Cutting Edge

by Robert W. Walker

  “Give me white lightning any day,” he muttered to himself.

  TWELVE

  His warm milk and whiskey in hand, a full glass of it, Lucas now lowered himself into Sears' poor excuse for a La-Z-Boy, as he had no sofa yet, and found the TV remote and a cold piece of pizza. He tossed aside the pizza, finding it a poor complement to the hot toddy.

  Fatigued, feeling spent, he flipped on the TV and channel-surfed, stopping to stare with wonder at a QVC-style television evangelist who was going to save him from himself, from wild, wild women, from anything smokable or pokable, from anything he might guzzle, such as whiskey, from Satan, and from an eternity in Satan's last resort. The TV evangelist whooped as well as the best Baptist minister in all of Texas and made as much sound and fury and promise as a used-car salesman with a sledgehammer in hand.

  Unable to stomach another word, Lucas switched on an old western with Jimmy Stewart in the lead role opposite bad guy Arthur Kennedy. Lucas closed his eyes and allowed the dialogue, voices and music to wash over him. It was nearing three-thirty in the morning, the dementia hour, and he dozed, semiconsciously wondering if the white medicine woman's remedy acted as placebo more than anything else, wondering if his sleep was helped by the drink, or if it had come on simply due to exhaustion, or a combination of both. Either way, he knew he'd sleep more soundly if he stopped worrying about how-he had gotten here...

  He awoke with a knife to his heart, but the startled moment came to an abrupt end the instant his eyes leapt open. Those damned Cold Room files had brought on a nightmare. He surveyed the apartment, a barren, stark personality, this place, without warmth or color. Meredyth could not have approved of the place or liked it. He had to do something about that, had some ideas, wondered when he'd find the time. He wanted very much to get some rich, vibrant desert earth colors to surround himself with—reds, browns, ochres, umbers, perhaps a few Arizona or Texas landscapes with towering mountains. He loved the Painted Desert and Grand Canyon scenes. Yes, that would work.

  He'd work on it. For now, he shuffled off to the shower, painfully stripping away his clothes, the old injuries firing up anew, a punishment for falling asleep in the old chair. In his medicine cabinet, he found some horse-sized pain pills left over from his days at the hospital in Dallas. The pill bottle ought to've been emptied months before, but he'd weaned himself off traditional medications, taking the big brown things only sparingly, relying more and more on tribal medicines forwarded by his grandfather, as well as smoking the root. The root gave him a greater high than any bourbon or marijuana might. The herbal medicine, also known as locoweed, was as old as his tribal people. This and meditation were now his constants, his caregivers, his doctors.

  Still, since he'd not smoked anything tonight, he popped one of the white man's remedies and got under the soothing hot spray of the shower. Afterward, he quickly toweled down and found his soft mattress. The bed comforted him back to a deep slumber, his greatest regret at the moment being that Meredyth Sanger wasn't lying beside him, and secondly that she'd have absolutely no reason to ever speak to him again—not after what he had to say to her in the morning.

  But liking her wasn't enough reason to get involved with her harebrained scheme of building a case for a serial killer going about with steel-tipped arrows over a period of almost twenty years. Besides, there were just too damned many loose odds and ends.

  Still, linking the two most recent cases, Mootry and Palmer, might have merit, and there damned well could be a serial killer on the warpath in the greater Houston metropolitan area. But such cases were out of Lucas's hands, beyond any reach of either him or Dr. Sanger, so far as he could tell.

  He fumbled for the card she'd left him, which he had placed next to his phone, and for a long moment, he focused on her melodic name. “Oh, hell,” he announced to the empty room. “Might jus' 's well get it over with.”

  He began dialing her number, not worried about waking her. “Damnation and hell, she's kept me up all night with this crazy shit, not that I could sleep anyway, given all my givens.”

  His was an impossible situation. He understood the need for a Dr. Jack Kevorkian in the lives—or rather deaths—of many people. Insomnia alone was hell, but coupled with agonizing and torturous pain, that was quite a bit more. He silently meditated as the phone rang at the other end.

  The phone rang six times before he heard her knock it to the floor, retrieve it and find the mouthpiece. Obviously, she was having no trouble sleeping. Maybe she had taken her own remedy. She now found the presence of mind to speak clearly. “Ellowww? What time is it?”

  “Near four-thirty.”

  “Stonecoat...”

  He lied. “I've gone over the files again and—”

  “Again? So, you see the similarities!” she said, excited, instantly awake.

  “Listen to me, Dr. Sanger,” he began.

  “You'd have to be blind not to see the connection, the pattern.”

  “Will you listen to me?” he commanded.

  Her silence was her reply.

  “Now look, we both know that these back cases... well, that nobody gives a damn about the Cold Room files, but you go poking your nose into an ongoing case like the Mootry matter, and people go ape shit, especially detectives working the case.”

  “So what's your point?”

  “Point is, I'm in no position to piss off my superiors.”

  “Lucas, we have to... We can make a difference together if you'd only give it a—”

  “I need my job, Doctor, not just for the money... I need the work. Some people would say I have no business carrying a badge; most departments in this country would not have hired me, given my record.”

  “Have you tried other departments?”

  “I wanted to stay in Texas.”

  “Then you're whining, Lucas. Come on, I need your expertise, and I need an ally.”

  “There're plenty of guys down there who'd like nothing more than to help out a... help you out. I'm just not the guy. Sorry, Doctor. I'll keep your confidences. You needn't worry about that, and—”

  “How can you do that?”

  “What? Keep your secrets?”

  'Turn your back on the evidence.”

  “What evidence? We're talking about a handful of similarities and your... assumptions, Doctor.”

  “Arrows don't show up in bodies every day, Lucas. Not even in the Wild West of Texas, not anymore.”

  “I agree there's a possible, perhaps probable connection between Palmer and Mootry, and possibly Whitaker, but the others I'm not sold on.”

  “But that's enough to start a real investigation.”

  “For you, maybe. Look, I'm sorry but—”

  “I thought you were different, Stonecoat.”

  “Different how?”

  “I thought you had some guts, that you weren't afraid to go after the truth.”

  “What I'm afraid of, Doctor, is being used by a woman.”

  “Go to hell.” She hung up on him, hurting his ear with the resounding gavel of the receiver.

  “Have a nice day...” he grumbled to the dead phone. “Now that went well,” he told the room. He also told the room that he wasn't going to jump up and down and walk on the ceiling for her. And he didn't want her making a lot of assumptions about him, as she'd obviously already done. He told himself all of this as he dozed more readily toward much needed slumber; two hours before alarm bells would peal. Still, if the Mootry and the Palmer cases alone were unmistakably linked, maybe it was his duty to pursue the matter a little further, discreetly and on his own. Telling her of his plan to do so would be less than discreet.

  Vacant of substance, smoke and mirror images and shadowy figures now danced about a roaring fire on the ceiling before dancing inside Lucas's mind as he again found sleep. The final image to come before his closed eyelids was of an impatient and angry Captain Phil Lawrence, reaching out to tear the buttons off Lucas's shirt in a theatrical display of disgust and unbridled hatred. The b
uttons bounced and rolled away from Lucas's dream self like enormous black tires off a DC-7, and suddenly a howling wind blew a fierce fire over Lucas's badge, melting it. Looking over his shoulder, Lucas located the dripping, molten gold of his badge as it seeped downward from the branches of a twisted and scorched oak, where the badge had taken a Dali pose amid the charred limbs, like one of those melting clocks the artist was so curiously fond of.

  764LTl:C42119Category 42….. Topic 159LOG….. Message 302 …….. Tues July 23-.1996 ….. 4:03:05

  Questor 3….. Helsinger's Pit…..

  Q3: Problem north of Eden resolved. Altar prizes on the way. Enjoy and appreciate efforts here to gain sacrifices to Helsinger.

  End Transmission...Category 42 Topic 159LOG... 4:05:02

  Category 42…… Topic 159LOG ….. Message 303….Tues-July 23 1996…..4: O5: 07

  Questor 1

  Q1: Again you have proven your worth, Questor. 3. I look forward to the prize.

  End Transmission….. Category 42, Topic 159LOG, 4:07:00

  Meredyth Sanger couldn't believe what Lucas Stonecoat had left her with—nothing, no way to turn. Damn him. Maybe it had all been a stupid play from the beginning, she rationalized. Maybe he wasn't the man she had thought, or perhaps since Dallas and all that horrible trouble, he simply wasn't the same man Dave Cass had known. Cass was the police shrink in Dallas, and they had been friends for six years, seeing one another at various conventions and conferences over the years. Cass had not blinked when she asked him for whatever records on Stonecoat he might possess when she told him that she would be taking over his case from here on out, now that Lucas was a Houston cop. Cass had held back nothing.

  Meredyth couldn't go back to sleep now. She felt like an army of one, as though everyone down at the precinct was against her. Only Cass from afar and young Randy Oglesby, her computer-wise male secretary, had given her any help whatsoever. She had really been counting on Stonecoat, and she had put in a lot of time courting the bastard.

  She climbed from bed and replaced the receiver on the phone. She had slam-dunked it when she had hung up on Lucas, and while it had hit squarely on the cradle, it bounced a foot away like an errant basketball shot. She went for the kitchen where she thought she might scramble some eggs, make coffee for one, get an early-bird start on the day. As she did so, she tried to get Lucas Stonecoat and the shameless way in which she had pursued him out of her mind. The man no doubt thought she needed psychiatric care. Still, how could he ignore the evidence before his very eyes? How could he ignore Alisha Reynolds and Dr. Palmer and the way they had died? How could any rational man?

  Of course, he hadn't known Alisha. She'd been a wonderful friend. She would have given Meredyth anything, and they had shared two wonderful summers together between her mother's farmhouse and Alisha's ranch. Together they had tried out every horse on every path and every ridge of the Georgia estate. Meredyth had been much younger than Alisha, but Alisha had treated her as an equal, and when she confided through correspondence that she was marrying a doctor, she begged Meredyth to return to be her maid of honor. Meredyth had not responded one way or another before she got the horrid news that her longtime friend had been the victim of a homicide.

  The incident changed Meredyth's life forever. It wasn't that she was obsessed with her friend's death, but it did take her in the direction of criminal psychology and away from a more conservative area of medicine.

  Her Uncle Howard's influence encouraged her to break away from the traditions of the family, a tradition that would have had her married off to a “proper young man” years ago. Uncle Howard, something of a black sheep, had played a large role, but she had never once considered following in any way, shape, or form his footsteps. Autopsies and death investigation simply were not a calling for her, that is until Alisha Reynolds was so brutally murdered.

  Captain Phil Lawrence and others had dismissed her before all the evidence was in, before she had gathered all that she now had, and so for them, there was no turning back, no way to say, Sorry, Dr. Sanger, we were wrong about you; we perhaps rushed to judgment, failing to weigh the obvious merits of your arguments and the evidence you have brought to bear on this matter. No, no way in hell she'd ever hear those words from a jerk like Lawrence.

  'The matter is under investigation by those in charge, men better suited to criminal investigation than you, Doctor,” Lawrence kept snidely saying, the words now like a mantra, a chorus of nonsense. So typical of men—unable to admit a mistake or make an apology, so what was left but to withdraw?

  She had once approached the team of Fred Amelford and James Pardee, the principal investigators on the Mootry case, only to find them as narrow-minded and as paranoid about her wanting to help as Lawrence had been. The good old boy network just closed right down on her.

  So she had moved on to Lucas Stonecoat, an outsider and a loner. And she had expected more, better perhaps, from Stonecoat. She didn't know why, but she had. His phone call tonight was crushing.

  When she got settled at the small kitchen table, eggs, toast, and coffee in hand, she saw that Lucas's medical file was still there on the tabletop from the previous day. She lifted it and flipped through it, staring again at the Dallas Memorial Operative Report. It read like a medical dictionary, a What's What of medical jargon:

  DALLAS MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

  Operative Report

  Date of Operation: 01/6/92

  Operation: Multiple trauma, craniocerebral trauma, and respiratory failure.

  Postoperative Diagnosis: Same as above.

  Procedure: Laparotomy; tracheostomy; Swan-Ganz placement; bladder repair; cystostomy; reduction of respiratory difficulty.

  Meredyth went on to read the procedure as described and attached by the physician who'd overseen Lucas's multiple operations. It read:

  Procedure: With patient in supine position and with hyper-extension of the neck, the anterior cervical area was prepared and draped. 1% Xylocaine anesthesia administered at all levels for a total of 8 ccs.

  With adequate anesthesia established, a midline incision was made and deepened down through subcutaneous layer to the cervical fascia. Subcutaneous homeostasis achieved with a Bovie. The deep cervical fascia was next incised. A large venous channel was ligated with a #3-0 black silk and divided. Dissection was then carried down the midline incision to the pretracheal fascia, which was incised. Tracheal cartilages were immediately apparent. Using a hook, trachea was grasped and a window inferior to the hook was excised.

  At this juncture, thirteen minutes into operation, a #6 soft pressure Shiley tube was inserted into the trachea and immediate functioning was successfully begun. The tube was attached to the ventilator and skin closure instituted with #3-0 silk sutures. Routine dressings with KY gauze and 4 x 4s applied. The tracheostomy tube secured around the neck with umbilical tape.

  The patient tolerated procedure well, considering earlier head injuries and operations to reduce pressure on the brain. Patient went back into ICU with stable vital signs.

  Dr. Daniel Garvey, M.D.

  01/6/92 Attending

  Patient Name: Stonecoat, Lucas

  The bullet lodged in Lucas's right upper chest was near the heart and quite life-threatening, and at first it appeared his severe burns might be beyond help. Certainly, witnessing the burning death of his partner, trapped in the car beside him, must have left psychological scars as well. The removal of the bullet and the work of Lucas's skin grafts came later. Meredyth Sanger once again found Stonecoat's medical records both heart-wrenching and astounding. It was truly astounding that he showed such determination, first to live and secondly to rebuild a life.

  Despite all this, and despite the fact she realized anew just how much he had gone through, and that most men who had managed to live beyond such an incident as he had faced would have long before retired from active duty, Meredyth was now in the unhappy position of having to blackmail Lucas into cooperating with her. She wondered if she could do it, use his
medical records against him in so foul a manner. It was either that or drop the Mootry-Palmer connection and go back to administering to the needs of officers on the force, her Rorschach tests and filling in reports. If anyone knew about Hermann Rorschach's imaging tests, in which the patient was asked to project his feelings into an ink splat, it was Meredyth Sanger. And if anyone knew how to skew results on an ink test...

  And sometimes she wondered, Why not? Why not simply forget about what she knew? Why not return to the staid lifestyle of before? It would demand a great deal less of her, and Lawrence would be a great deal happier with her.

  Stonecoat surely would detest her if and when she lowered the boom on him. It wouldn't take much for her to see that he came under such close scrutiny that he could hardly survive as an officer in the HPD; his hopes of ever becoming a detective again could so easily be denied him if she were to do a psychiatric investigation. Add to this what she knew of his personal habits, his health record, his getting involved in a shooting his first day back on the job...

  No, getting Lucas Stonecoat into deep shit would be as simple as making a phone call. In fact, Lucas did it to himself; he made it so easy. Maybe teaming with him had been a ridiculous notion to begin with, so why had his turning her down made her so bloody angry? Still, how could he—a detective—ignore the importance of the cases she'd so painstakingly brought to his attention?

  Like most men, he needed a good swift kick. “Where the sun don't shine,” she muttered to herself. She had thought that kick would have come in the form of information carefully fed him by her. She'd thought manipulating the big lug would be a simple enough matter, but obviously the man was not so easily manipulated. She supposed that was normally a good quality, his thinking for himself, but not when it affected her this way.