“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.
764LTclass="underline" \C42119\Category 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 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.