04.Final Edge v5 (4 page)

"Damn it, he's in transit to Dr. Sanger's."

"All right. I'll get his dispatcher on the line. I'll speak to him directly."

Nielsen hung up and Tebo stared at the phone, and spoke to it. "Maybe it is all a gag! Maybe this Dr. Nielsen is in on it. Hell, maybe even Dr. Sanger's call is part and parcel of the prank. Gotta be it. They're all in on it."

"In on what?" Tebo's heavyset wife stood in the doorway, having come to look for him when she saw Stonecoat fleeing off in a panic. "What's that awful odor?" she asked, going for the kitchen.

Tebo stood and blocked her way, pleading, "Don't go in there. It's not something you want to see, Eunice...Eunice!"

She pushed past him and into the kitchen, going for the thing in the sink sitting amid the discarded wrapping paper. The stench and the sight made her gag and ask, "What the hell is it, Jack? What the hell has that man brought down on our place now?"

"You can't blame Lucas for this."

"Who else you know in this life who's going to have such a horrible thing sent to him? I want him outta here, Jack. This is the limit, the camel and the straw, believe me! Out he goes or I go! You gotta make the choice. Jack Tebo. That man is a magnet for trouble. Trouble, hell, he attracts danger and death."

DR. ARTHUR BELKUIN had a nightmare that wouldn't go away, the unremitting, repeating replay in his head of the ax coming down on Mira Lourdes's neck, and in the nightmare, her head revolved in a one-eighty-degree turn, her eyes open and staring up at him, her lips parting, asking why... why...why?

He still could not give her an answer, because he didn't himself know why Lauralie had selected her for death. He had watched how Mira Lourdes had been selected, but he didn't know why she had been chosen, but chosen she was, right out of the White Pages. Lauralie had opened the hefty Houston city directory to the Ls, saying she needed someone named Lourdes to kill.

"Lords as in gods, like my Lords?" Arthur had asked.

She'd spelled it out for him as her eyes scanned the directory page. "L-O-U-R-D-E-S, Lourdes."

"Why Lourdes?" he'd asked.

"Only a Lourdes will do." She then found four candidates listed in the book.

They took down each address and cased each home. One was in a faraway, upscale gated community north of the city. A second was in a pleasant neighborhood and had a high fence around it, guard dogs, and a prominently displayed ADT alarm system. A third was in a rundown section of the city that was dangerous to drive through, and Arthur's expensive car stuck out like a zebra there, she had told him. The fourth house proved perfect. At the end of a cul-de-sac, bushes all around, and a car for sale sitting out on the lawn. It was a perfect excuse to ring the doorbell and to put Mira Lourdes at ease. Lauralie claimed their finding Mira Lourdes was nothing short of fated, that she was placed before them by God.

Arthur stared up at the ceiling fan he had installed in the old farmhouse bedroom; he lay on his back, looking about the room, unable to sleep, feeling Lauralie's heat beside him. He had never known anyone to exude so much heat from her body as did Lauralie.

From outside at the pens, the sound of his two beautiful greyhounds wafted in to him, a low, guttural chorus of baying. Arthur had wanted to bring the dogs inside, knowing they were agitated at the new home, and he'd always kept them indoors at night before, but Lauralie didn't care for them so much, and she had pleaded that she wanted Arthur all to herself tonight, and as always, she got her way, and here he was, the sex over, lying awake in a fitful stew of images that refused to let him so much as doze. True slumber kept just ahead of him, just out of mental reach, denying him even a moment in the land of nod.

By comparison, she lay sound asleep; in fact, she slept nightly like a newborn innocent, a kind of pink fluff cloud seemingly hovering over her angelic chaste features. A slight nasal whine welled up from her, escaping in a contented breath, while he tossed and turned, unable to get the images of Mira's death out of his head, and unable to flee the quivering questions that swam like so many water beetles skimming over the surface of his consciousness, slowly driving him out of his mind.

Arthur watched himself once again dropping the ax on Mira Lourdes's neck without enough force to severe the head cleanly; he watched Lauralie finish the job. He saw himself against the night sky, struggling with the body, trying to get a grip on it without directly looking at the huge, bloody cavity that remained of the wounded neck, trying desperately to get no more blood on himself. All this while the greyhounds protested fiercely, the smell of blood agitating them into a competition of braying and baying.

He detested blood. "Why can't we simply poison her?" he had asked Lauralie when they had planned the killing, but Lauralie had said she wanted the death to be fast, final, and traumatic; she'd added that Mira's death was the least of her concerns, but that law-enforcement officials and the public must be outraged on learning how she'd died in a beheading with her parts scattered.

He had argued about getting Mira's blood all over, using an ax as Lauralie planned. She had countered, "Then we'll do it outdoors."

While carrying Mira's body, Arthur looked up at the stars and the three-quarter moon that looked on their deed. The body felt like an overstuffed potato bag, bulging here, sliding there, slipping here, as if the thing wanted escape from his arms, as if even in death she detested him and his touch. He struggled to get the body inside where Lauralie awaited them.

Stepping inside the little farmhouse, he heard Lauralie talking to the severed head. Lauralie stared into the dead eyes as she spoke. "They'll pay now. They'll all pay now, especially Dr. Meredyth Sanger and her lovey-dovey friend, Lieutenant Detective Lucas Stonecoat."

"Why do you hate them so much?" Arthur asked, standing in the house at that point, blood dripping from the corpse's enormous cavity. "You must tell me now...now that I've killed for you."

"You call what you did killing? Shit, I had to finish the job you started. And remember, I've killed before."

"You didn't really kill your own mother, did you?" v

"I did. It was easy. She made it easy, too easy, in fact."

She'd told Arthur how she had used her mother's own alcoholism against her.

"Why Mira Lourdes? Why'd you need to kill someone named Lourdes? And why do you hate Sanger and her friend so much?"

"In time...in time, Arthur. For now it's enough for you to know that I hate them passionately." She considered the body for a moment as he placed it onto the steel table at the center of the room. The house had been converted into an operating room of sorts, Arthur having accumulated equipment and furniture from his once-thriving, now-failing veterinary practice in Houston, where he had had to lay off personnel.

Lauralie had returned her attention to the severed head again, its eyes staring wide at her from the shelf she had placed it on.

Blue and lustrous, seemingly alive yet still as stones are those eyes, Arthur had thought. He thought of how those eyes had pleaded with him for mercy and how he had had to ignore that plea. And then he thought that they still bored through him like a dual pair of drills, angry now, spiteful, furious in their blueness.

Lauralie noticed his having been frozen in place by the dead woman's eyes. She taunted him, saying, "Just imagine, Arthur, the life inside these so-called dead orbs"—she paused to touch the eyes with her fingers—"still in movement at the subatomic level, the only life left only seen through a microscopic lens. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?"

"Wonder what?" he asked.

"Wonder if on some level, Mira can still see us in this world." She laughed. "When I harvest those baby blues of yours, Mira, they'll make a nice gift for someone, not to mention your other lovely parts..."

"Why, Lauralie? Why are we doing this? I gotta know; I have to understand."

"In time you will. In time even Mira here will under- "stand. Now, do that magic you promised me with your medical wizardry. I want two of her teeth and both her eyes from her head. From the body, I want slices of her major organs."

A failed medical student, Arthur had become a veterinarian in order to remain close to medicine. What Lauralie now proposed, carving up the body, he hadn't done since medical school, and he had never removed anyone's eyes, not even those of a cadaver, and he had never pulled a human tooth. Still, that night when Lauralie had come up to him in the bar, she had gotten him talking, and he had bragged about his abilities in animal surgery. She had easily talked her way into his bed that night, and soon he was making promises to her. He promised her that he could do any surgery necessary on any animal brought to him. It wasn't until much later that he learned the animal she was interested in slicing up was a human being. But by then, Arthur had said whatever was necessary to impress Lauralie, and now was the moment of truth.

He pulled on his surgical gloves, and using his bare hands, he dug a finger into the eye cavity and began to work the eyeballs loose from their moorings. Once he had them popped out, he used his scalpel to sever them from the optic nerve.

Lauralie was delighted beyond reason, beyond any delight she had ever displayed in Arthur's embrace.

Again the cry of his dogs stiffened Arthur's spine. He thought of getting up, giving up sleep altogether, and going out to his two babies outside in the cold. But it might wake her again. He'd better stay put.

Arthur rolled over onto his side, struggling with his mind to leave him in peace, to turn over one hour of blank- ness on the screen of his skull to slumber, but instead the images of horror kept up a constant barrage against him. "I'm not cut out for this kind of business. I'm too weak for this. God help me," he lamented.

Lauralie rolled over and placed her arm over him, saying, "Jesus H. Christ, Arthur, go to sleep, will you? You're keeping me awake again."

CHAPTER 3

DR. MEREDYTH SANGER'S tearful sea-green eyes widened on seeing Lucas at her door; she next threw the door open and leaped into Lucas's arms. In his arms, her body heaved, fearful and shaking in his fervent embrace. They had been close friends for a decade now, and they had tested the boundaries of that friendship to include a sexual interlude from which she'd backed off while Lucas had patiently awaited a time when they might renew their mutual passion for one another. She feared "losing herself" in him, analyzing what they had out of existence. They had argued heatedly, all that she'd needed to back further from the relationship and see to other men.

Lucas brushed her hair and held her against his chest. "It's going to be all right. It's going to be all right," he assured her, taking her face in his hands now, making her focus on his dark eyes. "I'm here now." Lucas wondered where her boyfriend, Byron Priestly, might be as she answered his thought for him.

"Byron left me alone with it...ran out the door."

"Are you kidding? He was with you when you opened the package, and he just ran out the door?"

"Said he could not put up with my patients and their sick claim on my time anymore, not after this. The sight of the eyes in the box scared the shit out of me, but it terrified him."

"Then I suppose he won't be back?"

"He wouldn't dare," she replied. "But Lucas, his prints're gonna be all over the wrapping."

"Why're his prints all over the packaging?"

"He insisted on opening it. I had put it aside...not wanting to deal with it tonight, in no rush, but him! No, his curiosity was burning a hole through his brain, so I gave in, chucked it to him, and told him to have a ball."

"And he got it right between the eyes, so to speak...two eyeballs. How prophetic."

"More like pathetic, his lack of balls."

"I can understand how a package with eyes might upset a fellow who calls himself By."

"Everything fell out, including the note, the CD, and the teeth...all over my carpet."

"Must've shook ol' By up."

"Shook us both up! Lucas, I've wracked my brain for anyone who might b£ capable of this, and even my worst client is not capable of this—and to send a foul package to you as well. Lucas, who could be behind it?"

"On my way over, I wondered if one of your clients might be behind it. Perhaps one who somehow knows our history together? One who knows about our having worked cases together, and that we have been intimate with one another?" he asked.

"The first one I thought of was Herman Philip Teal, my weirdest at present, but as for knowing about the connection we have, Lucas, anyone reading the newspapers last spring, following the Walters case, would know how closely we work together." Meredyth had offered not only profiling advice on the case, but she had helped interview Samuel Irving Walters when Lucas had arrested him for the rape and mutilation murders of six teens—all male—all occurring in the concentrated areas of West University Place, Southside Place, and Bellaire.

Meredyth took a deep breath, nourishing her shattered nerves and calming in his presence. He had that effect on people. She focused on his reassuring power and gaze, and the soft words of encouragement and support. "You're all right now. We'll get past this together, Mere."

They still stood in the foyer, the door left to stand open, neighbors creeping from their doorways, curious but tentative. It was clear she wanted out of the apartment, to run out like her boyfriend before her; she certainly didn't want to go back into the condominium alone. But seeing the prying eyes of others, she pulled him inside and closed the door.

Lucas firmly said, "Point me in the direction of these wayward eyes, Mere."

Leaning against the door now, she simply pointed to the interior.

Across the room lay the pair of human eyeballs, still attached to the optic nerves that trailed after like the fantail of exotic jelly fishes. The sight had an unholy irreverence about it, the eyes lying askew in the thick pile of her plush gray carpet, fibers clinging to the gummy irises. The flesh was as freshly cut from a human corpse as the selection of human organ tissue sent to Lucas himself.