Final Edge

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?"

"Yeah, I can really see you fitting in there with the cappuccino crowd. Look, I gotta call Chang, get his CSI unit over here. Hell, this is human remains.. Damn sure ruined my night. They'll have to go over every inch of this thing."

"Christ!" Tebo banged an open palm into the doorway, causing some of Lucas's gun collection, hanging on the adjoining wall, to shake loose and go helter-skelter, barrels tilted, handles swaying.

"Hey, easy! My guns."

"I like having you around, Stoney. You're like insurance in my book, like having a pit bull around, but Eunice…no way I can keep a coroner's van parked outside from Eunice."

"All right, then she knows."

"She'll want you out, bro. And she'll bug me for every detail. Damn these times we live in…all kinda vipers and lunatic snipers coming out of the woodwork everywhere you turn. Can't go out to dinner anymore without packing a weapon."

"Agreed."

"What with you being a cop…amigo, seems doubly foolish of you to've opened that package at all. Hand- delivered, that weird return address. Suppose it was anthrax or some other infectious disease?"

"I suppose you're right, Jack."

'Tell me, Lucas, being Wolf Clan in the Cherokee Nation and all… you got something going with that convent chick on the side that might've, you know, pissed her or the boyfriend off maybe?"

"Hell, no. You know I prefer a mature lady."

"Then what connection do you have to that convent school?"

"None, damn it."

Tebo's frown said he wasn't buying it.

Lucas opened his palms in the universal gesture for confusion. "Look, before I gave any mind to the return address, for just a moment, I thought it might've come from some bastard on the reservation who'd gutted a deer," he confessed.

"Yeah, sure, when you got that first whiff, whew! First thought was reservation road kill cookin', huh?"

It made Lucas laugh. "Thought someone was sending a buffalo burger through the mail," he said to keep the joke rolling.

Tebo laughed lightly, "Hey, don't knock the favorite tourist dish. It's on every menu now 'long with-"

"Spare me, Jack. Don't go there."

Both men had family on the Alabama amp; Coushatta Indian Reservation near Huntsville. Both had found a life off the reservation. Tebo's family ancestry was Coushatta Comanche, Lucas's Texas-immigrated Cherokee.

"So, you've got no idea who might be behind it?" asked the big man at Lucas's side as he too dropped onto the sofa.

"I suspect it's a joke. Has to be a sick prank."

"Christ, if that's true…Some friends you've got, amigo. You give any thought to it's maybe originating with that prick cousin of yours, Billy Hawk? Or worse yet, his boss?"

"Zachary Roundpoint's too busy with his casinos and Indian mafia networking to play games like this with me. Besides, there's no animosity between us."

'Tell that to Billy Hawk. He still thinks you stole his wife from him."

"Bullshit. Everybody on the res knows she left him because he hooked up with Roundpoint. I had nothing to do with her leaving him. Billy brought that all on himself."

"You told me she wanted him out of the picture, so she and you could ride off into the sunset, man. I don't forget a thing like that."

"I thought I told you to forget that, Jack! I told that to you in confidence, so don't repeat it."

"Confidence? How many others've you told the same story to? Stoney, you light up on beer and peyote, and you sometimes talk, my friend, but I've kept your secret." Tebo began to pace, agitated. "You gotta at least consider that maybe Billy thinks you are after him? Maybe this is his way of striking first, sending a warning, bro. I mean, Tsali, she's not known for diplomacy or discretion, and she is living in your grandfather's house with her girls- the house you bought for the old man."

"She nursed the old man in his final days."

"We all know that, but like Eunice says, your old girlfriend's got it easy because of you, and that can't sit well with Hawk."

Lucas thought, If it is Billy, let the bastard come, but he said, "Come on, Jack, you're beginning to sound like the gossips on the fucking res. That shit with Billy's old water under an old bridge."

"But the woman wanted you to snuff her husband!"

"Shhhh! Can you be any louder? Damn it, Jack, when Tsali came to me with that nonsense, she'd been pushed beyond her limit. It's been a year, and I stopped seeing her, end of story."

Tebo frowned and muttered under his breath as he wiped at his two-day-old stubble. "Seems there's plenty of room between the lines for bad blood, and-"

"Not on my part!"

"— and a desire to avenge family honor, whether-"

"Bullshit!"

"— whether you've sworn off her or not!"

"Jack!"

"Either on Billy's part or hers."

Lucas pictured the beautiful, young Tsali of his childhood, the one he'd wandered the banks of the Trinity River with, the one he had made love to before leaving for Viet Nam. The one who had rejected him when he chose to live among the whites, marrying his cousin, Billy Hawk, instead. He gave a thought to the short, stocky Billy as well, a henchman now for the local Indian crime boss, Zachary Round- point. "What're you suggesting, Jack?" Lucas stepped back to the kitchen, pointing to the awful package stinking up his sink. "That Tsali could do something like this?"

"A scorned woman, all that, you know."

"I know her too well. Tsali wouldn't do something like this. I know her."

"How well do any of us know what others are capable of, Lucas?"

"Drop it, Jack. Tsali is doing well; I speak to her from time to time. She doesn't hate me. As for Billy, I haven't had any dealings with him whatsoever since he's taken up with Roundpoint's crowd." As much as he grudgingly admired Zach Roundpoint, Lucas's being a Houston police detective prevented any public dealings with the man.

"All right, smart guy, then who?" asked Tebo. "Who's got the cajones to send you something this bloody nasty?"

Lucas took a deep breath of air. "This's more likely the work of those bonehead idiots down at the precinct, testing me."

"Yeah…sure, that's it!" Tebo smiled wide. "When you get in tomorrow, they'll be studying your reaction. You'll see." Tebo laughed, his belly rising and falling. He decided he liked this solution.

"They will've read all the reports to see if I freaked out…see if I called in the bomb squad or a CSI unit, all of it, no doubt."

Both men breathed easier with this notion, and Lucas offered Tebo a beer from the fridge, and together they relaxed a moment, Lucas switching on a Houston Astros game. Tebo lifted the note with the cryptic poem on it.

To the backdrop of the announcer, Tebo mused, "Lousy at poetry, whoever the jerk-or jerks-are. So, you think they got the parts from Chang's crime lab or the morgue?"

"That'd be my guess. Sometimes waste isn't disposed of properly, you know…hear about it all the time. One of those bozos like itchy Arnie Feldman is in the morgue maybe…maybe on legitimate business when he sees this, sneaks the stuff out, wraps it up, and sends it to me."

"This's the guy everybody calls The Itch?"

"Yeah."

"Why The Itch? He got a bad case in his BVDs?"

"Well, joke goes that he's never had an itch he didn't scratch. Anyway, to add to the mystery, The Itch hires a little prostitute off the street to dress up in a Catholic school uniform to deliver the package."

"Yeah…yeah!" Tebo's eyes lit up. "She was maybe a hooker or a stripper dressing the part, pal," Tebo said, toasting with his beer. "She was no little kid. Kick-ass body. Had that uniform bulging. Lot of makeup, eyelashes, eyeliner, rouge, lipstick as thick as molasses."

"Gotta be Feldman scratching another itch. He spent a lot of time in vice, knows every prostitute on the street."

After a long silence, Tebo asked, "Suppose you're wrong."

Lucas silently considered this. If it weren't a stupid prank, if it had come from some enemy, it presented a real threat, a warning of some kind, or it could be someone's reaching out, pleading for the Cherokee detective to put an end to his killing again. No way to be sure. Not a clue. To Tebo he simply said, "Got to be a prank."

Lucas's red face somewhat camouflaged his scarred right cheek and neck, until the scar flinched with his consternation, as was the case now. The twinge called to mind how he had gotten the scar in a fiery shootout early in his career as a police officer in Dallas. Now a detective in Houston, he had little desire to relive that day many years before, but he could not escape it either, tattooed as it was on his countenance.

Tebo considered the worried look on his friend's face, and he thought how tall and angular Lucas was even here in his sitting position.

The phone rang, and Lucas grabbed it up as if it might be a lifeline to take his mind away from the package and what it portended.

Dr. Meredyth Sanger, the precinct psychiatrist, gasped out her words. "I need you right away, now, to come over here, Lucas. Can you come over now?"

He heard the desperation in her voice. "What's happened?"

"Something awful… arrived in the mail… can't fathom it."

Lucas thought she must mean some bad news, a death in the family perhaps. "I have something I've got to deal with right here at the moment that requires my presence here. Believe it or not, my apartment may be in need of a crime-scene unit."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I got a strange package in the mail," he explained, "extremely strange."

"Is it…in any way human body parts?" Meredyth's voice rose.

"How did you know?" Lucas nearly shouted.

"I got a package too."

"Body parts in a Styrofoam-lined box?"

"Eyes…a pair of eyes, Lucas, and two teeth! I freaked out."

'Take it easy. Tebo and I wanna believe it's some of the guys down at the precinct, pulling a hoax, you know, using autopsy debris."

"It's a pair of eyes, Lucas. Hardly autopsy culls. Some sick SOB has mailed me a pair of bloody eyeballs and… and teeth… with a crumpled note and a CD."

"Eyes, teeth, a note, and a CD," he repeated, "Christ."

On hearing this, Tebo switched off the TV and leaned in to listen.

Lucas added, "This is too foul even for Feldman and Patterson. Tell me, what does the note say? And have you played the CD?"

"It's fashioned in poetic lines." She read the note to him. " 'Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, I give you peace beyond the confessional booth.' Whoever sent it knows I'm Catholic."

"Sounds similar to what I have here. Whoever it is, he's targeted us both, and if it isn't the idiots downtown…if it's for real, we need to protect ourselves, Mere."

"Agreed. Sounds like a revenge motive of some twisted sort. Listen to what's on the CD."

Coming over the line were the lyrics and music of the song "(I Had) The Time of My Life" from the hit film Dirty Dancing. In the context of the moment, given that someone had cut out the eyes and organs of a body and sent it to the two police officials, the lyrics proved chilling.

Lucas pictured Meredyth, her tall frame shivering at the circumstances, and yet she had steeled herself enough to have played the CD while alone with the heinous package she had opened. Lucas found her beautiful and intelligent as well as courageous, as he had worked many cases with the ash-blond psychiatrist's invaluable help.

When she came back on the line, she said, "Maybe it's somebody we put away."

"No. Everyone we've put away is either dead or still behind bars."

"Someone's behind it…someone who hates us both. Perhaps orchestrating it from behind prison bars," she persisted. "Whoever did this must hate me a great deal, Lucas."

"We'll find out who's behind it. Mere. Trust me. Where are the eyes now?"

"Spoiling my gray carpet in the living room. I dropped them the moment I realized what I had in my hands."

"How was the package delivered, by hand or via the mail, what?"

"Left with the doorman, who brought it up for a tip."

"Any return address on the package?"

"My private office downtown. It looked harmless enough."

"I'm on my way. Go to a separate room until I get there."

"I already have. I'm calling from outside on the deck."

"I'm on my way," he reassured her.

Lucas gave Tebo the number to call Chang's crime scene unit. "Dispatch them to both locations, Jack. I'm on my way over there to Meredyth's."

Tebo waved him out the door and once alone, he realized he'd been abandoned with the thing in the other room. He stared through the doorway at the opened parcel in the sink, and suddenly felt a raw fear waft into the living room. He got on the phone to dial Chang. While Chang's phone rang, Jack Tebo tried to imagine the kind of mind that could conceive of such a deed, and then follow through with this insulting attack on both Stonecoat and Dr. Sanger. He himself could not harm a hair on the head of a mouse, knowing the deep empathy he would feel during such an act, even on the smallest of sentient creatures. Destroying a life would haunt his sleep. He could not imagine how anyone calling himself a human being could operate without falling apart after committing murder. Lucas had told him all about the sociopathic mind-set of murderers and serial killers in particular, but still Tebo could not fathom the kind of thinking that went into long, tedious fantasizing of rape, torture, and murder plans. He wondered now about the kind of mind that could do this to his friends.

Chang's assistant Lynn Nielsen came on the line, and Tebo explained that Detective Stonecoat needed a CSI unit at both his apartment and the condominium home of Dr. Meredyth Sanger immediately. Dr. Nielsen replied, "I cannot, sir, Mr. Tebo, authorize two CSI units to descend on locations on the say-so of a friend of a detective's."

Tebo gnashed his teeth and lied, "We got an anthrax letter here and another one at 1220 Belmont Drive, Dr. Sanger's place. Do you, or do you not, want to take responsibility, Dr. Nielsen?"

"All right…all right…I'll dispatch the teams on Detective Stonecoat's order. Have him call immediately."

"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."