04.Final Edge v5 (30 page)

"We find her, we find the boyfriend, and we can shut them down."

"Wish I could be a hundred percent certain one way or the other of any part I played in helping shape this woman's obsession. Wish I could see those records at the courthouse."

'Tonight? Open the Harris County courthouse records? That'd also take a warrant signed by a judge. Tomorrow's another day, Mere."

"Another day and possibly another horrible mailing to you or me or both of us."

He pulled her into his arms and hugged her close. "It'll be all right. I promise you, it's going to be all right."

They drove from the restaurant down a series of meandering streets until Lucas pulled to the curb in a residential neighborhood. An Interstate overpass sliced the street in two, and cutting his engine, Lucas said, "I want you to stay right here, Mere. I'll be right back."

"Where the hell are we, Lucas? And where're you going?"

"Katherine Croombs's house. There're lights on inside. I'm going to have a look-see."

"But without a warrant, what'11 happen?"

"I'm not going to break in, just determine if she's inside or not," he said, climbing from the driver's seat.

"And how're you going to do that?"

"Old Indian sleuth trick," he said, standing in the rain.

"What trick?"

"I'll knock." With that, he sprinted to the door.

Meredyth nervously watched him climb the stairs of the rundown tenement house. She listened to the whirring, whining, and roaring of cars, trucks, and buses whizzing by on the Interstate overhead. "Think I'd drink myself to death if I had to listen to this all day long," she muttered to the interior of the car. She glanced again at Lucas, now speaking to someone on the porch, an elderly lady who had probably caught him peeking in at Katherine's windows.

Then she saw Lucas coming back to the car. He opened the door, got in, turned on the ignition, and started away from the curb. "Dead end," he said.

"Whataya mean, dead end? What did you learn from the neighbor?"

"Says no one's been living below her. She's had an eye out for the daughter herself, wants to know who's going to pay the water and electric bills, neither of which were turned off. Says she's having it all turned off if she doesn't hear from Lauralie by morning."

"Then Lauralie did live there for a time after the mother's death?"

"Yes, for a month and a half. She says the girl went from saccharine sweetness when she first arrived to a bitch during and after the funeral."

"So the woman—"

"—Mrs. Crane—"

"—saw Lauralie at the funeral?"

"She was at the funeral, no thanks to Lauralie. She had to get the information from the police report in the Chronicle, and from there she called the funeral home for the details of when and where. Says Lauralie didn't invite her or any of Katherine's cronies, and when Mrs. Crane arrived with several others in tow, Lauralie hadn't a word for her or any of Katherine's few friends and neighbors. She also said that Katherine had been off the bottle and was making an effort to please Lauralie, allowing her to live with her, feeding her, buying her things, all that. But Mrs. Crane says Lauralie never showed the least gratitude or appreciation for Katherine's efforts. It's likely what drove her back to drinking that night, she says."

"So where is Lauralie now?"

"Got to be she's with the boyfriend, Mr. Mystery, his pad."

"Her personal butcher. You think he helped her in poisoning her mother?"

"According to Mrs. Crane, she never once saw Lauralie with a man. She came to think her a lesbian, and you recall Rachel's take on that back at the convent."

Meredyth mulled it over. "AC-DC as her needs required, depending on whom she felt a need to control or manipulate at any given time, be it Father William, Rachel, her mother, and perhaps the killer."

As they drove through the increasingly clinging fog—a fog doing battle with the orange glow of the city's lights— Meredyth's stress got the better of her. Lucas realized that she was sobbing beside him. He reached out and placed a hand around her neck, rubbing it tenderly.

"I can't believe we can't locate one convent girl recently released on her own from that place," lamented Meredyth, placing her head on his shoulder. "And that place. And the lessons of that place, what Lauralie took from there."

"And what would that be?"

"Just put yourself into her place. Imagine spending your entire life there, without a true home, without parents, without siblings...bullied by the older girls, possibly assaulted by them, possibly molested by a priest, learning only how to connive, he, cheat, steal, destroy people and things, how to sexually manipulate others, until your behavior escalated into something far more sinister...escalating to fire-setting and causing accidents that result in death."

"It's not your fault or doing, Mere. Don't put all that on your head."'

"No telling what kind of tyrant that Mother Orleans was. Do you think she drove Lauralie to kill her? First attempting to do it by fire, and later helping her down a flight of stairs?"

"We don't know any of this is true," Lucas objected.

"And—and as for Mother Elizabeth, I've never met anyone more in denial. She knows...down deep, Lucas, she knows Lauralie is a disturbed individual, and not another Rachel—not a child in need of coddling, but a child in need of a straitjacket."

"Exactly...got that right." He placed one arm around her as he drove on. "Time you got your mind off it tonight, sweetheart."

But she went on. "And us...look at us...two professionals going round in circles inside a labyrinth she has led us into...a maze created especially for us, and she's got to be laughing at us—Lucas, the big bad Texas Cherokee detective with an uncanny record for tracking down the monsters among us, and Meredyth Sanger, Ph.D, M.D., a forensic psychiatrist well respected in my field, and together we can't find a missing murderous child."

"Hey, Mere, damn now you've got to go easier on yourself—and me. After all, it's not as if we haven't gotten anywhere. We've come a long—"

"But we haven't. She's still out there somewhere free to do whatever her deranged mind—in cohort with Crazy Joe as you call him—can whip up! And we're no closer to stopping them."

"Oh, but we are! Thanks to your brilliant mind, we've put together a motive behind all this madness. Mere, not to mention we have put a name to one of the suspects in the abduction of Mira Lourdes. A name and a likeness, which will be placed on the all-points bulletin along with our Mr. X with the mole on his cheek. Tomorrow's papers will carry it, along with the news broadcast. It's on Captain Lincoln's desk."

"When did you do all this?"

"I used the graduation photo and made out a report while you were in the ladies' room, and left it with our fearless leader. Now, thanks to you, we're that much closer to ending this terror."

"No, no thanks to me, to her, Lauralie. She has consciously led us to her, Lucas; she wants us to put the puzzle together. Don't forget that. She not only wants to insult us, she wants to control us by controlling every step of the investigation against her. She's shrewd, calculating, and cruel—a terrible combination."

"All the same, we're a lot closer to closing this thing down than we were before going to the convent. You should take some comfort in that."

"Where're you taking me now, Lucas? I'm a nervous wreck, so worried about going home, finding another part of Mira Lourdes awaiting me."

"I don't blame you. I don't relish seeing another of Lauralie and Crazy Joe's gifts either."

"Then we have to dodge your place too."

"And the precinct," he half-joked. "We could always return to the desert, sleep beneath the stars again. Maybe this time, you'll include me on the cloud of your dreams. Whataya say, me-lady?"

"The desert sounds nice, but I have a better idea."

"Shoot."

"My family's country house. She can't know about that. Hey, let's do it. Let's go there. It's on a beautiful lake, and I don't receive mail there."

"Are you suggesting I meet your parents?" He half- smiled, staring into her eyes.

"No, they won't be there. They're in Paris."

"Paris, Texas?"

"France, on holiday. So, we'll be alone, and you won't have any pressure whatsoever. We can pick up some groceries and bathing suits on the way."

"How far is it?"

"Between here and Huntsville. Not to worry. We can be back in the city in an hour and a half."

Lucas raised his hands as if arrested. "All right, you got me, Doctor. I am in your hands completely tonight."

"That sounds promising."

"Lead on, please."

"Interstate north," she said, "Derry Road exit, Madera Lake." She nestled into the crook of his arm, closing her eyes, persuaded she could get far enough away to escape any further thoughts of Lauralie Blodgett tonight.

ARTHUR BELKUIN’S GL0VED hands twitched ever so slightly where he gripped the freezer door over his head. The surgical gloves he wore made a stifled little barking rubber sound against the lid of the horizontal freezer. Arthur closed the lid over what little remained of Mira Lourdes where she lay inside her frozen coffin: a pair of legs held together by lower torso and hips, two severed arms—one missing a hand, another a finger.

Behind Arthur, her headless, armless upper torso lay on the stainless-steel operating table, where his rotary bone saw rested, silently dripping with blood. He stared at his reflection in the patent titanium blade, so efficient and clean was this blade. He defied any human eye to detect the microscopic tissue and bone fragments adhering to it. He'd have to give it a Muriatic acid bath to be certain the saw, like the ax, could not be DNA'd to Mira Lourdes, and so linked to him. He'd eventually wash down the table as well, whenever Lauralie finally resolved that they had come to the end of this dark journey she had set them on. At which time, he would take the table and all the tools far out to the desert, possibly as far as Mexico, dig an enormous hole, and bury it aU.

He silently thanked God that the blood was at a minimum, most of Mira's blood having been lost when she was killed, and the remaining blood, pooling in the lungs and back, remaining thick and gelatinous from the corpse's having been so long in cold storage. The solid flesh made cutting easier, cleaner. The torso itself had been opened earlier to get at the organs that he had sliced up in thin leaves for the first box sent to Detective Stonecoat. Lauralie had tossed what was left of those organs into the brook that ran through the property, a backwater creek off the Navasota River. He recalled how she'd delighted in watching the creek ripple along on its path, taking its natural course. "On a mission, Arthur, like us," she'd said of the stream as she fed Mira's internal organs to the fish.

The only untouched and undefiled of Mira Lourdes's organs was the heart, now swimming in a formaldehyde- filled jar on a shelf over Arthur's shoulder. Arthur had closed up the huge Y-section cut he had made to the torso and abdomen to get at the organs for Lauralie. The crude autopsy scar on the torso looked like the stitching on a bloated football, Arthur thought. He'd done the procedure quickly and with a shaking hand.

"Lauralie, damn it now, you promised you'd tell me the whole story, and I think it's high time. I think I've earned your trust and the right to know everything."

"You are on a need-to-know basis, Arthur—you need, and I know." She laughed, while outside his dogs, locked in the run, whimpered and whined for the warmth and light inside.

"Lauralie, your reason for doing all this!" he demanded, pointing at the dissected, sewn-up torso lying between them. "You promised, remember?"

"You want rationalizations, Arthur? Will a good rationale help you get past your part in murder, Arthur, sweetie?"

"You promised. You said that you had a lifetime of reasons for what you've done, remember? And you promised to share them with me."

"I remember telling you I'd tell you, Arthur, when the time came...when conditions were right, when I was good and ready. Do you remember that, Arthur, do you?"

"I need to know why, Lauralie, now! Why am I doing this?" How could I have agreed to this? Arthur wondered, but did not say. Arthur looked down over Mira Lourdes's armless torso and breasts, where he stood directly across the dissecting table from Lauralie. He imagined die eerie picture it must make, this meeting of the three of them, together again—Mira not entirely present physically, Lauralie not entirely present mentally, Arthur not entirely present emotionally—a strange bizarre twist on the eternal triangle, he thought.

Lauralie was angry with him, but she appeared to have calmed. Arthur had balked at her orders once again, balked at any further mutilation of the body. He dared voice his wish now. "We should end this thing now, bury what's left of Mira in the desert, and be done with it."

Lauralie only laughed, and between laughs, she said, "Mira, Mira on the slab, who's the prettiest of the hags? You talk about her as if you knew her, Arthur. Get over it. Look at what she is for what she is, an unfeeling and empty shell."

"She was a human being, Lauralie."

"Was being the operative word! Look at her now! We've excised her eyes, her teeth, a hand, and her head, not to mention the finger I left at the convent, and now you're going soft on me, Arthur? Don't be a wimp!"

Arthur again looked down at the upper torso of Mira Lourdes lying before them. Lauralie had operated the circular bone saw to sever torso from lower abdomen and legs. With Arthur's guidance, she had done all the cutting this time, and she'd done it with a kind of gusto. In fact, she took a kind of otherworldly delight in carving up the frozen corpse, while Arthur again questioned her reasoning and motivation.

Lifting a scalpel now, she asked Arthur how best to remove the breasts.

"Why do that?" he asked.

'To gross them out. The idea is to gross them out as much as I possibly can. Now tell me how to begin and where to go with the scalpel." Arthur did as instructed, swallowing his inner quaking and the sense of regret infiltrating his heart.