Robert Walker - Final Edge

Chang's stomach lurched and began to growl, reminding him he hadn't eaten anything other than a donut and a cup of coffee all day. It was nearing noon, and the closest diner, down the road, was useless-closed down as a crime scene by the State Patrol and County Sheriff's Office, both of which were represented here as well now. They had called Leonard Chang to the murders at the M amp;M Cafe, and when time ran late, he'd been convinced to get adjoining rooms at the Longhom.

Little physical evidence pointing to the multiple killer at the diner had emerged aside from spent shell casings from a Walther 9mm, nothing to connect the kill spree with Lauralie except that the only eyewitness saw a BMW racing away from the scene with an olive-skinned blond woman at the wheel. When a photo of Lauralie had been shown, the ID had proven inconclusive. All the same, he and Lynn had remained to help out the locals in the worst crime ever committed in the typically peaceful region.

Chang had tried desperately to get the word out that it might well be Lauralie Blodgett who had done the terrible deed at the diner, but he'd been unsuccessful in locating either Lucas or Meredyth, having to settle for Detective North and Captain Lincoln. No one seemed to know Lucas's whereabouts, and he wasn't answering his cell phone or his car radio. Meredyth had remained silent as well, despite a number of messages left on both their cell phones. Lincoln ordered any information relative to the Blodgett investigation, however tentative, be shared by Leonard with Fuller's regional FBI office.

Now Chang knew the reason why neither Lucas nor Meredyth had been reachable.

While Chang looked extremely young for his age, he felt old today. He had organized the largest death scene investigation of his career here on Lake Madera. It would beg to be written up for the journals some day, once he could step back and view it in its entirety with an objective eye, but for now the thought of wanting to share the story with other professionals in his field and in law enforcement in general was a long way off. For now, uppermost in his mind must be to gather all the various threads together and weave them into a mosaic that made sense, and to create a time line of events, and at the same time preserve crucial evidence-not to prosecute in this case but to vindicate actions taken by Meredyth and Lucas, and to explain exactly how the Farnsworth boys, Kemper, the Brodys, the people at the diner, and others had become targets of an audacious madness.

At least Lauralie Blodgett was dead and could harm no more. Precisely how she'd died along with each of her unfortunate victims, this was the mosaic he was now after. It would take more than the hour or so he'd promised Lincoln; even Lincoln had to know that an hour or so in forensic jargon meant four or five. "I work on a Chinese clock," he often joked with an impatient Detective Stonecoat.

He fought back a tear. He only hoped that when he next saw Lucas, he could tell him all about the complexities and problems of this enormous case.

"Dr. Chang, we got the way it went down with the two Farnsworth boys," said Agent Ron Meserve of the ATF, an assistant alongside him looking young, bright, and excited to be a part of the investigation.

They explained it in graphs they'd made that followed minute details of spent shell casings where the Blodgett woman had stood at the Farnsworth pickup firing off rounds at the backs of Jeff and Tommy Farnsworth as they ran, unprotected and unarmed, down from the house toward the pier, as if ordered to.

"She was dressed as the gardener, pruning those oleander bushes," said the younger ATF agent. "The two male victims drove up, unsuspecting, got out, and moved toward her. We surmise that she trained a weapon on them, this one." He held up a Walther 9mm. "Clip was emptied already at the M amp;M, and the Brody house, but the boys had no-way- a-knowin '-it."

The older agent, Meserve, summed it up with, "Had they called her bluff…had they jumped her, it might've been a whole different story."

And Lucas and Meredyth would've been spared, thought Chang, along with the two young horse wranglers, along with their pitifully grieving mother. Mrs. Farnsworth had been going between Jeff's and Tommy's body, holding first one and then the other, here on the lawn when Chang and the others had first arrived. Lynn Nielsen, a great help at the M amp;M Cafe, had somehow managed to talk the grieving mother away from the crime scene, sending her home with a female deputy from the County Sheriff's office.

A picture of what had happened at the stables and the direction of the gunshots from the upstairs window emerged, and now an equally clear picture of Lauralie Blodgett firing from the front porch on die Farnsworth boys had come into focus. The boys were killed hours before Lucas had been wounded, their bodies and the insect activity over them telling the tale.

So now Chang had a partial time line, and he knew that with Lauralie wearing the gardener's clothes and hat, discarded at the steps, the missing Howard Kemper was dis-patched sometime before the two boys were gunned down. Prior to this, across the lake, Lauralie had apparently killed the Brodys sometime during the early morning, after which she'd exchanged her viper's nest at the Brody home for her sniper's nest at Meredyth's bedroom window.

From bullet holes peppered into an upturned rowboat found on the lake, it had been surmised that Lucas and Meredyth had been fired on while out on the lake, unprotected, unarmed, helpless. Firearms experts had assured Chang that a child using the Remington and its scope could not miss a target as large as Lucas Stonecoat out on the lake, but neither he nor Meredyth were hit while in the bullet-riddled boat.

A broken table leg was found very near where Lucas had been gunned down, and early reports from the Brody kitchen spoke of a table that had been upended and scav-enged for its legs.

How had Lucas and Meredyth gotten to the Brody home alive under the crosshairs of that bolt-action, high- powered Remington? And once in the Brody house, why had they chosen to return here, crossing the lake and painting themselves with muck in a vain attempt at getting the horses from the stable? All questions he wanted to put to Meredyth, but she was, for the time being, unavailable to him.

Why didn't Stonecoat simply wait it out across the river? Why didn't he walk out? Why come back in the face of overwhelming firepower when he was unarmed? Macho shit-head fool, Chang summed up, what did his Cherokee bravura get him?

From where she stood in hip-deep lake water, Dr. Lynn Nielsen watched the skittish unmanned rowboat and its contents as it was guided to her by the divers. They'd had to swim out to the center of the lake to fetch it; there it had bobbed in their wake, eluding touch, acting like a shy cat, not wishing to be cornered. Finally, the two swimmers took hold of the gunwales and guided it into the shallows and an increasingly anxious Dr. Nielsen.

A third wet-suited diver stood alongside Nielsen in the shallows, and he now lifted his water-proof camera and began taking shots of the unholy sight at the bottom of the floating coffin, gagging at what his lens and his eye reported to his brain.

From the safe distance of thirty or so feet, a news camera in a helicopter overhead focused in on the activity at the lake. A dead man lay in the flat pool of water in the bot-tom of the boat, covered in worms, his throat a jagged mass of blood where his jugular had been severed, his lips moving with worm activity, and the soft tissue of his eyes, already eaten away, had sunk into their sockets, the worms finding a home in the collapsed orbs. Nielsen imagined these news camera pictures would not be finding their way into American living rooms, at least not until some money- crazed TV producer somehow created a reality show forum for crime-scene and autopsy photos. Newsroom vaults were crammed full with video deemed unfit for public con-sumption and viewing. Still, pretty soon nothing would be unfit, she told herself, if these Americans continued on their present course.