She had to admit, though, that Lawrence was far easier to take than some men she'd worked with in police circles. She once had had to expose a watch lieutenant who had raped a female officer and had threatened the woman's life if she should ever talk. The woman had come to Meredyth for advice, help, comfort and support. Meredyth gave her all this and more over a period of a year, while the handsome but vicious lieutenant continued a constant barrage against the young woman until finally she agreed to wear a wire. With the help of Internal Affairs, Meredyth was able to corner this man, to put him where he belonged. He was serving eight to ten for rape now, and his conviction had been upheld on appeal.
Despite the good work she was doing within the department, men like Lawrence still failed to take her seriously- partly due to the Blue Code, which labeled her a snitch, because the unspoken and inane belief held by many cops was that no matter what a fellow cop did, you never ratted on him. She sometimes wondered just who was crazy and who was sane.
How did a guy like Lawrence get ahead? He was a throwback to an earlier time, a freaking caveman without the body hair, yet he fit right into the old-boy system of the HPD. Hell, he fished and hunted with the best of the brass, told off-color and ethnic jokes so nasty they'd make Don Rickles cry and Howard Stern wince, and he talked openly in the squad room with his detectives of his many encounters and conquests of women as if some newsreel were playing relentlessly inside his self-deluded brain.
“Fatso” was Lawrence's squad room handle, but now that he was thirty pounds lighter than when he began and now that he was a captain, nobody dared call him that to his face, except perhaps the self-destructive type-maybe a guy like Lucas Stonecoat, from what she could see.
She leaned back into the cushioned car seat now; she had felt some guilt at first for having followed Lucas from the precinct, but not near so much as she had while watching him as he swilled booze a hundred yards away from her.
She had bottled up so much outrage at Phil Lawrence that her anger with Stonecoat was mild by comparison. “Damn that Lawrence,” she said to the empty car. “Why can't the captain see facts in evidence when put before him?”
She had stumbled onto some interesting anomalies with regard to the recent murder and mutilation case of a man named Charles D. Mootry. The man, an appellate court judge, died under gruesome circumstances. He was first dispatched with an arrow fired from some sort of high-powered gun or crossbow, piercing the victim directly through the heart. The unusual choice of weapon used by the killer was just the beginning in this bizarre case, for the victim's head had been removed and carried off by his assailant, along with other telling body parts, such as the hands, feet and the privates. Only a torso with arms and legs remained.
She'd first learned of the case itself, minus the most heinous details, through newspaper accounts, along with everyone else. She, like the poor slob in the basement pushing dust mites about, was not on Phil Lawrence's kiss list. In fact, Phil didn't believe in either of two facts of life in 1996- that women belonged in police work, or that men who were real men ever needed psychiatric support. In effect, he didn't believe she could work effectively within the superstructure of a paramilitary organization such as the Houston Police Department, which was not only a male-dominated environment but one rooted in the history of the decidedly male Texas Rangers, another law enforcement agency under repeated siege due to sexual harassment charges that could no longer be ignored.
So what good was her mental medicine here? What possible good could she do here? Men like Lawrence hid their prejudices well for appearance' sake, allowing underlings like his detectives to do their talking for them. Perhaps no psychiatrist-male, female or neuter-could be of any damned use whatsoever to a man living out a fantasy of being Wyatt Earp or Matt Dillon. God, she hoped Stonecoat wasn't a Geronimo wanna-be.
Both her sex and her profession irked the captain, but she didn't work for him, not strictly speaking, and while she hadn't wanted to go over his head-another cop taboo- Phil didn't exactly leave her with any choice. She was damned if she did and damned if she didn't, but also damned if she'd sit another day in her office while Lawrence casually, unassumingly, even cunningly assured his men that appointments with her were made to be broken-despite his lip service, despite what he called policy, as when he'd told Lucas to submit to her scrutiny on a routine basis. It was all hogwash.
She realized that Texas was part of the Bible Belt, that it was ten, maybe twenty years behind in both the civil rights movement and in women's rights issues, and that men like Lawrence were on every old-boy circuit in the bloody state, but it was high time someone explained the facts of life to “Cap'n Phil,” as his boys called him. She'd gone to top brass officials and had quoted their offical manuals to them. She had not only blown the whistle on Captain Lawrence's out-of-date practices, but had also pointed a finger at his ineptness and incompetence. She had gone out on a lengthy, shaky, narrow limb.
She still fumed from what he'd said to her behind the closed door of his office this morning. After getting assurances that he wasn't being put on tape by a hidden recording device, he had half-kiddingly and sanctimoniously dared ask her if she'd take exception to his frisking her. She did take exception and promised their discussion was strictly private. “Good,” he'd replied to this, coming around his desk and pressing his body close to hers, searching her eyes for a rise. She instead glared and stepped back, giving off no uncertain signs.
“Look,” he said, his voice quivering, “no pussy with a Ph. D. is going to screw me over in my own department and get away with it.”
“Is that a threat, Captain?”
“Consider it fair warning.”
“Consider this, then. I'll file charges against you if you so much as come near me again.”
She'd stormed from Lawrence's office, driven by anger and frustration to chase out after the only man in the department who didn't appear to be under Lawrence's thumb, yet-Lucas Stonecoat.
“Right, you are,” a small voice told her. “He's not under Phil's thumb now, but give him time.” She realized the bastard had gotten to her, that she was talking to herself now.
She didn't know precisely how Lucas Stonecoat and Lawrence were getting on, but she knew Lawrence was just bigoted enough to rub Lucas the wrong way. A feud between them was as likely as water rolling down a rocky slope. Perhaps she could usher in the feud between them a little sooner with a few well-placed words, all to her advantage. It wasn't a pleasant alternative and certainly called her ethics into question, but it was feminine, after all, and she damned sure had to do something. She was grasping at straws, and the largest one to come along in some time was the tall, imposing Lucas Stonecoat.
She considered his size as he climbed from the car across and down from her. She thought Lucas strong looking, handsome, save for the scar, but even this added an element of mystery that lured her on. His voice, so like a whiskey-drinking blues singer, reminded her of her father's cracked tones.
Maybe she'd best get to know Lucas Stonecoat, she thought, see if he could provide some assistance. After all, he'd once been a detective. His insights on the Mootry case might prove invaluable.
To this end, she'd stalked him from the precinct like a cub following a lumbering grizzly bear. This grizzly drove like a crazy man, a good deal more fleet of wheel than he was of foot, given the pronounced limp. He was already ducking out of sight ahead of her. Damn, he really was going into a bar this time of day, while on duty. What kind of a fool was he?
She hesitated now, debating with herself. Should she boldly go inside, confront him, or see him another time? Time was a luxury she could ill afford, especially now that Lawrence had taken off the gloves. At bedrock of all the rumors she'd heard about Lucas Stonecoat, there seemed a grudging admiration on the part of others that Lucas was a badger once he clamped down on a case, the kind of tenacious, tough detective who'd make for a useful ally, if only she could get him to listen to her.