Chang's assistant Lynn Nielsen came on the line, and Tebo explained that Detective Stonecoat needed a CSI unit at both his apartment and the condominium home of Dr. Meredyth Sanger immediately. Dr. Nielsen replied, "I cannot, sir, Mr. Tebo, authorize two CSI units to descend on locations on the say-so of a friend of a detective's."
Tebo gnashed his teeth and lied, "We got an anthrax letter here and another one at 1220 Belmont Drive, Dr. Sanger's place. Do you, or do you not, want to take responsibility, Dr. Nielsen?"
"All right…all right…I'll dispatch the teams on Detective Stonecoat's order. Have him call immediately."
"Damn it, he's in transit to Dr. Sanger's."
"All right. I'll get his dispatcher on the line. I'll speak to him directly."
Nielsen hung up and Tebo stared at the phone, and spoke to it. "Maybe it is all a gag! Maybe this Dr. Nielsen is in on it. Hell, maybe even Dr. Sanger's call is part and parcel of the prank. Gotta be it. They're all in on it."
"In on what?" Tebo's heavyset wife stood in the doorway, having come to look for him when she saw Stonecoat fleeing off in a panic. "What's that awful odor?" she asked, going for the kitchen.
Tebo stood and blocked her way, pleading, "Don't go in there. It's not something you want to see, Eunice…Eunice!"
She pushed past him and into the kitchen, going for the thing in the sink sitting amid the discarded wrapping paper. The stench and the sight made her gag and ask, "What the hell is it, Jack? What the hell has that man brought down on our place now?"
"You can't blame Lucas for this."
"Who else you know in this life who's going to have such a horrible thing sent to him? I want him outta here, Jack. This is the limit, the camel and the straw, believe me! Out he goes or I go! You gotta make the choice. Jack Tebo. That man is a magnet for trouble. Trouble, hell, he attracts danger and death."
Dr. Arthur Belkuin had a nightmare that wouldn't go away, the unremitting, repeating replay in his head of the ax coming down on Mira Lourdes's neck, and in the nightmare, her head revolved in a one-eighty-degree turn, her eyes open and staring up at him, her lips parting, asking why… why…why?
He still could not give her an answer, because he didn't himself know why Lauralie had selected her for death. He had watched how Mira Lourdes had been selected, but he didn't know why she had been chosen, but chosen she was, right out of the White Pages. Lauralie had opened the hefty Houston city directory to the Ls, saying she needed someone named Lourdes to kill.
"Lords as in gods, like my Lords?" Arthur had asked.
She'd spelled it out for him as her eyes scanned the directory page. "L-O-U-R-D-E-S, Lourdes."
"Why Lourdes?" he'd asked.
"Only a Lourdes will do." She then found four candidates listed in the book.
They took down each address and cased each home. One was in a faraway, upscale gated community north of the city. A second was in a pleasant neighborhood and had a high fence around it, guard dogs, and a prominently displayed ADT alarm system. A third was in a rundown section of the city that was dangerous to drive through, and Arthur's expensive car stuck out like a zebra there, she had told him. The fourth house proved perfect. At the end of a cul-de-sac, bushes all around, and a car for sale sitting out on the lawn. It was a perfect excuse to ring the doorbell and to put Mira Lourdes at ease. Lauralie claimed their finding Mira Lourdes was nothing short of fated, that she was placed before them by God.
Arthur stared up at the ceiling fan he had installed in the old farmhouse bedroom; he lay on his back, looking about the room, unable to sleep, feeling Lauralie's heat beside him. He had never known anyone to exude so much heat from her body as did Lauralie.
From outside at the pens, the sound of his two beautiful greyhounds wafted in to him, a low, guttural chorus of baying. Arthur had wanted to bring the dogs inside, knowing they were agitated at the new home, and he'd always kept them indoors at night before, but Lauralie didn't care for them so much, and she had pleaded that she wanted Arthur all to herself tonight, and as always, she got her way, and here he was, the sex over, lying awake in a fitful stew of images that refused to let him so much as doze. True slumber kept just ahead of him, just out of mental reach, denying him even a moment in the land of nod.
By comparison, she lay sound asleep; in fact, she slept nightly like a newborn innocent, a kind of pink fluff cloud seemingly hovering over her angelic chaste features. A slight nasal whine welled up from her, escaping in a contented breath, while he tossed and turned, unable to get the images of Mira's death out of his head, and unable to flee the quivering questions that swam like so many water beetles skimming over the surface of his consciousness, slowly driving him out of his mind.
Arthur watched himself once again dropping the ax on Mira Lourdes's neck without enough force to severe the head cleanly; he watched Lauralie finish the job. He saw himself against the night sky, struggling with the body, trying to get a grip on it without directly looking at the huge, bloody cavity that remained of the wounded neck, trying desperately to get no more blood on himself. All this while the greyhounds protested fiercely, the smell of blood agitating them into a competition of braying and baying.
He detested blood. "Why can't we simply poison her?" he had asked Lauralie when they had planned the killing, but Lauralie had said she wanted the death to be fast, final, and traumatic; she'd added that Mira's death was the least of her concerns, but that law-enforcement officials and the public must be outraged on learning how she'd died in a beheading with her parts scattered.
He had argued about getting Mira's blood all over, using an ax as Lauralie planned. She had countered, "Then we'll do it outdoors."
While carrying Mira's body, Arthur looked up at the stars and the three-quarter moon that looked on their deed. The body felt like an overstuffed potato bag, bulging here, sliding there, slipping here, as if the thing wanted escape from his arms, as if even in death she detested him and his touch. He struggled to get the body inside where Lauralie awaited them.
Stepping inside the little farmhouse, he heard Lauralie talking to the severed head. Lauralie stared into the dead eyes as she spoke. "They'll pay now. They'll all pay now, especially Dr. Meredyth Sanger and her lovey-dovey friend, Lieutenant Detective Lucas Stonecoat."
"Why do you hate them so much?" Arthur asked, standing in the house at that point, blood dripping from the corpse's enormous cavity. "You must tell me now…now that I've killed for you."
"You call what you did killing? Shit, I had to finish the job you started. And remember, I've killed before."
"You didn't really kill your own mother, did you?" v
"I did. It was easy. She made it easy, too easy, in fact."
She'd told Arthur how she had used her mother's own alcoholism against her.
"Why Mira Lourdes? Why'd you need to kill someone named Lourdes? And why do you hate Sanger and her friend so much?"
"In time…in time, Arthur. For now it's enough for you to know that I hate them passionately." She considered the body for a moment as he placed it onto the steel table at the center of the room. The house had been converted into an operating room of sorts, Arthur having accumulated equipment and furniture from his once-thriving, now-failing veterinary practice in Houston, where he had had to lay off personnel.