sharper now that I've distanced myself both physically and mentally from the situation.'
'I'm sure you're right.'
'And none of the others on the task force have been personally assaulted as you and I have been. To have our homes invaded, our lives disrupted by these maniacs.'
Lucas still sat in his car, and Meredyth, standing in the open doorway, climbed in, crowding him, putting her arms around him. 'Been a long time since I made out in a car. Wanna climb into the rear?' As she spoke, she noticed the manila file folder on the rear seat. 'What's this?' she asked.
'What's what?'
'This file.' She reached into the backseat, retrieved the file, and attempted to pull free of his embrace, all the while struggling with Lucas, who said, 'It's nothing. Leave it. Forget about it.'
Tickling her and kissing her, he attempted to get her to drop the file, but she was determined. She pulled free of his grasp and straightened to a standing position outside the car, the file in hand. She couldn't make it out clearly in the dark. Lucas, alongside her now, grabbed for it, but she slipped around to the front of the car where Match light torches on the enclosed porch-meant to keep mosquitoes away-glowed round Meredyth's lovely ash-blond head and bathed her and the awful photos of the dead girl, Yolanda Sims, in light.
'Don't, Mere,' Lucas pleaded, not wanting her evening spoiled.
She put up a hand to him, examining the manila folder further, realizing it to be a cold case file that Lucas had obviously been perusing.
'What's this all about?' she asked.
He put his arm around her and they walked back to the enclosed porch to escape the gnats and mosquitoes. 'It's a long story.'
'I've got all night.'
'Are you sure you want to taint this beautiful place with the ugliness of my work?'
'It's all right, Lucas. You need to talk about it, and I'm supposed to understand that; it's my job, remember? If we're going to be together, romantically involved, then we share everything. So…tell me about Yolanda Sims.'
Lucas began by saying, 'Not much to tell you, young girl abducted, tortured, raped, and killed, her body dumped 'home,' but the killer got the wrong doorstep.'
'Wrong doorstep?'
Lucas explained the killer's mistake.
'One block over…same address,' Meredyth considered the error. 'Curious,' she commented.
'Sloppy, clumsy fellow. Sounds on the surface like an unplanned attack from a person unfamiliar with the territory.'
She nodded. 'Certainly a disorganized killer as opposed to an organized planner. Someone who did it on the spur of the moment.'
'Investigators keyed in on an uncle for a time only because he had a record for burglary. Then they interrogated the hell out of an old man, a neighbor with a record for child molestation. To this date most believe this Paul Mick Ryan, now deceased, did it. They also grilled two neighborhood teens.'
'But if these people were familiar with the neighborhood, and they knew the girl-'
'— who disappeared from her backyard doorstep-'
'— then why go after the neighborhood's usual suspects? They wouldn't have dumped her at the right address one street over.'
'Right, none of the people interrogated could've gotten her address so screwed up-including Ryan, who fried for other killings.'
'Then they never caught the guy who did it? Of course not, that's what makes it a cold case file!' She plowed a palm into her forehead, in a gesture of realization. 'How stupid am I?'
'You're relaxed! Come on, put that file away.' He gathered up the paperwork and crime photos, tucking them back into the manila file and dropping it back into the large brown clasp envelope.
'Whew…1956, Lucas…that's a hell of a long time ago.'
'Remember that '48 case I solved?'
'Of course, but you had a great deal more to go on.'
'Not much more. I'll keep at it.'
'For Yolanda or for yourself?'
'Maybe for both of us.'
'You're a good man, Lucas Stonecoat.' She locked her arms around his neck and pulled his lips to hers. Under the torchlight, their shadows dancing, their passions flared once again. Lucas dropped the file folder on the porch swing, lifted her up into Ids arms, and carried her inside and to the bedroom.
'You can't be serious,' she teased.
'Watch me.'
'Living up to your Wolf Clan heritage, are you?'
'I'm passionate about you, Mere.'
'Shut up and kiss me.'
The following day Lucas and Meredyth reluctantly returned to the world in which they had to honor their responsibilities, Precinct 31, each feeling the remorse of having to leave their secret retreat behind. It seemed the only place where the killer had not found them.
They split up at the precinct house front desk under Stan Kelton's watchful gaze, Lucas going for Captain Lincoln's office as Kelton advised, and she for her office, but not before Stan shared the morning Chronicle with them. Lauralie Blodgett's graduation picture stared back at them from its placement beside the unnamed assailant and mur-derer known only as the Post-it Ripper. Lauralie was wanted for questioning in relation to the case. A brief biography and the mention of Our Lady of Miracles as her last known address appeared below the photo, along with the phone number for Crime Line.
Soon after checking in with her secretary, Meredyth announced she could be found at the county courthouse. She quickly located her car in the street lot where she had left it, and drove to the nearby courthouse in search of the records she felt she must review, the cases she oversaw during her year-long internship with Child and Family Protective Services in 1984.
As a forensic psychiatrist for the HPD, Dr. Sanger was well known at the Harris County courthouse, as her casework often involved testifying in various proceedings for the DA, and sometimes for the PD. Whether offense or defense, she, like any forensic investigator, had a duty to the truth, whatever it may bring, whomever it helped or harmed. She was called on to decide if a person under arrest or indictment was legally sane, whether the defendant proved capable of knowing right from wrong at the commission of a crime, whether the defendant proved capable of standing trial, whether he or she proved culpable in criminal premeditation, and to make any number of other determinations.
Of course, her most heart-wrenching determinations came in cases where the killers were children, largely unheard of when she began her practice, but now all too common. She blamed the culture of violence created since the advent of TV, films, and video games that exploited the basest, darkest reaches of the human psyche-the thrill of the kill. What child, unable to resist the slightest brainwashing over what brand-name shoes to wear, could possibly combat such exploitation of the worst instincts in mankind at the hands of computer-generated animation characters bent on mass destruction and murder? The lauding of serial killers by media and merchandisers? The lauding of killing for killing's sake in increasingly violent Hollywood films and video games, even in music videos born out of a generation fed on such bloodletting 'classics' as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Cult followers had grown up with technology that now made virtual murder, sniping, knifing, mutilating, so real as to be virtually the real thing. Murder without consequence. Murder without concern for the life force, the soul of another human being. Children had learned this lesson over several generations now, and also that bloodletting for dollars was now a mega-business reaching into the billions each month.
She wondered, however, how Lauralie Blodgett, having an upbringing largely protected from the culture of violence, having limited access to computer games, Hollywood violence, and TV carnage, could become the demon she had become. Perhaps there was some truth to the argument that a genetic predisposition toward violence also existed. How a Charles Manson or a Ted Bundy figured into such musings, perhaps only future science into the
