one principle and it was called lucrative payment. They were mercenaries, pure and simple. Lucas had a hard time imagining a pro who would have anything to do with gratuitous bloodletting, unless… unless he was paid a great deal more for the extra show?
Whether a hired killer or just a nutcase, was the after-death mutilation an effort on the part of the murderer to shock authorities, confuse or slow the process of identification? If so, why leave the torso in the dead man's home? And how did the killer gain entrance? And did his victim know him, even trust him?
“Damn that Meredyth Sanger,” he muttered to himself. Without knowing it, she had hooked him like a marlin.
He wondered if he ought to simply call her and tell her that he knew she was withholding information about Palmer's fiancee and facts surrounding that case just to keep him on her damned string.
Instead, Lucas stood now, stretched, and decided that since it couldn't be Miller time yet, he'd locate the coffee station upstairs, take a break and come back at this thing fresh. It hadn't surprised him that neither Captain Phillip Lawrence, Duty Sergeant Stanley Kelton, nor anyone else for that matter, had interrupted him all afternoon. This place was not inviting; in fact, it was ignored, the pretense being that it didn't exist, and by extension, neither did he.
He went for that coffee.
The coffee station stood alongside the active homicide board, on which the names of victims were placed in red ink alongside the name of the detective in charge of the case. Cases in red ink meant they were open; cases placed on the left-hand side of the board, scripted in black ink, meant they were closed. There was no pen color or place on the board for the cases that went unsolved. They merely disappeared from the board when Lawrence decided it was time to call a halt to the “waste of taxpayers' money” on a case that wasn't ever going to be solved, usually when it was two or three years old. Many cases came in with the name of the perpetrator all but emblazoned on them, but what cops termed a stone-hard mystery was that rare case in which whodunit is unclear and sometimes completely invisible. Sometimes, many times, even the stone-hard mystery could be solved, but often it took years to do so. More and more, departments were unwilling or unable to apportion manpower and man hours of that duration to a single case, so that rooms like Lucas's had begun to swell at the seams.
Every city in America had such cases; every precinct in the city had such cases. For the Thirty-first Precinct, such homicides wound up as dust collectors in what was now Lucas Stonecoat's necromancy collection. It had always been referred to as the Dungeon, the Graveyard and the Cold Room, but already the cops upstairs were referring to it in various cute ways for Lucas's benefit, names such as Lucas's Lodge and, Stonecoat's X-Files. They were also calling Lucas “Spooky” just to further annoy him.
NINE
A LONELY STRETCH OP INTERSTATE 5 OUTSIDE ROGUE RIVER, OREGON
Timothy Kenneth Little felt a dull, pounding throb tolling with the rhythmic back-and-forth of a bell against his temple. It'd been a trying day, and the long trip to the Rogue River plant had required a two-junket flight that got him only as far as Medford's little municipal airport. Eugene, Oregon, was just too bloody far from the plant to be of any damned use whatsoever, and he cursed himself these days for not having had the foresight to've leased a similar parcel of property in Eugene in the early days rather than taking the cheaper route and building in Rogue River. But back then every dollar had to be accounted for. End result? A plant full of people in Rogue River had jobs, thanks to him, and there was no taking those jobs elsewhere now. Bottom line? He now had one helluva long, difficult drive ahead of him, and his back was acting up, and his neck was killing him. Turning fifty was a bitch, and that, too, was preying on his mind.
At least he'd done something with his life. Not like his brother, Thorn, who was still cutting other people's lawns and frying eggs, bacon and ham as a short-order cook in San Francisco, where when he wasn't working he was catching the latest wave, a ridiculous, aging surfer.
Timothy Little had never stood a surfboard, had never been athletic at anything in his life, but he had been a careful investor, and now he owned sixteen plants around the nation, plants that made aircraft parts which were always in demand-the convenient little kitchen apparatuses needed aboard every jet airliner. He'd tried to get Thom interested in the business, but Thom declared he'd go homeless before he'd take charity from his little brother.
He wasn't by any stretch the wealthiest man on the continent, but if this were France, maybe… Still, his loved ones didn't want for a thing. All the boys were grown up, following careers of their own, each with a family of his own, nice houses and cars, and they all owed it to their pop, a man who'd been as a pre-teen and teen what all the other kids in school called a pencil-carrying nerd. Thank God his interest in science and gadgetry never waned, paying off handsomely in the long run. Where were the jocks who'd bullied him throughout high school now? He curiously wondered as yet another discourteous driver the other side of the highway blinded him with high beams.
“Bastard!” he uselessly shouted while flipping his own brights on and off-another useless gesture.
The brights hitting his eyes conspired with the thumping headache to make him feel a creeping nausea rising within him. He tried to concentrate on the importance of the trip, the big merger with ASCAN, and how best to break it to the people at the plant, put the most positive spin on it. Hell, he wasn't getting any younger. And if something should happen to him, God forbid, say a heart attack? Where would it leave the company? If he sold out, and if ASCAN followed through on its promises, everyone-not just him-would benefit in the long run. It would mean more overtime, more money for everyone all around, and he could retire, begin to enjoy the fruits of all the years of intensive labor he'd put in.
He felt good about himself and the direction his life had taken him. Thought briefly about Lenore back in California, waiting for his call, no doubt. They had had another argument about money. He had wanted to, as they say, “give some back,” and Lenore had always supported him in his charitable donations in the past, but for some reason she had had a strange and urgent dislike for an old acquaintance from college who had contacted him for a donation, suggesting that he leave part of his estate to the religious organization his old friend now represented.
Timothy and Lenore Little were of the same faith, after all, and so why shouldn't he be charitable toward his church? Lenore simply didn't like the approach his college friend had taken.
Without telling Lenore, he'd gone ahead and made the donation, along with others to organizations he believed in and supported. For his old friend, he had gone a step further, signing over one of his many life insurance policies to the friend, who was now a Jesuit priest in Texas. His friend had contacted him via computer modem to tell him of their needs in Texas.
The dusk of evening was giving way to that twilight moment when visibility was at its worst. Timothy Little kept his eyes on the road, popped a cassette of relaxing, old-time piano music by Billy Vaughn into the player, and took a deep, long breath of air. On his left, on the grass median between the divided high way, he noticed a silver- gray van that might be in trouble. But what next caught his attention was the man atop the van on his belly. He was dressed all in black, like someone out of a Bruce Willis Die Hard film, like someone wanting to blend in with the night.
“My God, if he doesn't look like some sort of commando sniper preparing to fire,” Little said to himself.
Then Timothy saw movement at the base of the van on either side, two additional black-clad men. They truly did look like bloody assassins out of a Hollywood action-hero movie or something. Each man was holding up some sort of telescope or weapon; he could not tell for sure. He was moving sixty miles per hour, the car on cruise control, careful at all times to obey the traffic laws and speed limits, but now for some insane reason, he thought these strange, alien-looking creatures on the grassy knoll ahead were going to fire high-powered rifles at him. So he instantly forced the gas pedal to the floor.
The speedometer on the Olds Cutlass immediately rose to sixty-five, then seventy. Suddenly the windshield shattered in front of Timothy, glass and blood showering his line of vision, his right arm throbbing, but a second powerful blow, like a fist to his chest negated all sight and feeling, save the cold numbness and dark blindness that spread through him like a moving current. My God, he thought, they've killed me… but who… who are they?
He didn't know that his car was skidding off the road or that he'd blacked out all in the space of a nanosecond.
