Final Edge

CHAPTER 4

The following day. Lucas awoke in Meredyth's arms, a place he had sought on and off for as long as they had known each other, but this time it felt right. He sensed her comfort in his arms, and he reached around her, holding her closer, tighter, filling his nostrils with the smell of her hair, all the while wondering when and how they had made it to the bedroom from the living room.

Her eyes came open, and she tenderly, longingly returned his embrace, until soon they were locked in a passionate kiss.

When she broke it off, coming up for air, she said, "That peyote works wonders."

"Here I thought it was me…"

"I was referring to sleep."

"Then you slept restfully?"

"I did, and I dreamed."

"A pleasant dream, I hope," he replied.

"Dreamed of a world of clouds to walk on and waterfalls to stand beneath, of a warm spray of water cleansing my body, and there were hillsides of flowers and roaming deer, birds overhead, a lake, a canoe, snowcapped mountains in the sky and reflected in the lake."

"Sounds like Indian paradise. The peyote payoff, I call it," he joked.

"It was beautiful, Lucas. A million miles of far away…"

"Were you alone or was I there?" he asked.

"You came into the viewfinder about the time I woke up."

"Figures!" He placed a finger to her cheek, tracing a line to her lips before he again kissed her. She leaned into him, and their bodies tingled against one another. He inched downward and buried his face in her bosom, nibbling at her neck, biting at her bra, and making sounds like a wolf. Lucas became hard and firm, and Meredyth responded by sinking her teeth into his shoulder and sucking on his skin, bringing up a red welt.

"You're now officially a marked man," she joked, and seriously added, "and no one, not even your Tsali, can have you now. And no one but I can be your cactus flower. Only me."

"I'm all yours," he promised, then gently rolled further atop her and passionately found her. Together they entwined, becoming one sentient being with a single purpose.

Their lovemaking rose to a crescendo and ended in mutual exhaustion, until she revived Lucas, and their playfulness turned again into burning passions that rose anew like a flame from the ashes. The loving continued for another hour in waves, eddies of shivering passion. Finally, they lay in the aftermath of their passions, their lovemaking over, and Lucas climbed from the bed. He began putting on his pants.

"Hey! Where're you going so fast, Injun?' she complained.

"I'm going to rustle you up some breakfast, sweetheart," he said with an exaggerated Texas drawl.

"Don't you think we ought to…you know…at least talk about what just happened?"

"Don't analyze it, Mere. It's why we've never made it as a couple in the past."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, God, here we go."

"What do you mean?" she repeated.

"You…you and your…shrinking response! I'm beginning to think it's your coping mechanism, your way of pushing me away whenever we get intimate."

"Shrinking response…Clever, very clever, but what's that supposed to mean? And since when did you start using words like coping mechanism and intimate? You been sneaking episodes of Phil and Oprah?"

"I don't want to get into another disagreeable confrontation with you over a perfectly natural fondness we have for one another. Just let it be, like the song says."

"Fondness? Is that what this is, a fondness for one another? Is that how we wound up in bed together last night? And come to think of it, how did you get me in bed last night? And you call it fondness? We make mad passionate love this morning, and it's out of a fondness?"

"How do I know how we wound up in bed? If you don't want to accept the fact that I genuinely care about you, then blame it on the peyote."

"Seriously, how did we wind up in bed last night?" she asked.

"I don't know." He shrugged and disappeared as a pillow came at his head.

With him gone, she lay back in the bed, smiling, secretly pleased with the direction they had gone in. Perhaps this time the bond would be stronger than the sum of all her fears, fears that had kept her at arm's length from Lucas all the years they had known one another. He had always represented a dark and perilous ocean to her, a man she thought dangerous, a man who made her lose herself entirely at the end of his fingertips. She even feared telling him this simple truth.

She got up, showered, and dressed, and in a happy frame of mind, she found him in the kitchen, the sink having been thoroughly Ajaxed. With the smell of bleach and bacon competing, Meredyth attempted to continue the bedroom topic over breakfast. "Are we just going to call it a drug-induced stupor-what has happened between us-or are we going to pursue a lasting relationship, Lucas?"

"I would like to keep you, Meredyth, but not at the price of analyzing every action I take, every g'damn word I say."

"Whatever are you talking about? God, you can be so…so…"

"Fond of you? Like when I said the word, you felt compelled to ridicule it. I meant it in the best of all possible…meanings."

"What about love? Would you say what we have between us is love?"

He clenched his jaw and hesitated a moment.

"Well, Chief?" she pressed.

"Yes, damn it, I believe it is."

"Is what?"

"Is what you said."

"Is what I said? What'd I say?"

"You know…what you said."

"You can't even bring yourself to say it, can you?"

"Maybe because of the fact that you, Mere, have always made it clear that… that guys like Byron…or someone like him are more suited to you and your social standing and the lifestyle to which you've become accustomed."

"After last night and what he did, trust me, Byron isn't suited to me in any way, shape, or form. He's history. I should have known him better than I did."

"Oh, really? I didn't know. Then I'm the rebound guy…maybe?"

"No, Lucas, I've always…" Now she hesitated.

"Always what?"

"Felt great…fondness for you; it's just that I've also always… well, always…"

"Always what?"

"…also feared loving, that is, feeling fondly toward you as well."

"Come on. What's to fear?"

"You'll break my heart, one way or another. Your job for one. If I let myself love you as totally and completely as I want to, and something should happen to you…I'd be… devastated."

He stood and walked around to the table to her, and taking her in his arms, he kissed her anew. They embraced for some time, their clothing beginning to shed, when a phone call interrupted them.

"Damn, let it ring," she said.

He kissed her deeply, probing her mouth with his tongue. As he did so, he lifted the receiver and listened to the voice on the phone. He pulled back from her lips, held the phone up and away, covering the mouthpiece with his hand, and said, "It's Uncle Tebo. Curious if we know anymore about last night's goings-on." He then spoke into the phone and urged Tebo to have patience. "Not even Chang works that fast. By the way, tell no one about this. I don't want it broadcast in the Res Report at the Coushatta, any more than I want it in the Houston Chronicle, okay?" he finished, and hung up knowing he'd asked the impossible of Tebo.

'Take me home, will you, Lucas? I really have to change before going in this morning."

"Maybe you ought to take some time off, visit a relative or friend. Leastways go stay at your parents' house in Clover Leaf like Leonard said."

"Get outta Dodge, you mean? Run and hide? Nice try, and thanks for the protective thoughts, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let some nutcase chase me from my home and duties. No, I've got a full calendar both at the precinct and at my private office downtown. So, if you don't mind, sweetheart, get me there on time."

As they pulled up to Meredyth's condo, he pointed out the doorman and asked, "Is that the fellow who delivered the bundle of eyes to your door, Mere?"

"No, that's Max. You want the day man, Stu. Max comes on at ten P.M."

"So when does Stu come on duty?"

"Nine, nine-thirty in the morning, somewhere in there."

"Someone needs to grill him about who handed him the package. Maybe we can get a composite going."

"I'm sure he'll cooperate. I'll ask him to drop by the Thirty-first on my way out. Now stop worrying," she said, exiting the car. "You do love me, don't you?"

"I do, Mere. I've always loved you, but you know that."

"I haven't…not always, not when you were with Tsali."

"That was a mistake. I know that now."

She leaned in though the window and kissed him goodbye.

"Are you sure you're up to driving?" he asked.

"Worrywart. Lucas, I want my own car, and I want to walk through that door and up to my home without fear. I won't be run out of my apartment any more than I'll be run out of my life."

"Despite my misgivings, I respect your motives and wishes, so I am smiling and saying see you later, my white Anglo beauty."

Meredyth waved him off as he pulled away from the curb. In his rearview, he watched her go toward the safety of her door. Earlier, he had scanned the entire street, looking in all directions for anyone appearing suspicious or overly interested in either of them. The only one seeming to take notice of Meredyth was the night-shift doorman, who courteously opened the door for her as he chimed, "Good morning, Dr. Sanger. I do hope all is resolved and you won't have any further problems."

"Thanks, Max, and would you have Stuart ring me upstairs when he comes on? I have to speak with him."

"Sure, sure, Dr. Sanger."

"Thanks, Max, and for your concern last night and this morning."

"Don't mention it, ma'am. Only wish I coulda done more, Dr. Sanger. If you'd like, I could ride up to your place with you, have a look around before you go inside, if you'd like, I mean."

"That won't be necessary, Max. I'm the only one with a key, and it's thirty floors up. Not likely to be anyone lurking inside, but thanks for the thought all the same."

Max tipped his hat to her and nodded. "You're welcome, ma'am, Doctor."

She went for the elevator, feeling Max's eyes on her, curious or sympathetic, most likely both. She also wondered at the creeping inchworm of doubt that suggested that Max or Stu or any number of people she saw on a daily basis in the building could have had something to do with frightening the hell out of her and Byron the previous night. Foolish thought, she reasoned, but when the elevator door opened, she had to smile at four people exiting the building who smiled back, all long-term tenants save one, the newest face in the building, a petite but buxom young girl in jogging suit, her Jack Bull terrier straining at his leash as they exited the elevator.

"Morning."

"Morning."

"Morning."

"Morning."

They all sounded genuine; they all looked harmless enough. They all also had heard something about police and a coroner's van having descended on their condo homes. She could only imagine the buzz at the next owners association meeting.

How much did her neighbors know? How much had Max already revealed to the people living in the building? Who was that new girl? What'd she do for a living? Wasn't there some association rule about dogs in the building when she had bought into her condo? What had happened with that?

The elevator doors closed on Meredyth, and she found herself alone with all the dizzying bombardment of questions and the whirring vibration of the cab ascending to her floor. "Who's wanting to make me fear my own neighbors?" she asked aloud.

She arrived at her floor, glad to exit the confining cab and briskly walked to her door. But she was stopped on seeing a note tucked beneath the knocker. It made her pause.

"Likely just a concerned neighbor," she told herself. She stepped up to the door and snatched the note open.

It was from Byron. A note of apology. Said he'd been back to look in on her. Felt panicked at being unable to reach her by phone. Tried her parents' house in Clover Leaf. When that failed, tried driving out to Lake Madera to the ranch house getaway, but car threw a gasket. Repair took hours. Returned here by cab, knocked knuckles raw. Gave up. Again sorry for rude behavior in having abandoned her when she most needed him. Signed By.

"Fuck you, Byron," she replied, pushed the door open, and stepped into her home.

The message light on the phone blinked so rapidly it seemed to be screaming at her. Byron, no doubt.

As she changed, she thought of how best to break it off with him. What she really wanted to break off, however, would get her jail time.

Once at his Precinct 31 basement office, Lucas Stonecoat found his wide oak desk as cluttered as ever with pending caseload work-Houston criminal cases gone unsolved for generations, known as cold cases. Cold casework had become Lucas's expertise, as he had spearheaded tracking the backlog for a decade now. When he had first come on as a Cold Case detective, he'd found the basement offices here a cluttered library filled with dust- laden files and boxes bulging with the murder books on people whose often violent and mysterious deaths had gone unanswered and untangled. Confronted by whole walls from floor to ceiling filled with files Lucas had transferred to computer disks. The old files themselves were in the process of being destroyed, most already at the city dump incinerators, but one murder file had intrigued Lucas, had in effect called out to him, and so he had set it aside, saving it from destruction. Its uploaded counterpart on the computer screen didn't have the same aura of spirit surrounding the hard file and the actual crime-scene photos, only three of which could be transferred to the database, that number having been agreed upon by those in charge in order to save on memory.

Lucas had stockpiled hundreds of murder-scene photos dating as far back as the 1890's with the intention of creating a publishable book with comments on each photo from a forensic photographer-Perelli, a forensic shrink- Meredyth, and a murder cop-himself. But the project had bogged down as all of them were kept so busy in their respective fields, and while Lucas himself dealt with overseeing the enormous task of transferring hard files to disk. While he had a crack team of men and women under his direction who worked independently and well without a lot of supervision, the Cold Room created its own steady stream of work-related headaches.

Lucas had been assigned the Cold Room files from the moment he had walked into Precinct 31, and he had made the task his own, coordinating with every precinct in the city to create a database of Cold Cases for use across the city, the state, and the nation. While the COMIT program had limitations, he had had the files cross-referenced with Detective Jana North's Missing Persons division. She had unsolved cases dating back to the 1920's. She'd admired what he had done with the Cold Case murder bonks, and now she was coordinating MP files in other jurisdictions with her own, modeling the COMIT in her area of expertise. Other cities, across the state and the nation, had begun to fashion similar programs after the Houston model, and as a result, Lucas had often been called away to assist in developing those programs. Even the FBI had taken an interest in COMIT, giving Lucas an opportunity to visit Washington, D.C., and to meet such luminaries as the Director of the FBI and forensic guru Dr. Jessica Coran.

Even more impressive, Dallas, his former home and police department, with which he had parted on very bad terms, had put in a request for his help after all these years. Dallas PD had refused to pay him compensation for the injuries he'd sustained when he and Wallace Lafayette Jackson-both off duty at the time-had given chase after a young Hispanic-black hellion who had been terrorizing the city with a robbery spree growing increasingly violent. They'd expected the robbery spree to escalate to murder at any time. Jackson had been driving, and when they cornered Elzono, Jackson's car careened into the suspect's car, the impact setting Jackson's car ablaze. Jackson was shot and slumped over at the wheel as Lucas leaped from the fiery vehicle, returning fire under a hail of bullets from Elzono. Lucas killed the young man, later made into a saint of the neighborhood, Hector "Malcolm X" Elzono, who, after seeing the movie and reading the book, had proclaimed himself, "The reincarnation of Malcolm, returned from Hell, ready to set this world on fire, man!"

All bullshit, as Elzono's interpretation of X and his Muslim teachings was as perverted as the teachings of A1 Quaeda.

Jackson, hit in the chest, was enveloped in smoke and flame and burned alive while Lucas fought to pull him free of the inferno, Elzono still shooting and laughing at the sight. Finally, Lucas's aim sent Elzono to his grave, and with Elzono shot dead, Lucas tried even more desperately to pull the trapped Jackson from the flames. Lucas burned his hands, arms, cheek, and neck in the failed attempt. He had also been hit by bullets, and had suffered head and internal injuries in the crash. Lucas would spend almost a year in rehabilitation while fighting for compensation from the Dallas department.

Dallas's Internal Affairs jumped on the alcohol content in Lucas's system, and that in the seared body of Jackson as well. Following policy, the department denied benefits to either man, and Lucas wound up suing for both himself and for Jackson's family. He won his case only after years of struggle and condemnation on both sides. Lucas had had to start over in Houston, but not as a detective. He'd had to prove himself over again, starting from the bottom rung as a new recruit, and even after beating these odds and overcoming his physical problems, still Houston PD, remembering Dallas, placed him on desk duty here in the Cold Room. However, Lucas had not let the desk ride him. He pursued cold cases with the vengeance and tenacity of any competent detective pursuing a murder, disregarding the negatives, and as a result, he spent as much time on the streets, tracking criminals, as any detective on the force. His aggressiveness had earned him the respect of others, commendations, and a gold shield-reinstatement as a murder cop, a detective. He had made the best of it, and now he ran the place, having solved more cold cases than anyone in the history of the room, surpassing even the fabled Detective Maurice Remo, who had run the CC room for thirty years, retiring as Lucas had come on.

Given his bad history with Dallas, he understood why HPD brass had placed him on unsolved cases. They wanted to keep him off the streets, and they fully expected little of him beyond keeping the records tidy. The idiots had no idea how Maurice Remo and other good CC cops operated. After the grueling hours on the phone, running down people who were often in geriatric care or even dead, a Cold Case cop had to commit to a theory like a Jack Bull terrier sinks his teeth into it, and this meant hitting the pavement, ringing doorbells, interviewing, cinching a lead, following up, locking on, arrest, and interrogation-the entire gamut of the hunt.

The brass hadn't expected the Indian Cold Case worker to know anything about computers either, but again they were wrong. COMIT was a program he instituted with the help of able others. Even the FBI were now modeling their unsolved backlog storage program on the COMIT model.

Lucas thumbed open the old dusty file that had caught his attention: a skimpy murder book on a young girl named Yolanda Sims, just turned nine years of age, the picture of an angel in 1956-the year of her death. She had been found with a scarf tied tightly around her neck, and the assumption of death by manual strangulation after being tortured, beaten, and raped by some fiend had been dismissed by the pathology report made out by a Dr. Wisniewski, who signed off as Wiz. The strangulation with the scarf came after death by internal hemorrhaging from the beatings about the head and abdomen. The odds of her killer being found alive today were slim at best, but the girl remained un avenged, and the eyes in her photo struck Lucas to the core, asking, "If the monster is alive, he has enjoyed fifty years of life that should have been mine. So what're you going to do about it?"

The odd features of the crime itself posited few clues. She had sawdust in her natty hair and over her nude body. Aside from a closed adult fist, a carpet layer's nail-filled wood stripping had been used in beating her. She had cigar-sized, round bums on her legs and arms from a large soldering iron-said Wiz. She had been brutalized with what the coroner thought a screwdriver, and finally she had bled to death of internal wounds. The girl's body was left on a doorstep of a home in the southwest comer of the Jacinto City area, at the exact house number as hers but one block over from her house. The geography, the buildings, the neighborhood must be all entirely different now, and most certainly relatives, friends, neighbors-all different, older, moved on, and moved out. Nearly fifty years had come and gone. What hope of ever solving this little girl's murder now?

Still, something about the deep pools that were the black girl's eyes, the cut of her dimples, her pigtails, the simple cloth dress, the smile in the life photo comparing so starkly with the empty eyes and down-turned lips of the death photo. It all spoke to Lucas, pleading with him to take the next step. "What is the next step?" he asked him-self. Talk to her parents? Was either alive? Talk to her brother, her sister, her uncles and aunts? Some of them were younger than she was when the crime was committed; they'd be in their forties and fifties now. What could they possibly know that might help? Would any family member care to go there with Lucas as guide? Besides, hadn't the original investigative team asked all the pertinent questions of all the pertinent family members? Perhaps not. Lucas's reputation for uncovering blunders piled upon blunders in earlier cold cases had earned him recognition and kudos from most, but it never endeared him to the cops his investigating had revealed as bungling. In other cases, it wasn't so much the errors of investigators as the era of ignorance of such scientific breakthroughs as criminal profiling, technological advances, and DNA fingerprinting.

Law enforcement had learned a great deal about child abduction and murder since '56, such as the fact that only 20 percent of child abductions fell under the umbrella of stranger abductions, that the other 80 percent were abductions by someone known to have had at least some passing acquaintance with the victim. The Ward Weavers of the world came to mind, those who wooed their victims with promises and gifts and a place to stay the night, a place to light up on weed, a place to hide from their own threatening home life.

The 1956 police reports proved sketchy as Lucas's eyes scanned over the aged paper and the old script. There was a record of the detectives having talked to the parents, but a reading between the lines spoke of a bigoted-or at least jaded-police force that had written them off as shiftless niggers whose lifestyle had brought the tragedy down around young Yolanda's head. Unofficially, the dead child's parents were at very least negligent, having allowed a live- in uncle to send the nine-year-old out after dark for cigarettes and coffee. She made it back with the grocery bag, and was allowed to play out back of the house as a reward. The child then disappeared from their backyard, skirted by an alleyway, and she was returned later, dumped on the doorstep of a home a block over. The numbers on the two homes corresponding as they did-1214 Denton- Yolanda's home-to 1214 Denby Street-home of startled neighbors who'd discovered Yolanda's body and called police-nagged at Lucas, tugging like a fish on a line. He pictured the startled neighbors trying to explain to a desk sergeant over the phone what lay on their front steps, this before the days of 911 emergency dialing.

One of the original detectives felt the killer had confused the two addresses on his return. If this were true, then the killer couldn't have been a long-time resident of the neighborhood, like the girl's uncle, who had a record of burglaries, or the neighborhood dirty old man, or the pair of teens brought in for questioning. In fact, Yolanda's killer might be a total stranger to the area, and so not likely known in the area. Somebody would notice a stranger in a close-knit community, or someone new to the block, but how close-knit was this area in 1956? Was there a welcome wagon lady in the area who might know of anyone recently moved in, and if so, was she still alive for questioning? Not likely on both counts.

Lucas wondered about the possibility of a recently released sex offender taking up residence at a time when news of such releases was not divulged to the public. He thought of pursuing such a record, lost to time. What prison would he begin with, Huntsville? It was the nearest, but hardly the only one in the state.

An aged black man had been hauled in for questioning, a man who lived a few doors down. Sixty-two-year-old Jacob Perry, a man with a record for attempted molestation of a minor, was known for hanging about the schools and parks of Jacinto, always with an eye on the local children, but the detectives could not shake his alibi. He'd gone into the hospital that weekend for a hip replacement. Besides, reasoned Lucas from the standpoint of fifty years of police growth and hindsight, since the "dirty old man" was well versed in the terrain, he would have known the child's address and not confused it with a corresponding number a block away.

"Unless he was suffering from Alzheimer's," Lucas told himself now.

A pair of young thugs from the neighborhood were also questioned, Donnell Knight and Rory Billings, both of whom knew the neighborhood intimately. The detectives on the case reasoned the boys might have deliberately dumped the girl's sexually molested, tortured, and brutally beaten body on the wrong doorstep to throw suspicion away from themselves, but by the same token, police interrogators deemed the young men stupid and sloppy, seemingly contradicting their own findings. And it had been Lucas's experience that, despite popular novels and films glorifying the evil genius of killers such as Hannibal Lecter, ninety-nine percent of murderers were far too stupid to know how to divert attention away from themselves, and in practice, when they tried, it created a net thrown over themselves. In this case, the two boys' families alibied for them and they too were released.

Lucas read on. A year passed without any breaks in the case, and the thin little emaciated murder book traveled from upstairs to here, the dungeon of dead case files, and here it had remained all these years for Lucas to regard as one of thousands that deserved special heed. He didn't know why it deserved his care now, but it did. Maurice Remo had jumped in on it, when it arrived on his desk, the same desk Lucas sat at now, and the great Remo had not been able to crack the case either. In fact, Remo appeared to have given it short shrift, but he did write some marginal notes indicating that he, like Lucas, ruled out the girl's uncle, the old man, Perry, and the two boys as the killer based on the known evidence. Remo's signature on a routing sheet hinted at more information, perhaps a second volume to the investigation, but Lucas could find no additional tombstone in the paper cemetery he called home.

Maurice Remo was likely in a Florida retirement community by now, if not passed away Lucas pushed the file to a corner of his desk, as if the gesture would put an end to its nagging him; he firmly told himself that pursuing it would only be a waste of time.

In an effort to escape Yolanda Sims, he got on the phone and called upstairs to Chang's lab, anxious now to learn anything new about the god awful packages forwarded to Meredyth and him. When he located Leonard in his morgue, he asked, "Anything you can tell me about last night's findings at my and Meredyth's place?"

"Blood and serum tests show it's all from same body as I suspected. DNA typing is ongoing. Will take more time. Pretty sure now we have a young female, somewhere between seventeen and twenty-nine or thirty…healthy tissues, all of it."

"Then it's either from a murder victim or materials stolen from some medical facility, likely a morgue."

"So far as I can tell you, we here can account for all human tissues and organs, nothing missing or stolen."

"So far?"

"I have Dr. Lynn Nielsen doing the work, investigating two weeks of intake and output, paperwork to burial, and what's remaining in our freezer units. Of course, most of the bodies we process go either to one of the potter's fields or into the hands of family, and in turn into the care of a local mortician who preps 'em for funeral and burial services. Along that route, any number of people might have absconded off with body parts, especially if it's a close-lid affair."

"With missing eyes, I should hope so."

"News out of Florida has been full of unscrupulous morticians, but I don't know of any who's packaged up body parts and forwarded them to police personnel, do you?"

"No…no, that's a new wrinkle, Leonard."

"So far, Dr. Nielsen has found no discrepancies to indicate anyone stole anything from us," Chang reiterated. "They don't call me No Waste for nothing, Lucas."

"I always thought that referred to your slim waist. Doc."

"Both, I'm told. Of course, you know, Lucas, the parts could have come from another lab, morgue, or medical school."

"And you found no indication of cause of death, no toxins, no disease?" Lucas asked.

"No, nothing points to cause of death. Eyes show none of the microscopic hemorrhaging, no telltale signs of strangulation in the tissue. Nor do any of the tissue cuts show any sign of toxins or disease."

"A perfectly healthy woman without a name or a face." Lucas leaned back in his chair, his weight making it squeal. "What's our next step, Leonard?"

"Well, on the chance the human materials were stolen from someone's care, I took the liberty and contacted every hospital in the state with its own morgue where autopsies can be legally performed by trained pathologists. The number is considerably smaller than you might think. Only a few counties still allow hospital morgues to perform autopsies, and even these must be affiliated with a medical school or with the city or state Medical Examiner's Office."

"That's a good thing, isn't it?"

"Better reporting of suspicious and unknown cause of death, yes."

"I guess the number of funeral parlors in and around greater Houston is too astronomical to begin to contemplate. And I doubt anyone's going to phone in to tell us they've lost a pair of eyes, teeth, and four slices from a cadaver's abdominal organs."

As usual, Leonard did not always follow Lucas's sarcasm. He flatly replied, "Not all morgues have responded yet, but so far, none admit to having lost any human tissue whatsoever on the scale we are talking about here."

Lucas momentarily wondered if Chang meant to imply that there was an acceptable scale of medical waste and tissue loss in most hospitals, that this was chalked up to the cost of doing business. "Any way to get help from the teeth?" he asked.

"Absolutely, yes. DNA from the marrow is being matched to DNA from the organ parts. And if we find someone to match teeth to, then they will be of great benefit."

"My money's on it all coming from the same body…same person."

"I told Dr. Sanger this is my suspicion too."

"She called you?"

"Stopped by."

"Then she's in her office?"

"I suspect so by now, yes."

"Thanks, Leonard. I'm going to interface with Missing Persons. See if anything pops there."

"Pops?"

"Matches, makes any connection."

"Ahh, I see…yes. But first you may want to speak with Dr. Purvis, our expert forensic ophthalmologist. She knows a lot more about eyes than I do, so I left the eyes with her."

"Purvis, sure. I'll do that."

"Oh, and by the way, Lucas, Kim and the kids keep asking me to have you over again. You were a big hit with my girls."

"Yeah, I'd like that sometime soon, Leonard. Say hello to the kids and your beautiful wife for me."

Lucas hung up and called Dr. Catrina Purvis. She could only add in a painfully strident voice that the eyes were in need of correcting, that the owner would have worn a serious prescription with more than one prism. "She could not have worn contacts. Somewhere there's a pair of relatively thick, certainly expensive glasses gone missing. She would have worn them everywhere."

"You can tell that from dead eyes?"

"With today's technology, yes."

"Thanks, that helps, Doctor."

Lucas then telephoned Sergeant Stan Kelton at the front desk, asking if Meredyth Sanger's day doorman, Stu, had either called or come into the precinct. Kelton had not heard from the man. Lucas suggested he call Meredyth, get the number, and strongly urge Stu to come down to help with a composite on the delivery person. Kelton, who knew only what was the buzz about the case, agreed to take care of the matter. "And call Jack Tebo to come in and do the same. He spoke to the delivery person who showed up at my place." Lucas gave him Tebo's number.

Lucas hung up and then opened his computer, logging on and going to the MP files. He scanned for recent missing females-recent disappearances, females between the ages of seventeen and thirty, according to Change's estimates of age, gender, and the freshness of the stolen human tissues.

Just then Meredyth came through his door. The Cold Room was open to any and all detectives and personnel who might have a vested interest in a Cold Case, and consequently, the door was opening and closing all the time. Lucas's focus was on his computer, and he assumed whoever had entered would sign for anything they'd come for, be it a hard copy file or a floppy disk. Lucas kept working.

Meredyth reached her hands out to him, taking his shoulders in her grasp, causing him to flinch in surprise. "Hey, Wolf Clan man, it's only me," she said, soothing him, refer-ring to his clan name. "God, you're as tense as I am over this thing, aren't you?" Then seeing the array of photos of young women on his screen, she half-joked, "What're you delving into here, a lonely-hearts-dot-com singles match website?"

"Missing Persons files, Mere. They're on-line now, and I'm trying to match what we know of the body parts to anyone on this list," he said, pointing to the screen. "Look at them, all sizes, shapes, ages-the missing souls of a nation." He typed in Texas, narrowing the field. Houston and vicinity narrowed it. Finally, he called for a fifty-mile radius from downtown Houston. With each new request, the numbers of the missing dwindled, allowing more focus. When he narrowed his search by age, the files and corresponding photos came up fast and furiously. There were nine people missing. He then limited search parameters to only those missing in the last seventy-two hours.

Seven files and photos remained. Lucas had to click on the photo to go into each file.

Lucas began the process, taking each in alphabetical order, unsure what he was looking for beyond those beautiful sea-blue pupils he'd seen on Meredyth's carpet. "We can rule out all but the blue-eyed missing," he said, asking the computer to comply, and this narrowed the number to four. He then narrowed them to girls wearing corrective lenses. "Catrina Purvis tells me whoever belongs to the eyes, she had a serious prescription with prisms."

"Really? She's good."

"Jane Doe was a four-eyes. Wore them everywhere."

This latest entry narrowed his search to three remaining young women. Meredyth looked on with interest. The youngest MP was nineteen, a Helga Muncie, the oldest at twenty-eight, a woman named Mira Lourdes, and the third a girl of twenty-one named Irma Nance. "Any one of them might have once carried those eyes and teeth in her head," said Lucas. "Or else none of them have any connection to the wayward eyes."

"Oh, the wayward eye is a restless eye," sang out Dave Casey as he passed by. "Everybody's heard, Lucas, about your encounter last night."

"That thrills me, Dave. How's the Conroe case going?"

"Plodding along."

Lucas returned his gaze to the screen, staring at the photos of the three remaining possible victims, all of whom had disappeared without a trace. He tried to will himself to recognize the eyes. Helga's looked close, Mira's looked closer, and Irma's looked closest. Then, on a second go- round, they all looked closest. "No way to tell from the photos. For one, the glasses they wear obscure the eyes."

"Stare long enough and all you see are the eyes," Meredyth muttered, still holding his shoulders.

He clicked on the photo of Helga Muncie, opening the first of the three files. "This'11 take some time."

She looked at her watch. "I've got a group session upstairs I've got to be at, and then I've got to get uptown." She looked around, saw no one else at the other desks in the room was watching, and pressed a kiss to the back of his neck. "Let me hear from you if anything should click."

"Will do, but it may take some fieldwork. Only so far a computer screen will take you."

"Keep me apprised, will you?"

"Sure thing." He patted her hand on his shoulder, but his eyes remained on the screen as he began reading the first file.

Lucas didn't recall seeing Meredyth leave, and he took each of the MP files in turn, studying them in order with an eye to eliminating his search further, but instead, he had to hold Helga's file in abeyance. Perhaps it had been Helga's eyes.

One by one, he read through the details of each story, the information supplied by family members, friends, coworkers about the missing person, nothing but shining accolades. No one in any of the three cases had the slightest notion how their loved one or friend could simply vanish, but in each case they had.

When he looked up again from the computer files, it was nearing two in the afternoon, and he hadn't eaten. His research had focused in on how much trouble each girl had with her eyes. Unfortunately, all three had serious sight problems and eyewear. Still, he felt good that he'd been able to narrow his search from hundreds to only these three.

Lucas again called Chang. "I've narrowed my search from reported missing persons cases that might match the unusual circumstances of our case down to three, Leonard."

"Fantastic."

"From these three, I'm going to obtain dental records on each, and we'll get your pal Davies to see if any of them are a match with the teeth found at Meredyth's." Dr. Thomas Phillip Davies, the forensic orthodontist Lucas referred to, had already extracted DNA from the teeth for Chang.

"Wonderful idea. Good work. I've already provided the teeth for Dr. Davies, so when time comes, let us know."

"Thanks again." Lucas hung up and then he called upstairs to Meredyth's office, hoping to catch her and update her on his progress, but he was informed that she'd left for her private practice and could be reached there in an hour. He decided to get a bite to eat and call her afterward.

He ran a hard copy of the three files he thought could be a match to the eyes and teeth. He'd spend the afternoon obtaining the dental records he required, knowing it would be tough to get these, as all three files indicated dental records had not been forwarded for any of them. He wondered how common an oversight this was in Missing Persons, and made a mental note to ask Jana North about this.

Now, unfortunately, it was left to him to locate first permission and then the actual dental records for each young woman. He must make the request via the next of kin, and had to impress upon them how urgent his need was. Such a request would trigger fears in family members, and since they didn't know him, they would be doubly wary, slowing him with questions, getting their hopes up, as well as arousing misgivings, old doubts, regrets, and fears. Dental records usually meant a match with a corpse if a match were to be made at all.

He knew at this stage he must involve Detective Jana North, Missing Persons. She had done most of the work of logging on all the MP files in the COMIT system. He knew her well and trusted her. She'd be an asset in going after the dental records of each of the girls Lucas proposed investigating. Certainly, she had far greater experience in dealing with anxiety-ridden, bereaved loved ones than most of the cops at the precinct put together. He rang her number.

"Have you had lunch yet?" he asked Detective North.

"Matter of fact I haven't, why?" replied Jana. "What'd you have in mind?"

"I haven't eaten either, and I have some cases to go over with you. Meet me at Crazy Calories in ten minutes?"

"I've been seeing your turkey track on the COMIT-MP interface. Something cooking?"

"You found me out."

"Has it to do with rumors I've been hearing about you and Dr. Sanger being targeted by a mad mailer sending packets of body parts?"

"You're well informed. Try to keep a secret around here."

"Make it fifteen minutes and you're on. See you at Crazy's."

Lucas strapped on his gun and put his Wellington overcoat on, going for the door. He called out to other detectives who manned Cold Case desks in the room that he was out for the day, 'Tracking leads," he announced.

"Lucky SOB!" Casey shouted in response.

Lucas had looked in on Itchy Arnie Feldman that morning for any sign of foul play on his part, but if Arnie was involved, his poker face gave nothing away. Not the slightest twitch or snicker. Lucas had also dropped in on the M.E., Frank Patterson, and dropped a few hints about what had occurred at his and Sanger's apartments, but didn't find Patterson the least bit edgy or revealing anything in his body language. The cruel incident looked, as time had passed and the day wore on, to have no hoaxsters behind it after all.

Lucas walked the short way to the bistro, his insides screaming for a roast beef sandwich and a drink. In the back of his mind, he knew that the missing persons avenue, while a logical and methodical step to take, might net nothing. Still, he had no other lead at the moment.

He stepped off a curb and a car screeched to a halt inches from his legs. Lucas stared at the driver, his jaw clenched as the man in the car laid on his horn and cursed. The irate driver then leaped from the car, rage on his face as he came toward Lucas with a tire iron.

Lucas snatched out his badge in one hand, his Glock 9mm in the other, extending both to the charging bull's eyes. The beefy red-faced Texan stopped cold, gestured for clemency, backed to his door, climbed into his pickup truck, and roared off, leaving Lucas standing in the street.

"What the hell's the matter with people?" he asked no one in particular as he holstered his weapon.

In a moment, he carried on toward the restaurant, hoping Jana wouldn't keep him waiting long.