She only half-heard the TV now, her attention on the two cops coming through the door as one stopped and pointed back at the car beside their cruiser. "Two News has learned that two high-ranking officials with the Houston PD to whom the Ripper has communicated…" The two policemen made tentative steps back toward the lot and began inspecting her car, moving about it like a pair of flies, curious and growing more so.
"The killer in this case does not fit any of our normal typologies when it comes to serial-killer profiling," came the voice of a so-called FBI expert on the TV over the counter.
From her booth, Lauralie pointed to the TV and said, "I know more about that shit than anyone on the planet."
The waitress looked more closely at Lauralie now, studying her features as if trying to place her. "Yeah? Really? You don't look old enough to know a lot about crime fighting."
"I know more than that idiot profiler, more than any newscaster, more than anyone in law enforcement, more than all the damned politicians and religious leaders! More than even God himself if only there was a God, which I have never particularly relied upon, Mary."
The waitress unconsciously touched her name tag and recalled giving the young woman her name when first waiting on her. "You shouldn't say such things about God, honey."
"Mary, Mary, quite contrary, Mary, Mother of God… no, I don't hold faith in the Exalted One, despite or because of the years I've spent behind the black gates of Hell."
Mary stared at the stranger, trembling now, giving herself away in the eyes and wavering lower lip. They both realized in the same instant that Mary had recognized Lauralie's likeness as the woman law enforcement wanted for questioning. Considered armed and dangerous. The waitress's eyes moved off Lauralie a moment too late, going to the big plate-glass window, determining where the two troopers had gotten off to.
The TV news anchor was again relaying the story, with video, of an isolated farmhouse on Old Hazard Creek Road in Waller County, not terribly far from here, where the mutilated body of one Dr. Arthur D. Belkvin, a veterinary doctor and instructor at the Dean King School of Veterinary Medicine, was found in a commando-style raid by police-in an apparent failed attempt to locate Belkvin and an accomplice alive. The raid was the culmination of a week-long missing persons investigation in which authorities knew the missing woman had already been killed since her chopped-up remains had been mailed piece by severed piece to several high-ranking police officials in Houston.
"Liars!" Lauralie shouted at the TV. "They were only sent to the famous forensic shrink Dr. Meredyth Sanger and to her lover boy Lieutenant Lucas Stonecoat, and that's all. So why don't they name that bitch, huh? She's the cause of all this."
Mary, frozen in place, said nothing and did not move. Again Lauralie stared up at the TV to see her yearbook photos displayed.
"I got what I wished for, Mary. Finally…wanted." She laughed. "Wanted by everybody now…hell of a price on my head, you know that, Mary? Mary, Mother of God, you think you'd like to collect on that bounty, Mother dear?" Lauralie again laughed.
Maury called from the kitchen, saying, "'Nough yammering out there, Mary. Burgers'll be up in five!"
"If you want to stay safe, get down behind the counter, Mother Mary," Lauralie told her as she snapped open her purse, tilted it in Mary's direction, and flashed the muzzle of a gun lying within. The muzzle looked like the head of a snake to Mary, but she knew what it represented.
Lauralie had seen the activity of police vehicles going for the farmstead as she had filled the gas tank at a Mobil station on the main artery leading to her and Arthur's "sugar shack" as she'd called it. She had waited at a careful distance, watching as slowly the raiders came away, leaving the area. One car in particular, belonging to Lieutenant Lucas Stonecoat, she had followed to this vicinity, noting where the shrink and the cop had turned off, approving of the location.
"I can't stop them from knowing they've located Arthur's car," she told herself aloud, "but I can stop them from calling it in."
"What's that, honey?" asked the waitress, trying to bolster some courage in her heart and some feeling in her knees. Pretending ignorance and failing miserably. The heavyset blonde's makeup had melded with the grease here, her pores shining. "Did ya want something else? Some coffee maybe?" She lifted the steaming pot and took a step, coming out from behind the counter, when Lauralie lifted the 9mm Glock from her purse, causing Mary to drop the coffee on the counter and duck. The explosion of the coffee urn sounded like a gunshot inside the empty diner. Outside, the two state troopers snatched out their weapons.
She wasn't yet ready for capture. She pulled the trigger of the 9mm she'd purchased from Clive's Gun Emporium, two blocks distant from the orphanage, the day she walked out of Our Lady. The first shot exploded the plate-glass window dropping the closest trooper, his body slamming into the pebbled drive, his feet twitching in his boots. The exploding shards of glass had dug into the second trooper's face and eyes while he pulled off a single shot, narrowly missing Lauralie's head, hissing by her.ear. Her second shot created a bloody hole in the other trooper's chest as he fell back on the hood of the BMW, instantly lifeless, his body slumped down to the grille, where he appeared merely to be in a slumped repose.
Maury had come racing in from the kitchen, had grabbed Mary by the arm, and was guiding her out the door behind the counter, rushing for a rear exit. Lauralie calmly stood, shouldered her purse, and walked around the counter, almost slipping on spilled coffee, going for the couple, her weapon smoking in her hand.
As she made her way to the rear of the M amp;M, Lauralie imagined Meredyth Sanger lying in the crook of Lucas Stonecoat's arm right now, sleeping blissfully under the canopy of safety she enjoyed, while she, an orphaned child without home or family or loved ones, was engaged in killing people she did not even know in her effort to make Sanger feel fear and self-loathing for her part in all of this. Lauralie meant to shatter Dr. Sanger's every conscious and perhaps unconscious moment of well-being and comfort, whatever it took.
She'd narrowly escaped the farmhouse raid, thanks to a sixth sense that police had zeroed in on Arthur. She suspected it had unraveled because Arthur had babbled on too long with the realtor lady when they'd rented the farmhouse. This, along with the likeness in the newspaper, made Arthur a liability, and adding to her growing dislike of Arthur and his touch, she'd had to listen to his increasingly constant nagging about her motive for hating Meredyth Sanger, until finally she'd simply had enough.