Authors: Robert W. Walker
"Damn it, Badger One, report back!" Lucas repeatedly sought information. "What've we got down there? What're we looking at?"
Through her headphones, Meredyth summed up her assessment of the body language on the ground. "If we have them, it's bad. A murder-suicide or a suicide pact perhaps?"
"Andrews! Andrews!"
"There he is," said the pilot, pointing as Andrews, alongside Lincoln, emerged from the front door. Both men looked disheartened and overcome.
"Look for the car, Belkvin's BMW," Meredyth said, but no vehicle whatsoever came into their considerable view from overhead.
"Badger One, report back," Lucas asked again from the police whirlybird. "God, I shoulda been down there." Then he angrily tore off his headphones and ordered the pilot to set the chopper down in a nearby field.
They had checked with DMV for Belkvin's license plate, and the information matched that given by his secretary—he had only the one car. An exhaustive search by Jana North's people to locate Arthur Belkvin's relatives had turned up nothing. He seemed to be without any familial ties, another clue to his isolation and contributing, no doubt, to his being the perfect beau for Lauralie.
"Damn, I don't see his car out here anywhere," Meredyth said, cursing their luck. "Likely they've made off for Mexico as you feared. If so, at least it means an end to the killings, at least for the time being."
From the headphone in his lap, Lucas heard the helicopter cop in the second hovering craft shouting a response to Meredyth's request. "No vehicles at all in the open. Still, could be tucked away in the barn."
"Andrews! What've we got at ground zero?" pleaded Meredyth as their helicopter wobbled to an unsteady standstill in the boulder-strewn field, the rotors and engine still roaring as Andrews's voice came over the radio, saying, "Flying Wolf, come in...come in."
"We're here, Elliot, out," said Meredyth as Lucas replaced the headset.
"We got what appears to be left of Arthur Belkvin, a pair of dead greyhounds, and enough scattered evidence to put Lauralie Blodgett away forever, but we don't have Lauralie."
Moments before the chopper had bathed the farmstead in brilliant blue-white, Lucas and Meredyth had been watching the single light winking back at them—on-off, on-off—the result of their speeding past the foliage surrounding the dark little farmstead. This light had been left on for them, obliterated now by the radiance of the chopper's floodlights. Meredyth wondered what Lauralie had left under the light inside. She wondered if she really wanted to know.
Lucas didn't hesitate, leaping from his front seat out of the chopper, rushing ahead of her as if he meant to decide this for her. Meredyth climbed from the helicopter, seeing Lucas narrowing the gap between himself and the others now assembled before the broken-down farmhouse doorway—a shaken Captain Lincoln, a deflated Andrews, a businesslike Jana North, and Stanley Kelton in flack gear all huddling together, comparing notes on what was found at each structure. Leonard Chang's CSI van had been immediately called in, and it came right up to the front door, kicking up gravel and rock into a woodpile and pinging against a free-standing fuel oil drum.
Lucas stormed up to the group, anxious to know what they knew about the interior. The noise from the two choppers and the churned-up wind—sweeping debris-filled dirt devils taunting on all sides of them—added to the confusion. Lucas reached the others, and Meredyth saw Andrews throw up his hands as if to wash them of the operation. With Andrews stepping off and Captain Lincoln grabbing Lucas, keeping him from saying another word to Andrews, Meredyth gauged the level of emotions as being at the frayed . Kelton took Lucas aside, trying to calm him as the SWAT team retreated to a respectful distance, and Chang began orchestrating his small army of evidence techs, Lynn Nielsen overseeing the preparation of field lighting going inside the house. Meredyth cornered Lincoln, asking, "What's in there? What'd you find?" She had to speak over the whump-whump-whump of two helicopters until the earthbound one finally cut its engines. "It's the rest of Mira Lourdes, isn't it?" She imagined what little remained of the woman dangling on a tether hook.
"No...no sign whatever of the woman, only the freezer they kept her body in," replied Lincoln.
"Then it's just Belkvin and his dogs inside?"
Lincoln gulped down large doses of the cool night air like a man splashing water into his face, trying desperately not to vomit or show any sign of weakness before the telescopic cameras focusing in on him from some fifty-odd yards away where the press was held in check. Then overhead, a 2News helicopter began competing for space with the police chopper still lighting up the ground. Lincoln tore at the Velcro snaps of his bullet-proof vest, the vest responding with a rending sound, popping open like a loosed girdle, dropping Lincoln's generous stomach out and over his belt-line. "The man's heart, Meredyth, is literally on his sleeve."
Her mind immediately went to the old aphorism: He wore his heart on his sleeve. "She's still making jokes, taunting us."
"He must've had a real heart-on for her," Lincoln said, attempting a dark joke. "The thing is positioned in the crook of his well-posed arms. I think the message she means to convey is that dear old Arthur wore out his welcome in her demented world."
Lucas had stepped over the torn-away door and had gone into the house, and he now returned to Meredyth. "She opened up his chest, using a bone saw like a damned can opener, blood everywhere...cut out his heart and handed it to him, not to mention what she did to his Johnson. She cut off his whole package, including the balls."
"No sign of a car," commented Kelton, joining them.
"She's long gone," added Jana North. "You okay, Lucas?"
"What'd she do with Mira Lourdes's remains?" asked Meredyth. "Captain, we should have the area around the house and outbuildings, and the interior of the bam, the basement, root cellar all searched for Mira's remains. If we accomplish nothing else here tonight, let's bring her home."
"I'll so order Andrews, and we'll leave the fine-tuning sleuth work to Chang's CSI unit," replied Lincoln.
"I want a look inside," Meredyth said to Lucas.
"It's bad. Mere."
"I need to do this."
"Why? Why play her game?"
"Do I have any choice?"
Lincoln looked on, listening to their discussion, his features creased with concern. "I gotta go deal with the press."
"Arthur Belkvin's body is laid out on his own operating table, Mere, and—"
"We found the missing table."
"—and his two dogs, dead on either side of his feet, their bodies posed against the table struts like Egyptian statues, stiff as stone, intact, no violence done to their bodies. Poisoned, it seems. And there's a floor-model Freezer Queen taking up most of the room in the kitchen where a kitchen table ought to be."
"I gotta get inside, see what she wanted me to see," she firmly told Lucas.
Lincoln had stopped short, turned, and come back to them where they stood on the porch. "I want you two to know I've made up my mind. You're to stand down on this case after tonight. Too many eyes on us now, and you're both too emotionally involved, and it's time others had a shot at this madwoman."
"What others are you talking about, Captain?" asked Lucas.
"All right, Lucas...FBI's coming in on the case now. We need their resources and experience, and we need national and international jurisdictional cooperation. This crazed Blodgett woman could be anywhere in the U.S. by now, or across the border."
"I'm sure that line will play well on the ten o'clock news, Captain."
The comment turned Lincoln's calm features into those of an angry gargoyle. "Hold on there, Lieutenant! That's uncalled for!"
"You gotta give us more time!"
"The hell I do! And what's wrong with getting more help, Lucas?"
"It'll take days to bring them up to date, for one. And we both know that caving into them now is only good for the cameras. That it's all PR bullswallop!'
"Christ, Stonecoat! You know damn well the FBI's coming in on the case whether I invite them or not!"
"You can stiff arm 'em. You know they'll spend hours on disputing our findings, Meredyth's profile, all our hard-earned inches, every clue, and even after all that, if they are finally educated to what we have here, we've lost all those man hours away from—"
'Too late! At this point, it's out of my hands."
Lucas followed him down the steps and onto the gravel. "But Captain!"
"I held 'em off as long as I could. Tonight's raid was supposed to end in an arrest or a death—an end to this deviant bitch."
Lucas fell silent, staring at the earth, making a dust cloud of the dirt he displaced, his boot tip creating a lazy- eight configuration in the driveway, the symbol for infinity.
"Damn it all, Lucas, you have no idea the pressure I'm under. I don't always want to give into public pressure, pressure from the press, and certainly not from the damn Feds, but everybody's on this bandwagon, and I no longer have any choice."
"Sure...sure..." Lucas calmly replied, but the single word answer only added to Lincoln's distress.
"And what about you and her, Meredyth? You think you're Batman and Robin or something? You fucked up, the two of you. You both led me to believe we had the Blodgett girl and Belkvin cornered and outfoxed, dead to rights, finished! Finito! Not once but twice. But obviously she's made fools of you again, and now—and now!—the bitch is likely over the state line in California, Louisiana, New—or goddamn old—Mexico...for God's sake."
Lincoln stormed past the CSI van. Leonard Chang, with Nielsen's help, had just finished suiting up in full protective wear, including plastic laminate helmet. Nielsen too looked like a space man, covered from head to toe.
Lucas set his teeth and nervously studied the black woods off to their left. Anyone could be hiding there, just out of range of the helicopter's floodlights. Lincoln cornered Andrews, barking orders, and Elliot, in a show of bravado, led a contingent of SWAT members fanning out to search in all directions around the house for any sign of freshly turned earth. The men, women, and dogs of the SWAT poured into the surrounding dark without complaint, disappearing from the artificial safety of the camp fire circle created by the overhead floodlights.
"One pissed-off captain on our hands now," Jana North said to Lucas, at his side now.
"He's become quite the politician lately."
"Don't be too hard on him, Lucas. Like it or not, politics comes with the job, and his strategy for coping has always been to appease as many as possible without com-promising a case. He's not the worst sort of brass I've ever worked with. How 'bout you?"
"No. Lawrence, now there was a prick." He turned to stare again at the single light in the front room when he realized that Meredyth was no longer on the outside. He saw her form through the shattered window, standing over Arthur Belkvin's remains. He rushed inside, leaving Jana standing alone under the glare of the chopper.
Chang and Nielsen entered on Lucas's heels, Jana North following them. Stan Kelton stopped in the doorway, tall enough to see over the others.
On entering the death house a second time, Lucas was again struck by how the eyes were immediately lassoed and pulled to the single light over the stainless-steel table at the center of the front room on which lay the nude, mutilated body of a sandy-blond-haired man. It had been this medical tensor lamp hanging over the table that had winked at Lucas and Meredyth through the foliage.
Below the light, Arthur Belkvin's blood-spattered and tortured features, eyes wide in a kind of amazed horror, easily matched the photo of the veterinary doctor. As Lincoln had warned, two stiff-bodied greyhounds sat on their haunches, propped against the table, positioned at Arthur's feet.
Chang had gone straight to the body, but Nielsen had found Belkvin's discarded pants, and she carefully wrenched a wallet from a pocket. Holding out the open billfold to the driver's license, she pronounced it belonging to Dr. Arthur D. Belkvin. Chang had switched on a tape recorder attached to his belt, taping her reading of Belkvin's name, age, color of hair, eyes, nationality, and address.
As Chang worked, he continued to record their findings, stating that the dead man on the slab matched the photo ID, eyewitness descriptions, and now the driver's license information. He next began to describe the condition of the body as he hovered over Belkvin, when suddenly he bumped one of the dead dogs and it fell over with a noisy thud. Startled, he swore and stopped the tape long enough to shout at a pair of evidence techs, "Get these stinking dogs outta the way! Put them on ice. We'll autopsy them back in Houston."
Meredyth had stood frozen by the sight of Belkvin's heart in his hands, his chest splayed open, a bloody, meandering, flapping, puckering snake of a wound some one and a half to two feet in length from clavicle to navel. A handheld rotary bone saw had split him open. Lying nastily where his genitals ought to have been, between his bloodied thighs in a pool of crimson, the saw rested skewed to one side.
"Heart lying in crook of Belkvin's right arm. Appears cut from its moorings below the rib cage, ribs having been cut, presumably using saw found between victim's legs. Each arm neatly folded across the mutilated chest. Missing altogether are the genitals. Am making request of all present to find Mr. Belkvin's genitalia."
Everyone got the message, glad to have a chore to perform in this nightmare room. But try as they did, they could not locate the man's missing parts. Jana, spotting a jar on a shelf with human tissue inside, rushed to it, saying, "I've got them!" But she quickly corrected herself. "Sorry...don't know what this is, but it's definitely not Arthur's nuts and bolts."
Lynn Nielsen took the big Mason jar in hand, studying its contents. Another human heart, this one floating in formaldehyde.
She cradled it and carefully walked it to Chang, who agreed. "Yes, most likely from the Lourdes woman. A final memento to Dr. Sanger, I suspect."
The remark felt like a dagger plunged in her own chest, Meredyth thought, wondering if Chang, like others in the know, was beginning to consciously or subconsciously blame her for the string of deaths. She held a handkerchief over her nose, battling the odors, struggling to stabilize a sudden nausea and dizziness threatening to overtake her. Nielsen belatedly handed out scented surgical masks and gloves for them all.