Lucas had to admit that what had begun as a dismal, uneventful day had quickly transmogrified into an exciting, exhilarating and challenging day after all. He'd met a vivacious woman who was passionate about her work- perhaps too passionate about her work-had visited the animals in the zoo, had foiled a robbery attempt by two other animals, and what's more, he had been cheered to see his captain come straight to the Texaco station and back him one hundred percent. Lawrence had done all he could to shield his new recruit from the onslaught of Internal Affairs detectives, a breed of cop always anxious for a scandal. It appeared that Captain Lawrence wasn't half so bad as Dr. Sanger had made him out to be. Whatever personal and professional differences existed between Sanger and Lawrence, Lucas was sure of one thing: He didn't want to get in between a rock and a hard place.
Lucas now pulled into a parking spot at the rear of the Thirty-first, near a back door that would take him into the precinct without his having to pass either the sergeant's cage or the squad room. He wasn't anxious to face his big Irish sergeant just now, nor the detectives and officers who would want all the dope on what went down at the gas station. Word got around a precinct faster than a hairdresser's.
Lucas now scooped up his assorted newspapers and headed toward the building and back to the Cold Room, where he had a couple more hours to kill before going off duty. The newspaper stories on the Mootry case would keep him occupied till then, he was sure. Maybe he'd get through this day after all.
He quickly located the staircase that took him down into the bowels of the old structure and to the Cold Room, the stack of Houston Chronicles and Star-Standards under his arm.
Reopening the dank room, he found it a stone coffin. Looking around at his small kingdom, a dungeon in the belly of the Thirty-first Precinct, wondering if every goddamned precinct in the lousy city had a Cold Room, he mentally reconsidered Dr. Sanger's offer with a glacial, determined eye. On the one hand, he told himself, he had a great deal more to lose than did Dr. Sanger in sticking his neck out on a case he had no business on; on the other hand, what had he to lose? His dark little castle of moldy case files, the faceless, lost orphans of murder dating back to the turn of the century?
Still, it would require some quiet deliberation. He'd have to weigh all the facts, review the information on the Mootry case, see what if anything it had to do with the case files Dr. Sanger had mentioned. Still, he was no one's fool. He realized how crazy it'd be to team up with Meredyth Sanger. “What does she know about criminal investigation anyway?” he asked himself. Still, she could be his ticket out of here, if not for good, then at least during their investigation into this matter together. And what might that lead to? he wondered. There was no telling.
He suddenly slumped into the shocked and protesting chair, its piercing wail an ear-shattering banshee scream that could curdle the blood of the toughest cop in the precinct. He imagined it must be echoing through the heart of the old building and hurting everyone else's ears and teeth as much as his own. Christ, am / getting that heavy? He silently wondered.
As comfortable as he was going to get, he flicked on the swivel lamp and scanned the papers for all the news on Charles D. Mootry, Esquire, now deceased. After three-quarters of an hour spent scanning the various articles he'd collected, he decided aloud, “Not much more than what Meredyth had to say has gotten into the press.” This was true so far as he could determine from the articles read, but the case itself was rather an incredible one, something for Gary Larson's Far Side or Ripley's Believe It or Not.
It had all the earmarks of a Movie of the Week, too.
He next dug out the file that Dr. Sanger had carelessly tossed below his desk lamp early that morning. At first he just picked at the file the way he might a blemish on his skin, and he helplessly wondered how much of the file material she'd duplicated on the station Xerox. He finally, without enthusiasm, thumbed the file open and peered at the police reports and ghastly photos she had been playing with. Inside the innocent-looking, cream-colored manila folder, now yellow with age, an abhorrent world of black-and-white crime scene photos stared back, like grinning devils, displaying broken and irreparable lives; lives lost to the ultimate discontinuity: murder.
The older case file held a nightmare similar to the Mootry affair; in fact, it was shockingly similar to what had occurred in Bay town, where Mootry's body had been discovered, but this was a case in Sugar Land, and this one was-by police file standards-ancient, dated 1986. One of the ads clinging to the news clippings he found said that gasoline was eighty-seven cents a gallon. President Ronald Reagan was in office; the paper was filled with news of an armed U.S. strike against Libya, this after several terrorist bombings Libya was believed connected to. Ferris Bueller's Day Off was playing at the movies and Me and My Girl topped the musicals list. The largest U.S. corporation according to Fortune was General Motors, and a dispute was waged over AIDS virus research in which the Patent and Trademark office designated the Pasteur Institute of Paris as the senior party rather than the U.S. National Institutes of Health, in the matter of the first AIDS blood test. At stake were millions of royalty dollars to be earned by the use of the test.
Stonecoat could only recall that it was the year that the North American Soccer League went belly-up with great financial losses to all involved. This memory triggered his recollection of several more events in '86 that he had taken particular note of. It was the year the Chicago Bears defeated the New England Patriots to become world champions in Super Bowl XX. It was the year Ivan Boesky agreed to pay the government one hundred million dollars as a penalty for illegal insider trading, while Congress voted to make the rose the official U.S. flower, a choice debated off and on for a hundred years. Roger Clemens, pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, started the season with thirteen straight wins-only the seventh man in history to do so; the World Series was lost by the Boston Red Sox, won by the New York Mets in a stunning upset. Len Bias, star forward for the University of Maryland, died of a heart attack reportedly brought on by the use of cocaine at a party celebrating his signing a contract with the Boston Celtics; the space shuttle Challenger exploded seventy-four seconds after liftoff at Cape Canaveral, Florida, killing all seven astronauts aboard, including civilian Christa McAuliffe, thirty-seven, a Concord, New Hampshire, schoolteacher, the first private citizen chosen for a space shuttle flight. On August 20 the third worst murder spree in U.S. history took place in Edmond, Oklahoma, when Patrick Henry Sherrill shot and killed fourteen of his former coworkers, wounded six others, and then killed himself, after losing his post office job. In Leicestershire, England, Dr. Alec Jeffreys had discovered genetic fingerprinting, and the test for DNA evidence was put to work for the first time on a criminal case the following year. And the first American Indian to become a Roman Catholic bishop, the Reverend Donald E. Pelotte, forty-one, was ordained in Gallup, New Mexico.
Among law enforcement officials, 1986 was also remembered as the year crack cocaine came on the scene.
Stonecoat brought his mind back to the man for whom the death file was named. He knew he must go slow and easy to fully appreciate just how similar these two deaths were: Mootry today and this professional man, this medical doctor, some ten years before. Dr. Wesley Palmer had been murdered in his bed in the same brutal fashion, a steel arrow through his chest, his head severed, along with hands, feet, penis and testicles. These body parts were carried off by the madman. This had occurred at the doctor's home some six months after his arrival in the area.
The maniac had coolly gained entry to the house, found the doctor asleep in his bed, and mercilessly fired an arrow from a crossbow. As indicated in the report, the hundred pounds plus pressure behind the arrow was enough power to split apart the man's heart and send the arrow cleanly through to the floor beneath the bed.
The forensics report read like dja vu: The arrow in each case had been placed point-blank at a location that assured the heart would burst immediately. In each case, Mootry's and the older case, the deadly arrow had in fact been recovered from below each of the dead men's beds. This suggested that one, the killer had no trouble gaining entry or getting close to his victim with a large and deadly weapon, and two, perhaps the killer had some working knowledge of anatomy, since in both cases the killer had obviously managed to avoid both breastbone and ribs. According to the records, the arrow had slammed into and run completely through each victim's heart as if that were the practiced purpose.
And if the killer knew something of anatomy, then perhaps he shared the same profession as Dr. Wesley Palmer, the 1986 victim. After all, deadly doctors abounded in the annals of crime.
Lucas was now thoroughly entranced.
He went back and forth between the fresh ink of today's news clippings and a musty handful that had remained all these years in the Palmer file. He pored over the police reports and FBI reports, all of which led to so many dead ends. Usually serial killings with such a closely linked pattern happened within months, often weeks, of one another, sometimes days of one another, but these two killings were separated by ten years. It didn't figure.
According to the record, Dr. Wesley J. Palmer, like Judge Mootry, had been clean. No ties to organized crime, no outstanding gambling debts, no angry clients or customers, no relatives or others with a grudge. In fact, like Mootry, the man had been well liked, well respected, apparently by all who knew him, save a pair of would-be in-laws, parents to a young lady the doctor had planned to marry when the young woman's untimely death had ended all such plans. The woman's death was some sort of mystery in it self, and her parents had concocted the idea that Dr. Palmer had somehow caused her death. Lucas made a mental note to check more deeply into the young fiancee's death, but however bitter her parents were at the time of her death, they were, in 1986, completely absolved of any wrongdoing surrounding Dr. Palmer, their alibi standing despite a vigorous effort on the part of police to bring a charge of murder. Lucas's eyes widened at the reason investigators were convinced, for a time, that the elderly couple had acted on a revenge motive: Palmer had been dispatched in identical fashion as his fiancee! Lucas dropped his feet from his desk and rode his squealing chair to an upright position on seeing this.
How had she died? He searched the report for more information. It was vital to know how the fiancee had died the year before; what did the '86 coppers mean by “dispatched in identical fashion”? Did they actually mean by bow and arrow?
He could find but scant details of the earlier death filed with Palmer's paperwork. What he found was far too sketchy. Still, he read all there was on the 1985 Alisha Reynolds, Marietta, Georgia, case mentioned in the file. The information about the previous murder of the doctor's fiancee in Palmer's former palatial home in Georgia was teeth-gnashingly superficial and insufficient.
Lucas searched high and low for more information on the dead fiancee, but there was no more here. Had Meredyth Sanger lifted it? There had to be more. How precisely did Dr. Palmer's fiancee die? Was there some revenge motive in the Palmer case that involved the dead girl? Had the parents hired a hit man in retaliation after the courts found Dr. Wesley Palmer innocent in the wrongful death of his intended bride? Had she been strangled, shot, poisoned? Had she been given too many barbiturates or uppers? Had she stumbled off a balcony? The damned reports were infuriatingly silent on exact cause of the woman's death, as if details of her death had been ripped from the file and tossed out as unimportant, the only tantalizing smidgen of detail left the single phrase “dispatched in identical fashion” to Palmer's own death. Could he trust this image? And if so, did this mean there were three intended victims of the crossbow killer? Or had the fiancee stepped into the crossfire?
Was it possible that the parents, a year later, still filled with grief over the loss of their daughter, hired a professional who preferred the sound of an arrow to the sound of a gun? That could explain the coincidence of a ten-year separation in “jobs” for this killer, but it wouldn't explain who killed the daughter.
Lucas made another notation to check the national crime files for any information on professional hits or hit men who used a crossbow or bow and arrow. It seemed as far-fetched as finding an alien hit man or a Geronimo out of time, but it could sound off some bleeps and alarms, so he'd give it a try. But then, perhaps Dr. Sanger had already done as much. He didn't want to ask her, however. Instead, he wanted to dig a little deeper before committing himself to her little covert operation.
Just as in the hit movie Pulp Fiction, hit men did come in all sizes, shapes, colors, sexes, and brainpan sizes these days; perhaps there was one out there with a Robin Hood fetish? Maybe he or she even wore tights? If it was a she, that might explain how she had gotten so close to two men-at their bedsides-with a deadly weapon the size of a shotgun.
Lucas needed a break. The information was coming in too fast for him, and his legs needed stretching, and his back was beginning to trouble him again. If he was going to be behind a desk for as many hours as this a day, he would have to get a contoured, expensive-as-hell chair like the one Johnnie Cochran and the rest of the O. J. dream team had had for the duration of what had become the longest trial in the history of jurisprudence in America and the world.
On a notepad, he jotted down the name of Palmer's fiancee-Alisha Reynolds-along with a note about her parents, Dick and Mildred Reynolds of 1224 Cherry Lane Drive, Marietta, Georgia. By now they could have moved out of the country, or out of life, he reminded himself even as he wrote. Still, he'd have to find out what he could about the would-be in-laws. Most crime started in the home, in one fashion or another.
Lucas pondered further what he'd learned about the similarities in the Mootry and Palmer cases. Why were these supposed good men, pillars of the community, targeted for murder in such heinous fashion? What did both men have in common? What clubs did they belong to? Did Mootry know something about the Palmer case? Had he known Dr. Palmer? Had he known of Palmer's murder? What did he know about the earlier problem in Georgia, when Palmer's fiancee was killed? Was Mootry dispatched for what he knew about Palmer? Had the judge ever been to Georgia? Did the judge know Alisha Reynolds's parents, perhaps? Perhaps.
While the cleanly efficient method of dispatching both men seemed wholly practiced and professional, why decapitate and remove hands and feet and private parts? That was not the sort of work your usual hit man bought into. He didn't want to leave the scene covered in blood; he didn't want to make a mess. So why the mutilation of the two bodies? It certainly didn't seem to be for reasons a hit man would enjoy. Hit men and women worked on one principle and it was called lucrative payment. They were mercenaries, pure and simple. Lucas had a hard time imagining a pro who would have anything to do with gratuitous bloodletting, unless… unless he was paid a great deal more for the extra show?
Whether a hired killer or just a nutcase, was the after-death mutilation an effort on the part of the murderer to shock authorities, confuse or slow the process of identification? If so, why leave the torso in the dead man's home? And how did the killer gain entrance? And did his victim know him, even trust him?
“Damn that Meredyth Sanger,” he muttered to himself. Without knowing it, she had hooked him like a marlin.
He wondered if he ought to simply call her and tell her that he knew she was withholding information about Palmer's fiancee and facts surrounding that case just to keep him on her damned string.
Instead, Lucas stood now, stretched, and decided that since it couldn't be Miller time yet, he'd locate the coffee station upstairs, take a break and come back at this thing fresh. It hadn't surprised him that neither Captain Phillip Lawrence, Duty Sergeant Stanley Kelton, nor anyone else for that matter, had interrupted him all afternoon. This place was not inviting; in fact, it was ignored, the pretense being that it didn't exist, and by extension, neither did he.
He went for that coffee.
The coffee station stood alongside the active homicide board, on which the names of victims were placed in red ink alongside the name of the detective in charge of the case. Cases in red ink meant they were open; cases placed on the left-hand side of the board, scripted in black ink, meant they were closed. There was no pen color or place on the board for the cases that went unsolved. They merely disappeared from the board when Lawrence decided it was time to call a halt to the “waste of taxpayers' money” on a case that wasn't ever going to be solved, usually when it was two or three years old. Many cases came in with the name of the perpetrator all but emblazoned on them, but what cops termed a stone-hard mystery was that rare case in which whodunit is unclear and sometimes completely invisible. Sometimes, many times, even the stone-hard mystery could be solved, but often it took years to do so. More and more, departments were unwilling or unable to apportion manpower and man hours of that duration to a single case, so that rooms like Lucas's had begun to swell at the seams.
Every city in America had such cases; every precinct in the city had such cases. For the Thirty-first Precinct, such homicides wound up as dust collectors in what was now Lucas Stonecoat's necromancy collection. It had always been referred to as the Dungeon, the Graveyard and the Cold Room, but already the cops upstairs were referring to it in various cute ways for Lucas's benefit, names such as Lucas's Lodge and, Stonecoat's X-Files. They were also calling Lucas “Spooky” just to further annoy him.