'This disturbed, distorted, screwed-up take she has on her being abandoned, put up for adoption, pawned off to foster homes as she sees it, Lucas, it all provides her a sick motive to seek out a twisted revenge for all the wrongs she perceives people have done her. And me? I am the last of those women involved who placed her at the orphanage.'
'You, Orleans, her mother, all three of you are on this record,' Lucas said, holding up the document Lauralie had duplicated for them.
'And Lourdes? What was she to Lauralie?'
'A mere pawn in her game,' mused Lucas.
'She wants to kill me slowly, slower than she did her mother or Sara Orleans. They died too easily and quickly for her liking. For me she has a different plan, an appalling purpose, as if she's mailing pieces of herself.'
'The team's here, waiting for orders to move in,' he said as they pulled around to the rear of the courthouse, the entrance to the low-lying wing housing the county clerk's department and Child and Family Services, and below these offices, the archival records.
A man in full body protection and an ITRT patch on his arm and back-head of the Imminent Threat Response Team-introduced himself as Elliot Andrews. 'Lietuenant, these the two we're looking for? Armed and dangerous?' Andrews held up photos of Lauralie Blodgett and the man known only as the Ripper.
'That's right, but I want your team ready for anything, and I want every nook and cranny searched.'
'You suspect a bomb?'
'Anything's possible.'
'We've got a canine unit. They can sniff out just about anything.'
'Trained on cadavers? We might find body parts left by the suspects.'
'Oh, I see. This has some connection to the Post-it guy, right!' Andrews immediately responded, getting on his radio and ordering the dogs to be guided into the building ahead of the men. He repeated Lucas's search orders to his men. Lucas wondered how Jana North's team at the funeral parlor was managing. He trusted that she had a capable man like Andrews and a strong CSI team at her location.
Lucas and Andrews, with Meredyth tentatively following, paced themselves to remain behind the men leading the dogs into the courthouse annex.
The dogs, large German shepherds, and their handlers, split off, one guided into the archives downstairs, the other taking the main floor. There were two floors overhead yet to secure. Andrews had the security guard named Roy on hand to point out all exits and entrances to the annex, including a service elevator only maintenance and security had access to, the one he'd escorted Meredyth onto earlier today. A second exit that opened on the main concourse of the courthouse itself. The lockdown meant no one could go in or out. Already people were clamoring to get past the exits, cell phones aflutter. Others jammed in hallways. People plastered to windows, looking out over the lot at the police activity. Loved ones had already begun showing up, jamming the courthouse parking lot, vehicles circling buzzard-fashion in search of parking, anxious to see their relatives unharmed. A police perimeter pushed them back, along with the news media.
Inside, the sound of the dog in the basement, sending up a barrage of agitated barks and howls, sent Lucas, Andrews, and Meredyth racing down toward the archives. The dog had alerted on something.
At the foot of the stairs, along this corridor to the archives, the dog stood, ears erect, agitatedly dancing about, yipping excitedly. His handler fed him a beef jerky cube from his hand as a reward, and they pulled back, allowing Elliot Andrews in. Lucas and Andrews, guns drawn, nodded at one another. Andrews so forcefully tore open the dark oak-wood door that it swung into the marbled wall, creating a reverberating blast down the corridor and up the stairs, and this, combined with the stench of blood let free, gave Lucas the feeling of a fleeting soul that'd been trapped inside where the body of an unrecognizable man lay in a pool of blood, his thrown-away tie, trousers, and half-tom-away white shirt stained with blood.
The walls-flecked with blood-told the story of multiple stab wounds.
'Dear God,' muttered Andrews, turning his head away from the mutilated facial features after Lucas, crouching, lifted the chin and turned the eyes upward from the heap of clothing and flesh at their feet. 'Who is he?'
Meredyth looked past Andrews now and screamed. 'It's Byron! My God, it's Byron!'
Lucas made out the features and nodded to Andrews. He also held up Byron Priestly's wallet, his license and credit cards intact. He rifled for his keys and found them in the bloody pants.
A police woman alongside Meredyth had caught her from falling when her knees had buckled, and she'd led her to a nearby bench. Meredyth sobbed openly.
Lucas looked across at her, his heart feeling the pain of her anguish. She had broken it off with Priestly, but they had been friends for a long time. They had been talking marriage at one time. This shocking development could send her into a complete spiral, he feared.
Byron had been viciously torn apart in the confines of the small shoulder-width cubbyhole, and no one had heard his screams here just off the archives where Meredyth had been working that morning. Everything seemed now to move in slow motion as Andrews radioed for an at-ease and called Lynn Nielsen to bring in her CSI team, informing her over the secured channel that a body had been found at his location. Someone brought a thermos of hot coffee down to them, and Lucas sat quietly holding Meredyth's hands in his.
After doing an initial assessment of Priestly's body, Dr. Lynn Nielsen came to them. 'Your friend Byron has been stabbed in the gut so many times that without cleaning the wounds thoroughly and viewing them under the lights at my lab, it is impossible to say how many times he was stabbed, but one thing is certain, whoever did this truly hated the man. It looks like a crime of passion, one of those estranged relationships in which one party snaps and can't seem to stop at inflicting only one wound or even three.
This is in the neighborhood of twenty-five, possibly more stab wounds, plus the afterwards mutilation to the eyes, nose, mouth…and we found something peculiar stuffed down his throat.'
'What is it?' asked Lucas.
She held up a clear plastic bag. 'Rosary beads.'
Meredyth said nothing; she could only stare at the onyx string of beads.
To Lucas they looked like the symbol for the passage of days into night, nights into days in an old Cherokee pictograph-a string of beads. 'Was Byron a practicing Catholic?' he asked Meredyth.
'About as much as I was, but no…he didn't carry a rosary with him, and no, I never gave him any as a present. I've never seen this rosary before, and I resent your implication, Dr. Nielsen, that I had anything to do with Byron's murder… except as…due to our proximity…anyone being close to me in the least, she's targeted. You're in danger too, Lucas, perhaps far more than I am.'
'He had no advance warning, Mere, but I do. I know what those two maniacs look like, and I'm hunting them down.'
Nielsen had begun to apologize, saying she hadn't meant to imply that Dr. Sanger had any part in Priestly's murder. Meredyth ignored her, continuing to speak to Lucas. 'While Lauralie and Crazy Joe are hunting you.'
'Whoever killed him, he, she, or they did it with a maniacal ferocity. I believe in the lab, we will find wounds in which the knife blade-a large one-will have exited the back. That's how much energy the Ripper-if this proves to be the work of the Post-it Ripper-put into the effort. It would have left the killer breathless, disarrayed, perspiring, and bloody but for the apron and the cleanup she did inside. There's a sink in there and lots of soap, and a stack of maintenance aprons, caps, hair nets, rubber gloves.'
'She donned the maintenance uniform for him,' said Meredyth. 'Caught up to him, asked him for some help inside the closet-something on a shelf perhaps. She lured him inside, teased him as she put on the apron and gloves, the paper hat and hair net.'
'Teased her way into his pants,' added Lucas. 'Explains the discarded tie and trousers.'
'And when he most expected gratification, she stabbed him.'
'No outcry alerting anyone.'
Nielsen said, 'He may well have gone into immediate shock, unable to call out-'
'— then came the ratcheted knife strokes, machine-gun fashion,' said Lucas. 'It all fits.'
Nielsen said. 'Killed by someone who had a personal connection, someone who had either hated him greatly or was driven to such an emotional pitch that after the first several stab wounds, he or she could not stop a wild violence against him. Like the killer of Yolanda Sims, whoever did it was emotionally involved, deeply so.' She looked
