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He wanted rather to crawl back into that safe place where he had been before meeting her. But that meant returning like a dog with his tail between his legs to the goddamned Cold Room and pretending nothing had changed. He wasn't completely convinced he could do that, but a stem and cautionary voice deep within told him he bloody well had no other choice.

Meredyth Sanger had tried to sleep, but her frustration and her feeling of resentment toward everyone associated with the Houston Police Department-and especially Lucas Stonecoat now-had boiled anew to the surface and had actually awakened her in the night. A look at her clock told her that it was 3:11 A.M. The entire day before, she had hoped to hear from Lucas Stonecoat, that he had had time to really think things through, and that he realized his earlier mistake in not instantly and readily joining forces with her. It all seemed so obviously the right thing to do, at least in her mind's eye. Besides, what better offer was he holding out for?

She sat upright in bed, feeling like a windswept prairie, her throat parched. She reached for the water beside her bed and gulped at it. She mentally began to browbeat herself for having sunk so low as to go out stalking and pleading with the big bear for his help. “To hell with him,” she reiterated for the hundredth time since he'd declined helping her in her quest. “As a trained psychiatrist,” she told herself aloud, “you should've known better. You'd think you would be a better judge of character after all this time, dealing with the abnormal, the aberrant, the psychos.”

Part of her work took her into jail cells and courtrooms, where she ran tests and conducted interviews to determine whether or not a man was legally sane or medically insane, competent to stand trial or not.

“So, why couldn't I have seen the truth about Stonecoat?” she wondered aloud.

Like any man who faced extreme trauma, pain, and suffering, he had a right to the armor he had built up around himself, his protective coat. Stonecoat was an apt name for the man. Trauma permanently changed a man, any man. Why should Lucas Stonecoat be any different? Nowadays, he naturally leaned more toward a conservative and safe lifestyle. Naturally he did not want to go out of his way to risk himself. Unfortunately, his reaction to her and her offer was all too normal.

In her profession, she saw all the wide spectrum of machismo in the male cop-and in many a female cop as well. She saw the gung-ho, anxious to face down death and prove some private code of valor, and she saw those who feared not only the street and the job they had committed themselves to, but their own shadows after a brush with death. She saw some ruthless cops, some reckless cops, and others who were careless and foolish, while some were careful and cautious to a fault, a fault that could get a partner killed.

Every man reacted to the streets differently, and little wonder, given the variety of experience of each new recruit.

So maybe the Cold Room was easy for Lucas Stonecoat, a haven of a place to spend his second career as a cop in absolute safety, without risks and far removed from the trauma of his past in Dallas. She had thought the Cold Room her ally in fetching him to her side. The Cold Room, with its walls closing in on his Indian soul, she had believed, must convince Lucas that if he did not join forces with her, his spirit would wither and die.

But perhaps that spirit she had heard about had already died, back in Dallas.

She knew the Cold Room might easily drive any man crazy, but once more, Lucas was not just any man.

Despite it all, despite his turning her down, there remained a gentle intrigue surrounding this man, with his tough guy exterior and hidden hurts. There was a mystery about the pained expression-the knowing eyes that seared another's soul. There was a fire, like embers that might burn on forever, deep within the luminous brown eyes of this man, and this mystery had leapt out at her like a cougar and had touched her as she had not been touched by anyone in a long time. He was, clinically speaking, a fascinating case study.

At the same time, she knew she could not allow this man too close. He was nothing if not dangerous; he was, rightly or wrongly, filled with paranoia and phobias, not to mention his physical problems and the abuse of alcohol and drugs that were all too often the aftermath of a yearlong hospital stay. Besides, she had Conrad McThuen to think of. She and Conrad had been working up to a total commitment now for too long, and she loved Conrad, who was a real estate acquirer and market analyst for the University of Texas at Houston, a man who was outside police and legal circles- and she thanked God for that.

Conrad's duties with the university had sent him on an extended trip to Italy, of all places. Conrad had pleaded with her to take some time, come away with him, but she had been too obsessed with her recent discoveries to back off now, and so she had declined a romantic getaway with her lover in favor of beating her head against the stone wall of Captain Lawrence's prejudice and attempting headway with Stonecoat, and nothing guaranteed.

“So what does that say about you, Doctor? Maybe the redskin was right: 'Heal thyself?” she muttered to the empty bed.

Maybe she needed to soften the Indian up, but how? She could fix him up with a girlfriend. He did great with the zoo animals; maybe he could be half as charming toward Carrie or Dana? Or perhaps the more exotic Abigail?

She lay back against her pillows, contemplating her role as Cupid, soon allowing sleep to reclaim her, the thought of playing matchmaker to Lucas Stonecoat swirling about her brain like a whirling dervish, perhaps determined to find an alternative to the idea of matchmaking-maybe blackmail?

It wasn't an idea she relished, and it certainly wouldn't enhance her already shaky beginning with Stonecoat, but if it was all she had… maybe…

FIFTEEN

A fire raged in the gaping, open mouth of the giant incinerator, the resultant heat singeing the hair on the thick arms of the man standing before it. With a grunt, he lifted a final shovelful of black coal and tossed the black rock and ash to feed the fire even further. He stared at the gauge, which was nearing nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

“Close enough,” he told himself.

The room was hot with the furnace's maw. The fire inside the furnace licked out at the surrounding world like a living creature in search of prey.

Carefully placing the now-hot shovel against the ancient stone walls of his dungeon, the big man reached next for one of two black polyethylene Hefty bags that had been left against the wall as well. With friends looking on, the bare-chested fire-feeder lifted one of the bags and slowly approached the furnace mouth. But before he could fully swing the bag and its deadweight contents into the raging fire, the heat melted the facing side of the bag, causing its heavy and bulky contents to spill out over the filthy bare concrete floor here, creating a kind of sticky gruel of the ancient dust on the stone floor and bodily fluids spilling from the human body parts that the fire-feeder had spilt.

The man stared down at the head, eyes, nose, ears, hair and the left leg once attached to Timothy Kenneth Little.

“Damn you, Little,” cursed one of the other men looking on, whose face was hidden in shadow, lit now and again by the licking flames from the incinerator. “You'll not escape so easily as that. You're in Helsinger's Pit now…”

“Toss the bastard in, eyes directed at the flames,” said another of the onlookers. “So the evil bastard can see the flames as they lick him up.”

The others agreed with a hearty alcoholic cheer, and the bare-chested, sweating fire-feeder did as instructed.

The leg followed.

The second bag was pushed into the fire-feeder's hands after this, and he was told, “Be a little more careful with the rest of him.”

The booming voice of their leader, still in shadow, called out, “Sure beats burying his parts all over the country, wouldn't you say, gentlemen?”