04.Final Edge v5

by Robert W. Walker

  She looked up at the middle-aged single mother of two, unable to tell her what had happened, but her eyes spoke clearly enough. Mrs. Farnsworth gasped and raced for the bam to locate her boys, calling out their names and getting no answer. "Where's their truck?" she finally asked, and looking up at the house, she got her answer.

  "Those boys didn't do anything wrong, did they? Who shot your man, Meredyth? Talk to me, damn it!"

  "Jeff and Tommy're..."

  "Spit it out!"

  "...are dead, Janie. I'm sorry. A maniac got hold of their rifle and used it on them. She shot Lucas too."

  "My boys...are they badly hurt?" She didn't want to hear the word dead. "Where are they? Where are my boys?" Tears flowed freely now.

  "Out on the lawn, halfway down to the lake."

  She climbed back into her car and raced up the path to the house, plowing over the lawn in her car to get to where her boys lay. Meredyth's heart, once more, was ripped apart.

  She heard the dispatcher on the phone calling to her. "Meredyth... Doctor...are you still there?"

  "Where the hell's the help we need?"

  "You're in a remote location. They're on their way!"

  "I need blood plasma, maybe a transfusion; he needs stabilizing now!"

  She saw that Lucas's normal red pallor had a skein of ashen white painted on now. His usual vigor and bravado had been replaced by a limp body and a lethargic malaise. He no longer fought her, allowing himself to be enveloped in her arms. She feared he would die here in her arms at any moment. "Don't do it, Lucas. Don't leave me! Please, don't."

  She got no response from him. Lucas Stonecoat lay in her arms in a hemorrhagic coma.

  In the distance, she heard the sirens that could not get here soon enough to suit her. In another three minutes, her tree-lined drive around the lake was lit by a parade of fire engines and paramedic vans followed by police cruisers.

  "Where's the damned chopper!" she called out through the phone. "He's gone into coma!"

  "The chopper's on its way, Meredyth. It's on its way," replied the calm voice of the 911 emergency dispatcher. "It's in the air and on its way."

  She heard the faint sound of chopper blades—chomp- chomp-chomp-chomp—competing now with the ambulances and fire trucks that'd pulled down to the stables, encircling them. Over the blackened horizon, she saw the helicopter come into view. On its side, she read the luminescent logo—2NEWS. It was a damned news crew chopper!

  It's too late...too late, came the evil voice in her head. And it's all your fault for wasting time on that lunatic bitch.

  Paramedics flooded round them, and someone tugged her away, freeing the medics to attend to Lucas's wounds. They'd come from nearby rural Harris County Memorial Hospital, their emergency response unit. They immediately put Lucas on a plasma-and-glucose hookup, attempting to stabilize him for transportation. They examined the bandages Meredyth had wrapped him in, and these were replaced with sterile wraps. In what seemed a lifetime for Meredyth, they finally had him on a stretcher and into the waiting ambulance. Meredyth jumped into the rear with him, and they drove out into a field, and from overhead, a medevac chopper appeared, setting down, ready to take Lucas aboard.

  Meredyth insisted on taking flight with him, certain it might be the last opportunity to see him alive. He remained in a coma.

  CHAPTER 21

  DR. LEONARD CHANG shakily balanced himself atop the tin-roofed shed, having left the safety of the ladder he'd ascended, and now he cautiously made his way to the impaled body. The sight stopped him, so chillingly ironic, the proud head of the metal greyhound protruding out of the woman's abdomen.

  Fearful of falling, Steve Perelli followed and stopped short alongside Chang, crouching to keep his balance, his video camera in one hand. He too stared down at the curious wrought-iron spike and made out the greyhound's arrogant grin and alert ears painted in blood, poking through the young woman's abdomen. "Looks like something out of a B horror movie," the police photographer said.

  "Get the shots, and let's get her off this thing. You'll lend me a hand?"

  Perelli gaped at the M.E. "That's not my job. I never handle the bodies. I place rulers beside them to indicate scale, and I get in close, to within a hairsbreadth of a puncture wound with my camera lens, but I don't touch dead people."

  "Union rules?"

  Perelli replied, "My rules." He'd photographed the worst kind of bloating, discoloration, bruises, slashes, even a screwdriver though a guy's skull once. He'd filmed the results of nail guns, staple guns, ordinary bullet wounds. He'd filmed brutalized, raped, and murdered women, and people run down by cars, tire marks so clearly and indelibly imprinted on their clothing and flesh that people had been put away on the evidence. He'd photographed jumpers, floaters, burn victims, and he'd busted his ass getting shots as detailed as the broken front teeth of a murdered prostitute beaten to death. In fact, he'd photographed areas of the human body that anyone else would be arrested for. But he had never been asked to handle one of them. "It's one thing to film the dead, another to touch, roll, or move the bodies. That's not my job, Dr. Chang," he repeated.

  "I need you, Steve. We're stretched thin here." Chang held up a pair of surgical gloves for Perelli to don.

  "You got a small army out here. Where's Ted? Nielsen? Detective North's in the house with four Feds, doing nothing so far as I can see. Call her for help."

  Chang gnashed his teeth. 'Take your video. I'll get someone."

  Under the first light of a cloudy dawn, from his elevated position on the shed roof, Chang could see all around the property. He watched the activity down at the stables, Ted Hoskins leading an investigation into the blood trail left by Lucas Stonecoat only hours before. He could also see the Harris County coroner and his crew finishing up with the two gunshot victims on the lawn. Through the open window, Chang heard North arguing with one of the Feds and stomping around in Meredyth Sanger's upstairs bed-room, from which Lauralie Blodgett had obviously fallen—or had she taken a leap? And if so, had it been her intent to die or simply to take flight? The hunting rifle used to shoot Lucas and the two dead boys on the lawn appeared to have flown down with her, coming to a rest alongside the shed in some brush there. Curious too was the neck, wrapped in bandages spotty with bloodstains. Chang bent over and began unraveling the bandage, that incredible new stuff he'd invested in years ago, Fresh Flesh. When the bandages came away, Chang mentally gauged the wound to the throat—three puncture marks equally spaced. It would fit with the garden tool found in Meredyth's room upstairs.

  "Another puzzle piece," he muttered.

  Through the tops of trees sloping away from the house, Chang made out the pier and the man-made lake, his gaze finally finding Dr. Lynn Nielsen, tall and slim in a wet suit. Assisted by divers in the water, she was dealing with the dead man in the rowboat, and confiscating the other boat riddled with bullet holes and floating upended.

  Further on, across the lake, Dr. Frank Patterson had been diverted immediately to the Brody family crime scene. Via a linkup with Meredyth Sanger from the mede- vac chopper, Chang, en route to the multiple crime scenes, had been given details of where the bodies lay. Once at the Sanger cabin, Chang had set up a command post with Detective Jana North's invaluable help. Everyone was told to also be on the lookout for any sign of body parts and remains of Mira Lourdes.

  Meredyth, distraught, had not remained long on the phone. She told Leonard she feared the worst, that Lucas might not make it. The thought had cast a pall over the gloomy work, and the weather reflected the grim inner turmoil Leonard felt for his badly wounded friend listed in critical condition and lying on an operating table.

  DETECTIVE JANA NORTH leaned again out the window from which Lauralie Blodgett had gone to her death. She needed the air. She was exasperated with the Feds, her body language told anyone caring to read it, like Chang down below on the "hot tin roof" where he motioned for her to join him. The local ASAC—assistant special agent in charge—and his followers had in
sisted on being brought in on the case, kidnapping being their angle. But Fuller and his boys remained woefully behind and hadn't done their homework. "They have no idea how vested our Missing Persons Bureau is on this case," she had bemoaned to Captain Lincoln over her cell in a private moment, pleading with him to hurry out to the scene.

  Lincoln was on his way still. He'd stopped off at the hospital to look in on Meredyth and learn what he could of Lucas's condition. Jana caught herself blaming Meredyth, telling herself that if Lucas died, she'd hate Sanger for the rest of her life. At the moment, no one at ground zero here knew if Lucas was dead or alive.

  She stared down at the remains of the deadly Post-it Ripper. Lauralie didn't look like much in death, but Jana had seen what the petite vixen had done at the cafe not far from here, as well as what she'd wrought here on Lake Madera. From her safe vantage point, she watched Chang carefully unwrap Lauralie's throat, freeing it of the bandage- tourniquette. A hell of a lot of loss of blood in the bedroom told the story of Lauralie's bleeding out here, and no doubt Chang's eyes would verify that a struggle for life and death between Meredyth and Lauralie had occurred, and Meredyth had not only won the battle, but had staunched the wounds of her defeated enemy while Lucas lay somewhere bleeding out.

  She turned and surveyed the brightly lit crime scene again. From the appearance of things in the bedroom, including several spent shell casings, along with the location of the Remington breech-loader, Jana had a good sense of what had happened here. While Meredyth had been treated for superficial wounds caused by a three- pronged forked garden tool, the trail of mud and dirt leading up to the room suggested that someone most assuredly attacked Lauralie, bringing the garden fork down and into Lauralie's throat.

  Jana paced to the door and started down the stairs and out of the house, responding to Chang's gesture to join him atop the shed. She got on her cell phone and dialed. Chang came on instantly.

  "Dr. Chang...Leonard!"

  "Detective North? Why're you calling? I can hear you from where I'm standing." He looked up again only to find her gone from the window. "Wait...where are you?"

  "I don't want anyone else to hear this."

  "Go on." The sun had slipped through the cloud cover, and a wide swath of blinding rays sent Chang's arm up to shade his eyes as he looked up at the window again, not ten feet overhead, still searching for the detective. "What is it? Where'd you go?"

  "Got a call from the Brody house, one of the evidence techs named Tory."

  "Yes, Tory. She is a promising intern."

  "She's gotten ill over there. Has a strange story to tell about 'something' hanging from a ceiling fan in the teenager's room."

  "And you think it is the rest of your missing person, Mira Lourdes?"

  "Sounds extremely likely. The ET, Tory?"

  "Yes?"

  "She says Dr. Patterson has known about the remains in the second-story room for two hours."

  "My God, no!"

  "This is the first you've heard?"

  "I just discovered my cell phone was switched off accidentally."

  "All the same, Frank Patterson knows damn well how important finding the rest of Mira Lourdes is to me—ahhh, the family—you, all of us, and he's so damn strange that he's failed to share the discovery with the rest of us. Why?"

  "You tell me, Detective North, why? Why is Frank doing this?"

  "Because he's waiting for those bozos with Fuller to CSI the place before any of the rest of us, even before you, Dr. Chang."

  "Still currying favor with Fuller's team. Damn Frank...never knew what side to butter his bread on."

  'Tory came to me with it because she'd been unable to reach you, and she knows how Nielsen and Frank have been feuding, so she didn't want to go to Lynn out on the lake without first running it by you."

  "What shall we do... what shall we do..." Chang muttered as if to himself.

  "I have no idea, but the young intern, she's been dismissed by Dr. Patterson because she dared push him on the issue. Meanwhile, Patterson's focus has been on the down-stairs kitchen and basement areas. She called him an ass."

  "Yes, that'd be Frank all right. What do you propose we do? We have our hands full here."

  "I'm going over there, but I don't want this intern getting into any trouble over this."

  "I see Captain Lincoln's car coming in. Why don't you take him over there with you. Let Frank explain things to him?"

  "Great, good idea. Just wanted you to know what's going on across the lake."

  "You got someone up there can help me pull Blodgett off this doggie windmill? I need someone strong."

  "Sure. I'll send down a couple of big, strapping FBI boys."

  She hung up. Chang cursed Patterson's inept people skills. He could well imagine how Frank had treated young Tory, who no doubt felt traumatized at finding parts of Mira Lourdes's corpse dangling from a ceiling fan.

  Perhaps a silver lining, he thought, in that Mira's final remains might be located and reunited with the rest of her body—all the parts still in frozen limbo at Chang's morgue, downtown Houston, where her body was treated with the decorum, dignity, and humanity that all his guests received. If it were Lourdes's remains up in that second- story room, and Frank had let it hang there beyond the time it took to make a video record, he was breaking Chang's rules of conduct with respect to the dead.

  Leonard had hoped to have a full and detailed map of precisely what had "gone down" here, as Gordon put it, by the time Captain Lincoln had arrived, but obviously a lot of the puzzle still needed fitting into place. Sending off the captain now with Detective North was a stroke of luck he realized, watching North intercept Lincoln at the driveway as he exited his car, seeing her point to the Brody house, and smiling to see Lincoln and North climb into the rear seat of his squad car and turn back for the cutoff to the Brody house across the lake.

  Earlier, while en route to Madera Lake, Lincoln had called Chang, and had bellowed into the phone, "Leonard, I want to know what went down exactly when, and in what order. I need a time line. Every bloody detail, Leonard. I want to know what happened to Lucas Stonecoat. Shit, you know how many cop-killing wakes I've gone to this year, and it's only September."

  Lincoln would be back soon for all the answers. His going to the Brody house with Jana meant only a temporary reprieve. Chang did not know all the answers, not yet. Hell, he had just learned of the Lourdes remains at the Brody house It seemed only God and Frank Patterson knew all that had gone on there. And what about the weird shit that had "gone down" out there on the lake itself? The naked dead guy covered in worms? One for the table conversation at the American Forensic Society's annual next month, if Nielsen could figure the mystery out.

  Chang had made cursory rounds, setting up the individual teams, going from house to stable to lawn to lake, and now the top of the shed. Somebody had to be in charge, and he had been nominated, but Lincoln demanded an impossible magical time frame. A typical crime scene took time, lots of it, but this, seven bodies spread over six—now seven—crime scenes (shed top, second-story bedroom, stable front, the lawn, the rowboat, the Brody basement, and add the Brody second-floor bedroom). On top of that, they had an officer down, quite possibly the eighth body...awaiting Leonard back at Houston General—and what of the sheer number of vehicles involved?

  Leonard finally saw the young Feds coming out of the house, one of them approaching him. Belkvin's BMW had been found and was being impounded by the Feds. Three vehicles littered the driveway, and another sat at the Brody house, all in need of at least a cursory going-over.

  Leonard gave another moment to Lucas back in Houston, still fighting for his life, he hoped, but the stories filtering to Leonard made his friend's condition sound a great deal worse than merely uncertain. Last word had him in a per-ilous fight for his life on the operating table.

  ATF and FBI personnel and forensic crews continued to scour the entire yard for additional shell casings, their leaders drawing diagrams based on findings, attem
pting to clearly identify Lauralie Blodgett's position and movements at the time of each shot fired, and how she had overpowered the husky 269-pound Kemper.

  No agent came to help Chang. The one he'd thought approaching continued on down the path to the bam. "I need help here!" he shouted up to the second-story window on hearing Fuller's voice still there.

  "Hold on down there!" shouted one of the FBI agents from Meredyth's window.

  "I asked for a couple of men here!" Chang shouted back. "We need to get her off this roof and into the van for transport."

  The FBI agent shouted back, "I got a local guy with a cherry picker on his way. It'll help in getting her down from there."

  "A cherry picker? We don't need no stinking cherry picker!" But the agent had ducked back inside already. Chang shouted louder, "Agent Fuller! I just need two men. She's getting ripe up here."

  Perelli breathed a sigh of relief on hearing of the cherry picker, and he quickly found his way back to the ladder ahead of Chang, balancing his camera as he made his way down.

  Chang returned to Lauralie's body and thought how shapely she was, and that she had a beautiful face for a maniac. He mused about the men in her life, all those she had used with such ease. "You could have been anything you chose to be, if only you had put your genius to a good cause. Why did you choose evil?"

  "Talking to the dead, Dr. Chang?" Fuller called down to him.

  Chang saw that he'd sent his team racing off toward the Brody house with their own evidence technicians and cameraman.

  "So this is jurisdictional cooperation," he called up to Fuller. "We must do it more often."

  WHILE AWAITING THE FBI-ordered cherry picker, Leonard Chang had climbed down from the shed roof and had returned to the second-floor bedroom crime scene for another look. From there he got on his cell phone and rang Frank Patterson at the Brody house for an update there. Patterson picked up his cell and replied to Chang's question. "Maybe another hour, maybe two. Depends."