you have brought to bear on this matter. No, no way in hell she'd ever hear those words from a jerk like Lawrence.
'The matter is under investigation by those in charge, men better suited to criminal investigation than you, Doctor,” Lawrence kept snidely saying, the words now like a mantra, a chorus of nonsense. So typical of men- unable to admit a mistake or make an apology, so what was left but to withdraw?
She had once approached the team of Fred Amelford and James Pardee, the principal investigators on the Mootry case, only to find them as narrow-minded and as paranoid about her wanting to help as Lawrence had been. The good old boy network just closed right down on her.
So she had moved on to Lucas Stonecoat, an outsider and a loner. And she had expected more, better perhaps, from Stonecoat. She didn't know why, but she had. His phone call tonight was crushing.
When she got settled at the small kitchen table, eggs, toast, and coffee in hand, she saw that Lucas's medical file was still there on the tabletop from the previous day. She lifted it and flipped through it, staring again at the Dallas Memorial Operative Report. It read like a medical dictionary, a What's What of medical jargon:
DALLAS MEMORIAL HOSPITAL
Operative Report
Date of Operation: 01/6/92
Operation: Multiple trauma, craniocerebral trauma, and respiratory failure.
Postoperative Diagnosis: Same as above.
Procedure: Laparotomy; tracheostomy; Swan-Ganz placement; bladder repair; cystostomy; reduction of respiratory difficulty.
Meredyth went on to read the procedure as described and attached by the physician who'd overseen Lucas's multiple operations. It read:
Procedure: With patient in supine position and with hyper-extension of the neck, the anterior cervical area was prepared and draped. 1 % Xylocaine anesthesia administered at all levels for a total of 8 ccs.
With adequate anesthesia established, a midline incision was made and deepened down through subcutaneous layer to the cervical fascia. Subcutaneous homeostasis achieved with a Bovie. The deep cervical fascia was next incised. A large venous channel was ligated with a #3–0 black silk and divided. Dissection was then carried down the midline incision to the pretracheal fascia, which was incised. Tracheal cartilages were immediately apparent. Using a hook, trachea was grasped and a window inferior to the hook was excised.
At this juncture, thirteen minutes into operation, a #6 soft pressure Shiley tube was inserted into the trachea and immediate functioning was successfully begun. The tube was attached to the ventilator and skin closure instituted with #3–0 silk sutures. Routine dressings with KY gauze and 4 x 4s applied. The tracheostomy tube secured around the neck with umbilical tape.
The patient tolerated procedure well, considering earlier head injuries and operations to reduce pressure on the brain. Patient went back into ICU with stable vital signs.
Dr. Daniel Garvey, M.D.
01/6/92 Attending
Patient Name: Stonecoat, Lucas
The bullet lodged in Lucas's right upper chest was near the heart and quite life-threatening, and at first it appeared his severe burns might be beyond help. Certainly, witnessing the burning death of his partner, trapped in the car beside him, must have left psychological scars as well. The removal of the bullet and the work of Lucas's skin grafts came later. Meredyth Sanger once again found Stonecoat's medical records both heart-wrenching and astounding. It was truly astounding that he showed such determination, first to live and secondly to rebuild a life.
Despite all this, and despite the fact she realized anew just how much he had gone through, and that most men who had managed to live beyond such an incident as he had faced would have long before retired from active duty, Meredyth was now in the unhappy position of having to blackmail Lucas into cooperating with her. She wondered if she could do it, use his medical records against him in so foul a manner. It was either that or drop the Mootry-Palmer connection and go back to administering to the needs of officers on the force, her Rorschach tests and filling in reports. If anyone knew about Hermann Rorschach's imaging tests, in which the patient was asked to project his feelings into an ink splat, it was Meredyth Sanger. And if anyone knew how to skew results on an ink test…
And sometimes she wondered, Why not? Why not simply forget about what she knew? Why not return to the staid lifestyle of before? It would demand a great deal less of her, and Lawrence would be a great deal happier with her.
Stonecoat surely would detest her if and when she lowered the boom on him. It wouldn't take much for her to see that he came under such close scrutiny that he could hardly survive as an officer in the HPD; his hopes of ever becoming a detective again could so easily be denied him if she were to do a psychiatric investigation. Add to this what she knew of his personal habits, his health record, his getting involved in a shooting his first day back on the job…
No, getting Lucas Stonecoat into deep shit would be as simple as making a phone call. In fact, Lucas did it to himself; he made it so easy. Maybe teaming with him had been a ridiculous notion to begin with, so why had his turning her down made her so bloody angry? Still, how could he-a detective-ignore the importance of the cases she'd so painstakingly brought to his attention?
Like most men, he needed a good swift kick. “Where the sun don't shine,” she muttered to herself. She had thought that kick would have come in the form of information carefully fed him by her. She'd thought manipulating the big lug would be a simple enough matter, but obviously the man was not so easily manipulated. She supposed that was normally a good quality, his thinking for himself, but not when it affected her this way.
“Damn you, Stonecoat,” she vowed to the empty apartment, which in comparison to Lucas's seemed over furnished with its huge winter-white sofa and cool gray carpet, its glass surfaces and paintings of the blue Adirondacks and the even darker blues of the Smoky Mountains all around. Her place was perfectly suited to her, she believed: cool and blue and icy. She'd have to be all three where Stonecoat was concerned.
There had to be a way to make the deaths of Mootry, Palmer and Alisha Reynolds as important to Lucas Stonecoat as they were to her; she must find that way no matter what it took.
THIRTEEN
Lucas's day had gone by uneventfully; surprisingly, he hadn't again been bothered by either Dr. Sanger, who obviously knew how to take a hint, or IAD. Internal Affairs officers were either lying low and in wait for him, or they had decided that his handling of the problem at the Texaco station the other day had been well within proper procedures. But with Internal Affairs, one could never be certain or sure. It had been an IAD unit's unflattering investigation of both Lucas and Wallace Jackson after the deadly accident in Dallas that had given the department all the excuses they needed to wash their hands of Detective Lucas Stonecoat.
Lucas had all day silently thanked Meredyth for allowing him to bow out at this point without pursuing or attacking further, or making further attempts to persuade him. With IAD still investigating the Texaco shoot-out, with Captain Lawrence giving him the watchful evil eye, he had hoped for and had gotten a day without stress or pressure. In large part, this was made possible by the Cold Room.
One advantage was becoming clear: He could retreat to his “office” and no one would follow. It was as popular a place as a funeral parlor, the city morgue or the cemetery.
Tonight he had no class to attend, so he found himself here, sitting outside the gated home of Judge Charles Darwin Mootry, the man whose murder had been so sensational no newspaperman in town could ignore it. The police were doing an excellent job of keeping the prying, curious eyes and cameras off the grounds, however, and so it appeared Stonecoat might have a difficult time getting beyond the yellow and black ribbons himself.
“Do I wanna do this?” he asked himself now in the empty cab of his car while staring down the street at the gates ahead. Police vehicles and a gray van marked CORONER had come and gone, not for the first and perhaps not for the last time in this bizarre case. But for the past hour, the place had fallen into a relative calm, and even the
