Cutting Edge

by Robert W. Walker

  The only thing remotely linking David Ryan Gunther to the other deaths was the large Bowie knife sunk to its hilt that—according to the coroner's report—had been driven in with such force as to pin the body to the ground. The huge blade had been discovered still straight up after some eight years, while the body had decayed around the knife and bones. And with the cranium missing, there wasn't an opportunity to even guess at his facial features. It was presumed that the skull was either pulled off by animals and taken to a den somewhere, or that the killer had taken Gunther's head away with him for some bizarre ritual or dark purpose. With no one claiming the body or coming forward with any information, the remains were buried in a city cemetery at cost to the taxpayers.

  Again she asked, “What do you think about the Gunther body being discovered where it was, as it was?”

  He gave her a deprecating shrug. “Obviously, there are a few tenuous links that you've already examined and judged. Obviously, you've buzzed about on the VICAP and other computer systems in your search for similarities in killer MO and victim profile, and the big bulletin board must have alerted you to the Gunther case along with the others. Then, for a closer and more personal and detailed look-see, you found your way down to the Cold Room for the actual files.”

  “But?”

  “But I don't think it washes, especially in the Gunther case.”

  “Still, what about the link between the Gunther kid's body and where it was unearthed? I mean, someone had him dig his own shallow grave, lie down in it, and take a hit from that Bowie knife that pinned him to the grave. After which his head was removed, and he was covered over.”

  Lucas threw up both hands. “Whoa, you're making twenty assumptions there, none of which you know for sure.”

  “His body was unearthed by a dog out on a walk in the woods very near the Charlton Whitaker estate. This geographical link seems a bit eerie and uncanny.”

  “Yeah, but Whitaker's murder and the subsequent destruction of the Whitaker family crypt came much later in time. It's most likely just a curious coincidence, coincidences being more common now that computers and computer cross-referencing are a fact of life. More coffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “A beer?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Well, if you'll excuse me a moment.” Lucas went to the bathroom and splashed cold water into his eyes and face, staring for a long moment at what remained of his youth and vigor in the mirror, seeing the scars, incised worry lines and crow's feet instead. Since the accident, gray strands of hair had become his, entwined amid the thick black weave, finding a permanent home now at each temple. Some people said it gave him more character, others called it credibility, as if the gray meant more wisdom or vision, and this, along with his Indian blood, had had the naive among the white rookies at the academy coming to him for advice! Advice ranging from money matters and relationships to the best scoped rifle to use on a deer hunt. He doubted that hair of any color had much to do with wisdom or power, but the illusion certainly was there. And as every good magician or Indian shaman or good cop knew, mirage, mirrors and chimera—the appearance of things—usually meant far more to people than the reality behind a fantasy. But no amount of phantasm was going to be of any help here and now as he weighed the relative wisdom or foolishness of either accepting or turning down Meredyth Sanger's 'request for assistance. She was not likely to be taken in by anyone's hocus-pocus.

  She was waiting in the next room for an unequivocal answer.

  He toweled off. There was more to sift through waiting for him in the other room. He returned to it, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, his resolve to remain objective stronger than his resolve to remain awake.

  “I need to look a little deeper,” he told her, stalling for time.

  She began pointing items out to him, facts he had already considered. It became annoying. A few minutes later, he stood and paced, went for a hefty tumbler of whiskey, offered her some, which she declined, and drank long and sighed heavily afterward.

  He saw that she watched him with one eye—the eye of retribution and rebuke—while her other eye filled with a pleading appeal. She felt like, smelled like, sounded like, and probably would taste like Katharine Hepburn in African Queen, he thought. Given half a chance to get near his kitchen, she'd likely pour out every ounce of booze he owned and tell him it was better than Drano for the pipes.

  “You took some documents from the Palmer file,” he accused.

  She dropped her gaze. “I haven't been completely forthcoming, no.”

  “No, you haven't. Now, do you want to tell me why?”

  They were both seated again now, she leaning in toward him as if she must whisper what would come next. “I left the Gunther report in to test you; see if you were as good as they say.”

  “As good as who says? My superiors in Dallas weren't exactly handing out laurels when I left.”

  “No, but you had a number of supervisors up till then, and no one could change your record.”

  “You sure do your homework, lady. So, Gunther was a ringer? To see if I was paying attention.”

  “Not at first, but I decided to use it as such. See what you had to say about it.”

  “And what about information on Alisha Reynolds? Or do I have to call Atlanta for that tomorrow?”

  She snatched her purse to her and rummaged through it, pulling forth a folded cache of papers. “Here's all that was in the file. I didn't have time to make you a copy, too.”

  “These are the originals? Police property...”

  She frowned. 'They are and you know it. Read them over.”

  Lucas first stared at the ceiling overhead. Do I really want to get into this any deeper than I already am? he wondered.

  “Just look them over,” she urged. 'Then we'll talk about threads and coincidences, Lucas.”

  The police report on Palmer's fiancee, Alisha Reynolds, was a fax some ten plus years old,

  dated as it was 1985

  . Atlanta and Houston obviously were ahead of the times, having faxes so early on in the game. At that time, many law enforcement officials used a nearby college or university in faxing information back and forth. The report wasn't as detailed as it might have been, but close enough attention was given to Alisha Reynolds's death to sort out a few things in Lucas's mind. The woman's death was ruled a murder in the first, and it had taken place at Palmer's home just after the breakup of a party that evening. Alisha Reynolds had actually been cut down by a steel-shafted arrow fired from a crossbow through a closed window.

  “The dead woman's name—Alisha Reynolds—corresponded with the would-be in-laws, who became suspects in Palmer's death the next year,” said Meredyth, her voice like a narrator of some dark documentary. “Very little was done in the way of background on her here in Houston. She was an Atlanta socialite, expecting to marry well, and all seemed right with her world when a mindless random act of violence took her.”

  “Could there have been a jealous suitor? Someone smart as well as enraged? Someone who wanted to make it look like a maniac had done Palmer and his intended in, in order to cast the shadow of suspicion away from himself? Perhaps another doctor who worked alongside Palmer at Georgia Baptist Memorial Hospital in Atlanta? Did Palmer engage in crossbow hunting? Did anyone, friend or acquaintance, ever take up the weapon?” All these questions escaped Lucas's mouth, and he could see that she could see that his mind raced with curiosity over the oddities here.

  Just how much of me are you wanting to take, Dr. Sanger? Lucas wondered. He had on occasion used a crossbow himself on deer hunting excursions, but she probably had unearthed that bit of information as well.

  The high-tech crossbow weapons of today were damnably, horribly accurate and cleanly deadly.

  In what seemed an attempt to explain why the similarities in the cases had been overlooked, she said, “In one of the earlier case files, some fool with no knowledge of crossbows quickly characterized the arrow
as having come from a spear gun, and so the word spear gun had continued to be carried over from protocol to protocol until the M.E. got hold of it and declared it an arrow from a crossbow.”

  'The M.E.?”

  “He's something of a hunter himself. He'd seen crossbows and crossbow arrows before.”

  “And you?”

  “Yes, I had. The M.E.'s my uncle, and he's been retired, encouraged to take a pension. He hunts with a member of a hunt club.”

  “Ahh, I see, and so that's how you got started on this trail?”

  “That and the fact I knew Alisha Reynolds when I was a child, growing up. I summered in Georgia, where my mother lived at the time. I was going to be one of Alisha's bridesmaids. Her parents were like my own for a time, and when they were under investigation for Palmer's murder, it brought it all back like a nightmare that never left us.”

  “Funny, you don't look old enough...”

  She smiled at the compliment. “In any case, I never forgot how awfully she died. When Palmer was killed, I was away at college and hadn't heard anything of it, but when Mootry was killed, I was reminded of Alisha, so I went back in time, searching in Georgia first, and getting very little help. It was, after all, a dead file.”

  “No wonder you want an Indian on the case,” he managed to mutter to her now.

  She managed a light laugh, which brightened the dark room. “Whatever can you mean by that, Lucas?”

  “An Indian knows the difference between a spear and an arrow, and besides, an Indian never forgets an enemy.

  ” She indulged him with a broad smile now. “Truly, I hadn't given it any consideration.”

  “So were any of Alisha's former lovers or suitors ever traced? Anyone jet to Atlanta to check firsthand on the situation there?” He riffled through the additional pages she'd provided but found nothing of great import on the Atlanta murder.

  “With so little in the file, your guess is as good as mine,” she replied, “but it appears the detectives in charge didn't follow Atlanta up, or someone didn't get back with more than what you have there in your hands, Lucas.”

  “Appears that Palmer's murder here in Houston PD's jurisdiction was given far more attention than the dead socialite in Atlanta.”

  “It was already old news. He had moved on to wooing women here in Houston high society.”

  Stonecoat nodded. “And since he had become so prominent here—”

  “He was originally from here and had returned to get away from the morbid curiosity surrounding the death of his fiancee in Georgia.”

  Lucas nodded and said, “Since he was so big here, his case file actually carried an asterisk, indicating that it required a box of its own.”

  “The single folder I pulled is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg,” she agreed, adding, “the HPD swarmed over this case, turned it into a special task force operation with forty detectives working around the clock. Palmer's family was well connected. They even got TV time on America's Most Wanted, but nothing—absolutely nothing—came of it.”

  Lucas may've heard vague rumblings about the case, but in Dallas at the time, he'd had his own problems as a first-year cop in a mean town. He was filled to overflowing with an unbridled energy that kept his paperwork cryptic and his time on the street twice that of any other cop. He and Jackson hadn't yet been teamed, and no other cop in the precinct could stand being around him. He was too gung ho, the others said of him. He had made few friends in or out of the department. He was hard to get to know because he was always so fired up and anxious. Soon it was rumored he was doing drugs, which he wasn't; but he was called in for a spot drug test. He passed with flying colors. Still, not even his captain could keep him in one place long enough to explain the simplest of regs to him. He couldn't sit in a chair without rocking, couldn't stand in a doorway without bouncing off the facings. When he had been on his back, facing rehabilitation and a grand jury probe and his superiors, the worst part of that hell was being immobile.

  “Yeah, I seem to recall something about the case when it broke,” he managed. “It might be interesting to see the episode that aired on it.”

  “I've seen it, and it is; in fact, I had a copy made. I'll gladly share it with you.” She went on to explain, “The HPD detectives working the case had spared no one in '86: not Palmer's shrink, not his personal physician, not his attorney, not his servants; they even went so far as to question the doctor's minister at his church. My uncle used to joke that they even brought in a psychic to talk to Palmer's dog. They were that hard up for a lead that had never been forthcoming.”

  “Your uncle sounds like a smart man.”

  “He thinks he got on everyone's nerves too much.”

  “Oh?”

  “He was—still is—something of a perfectionist. Things never sat well with him with the Palmer case.”

  “Retired, you say? So, where'd he retire to?”

  “South of Galveston on the bay. Has a great place. Visit there whenever I can, but he doesn't like me just dropping in.”

  “Oh, why's that?” Lucas didn't expect an answer, and his thoughts were running toward the old guy's having plenty of girlfriends in.

  “He's writing up his memoirs and it's making him a real bastard. Ask him to tell a story and he's masterful; ask him to put it in permanent ink and he chokes like a dog on peanut butter. I got him a tape recorder for his birthday and told him to just speak the damned book and let someone else transcribe it. I hear now it's going well, but for a time, God!”

  When she finished, he said, “It's hard for a man to speak his heart.”

  “More Indian wisdom?”

  “Fact, is all. Like the detectives at the Thirty-first who joked about dropping a match on the Cold Room. It's easier than speaking their hearts about cases they couldn't solve.”

  “Well, sure... The place houses mistakes, oversights... doubts and regrets.”

  “Being the designated curator of such a museum isn't likely to win me any friends. The other guys are already calling it Indian Affairs.”

  “As opposed to Internal Affairs?” She smiled and laughed.

  He joined her, his laugh so loud that someone in the apartment overhead beat the floor to silence him.

  “So what will it be, Stonecoat? Are we a team or aren't we?” she finally asked point-blank.

  “I'll have to sleep on it.”

  “And if you never get to sleep?”

  “You know about my insomnia, too? You've been all over my medical file, and you've been all over the computer Internet trying to locate all kinds of conspiracies. I'm not so sure I trust you, Doctor.”

  “Don't be ridiculous. I'm only interested in the truth.”

  “Yeah, well, perhaps you should heed some of your own Anglo advice.”

  “Which is?”

  “Careful of what you wish for... you may get it.” She bit her lip and nodded. “Tomorrow, then, without fail, you will let me know, one way or the other.”

  “I will.”

  She stood up, took his hand and shook it firmly. “Thank you.”

  He held on to her hand, enjoying the warmth of touch. It had been a long time since he had held a woman's hand. “For what?”

  “For being the first man to listen to me on this, to take me seriously on this, and to see that there is something quite odd going on here.”

  “Did you take all you have to Captain Lawrence?”

  “I did.”

  “Withholding nothing? Not even the Gunther file or the added info from Atlanta on Reynolds?”

  “Well, he never gave me a chance to get that far. He's so negative and so insufferable.”

  “Funny, I haven't found him to be either.”

  “That's because you're a man. He doesn't treat you like a... a goddamned Barbie doll or a bug.”

  She made her way toward the door.

  “You sure you don't want to stay a little longer?” he asked, afraid to let her go and afraid she might hear the panic in his voice as well. The
moment she stepped out the door, the place wrapped itself again in that deafening silence it wore before she'd brought her fire inside. It was a fire he both admired and remembered; it was the fire he had once carried.

  “Lucas, it's going on three A.M.; I've got to get some sleep, and you'd better do the same. Have you tried some of that whiskey in a tall glass of warm milk?”

  “Milk?” He almost spat the word. “I don't have any milk in the apartment.”

  “Then I take that as a no?”

  “That's right.”

  She could only frown. They said a final good night.

  But ten minutes later there came a knock at his door, and when he opened it, there she was, extending a pint of milk to him. 'Try the milk-and-whiskey toddy. There's something released in warm milk that'll help you sleep. Trust me.”

  He stood astonished, not remembering how the pint of milk got into his hands. “Thank you. I will try your remedy.”

  “That's all I ask. Just a try.” Her smile warmed him. “Now, good night, I hope!”

  She was rushing away again.

  “Are you sure you're safe out this late alone?” he asked her as she disappeared into the shadows of the hallway for the elevator.

  He next saw her silhouetted against the light of the elevator when the door opened. Someone in a nearby room was shouting through the wall for quiet. “I know how to take care of myself, thank you. And Lucas,” she paused, and just as the elevator door closed, added, “I do hope we can be partners.”

  Lucas stared down at the cold pint of milk in the green-and-white carton she'd handed him. The slogan on the milk proclaimed it to be WINS DAIRY MILK—THE VERY BEST OF LIFE IN A CREAMY CASCADE OF WHITE ENERGY.