Robert Walker - Final Edge

A police woman alongside Meredyth had caught her from falling when her knees had buckled, and she'd led her to a nearby bench. Meredyth sobbed openly.

Lucas looked across at her, his heart feeling the pain of her anguish. She had broken it off with Priestly, but they had been friends for a long time. They had been talking marriage at one time. This shocking development could send her into a complete spiral, he feared.

Byron had been viciously torn apart in the confines of the small shoulder-width cubbyhole, and no one had heard his screams here just off the archives where Meredyth had been working that morning. Everything seemed now to move in slow motion as Andrews radioed for an at-ease and called Lynn Nielsen to bring in her CSI team, informing her over the secured channel that a body had been found at his location. Someone brought a thermos of hot coffee down to them, and Lucas sat quietly holding Meredyth's hands in his.

After doing an initial assessment of Priestly's body, Dr. Lynn Nielsen came to them. "Your friend Byron has been stabbed in the gut so many times that without cleaning the wounds thoroughly and viewing them under the lights at my lab, it is impossible to say how many times he was stabbed, but one thing is certain, whoever did this truly hated the man. It looks like a crime of passion, one of those estranged relationships in which one party snaps and can't seem to stop at inflicting only one wound or even three.

This is in the neighborhood of twenty-five, possibly more stab wounds, plus the afterwards mutilation to the eyes, nose, mouth…and we found something peculiar stuffed down his throat."

"What is it?" asked Lucas.

She held up a clear plastic bag. "Rosary beads."

Meredyth said nothing; she could only stare at the onyx string of beads.

To Lucas they looked like the symbol for the passage of days into night, nights into days in an old Cherokee pictograph-a string of beads. "Was Byron a practicing Catholic?" he asked Meredyth.

"About as much as I was, but no…he didn't carry a rosary with him, and no, I never gave him any as a present. I've never seen this rosary before, and I resent your implication, Dr. Nielsen, that I had anything to do with Byron's murder… except as…due to our proximity…anyone being close to me in the least, she's targeted. You're in danger too, Lucas, perhaps far more than I am."

"He had no advance warning, Mere, but I do. I know what those two maniacs look like, and I'm hunting them down."

Nielsen had begun to apologize, saying she hadn't meant to imply that Dr. Sanger had any part in Priestly's murder. Meredyth ignored her, continuing to speak to Lucas. "While Lauralie and Crazy Joe are hunting you."

"Whoever killed him, he, she, or they did it with a maniacal ferocity. I believe in the lab, we will find wounds in which the knife blade-a large one-will have exited the back. That's how much energy the Ripper-if this proves to be the work of the Post-it Ripper-put into the effort. It would have left the killer breathless, disarrayed, perspiring, and bloody but for the apron and the cleanup she did inside. There's a sink in there and lots of soap, and a stack of maintenance aprons, caps, hair nets, rubber gloves."

"She donned the maintenance uniform for him," said Meredyth. "Caught up to him, asked him for some help inside the closet-something on a shelf perhaps. She lured him inside, teased him as she put on the apron and gloves, the paper hat and hair net."

'Teased her way into his pants," added Lucas. "Explains the discarded tie and trousers."

"And when he most expected gratification, she stabbed him."

"No outcry alerting anyone."

Nielsen said, "He may well have gone into immediate shock, unable to call out-"

"— then came the ratcheted knife strokes, machine-gun fashion," said Lucas. "It all fits."

Nielsen said. "Killed by someone who had a personal connection, someone who had either hated him greatly or was driven to such an emotional pitch that after the first several stab wounds, he or she could not stop a wild violence against him. Like the killer of Yolanda Sims, whoever did it was emotionally involved, deeply so." She looked at Meredyth where she sat sobbing still. "Could this Lauralie have been sleeping with your friend?"

"Anything's possible. But I don't think so. He was just weak when it came to an overture by any female."

"I know a few men like that," Nielsen said sarcastically, trying to elicit a smile but failing.

"Don't you see? She'd like nothing better than to have me on trial for murdering Byron, to put me through that ordeal. To see me disgraced, my life in a shambles. Every-one I ever cared about either dead or scurrying to put as much distance between me and himself as possible. Putting my friends and family through a humiliating time. She wants you to indict me for Byron's murder-I was here at the time of his murder! I have the classic three necessities for a D.A. to put me away-motive, means, and opportunity. I knew the man, detested him, have complained of being stalked by him, been seen arguing with him right outside in the lot the morning of his death not twenty feet from where I sat behind those doors without an alibi."

Lucas added, "It's the work of that cunning bitch we've told you about, Dr. Nielsen. She wants it to look as if he were butchered by her in a fit of rage. But Meredyth doesn't do rage."

"If this is her work, she's done a good job pointing the finger at you, Dr. Sanger, if you can so incriminate yourself-with your own assessment. I urge you to say no more that someone might take as self-incriminating. Besides, liking you as I do, I would not wish to be called to the stand against you to say yes and nod to words taken out of context."

"In other words shut my mouth?"

Nielsen nodded, and then spoke to Lucas. "Now, Lieutenant, as to this sort of disfigurement to the face…"

"Yes?"

"Speaks to the kind of rage between estranged lovers as well, so my advice stands."

"Disfigurement is what this maniac does," said Lucas. "It's why we call him, her-the two of them-rippers- mutilation murderers."

"I understand, of course. I was just pointing out-"

"It looks on the surface very bad, we know," countered Meredyth. "And having been arrested on a weapons charge the same afternoon, well…"

"Technically speaking, you weren't arrested," he said. "You were detained and transported but not booked."

"All the same, multiple witnesses saw the incident."

"Your clever Lauralie was wise enough to have left no calling card or telltale signs of herself behind this time," Nielsen said. "A few toes, teeth, or fingers belonging to Mira Lourdes, left in or around the body here, that would insure it was she and her friend who hacked Mr. Priestly up."

"Only the damn rosary," lamented Lucas. "Only the damn rosary."

"That butchering bitch," muttered Meredyth. "Don't you see, the rosary is her calling card. She wants no mistaking this; she wants me to know she can hurt me at any time. That no one around me is safe either."

Elliot Andrews was standing nearby, picking up as much of what was being said as possible, when his radio crackled into life. He answered it and carried it to Lucas. "For you, your captain."

Lucas accepted the radio Andrews held out to him, Lincoln's ranting voice coming over even before he put it to his ear. His shouting focused on the chaos and phone calls caused by the raid on the courthouse. "I want to know if it's been worth it all. What've you netted there?"

Lucas relayed the gruesome find and informed Lincoln that it was connected to the Mira Lourdes murder, and that the CSI unit at the annex would be here well into the night collecting evidence. Lincoln was placated for the moment, but he wanted to be kept abreast of things, finishing with, "We'll red-ball this APB we have out on this Blodgett woman and her friend, Lucas. Shame what's happening. Give Meredyth my best, and we need to talk in full as soon as possible."