Authors: Robert W. Walker
"You know, Merrick, you aren't a half-bad-looking guy when you're not being so damn cynical."
"Really? Perhaps I ought to lighten up a bit, if it makes me more attractive to someone as attractive as you."
This got her attention, and she looked more closely at his eyes—good, strong, clear, moist icy-blue eyes. "Why, thank you, Merrick."
"Why don't you call me by my first name."
"I will if you will."
ACROSS TOWN, LUCAS and Meredyth took the warrant from Harry Jorganson's outstretched hand as if it were a baton in a footrace. Jorganson held back, wishing them good luck as they entered the Bright Day Animal Clinic. Dr. Arthur D. Belkvin's name was emblazoned on the sign below the clinic's name. Lucas and Meredyth held high but tempered expectations of finding evidence to prove this was the location of Mira Lourdes's murder.
Earlier, as they raced to the location, Lucas had confided, "Where else would he do her but at the site where the tools are readily available, his own cozy operating room in his own clinic? Where else would he feel safe to perform his deadly operations than in surroundings so familiar?'
"Perform is the right word, if he did it for Lauralie."
Inside, they found a blocky small building reminiscent of someone's basement, a small waiting room area scrunched against the reception desk, and a door leading to the rear, where two separate rooms for examinations and operations stood like barriers to the kennel in the rear.
"You hear that?" asked Lucas as they looked around, flashing their badges for Ms. Jones.
"What? I don't hear nothing," said MariLouise Jones.
"That's just it, a silent kennel."
"Oh, well...no, we haven't been operating so well since Dr. B's been gone."
A quick scan of the place revealed a storage room off the kennels, where the metal cages stood empty of occupants. It was a crowded little area, hardly worthy of the name kennel—a holding place for sick animals. The odors pinched Lucas's nerves.
However, the place was neat, tidy, and clean—too well cleaned, Lucas thought. If they were going to find evidence, it would be masked, he thought. Then he realized there was a gaping space in one of the examination rooms where once a steel table most assuredly had stood bolted to the concrete floor. "What's not in this room?" he asked Ms. Jones.
Ms. MariLouise Jones, a slender black woman with a pompadour hairdo and manicured nails painted red, stiffened at the question before answering. "Dr. Belkvin...he had to cut back on his practice sharply in the last few weeks, and he...he tol' me he had da sell one of his operating tables."
"Anything else sold recently?" pressed Lucas.
"I noticed some of his older surgical tools gone one day."
"Recently?" asked Meredyth.
"Yeah, recently."
"Would those tools include a scalpel and a rotary bone saw?" asked Lucas.
"Am I in some kinna trouble here?" she asked where she stood between the two strangers interrogating her. "Do I need a lawyer?"
Lucas bit his lower lip and instantly pulled out his cell phone, moving back toward the front of the clinic. Stepping just outside, out of earshot of Ms. Jones, he dialed. His call was to Leonard Chang's crime lab. Kelton, standing by here with a handful of other uniformed cops, had assured him that Chang was on standby alert.
In a moment, Chang came on. "Leonard, it's me. Get a team and a photographer over here pronto, preferably Steve Perelli. We may have something here."
'Terrific, then you like this guy for the mutilation murder, Lucas?"
"I like him mightily for it, yeah."
"The bastard chopped her up at his clinic, didn't he?"
"I'd bet my eyeteeth on it. Get this, not only has he wiped the place clean, he's ripped out one of two operating tables from the clinic and has stashed a lot of his tools, hopefully being unearthed at his house by now." Lucas gave a thought to Jana North's progress across town.
"Unreal. Don't worry, Lucas, my boys and girls, we'll find the nails to drive into these vampires' coffins. What a monster these two are together. We've got to get them off the streets."
"I have every confidence in us doing just that, Leonard."
"Wish everybody else did."
Lucas wondered how much flack Chang was being bombarded with. "FBI making a move on us, Leonard?"
"They're in Lincoln's office as we speak."
"Then you'd best be—"
"On our way."
Lucas returned to where Meredyth had continued to get a feel for Arthur Belkvin from his receptionist/secretary.
"Have you any pictures of Dr. Belkvin?" Meredyth was asking Jones when Lucas came alongside her.
"There's a lotta photos on the wall in here." Jones guided them to another operating room, one door littered with photos of Dr. Belkvin standing, crouching, leaning in various poses with dogs, cats, birds, ferrets, rabbits, even a monkey or two, sometimes with the owners, their arms thrown over Dr. Belkvin's shoulder.
"Doesn't look at all like your typical flip-out killer, Mere. All these people to interact with in positive ways. Holding down two good jobs—careers actually. No profiler would put this guy together with this crime."
"Agreed, but he's our man just the same, whether he fits or not." Meredyth found the best facial shot available and said, "We'll need this one, Ms. Jones, in our search for your boss."
'^To find him or to shoot him down? I called Missing Persons 'cause he's missing, but you come in here turning him into some kind of bloodthirsty murderer—askin' don't I think he looks like the man on the news and on the front pages."
"Ms. Jones, we want to find him and question him, as much for his safety as that of others," Meredyth assured her.
Losing patience, Lucas bluntly asked, "Was he acting strangely, other than selling off his table and tools, that is?"
"He seemed agitated, yes...like he was in some kinna trouble. But, you see, he's a reformed gambler and, well..."
"Goes to the Gulf for the action there?" asked Lucas.
"Used to go to the Gulf casinos down below Galveston, and he played the horses a lot, but I was thinking he'd gotten past all that since he got into so much financial quick-sand the last gambling binge. But now, however, now you mention it, I'm thinking maybe he fell back into his old ways...maybe."
"Meredyth had earlier held up the artist sketch of Mr. X, and while Jones had flinched, she'd denied it was him. "Dr. B, he can't be your Ripper man, no way."
"Why's that?" Meredyth had asked.
"He's got a mole, but it's not on his right cheek. It's on his left."
Meredyth now pointed this oversight in the sketch out to Lucas. "They've got the damn mole on the wrong side of the face."
"All the same, the general appearance, it's him, isn't it?" said Lucas.
When Jones simply glared at Lucas, refusing to answer, Meredyth softly asked, "MariLouise...can I call you MariLouise?"
"Ms. Jones will do just fine."
"Okay, Ms. Jones, what about the eyebrows? They look dark brown or black in the photo, and he has blond hair, right?"
"More like sandy brown than blond."
"And the eyebrows?"
"There's no way Dr. B's going to be a killer. He's just too gentle with the animals." She said this as if there could be no argument. "He couldn't've done no abduction and murdering. I know him too well. Nobody that knows the man will ever be convinced he coulda done what they— what you all're trying to tell me that Dr. B's done, never. And maybe you can send him to prison for it, or even to the death row, and the gas chamber, but I'll still know he's wrongfully accused."
"You don't think he'd kill, say, to pay off a bet, say thousands upon thousands lost to a mob loan shark?" asked Lucas somewhat facetiously.
"No...not even then could you convince me that this man kilt somebody. He's a gentle, caring man, Dr. B is."
"What about for his girlfriend, Ms. Jones? Do you think he would kill for her?"
She hesitated answering for a moment. "His girlfriend?" she asked. "He didn't have no girlfriend."
Meredyth flashed Lauralie's picture. "You ever see this young woman here at the office?"
"Yeah...yeah, but she wasn't his girlfriend."
"What was she to him then, if not his girl?"
"His student." Her tone and the bobbing and weaving head and rolling eyes left no doubt she thought Lucas and Meredyth a pair of simpleminded fools. "He said she had great promise...said he expected her to change the face of veterinary medicine someday. They laughed about it, but I swear I never saw anything going on between them, not like you're thinking. Course you being cops...but me, I don't own a nasty mind and don't particularly ever want to."
"How often did you see her here?"
'Twice, maybe three times."
"Ever leave at closing with the two of them still here?"
"Well...yes...once, maybe twice."
"But you never thought anything unusual was going on between Dr. Belkvin and Lauralie?"
"Never crossed my mind. He was old enough to be her father, and so far as I ever saw, Dr. B, he just never was interested in sex whatsoever."
"Let me get this straight if I can," Lucas said to her. "Lauralie shows up, hangs out here, does some interning with the doctor, no hanky-panky as you see it, but one morning after you leave them here together at night, you come in to find a whole damned operating table and a slew of cutting instruments gone—disappeared overnight—but you don't think anything unusual is going on between Belkvin and Blodgett, because you attribute his strange behavior to his old gambling habit. Is that right, about the gist of it?"
"That's how I see it still, and why not? Why would he lie to me?"
"He told you he had to sell the table and tools to pay old debts, Ms. Jones, and that was a lie."
"Please, Lucas." Meredyth backed him off, making a show of scolding him. She returned to MariLouise, apologizing for her partner's rudeness. 'Tell me, Ms. Jones, how soon after meeting Lauralie did Dr. Belkvin begin to exhibit this stress level you mentioned?"
Ms. MariLouise Jones gave this time to sink in. "I see...I see what you're driving at. You're right. He started this...this crackup behavior soon after he introduced me to Lauralie."
She thanked the young receptionist and retuned to Lucas. "Why get rid of the operating table unless it's to get rid of incriminating evidence, but with his access to various chemical baths and acid cleaners, he could just as well have left the table and thoroughly cleaned it. Ripping it out of here...I don't get the logic, unless...unless..."
"Unless he transported the table elsewhere—possibly her idea—to be used at another location, along with the tools."
"Like the house. We need to know what's happening there."
"This damned mystery screams for an answer."
Meredyth asked, "Ms. Jones, did you see who hauled off the operating table?"
"No, your partner's right 'bout that much. It disappeared overnight one night, 'bout two weeks ago."
"Two weeks ago? Are you sure, absolutely sure of the timing?" asked Lucas.
"Thursdays I get off early, every Thursday. I remember coming in on Friday and almost tripping out seeing that room all empty! The whole surgical table just gone! Dr. B swore he had to sell it off. Said he had plans of getting a new one with coaster wheels and an overhead hose and lights attached, you know."
A phone call came through for Lucas on his cell. He took it, responding to Jana North at the other end, his face showing his disappointment. "All right...all right, Jana. No, not a whole lot here either. Disappointing overall, but we'll find this guy. Only a matter of time now that we know both their names, and we know the type vehicle and a license plate thanks to your snooping there. Cars, plates, and people don't just disappear into thin air. Yes...yes, do that update on the APB-BOLO. I agree, go ahead and upgrade the search. No, already done... planes, trains, and buses. Dogs... three dogs? No, none this location, no."
Lucas hung up, exchanging a look with Meredyth, his shake of the head telling her nothing useful had come of the search of Belkvin's home. No tools, no table, no deadly workbench drenched in blood. "They're trying to locate his dogs at a nearby kennel, but no one there has seen the doctor or the dogs."
"Pongo?" asked Ms. Jones. "Pongo's with me. Dr. B asked me if I could take him for a while."
"When was this?"
"A couple weeks ago."
"That same Thursday night?"
"Right."
Lucas took a deep breath. Interrogating MariLouise might have been easier with a lawyer present, he thought, exasperated. "Other than his home and the school where he teaches, Ms. Jones, do you have any idea where he might have disappeared to and why he didn't take Pongo?"
"He took his other two dogs with him, Desperado Pete— Petie, and Lupe Fritz, his two old, retired greyhounds."
"Weird dog names," commented Meredyth.
"They were one-time racers, you know, on a track in Abilene, I think. They had names to bet on, you know, like racehorse names, Sea biscuit, Xtra Heet, What Up...all that."
"Two other dogs he took with him?" pressed Lucas.
"They were all three here at the kennel for a time. Said he was having his place fumigated. Next thing I know, he's asking if I could take Pongo for a week while he took the other two."
"But you have no idea where he was going?"
"I thought he was going home."
"But he disappeared instead...with two dogs in tow."
Meredyth asked, "Where do you think he is now, Ms. Jones? I mean if you wanted to find him, where would you start?"
She at first hesitated answering, considering, as if she thought it a trick question. Then MariLouise's eyes widened and she dropped her right shoulder, followed by her left. "I'd put in calls to the casinos in the Gulf...try the race tracks—horses and dogs."
Outside the clinic, they watched soon-to-be-disappointed dog and cat owners parking and coming toward the veterinary with pets in hand and on leashes. Lucas and Meredyth took a moment to speak with a few of Belkvin's customers and to pet their animals. They got the same reluctance as Jones had exhibited from the regulars when confronted with the likeness between Belkvin and the artist's sketch.