Robert Walker - Final Edge

"You tell me, Detective North, why? Why is Frank doing this?"

"Because he's waiting for those bozos with Fuller to CSI the place before any of the rest of us, even before you, Dr. Chang."

"Still currying favor with Fuller's team. Damn Frank…never knew what side to butter his bread on."

'Tory came to me with it because she'd been unable to reach you, and she knows how Nielsen and Frank have been feuding, so she didn't want to go to Lynn out on the lake without first running it by you."

"What shall we do… what shall we do…" Chang muttered as if to himself.

"I have no idea, but the young intern, she's been dismissed by Dr. Patterson because she dared push him on the issue. Meanwhile, Patterson's focus has been on the down-stairs kitchen and basement areas. She called him an ass."

"Yes, that'd be Frank all right. What do you propose we do? We have our hands full here."

"I'm going over there, but I don't want this intern getting into any trouble over this."

"I see Captain Lincoln's car coming in. Why don't you take him over there with you. Let Frank explain things to him?"

"Great, good idea. Just wanted you to know what's going on across the lake."

"You got someone up there can help me pull Blodgett off this doggie windmill? I need someone strong."

"Sure. I'll send down a couple of big, strapping FBI boys."

She hung up. Chang cursed Patterson's inept people skills. He could well imagine how Frank had treated young Tory, who no doubt felt traumatized at finding parts of Mira Lourdes's corpse dangling from a ceiling fan.

Perhaps a silver lining, he thought, in that Mira's final remains might be located and reunited with the rest of her body-all the parts still in frozen limbo at Chang's morgue, downtown Houston, where her body was treated with the decorum, dignity, and humanity that all his guests received. If it were Lourdes's remains up in that second- story room, and Frank had let it hang there beyond the time it took to make a video record, he was breaking Chang's rules of conduct with respect to the dead.

Leonard had hoped to have a full and detailed map of precisely what had "gone down" here, as Gordon put it, by the time Captain Lincoln had arrived, but obviously a lot of the puzzle still needed fitting into place. Sending off the captain now with Detective North was a stroke of luck he realized, watching North intercept Lincoln at the driveway as he exited his car, seeing her point to the Brody house, and smiling to see Lincoln and North climb into the rear seat of his squad car and turn back for the cutoff to the Brody house across the lake.

Earlier, while en route to Madera Lake, Lincoln had called Chang, and had bellowed into the phone, "Leonard, I want to know what went down exactly when, and in what order. I need a time line. Every bloody detail, Leonard. I want to know what happened to Lucas Stonecoat. Shit, you know how many cop-killing wakes I've gone to this year, and it's only September."

Lincoln would be back soon for all the answers. His going to the Brody house with Jana meant only a temporary reprieve. Chang did not know all the answers, not yet. Hell, he had just learned of the Lourdes remains at the Brody house It seemed only God and Frank Patterson knew all that had gone on there. And what about the weird shit that had "gone down" out there on the lake itself? The naked dead guy covered in worms? One for the table conversation at the American Forensic Society's annual next month, if Nielsen could figure the mystery out.

Chang had made cursory rounds, setting up the individual teams, going from house to stable to lawn to lake, and now the top of the shed. Somebody had to be in charge, and he had been nominated, but Lincoln demanded an impossible magical time frame. A typical crime scene took time, lots of it, but this, seven bodies spread over six-now seven-crime scenes (shed top, second-story bedroom, stable front, the lawn, the rowboat, the Brody basement, and add the Brody second-floor bedroom). On top of that, they had an officer down, quite possibly the eighth body…awaiting Leonard back at Houston General-and what of the sheer number of vehicles involved?

Leonard finally saw the young Feds coming out of the house, one of them approaching him. Belkvin's BMW had been found and was being impounded by the Feds. Three vehicles littered the driveway, and another sat at the Brody house, all in need of at least a cursory going-over.

Leonard gave another moment to Lucas back in Houston, still fighting for his life, he hoped, but the stories filtering to Leonard made his friend's condition sound a great deal worse than merely uncertain. Last word had him in a per-ilous fight for his life on the operating table.

ATF and FBI personnel and forensic crews continued to scour the entire yard for additional shell casings, their leaders drawing diagrams based on findings, attempting to clearly identify Lauralie Blodgett's position and movements at the time of each shot fired, and how she had overpowered the husky 269-pound Kemper.

No agent came to help Chang. The one he'd thought approaching continued on down the path to the bam. "I need help here!" he shouted up to the second-story window on hearing Fuller's voice still there.

"Hold on down there!" shouted one of the FBI agents from Meredyth's window.

"I asked for a couple of men here!" Chang shouted back. "We need to get her off this roof and into the van for transport."

The FBI agent shouted back, "I got a local guy with a cherry picker on his way. It'll help in getting her down from there."

"A cherry picker? We don't need no stinking cherry picker!" But the agent had ducked back inside already. Chang shouted louder, "Agent Fuller! I just need two men. She's getting ripe up here."

Perelli breathed a sigh of relief on hearing of the cherry picker, and he quickly found his way back to the ladder ahead of Chang, balancing his camera as he made his way down.

Chang returned to Lauralie's body and thought how shapely she was, and that she had a beautiful face for a maniac. He mused about the men in her life, all those she had used with such ease. "You could have been anything you chose to be, if only you had put your genius to a good cause. Why did you choose evil?"

"Talking to the dead, Dr. Chang?" Fuller called down to him.

Chang saw that he'd sent his team racing off toward the Brody house with their own evidence technicians and cameraman.

"So this is jurisdictional cooperation," he called up to Fuller. "We must do it more often."

While awaiting the FBI-ordered cherry picker, Leonard Chang had climbed down from the shed roof and had returned to the second-floor bedroom crime scene for another look. From there he got on his cell phone and rang Frank Patterson at the Brody house for an update there. Patterson picked up his cell and replied to Chang's question. "Maybe another hour, maybe two. Depends."

"You don't have two hours, Frank. Lincoln's on his way up the steps now, and Fuller's team is behind him."

"That's just great. Leonard. Now I've got to stop everything and play nursemaid to King Gordo?"

"Just walk him through the crime scene as you can best piece it together, Frank. Use the phrases I think, perhaps, and quite possibly a lot. That way no one can hold you to anything you've said, like being a politician, Frank…like running for office. Now tell me, what the fuck are you hiding over there in the upstairs bedroom? Something dangling from a ceiling fan?"

"Leonard, you of all people've got to understand. I've got my team concentrated on the three-count 'em, Leonard-three whole and undivided corpses as opposed to dealing with the slaughterhouse remains of Mira Lourdes upstairs. Three gunshot victims in the-"

"Then it's true, you've known about the Lourdes remains there and you've kept it to yourself? Why wasn't I informed, Frank?"