Lincoln was on his way still. He'd stopped off at the hospital to look in on Meredyth and learn what he could of Lucas's condition. Jana caught herself blaming Meredyth, telling herself that if Lucas died, she'd hate Sanger for the rest of her life. At the moment, no one at ground zero here knew if Lucas was dead or alive.
She stared down at the remains of the deadly Post-it Ripper. Lauralie didn't look like much in death, but Jana had seen what the petite vixen had done at the cafe not far from here, as well as what she'd wrought here on Lake Madera. From her safe vantage point, she watched Chang carefully unwrap Lauralie's throat, freeing it of the bandage- tourniquette. A hell of a lot of loss of blood in the bedroom told the story of Lauralie's bleeding out here, and no doubt Chang's eyes would verify that a struggle for life and death between Meredyth and Lauralie had occurred, and Meredyth had not only won the battle, but had staunched the wounds of her defeated enemy while Lucas lay somewhere bleeding out.
She turned and surveyed the brightly lit crime scene again. From the appearance of things in the bedroom, including several spent shell casings, along with the location of the Remington breech-loader, Jana had a good sense of what had happened here. While Meredyth had been treated for superficial wounds caused by a three- pronged forked garden tool, the trail of mud and dirt leading up to the room suggested that someone most assuredly attacked Lauralie, bringing the garden fork down and into Lauralie's throat.
Jana paced to the door and started down the stairs and out of the house, responding to Chang's gesture to join him atop the shed. She got on her cell phone and dialed. Chang came on instantly.
"Dr. Chang…Leonard!"
"Detective North? Why're you calling? I can hear you from where I'm standing." He looked up again only to find her gone from the window. "Wait…where are you?"
"I don't want anyone else to hear this."
"Go on." The sun had slipped through the cloud cover, and a wide swath of blinding rays sent Chang's arm up to shade his eyes as he looked up at the window again, not ten feet overhead, still searching for the detective. "What is it? Where'd you go?"
"Got a call from the Brody house, one of the evidence techs named Tory."
"Yes, Tory. She is a promising intern."
"She's gotten ill over there. Has a strange story to tell about 'something' hanging from a ceiling fan in the teenager's room."
"And you think it is the rest of your missing person, Mira Lourdes?"
"Sounds extremely likely. The ET, Tory?"
"Yes?"
"She says Dr. Patterson has known about the remains in the second-story room for two hours."
"My God, no!"
"This is the first you've heard?"
"I just discovered my cell phone was switched off accidentally."
"All the same, Frank Patterson knows damn well how important finding the rest of Mira Lourdes is to me-ahhh, the family-you, all of us, and he's so damn strange that he's failed to share the discovery with the rest of us. Why?"
"You tell me, Detective North, why? Why is Frank doing this?"
"Because he's waiting for those bozos with Fuller to CSI the place before any of the rest of us, even before you, Dr. Chang."
"Still currying favor with Fuller's team. Damn Frank…never knew what side to butter his bread on."
'Tory came to me with it because she'd been unable to reach you, and she knows how Nielsen and Frank have been feuding, so she didn't want to go to Lynn out on the lake without first running it by you."
"What shall we do… what shall we do…" Chang muttered as if to himself.
"I have no idea, but the young intern, she's been dismissed by Dr. Patterson because she dared push him on the issue. Meanwhile, Patterson's focus has been on the down-stairs kitchen and basement areas. She called him an ass."
"Yes, that'd be Frank all right. What do you propose we do? We have our hands full here."
"I'm going over there, but I don't want this intern getting into any trouble over this."
"I see Captain Lincoln's car coming in. Why don't you take him over there with you. Let Frank explain things to him?"
"Great, good idea. Just wanted you to know what's going on across the lake."
"You got someone up there can help me pull Blodgett off this doggie windmill? I need someone strong."
"Sure. I'll send down a couple of big, strapping FBI boys."
She hung up. Chang cursed Patterson's inept people skills. He could well imagine how Frank had treated young Tory, who no doubt felt traumatized at finding parts of Mira Lourdes's corpse dangling from a ceiling fan.
Perhaps a silver lining, he thought, in that Mira's final remains might be located and reunited with the rest of her body-all the parts still in frozen limbo at Chang's morgue, downtown Houston, where her body was treated with the decorum, dignity, and humanity that all his guests received. If it were Lourdes's remains up in that second- story room, and Frank had let it hang there beyond the time it took to make a video record, he was breaking Chang's rules of conduct with respect to the dead.
Leonard had hoped to have a full and detailed map of precisely what had "gone down" here, as Gordon put it, by the time Captain Lincoln had arrived, but obviously a lot of the puzzle still needed fitting into place. Sending off the captain now with Detective North was a stroke of luck he realized, watching North intercept Lincoln at the driveway as he exited his car, seeing her point to the Brody house, and smiling to see Lincoln and North climb into the rear seat of his squad car and turn back for the cutoff to the Brody house across the lake.
Earlier, while en route to Madera Lake, Lincoln had called Chang, and had bellowed into the phone, "Leonard, I want to know what went down exactly when, and in what order. I need a time line. Every bloody detail, Leonard. I want to know what happened to Lucas Stonecoat. Shit, you know how many cop-killing wakes I've gone to this year, and it's only September."
Lincoln would be back soon for all the answers. His going to the Brody house with Jana meant only a temporary reprieve. Chang did not know all the answers, not yet. Hell, he had just learned of the Lourdes remains at the Brody house It seemed only God and Frank Patterson knew all that had gone on there. And what about the weird shit that had "gone down" out there on the lake itself? The naked dead guy covered in worms? One for the table conversation at the American Forensic Society's annual next month, if Nielsen could figure the mystery out.
Chang had made cursory rounds, setting up the individual teams, going from house to stable to lawn to lake, and now the top of the shed. Somebody had to be in charge, and he had been nominated, but Lincoln demanded an impossible magical time frame. A typical crime scene took time, lots of it, but this, seven bodies spread over six-now seven-crime scenes (shed top, second-story bedroom, stable front, the lawn, the rowboat, the Brody basement, and add the Brody second-floor bedroom). On top of that, they had an officer down, quite possibly the eighth body…awaiting Leonard back at Houston General-and what of the sheer number of vehicles involved?
Leonard finally saw the young Feds coming out of the house, one of them approaching him. Belkvin's BMW had been found and was being impounded by the Feds. Three vehicles littered the driveway, and another sat at the Brody house, all in need of at least a cursory going-over.
Leonard gave another moment to Lucas back in Houston, still fighting for his life, he hoped, but the stories filtering to Leonard made his friend's condition sound a great deal worse than merely uncertain. Last word had him in a per-ilous fight for his life on the operating table.
ATF and FBI personnel and forensic crews continued to scour the entire yard for additional shell casings, their leaders drawing diagrams based on findings, attempting to clearly identify Lauralie Blodgett's position and movements at the time of each shot fired, and how she had overpowered the husky 269-pound Kemper.