Lucas lay on his own bed now in his own small apartment, feeling foolish and harebrained and thinking now just how small his place was compared to how the rich lived, and he stared the whole while across the room at the two crystal goblets still in their cellophane sheaths. He'd placed them on his dresser, where they were busy catching and reflecting the light, the colors bouncing off the mirror in a variegated, miniature world of crazy mazes, dancing about the walls as if some spectral campfire from an ancient time had invaded Lucas's room.
The goblets' jewel-like multifaceted cuts were like fire in more ways than one. They would fetch a few good bucks at any of the hundreds of pawnshops in the city or in nearby Galveston. They could also bring him suspension, sanctions, possible other disciplinary action. He was angry with himself for having gotten sucked into this by Sanger, and even angrier at himself for having foolishly lifted these glasses from a taped crime scene. It was enough, alongside striking another officer, to get him thrown off the force.
He momentarily wondered if subconsciously the shining fire glass had symbolized for him his former self, his burning flame-lost for some years now; it also represented his old idiocy. Perhaps it was an idiocy handed down from former generations, an idiocy of the genetic kind, one he could never truly hope to escape. He had heard stories all his life of Indian ancestors who “counted coup,” men who dared death, flaunted their prowess as warriors, even brave Cherokee women of the Wolf clan and other clans, known as War Women, who fought alongside their men in battles lost to time and oblivion. But the Cherokee did not make war for territorial or political reasons; they made war for one reason only, to restore the natural order of the universe when one of their brothers was killed. They made war only in retaliation for murder, in order to avenge fallen brothers of the same fire. This thought, as always, made him curious about a missing people who called themselves the
Ani-yun-wiya, the Principal People who were at the known center of the world, and about Kana'ti and Selu, the first man and woman, who most certainly faced enormous obstacles in their lifetimes.
As with all life, change came, sometimes violently, with the clash of cultures, and so came war and reasons for war with it, along with the Cherokee idea of what constituted bravery. As Cherokees were pushed westward, first to Oklahoma Territory on the Trail of Tears, some later migrating from there to Texas, they adapted many of the Plains Indians ideas of war and bravery, learning that bravery could mean making a fool of a white man, sometimes simply by stepping into an enemy camp, slapping an enemy's face, and escaping with his horses to return to a village as a hero.
Stonecoat's very name had come about on one such foray into the camp of a sleeping band of conquistadors. His ancient ancestor had led a band of Cherokee into an enemy stronghold, surprising the “stone coated” one in his sleep, attacking and wiping out the Spanish detachment in retaliation for earlier wrongs. When his renowned ancestor had killed the leader of these men, he had taken the man's breastplate and henceforth worn it in battle, and so his followers came to call him Stonecoat. The first Stonecoat survived many battles and died in old age, probably forty or forty-five, and was buried with his silver breastplate as a warrior. Lucas had always wondered if the man, like Lucas, might not have simply been crazy.
Lucas wondered now if Meredyth Sanger was, in a sense, a War Woman, if she wouldn't fit right in with the Wolf clan. He admired her tenacity, but he also wished now he had never met the woman. He recalled at the same time their stroll through the Houston city zoo, what a wonderful time he had had with her, and how lovely a person she actually was, and how he had liked having her sitting across from him in his apartment, and how that was likely something he'd never see again. At the same time his mind raced with the question of how he was going to find an independent lab in this town that could discreetly analyze the fire glasses for fingerprints and chemical residue. At the same instant, another voice in his head told him not to bother, that no prints would be found on the glasses, that he killer was too damned smart for that, that he would have wiped them clean of prints before putting them into the dishwasher, and he'd have cleansed them of any chemical residue.
“Then why didn't he put them up with the other twenty-two goblets on the shelf?” Lucas asked the room.
“He couldn't find the others. He was in a rush, so he shoved them into the machine just to get them out of sight,” he answered himself.
He nodded to his own inner counsel and replied, “You know something, Indian man? You're probably right.”
So, if there wasn't so much as a damned trace of a print on the goblets, why'd / steal them? he wondered. Am I that hard up for trouble?
He got up, went to the mirror, and stared at his reflection before answering himself.
“I borrowed them as evidence,” he tried to convince himself, “because… if they are thoroughly an absolutely clean, then the glasses were wiped clean and shoved into the dishwasher. Why? This means the killer was careful to clean up after himself.”
Stonecoat paced the floor until someone below banged on the ceiling, sending him back to his bed where he placed his hands behind his head and resumed thinking and talking to himself. “After he drank wine with the judge, he killed the old man and then took great pains to clean up the evidence. He knew his victim. If that's the case, the old man went to bed with the killer, slept with him or her? Or allowed the killer to take a bed just down the hall from him, likely in one of his guest rooms, where the killer patiently waited for the old man to nod off, as in Poe's story The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Like The Tell-Tale Heart, this crime involved hearts, but unlike Poe's story of guilt and anxiety and stress overcoming the murderer, Lucas didn't expect to hear of anyone's claiming responsibility for Judge Charles D. Mootry's murder-save the habitual lunatic confessors found in every major metropolitan city. No… no sociopath who might be psychotic enough to drive a steel stake through the heart of the judge was likely to unburden himself at having killed old Uncle Charlie.
This thought brought him back around full circle to himself and self-protection and a concern for self-preservation. What kind of fool-or rather, how many kinds of fools-had he played tonight? He hadn't taken such risks since… since before the death of Wallace Jackson, since before the accident nearly costing him his own life as well as Jackson's. The night had been great, uplifting, filled with risks. It had rejuvenated him in many ways, and he had Sanger to curse or to thank for his troubles now.
Had Dr. Sanger known of his buried need for a life of risk-taking? Had she read him so thoroughly and easily?
But perhaps the risks were too great, too gaping huge should he tumble. He had so much to lose, and what was in it for him if he went out of his way to solve the Mootry case, anyway?
Certainly there were no guarantees. The department, once they learned of how he had approached this case, how he had circumvented the law, would not look kindly on his intervention, despite a favorable outcome. He knew this all too clearly. Even if he did succeed, there would be sanctions.
So what's in it for me? he silently asked himself, his room, the goblets, the dead judge, his own ancestors.
At near two A.M., he closed his eyes on the madness he'd become a part of. He was only certain of one thing at the moment of sleep. He did not wish to get any more involved with either the Mootry case or Dr. Meredyth Sanger.
He wanted rather to crawl back into that safe place where he had been before meeting her. But that meant returning like a dog with his tail between his legs to the goddamned Cold Room and pretending nothing had changed. He wasn't completely convinced he could do that, but a stem and cautionary voice deep within told him he bloody well had no other choice.
Meredyth Sanger had tried to sleep, but her frustration and her feeling of resentment toward everyone associated with the Houston Police Department-and especially Lucas Stonecoat now-had boiled anew to the surface and had actually awakened her in the night. A look at her clock told her that it was 3:11 A.M. The entire day before, she had hoped to hear from Lucas Stonecoat, that he had had time to really think things through, and that he realized his earlier mistake in not instantly and readily joining forces with her. It all seemed so obviously the right thing to do, at least in her mind's eye. Besides, what better offer was he holding out for?
She sat upright in bed, feeling like a windswept prairie, her throat parched. She reached for the water beside her bed and gulped at it. She mentally began to browbeat herself for having sunk so low as to go out stalking and pleading with the big bear for his help. “To hell with him,” she reiterated for the hundredth time since he'd declined helping her in her quest. “As a trained psychiatrist,” she told herself aloud, “you should've known better. You'd think you would be a better judge of character after all this time, dealing with the abnormal, the aberrant, the psychos.”
Part of her work took her into jail cells and courtrooms, where she ran tests and conducted interviews to determine whether or not a man was legally sane or medically insane, competent to stand trial or not.
“So, why couldn't I have seen the truth about Stonecoat?” she wondered aloud.
Like any man who faced extreme trauma, pain, and suffering, he had a right to the armor he had built up around himself, his protective coat. Stonecoat was an apt name for the man. Trauma permanently changed a man, any man. Why should Lucas Stonecoat be any different? Nowadays, he naturally leaned more toward a conservative and safe lifestyle. Naturally he did not want to go out of his way to risk himself. Unfortunately, his reaction to her and her offer was all too normal.
In her profession, she saw all the wide spectrum of machismo in the male cop-and in many a female cop as well. She saw the gung-ho, anxious to face down death and prove some private code of valor, and she saw those who feared not only the street and the job they had committed themselves to, but their own shadows after a brush with death. She saw some ruthless cops, some reckless cops, and others who were careless and foolish, while some were careful and cautious to a fault, a fault that could get a partner killed.
Every man reacted to the streets differently, and little wonder, given the variety of experience of each new recruit.
So maybe the Cold Room was easy for Lucas Stonecoat, a haven of a place to spend his second career as a cop in absolute safety, without risks and far removed from the trauma of his past in Dallas. She had thought the Cold Room her ally in fetching him to her side. The Cold Room, with its walls closing in on his Indian soul, she had believed, must convince Lucas that if he did not join forces with her, his spirit would wither and die.
But perhaps that spirit she had heard about had already died, back in Dallas.
She knew the Cold Room might easily drive any man crazy, but once more, Lucas was not just any man.
Despite it all, despite his turning her down, there remained a gentle intrigue surrounding this man, with his tough guy exterior and hidden hurts. There was a mystery about the pained expression-the knowing eyes that seared another's soul. There was a fire, like embers that might burn on forever, deep within the luminous brown eyes of this man, and this mystery had leapt out at her like a cougar and had touched her as she had not been touched by anyone in a long time. He was, clinically speaking, a fascinating case study.
At the same time, she knew she could not allow this man too close. He was nothing if not dangerous; he was, rightly or wrongly, filled with paranoia and phobias, not to mention his physical problems and the abuse of alcohol and drugs that were all too often the aftermath of a yearlong hospital stay. Besides, she had Conrad McThuen to think of. She and Conrad had been working up to a total commitment now for too long, and she loved Conrad, who was a real estate acquirer and market analyst for the University of Texas at Houston, a man who was outside police and legal circles- and she thanked God for that.
Conrad's duties with the university had sent him on an extended trip to Italy, of all places. Conrad had pleaded with her to take some time, come away with him, but she had been too obsessed with her recent discoveries to back off now, and so she had declined a romantic getaway with her lover in favor of beating her head against the stone wall of Captain Lawrence's prejudice and attempting headway with Stonecoat, and nothing guaranteed.
“So what does that say about you, Doctor? Maybe the redskin was right: 'Heal thyself?” she muttered to the empty bed.
Maybe she needed to soften the Indian up, but how? She could fix him up with a girlfriend. He did great with the zoo animals; maybe he could be half as charming toward Carrie or Dana? Or perhaps the more exotic Abigail?
She lay back against her pillows, contemplating her role as Cupid, soon allowing sleep to reclaim her, the thought of playing matchmaker to Lucas Stonecoat swirling about her brain like a whirling dervish, perhaps determined to find an alternative to the idea of matchmaking-maybe blackmail?
It wasn't an idea she relished, and it certainly wouldn't enhance her already shaky beginning with Stonecoat, but if it was all she had… maybe…