04.Final Edge v5 (2 page)

"We should've thought to bring a Polaroid," she joked. "Damn but that felt good. Now we begin the fun work, right, Arthur? Just as we planned. You brought all your tools, didn't you? The bone cutter, the saws, and scalpels?"

"All my tools, yes...got them inside." He pointed to the old white clapboard house they had renovated for the work. He had taken hold of Mira's runaway head by the long hair, and he handed it to Lauralie's outstretched fingers.

Balling up Mira's long auburn tresses in her fist, Lauralie lifted Mira's eyes up to her own, staring into them for a long moment as blood dripped from the severed head. "Your bad luck your name is Lourdes," she said, lowering the head to her side now. Lauralie then stepped off, carrying the severed head toward the farmhouse, her jaunty, schoolgirl gait, her playful hand, and the breeze conspiring to sway the bloody dismembered thing as Arthur watched it paint Lauralie's white cotton dress and gray flannel apron as if with a repeated brush stroke. Lauiralie's hip and thigh had an increasingly large red-brown rust spot building with each step toward the house.

"God, I hope she's not planning on cooking that for dinner," he quietly said to himself.

"Come ahead, Arthur! Bring the rest of her, Arthur!" she shouted over her shoulder at him. "We'll need all of her for what we have to do."

Arthur watched a fall cardinal chase its mate into the nearby thicket.

Houston, the following evening

LIEUTENANT DETECTIVE LUCAS Stonecoat's large Cherokee hands carefully fingered the unmarked package that had arrived via courier at his apartment home. The package had been left with Jack Tebo downstairs at Tebo's Grill and Tavern, situated just below Lucas's apartment. It had been hand-delivered—no stamps or UPS or FedEx markings whatsoever. With a strange return address, that of a convent school on the north side of the city, the package simply looked out of place and unusual. The tough, seasoned cop knew no convent girls, but he had enemies both in and out of the Houston Police Department. Lucas knew he could not be too careful.

When Lucas had stopped at Tebo's, the older man had told him that he'd left a package on his doorstep, and that Lucas owed him two bucks for the tip. When Lucas had lifted the package, it had made no sound, but it felt hefty for so small a bundle, about the size of a softball; worse yet, it smelled. Not of sulfur or minerals; not even of fertilizer. Something altogether worse—something of rotting flesh—odors he'd encountered as a young man in a nameless, faraway jungle in Vietnam. Tebo's rhino-sized nostrils were so gummed up with nicotine, tar, and burger grease that he'd obviously missed the odors emanating from the package.

Lucas now carried the package inside and through his home, going for the kitchen sink. There he gingerly placed it into the basin. He toyed with the idea of calling in the bomb squad, but something nagged at him, telling him it was not an explosive, and that calling in the bomb squad boys would ultimately result in a big embarrassment.

He sought the tools he needed to carefully unwrap the box sent from Our Lady of Miracles Convent for Girls. Using tweezers and a paring knife, Lucas began to cut through the rough twine binding the package. As he worked, Lucas thought of the time he had come back from the dead on a battlefield strewn with bodies. He had been taken for dead, just another corpse to add to the growing pile that the Viet Cong had created of their enemies. They liked piling bodies atop one another, dousing them with gasoline, and burning the pyre of dead and dying.

In order to cope with the horror of his situation there in Nam, Lucas had gone into a coma of sorts, or what his Cherokee ancestors called a ghost walk, a weightless, bodiless existence in which the spirit leaves the body. During this time, he saw his body being lifted by two Viet Cong who struggled with his weight. They swung his lifeless form onto the hill of flesh, the bodies piled high and growing. It all came from an overhead view as if he were floating above the scene.

He focused again on his own body, lying lifeless beneath others now piled onto his own. But something within spoke to Lucas, an ancestral voice. A dead grandfather figure telepathically told him he was yet alive and that he must return to his body. Lucas found himself amid the smoke and clouds of a chasm. All around him Lucas could see the souls of others as they departed, so many wisps of smoke dissolving into the atmosphere as others from beyond reached out and took their hands to guide them.

Lucas fought to touch the ancestral hand, but the old man adamantly and stoically refused to reach out to Lucas, telling him in a telepathic way that it was not yet his time, that he must go back, that he had much yet to accomplish in this life. Then he was gone in the time it took for Lucas to take a breath of air.

Choking, he awoke amid the stench of decaying flesh. The battle had raged on for days, and many of the dead he lay above, beside, and under were decaying beneath a baking sun. Then he felt the corporeal flesh and heaviness of his own body again. Opening his eyes, he found himself crushed, hardly capable of breathing, below a mountain of dead men stacked like cordwood. For a time, his spirit had walked among the dead, but now he had fully returned to his senses and the horror of war.

Minutes later, with the odor of petroleum and decay filling his nostrils and mouth, Lucas heard the distinctive whirring sound of U.S. helicopter gun ships, followed by gunfire. The U.S. Helicopter Cavalry raided the battlefield in a renewed offensive, chasing off the enemy before they could torch the bodies they intended to defile. When ground forces came near enough for Lucas to hear their talk, Lucas patiently waited for them to draw nearer. Choking on the overwhelming odors he'd been subjected to for so long now, Lucas shot a hand out from the wall of dead soldiers, grabbing hold of a live American cavalryman. The act startled the baby-faced kid and his companions where they stood, each reacting, raw-nerve fashion, weapons pointed, bodies shivering at the movement in Lucas's eyes. Finally realizing that the dead man was alive, a medic corporal barked out orders that made frozen men move. They finally dragged Stonecoat's battered body from the carnage of the death heap.

"And put out those damned cigarettes!" the medic added.

Now, here in his apartment, a world and decades away from Viet Nam, Lucas felt it all over again as he sliced away at the brown-paper wrapping of a package that annoyed his every sense—bringing back the enormous dismay and revulsion of war through odor alone. The Texas Cherokee detective tore open the awful "gift" sent him. And there it was... staring back at him...a stack of pancake-shaped decaying pieces of flesh. Human or animal, it was hard to say. A sliced section of spleen, kidney, heart tissue, sliced as he had seen done in autopsy rooms, all mixed in a soupy wash of liquid residue. The decaying organ parts swam about inside a Styrofoam-lined little wood box, looking like a miniature coffin, definitely hand- fashioned.

"Son of a bitch!" Lucas tried to picture someone going to such an extreme effort to target him and to make him ill. Which of his enemies inside or outside of the department would take such pains? Who wanted to make him turn from his Native American red to a pale green? Who had access to autopsy room debris? "Assistant M.E. Patterson? Detective Arnold 'The Itch' Feldman and his buddies?" Lucas asked the empty room. "How big a jerk-off would it take to pull a stunt like this?

"No. Neither man would have the nerve. Then who," he wondered aloud, "and why?"

Lucas then noticed the note jammed between the wood outer box and the inner lining of Styrofoam. Using a pair of medical tweezers, he lifted the brown bile-stained note and opened it to reveal the cryptic message in a shaky hand. It read:

spleen on spleen,

cut true and clean,

kidney for kidney,

bake to a pie,

heart on heart,

piece by piece

I give you art,

food for thought,

and a final piece

for the feast

to grease the way to peace

Lucas studied the tight, pinched handwriting that reeked of agitation, but even as he reread the rhyme, he could get little meaning from it, save that perhaps the author wanted him to dine on the awful contents of the package, using such culinary words as grease, feast, bake, pie, cut, and food for thought. Perhaps a handwriting expert could gather more from the size of the letters, the loops and swirls that deviated from the center line, and the choice of words. However, Lucas's first impulse was to know how the package was delivered and by whom. He got on the phone and called down to the bar below his apartment. Jack Tebo lifted the receiver and barked, "Tebo's!"

"It's me. Jack, Lucas."

"Wha's up, Stoney? Want a six-pack sent up? A sandwich? Special tonight is—"

"No...I want to know if you got a good look at the guy who left that damnable package for me? Did you pay him any attention?"

"I didn't pay her too much attention, no. Rather plain- looking young woman...just got a passing glance at her. Tipped her a couple of bucks, like I said."

"A woman? You saying it was a woman?"

"Had a childlike quality to her eyes, a kind of innocence in there."

"How do you mean?"

"She was kinda vacant, you know, like a kid, but man, Stoney. She was curvaceous, my friend, sexy as they come. Small, but not anorexic, you know."

"Childlike and sexy? Tebo, you could be arrested for that. How old was she?"

"My best guess, she'd have to be in her early twenties, but strange thing..."

"What strange thing?"

"What she was wearing."

"Which was?"

"A uniform."

"Delivery uniform? UPS? Shorts and shirt? What?"

"No, not exactly. She was in a plaid skirt with suspenders over a white blouse and little string tie."

"Sounds like a schoolgirl's uniform...a Catholic schoolgirl's uniform."

"Bingo, now you mention it. Skirt was just above the knees cut high. And man, did she fill out the blouse."

"A cap? Did she wear a cap?"

"She was holding a cap in her hand, yeah. Why? What's got you all fired up? What was in the package? Was the kid 'spose to sing 'Happy Birthday' or do a strip tease for you, Stoney, or what?"

"Early twenties, huh? Little old for a convent girl," muttered Lucas.

"What's got you in such a lather, amigo?"

"The return address and the contents don't exactly jive with one another."

"Yeah, Eunice was curious about that, and she didn't like the look or the smell of the package, but you know Eunice, she just raised her shoulders and told me not to get involved in your affairs. Frankly, I'm curious myself." He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Do you know this girl from the convent?"

"Convent girls aren't in their twenties. Jack, but even so, the answer is no."

'Told Eunice it was none of our business what business you had with a girl from a convent school."

"Jeeze, Tebo, I haven't one damned clue who the girl might be or why anyone from a Catholic school would be sending me disgusting shit through the mail."

"What kinda shit're we talking about, Lucas?"

"Jack, the sender is anonymous, and the contents of the package... well, it's highly unusual."

"Highly unusual?" he repeated.

"Especially for a young woman to be hauling around."

Tebo grunted. "Unusual how?"

"Come on up and see unusual for yourself."

"Give me a few minutes...be right up. Haven't seen a good unusual for some time, bud." Tebo imagined it must be sexy under things.

"I need a witness to this, Jack."

"That bad, huh? Some bitch stalking you, huh?"

"I'm so glad my supposed love life affords you so many fantasies, Jack, but believe me, unless you are the pervert I suspect you are, you'll get no pleasure out of this business." Lucas breathed too deeply, catching up the odors of the package in his nostrils and throat again. His mind wafted back to Nam, but he fought the memories. Choking, he added, "So get up here, will you? I don't want to be alone with this thing any longer."

Finally a serious note came out of Tebo. "That bad, huh?"

"That bad, yes."

CHAPTER 2

TEBO READ THE note and stared at the contents of the package opened in Lucas's kitchen sink. A hefty, barrel chested man in an apron with his tavern's signature-logo T- shirt blazoned and stained across his chest, Tebo sputtered, "Damn, you weren't kidding. Somebody's trying to tell you something... something damned serious, Stoney. This is just sick, man, too sick."

"My own personal psycho-terrorist, it would seem."

"We better not let Eunice hear about this. She gets a whiff of this, and you're outta here, amigo...no pun intended."

"Yeah, when Eunice learns about this, she'll have me kicked out for certain," Lucas conceded. "Look, you were a butcher for a time. Does this soup and sandwich of fleshy cuts look human or animal? If it's animal, I won't have to take this quite so seriously. I'll know for certain it's a hoax."

"Hoax?"

"Bad joke then...cooked up by some of the fools in the department."

Tebo examined the contents more closely, squirming, squinting, puckering his lips, retracting his nose, creasing his forehead in a mix of revulsion and thought. His beard bobbing, he said, "Sorry, pal, doesn't look like any animal I ever cut into."

"I was afraid you'd say that. I had the same initial reaction." Lucas stepped from the kitchen and fell into an easy chair. "I've seen autopsy cuts like this, when Chang wants to take a biopsy of an organ, you know. This has the stamp of a medical man behind it."

Tebo, his nose twitching with the odor rising from the sink, followed Lucas into the living room, shaking his head in disbelief, still reeling from the odor left behind in the kitchen. "You know, amigo, I didn't smell any of that stench coming off the package when it was delivered. But like I said, Eunice—she's got a nose on her like a bassett hound— said she didn't like the smell of it. Sure gotta be some sick creep behind this! You ever give any thought to getting into another line of business? Maybe invest in that new location I'm opening on the Rivera Esplanades?"