Authors: Robert W. Walker
"My team's all over that," Jana assured him.
"The fact he's sending parts of a single victim over and over could signify his belief that life has screwed him over again and again, that it has cut him up slowly in pieces over the years," suggested Lincoln, playing at shrink himself now.
Meredyth cut him off, saying, "The killer may also be sending pieces of his victim to us again and again to direct our attention to his powerful scorn and disdain for us, for law enforcement, and societal sanctions. A complete psych profile is being worked up. I'll get a copy to each of you by day's end."
Lincoln thanked her for the input. "Whatever it takes, manpower, currency, overtime, you people are it for the time being—the front line in this twisted little war we have had thrust upon us. Time is our enemy along with this monster out there. So I want brainstorming and answers before this bastard forwards so much as another fingernail, understood? Damn it, I don't want any more pieces of her sent off like a Christmas package to Lucas or to Dr. Sanger. And I want it cleared before the press eats us alive on it, understood? And I don't want any more leaks coming out of the Three-one, clear?"
"Captain, we had an obligation to inform the Lourdes family and her boyfriend, who made the initial missing persons report," said Jana.
"Yes, I heard all about that, Jana." Lincoln looked in Lucas's direction. "It's done. Let's just not give any more guns to the Indians...ahhh..." Lucas had shot him a grim look, "I-I mean, ammo to the press, okay?"
"You're going to have to deal with the press sometime, Captain," said Lucas. "They need to be handled."
"Yes, but most of the Lourdes woman's remains... well, remain missing, Lucas, and until we can say we have all one hundred percent of her in our safekeeping, well...I suspect we'd best keep this in-house. Is that understood?"
Lucas lunged in, adding, "It's already out there, Captain. They're coming for us on all sides. Some sort of press conference or at least a release needs to be put together to stave 'em off."
Lincoln sighed heavily, heaving his gut; he ground his teeth so hard it hurt others in the room to hear it. "Why the hell can't we keep a lid on our own fucking cases?"
"We already brain-graphed and polygraphed Lourdes's boyfriend and he sailed through the tests," Lucas replied, "so now he's out there on the street with what he knows and what he suspects."
Jana added, "And if an idiot like Stokes can read the papers, he can put two and two together...."
"He's likely selling his story to the National Inquirer right now," Lucas said.
Meredyth added, "Any number of uniformed cops at my place, at Lucas's, in the garage the other night, not to mention civilian personnel. They're all talking about the choice of delivery system—the variety of method, and what's going on between this creep and us, Lucas and me. Sorry, Captain, but there's no lid big enough to put atop this thing, not anymore."
Lincoln looked as if he wanted to roar, but he calmly said, "All right, so I guess we should expect a barrage of embarrassing publicity."
"Which, if Dr. Sanger is correct, will feed the killer's appetite and hopefully appease him," added Jana, "but I rather doubt that any amount of publicity for his crimes will ever be enough, not once he gets a taste for it. Like a wild animal that acquires a taste for human blood, he'll be back for more."
"We have to be smart and use the media to our advantage," Lucas suggested. "See if we can get at him through a judicious use of the press. Give him an E-mail address where he can contact us, chat with us. Start by releasing some choice photos of the packages from Steve's collection along with Anna's new and improved sketch of the suspect." Lucas gave a thought to Jack Tebo's having failed to come downtown to work with Anna Tewes on a sketch of the girl who'd delivered Lucas's first parcel.
Lincoln gave in, outvoted. "I'll get our best PR people on it. Play up the fact we're closing in on the creep, banter the catchphrase Postmortem Ripper, is it? Put out the fact we've got a face to go with the victim within forty-eight hours of receiving the first package, all that."
"Post-it Ripper," corrected Nielsen. "Postmortem is what I do."
"Oh, yes, sorry." Lincoln's eye lingered & moment too long on die lanky coroner. "Okay, well, then...what was I saying? Oh, yes. Then that means you people in this room are going to have to show some progress beyond learning the name and address of the victim."
Meredyth addressed the others from where she sat, her voice firm, the occasional crack in her tone contradicting her outward resolve. "We have already discovered a great deal about our man in the short time we've had to work this case. He's got a hard-on for Lucas and me, but there may or may not be a connection there; it may be he has seen us on TV in the past and simply zeroed in on us, but we will be going over clients I've counseled as well as perverts we've encountered in the line of duty, ruling them out as we go in a process of elimination. Fact is, that process is already under way."
"Still, it's going to require considerable man hours and manpower, given how long we've both been in the business of putting perverts away," added Lucas. "As we come up with possible leads and suspects, we may call upon any one of you to follow up, whatever that entails, from getting a search warrant to using your special talents."
With that said, Lincoln declared, "Thank you all for being here and withstanding the assault on your sensibilities that Dr. Chang, Dr. Nielsen, and I orchestrated, but I wanted you all as committed to this as Dr. Sanger and Detective Stonecoat, so I wasn't sparing anyone's ahhh...ahhh...what's the word?"
"Emotions?"
"Senses?"
"Yeah, those things."
The wrapping paper and the note were bagged, destined for the documents experts already poring over the previous handwriting. The cooler containing the head was carried off by Nielsen, destined for the freezer in Chang's lab. This time the foul contents purported to have originated at an address in the 2700 block of Lowe Boulevard, a grimy business district off Clinton Drive, near the ship channel, a stretch of urban real estate devoid of apartments or homes. Lucas had earlier jotted down the address.
"It's most likely a phony address to throw us off, like the convent school," he told Kelton, handing the note to him and asking Stan to check it out and report back to him on what he learned.
"Should not take long. I sent a cruiser over to the address to eyeball it. Probably got round to it by now."
"If not, goose 'em for me, will you, Stan?"
"Sure thing."
Leonard Chang doled out assignments to the remaining CSI members with respect to the newly acquired evidence. Meanwhile, Tom Davies wondered aloud to Meredyth and Lucas why he needed to have been in on this meeting, feeling he had already done all that he could to further the investigation along, "Unless," he confided in her, "you can bring me some of the killer's teeth to work with."
Lucas replied, "I'd like nothing better than to kick this mother's teeth out of his sick head, believe me."
Dr. Davies nodded, smiling, and quickly followed Catrina Purvis and Anna Tewes out the door. Meredyth now looked long and hard into Lucas's eyes. "Do you think this maniac is sending us all these parts because he thinks we can put Mira back together again?"
"All the king's horses and all the king's men, you mean? Hadn't occurred to me, but who knows...maybe...maybe he's that damned batty."
"What's he going to send us next, Lucas? Her heart? Her torso? He is attempting to shock us more and more by escalating the vileness of his gifts to us, and I gotta say, it's working."
"I'm going to the convent this afternoon, poke around there, ask a few questions of the people in charge. You want to join me?" he asked.
"Convent? What convent? I heard you mention something to Stan about a convent." Her squint told him clearly that she was confused.
"Our Lady of Miracles, a church and girls convent—an orphanage for girls. Not too far from my place."
"But why?"
"It was the return address on the first package I received, remember?"
"No, I don 7 remember."
"And the delivery was made by someone sporting a Catholic schoolgirl's uniform, according to Tebo."
"You never told me any of this."
"But you were there, at my place, when Chang and I were talking about it."
"No, I wasn't all there. I was extremely upset that night, and I didn't pay close attention, not after what I'd been through, not that night. Tebo saw a Catholic schoolgirl deliver the package?"
"I'm not sure she was a girl. He seemed to think she was heavily made up, older than a schoolgirl, but she wore a Catholic school uniform."
Meredyth considered this, picturing the killer luring some young woman to do his godless bidding for him.
"I'm fairly sure it's just a ruse to send us on a wild-goose chase, so I haven't given it top priority. But at the moment, I'm at a loss for what our next step should be, so..."
"So, let's go see the nuns. Ask them if they've noticed any unusual person hanging around the school."
On their way out of the precinct house, going past the front desk, Lucas was stopped when Stan Kelton called out to them. Stan gestured for them to come near.
"What's up, Stan?" he asked the big Irish sergeant.
Kelton had come around his front desk and whispered conspiratorially, "That address on Lowe..."
"Yeah? You got it pinned down?"
"Morte de Arthur's."
"A restaurant with medieval cuisine?" guessed Lucas.
"No, it's a mortician place, funeral home—a chain mortuary."
"What's a chain mortuary, Stan?"
"A chain of mortuaries. Supposed to be cheaper way to send off your loved one. They're listed with penny stocks. Have their own website where, if you like, you can bury your dead on-line. Don't ask me how that works. The lady said she'd happily send over brochures."
"I'm sure she did. A chain-store undertaker's you can buy into? A franchise?" asked Lucas, amazed. "What'll they think of next?"
Meredyth, listening in, tried to put the fact of the mortician and convent as return addresses together with the return address on her two packages—both indicating her downtown office. She tried to put it all together with the various poems and the CD. "Creep is just yanking our chains, Lucas, having a gay ol' time."
"Then I guess we follow where the yanking chain takes us."
"Play his game out to the end? That could be dangerous."
"What choice have we at this point? He's holding all the cards damned close to his chest, so come along, Mere."
"All right."
"If there's time enough, we'll visit Morte de Arthur's after we visit the house of miracles and nuns."
Kelton waved them off, saying, "Good luck, you two!"
AS THEY MADE their way to Our Lady of Miracles—a shimmering fall sun slapping on-off, on-off, on the windshield as the car darted beneath rows of trees—Meredyth asked, "Lucas, do you know who Our Lady of Miracles refers to?"
"I'm not sure I follow you," he replied, confused.
The sunlight first dimmed and then disappeared altogether from the windshield, Lucas commenting on the sudden cloud cover.
"The Lady of Miracles, do you know who she was in life, in the history of the Church?"
"I assume the Virgin Mary? Right? I mean doesn't she represent everything to the Catholic believer?"
"Yes, and Our Lady of Miracles is Our Lady of Lourdes—Lourdes. Get it?"
"Whataya mean, as in our victim, Lourdes?"
"A French village, city now...Lourdes, France, Our Lady of Lourdes...the movie they made of it, Song of Bernadette? About the village girl to whom the Virgin Mary appeared, thus Our Lady of Lourdes. She is said to have appeared on several occasions."
"I've heard of it, of course. Bernadette had visions when she was a child. An angel told her where water would spontaneously appear out of the earth, right?"
"At the mouth of a grotto, yes."
"A cave."
"Yeah, like a cavern mouth, and to this day, a spring created by the Angel of Lourdes wells up in the town, and it has been made a shrine to which people the world over make pilgrimages in hopes of a miracle cure for various illnesses."
"Lourdes, sure. Didn't they make the little girl a saint?"
"Not before she was put through hell. Religious celebrities are put through the ringer by the Vatican."
'Tell that to Joan of Arc."
"Eventually, after years of examinations and investigations, Bernadette was made a saint, but by then, she could not live comfortably in Lourdes. She joined a convent and spent her adult life in the service of Christ."
"So now you're thinking there's a definite link between Our Lady of Miracles convent and our victim, Mira Lourdes, that it's too much coincidence to be just a twist of fate or happenstance?"
"The killer's hand is all over this chance fluke. He gave us the convent as a return address, and he gave us enough of Mira to identify her—her teeth and next her head. And how many times have you told me that you don't believe in coincidences in a murder investigation?"
"Touche. So our killer is a saint killer?"
"Perhaps contemptuous of Catholic icons—pictures, symbols, idols, and saints."
"So we're chasing someone who might have a history of destroying or disfiguring...say...a statue of Saint Francis of Assisi?"
"Or even a crucifixion cross, or a painting of mother and child—the Pieta—an altar, or an image of the baby Jesus."
Lucas drove with one hand and used his radio with the other, calling into headquarters and speaking to Kelton. "Get the word out, Stan, that we're interested in any reports of religious vandalism in Catholic churches, schools, graveyards, anywhere in the city, understood?"
Kelton replied, "We get calls like that all the time, Lucas."
"Anything recent, say in the past week?"
"Usually turns out to be corner-hugging teens so bored out of their skulls they don't give one damn thought to the consequences of their actions," Kelton replied.
"Any unsolved, recent vandalisms of religious icons, gravestones, statues, or paintings, Stan?"