"You don't have two hours, Frank. Lincoln's on his way up the steps now, and Fuller's team is behind him."
"That's just great. Leonard. Now I've got to stop everything and play nursemaid to King Gordo?"
"Just walk him through the crime scene as you can best piece it together, Frank. Use the phrases I think, perhaps, and quite possibly a lot. That way no one can hold you to anything you've said, like being a politician, Frank...like running for office. Now tell me, what the fuck are you hiding over there in the upstairs bedroom? Something dangling from a ceiling fan?"
"Leonard, you of all people've got to understand. I've got my team concentrated on the three—count 'em, Leonard—three whole and undivided corpses as opposed to dealing with the slaughterhouse remains of Mira Lourdes upstairs. Three gunshot victims in the—"
"Then it's true, you've known about the Lourdes remains there and you've kept it to yourself? Why wasn't I informed, Frank?"
"As I said, my first duty, as I see it, is to determine how the Brodys died here, not how a half a decayed woman's body found its way through the door."
"I suggest you do precisely as Detective North and Captain Lincoln wish, Frank."
"North?"
"She's coming through the door with Lincoln as we speak. I have them in my sight. They'll want you to drop everything, Frank, to sort out the Lourdes woman's remains, as I do, Frank. Tell me, Frank, is it the entire rest of the woman or not?"
"It's all the rest of her."
"Thank God for that."
"Leonard, had you been here, you'd've done the same as I did. You'd've focused on the larger problem first— three bodies in the basement to process and bag, not to mention the walls we've had to cut through."
"Walls?"
"Blood-spatter evidence."
"Frank, photos would just as well suffice. The killer's not going on trial in her condition."
"Just being thorough, Leonard."
"You need me to look in, run interference with Lincoln?"
"No, everything's under control here."
Ten minutes later and Chang, looking through binoculars, saw Jana North pacing the Brody porch, waving her hands, and exchanging words with Captain Lincoln, who kept pace with her. Leonard thought it like watching a silent film without benefit of titles—frustrating. Still, the overall message was made clear when Lincoln suddenly took her by the arm, led her to his car, and they drove off, disappearing from view.
Chang sensed that neither Captain Lincoln nor the female lieutenant were happy with Frank Patterson or his decisions after actually viewing the final piece of divvied- up remains belonging to Mira Lourdes, and they'd likely had just as bad a reaction to dealing with Frank.
Leonard imagined the partial corpse in its indignant pose, dangling there in an airy, pastel-colored room, surrounded by teddy bears and other stuffed animals the teen had held onto, the ruffled curtains and bedspread, the walls no doubt graced with posters of Britney Spears, the Back Street Boys, and perhaps a poignant remnant of her younger years—say a painted wall sporting a character like Winnie the Poo and his thousand-acre wood. Candice Brody, unknown to Lauralie Blodgett, dead at thirteen, her room turned into a horror chamber.
Chang imagined the impact the scene must have had on Jana North, who by now had become so personally involved and familiar with Mira Lourdes's history, her nature, her life and loves, hobbies and preferences in music, eyeliner, clothing, and favorite TV stars and cartoon characters.
"All right, Frank," Chang said into his cell. "I'll be over soon. When I get there, I'd like whatever there is left of Mira Lourdes bagged and put away. That poor woman has told us all she's going to tell us, Frank."
"I'll do what I can when I can, Leonard. I'm only one person."
"Then use your people. Delegate. Get what's left of Mira Lourdes downtown now, and let's assemble her as best we can for burial or cremation...whatever the family wants. Let the family have some closure, Frank. Can you imagine the hell they've been put through?"
"Sure thing... absolutely."
Chang hung up, on the verge of losing his temper. The moment he hung up, his phone rang again.
It was Lincoln. "Thought I'd let you know, Chang, that business we discussed about Frank Patterson?"
"Yes?"
"I'm with you. The guy's a first-rate prick."
"Then you saw this morning's papers?"
"Yeah, I saw the papers, and I saw what was left of Mira Lourdes hanging from her decayed ankles in the little girl's bdroom. All this could be twisted to put Lucas and Meredyth in a bad light. Not only has the Chronicle identified them, but it makes my forensic psychiatrist and one of my best detectives appear somehow the cause of this nutcase's obsession—like as if their high profiles mean they asked for it or some such bullshit."
"And you think Patterson is—"
"Frank's sabotaged this investigation once too often, and the jerk upset Detective North to no end, so I pulled her outta the Brody place. Nothing more she and I can do here. We've decided to get back to Houston and zip over to the hospital. Get a firsthand look at Lucas, assess the situation there, give Meredyth our support, all that, you know."
"Sounds like a good move. Let's take care of the living."
"Yeah...yeah..." The unspoken words floated between them over the phone connection: If Lucas is still among the living. "So, Leonard, I leave the decision about Frank up to you. Me...the board, we're behind any decision you make regarding Frank Patterson."
"Thanks, Captain, but you know I don't need board approval or your okay to fire Frank."
'Technically, I know that, Leonard, but you'll want all the support you can muster when-if comes a time Frank should file a lawsuit for reinstatement or loss of pay and defamation of character—as if he had one."
"I appreciate your confidence and advice, Captain. I'm going over to the Brody home as soon as I can. Expect to close down all the crime scenes within one, one and a half hours."
"I'll need you at the five P.M. news conference, One Police Plaza downtown, since obviously, Leonard, you know more about what went down out at the lake than anyone else."
"Thanks, Gordon. I'll be there."
"With the answers?"
"Absolutely."
Lincoln waxed nostalgic for a moment. "Remember a time when crime was on the downswing, a time when we were young and optimistic, Leonard? A time when we thought we could win this war?"
Chang didn't know what to say. He let Lincoln continue. "Now so many crazies out there you gotta wonder if it's not something in the water or the preservatives in our food. So many people affected by this single madwoman."
Chang didn't know how to respond to this either, but he didn't have to. The next sound he heard was a dial tone.
Chang had left the upstairs bedroom and had stepped outside, where he now stood on the front porch, all doors standing open, technicians entering and exiting. He dialed Dr. Nielsen, and in a tired voice asked, "How is everything going down there? You able to finish up soon?"
"You see me in hip-deep water here, Dr. Chang? I'm working as fast as I can here."
Why was she so curt and annoyed, he wondered, guessing that the nature of the crime scene she was asked to handle would get to anyone. "I'll get back to you."
Chang hung up as Hoskins joined him. Ted Hoskins had drawn up a thumbnail map to help in his synopsis of precisely where Lucas had taken the first hit, falling into a stack of uncut six-foot logs and crawling below a big green John Deere tractor. A few feet farther off to the right, he took a second hit as he appeared to have left the ground, diving for cover below the stable canopy. "The blood trail and his barefoot prints tell the story. Picked up a female track as well, presumably Dr. Sanger's. She was with him at the end," said Hoskins.
"What end? He's not dead yet."
Hoskins apologized. "I meant the end of the ordeal."
"Sorry. What else do you have, Ted?"
Inside the stable, the blood told the story of his preparing the ho
rses. Hoskins then showed where Lucas had finally fallen, where Meredyth had held him wrapped in the blanket. "Preliminary reports from the paramedics said that Lucas would have bled to death had she not jammed that super-gauze bandage into the exit wound at his back. There would not have been any use for the mede- vac chopper."
Chang and Nielsen had been nearby at the Longhorn Inn after having spent hours at the M&M Cafe in an attempt to link four murders there to Lauralie Blodgett. No one aside from Lauralie Blodgett had known that just down the road Lucas and Meredyth vacationed in relative calm. For this reason—and the fact that Nielsen always slept to the monotone of a police radio, they'd arrived at Madera in time to see Lucas airlifted by the medevac helicopter. He'd seen Meredyth leap into the chopper alongside him, shouting at the medics to do something. That had been the last time he'd seen Lucas Stonecoat, and it pained Leonard Chang to have seen so virile a man carted off like an inert and deflated gunnysack. The man Leonard Chang most admired for strength, stature, courage, and sheer instinctive ability. It was like seeing the unarmed John Wayne gun downed by Bruce Dern in The Cowboys, a feel-ing of stark surprise and horror. If a guy the size and breadth of Lucas Stonecoat could be brought down...
Chang's stomach lurched and began to growl, reminding him he hadn't eaten anything other than a donut and a cup of coffee all day. It was nearing noon, and the closest diner, down the road, was useless—closed down as a crime scene by the State Patrol and County Sheriff's Office, both of which were represented here as well now. They had called Leonard Chang to the murders at the M&M Cafe, and when time ran late, he'd been convinced to get adjoining rooms at the Longhom.
Little physical evidence pointing to the multiple killer at the diner had emerged aside from spent shell casings from a Walther 9mm, nothing to connect the kill spree with Lauralie except that the only eyewitness saw a BMW racing away from the scene with an olive-skinned blond woman at the wheel. When a photo of Lauralie had been shown, the ID had proven inconclusive. All the same, he and Lynn had remained to help out the locals in the worst crime ever committed in the typically peaceful region.
Chang had tried desperately to get the word out that it might well be Lauralie Blodgett who had done the terrible deed at the diner, but he'd been unsuccessful in locating either Lucas or Meredyth, having to settle for Detective North and Captain Lincoln. No one seemed to know Lucas's whereabouts, and he wasn't answering his cell phone or his car radio. Meredyth had remained silent as well, despite a number of messages left on both their cell phones. Lincoln ordered any information relative to the Blodgett investigation, however tentative, be shared by Leonard with Fuller's regional FBI office.
Now Chang knew the reason why neither Lucas nor Meredyth had been reachable.
While Chang looked extremely young for his age, he felt old today. He had organized the largest death scene investigation of his career here on Lake Madera. It would beg to be written up for the journals some day, once he could step back and view it in its entirety with an objective eye, but for now the thought of wanting to share the story with other professionals in his field and in law enforcement in general was a long way off. For now, uppermost in his mind must be to gather all the various threads together and weave them into a mosaic that made sense, and to create a time line of events, and at the same time preserve crucial evidence—not to prosecute in this case but to vindicate actions taken by Meredyth and Lucas, and to explain exactly how the Farnsworth boys, Kemper, the Brodys, the people at the diner, and others had become targets of an audacious madness.
At least Lauralie Blodgett was dead and could harm no more. Precisely how she'd died along with each of her unfortunate victims, this was the mosaic he was now after. It would take more than the hour or so he'd promised Lincoln; even Lincoln had to know that an hour or so in forensic jargon meant four or five. "I work on a Chinese clock," he often joked with an impatient Detective Stonecoat.
He fought back a tear. He only hoped that when he next saw Lucas, he could tell him all about the complexities and problems of this enormous case.
"Dr. Chang, we got the way it went down with the two Farnsworth boys," said Agent Ron Meserve of the ATF, an assistant alongside him looking young, bright, and excited to be a part of the investigation.
They explained it in graphs they'd made that followed minute details of spent shell casings where the Blodgett woman had stood at the Farnsworth pickup firing off rounds at the backs of Jeff and Tommy Farnsworth as they ran, unprotected and unarmed, down from the house toward the pier, as if ordered to.
"She was dressed as the gardener, pruning those oleander bushes," said the younger ATF agent. "The two male victims drove up, unsuspecting, got out, and moved toward her. We surmise that she trained a weapon on them, this one." He held up a Walther 9mm. "Clip was emptied already at the M&M, and the Brody house, but the boys had no-way- a-knowin '-it."
The older agent, Meserve, summed it up with, "Had they called her bluff...had they jumped her, it might've been a whole different story."
And Lucas and Meredyth would've been spared, thought Chang, along with the two young horse wranglers, along with their pitifully grieving mother. Mrs. Farnsworth had been going between Jeff's and Tommy's body, holding first one and then the other, here on the lawn when Chang and the others had first arrived. Lynn Nielsen, a great help at the M&M Cafe, had somehow managed to talk the grieving mother away from the crime scene, sending her home with a female deputy from the County Sheriff's office.
A picture of what had happened at the stables and the direction of the gunshots from the upstairs window emerged, and now an equally clear picture of Lauralie Blodgett firing from the front porch on die Farnsworth boys had come into focus. The boys were killed hours before Lucas had been wounded, their bodies and the insect activity over them telling the tale.
So now Chang had a partial time line, and he knew that with Lauralie wearing the gardener's clothes and hat, discarded at the steps, the missing Howard Kemper was dis-patched sometime before the two boys were gunned down. Prior to this, across the lake, Lauralie had apparently killed the Brodys sometime during the early morning, after which she'd exchanged her viper's nest at the Brody home for her sniper's nest at Meredyth's bedroom window.
From bullet holes peppered into an upturned rowboat found on the lake, it had been surmised that Lucas and Meredyth had been fired on while out on the lake, unprotected, unarmed, helpless. Firearms experts had assured Chang that a child using the Remington and its scope could not miss a target as large as Lucas Stonecoat out on the lake, but neither he nor Meredyth were hit while in the bullet-riddled boat.
A broken table leg was found very near where Lucas had been gunned down, and early reports from the Brody kitchen spoke of a table that had been upended and scav-enged for its legs.
How had Lucas and Meredyth gotten to the Brody home alive under the crosshairs of that bolt-action, high- powered Remington? And once in the Brody house, why had they chosen to return here, crossing the lake and painting themselves with muck in a vain attempt at getting the horses from the stable? All questions he wanted to put to Meredyth, but she was, for the time being, unavailable to him.
Why didn't Stonecoat simply wait it out across the river? Why didn't he walk out? Why come back in the face of overwhelming firepower when he was unarmed? Macho shit-head fool, Chang summed up, what did his Cherokee bravura get him?
FROM WHERE SHE stood in hip-deep lake water, Dr. Lynn Nielsen watched the skittish unmanned rowboat and its contents as it was guided to her by the divers. They'd had to swim out to the center of the lake to fetch it; there it had bobbed in their wake, eluding touch, acting like a shy cat, not wishing to be cornered. Finally, the two swimmers took hold of the gunwales and guided it into the shallows and an increasingly anxious Dr. Nielsen.
A third wet-suited diver stood alongside Nielsen in the shallows, and he now lifted his water-proof camera and began taking shots of the unholy sight at the bottom of the floating coffin, gagging at what his len
s and his eye reported to his brain.
From the safe distance of thirty or so feet, a news camera in a helicopter overhead focused in on the activity at the lake. A dead man lay in the flat pool of water in the bot-tom of the boat, covered in worms, his throat a jagged mass of blood where his jugular had been severed, his lips moving with worm activity, and the soft tissue of his eyes, already eaten away, had sunk into their sockets, the worms finding a home in the collapsed orbs. Nielsen imagined these news camera pictures would not be finding their way into American living rooms, at least not until some money- crazed TV producer somehow created a reality show forum for crime-scene and autopsy photos. Newsroom vaults were crammed full with video deemed unfit for public con-sumption and viewing. Still, pretty soon nothing would be unfit, she told herself, if these Americans continued on their present course.
The diver with the camera, Bert Quinn, continued to snap shots in such a way as to not again look into the dead man's missing eyes.
"Jesus, damn most horrible thing I've ever seen," said Bert's partner, going for shore, anxious to distance himself from the floating coffin.
The third diver kept one hand on the gunwale, steadying the boat for Dr. Nielsen, his attention on her. "How'd you ever decide-ta become a coroner, Dr. Nielsen?" he asked, staring across the boat and into her eyes. "I mean, didya just wake up one morning and say to yourself I wanna work with stiffs, or what?"
"I went to med school to become a physician, and I somehow wound up working under an extraordinary man in forensic pathology who gave me great respect and from whom I could learn....A too good chance to pass up."
"Everybody over in Norway talk so cute?"
She felt uncomfortable now at his attention. "I am from Sweden, not Norway, and I do not have the time to teach you the difference."
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