Final Edge

CHAPTER 9

Captain Gordon Lincoln had given everyone a fifteen-minute break, "Time enough to call home, let your significant other know you're going to be running late, grab a snack, make for the johns, whatever cranks your shaft."

That fifteen minutes had gone by in the blink of an eye, it seemed, and now they had reassembled at the conference table.

"All right, people, quiet now…listen up," began Lincoln. "I want cooperation among you all, and I want this case cleared posthaste, pun intended. If there's any upside to this Postmortem Ripper guy, it's that we have only one victim to our knowledge, but the downside is this continued butchering of her body. Dr. Sanger informs me this may well have a powerful symbolic meaning for the killer, that he is killing her over and over with each severing.

"Which likely means he's nurtured a long-standing hatred for this Mira Lourdes," concluded Lincoln. "Are we on her acquaintances, former boyfriends, relatives?"

"We've cleared her live-in," said Jana, "and there's no one else who fits the bill, according to her parents. No one was stalking her, no one disliked her. She went from work to home and back again in a steady routine in which nothing untoward should ever have happened to her."

"But it did," said Lincoln. "Canvas the neighborhood for perverts living in the area, anyone recently moved in, any recent sex offenders released from Huntsville. Talk to her friends at work too."

"My team's all over that," Jana assured him.

"The fact he's sending parts of a single victim over and over could signify his belief that life has screwed him over again and again, that it has cut him up slowly in pieces over the years," suggested Lincoln, playing at shrink himself now.

Meredyth cut him off, saying, "The killer may also be sending pieces of his victim to us again and again to direct our attention to his powerful scorn and disdain for us, for law enforcement, and societal sanctions. A complete psych profile is being worked up. I'll get a copy to each of you by day's end."

Lincoln thanked her for the input. "Whatever it takes, manpower, currency, overtime, you people are it for the time being-the front line in this twisted little war we have had thrust upon us. Time is our enemy along with this monster out there. So I want brainstorming and answers before this bastard forwards so much as another fingernail, understood? Damn it, I don't want any more pieces of her sent off like a Christmas package to Lucas or to Dr. Sanger. And I want it cleared before the press eats us alive on it, understood? And I don't want any more leaks coming out of the Three-one, clear?"

"Captain, we had an obligation to inform the Lourdes family and her boyfriend, who made the initial missing persons report," said Jana.

"Yes, I heard all about that, Jana." Lincoln looked in Lucas's direction. "It's done. Let's just not give any more guns to the Indians…ahhh…" Lucas had shot him a grim look, "I–I mean, ammo to the press, okay?"

"You're going to have to deal with the press sometime, Captain," said Lucas. "They need to be handled."

"Yes, but most of the Lourdes woman's remains… well, remain missing, Lucas, and until we can say we have all one hundred percent of her in our safekeeping, well…I suspect we'd best keep this in-house. Is that understood?"

Lucas lunged in, adding, "It's already out there, Captain. They're coming for us on all sides. Some sort of press conference or at least a release needs to be put together to stave 'em off."

Lincoln sighed heavily, heaving his gut; he ground his teeth so hard it hurt others in the room to hear it. "Why the hell can't we keep a lid on our own fucking cases?"

"We already brain-graphed and polygraphed Lourdes's boyfriend and he sailed through the tests," Lucas replied, "so now he's out there on the street with what he knows and what he suspects."

Jana added, "And if an idiot like Stokes can read the papers, he can put two and two together…."

"He's likely selling his story to the National Inquirer right now," Lucas said.

Meredyth added, "Any number of uniformed cops at my place, at Lucas's, in the garage the other night, not to mention civilian personnel. They're all talking about the choice of delivery system-the variety of method, and what's going on between this creep and us, Lucas and me. Sorry, Captain, but there's no lid big enough to put atop this thing, not anymore."

Lincoln looked as if he wanted to roar, but he calmly said, "All right, so I guess we should expect a barrage of embarrassing publicity."

"Which, if Dr. Sanger is correct, will feed the killer's appetite and hopefully appease him," added Jana, "but I rather doubt that any amount of publicity for his crimes will ever be enough, not once he gets a taste for it. Like a wild animal that acquires a taste for human blood, he'll be back for more."

"We have to be smart and use the media to our advantage," Lucas suggested. "See if we can get at him through a judicious use of the press. Give him an E-mail address where he can contact us, chat with us. Start by releasing some choice photos of the packages from Steve's collection along with Anna's new and improved sketch of the suspect." Lucas gave a thought to Jack Tebo's having failed to come downtown to work with Anna Tewes on a sketch of the girl who'd delivered Lucas's first parcel.

Lincoln gave in, outvoted. "I'll get our best PR people on it. Play up the fact we're closing in on the creep, banter the catchphrase Postmortem Ripper, is it? Put out the fact we've got a face to go with the victim within forty-eight hours of receiving the first package, all that."

"Post-it Ripper," corrected Nielsen. "Postmortem is what I do."

"Oh, yes, sorry." Lincoln's eye lingered amp; moment too long on die lanky coroner. "Okay, well, then…what was I saying? Oh, yes. Then that means you people in this room are going to have to show some progress beyond learning the name and address of the victim."

Meredyth addressed the others from where she sat, her voice firm, the occasional crack in her tone contradicting her outward resolve. "We have already discovered a great deal about our man in the short time we've had to work this case. He's got a hard-on for Lucas and me, but there may or may not be a connection there; it may be he has seen us on TV in the past and simply zeroed in on us, but we will be going over clients I've counseled as well as perverts we've encountered in the line of duty, ruling them out as we go in a process of elimination. Fact is, that process is already under way."

"Still, it's going to require considerable man hours and manpower, given how long we've both been in the business of putting perverts away," added Lucas. "As we come up with possible leads and suspects, we may call upon any one of you to follow up, whatever that entails, from getting a search warrant to using your special talents."

With that said, Lincoln declared, "Thank you all for being here and withstanding the assault on your sensibilities that Dr. Chang, Dr. Nielsen, and I orchestrated, but I wanted you all as committed to this as Dr. Sanger and Detective Stonecoat, so I wasn't sparing anyone's ahhh…ahhh…what's the word?"

"Emotions?"

"Senses?"

"Yeah, those things."

The wrapping paper and the note were bagged, destined for the documents experts already poring over the previous handwriting. The cooler containing the head was carried off by Nielsen, destined for the freezer in Chang's lab. This time the foul contents purported to have originated at an address in the 2700 block of Lowe Boulevard, a grimy business district off Clinton Drive, near the ship channel, a stretch of urban real estate devoid of apartments or homes. Lucas had earlier jotted down the address.

"It's most likely a phony address to throw us off, like the convent school," he told Kelton, handing the note to him and asking Stan to check it out and report back to him on what he learned.

"Should not take long. I sent a cruiser over to the address to eyeball it. Probably got round to it by now."

"If not, goose 'em for me, will you, Stan?"

"Sure thing."

Leonard Chang doled out assignments to the remaining CSI members with respect to the newly acquired evidence. Meanwhile, Tom Davies wondered aloud to Meredyth and Lucas why he needed to have been in on this meeting, feeling he had already done all that he could to further the investigation along, "Unless," he confided in her, "you can bring me some of the killer's teeth to work with."

Lucas replied, "I'd like nothing better than to kick this mother's teeth out of his sick head, believe me."

Dr. Davies nodded, smiling, and quickly followed Catrina Purvis and Anna Tewes out the door. Meredyth now looked long and hard into Lucas's eyes. "Do you think this maniac is sending us all these parts because he thinks we can put Mira back together again?"

"All the king's horses and all the king's men, you mean? Hadn't occurred to me, but who knows…maybe…maybe he's that damned batty."

"What's he going to send us next, Lucas? Her heart? Her torso? He is attempting to shock us more and more by escalating the vileness of his gifts to us, and I gotta say, it's working."

"I'm going to the convent this afternoon, poke around there, ask a few questions of the people in charge. You want to join me?" he asked.

"Convent? What convent? I heard you mention something to Stan about a convent." Her squint told him clearly that she was confused.

"Our Lady of Miracles, a church and girls convent-an orphanage for girls. Not too far from my place."

"But why?"

"It was the return address on the first package I received, remember?"

"No, I don 7 remember."

"And the delivery was made by someone sporting a Catholic schoolgirl's uniform, according to Tebo."

"You never told me any of this."

"But you were there, at my place, when Chang and I were talking about it."

"No, I wasn't all there. I was extremely upset that night, and I didn't pay close attention, not after what I'd been through, not that night. Tebo saw a Catholic schoolgirl deliver the package?"

"I'm not sure she was a girl. He seemed to think she was heavily made up, older than a schoolgirl, but she wore a Catholic school uniform."

Meredyth considered this, picturing the killer luring some young woman to do his godless bidding for him.

"I'm fairly sure it's just a ruse to send us on a wild-goose chase, so I haven't given it top priority. But at the moment, I'm at a loss for what our next step should be, so…"

"So, let's go see the nuns. Ask them if they've noticed any unusual person hanging around the school."

On their way out of the precinct house, going past the front desk, Lucas was stopped when Stan Kelton called out to them. Stan gestured for them to come near.

"What's up, Stan?" he asked the big Irish sergeant.

Kelton had come around his front desk and whispered conspiratorially, "That address on Lowe…"

"Yeah? You got it pinned down?"

"Morte de Arthur's."

"A restaurant with medieval cuisine?" guessed Lucas.

"No, it's a mortician place, funeral home-a chain mortuary."

"What's a chain mortuary, Stan?"

"A chain of mortuaries. Supposed to be cheaper way to send off your loved one. They're listed with penny stocks. Have their own website where, if you like, you can bury your dead on-line. Don't ask me how that works. The lady said she'd happily send over brochures."

"I'm sure she did. A chain-store undertaker's you can buy into? A franchise?" asked Lucas, amazed. "What'll they think of next?"

Meredyth, listening in, tried to put the fact of the mortician and convent as return addresses together with the return address on her two packages-both indicating her downtown office. She tried to put it all together with the various poems and the CD. "Creep is just yanking our chains, Lucas, having a gay ol' time."

"Then I guess we follow where the yanking chain takes us."

"Play his game out to the end? That could be dangerous."

"What choice have we at this point? He's holding all the cards damned close to his chest, so come along, Mere."

"All right."

"If there's time enough, we'll visit Morte de Arthur's after we visit the house of miracles and nuns."

Kelton waved them off, saying, "Good luck, you two!"

As they made their way to Our Lady of Miracles-a shimmering fall sun slapping on-off, on-off, on the windshield as the car darted beneath rows of trees-Meredyth asked, "Lucas, do you know who Our Lady of Miracles refers to?"

"I'm not sure I follow you," he replied, confused.

The sunlight first dimmed and then disappeared altogether from the windshield, Lucas commenting on the sudden cloud cover.

"The Lady of Miracles, do you know who she was in life, in the history of the Church?"

"I assume the Virgin Mary? Right? I mean doesn't she represent everything to the Catholic believer?"

"Yes, and Our Lady of Miracles is Our Lady of Lourdes-Lourdes. Get it?"

"Whataya mean, as in our victim, Lourdes?"

"A French village, city now…Lourdes, France, Our Lady of Lourdes…the movie they made of it, Song of Bernadette? About the village girl to whom the Virgin Mary appeared, thus Our Lady of Lourdes. She is said to have appeared on several occasions."

"I've heard of it, of course. Bernadette had visions when she was a child. An angel told her where water would spontaneously appear out of the earth, right?"

"At the mouth of a grotto, yes."

"A cave."

"Yeah, like a cavern mouth, and to this day, a spring created by the Angel of Lourdes wells up in the town, and it has been made a shrine to which people the world over make pilgrimages in hopes of a miracle cure for various illnesses."

"Lourdes, sure. Didn't they make the little girl a saint?"

"Not before she was put through hell. Religious celebrities are put through the ringer by the Vatican."

'Tell that to Joan of Arc."

"Eventually, after years of examinations and investigations, Bernadette was made a saint, but by then, she could not live comfortably in Lourdes. She joined a convent and spent her adult life in the service of Christ."

"So now you're thinking there's a definite link between Our Lady of Miracles convent and our victim, Mira Lourdes, that it's too much coincidence to be just a twist of fate or happenstance?"

"The killer's hand is all over this chance fluke. He gave us the convent as a return address, and he gave us enough of Mira to identify her-her teeth and next her head. And how many times have you told me that you don't believe in coincidences in a murder investigation?"

"Touche. So our killer is a saint killer?"

"Perhaps contemptuous of Catholic icons-pictures, symbols, idols, and saints."

"So we're chasing someone who might have a history of destroying or disfiguring…say…a statue of Saint Francis of Assisi?"

"Or even a crucifixion cross, or a painting of mother and child-the Pieta-an altar, or an image of the baby Jesus."

Lucas drove with one hand and used his radio with the other, calling into headquarters and speaking to Kelton. "Get the word out, Stan, that we're interested in any reports of religious vandalism in Catholic churches, schools, graveyards, anywhere in the city, understood?"

Kelton replied, "We get calls like that all the time, Lucas."

"Anything recent, say in the past week?"

"Usually turns out to be corner-hugging teens so bored out of their skulls they don't give one damn thought to the consequences of their actions," Kelton replied.

"Any unsolved, recent vandalisms of religious icons, gravestones, statues, or paintings, Stan?"

"Fact is, we got an outstanding on a grave site at Green- haven Meadows off Berwyn."

"Whose grave, Stan?"

"Some guy named Blood…John Blood, as I recall. I can look up the report. Came in from the caretaker. Said the dirt around the grave was disturbed, and the stone was cracked from what had to be a sledgehammer."

"Anything else? Anything to do with a church?"

"No, nothing."

"Keep an eye out for such things, Stan."

"I'm on it." Kelton was gone.

They drove on in silence under the increasingly overcast sky, each taking silent counsel, she with her training in human nature, he with his grandfather's words in his head, and both weaving what little they knew of the killer with the puzzling scraps they had collected thus far, and now this new notion involving the Catholic Church. Meredyth's profession didn't like coincidences of this size any more than did Lucas's Native instincts. This matter of Our Lady of Miracles being Our Lady of Lourdes, and their victim being a Lourdes. Had the poor young woman paid the ultimate price because she bore the name of the convent?

Meredyth broke the stillness, saying, "There's too much here to be called mere coincidence, Lucas, and…and there's something else I have to tell you."

He looked at her, her tone signaling a confession of some sort. "What is it, Mere?"

"Almost twenty years ago, when I was a psychiatric intern doing social work for my degree, I had some dealings with the orphanage at Our Lady of Miracles."

"Another strange harmony?"

"What astrophysicists call a concurrence, I think. Ongoing occurrences on a collision course."

'Too close for comfort," he agreed.

"But Lucas, it's the first real clue that the killer may have targeted me for some specific reason other than my notoriety as a forensic psychiatrist."

"And what reason is that, Mere?"

"I…I didn't recognize the name of the convent orphanage right off, but since you mentioned it, I've been sitting here struggling, dredging up a twenty-year-old memory."

"Connected to the convent?"

"It's our first real connection to the killer. My history with this place we're going to. The killer intentionally pointed us in this direction."

"And what is the history, Mere? Were you once thinking of joining the convent? Did you go there as a child?"

"No, no! I had very little relationship with the convent really, and it was all so long ago."

He turned sharply into a small street, causing a pedestrian a bit of distress, the man shouting an obscenity at Lucas.

Lucas merely waved and kept going. "Go on," he told Meredyth.

"I was a teenager, my first year of college, and I knew I wanted med school. I was a student trying to get brownie points by getting my sociology requirement out of the way early on, you know, to impress my academic counselor. I kinda had a crush on him."

"That's the extent of your association with the convent? You did your sociology internship there? What, one quarter term? Seems pretty weak as connections go."

"No, not even that. I did my internship with Child and Family Services with the county, and I helped place a handful of children with the convent orphanage. I spent all my time at the courthouse downtown. I never saw the orphanage itself. Never set foot in it actually."

"That's it, huh?" He took another turn. They passed storefronts, taverns, eateries.

"I haven't been associated with them since those days in my first year of college. I represented indigent single mothers in cases involving newborns, to give them a home."

"Damn lot of responsibility for a kid."

"I was aggressive, and the caseworker I was helping out, she was swamped. I mean, case files to the ceiling. She was glad to have my help, and no one questioned it. Hell, it was 1984 and it was benevolent work."

"So you worked in finding foster homes and making adoptions possible?" he asked. "Benevolent work."

"My responsibilities ended at the courthouse door. I merely counseled and helped out the mothers who turned their children over to the orphanage for adoption. The county, the court, the nuns, under the mother superior, they saw to the actual adoptions. I just facilitated the paperwork and acted as advocate for the mother, and by extension, the child."

"Then your job was to…to…?"

"Expedite the transition for the mother; help her with her decision after weighing all options. Basically, all I signed off on was the mothers' understanding and state of mind…you know, sound mind, clear understanding of adoption. Had to make sure Mom knew what rights she was signing off on. It was just interview work."

"I see, and you never actually handled the children involved?"

She shrugged. "Occasionally, one of the infants was thrust into my arms when the mother needed to locate a proof of address or needed both her arms to sign papers."

The drive had taken them onto the Interstate, and after passing several exits, Lucas found Crockett Avenue, where he exited onto the surface street. The grim and growing cloud bank had engulfed the city, thrusting them into a daytime night. The car now moved through a crowded little neighborhood of narrow streets and boxy houses.

Meredyth continued speaking in a level voice. "Frankly, almost all of the women that I helped in my year of internship with the legal system didn't really have any options, hooked as they were on drugs."

"You spent a year at this social work requirement?"

"Well, two college terms, eight credit hours, a fall and a spring."

"And how long ago was this?"

"It was like two freaking decades ago, 1983…'84 may be."

"Given the fact the killer has pointed us to the convent, we need to look over the records of your cases that year."

"The case files should be on record with the courthouse downtown. I have no idea what sort of records we'll find at the orphanage or what condition they will be in, but my name isn't likely to be on anything there."

"And you spent no time at the convent school?"

"Like I said, my job ended at the courthouse steps. The children were taken by the nuns from the judges' chambers."

Lucas wondered aloud, "How many kids are we talking about, Mere?"

"A handful…a dozen at most that I handled, certainly no more."

He pulled the car over and parked outside a Starbucks. "How about a cup of coffee and a grain of truth?" he asked.

"All right, I'll tell you about it."

Lucas and Meredyth sat at a table inside the coffee shop and watched the drizzling rain against the windows. Tentatively sipping at her steaming coffee, Meredyth began her story.

"A terrible situation had evolved in the seventies and into the eighties, when I started this internship-against the wishes of my parents, I might add. I was more surprised than anyone when I found myself making life-and-death decisions for drug abusers and their children."

"Were they all drug abusers?"

'To a woman, yes. Heroin, cocaine…hard-liners, most of them, their arms full of tracks, their noses pink red. I despised them, Lucas, for what they did to their babies. I was unable to have children, am unable to have children, Lucas. Something you have a right to know."

He reached across and took her hands in his. "Go on."

"And here these women were, slaves to addiction, giving no thought to how they were harming their children's health, poisoning their unborn children. I took it all quite personally, and it wasn't long before I knew I couldn't do this kind of work objectively."

"You were just a kid, Mere."

"It was a time of rampant drug use among pregnant teens. This created so many thousands of crack mothers having crack babies. These typically single-parent mothers were unable to fend for themselves, much less take care of a sick child's multiple needs." Meredyth paused to drink her cooling coffee.

Lucas picked at a giant cinnamon bun he'd placed between them to share. He said nothing, but she felt a disapproving coolness had come over him, something in his eyes, a judgment.

"Look, Lucas, organizations and high-minded institutions-"

"Like the Harris County court, the government, the Catholic Church?" he finished for her, interrupting.

"Yeah, like the Church…they took an interest in helping the children, many of whom were born with mental and emotional problems, some with serious, irreversible damage and retardation. Few doors were open to them, and there weren't a lot of people or resources to throw at the problem."

He sipped at his coffee to the sound of FM music piped in, a Gordon Lightfoot tune…don't you come creepin' round my back stair…and angry words rising from another booth in the cafe. Lucas glanced at the couple arguing. Something deep within him wanted to go over and yank the man to his feet and plant a fist in his face. Instead, when Meredyth squeezed his hands, he returned his attention to her. "Go on. I'm listening."

"The orphanages were filling up with many thousands of such children, and Our Lady and other such homes opened their doors wide. They were constructing more housing! We took advantage. Here was hope, a chance to find decent homes for them."

"Or a lifetime in orphan care."

"I always believed it the lesser of two evils as did the lady I worked for, as did the system."

"Your ever think of adopting one of them yourself?"

"There was one, yes. She had no name, Lucas. Her mother hadn't given her a name. I thought that so sad."

"That is sad."

"I assume because the mother didn't want to get attached, knowing she was giving the little girl up. She'd made that decision before I even got involved. But I was a kid in college myself, my plans laid out, my days and nights filled. Her mother pleaded with me to find her a good home. I did what I could and went on to fulfill my dream to become a forensic psychiatrist. I just wanted to earn my degree, go on to help people."

"Like these destitute, addicted women who had no chance of ever getting their children back, right?"

"There were programs in place, rehab programs, but for most"-she grimaced and shook her head-"the program was an impossibility until they broke the cycle of loss of identity, loss of self-esteem, loss of direction, values, faith."

He remained stone-faced, his Indian features impossible to read.

"Whatever you're thinking, Lucas, don't condemn me for what we did for those children back then. We did what we had to do. Nobody wanted to deal with the problem."

"Anyone think to keep records on these children? To see how they did one, two, three years later?"

She shook her head. "We're talking about sick children. The fact we found orphan homes willing to take them was reason for celebration."

"And no one kept trace of the crack mothers, right?"

"Correct." Her long face dropped. The noise level at the other booth had continued to rise. Lucas glared at the couple, realizing now that the woman had an infant in a little plastic carry on the seat beside her. Take it to the Maury Povich Show, he wanted to shout, but kept his calm.

Lucas thought of the thousands of Native American children who, in the early part of the 20th century, had been ripped from their parents by state welfare systems across the West-placed in "good" white homes by well- meaning white officials anxious to Christianize and Anglicize these heathen children. It was nowadays considered one of many disgraceful episodes in U.S.-Indian relations sanctioned by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs; it had been a part of the "war" to end once and for all the aboriginal problem of the Native American races, to homogenize, tame, incorporate and blend them into the white race and make farmers of them all. The policy of assimilation of the races had begun as early as the 1820s, with successful results in the peace-loving Five "Civilized" Tribes led by the Cherokee Nation and including the Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole.

In 1861, when war broke out between the states, the Cherokee Nation had more English-speaking schools and post offices flying the American flag than did neighboring whites in the state of Arkansas, and American Indians formed regiments in both the Federal and the Confederate armies. The Five Tribes fought at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, up and down the Oklahoma Indian Territory, along the Texas corridor, and struggled for control over the Indian Capitol of Tallaqua. Federalist Indian regiment soldiers lost-alongside their Confederate brothers-more casualties per capita in the Indian State than did any other state in the Union or the Confederacy, yet it never appeared in a U.S. history book. No Hollywood film or Ken Burns documentary had ever been made of their heroism, either in the war or as leaders in following the White Path of peace over the Red Path of war against the people who had forced them on to the Long Walk of the Trail of Tears. Only a handful of dust-laden studies and historical treatises on these lost facts dealt with the Indian regiments of the Confederacy and the Union.

After the Civil War, and after the loss of Lincoln as their president, all the civilized Indians of the Territory were punished for the actions of those who sided with the Con-federacy. Five Tribes simultaneously stripped of all the dignity and freedom they had earned as U.S. citizens in their once-proud U.S. Protectorate, not to mention their land and businesses. The president of the Cherokee Nation, John Ross, lost his dream along with his steamboat company, but the tribes had lost the entirety of their treaty lands, seeing them given away to white settlers flooding into the Cherokee Strip to create the state of Oklahoma. Strip was the right word for it. Government-sanctioned, the rape of the Indian Territory was overseen by armed military forces. Then came the sweeping missionary influx and the welfare brigades. And in far too many instances, Native American children were forced to renounce their heritage and very DNA and take on the manner and characteristics, the language and religion of the majority race without any protest allowed beyond the tears shed when they were taken from their loving parents. The biography of such men as Jim Thorpe told the story. In too many cases, these children were taken out of perfectly fine family environments and placed with foster homes, causing the children as adults to be alienated in a white world. Jim Thorpe had beaten the white world at its own game, only to be stripped of his Olympic medals, left in the end depressed and beaten, left to drink himself to death.

"Where did you go, Lucas Stonecoat?" Meredyth asked. She'd quietly studied his strong features and iron eyes, a beautiful brown with specks of green and incredible depths she could easily lose herself in. "Where were you just now?" she repeated when he did not answer.

"Bad times."

'Tell me about these bad times."

He shared his thoughts on the history of lost Native American children who had grown up a generation of lost adults. "My father had been one of them," he confessed, "and he died the ignoble death of a drunken Indian, drowning in a mud puddle on the Coushatta Reservation, thousands of miles from the lost ancestral home where his fathers were born, lived, died, and joined the netherworld."

"I'm sorry, Lucas, very sorry for your pain, but…but you can't compare what the Bureau of Indian Affairs did from the nineteenth century through nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties to what we tried to do in the nineteen- eighties. Our intentions were good and honorable."

"So were those of the missionaries. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Isn't that what Anglos say?"

"I'll see you at the car," she said to this, standing and starting away.

He grabbed her wrist, saying, "I'm not saying it's the same thing, but it brings back bad memories, that's all."

She pulled away. "I need a moment alone."

Lucas sighed heavily, finished his coffee, and tossed down a tip for the hardworking busboy. He glanced out the window to where Meredyth sat in the car, pensively waiting for him.

He noticed the quiet that had come over the cafe, the music gone, replaced by an ad man touting a debt-free existence, the arguing couple with the infant now cuddling one another, the young man having come around to her side of the booth, the infant between them. They now presented a picture of peace and tranquility.

Lucas wanted an excuse to punch something, but nothing presented itself as the target he needed. Instead, he found his cell phone and called Mother Elizabeth Portsmith, the lady in charge at Our Lady of Miracles, to inform her of his and Meredyth's delay, but promising to be there within ten minutes. A cheery feminine response told him they anxiously awaited his arrival.

As he went for the exit, Lucas's boots made a slapping noise against the tiles that made the couple look up from a kiss to stare after him.

Lucas hoped the clue of the convent school, the connection to Lourdes, and the connection to Meredyth would lead them quickly to the maniac behind the abduction- murder case they worked.

He stopped short, looked up into the falling rain, allowing it to cool his face, and wondering if his getting intimately involved again with Meredyth Sanger was not a fool's errand. How much had her change of heart toward him had to do with this case, her running scared, her confused vortex of swirling emotions… her temporary desperation? Once the case was solved, he wondered if she'd throw up real roadblocks to their being together, go running back to her previous lifestyle that included such as Byron Priestly, men who asked little of her, the way she liked it.

He climbed into the car beside her, forced a smile, and asked if she was okay.

"Fine… drive. Let's get this over with."