Final Edge

CHAPTER 21

Dr. Leonard Chang shakily balanced himself atop the tin-roofed shed, having left the safety of the ladder he'd ascended, and now he cautiously made his way to the impaled body. The sight stopped him, so chillingly ironic, the proud head of the metal greyhound protruding out of the woman's abdomen.

Fearful of falling, Steve Perelli followed and stopped short alongside Chang, crouching to keep his balance, his video camera in one hand. He too stared down at the curious wrought-iron spike and made out the greyhound's arrogant grin and alert ears painted in blood, poking through the young woman's abdomen. "Looks like something out of a B horror movie," the police photographer said.

"Get the shots, and let's get her off this thing. You'll lend me a hand?"

Perelli gaped at the M.E. "That's not my job. I never handle the bodies. I place rulers beside them to indicate scale, and I get in close, to within a hairsbreadth of a puncture wound with my camera lens, but I don't touch dead people."

"Union rules?"

Perelli replied, "My rules." He'd photographed the worst kind of bloating, discoloration, bruises, slashes, even a screwdriver though a guy's skull once. He'd filmed the results of nail guns, staple guns, ordinary bullet wounds. He'd filmed brutalized, raped, and murdered women, and people run down by cars, tire marks so clearly and indelibly imprinted on their clothing and flesh that people had been put away on the evidence. He'd photographed jumpers, floaters, burn victims, and he'd busted his ass getting shots as detailed as the broken front teeth of a murdered prostitute beaten to death. In fact, he'd photographed areas of the human body that anyone else would be arrested for. But he had never been asked to handle one of them. "It's one thing to film the dead, another to touch, roll, or move the bodies. That's not my job, Dr. Chang," he repeated.

"I need you, Steve. We're stretched thin here." Chang held up a pair of surgical gloves for Perelli to don.

"You got a small army out here. Where's Ted? Nielsen? Detective North's in the house with four Feds, doing nothing so far as I can see. Call her for help."

Chang gnashed his teeth. 'Take your video. I'll get someone."

Under the first light of a cloudy dawn, from his elevated position on the shed roof, Chang could see all around the property. He watched the activity down at the stables, Ted Hoskins leading an investigation into the blood trail left by Lucas Stonecoat only hours before. He could also see the Harris County coroner and his crew finishing up with the two gunshot victims on the lawn. Through the open window, Chang heard North arguing with one of the Feds and stomping around in Meredyth Sanger's upstairs bed-room, from which Lauralie Blodgett had obviously fallen-or had she taken a leap? And if so, had it been her intent to die or simply to take flight? The hunting rifle used to shoot Lucas and the two dead boys on the lawn appeared to have flown down with her, coming to a rest alongside the shed in some brush there. Curious too was the neck, wrapped in bandages spotty with bloodstains. Chang bent over and began unraveling the bandage, that incredible new stuff he'd invested in years ago, Fresh Flesh. When the bandages came away, Chang mentally gauged the wound to the throat-three puncture marks equally spaced. It would fit with the garden tool found in Meredyth's room upstairs.

"Another puzzle piece," he muttered.

Through the tops of trees sloping away from the house, Chang made out the pier and the man-made lake, his gaze finally finding Dr. Lynn Nielsen, tall and slim in a wet suit. Assisted by divers in the water, she was dealing with the dead man in the rowboat, and confiscating the other boat riddled with bullet holes and floating upended.

Further on, across the lake, Dr. Frank Patterson had been diverted immediately to the Brody family crime scene. Via a linkup with Meredyth Sanger from the mede- vac chopper, Chang, en route to the multiple crime scenes, had been given details of where the bodies lay. Once at the Sanger cabin, Chang had set up a command post with Detective Jana North's invaluable help. Everyone was told to also be on the lookout for any sign of body parts and remains of Mira Lourdes.

Meredyth, distraught, had not remained long on the phone. She told Leonard she feared the worst, that Lucas might not make it. The thought had cast a pall over the gloomy work, and the weather reflected the grim inner turmoil Leonard felt for his badly wounded friend listed in critical condition and lying on an operating table.

Detective Jana North leaned again out the window from which Lauralie Blodgett had gone to her death. She needed the air. She was exasperated with the Feds, her body language told anyone caring to read it, like Chang down below on the "hot tin roof" where he motioned for her to join him. The local ASAC-assistant special agent in charge-and his followers had insisted on being brought in on the case, kidnapping being their angle. But Fuller and his boys remained woefully behind and hadn't done their homework. "They have no idea how vested our Missing Persons Bureau is on this case," she had bemoaned to Captain Lincoln over her cell in a private moment, pleading with him to hurry out to the scene.

Lincoln was on his way still. He'd stopped off at the hospital to look in on Meredyth and learn what he could of Lucas's condition. Jana caught herself blaming Meredyth, telling herself that if Lucas died, she'd hate Sanger for the rest of her life. At the moment, no one at ground zero here knew if Lucas was dead or alive.

She stared down at the remains of the deadly Post-it Ripper. Lauralie didn't look like much in death, but Jana had seen what the petite vixen had done at the cafe not far from here, as well as what she'd wrought here on Lake Madera. From her safe vantage point, she watched Chang carefully unwrap Lauralie's throat, freeing it of the bandage- tourniquette. A hell of a lot of loss of blood in the bedroom told the story of Lauralie's bleeding out here, and no doubt Chang's eyes would verify that a struggle for life and death between Meredyth and Lauralie had occurred, and Meredyth had not only won the battle, but had staunched the wounds of her defeated enemy while Lucas lay somewhere bleeding out.

She turned and surveyed the brightly lit crime scene again. From the appearance of things in the bedroom, including several spent shell casings, along with the location of the Remington breech-loader, Jana had a good sense of what had happened here. While Meredyth had been treated for superficial wounds caused by a three- pronged forked garden tool, the trail of mud and dirt leading up to the room suggested that someone most assuredly attacked Lauralie, bringing the garden fork down and into Lauralie's throat.

Jana paced to the door and started down the stairs and out of the house, responding to Chang's gesture to join him atop the shed. She got on her cell phone and dialed. Chang came on instantly.

"Dr. Chang…Leonard!"

"Detective North? Why're you calling? I can hear you from where I'm standing." He looked up again only to find her gone from the window. "Wait…where are you?"

"I don't want anyone else to hear this."

"Go on." The sun had slipped through the cloud cover, and a wide swath of blinding rays sent Chang's arm up to shade his eyes as he looked up at the window again, not ten feet overhead, still searching for the detective. "What is it? Where'd you go?"

"Got a call from the Brody house, one of the evidence techs named Tory."

"Yes, Tory. She is a promising intern."

"She's gotten ill over there. Has a strange story to tell about 'something' hanging from a ceiling fan in the teenager's room."

"And you think it is the rest of your missing person, Mira Lourdes?"

"Sounds extremely likely. The ET, Tory?"

"Yes?"

"She says Dr. Patterson has known about the remains in the second-story room for two hours."

"My God, no!"

"This is the first you've heard?"

"I just discovered my cell phone was switched off accidentally."

"All the same, Frank Patterson knows damn well how important finding the rest of Mira Lourdes is to me-ahhh, the family-you, all of us, and he's so damn strange that he's failed to share the discovery with the rest of us. Why?"

"You tell me, Detective North, why? Why is Frank doing this?"

"Because he's waiting for those bozos with Fuller to CSI the place before any of the rest of us, even before you, Dr. Chang."

"Still currying favor with Fuller's team. Damn Frank…never knew what side to butter his bread on."

'Tory came to me with it because she'd been unable to reach you, and she knows how Nielsen and Frank have been feuding, so she didn't want to go to Lynn out on the lake without first running it by you."

"What shall we do… what shall we do…" Chang muttered as if to himself.

"I have no idea, but the young intern, she's been dismissed by Dr. Patterson because she dared push him on the issue. Meanwhile, Patterson's focus has been on the down-stairs kitchen and basement areas. She called him an ass."

"Yes, that'd be Frank all right. What do you propose we do? We have our hands full here."

"I'm going over there, but I don't want this intern getting into any trouble over this."

"I see Captain Lincoln's car coming in. Why don't you take him over there with you. Let Frank explain things to him?"

"Great, good idea. Just wanted you to know what's going on across the lake."

"You got someone up there can help me pull Blodgett off this doggie windmill? I need someone strong."

"Sure. I'll send down a couple of big, strapping FBI boys."

She hung up. Chang cursed Patterson's inept people skills. He could well imagine how Frank had treated young Tory, who no doubt felt traumatized at finding parts of Mira Lourdes's corpse dangling from a ceiling fan.

Perhaps a silver lining, he thought, in that Mira's final remains might be located and reunited with the rest of her body-all the parts still in frozen limbo at Chang's morgue, downtown Houston, where her body was treated with the decorum, dignity, and humanity that all his guests received. If it were Lourdes's remains up in that second- story room, and Frank had let it hang there beyond the time it took to make a video record, he was breaking Chang's rules of conduct with respect to the dead.

Leonard had hoped to have a full and detailed map of precisely what had "gone down" here, as Gordon put it, by the time Captain Lincoln had arrived, but obviously a lot of the puzzle still needed fitting into place. Sending off the captain now with Detective North was a stroke of luck he realized, watching North intercept Lincoln at the driveway as he exited his car, seeing her point to the Brody house, and smiling to see Lincoln and North climb into the rear seat of his squad car and turn back for the cutoff to the Brody house across the lake.

Earlier, while en route to Madera Lake, Lincoln had called Chang, and had bellowed into the phone, "Leonard, I want to know what went down exactly when, and in what order. I need a time line. Every bloody detail, Leonard. I want to know what happened to Lucas Stonecoat. Shit, you know how many cop-killing wakes I've gone to this year, and it's only September."

Lincoln would be back soon for all the answers. His going to the Brody house with Jana meant only a temporary reprieve. Chang did not know all the answers, not yet. Hell, he had just learned of the Lourdes remains at the Brody house It seemed only God and Frank Patterson knew all that had gone on there. And what about the weird shit that had "gone down" out there on the lake itself? The naked dead guy covered in worms? One for the table conversation at the American Forensic Society's annual next month, if Nielsen could figure the mystery out.

Chang had made cursory rounds, setting up the individual teams, going from house to stable to lawn to lake, and now the top of the shed. Somebody had to be in charge, and he had been nominated, but Lincoln demanded an impossible magical time frame. A typical crime scene took time, lots of it, but this, seven bodies spread over six-now seven-crime scenes (shed top, second-story bedroom, stable front, the lawn, the rowboat, the Brody basement, and add the Brody second-floor bedroom). On top of that, they had an officer down, quite possibly the eighth body…awaiting Leonard back at Houston General-and what of the sheer number of vehicles involved?

Leonard finally saw the young Feds coming out of the house, one of them approaching him. Belkvin's BMW had been found and was being impounded by the Feds. Three vehicles littered the driveway, and another sat at the Brody house, all in need of at least a cursory going-over.

Leonard gave another moment to Lucas back in Houston, still fighting for his life, he hoped, but the stories filtering to Leonard made his friend's condition sound a great deal worse than merely uncertain. Last word had him in a per-ilous fight for his life on the operating table.

ATF and FBI personnel and forensic crews continued to scour the entire yard for additional shell casings, their leaders drawing diagrams based on findings, attempting to clearly identify Lauralie Blodgett's position and movements at the time of each shot fired, and how she had overpowered the husky 269-pound Kemper.

No agent came to help Chang. The one he'd thought approaching continued on down the path to the bam. "I need help here!" he shouted up to the second-story window on hearing Fuller's voice still there.

"Hold on down there!" shouted one of the FBI agents from Meredyth's window.

"I asked for a couple of men here!" Chang shouted back. "We need to get her off this roof and into the van for transport."

The FBI agent shouted back, "I got a local guy with a cherry picker on his way. It'll help in getting her down from there."

"A cherry picker? We don't need no stinking cherry picker!" But the agent had ducked back inside already. Chang shouted louder, "Agent Fuller! I just need two men. She's getting ripe up here."

Perelli breathed a sigh of relief on hearing of the cherry picker, and he quickly found his way back to the ladder ahead of Chang, balancing his camera as he made his way down.

Chang returned to Lauralie's body and thought how shapely she was, and that she had a beautiful face for a maniac. He mused about the men in her life, all those she had used with such ease. "You could have been anything you chose to be, if only you had put your genius to a good cause. Why did you choose evil?"

"Talking to the dead, Dr. Chang?" Fuller called down to him.

Chang saw that he'd sent his team racing off toward the Brody house with their own evidence technicians and cameraman.

"So this is jurisdictional cooperation," he called up to Fuller. "We must do it more often."

While awaiting the FBI-ordered cherry picker, Leonard Chang had climbed down from the shed roof and had returned to the second-floor bedroom crime scene for another look. From there he got on his cell phone and rang Frank Patterson at the Brody house for an update there. Patterson picked up his cell and replied to Chang's question. "Maybe another hour, maybe two. Depends."

"You don't have two hours, Frank. Lincoln's on his way up the steps now, and Fuller's team is behind him."

"That's just great. Leonard. Now I've got to stop everything and play nursemaid to King Gordo?"

"Just walk him through the crime scene as you can best piece it together, Frank. Use the phrases I think, perhaps, and quite possibly a lot. That way no one can hold you to anything you've said, like being a politician, Frank…like running for office. Now tell me, what the fuck are you hiding over there in the upstairs bedroom? Something dangling from a ceiling fan?"

"Leonard, you of all people've got to understand. I've got my team concentrated on the three-count 'em, Leonard-three whole and undivided corpses as opposed to dealing with the slaughterhouse remains of Mira Lourdes upstairs. Three gunshot victims in the-"

"Then it's true, you've known about the Lourdes remains there and you've kept it to yourself? Why wasn't I informed, Frank?"

"As I said, my first duty, as I see it, is to determine how the Brodys died here, not how a half a decayed woman's body found its way through the door."

"I suggest you do precisely as Detective North and Captain Lincoln wish, Frank."

"North?"

"She's coming through the door with Lincoln as we speak. I have them in my sight. They'll want you to drop everything, Frank, to sort out the Lourdes woman's remains, as I do, Frank. Tell me, Frank, is it the entire rest of the woman or not?"

"It's all the rest of her."

"Thank God for that."

"Leonard, had you been here, you'd've done the same as I did. You'd've focused on the larger problem first- three bodies in the basement to process and bag, not to mention the walls we've had to cut through."

"Walls?"

"Blood-spatter evidence."

"Frank, photos would just as well suffice. The killer's not going on trial in her condition."

"Just being thorough, Leonard."

"You need me to look in, run interference with Lincoln?"

"No, everything's under control here."

Ten minutes later and Chang, looking through binoculars, saw Jana North pacing the Brody porch, waving her hands, and exchanging words with Captain Lincoln, who kept pace with her. Leonard thought it like watching a silent film without benefit of titles-frustrating. Still, the overall message was made clear when Lincoln suddenly took her by the arm, led her to his car, and they drove off, disappearing from view.

Chang sensed that neither Captain Lincoln nor the female lieutenant were happy with Frank Patterson or his decisions after actually viewing the final piece of divvied- up remains belonging to Mira Lourdes, and they'd likely had just as bad a reaction to dealing with Frank.

Leonard imagined the partial corpse in its indignant pose, dangling there in an airy, pastel-colored room, surrounded by teddy bears and other stuffed animals the teen had held onto, the ruffled curtains and bedspread, the walls no doubt graced with posters of Britney Spears, the Back Street Boys, and perhaps a poignant remnant of her younger years-say a painted wall sporting a character like Winnie the Poo and his thousand-acre wood. Candice Brody, unknown to Lauralie Blodgett, dead at thirteen, her room turned into a horror chamber.

Chang imagined the impact the scene must have had on Jana North, who by now had become so personally involved and familiar with Mira Lourdes's history, her nature, her life and loves, hobbies and preferences in music, eyeliner, clothing, and favorite TV stars and cartoon characters.

"All right, Frank," Chang said into his cell. "I'll be over soon. When I get there, I'd like whatever there is left of Mira Lourdes bagged and put away. That poor woman has told us all she's going to tell us, Frank."

"I'll do what I can when I can, Leonard. I'm only one person."

"Then use your people. Delegate. Get what's left of Mira Lourdes downtown now, and let's assemble her as best we can for burial or cremation…whatever the family wants. Let the family have some closure, Frank. Can you imagine the hell they've been put through?"

"Sure thing… absolutely."

Chang hung up, on the verge of losing his temper. The moment he hung up, his phone rang again.

It was Lincoln. "Thought I'd let you know, Chang, that business we discussed about Frank Patterson?"

"Yes?"

"I'm with you. The guy's a first-rate prick."

"Then you saw this morning's papers?"

"Yeah, I saw the papers, and I saw what was left of Mira Lourdes hanging from her decayed ankles in the little girl's bdroom. All this could be twisted to put Lucas and Meredyth in a bad light. Not only has the Chronicle identified them, but it makes my forensic psychiatrist and one of my best detectives appear somehow the cause of this nutcase's obsession-like as if their high profiles mean they asked for it or some such bullshit."

"And you think Patterson is-"

"Frank's sabotaged this investigation once too often, and the jerk upset Detective North to no end, so I pulled her outta the Brody place. Nothing more she and I can do here. We've decided to get back to Houston and zip over to the hospital. Get a firsthand look at Lucas, assess the situation there, give Meredyth our support, all that, you know."

"Sounds like a good move. Let's take care of the living."

"Yeah…yeah…" The unspoken words floated between them over the phone connection: If Lucas is still among the living. "So, Leonard, I leave the decision about Frank up to you. Me…the board, we're behind any decision you make regarding Frank Patterson."

"Thanks, Captain, but you know I don't need board approval or your okay to fire Frank."

'Technically, I know that, Leonard, but you'll want all the support you can muster when-if comes a time Frank should file a lawsuit for reinstatement or loss of pay and defamation of character-as if he had one."

"I appreciate your confidence and advice, Captain. I'm going over to the Brody home as soon as I can. Expect to close down all the crime scenes within one, one and a half hours."

"I'll need you at the five P.M. news conference, One Police Plaza downtown, since obviously, Leonard, you know more about what went down out at the lake than anyone else."

"Thanks, Gordon. I'll be there."

"With the answers?"

"Absolutely."

Lincoln waxed nostalgic for a moment. "Remember a time when crime was on the downswing, a time when we were young and optimistic, Leonard? A time when we thought we could win this war?"

Chang didn't know what to say. He let Lincoln continue. "Now so many crazies out there you gotta wonder if it's not something in the water or the preservatives in our food. So many people affected by this single madwoman."

Chang didn't know how to respond to this either, but he didn't have to. The next sound he heard was a dial tone.

Chang had left the upstairs bedroom and had stepped outside, where he now stood on the front porch, all doors standing open, technicians entering and exiting. He dialed Dr. Nielsen, and in a tired voice asked, "How is everything going down there? You able to finish up soon?"

"You see me in hip-deep water here, Dr. Chang? I'm working as fast as I can here."

Why was she so curt and annoyed, he wondered, guessing that the nature of the crime scene she was asked to handle would get to anyone. "I'll get back to you."

Chang hung up as Hoskins joined him. Ted Hoskins had drawn up a thumbnail map to help in his synopsis of precisely where Lucas had taken the first hit, falling into a stack of uncut six-foot logs and crawling below a big green John Deere tractor. A few feet farther off to the right, he took a second hit as he appeared to have left the ground, diving for cover below the stable canopy. "The blood trail and his barefoot prints tell the story. Picked up a female track as well, presumably Dr. Sanger's. She was with him at the end," said Hoskins.

"What end? He's not dead yet."

Hoskins apologized. "I meant the end of the ordeal."

"Sorry. What else do you have, Ted?"

Inside the stable, the blood told the story of his preparing the horses. Hoskins then showed where Lucas had finally fallen, where Meredyth had held him wrapped in the blanket. "Preliminary reports from the paramedics said that Lucas would have bled to death had she not jammed that super-gauze bandage into the exit wound at his back. There would not have been any use for the mede- vac chopper."

Chang and Nielsen had been nearby at the Longhorn Inn after having spent hours at the M amp;M Cafe in an attempt to link four murders there to Lauralie Blodgett. No one aside from Lauralie Blodgett had known that just down the road Lucas and Meredyth vacationed in relative calm. For this reason-and the fact that Nielsen always slept to the monotone of a police radio, they'd arrived at Madera in time to see Lucas airlifted by the medevac helicopter. He'd seen Meredyth leap into the chopper alongside him, shouting at the medics to do something. That had been the last time he'd seen Lucas Stonecoat, and it pained Leonard Chang to have seen so virile a man carted off like an inert and deflated gunnysack. The man Leonard Chang most admired for strength, stature, courage, and sheer instinctive ability. It was like seeing the unarmed John Wayne gun downed by Bruce Dern in The Cowboys, a feel-ing of stark surprise and horror. If a guy the size and breadth of Lucas Stonecoat could be brought down…

Chang's stomach lurched and began to growl, reminding him he hadn't eaten anything other than a donut and a cup of coffee all day. It was nearing noon, and the closest diner, down the road, was useless-closed down as a crime scene by the State Patrol and County Sheriff's Office, both of which were represented here as well now. They had called Leonard Chang to the murders at the M amp;M Cafe, and when time ran late, he'd been convinced to get adjoining rooms at the Longhom.

Little physical evidence pointing to the multiple killer at the diner had emerged aside from spent shell casings from a Walther 9mm, nothing to connect the kill spree with Lauralie except that the only eyewitness saw a BMW racing away from the scene with an olive-skinned blond woman at the wheel. When a photo of Lauralie had been shown, the ID had proven inconclusive. All the same, he and Lynn had remained to help out the locals in the worst crime ever committed in the typically peaceful region.

Chang had tried desperately to get the word out that it might well be Lauralie Blodgett who had done the terrible deed at the diner, but he'd been unsuccessful in locating either Lucas or Meredyth, having to settle for Detective North and Captain Lincoln. No one seemed to know Lucas's whereabouts, and he wasn't answering his cell phone or his car radio. Meredyth had remained silent as well, despite a number of messages left on both their cell phones. Lincoln ordered any information relative to the Blodgett investigation, however tentative, be shared by Leonard with Fuller's regional FBI office.

Now Chang knew the reason why neither Lucas nor Meredyth had been reachable.

While Chang looked extremely young for his age, he felt old today. He had organized the largest death scene investigation of his career here on Lake Madera. It would beg to be written up for the journals some day, once he could step back and view it in its entirety with an objective eye, but for now the thought of wanting to share the story with other professionals in his field and in law enforcement in general was a long way off. For now, uppermost in his mind must be to gather all the various threads together and weave them into a mosaic that made sense, and to create a time line of events, and at the same time preserve crucial evidence-not to prosecute in this case but to vindicate actions taken by Meredyth and Lucas, and to explain exactly how the Farnsworth boys, Kemper, the Brodys, the people at the diner, and others had become targets of an audacious madness.

At least Lauralie Blodgett was dead and could harm no more. Precisely how she'd died along with each of her unfortunate victims, this was the mosaic he was now after. It would take more than the hour or so he'd promised Lincoln; even Lincoln had to know that an hour or so in forensic jargon meant four or five. "I work on a Chinese clock," he often joked with an impatient Detective Stonecoat.

He fought back a tear. He only hoped that when he next saw Lucas, he could tell him all about the complexities and problems of this enormous case.

"Dr. Chang, we got the way it went down with the two Farnsworth boys," said Agent Ron Meserve of the ATF, an assistant alongside him looking young, bright, and excited to be a part of the investigation.

They explained it in graphs they'd made that followed minute details of spent shell casings where the Blodgett woman had stood at the Farnsworth pickup firing off rounds at the backs of Jeff and Tommy Farnsworth as they ran, unprotected and unarmed, down from the house toward the pier, as if ordered to.

"She was dressed as the gardener, pruning those oleander bushes," said the younger ATF agent. "The two male victims drove up, unsuspecting, got out, and moved toward her. We surmise that she trained a weapon on them, this one." He held up a Walther 9mm. "Clip was emptied already at the M amp;M, and the Brody house, but the boys had no-way- a-knowin '-it."

The older agent, Meserve, summed it up with, "Had they called her bluff…had they jumped her, it might've been a whole different story."

And Lucas and Meredyth would've been spared, thought Chang, along with the two young horse wranglers, along with their pitifully grieving mother. Mrs. Farnsworth had been going between Jeff's and Tommy's body, holding first one and then the other, here on the lawn when Chang and the others had first arrived. Lynn Nielsen, a great help at the M amp;M Cafe, had somehow managed to talk the grieving mother away from the crime scene, sending her home with a female deputy from the County Sheriff's office.

A picture of what had happened at the stables and the direction of the gunshots from the upstairs window emerged, and now an equally clear picture of Lauralie Blodgett firing from the front porch on die Farnsworth boys had come into focus. The boys were killed hours before Lucas had been wounded, their bodies and the insect activity over them telling the tale.

So now Chang had a partial time line, and he knew that with Lauralie wearing the gardener's clothes and hat, discarded at the steps, the missing Howard Kemper was dis-patched sometime before the two boys were gunned down. Prior to this, across the lake, Lauralie had apparently killed the Brodys sometime during the early morning, after which she'd exchanged her viper's nest at the Brody home for her sniper's nest at Meredyth's bedroom window.

From bullet holes peppered into an upturned rowboat found on the lake, it had been surmised that Lucas and Meredyth had been fired on while out on the lake, unprotected, unarmed, helpless. Firearms experts had assured Chang that a child using the Remington and its scope could not miss a target as large as Lucas Stonecoat out on the lake, but neither he nor Meredyth were hit while in the bullet-riddled boat.

A broken table leg was found very near where Lucas had been gunned down, and early reports from the Brody kitchen spoke of a table that had been upended and scav-enged for its legs.

How had Lucas and Meredyth gotten to the Brody home alive under the crosshairs of that bolt-action, high- powered Remington? And once in the Brody house, why had they chosen to return here, crossing the lake and painting themselves with muck in a vain attempt at getting the horses from the stable? All questions he wanted to put to Meredyth, but she was, for the time being, unavailable to him.

Why didn't Stonecoat simply wait it out across the river? Why didn't he walk out? Why come back in the face of overwhelming firepower when he was unarmed? Macho shit-head fool, Chang summed up, what did his Cherokee bravura get him?

From where she stood in hip-deep lake water, Dr. Lynn Nielsen watched the skittish unmanned rowboat and its contents as it was guided to her by the divers. They'd had to swim out to the center of the lake to fetch it; there it had bobbed in their wake, eluding touch, acting like a shy cat, not wishing to be cornered. Finally, the two swimmers took hold of the gunwales and guided it into the shallows and an increasingly anxious Dr. Nielsen.

A third wet-suited diver stood alongside Nielsen in the shallows, and he now lifted his water-proof camera and began taking shots of the unholy sight at the bottom of the floating coffin, gagging at what his lens and his eye reported to his brain.

From the safe distance of thirty or so feet, a news camera in a helicopter overhead focused in on the activity at the lake. A dead man lay in the flat pool of water in the bot-tom of the boat, covered in worms, his throat a jagged mass of blood where his jugular had been severed, his lips moving with worm activity, and the soft tissue of his eyes, already eaten away, had sunk into their sockets, the worms finding a home in the collapsed orbs. Nielsen imagined these news camera pictures would not be finding their way into American living rooms, at least not until some money- crazed TV producer somehow created a reality show forum for crime-scene and autopsy photos. Newsroom vaults were crammed full with video deemed unfit for public con-sumption and viewing. Still, pretty soon nothing would be unfit, she told herself, if these Americans continued on their present course.

The diver with the camera, Bert Quinn, continued to snap shots in such a way as to not again look into the dead man's missing eyes.

"Jesus, damn most horrible thing I've ever seen," said Bert's partner, going for shore, anxious to distance himself from the floating coffin.

The third diver kept one hand on the gunwale, steadying the boat for Dr. Nielsen, his attention on her. "How'd you ever decide-ta become a coroner, Dr. Nielsen?" he asked, staring across the boat and into her eyes. "I mean, didya just wake up one morning and say to yourself I wanna work with stiffs, or what?"

"I went to med school to become a physician, and I somehow wound up working under an extraordinary man in forensic pathology who gave me great respect and from whom I could learn….A too good chance to pass up."

"Everybody over in Norway talk so cute?"

She felt uncomfortable now at his attention. "I am from Sweden, not Norway, and I do not have the time to teach you the difference."

"Maybe over dinner sometime?"

The cameraman looked over his lens to see her reaction to the other man's pass.

"I don't think this is the right place to talk of such matters."

"That's why I'm saying we ought to continue this over dinner, maybe some wine?"

"No, no, thank you. I don't date men outside my profession," she lied. "Still, your offer is a…a compliment. Thank you, but no, thank you."

Nielsen had begun to work as she spoke, pushing aside worm colonies from the nude body of the middle-aged gardener, searching with her gloved fingers and her sharp eye for any obvious wounds other than the enormous one at the throat. She immediately isolated a smaller curious puncture wound also in the throat, one masked by the larger wound. She ran her gloved hands down the torso, her eyes following, searching for any contusions, bruises, anomalies, or irregularities.

"This guy was hung like a thumb tack, like the size of an earplug, that thing," said the police diver who'd propositioned her over the body.

"Agent, if you're trying to embarrass me, you can 7, and if you're simply being rude because I said no to you, then I have to suspect you are hung like an earplug as well. Now please, allow me to do my job."

Both Bert the cameraman and his friend on the FBI dive team laughed at their colleague, Bert saying, "She got you good, Al."

She continued to survey the nude corpse, her gloved hand and eye now down to his scarred knees-recent bruising-and next she noticed the deep brown, tobaccolike stains under all his toenails. She took scrapings and efficiently put these into a vial, safely tucking them into a valise on a strap she'd placed around her neck. Finally, she said, "All right…we're needing to come at this in a fresh venue."

"Whataya make of what happened to this guy, Doc?" asked the third diver from shore now.

"Obviously, someone's cut his throat. Presumably Blodgett."

"That little woman?" erupted one of the divers, and this started a cacophony of disagreement.

"I saw her pictures! You're right. Skinny as a coyote."

"No bigger than a hen."

"The guy had almost two hundred pounds on her."

"Okay, gentlemen. I want the boat upended like the one we dragged into shore already, one with all the bullet holes." This boat had already been examined and photographed.

"Why're we turning the boat over with him in it?" asked the one named Al.

"I don't need or want the worms in the body bag, gentlemen, so let's upend the boat and feed the fish, shall we? We'll then float the man to the pier and lift him out there. I can better examine him once he's been…ahhh, baptized."

They reluctantly did as instructed, flipping the rowboat after some effort and spilling its contents out into the lake. The divers gently guided Kemper's floating body, facedown, to the pier. His plunge and short swim to the pier had dispersed the worms, and it had the added virtue of cleansing the wound that had killed him.

They lifted Kemper's body from the water, as the news chopper did another flyby, further grating on Nielsen's nerves. Kemper lay now faceup on the weathered dock, but the body bag, so patiently awaiting his arrival till now, suddenly flew off and into the lake on the other side of the berth, caught up in the whirlwind of the chopper as Nielsen climbed the ladder from water to platform.

"Kee-rist!" she shouted up at the chopper pilot, waving him off. "In Sweden we'd have shot those fools from the sky by now."

The body bag was retrieved, and the 2NEWS bird backed off while Lynn Nielsen leaned in over Kemper's throat for a closer look. She was unaware that the newsman overhead was shooting close-up footage of her lanky, curvaceous body now, and the divers too sat back and appreciated her statuesque beauty kneeling in over the corpse, the wet suit stretched to its limit. Nielsen's own attention was on the remaining, clinging worms that had stubbornly come along for the ride, burrowed as they were in the eye sockets and the gaping neck wound.

She again identified a small but deep gouge at the center of the throat other than the critical wound that had emptied the man's blood. There'd been no blood in the bottom of the boat, curiously enough, only cold, clear water, and of course the feasting worms. He'd been killed elsewhere and dumped in the green boat crudely carved with the Brody names- Myron, Lorene, Candice. The worms remained a mystery.

From the angle of the deadly jugular slash, Nielsen surmised that the killer was perhaps two and a half to three feet taller than Kemper-impossible, she could hear Chang saying-unless Kemper was kneeling at the time he was caught from behind and his throat cut right to left. Was he made to grovel on his knees perhaps?

There were other questions as well. For the slight Lauralie to have attacked so large a man and gotten his inert body down to the lake, she'd have had to have some sort of help, but Belkvin was out of the picture, long since dead. Had she lured a new boyfriend into her web, some local dupe she'd met at the M amp;M Cafe perhaps, to do her bidding? Had one of the Farnsworth boys fallen under her charms, only then to be murdered along with his brother? Perhaps she had even tempted both young men. She seemed to have an uncanny, near-supernormal power over men.

"Bag 'im, gentlemen." Nielsen stood and turned to face the lawn and the driveway, the house on the knoll. She saw Chang directing some guy in a cherry picker from his standing position atop the shed. She lifted a perfunctory wave in his direction, seeing that he was staring back at her now. Her eyes then went to the lawn, where the unevenly cut grass had been trampled by officers from the county, ATF, and FBI. She saw men smoking cigarettes, leaning against trees, cowboy boots resting on black valises, men and women in ball caps and Stetsons, some in uniform, others in jackets pulled over white shirts and ties. The overall effect was of a bizarre Norman Rockwell painting: a crowd of picnickers stepping over a pair of corpses, the bodies acting as focal point in the composition. Other than gabbing and biting on pipes, cigars, and cigarettes, these people on the lawn and standing around the vehicles in the drive looked as if they were doing nothing. She guessed most were standing about discussing the weekend college ball games. These thoughts wafted through her head, when suddenly it struck her. She knew how Lauralie had killed Kemper.

The lay of the grass coming toward her, creating a near- imperceptible path, screamed in her head; the lawnmower had made this errant path down to the docks. The more she stared at it, the clearer the picture came into edgy focus. She now recognized the faint little dirt and mud trail along the pier boardwalk, a trail they'd managed to trample over-the evidence that the mower had been guided with Kemper still sitting astride the cushion, with her knife at his throat while she straddled the back.

She heard the unmistakable sound of the body bag zipper closing on Kemper, plunging the body into darkness. "Hold on a minute." She returned to the body and slipped the zipper down far enough to investigate the neck wounds once again, zeroing in on the more tentative jab that had aroused her curiosity; seeing it again, almost lost in the puckering folds of the larger tear, she knew what it meant.

She closed Kemper from her sight again. "Okay, thanks. You can get that waiting van down here and put him aboard for the trip back to Houston."

She walked out to the end of the pier and back, giving her theories time to percolate in her head. Once Lauralie had forced Kemper down to the pier, she had him flank the boat she'd come across the lake in. Once the mower was aligned alongside the boat, she slit his throat, and he bled out over the wheel of the mower. The pool of blood would be found on the floorboard of the same big red Toro that everyone had treated as an obstacle, stepping around it all morning long up at the house where Lauralie had left it beside the lawn truck.

Nielsen pictured the events in her mind. Lauralie didn't want to shoot the gardener, knowing she'd never be able to drag his body from sight, and she didn't have to leap from the bushes to take him by surprise. With the noise of the mower, she might easily have stalked up from behind and stabbed him in the back, but as it was, she had to completely reach around him to cut his throat from left to right, and besides, she wanted him to strip, she wanted his clothes. Of course, it was an easy matter to cut the hefty man's throat after charming him out of his pants and into giving her a ride on his great big red mower. She had simply presented herself to him in those same tight-fitting jeans and that low-cut blouse she'd died in, the same outfit that had perhaps charmed the Farnsworth boys into dropping their guard as well…maybe…

Lauralie had stepped up to Kemper as he was mowing the grass, introduced herself as someone visiting from across the lake, and seductively talked him into a ride into the trees, where she convinced him to make love to her. Once she'd gotten him to drop his uniform, she showed her true colors, likely pulling a gun on him, the one used at the cafe. She ordered him back onto his mower in the buff. Once at his rear, Kemper no longer enjoying his luck, she suddenly put the knife to his throat and dug it in deeply- the initial wound-making certain he knew she meant business. She then ordered him to drive down to the pier. When he hesitated, she pierced his skin even deeper with the first cut, drawing blood.

After this, Kemper played along, doing as instructed, pleading for his life perhaps, wondering what she wanted perhaps. On stopping the mower halfway down the pier as ordered, he had no idea what she wanted. She stood up on the back of the mower guard, and keeping the razor-sharp knife at his throat, with the extra strength that standing over him provided, Lauralie thrust the knife into his jugular and dragged it across his throat.

Kemper immediately slumped forward over the wheel, his blood flowing down into the mower well at his feet, much of it soaking into his toenails. It was no simple matter, but from there, she managed to push his body from its sitting position on the mower to roll onto the dock and into the boat-surely almost toppling it over given his size and girth. He landed faceup to the heavens, his surprised eyes open along with his mouth and the gaping wound in his throat.

Nielsen began peeling off the wet suit, garnering stares from the men again. As she did so, she watched the body of the hapless, unlucky gardener, who had succumbed to Lauralie's lies and wiles, being carried unceremoniously to the waiting coroner's van.

Lillian Weist, an evidence tech intern, had come bounding down from the house. "I got some info on the guy in the boat."

"Kemper, yeah," replied Nielsen.

"How'd you know his name?" Lillian asked, clutching the form in her hand, all the blanks filled in. "It took me all morning to get all these facts."

"His truck. It's on his truck, Lil."

She scrunched up her nose and face in the universal facial expression that asked others to agree with the idiocy of its owner. "Duhhh," she said. "I got most of this from papers in his glove compartment, but didn't think to read the truck logo. Anyway…talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kemper normally arrived and did his work in the A.M., but yesterday he came in the P.M. He'd visited a family friend in hospital and had lunch with his wife at the hospital cafeteria before arriving here. Had he been on his usual schedule, he'd've been long gone before this lunatic's arrival."

Nielsen began verbalizing her theory of precisely how Howard Kemper met his end, telling Lillian, but also gathering the interest of Bert and Al. Young Lillian and the two men listened to her story with skeptical silence, Lillian nodding and struggling to stay with her, while the nodding of the men implied a condescending unwillingness to believe she could possibly know such details.

Nielsen stared up the lawn toward the mower. She could prove her theory at the mower. There she would find the evidence of the man's blood in the well of the mower bed. Evidence only inches from one FBI man who this moment stood leaning up against the Toro, blissfully unaware of its importance.

"What about his clothes?" asked Bert.

"Yeah, what became of his clothes, Dr. Nielsen?" asked Al.

Lillian provided the answer, pointing to the form in her hand. "Clothes were found beside the front exterior steps leading up to the Sanger home, discarded and bloody- particularly the lap area and the pants legs."

Dr. Nielsen had their rapt attention as she detailed her theory, anxious to air it, to test its validity in her own ear. When she finished, Bert, busy putting his camera and lenses away, replied, "All right, say you're right about the clothes, the mower ride onto the pier, dumping his body from mower direct to boat without tipping the damn thing over…" Al and the others leaned in to hear this. "It still doesn't explain how the damn worms got into the freaking boat with him, does it?"

Al jumped in, still smarting from having been burned by her. "Yeah, how do you explain the worms?"

She breathed deeply, shaking her head. "I don't know yet."

"They didn't just jump in on their own," added Bert, snapping his camera case closed. "Must've been hundreds of them," he told Lillian.

"A thousand or more," said Al to the intern. "You had to see it to believe it. Feeding on his eyes and inside his wounds."

"The worms were night crawlers, big reds," said Bert. "Good for fishing."

Al agreed. "Kind you buy at the bait and tackle."

"That's it, bait," said Dr. Nielsen. "Explains the water at the bottom of the canoe too."

"I don't follow you," replied Lillian.

"Someone's cooler fuU of frozed worms," she said, her accent showing doubly on the misspoken word for "frozen."

"Frozed? Frozed?" asked Al, poking Bert, and together they laughed.

Ignoring the men, Nielsen stepped to the boathouse door and scanned the interior. Lillian trailed curiously after. The two women had stepped inside just as the van carrying Kemper's body backed over the mower trail Nielsen had earlier photographed. She pointed out the wall of rods and reels hanging in the boathouse, and below it an empty Styrofoam cooler lying on its side, the lid inches away. A discarded blanket lay half in the water off the litde boardwalk. The motorboat that filled most of the space was up out of the water on davits.

"No expense spared here," said Lillian, lifting the lid of an electrically powered metal icebox, the wall unit. A handful of dead, dried-up earthworms lay at their feet.

The men poked their heads into the boathouse just in time to see Lillian drop the Styrofoam cooler down into the wall unit, a perfect fit. "This is a storage cooler for bait- worms," she said.

"Now we know where the night crawlers came from," said Nielsen.

"Yeah, they were frozed in here and thawed out in the boat," joked Al badly. "So, you saying she threw in the worms for sport?"

"Explains how they got there."

Nielsen now glanced across the lake at the activity of men and women going in and out of the Brody house. She wondered how Dr. Frank Patterson was doing there. It had irked her that Patterson should get the plum assignment, the house with three bodies to grid, while she was put on a dead gardener in the boat. After all, she had been on the Post-it Ripper case with Leonard from the "get-go," as the Americans liked to say, but when push came to shove, seniority had won out. Still, even though Frank was the As-sociate M.E., and she was a mere Assistant M.E., Patterson, unlike her, had not been involved on the case from the "get-go." No matter how she turned it in her mind, Lynn felt cheated.

Bide your time, she kept telling herself. Your time will come.

She then chided herself for daring to think she had problems; her problems were small potatoes compared to what Meredyth Sanger must be going through right now. She allowed a silent prayer to escape her for Meredyth, and for Lucas, one that would also suffice for his departed soul, should that be the case. Aside from being colleagues in a sense, the pair had become her new friends as well. How was Meredyth to cope? Lynn knew how desperately the woman loved Lucas. It must be so hard on her.

She started up the incline toward the house, working her way toward Leonard Chang even as she put her cell phone to her ear, having dialed him, but her eyes remained fixed on the mower. The Blodgett body apparently had been successfully plucked from the windmill by the cherry picker, and Chang was escorting the body, now on a stretcher, toward an ambulance. Nielsen didn't want to be distracted, but Lillian, trailing after her, still waved the form she'd come with originally. "You'll need this for your final report, Dr. Nielsen."

Nielsen had already filled a spiral book with observations, comments, notes, measured distances, maps, thumbnail sketches of the pier in relation to the boat, and an explanation on how it was impossible to get a true triangu- lation of where the body was discovered since there was no fixed position, the boat having wandered about on the lake. What had alerted authorities in the first place were the birds coming and going from the boat, their beaks full with what Bert called red beauties. Still, she knew about the thousand and one trivial little details needed to fill in all the blanks on all the damn forms waiting back at the office, and even inconsequential items-say a victim's Social Security number or his mother's maiden name-would be called for, delaying the proceedings unless the information was accessible.

At such a time she'd be thanking God for Lil's standard form. She thanked Lillian and took her report, laying it into her notebook just as Chang came on the line.

"Lynn, good! You've finished up with the Kemper body, have you?"

"And you with the Blodgett body?"

"Some truly curious details forming up here at the house. Meredyth tried to save Blodgett's life even after all this."

She countered, "I am dying to hear all about it, but it doesn't compare to the bizarre story I have for you, Leonard."

"Then you have answers, good!"

"Answers, yes. Meet me at the lawn mower."

"The lawn mower? All right…on my way down."

Reaching the driveway and the mower, she saw Chang rounding the back of the ambulance where he'd left Blodgett's body in its black bag. After the niceties, and questions about where they might find a bite to eat, she laid out how the gardener had died, and she walked him over to the mower, and pointing, showed him the coagulated blood at the bottom of the well beneath the wheel. It was there, and so were some distinctive shoe prints-small, feminine ones. "She drove the mower back to here, her feet wading in Kemper's blood. By time he was bleeding out, he was barefoot. The first giveaway was the dried blood I found under his toenails but nowhere else."

"Impressive," he replied. "Perelli! Got any film left in that camera?" Chang pointed to the blood pool imprinted by a pair of unique shoe prints, while Nielsen went to the ambulance and tore away one of Lauralie's shoes from her feet. She returned with it, and the match was clearly visible. "A matched pair," she said.

"A match made in blood," Chang replied.

Lil stood staring, learning, soaking up things, and realizing she wanted very much to work more closely with Dr. Nielsen.

Chang suggested they retire to the Brody house. They took the road that meandered around the lake, disappearing amid the tall sentinels of the pine forest. Along their way, they passed the spot where men in FBI and ATF wind- breakers dealt with the BMW found nestled in the trees just beyond the Brody house.

Dr. Frank Patterson. in white shirt and tie, stood now over the bodies at the foot of the basement stairs in the Brody home, his gloved hands going to his aching back. He'd been bending over the dead family for forty minutes now, assessing how each had died, their relative positions, relative ages, and searching for any additional bruises or obvious marks. Hands tied, the three bodies had been dumped here in the basement as if hurled down the stairs, but the gunshots had all occurred at the top of the stairwell. There the blood spatters, along with brain matter, along with gunshot residue, painted the unfinished wall with enough crazy art to call it a Jackson Pollock painting.

His assistant revved up a small rotary saw and went to work removing the section of wall in question. He'd take it back to the lab with him, study it in detail. Under the right light, and with the help of blood-spatter specialists, he would be able to tell in which order each of the Brodys were killed-father-mother-daughter, mother-father- daughter, or some other variation. The crime would be recreated down to its last detail. If it proved interesting enough, he could write it up in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Examiner. They paid well in both cash and cachet.

The sound of the saw ended, and Patterson looked up to the top of the stairs, thinking Jennings an efficient man to finish with the wall so quickly, but Jennings hadn't finished. He'd merely stopped to allow Dr. Chang and Dr. Nielsen the right-of-way. They came down the stairwell now for a look at the cruel massacre here. "Anything I ought to know here, Frank?" asked Chang.

"Dunno… little soon to tell, but it's pretty clear the victims were forced to tie one 'nother up. Probably with assurances nothing would happen if they cooperated. Looks like a page out of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. They cooperate and he-ahhh, she, if it proves to've been Blodgett, she blows their brains out anyway, all in the same manner, right here." He put an index finger behind Lynn Nielsen's ear to demonstrate the location of each entry wound, and said, "Pow! Just like a professional or someone familiar with the Godfather films."

Nielsen pulled away, annoyed he'd chosen her head to demonstrate on, his finger jabbing into her head. "It does appear to be her work," she said.

"And how would you know that from what little we have?" challenged Patterson, as had been his habit with her.

"She wasn't a big woman, only one hundred ten pounds at most. She wisely used her victims' weight against them here, as with getting Kemper off the mower and into the boat."

"What mower?"

"It's why they were shot at the top of the stairs and allowed to tumble down. She didn't have to drag, carry, or push them here."

"Good point," said Chang.

"Of course it is," said Patterson. "It's why I'm having the wall removed. They were shot at the top of the stairs and their bodies came tumbling down."

"What about the upstairs, the girl's room?" asked Chang. "Your guys finished there?"

"Finishing, yes."

"The other half of Mira Lourdes is on ice?" he asked.

"Well, no, not that far along yet, but it'll get done."

Chang gave a little nod to Nielsen. "Get up there and see to it Miss Lourdes's parts are bagged and put in the refrigeration van, Dr. Nielsen."

"I can handle it, Leonard," said Patterson.

"You've got your hands full here, Frank. Trust me, we've got enough autopsies to go around."

With Nielsen gone and the saw renewing its work at the top of the stairs, Chang stepped over the bodies and surveyed the basement-a lovely rec room with a Ping Pong table, a bar with a neon Coor's sign over it, lit and blinking, and on the bar a family photo of the Brodys on holiday in a snowy Christmas scene with skis-Aspen, Colorado, Chang guessed.

He continued examining the basement area. A washer- and-dryer unit at one end, little windows high overhead looking out on the earth. One comer sported a lounging area and a reading nook, with a bookshelf filled with dogeared paperbacks, assorted magazines, and a hardcover crime novel entitled Unnatural Instinct lying on one chair, a marker indicating the reader was halfway through the book. When Chang slipped it open, he saw the expensive bookmark was engraved with the name of Candice, the daughter.

Patterson had shadowed Chang. "Frank, life is too short. I came down here from upstairs, from Candice's room. I saw what's been hanging there all this time."

"What's the big deal, Leonard? I made the call. Priority one, the basement, two, the sweep of the kitchen-lotta things disturbed in the kitchen. Didya see that overturned, broken dining room table? And three, the upstairs rooms- not just Candice's but the master bedroom too. One that looks out on the forest out back."

"You lied to me, Frank, and you didn't follow my orders either. Look, we both know you're unhappy working under someone you feel superior to, Frank-a slant-eyed Chink."

"I never said anything of the kind. Who told you that?"

"You tell me that, Frank, every day."

The silence between them was rocklike. Chang broke it. "Look, I don't want to argue this here, not now. When this case settles, once all the reports are in, all the dots dotted and Ts crossed, you can defend your actions involving this case in a full rebuttal, okay? But Frank, I say it's time you started floating your resume."

"What? Whataya mean, Leonard? Are you firing me? You can't fire me, not without the approval of the board."

"I have their okay, Frank."

"You son of a-"

"My mother is descended from a royal Chinese princess, Frank. You never knew that, did you? So I'll forgive your calling her a bitch."

"You think this is the last word on this, Leonard? You couldn't be more wrong."

"See if ATF or FBI is interested in your talents, Frank."

"I'm a good M.E., Leonard."

"That's the shame of it, Frank. That's the shame of it. You are a kick-ass clinician. No one can touch you in the lab, but there's more to this job than slides, test tubes, and microscopes, and I've got to be a pragmatist. You're never going to be the people person you need to be, to deal with the public, the families, the detectives, your own peers in the lab."

"You want me out so you can put Nielsen in my spot. Whataya doing, Leonard-a good family man like you? You two sleeping together? Have a fucking good time at the Longhorn Inn down the road?"

"I've got a friend at County General lying in a coma, Frank, a man who may or may not live through the day. I've got another friend sitting at his side, holding his hand, talking him through. I'm finished here for the day, and I suggest you quit making graphs and measuring the distance from the top of the stairs to the bottom, and close this scene down."

"Fuck you, Chang. I'll say when it's time to close my crime scene down and not before. How many times've I listened to you, shut down a scene, only to wish I had taken more time at the scene? Too many to count, so it's when I say it's time."

"This place has given up all the clues it has to give, Frank, and as for the table, the legs were ripped off by Lucas and Meredyth to use as weapons. We found one at the stable where Lucas was shot."

"I still have say-so on how long we hold this place for forensic analysis. That much is still my call. That much you can't take away from me."

Chang looked over his notes, trying to collect his thoughts, how best to say what he must to Dr. Patterson to get it through to him that his career in the HPD Crime Lab was over. "Frank, you didn't just go over my head this time around; this time you went behind my back."

"What?" His look of exaggerated shock Chang thought laughable.

"You leaked sensitive information from my crime lab to the press, including Meredyth's and Lucas's names as the ones targeted by the Post-it Ripper, and-"

"That's a lie. Who's feeding you all these lies about me?"

"— and in the bargain, you told the city the name of the victim whose parts have been scattered all over this county by Blodgett. Christ, did you give one damn thought to Mira Lourdes's family, their wishes, Frank?"

"Captain Lincoln might have something to say about all this bullshit. Doctor." Patterson contemptuously spat his final word.

"Captain Lincoln has had something to say about this, Frank, and he agrees with my decision."

"We'll just see about this." Patterson lifted his cell phone and speed-dialed Lincoln.

Chang stormed up the stairs, where the blood-spattered wall had been completely removed and lay now on the kitchen island block. Two men worked at spraying a clear plastic preservative and adhesive over its surface.

Frank always had a problem working with women. He would handpick those working under him, but Tory had been foisted on him at the last by Chang, who wanted her, like Lil, to gain some experience in the field.

Chang watched the two men spending so much time over the section of wall. He thought it an awful lot of effort to go through, preserving the blood- and brain-spatter evi-dence in such an old-fashioned form. The space it would take up alone threw it into question since a single state-of- the-art series of high-resolution photos could tell them the same thing in the hands of the right man, though in this case, it was Jeannie Wyatt, the right woman. But this was Frank's scene and so Frank's call.

Leonard found Nielsen had dealt with the remains of Mira Lourdes-bagged and in the caravan now. Chang ordered the van to take what they had directly back to the lab in Houston, calling for another larger vehicle to accept the Brodys when and if Frank ever finished inside.

"Best you not be here when Frank emerges from the basement," Chang told Nielsen. "I just fired his ass. Fool had the gall to suggest you and me were having an affair, and that I wanted to give you his job in return for sexual favors."

"That's so like him, Leonard. I can't tell you how I relish the idea of one day walking into the lab and finding him gone."

Together, they climbed back into Chang's car, preparing to leave the Brody home. "I'm placing you in charge of all the evidence collected on Meredyth's side of the lake, Lynn."

"What? Really?"

Chang drove back for the Sanger house. "See to it all the bodies and anything that's been bagged from all the various grids, the photos, the vehicles-that it all gets back to the crime lab and the morgue, and whatever you do-"

"Do not break the chain of command, I know."

"That goes without saying, but also do not turn anything over to Frank if he should have the impudence to try taking command."

She smiled widely at this. "You won't be disappointed, Leonard, I promise you. Count on me. But where're you going to be?"

"Hospital. Check up on my friends."

He dropped her at the Sanger house and heard her commands carrying all the way down the drive, and likely across the lake, as he made his way back toward the Interstate and Houston. As he drove, he punched on his radio, searching for music to get the images of this day out of his mind. Ads filled the airways, and the search button stopped on a news report: An army of FBI, ATF, Houston, and Harris County law-enforcement personnel descended on Madera Lake in the early hours of this morning to investigate multiple murders at two crime scenes there. Too early to tell, but the buzz is that somehow the Post-it Ripper case has invaded this sleepy, peaceful area near the Navasota River reservoir….

Chang popped on a Mozart CD, struggling to escape the news and the stress. He got on the phone and called home to his wife for the second time today. The first time was to inform her of Lucas's having been shot twice and about his being in hospital in serious condition. This time he began by asking how she was doing, asking after the kids, apolo-gizing about the forty-eight-odd hours or so he had seen none of them, ending with a retinue of complaints about the job, the system, Lincoln's pomposity, of having had to fire Frank because of Frank, and the general callousness of the world.

Finally, his wife Kim stopped him, saying, "Len-len, he is going to be all right. I just know Lucas is going to be all right."

"How do you know? Have you heard from Meredyth?"

"No, I just have one of those intuitions. I just know."

"Kim, the man is listed in critical, unstable condition. He's in a coma, and he lost so much blood." The strings of Mozart filled the cab and traveled through the phone connection to her ear.

"You once told me that coma is nature's way of dealing with shock."

"Yes, but-"

"And you once told me he's a fighter. He'll pull through."

"Are you clairvoyant?"

"I have faith, as so you must."

"How? How do you have faith, Kim, in the face of all…all I have seen on this day? All that this single crazed individual did to so many innocent people, the ripple effect to their families, to the collective fabric…to the soul of humankind?"

"Faith, Leonard. It's all we have left in the end, faith and one another."

He said nothing.

"My hand is covering yours, my lips cover yours, my arms are folding around you, Len."

He glanced at her photo, kept always overhead in his car, and he mentally embraced her. "I am holding you too. I love you, dear one."

She replied, "I know… you are a thoroughly married man with three children who love you too. My thoroughly caring husband."

"True, I love you thoroughly, my wife."

"Yes, and it makes me happy. When will you come home to us?"

"In two hours."

"Then you really mean four?"

"All right, four."

"You sound so tired. How can you work with such necessary precision if they don't let you get rest?"

"I've got to learn to delegate more now that I have someone capable of taking over for me…thoroughly."

"Dr. Nielsen?"

"I turned over a multiple-murder scene to her, Kim. You have to be proud of me for that. Isn't that what you want for me? Patterson could never be trusted to do things right."

"I am glad for you, Len-len, so why will it take you four hours then?"

"I'm on my way back to Houston now, but I want to stop over to see how Meredyth is doing, and to see Lucas for myself. Go over his charts. Give Dr. Sanger any slight hope I might find in them."

"Do you wish me to meet you there?"

"Yes…yes, I do."

East Houston, the Colony in the Glade home of Paul and Caroline Sanger

Wearing a cleaned and pressed new Colony Security uniform and hat, Mike Wilson pulled up to the Sanger home in his official Colony vehicle with but one thing on his mind-impress, caress, and best Miss Lauralie Sanger from out of town. She hadn't called him back, and his repeated phone calls to the house had gone strangely unan-swered. He went so far as to leave messages on the answering machine. The Sangers were due back today, but when he arrived, he saw no sign of their being home. Perhaps they'd been delayed at some point on their long journey home from Paris.

He skipped up the stone steps to the huge Colony in the Glade home on Will-o'-the-Wisp Court. It was the largest of the models, called the Palatial in the brochures. The Sangers hadn't owned it long. They had reportedly moved off a large estate in North Houston to the Clover Leaf area, the home there having become too much for them to care for since retirement, especially since they had become world travelers. "Can't imagine the size of the house that got away from them," he'd told Jake Everly, his friend and superior on dispatch duty today. Mike had boasted that he'd met the young daughter, and he'd wagered they'd be dancing at Cimarron Kate's Cow Bam tonight. If he had to, he'd teach Lauralie how to square-dance.

He rang the doorbell, humming an old tune he now tried to recall the lyrics to. "If you could read my mind, love…what a tale…what a story… what a…To hell with it. Come on, Lauralie…baby…answer the fucking door. Getting cold out here."

He rang the bell, rocking on his heels. He watched his breath escape him like cigarette smoke. The thermometer had plummeted overnight, calling for a high of only forty- two. It felt like winter, but it was only late September. Weird for East Texas.

He again rang the bell.

He wondered if he ought to let it slip that he'd been an Ail-American at Tyler High in Tyler, Texas, and would've gone on to play for the University of Texas if not for an injury that sidelined him from the game for life. He wondered if he played it just right, if she wouldn't find that special spot of sympathy in her heart that inevitably led to necking. I can take it from there, he told himself.

Still no answer at the damn door.

An odd faint odor reached his nostrils, but Mike couldn't quite place it. Still no answer. Had she gone back to…where was it? Someplace in California, San Bernardino someplace, she'd said, by way of Phoenix.

She said she'd come in to surprise the folks, so where the hell was she? Maybe she's in the shower. Maybe she can't hear the bell.

He rapped his knuckles loudly against the door and slammed down the brass knocker several times for good measure. Enough to wake the dead, he thought. But still no one came to the door.

He was getting antsy…downright edgy.

Mike yanked at his sagging gun belt and tucked his shirt in better. He took in a deep breath and went to the window to peer into the interior through the sheer drapes. He squinted hard, trying to make out any movement inside. Seeing no one and no movement, but catching his reflection in the glass, he fixed his hair and admired his wide shoulders and thick neck bursting at the collar. Again came the odor he couldn't quite place. He'd been doing battle with a ragweed allergy, and lately could smell nothing, but this pungent on-off odor ran ahead of him. Still admiring his reflection in the window, he now noticed something odd about the complete stillness within. Something looked wrong, and even though he couldn't quite put his finger on it, he felt compelled to stare through at the living room until it hit him, and it did. Through the gauzy haze of the sheer cloth drape, he saw that the big fish tank along the living room wall was as devoid of life and movement as the surrounding room.

Squinting harder, he studied the tank, realizing some kind of strange layer of scum floated across the surface. Staring harder, he realized it was not scum but the residents of the tank-all the fish were lying belly-up at the top of the tank.

"Weird. Something's wrong inside. Lauralie could be in trouble inside." He imagined saving the damsel in distress and being lauded a hero in the papers-a not-uncommon fantasy since childhood.

He got a whiff of the strange odor again. The cold air seemed to heighten the odor one moment, mask it the next, but there it came again, teasing his nostrils. Then it came to him. Gas! Natural gas!

"There's a gas leak inside!"

He snatched his key chain and his radio off his hip, calling it in. As he hailed help, he found the key he needed, a master for every house in the Colony for emergency use only. This qualified.

Jake Everly came on the radio as he inserted the key.

"Jake! That you?"

"Mikeeee! Wha's up, kid? Wha's your lo-"

"I'm at 1638 Willow…I mean, Will-o'-the-Wisp, and we've got a-a-a gas leak here, Jake."

"Possible leak?"

"A leak, Jake-the real thing!"

"A gas leak? In the Colony? No way!"

"I'm telling you, I can smell it through the g'damn door! I'm going in!"

"No, Mike! If you can smell it through the fuckin' door, then it's too dangerous to go burstin' in 'cause if you do-"

Jake, at command headquarters for Colony Security, heard the massive explosion occurring at Mike's end. "Stupid kid! Stupid, stupid damned kid! Oh, fuckin' jeeze! Man-oh-freakin'-man!"

Jake could not hold back his tears. He stopped the tape that had recorded the conversation, and immediately got on the phone with 911, giving the address and the nature of the emergency.

Jake next called his boss to inform him of the explosion. "Christ," said his boss, "someone's got to get over there to rep us, Jake. You do it, Jake. Get your deputies in to cover the phones and the radio, and get yourself over there. I'm on my way! How the hell'd this happen? How the hell'd a gas explosion occur in the Colony in the Glade, Jake? Whose fuckin' house blew up?"

"The Sangers', a Mr. and Mrs. with a daughter visiting. Mike met the girl, sir, and-"

"They called Mike to the location?"

"Mike Wdson's dead, sir. That's all I know."

"Was he answering a call?"

"Awful, just awful!"

"What'd he go to the location for, Jake?"

"He was screwin' around, Dave!"

"Screwin' around?"

"Flirting with the girl there, the daughter. He went over to ask her out, and next thing I know he's shouting something about a gas leak, that he could smell it through the door, and he disregarded my orders and burst in, and-and- and-"

"Get hold of yourself, Jake! Don't have a coronary on me. Do we know if the family was inside? Do you know if the blast affected any surrounding structures?"

"No…don't know, but I felt the vibrations from here."

"Mike rushed in to help people inside. He died trying to save life, doing his duty, Jake, you got that? Get over to the site and be a rep for Colony Security. I'm on my way!"

When Jake arrived at the Sanger home, fire trucks were battling the blaze, and a Houston Natural Gas truck pulled up, followed by a taxicab from which emerged Mr. and Mrs. Paul Sanger, the look of shock and horror unmistakable.

Jake, knowing the couple by sight, stepped up to them and told them what he knew of how Mike Wilson tried to save their daughter, dying in the effort.

"Meredyth! Oh, my God! Meredyth's in there!" screamed Caroline Sanger.

"Mike said her name was Lauralie," Jake said to Paul Sanger, who was busy now holding onto his wife, pinning her to the cab to keep her from running into the inferno.

The cab driver leaned across his hood, staring at the activity of the firemen and watching the blaze. Scar-faced, scratching a three-day-old beard, the cabbie snatched his unlit cigar from his lips and said, "Looks like a g'damn Texas tornado went through here."

"Who the hell is Lauralie?" Paul Sanger asked Jake Everly.

"The girl staying at your place… said she was your daughter! Mike opened the… Maybe I ought not to say any more."

Paul Sanger got on his cell phone and dialed for Meredyth. When she picked up, he breathed again. "Thank God, Mere, it's you! I've got your mother here. She needs to hear your voice, Mere. Talk to her… ask about her trip." Paul pushed the phone on his wife, Caroline. "It's Mere! She's safe, honey! She's all right."

Caroline took the phone, relief the size of a tidal wave washing over her, yet she could not control her tears as she repeatedly called out Meredyth's name and said, "Sweet-heart, we love you so much, Mere. How much you'll never know."

"You're safely home from Paris," Meredyth replied from Lucas Stonecoat's bedside in the hospital. "I've got one hell of a story to tell you guys, Mother."

"And we've got one hell of a story to tell you. It's the house…all gone." She continued to cry.

"Mom, are you all right? What's happened? Are those sirens I hear?"

Her father got back on. "We'll be staying out at the ranch house, sweetheart. Your can reach us there. Think you could come out tonight, Mere? We really need to see you in the flesh and catch up. And by the way, do you know anyone by the name of-"

"Why aren't you going to the Colony home? What's happened there, Dad?"

"It's been reduced to rubble, apparently an explosion….Don't tell her I told you so, but"-he whispered now-"Mom appears to have left the gas on the entire time we were gone, and some poor schlep with Colony Security did a piss-poor job of checking it out. Opened the door and died of the blast. Whole damn house is in flames, pieces of it on our neighbor's roof.”

“Oh, my dear God, Dad! Are you and Mom-”

“We're fine! It blew, they're telling us, about twenty minutes ago. Had we not been delayed at baggage…"

Meredyth felt a creeping finger trace the nape of her neck and run along her spine-Lauralie's icy touch extending from the grave. Her fingerprints were all over this attempt to murder Paul and Caroline Sanger, to leave Meredyth without her parents. It was to have been Lauralie's final blow, and it nearly came to fruition.

"Before you go out to the ranch, Dad, you need to meet me at County General where-"

"We don't need medical attention, dear! We're shaken up, of course. Who wouldn't be. It's a shock, but we really don't need medical-"

"You don't understand, Dad. I'm stuck here at the hospital, but I need to talk to you guys before you go out to the ranch. So much to catch you up on, Dad.”

“You're in the hospital?"

"Hospital?" Again her mother's crying erupted, commingling with the sound of fire trucks coming over the line. "No, not me. Dad. It's Lucas! He's-”

“That detective you used to date?”

“He's in a coma, fighting for his life, Dad, and it's all my fault, and he may die, and I–I can't leave him, Dad. I love him."

"We're on our way, baby. Stay on the line."

"…saved my life, Dad, and he's in a coma. I can't leave him. I need you guys."

She heard him shouting for the cabbie to get them to County General. In a moment, her father was on the line again. "We're coming straight there, Mere, honey. Don't you worry."

Meredyth was crying into the phone now. "I'm afraid he's going to die. All because of a sick woman who stalked us to the ranch…and because I couldn't get to him in time."

"Stalked you?"

"Yes."

"An old girlfriend of Stonecoat's?"

"No, it wasn't like that."

"That one from the reservation? Her name wouldn't be Lauralie, would it?"

"Well…yes, I mean no…but how'd you get her name?"

"Seems she got into the house saying she was our daughter!"

"No wonder Mom was in tears."

"They told us our daughter might be in the rubble of the house! The way it's shaping up, a Colony Security fellow named Mike was interested in our daughter-Lauralie from out of towns-and came sniffing around. No pun intended."

"An unintended result," she muttered, pacing Lucas's small comer of the critical care unit. People checking on his vital signs every fifteen minutes. No windows, no light save for the artificial dim glow of soft blue that made the place look the perdition it was.

"The security fellow was just a kid, a year outta high school. Got more than he bargained for. Sounds like this Lauralie came onto him, and he went looking to close the deal on a date or some such thing."

I don't want to know his name or any more details about anyone she harmed in her mad obsession to harm me, she thought. "No more about it now, Dad. I can't take any more."

"Sure, baby…sure. Good news is they think she's dead in the rubble out here at the house."

"She is dead, but her body's in the HPD morgue, Dad. I killed her, Dad, out at the ranch house…I killed her. Now, please, come to me."

"My God, baby. We're on our way, Mere. Hold on there."