing in around him. Dr. Sanger was no fool; she knew he'd do almost anything to get reassigned out of the Cold Room. And damned if he didn't want it both ways—wanted her to be wrong about the files, about the connections she'd perceived, so he could safely bow out, and yet he wanted her to be right, so he could get excited about something and go back to being who and what he was before the accident. But that renegade was hardly more than a faint memory now, a shadow puppet in the theater of remorse. Still, he had promised the God who daily moved him that one day he would return to full health and vigor, and perhaps by getting involved here and now, getting excited about his work, this case... then perhaps.

  Still, he found himself as curious about Meredyth as the journey she'd been on, forged as it was from tantalizing footprints which, while timeworn and wholly spectral, had roused his most basic instinct for the hunt. Indeed, he wished very much to understand her motives as best he might, and to determine if he really wanted to get any deeper into this figurative hotbed with her, aligned as she was against the one man in the department who could most easily make his life miserable. Of course, Phil Lawrence's decision to place

  him in the Cold Room had pretty well created a hell from which there appeared no escape, save perhaps Dr. Meredyth Sanger's plans for Lucas, anyway...

  It was a convoluted mess already, and he hadn't done a thing beyond reading the files. So he worked, trying to see all she sa
w in the files, hoping to learn what, by God, had alerted her to the similarities in the first place—such as they were. Some of the answers, particularly regarding her, eluded him like a trout in two feet of water. He could see the prize, but picking it up was going to be near impossible, like falling in love with a woman who had devoted herself to a lifetime of love for a mission, a spirit, or God. He may as well declare it a useless enterprise and “step back,” as the rappers would say.

  “Maybe it's me,” he told himself, sipping at what remained of his beer, wondering if he ought to spike it with some Red Label. He would have to use some sort of drug or drink to get any sleep tonight, to get past the three-pronged problem of pain, insomnia and loneliness.

  Sure, there was a great deal of similarity between the other cases, beyond the obvious fact that they remained unsolved: The victims had all died of a massive blow to the heart or chest with a spear or arrow. Once again, semantic errors abounded in the reports, arrow and spear being confused. A spear was a lance, sometimes six times the size of an arrow, but these were white cops filling out reports at two and three in the morning, and words like spear and arrow were interchangeable in a brain of putty. But there were also distinctly dissimilar crime scene facts here. Not all the victims had been mutilated after the initial kill, and some only partially, but none perfectly matched the extensive mutilation damage done in the more recent cases of Palmer and Mootry.

  Maybe Palmer and Mootry were connected, and the connections seemed clear, but not so with the other bodies, at least not on paper.

  A fellow by the name of Bennislowe—poor slob—along with his wife and daughter were all slain in brutal fashion, all three with metal arrows fired nastily through their hearts, but their bodies were not mutilated—no chopping off of hands, feet, head, or private parts. Also, this awful occurrence had taken place many years before, in 1981 in the Brier Forest area, the outskirts of Harris County. When it had been unofficially closed and detectives put to other duties—murder cases technically remained open for ten years—relegated to the Cold Room, in 1984, with no likely suspects, the Palmer killing had been less than two years off.

  Were the HPD cops at the time blind, careless, stupid or all of the above? A careful check showed that each case had been handled by different detectives in differing precincts. Lucas wondered how many had retired between these incidents and gone to Florida or California. In any event, no one save Meredyth Sanger had considered the cases together, as a whole. He again wondered why her... why had Meredyth of all people come upon this startling string of events? What had been her springboard? What had first prompted her to ask, What if?

  Prior cases also involved high-tech, tempered-steel arrow shafts, one of these again fired through a window—an open window this time—directly into the victim's chest, missing the heart but causing such trauma as to leave him dead nonetheless. This fellow's name was Charlton Whitaker, and his head had been lopped off and carried away by the ghoul who'd killed him. The head had never been recovered, the killer never found. Sometime later, Whitaker's grave was disturbed, his family crypt opened, and additional mutilation to the body occurred: hands and feet fiendishly severed and carted off, along with private parts.

  Lucas winced at the thought of lying peacefully in a grave somewhere, already missing his head, and here come grave-robbing ghouls to take his privates and extremities— why and for what purpose? It sounded cultish, and certainly these days there were enough cults to choose from. However, the records showed that police investigated every known cult in the area for any hint of involvement, only to come up completely empty-handed.

  Whitaker's wife, parents, and all others in the crypt were disturbed in the process, arrows placed through the corpses at the heart as well, the “dead victims” left like so many staked vampires.

  The trail of Whitaker's killer or killers led detectives down multiple paths and directions ending in frustration, making some believe that the death of the wealthy financier had been tied into some sort of international intrigue beyond the kin and scope of the Houston Police Department. A second theory involved neo-Nazis and hatred of Jews, as Bennislowe was Jewish. Another theory had Charlton Whitaker somehow mixed up in a weird religious cult of some sort which had exacted this ritual vengeance on him. None of these theories had gotten detectives anywhere.

  The phone rang, and he had to search a moment to find it among the debris of boxes. Picking it up, he asked, “Yes?”

  “Stonecoat?” It was Meredyth Sanger. “Have you had an opportunity to look over some of the files I suggested?”

  “You don't waste time, I see.” A quick glance at his watch showed him it was almost two A.M.

  “So, whataya think?”

  “I think you're reaching.”

  “Maybe... or maybe you don't want to see what's before your eyes? I know it will mean bucking some broncos, cowboy, and maybe you're not quite up for that these days? Perhaps you prefer a quiet little desk job in the base—”

  “Hold on, there, Dr. Sanger. Hell.” Lucas stopped himself, covering the mouthpiece in order to mutter to himself, “Damn, but she's got some nerve.” Then he said to her, “Look, if the goddamned detectives who handled the cases at the time, the men who were that close to the case and time frame of the murder couldn't do anything about it, what kind of fool am I to think that I can step in and pick up a scent on this, after all these years.”

  “Still, there's the Mootry case.”

  “What about it?”

  “It's still warm and palpitating.”

  He involuntarily nodded and thought, Yeah, and for some unknown reason, it has enticed Dr. Meredyth Sanger to all these additional gruesome events.

  He finally said, 'Taken separately, these cases might simply be random acts of violence.”

  She seemed to agree, saying, “The mindless work of the inhuman types who walk upright and look like men, but whose minds are those of monsters, their occupation that of stalking the streets of every city in America, the kind of men police routinely call depraved, self-indulgent animals.”

  She was speaking of a sort Stonecoat had seen time and again in his long years as a peace officer. The sort who— having had a few snorts of cocaine—decide to pull into any driveway, scale any wall to attack the nearest man, woman or child they could lay their bestial hands on just for the sheer hell of it, for a thrill only the truly criminal-minded understood, as kicks to ward off the boredom and monotony which so characterized their otherwise dull and miserable lives.

  Lucas said, “So far as I can make out, neither Whitaker nor Bennislowe had anything remotely in common with either Palmer or Mootry, save strong ties to the community and an upstanding and exemplary life. Tying the cases together in one neat package just isn't going to happen, Dr. Sanger.”

  “Meredyth,” she mildly corrected him.

  “I mean, you've got a retired judge, a surgeon, a real-estate broker, a car salesman turned megabucks-filthy-rich when a theme park bought up his family's old homestead to build on. The other victims seem only afterthoughts, incidentals who happened to be in the... the way when... when—”

  “When the random act of violence was in full swing?” she facetiously asked.

  “All right, I admit there are some questions, lingering doubts, loose ends,” he replied.

  “Look, would you mind terribly if I came up to your place and we talked further about this?”

  “Where are you?”

  “At a place called Bonevey's, across the street.” Bonevey's was the all-night diner across the street. He could see the place from his window. “How did you know where I live? Never mind. You ever been under psychiatric care, Doctor?”

  “Whataya mean, physician heal thyself?”

  “I'm just not sure I care to be stalked, even if you are—”

  “Are what?”

  “—A beautiful woman.”

  “Trust me, Lucas Stonecoat. My interest in you is purely professional.”

  He hesitated a moment
before saying, “I'll put some coffee on.”

  “Don't go to any trouble on my account.”

  This made him laugh. “I'm apartment 15B, but then you know that. Come on up.”

  He looked around at his place; it was a shambles of opened and unopened boxes. He had never fully relaxed here, wasn't one hundred percent sure he meant to stay. There was a guy across the hall who sometimes sent out banshee wails when he went into delirium tremens, a real alcoholic of the old school: He lived on booze alone. The man looked like death walking. Fleckner was his name, and every time Stonecoat looked into his dead eyes, he feared the reflection, knowing that he himself could be Fleckner at any time, anytime he wanted to give up and give in...

  ELEVEN

  Over a shared pot of black coffee, the former detective and the police psychiatrist stared at one another. Meredyth got up from the single chair in the apartment, which he'd graciously offered her, to walk about the place and comment on its hardwood floors, and the pictures he'd hung, and the Cherokee blanket hanging from one wall. She began to think aloud as she gazed about the place, saying, “Your Indian bearing, your surroundings, and your natural good looks remind me of Lou Diamond Phillips, the actor, but you're taller, more broad-shouldered.”

  Lucas remained stonily cool to all her remarks, some of which were designed to bring him out, to relax him. He knew what she was trying to do. “So,” she finally said, “what'd you think of the fifth case, the Gunther case?”

  This case took place back in 1979, and it involved a younger man who really seemed to have nothing whatever in common with the other victims, as he was not a home owner or successful or wealthy in any sense of the word. In fact, he was a metalworker, something to do with automotive bodywork. His name was David Ryan Gunther, but he'd been somewhat new to the greater Houston area, and no one knew from where he had arrived. His body, or what little remained of it, had been discovered in a wooded area, in a little pit hastily covered over by brush and stone and earth, the head severed and missing while all other limbs and parts and members had remained intact. His name was known because of an ID found in the shallow grave. But after repeated police requests for help, including an appearance on the tube by cartoon Officer Take-a-bite-outta-crime, no one had ever come forward to claim the young man's remains.