more. He silently meditated as the phone rang at the other end.
The phone rang six times before he heard her knock it to the floor, retrieve it and find the mouthpiece. Obviously, she was having no trouble sleeping. Maybe she had taken her own remedy. She now found the presence of mind to speak clearly. “Ellowww? What time is it?”
“Near four-thirty.”
“Stonecoat…”
He lied. “I've gone over the files again and-”
“Again? So, you see the similarities!” she said, excited, instantly awake.
“Listen to me, Dr. Sanger,” he began.
“You'd have to be blind not to see the connection, the pattern.”
“Will you listen to me?” he commanded.
Her silence was her reply.
“Now look, we both know that these back cases… well, that nobody gives a damn about the Cold Room files, but you go poking your nose into an ongoing case like the Mootry matter, and people go ape shit, especially detectives working the case.”
“So what's your point?”
“Point is, I'm in no position to piss off my superiors.”
“Lucas, we have to… We can make a difference together if you'd only give it a-”
“I need my job, Doctor, not just for the money… I need the work. Some people would say I have no business carrying a badge; most departments in this country would not have hired me, given my record.”
“Have you tried other departments?”
“I wanted to stay in Texas.”
“Then you're whining, Lucas. Come on, I need your expertise, and I need an ally.”
“There're plenty of guys down there who'd like nothing more than to help out a… help you out. I'm just not the guy. Sorry, Doctor. I'll keep your confidences. You needn't worry about that, and-”
“How can you do that?”
“What? Keep your secrets?”
'Turn your back on the evidence.”
“What evidence? We're talking about a handful of similarities and your… assumptions, Doctor.”
“Arrows don't show up in bodies every day, Lucas. Not even in the Wild West of Texas, not anymore.”
“I agree there's a possible, perhaps probable connection between Palmer and Mootry, and possibly Whitaker, but the others I'm not sold on.”
“But that's enough to start a real investigation.”
“For you, maybe. Look, I'm sorry but-”
“I thought you were different, Stonecoat.”
“Different how?”
“I thought you had some guts, that you weren't afraid to go after the truth.”
“What I'm afraid of, Doctor, is being used by a woman.”
“Go to hell.” She hung up on him, hurting his ear with the resounding gavel of the receiver.
“Have a nice day…” he grumbled to the dead phone. “Now that went well,” he told the room. He also told the room that he wasn't going to jump up and down and walk on the ceiling for her. And he didn't want her making a lot of assumptions about him, as she'd obviously already done. He told himself all of this as he dozed more readily toward much needed slumber; two hours before alarm bells would peal. Still, if the Mootry and the Palmer cases alone were unmistakably linked, maybe it was his duty to pursue the matter a little further, discreetly and on his own. Telling her of his plan to do so would be less than discreet.
Vacant of substance, smoke and mirror images and shadowy figures now danced about a roaring fire on the ceiling before dancing inside Lucas's mind as he again found sleep. The final image to come before his closed eyelids was of an impatient and angry Captain Phil Lawrence, reaching out to tear the buttons off Lucas's shirt in a theatrical display of disgust and unbridled hatred. The buttons bounced and rolled away from Lucas's dream self like enormous black tires off a DC-7, and suddenly a howling wind blew a fierce fire over Lucas's badge, melting it. Looking over his shoulder, Lucas located the dripping, molten gold of his badge as it seeped downward from the branches of a twisted and scorched oak, where the badge had taken a Dali pose amid the charred limbs, like one of those melting clocks the artist was so curiously fond of.
764LTl: C42119Category 42…. Topic 159LOG…. Message 302…. Tues July 23-. 1996…. 4:03:05
Questor 3…. Helsinger's Pit….
Q3: Problem north of Eden resolved. Altar prizes on the way. Enjoy and appreciate efforts here to gain sacrifices to Helsinger.
End Transmission…Category 42 Topic 159LOG… 4:05:02
Category 42… Topic 159LOG…. Message 303… Tues-July 23 1996….4: O5: 07
Questor 1
Q1: Again you have proven your worth, Questor. 3. I look forward to the prize.
End Transmission…. Category 42, Topic 159LOG, 4:07:00
Meredyth Sanger couldn't believe what Lucas Stonecoat had left her with-nothing, no way to turn. Damn him. Maybe it had all been a stupid play from the beginning, she rationalized. Maybe he wasn't the man she had thought, or perhaps since Dallas and all that horrible trouble, he simply wasn't the same man Dave Cass had known. Cass was the police shrink in Dallas, and they had been friends for six years, seeing one another at various conventions and conferences over the years. Cass had not blinked when she asked him for whatever records on Stonecoat he might possess when she told him that she would be taking over his case from here on out, now that Lucas was a Houston cop. Cass had held back nothing.
Meredyth couldn't go back to sleep now. She felt like an army of one, as though everyone down at the precinct was against her. Only Cass from afar and young Randy Oglesby, her computer-wise male secretary, had given her any help whatsoever. She had really been counting on Stonecoat, and she had put in a lot of time courting the bastard.
She climbed from bed and replaced the receiver on the phone. She had slam-dunked it when she had hung up on Lucas, and while it had hit squarely on the cradle, it bounced a foot away like an errant basketball shot. She went for the kitchen where she thought she might scramble some eggs, make coffee for one, get an early-bird start on the day. As she did so, she tried to get Lucas Stonecoat and the shameless way in which she had pursued him out of her mind. The man no doubt thought she needed psychiatric care. Still, how could he ignore the evidence before his very eyes? How could he ignore Alisha Reynolds and Dr. Palmer and the way they had died? How could any rational man?
Of course, he hadn't known Alisha. She'd been a wonderful friend. She would have given Meredyth anything, and they had shared two wonderful summers together between her mother's farmhouse and Alisha's ranch. Together they had tried out every horse on every path and every ridge of the Georgia estate. Meredyth had been much younger than Alisha, but Alisha had treated her as an equal, and when she confided through correspondence that she was marrying a doctor, she begged Meredyth to return to be her maid of honor. Meredyth had not responded one way or another before she got the horrid news that her longtime friend had been the victim of a homicide.
The incident changed Meredyth's life forever. It wasn't that she was obsessed with her friend's death, but it did take her in the direction of criminal psychology and away from a more conservative area of medicine.
Her Uncle Howard's influence encouraged her to break away from the traditions of the family, a tradition that would have had her married off to a “proper young man” years ago. Uncle Howard, something of a black sheep, had played a large role, but she had never once considered following in any way, shape, or form his footsteps. Autopsies and death investigation simply were not a calling for her, that is until Alisha Reynolds was so brutally murdered.
Captain Phil Lawrence and others had dismissed her before all the evidence was in, before she had gathered all that she now had, and so for them, there was no turning back, no way to say, Sorry, Dr. Sanger, we were wrong about you; we perhaps rushed to judgment, failing to weigh the obvious merits of your arguments and the evidence
