The dust was not so thick or undisturbed on these folders, making it obvious they'd recently been fanned and scanned. He piled them atop one another, four in all, and placed them into a battered briefcase he'd been using for his classes. Not bothering to log the fact, not wanting to leave the kind of tracks Dr. Sanger was leaving in her wake, he pushed the files into his case, intending to study them overnight. Switching off the light, he limped from the exit of his monastic hole in the wall, his leg killing him from having sat so long in one position.
Locking up, he turned to the service elevator and waited for the damned pachyderm to come get him.
More coffee, Stonecoat told himself, pouring the last of the pot, long cold, into his cup. Instead of going to class as he should have, Lucas had spent a restless and long evening with the remaining files, holed up in his bare apartment in an effort to follow in Meredyth Sanger's curious footsteps along the convoluted trail she had blazed. He was trying his damnedest to punch holes into her reasoning and the stubbornness with which she had come down this path in the first place. But he wasn't having much luck in doing so.
He paced what little space remained here for him to walk, what with the files strewn about the floor, along with boxes yet to be emptied since his move. He was using unopened boxes as chairs and tables for the moment, as he'd taken the unfurnished apartment with the desire and design that he would decorate in a manner suiting him self. So far his interior decorations amounted to a handful of prints of noble Indian faces and early tribal life, which adorned the walls along with an authentic Cherokee blanket his aunt had sent him during his convalescence in Dallas. Lucas had moments before risen with some difficulty from the floor, where he'd been splayed out for an hour now, going over the final papers of the final file he'd taken from the Cold Room. He didn't own a table, so the papers were spread across boxes.
Going for the refrigerator, which was owned by the super, along with all the other appliances in the flat, he located a cold Coors and drank long and deeply, savoring the cool feel of the liquid and its bite as it slid familiarly and easily down his throat. Earlier, he'd ordered Pizza Hut's complete spaghetti meal, along with a small pizza, and what remained of the pizza sat on one edge of two unopened cardboard boxes that he'd been meaning to get to but was now using as a makeshift tray table in his nearly empty flat.
The chief features of the place were the hardwood floor, the poster bed he'd bought for the bedroom, and a pair of first-model Colt . 45's he'd hung in a special place above his bed. Lucas hadn't had the time required to do the place up right. And if he followed Sanger down the primrose path she wanted him to take, there'd be less time than ever to pursue personal interests, such as making a suitable home for himself, fishing, boating, diving or hunting. One of the allures of Houston was its proximity to the ocean on the one hand and to good hunting grounds on the other. Houston itself had very few lures. It was, like all cities its size, an abominable place to be if you were poor, a lovely place to be if you were rich. But within a two-hour drive, out beyond the last development, Lucas knew he could find the trail ways of his ancestors alongside those of Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, Austin, and Travis. He could canoe through a primeval swamp, angle for a free crab dinner or go sailing. There were ferries to ride to distant destinations, beaches to walk, and quiet country roads to drive. There were horse farms and sugarcane mills in every direction. It just took a little effort and looking to find sea-rimmed marshes and wilderness trails. And despite all of his physical problems, Lucas Stonecoat had dedicated himself to returning one hundred percent to the man he once was, a man who loved the outdoors and the open prairie.
He continued to pace, to think, and to become angry all over again at the circumstances closing in around him. Dr. Sanger was no fool; she knew he'd do almost anything to get reassigned out of the Cold Room. And damned if he didn't want it both ways-wanted her to be wrong about the files, about the connections she'd perceived, so he could safely bow out, and yet he wanted her to be right, so he could get excited about something and go back to being who and what he was before the accident. But that renegade was hardly more than a faint memory now, a shadow puppet in the theater of remorse. Still, he had promised the God who daily moved him that one day he would return to full health and vigor, and perhaps by getting involved here and now, getting excited about his work, this case… then perhaps.
Still, he found himself as curious about Meredyth as the journey she'd been on, forged as it was from tantalizing footprints which, while timeworn and wholly spectral, had roused his most basic instinct for the hunt. Indeed, he wished very much to understand her motives as best he might, and to determine if he really wanted to get any deeper into this figurative hotbed with her, aligned as she was against the one man in the department who could most easily make his life miserable. Of course, Phil Lawrence's decision to place him in the Cold Room had pretty well created a hell from which there appeared no escape, save perhaps Dr. Meredyth Sanger's plans for Lucas, anyway…
It was a convoluted mess already, and he hadn't done a thing beyond reading the files. So he worked, trying to see all she saw in the files, hoping to learn what, by God, had alerted her to the similarities in the first place-such as they were. Some of the answers, particularly regarding her, eluded him like a trout in two feet of water. He could see the prize, but picking it up was going to be near impossible, like falling in love with a woman who had devoted herself to a lifetime of love for a mission, a spirit, or God. He may as well declare it a useless enterprise and “step back,” as the rappers would say.
“Maybe it's me,” he told himself, sipping at what remained of his beer, wondering if he ought to spike it with some Red Label. He would have to use some sort of drug or drink to get any sleep tonight, to get past the three-pronged problem of pain, insomnia and loneliness.
Sure, there was a great deal of similarity between the other cases, beyond the obvious fact that they remained unsolved: The victims had all died of a massive blow to the heart or chest with a spear or arrow. Once again, semantic errors abounded in the reports, arrow and spear being confused. A spear was a lance, sometimes six times the size of an arrow, but these were white cops filling out reports at two and three in the morning, and words like spear and arrow were interchangeable in a brain of putty. But there were also distinctly dissimilar crime scene facts here. Not all the victims had been mutilated after the initial kill, and some only partially, but none perfectly matched the extensive mutilation damage done in the more recent cases of Palmer and Mootry.
Maybe Palmer and Mootry were connected, and the connections seemed clear, but not so with the other bodies, at least not on paper.
A fellow by the name of Bennislowe-poor slob-along with his wife and daughter were all slain in brutal fashion, all three with metal arrows fired nastily through their hearts, but their bodies were not mutilated-no chopping off of hands, feet, head, or private parts. Also, this awful occurrence had taken place many years before, in 1981 in the Brier Forest area, the outskirts of Harris County. When it had been unofficially closed and detectives put to other duties-murder cases technically remained open for ten years-relegated to the Cold Room, in 1984, with no likely suspects, the Palmer killing had been less than two years off.
Were the HPD cops at the time blind, careless, stupid or all of the above? A careful check showed that each case had been handled by different detectives in differing precincts. Lucas wondered how many had retired between these incidents and gone to Florida or California. In any event, no one save Meredyth Sanger had considered the cases together, as a whole. He again wondered why her… why had Meredyth of all people come upon this startling string of events? What had been her springboard? What had first prompted her to ask, What if?