Robert Walker - Final Edge

Fearful of falling, Steve Perelli followed and stopped short alongside Chang, crouching to keep his balance, his video camera in one hand. He too stared down at the curious wrought-iron spike and made out the greyhound's arrogant grin and alert ears painted in blood, poking through the young woman's abdomen. "Looks like something out of a B horror movie," the police photographer said.

"Get the shots, and let's get her off this thing. You'll lend me a hand?"

Perelli gaped at the M.E. "That's not my job. I never handle the bodies. I place rulers beside them to indicate scale, and I get in close, to within a hairsbreadth of a puncture wound with my camera lens, but I don't touch dead people."

"Union rules?"

Perelli replied, "My rules." He'd photographed the worst kind of bloating, discoloration, bruises, slashes, even a screwdriver though a guy's skull once. He'd filmed the results of nail guns, staple guns, ordinary bullet wounds. He'd filmed brutalized, raped, and murdered women, and people run down by cars, tire marks so clearly and indelibly imprinted on their clothing and flesh that people had been put away on the evidence. He'd photographed jumpers, floaters, burn victims, and he'd busted his ass getting shots as detailed as the broken front teeth of a murdered prostitute beaten to death. In fact, he'd photographed areas of the human body that anyone else would be arrested for. But he had never been asked to handle one of them. "It's one thing to film the dead, another to touch, roll, or move the bodies. That's not my job, Dr. Chang," he repeated.

"I need you, Steve. We're stretched thin here." Chang held up a pair of surgical gloves for Perelli to don.

"You got a small army out here. Where's Ted? Nielsen? Detective North's in the house with four Feds, doing nothing so far as I can see. Call her for help."

Chang gnashed his teeth. 'Take your video. I'll get someone."

Under the first light of a cloudy dawn, from his elevated position on the shed roof, Chang could see all around the property. He watched the activity down at the stables, Ted Hoskins leading an investigation into the blood trail left by Lucas Stonecoat only hours before. He could also see the Harris County coroner and his crew finishing up with the two gunshot victims on the lawn. Through the open window, Chang heard North arguing with one of the Feds and stomping around in Meredyth Sanger's upstairs bed-room, from which Lauralie Blodgett had obviously fallen-or had she taken a leap? And if so, had it been her intent to die or simply to take flight? The hunting rifle used to shoot Lucas and the two dead boys on the lawn appeared to have flown down with her, coming to a rest alongside the shed in some brush there. Curious too was the neck, wrapped in bandages spotty with bloodstains. Chang bent over and began unraveling the bandage, that incredible new stuff he'd invested in years ago, Fresh Flesh. When the bandages came away, Chang mentally gauged the wound to the throat-three puncture marks equally spaced. It would fit with the garden tool found in Meredyth's room upstairs.

"Another puzzle piece," he muttered.

Through the tops of trees sloping away from the house, Chang made out the pier and the man-made lake, his gaze finally finding Dr. Lynn Nielsen, tall and slim in a wet suit. Assisted by divers in the water, she was dealing with the dead man in the rowboat, and confiscating the other boat riddled with bullet holes and floating upended.

Further on, across the lake, Dr. Frank Patterson had been diverted immediately to the Brody family crime scene. Via a linkup with Meredyth Sanger from the mede- vac chopper, Chang, en route to the multiple crime scenes, had been given details of where the bodies lay. Once at the Sanger cabin, Chang had set up a command post with Detective Jana North's invaluable help. Everyone was told to also be on the lookout for any sign of body parts and remains of Mira Lourdes.

Meredyth, distraught, had not remained long on the phone. She told Leonard she feared the worst, that Lucas might not make it. The thought had cast a pall over the gloomy work, and the weather reflected the grim inner turmoil Leonard felt for his badly wounded friend listed in critical condition and lying on an operating table.

Detective Jana North leaned again out the window from which Lauralie Blodgett had gone to her death. She needed the air. She was exasperated with the Feds, her body language told anyone caring to read it, like Chang down below on the "hot tin roof" where he motioned for her to join him. The local ASAC-assistant special agent in charge-and his followers had insisted on being brought in on the case, kidnapping being their angle. But Fuller and his boys remained woefully behind and hadn't done their homework. "They have no idea how vested our Missing Persons Bureau is on this case," she had bemoaned to Captain Lincoln over her cell in a private moment, pleading with him to hurry out to the scene.

Lincoln was on his way still. He'd stopped off at the hospital to look in on Meredyth and learn what he could of Lucas's condition. Jana caught herself blaming Meredyth, telling herself that if Lucas died, she'd hate Sanger for the rest of her life. At the moment, no one at ground zero here knew if Lucas was dead or alive.

She stared down at the remains of the deadly Post-it Ripper. Lauralie didn't look like much in death, but Jana had seen what the petite vixen had done at the cafe not far from here, as well as what she'd wrought here on Lake Madera. From her safe vantage point, she watched Chang carefully unwrap Lauralie's throat, freeing it of the bandage- tourniquette. A hell of a lot of loss of blood in the bedroom told the story of Lauralie's bleeding out here, and no doubt Chang's eyes would verify that a struggle for life and death between Meredyth and Lauralie had occurred, and Meredyth had not only won the battle, but had staunched the wounds of her defeated enemy while Lucas lay somewhere bleeding out.

She turned and surveyed the brightly lit crime scene again. From the appearance of things in the bedroom, including several spent shell casings, along with the location of the Remington breech-loader, Jana had a good sense of what had happened here. While Meredyth had been treated for superficial wounds caused by a three- pronged forked garden tool, the trail of mud and dirt leading up to the room suggested that someone most assuredly attacked Lauralie, bringing the garden fork down and into Lauralie's throat.

Jana paced to the door and started down the stairs and out of the house, responding to Chang's gesture to join him atop the shed. She got on her cell phone and dialed. Chang came on instantly.

"Dr. Chang…Leonard!"

"Detective North? Why're you calling? I can hear you from where I'm standing." He looked up again only to find her gone from the window. "Wait…where are you?"

"I don't want anyone else to hear this."

"Go on." The sun had slipped through the cloud cover, and a wide swath of blinding rays sent Chang's arm up to shade his eyes as he looked up at the window again, not ten feet overhead, still searching for the detective. "What is it? Where'd you go?"

"Got a call from the Brody house, one of the evidence techs named Tory."

"Yes, Tory. She is a promising intern."

"She's gotten ill over there. Has a strange story to tell about 'something' hanging from a ceiling fan in the teenager's room."

"And you think it is the rest of your missing person, Mira Lourdes?"

"Sounds extremely likely. The ET, Tory?"

"Yes?"

"She says Dr. Patterson has known about the remains in the second-story room for two hours."

"My God, no!"

"This is the first you've heard?"

"I just discovered my cell phone was switched off accidentally."

"All the same, Frank Patterson knows damn well how important finding the rest of Mira Lourdes is to me-ahhh, the family-you, all of us, and he's so damn strange that he's failed to share the discovery with the rest of us. Why?"