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  Among law enforcement officials, 1986 was also remembered as the year crack cocaine came on the scene.

  Stonecoat brought his mind back to the man for whom the death file was named. He knew he must go slow and easy to fully appreciate just how similar these two deaths were: Mootry today and this professional man, this medical doctor, some ten years before. Dr. Wesley Palmer had been murdered in his bed in the same brutal fashion, a steel arrow through his chest, his head severed, along with hands, feet, penis and testicles. These body parts were carried off by the madman. This had occurred at the doctor's home some six months after his arrival in the area.

  The maniac had coolly gained entry to the house, found the doctor asleep in his bed, and mercilessly fired an arrow from a crossbow. As indicated in the report, the hundred pounds plus pressure behind the arrow was enough power to split apart the man's heart and send the arrow cleanly through to the floor beneath the bed.

  The forensics report read like dja vu: The arrow in each case had been placed point-blank at a location that assured the heart would burst immediately. In each case, Mootry's and the older case, the deadly arrow had in fact been recovered from below each of the dead men's beds. This suggested that one, the killer had no trouble gaining entry or getting close to his victim with a large and deadly weapon, and two, perhaps the killer had some working knowledge of anatomy, since in both cases the killer had obviously managed to avoid both breastbone and ribs. According to the records, the arrow had slammed into and run completely through each victim's heart as if that were the practiced purpose.

  And if the killer knew something of anatomy, then perhaps he shared the same profession as Dr. Wesley Palmer, the 1986 victim. After all, deadly doctors abounded in the annals of crime.

  Lucas was now thoroughly entranced.

  He went back and forth between the fresh ink of today's news clippings and a musty handful that had remained all these years in the Palmer file. He pored over the police reports and FBI reports, all of which led to so many dead ends. Usually serial killings with such a closely linked pattern happened within months, often weeks, of one another, sometimes days of one another, but these two killings were separated by ten years. It didn't figure.

  According to the record, Dr. Wesley J. Palmer, like Judge Mootry, had been clean. No ties to organized crime, no outstanding gambling debts, no angry clients or customers, no relatives or others with a grudge. In fact, like Mootry, the man had been well liked, well respected, apparently by all who knew him, save a pair of would-be in-laws, parents to a young lady the doctor had planned to marry when the young woman's untimely death had ended all such plans. The woman's death was some sort of mystery in it self, and her parents had concocted the idea that Dr. Palmer had somehow caused her death. Lucas made a mental note to check more deeply into the young fiancee's death, but however bitter her parents were at the time of her death, they were, in 1986, completely absolved of any wrongdoing surrounding Dr. Palmer, their alibi standing despite a vigorous effort on the part of police to bring a charge of murder. Lucas's eyes widened at the reason investigators were convinced, for a time, that the elderly couple had acted on a revenge motive: Palmer had been dispatched in identical fashion as his fiancee! Lucas dropped his feet from his desk and rode his squealing chair to an upright position on seeing this.

  How had she died? He searched the report for more information. It was vital to know how the fiancee had died the year before; what did the '86 coppers mean by “dispatched in identical fashion”? Did they actually mean by bow and arrow?

  He could find but scant details of the earlier death filed with Palmer's paperwork. What he found was far too sketchy. Still, he read all there was on the 1985 Alisha Reynolds, Marietta, Georgia, case mentioned in the file. The information about the previous murder of the doctor's fiancee in Palmer's former palatial home in Georgia was teeth-gnashingly superficial and insufficient.

  Lucas searched high and low for more information on the dead fiancee, but there was no more here. Had Meredyth Sanger lifted it? There had to be more. How precisely did Dr. Palmer's fiancee die? Was there some revenge motive in the Palmer case that involved the dead girl? Had the parents hired a hit man in retaliation after the courts found Dr.Wesley Palmer innocent in the wrongful death of his intended bride? Had she been strangled, shot, poisoned? Had she been given too many barbiturates or uppers? Had she stumbled off a balcony? The damned reports were infuriatingly silent on exact cause of the woman's death, as if details of her death had been ripped from the file and tossed out as unimportant, the only tantalizing smidgen of detail left the single phrase “dispatched in identical fashion” to Palmer's own death. Could he trust this image? And if so, did this mean there were three intended victims of the crossbow killer? Or had the fiancee stepped into the crossfire?

  Was it possible that the parents, a year later, still filled with grief over the loss of their daughter, hired a professional who preferred the sound of an arrow to the sound of a gun? That could explain the coincidence of a ten-year separation in “jobs” for this killer, but it wouldn't explain who killed the daughter.

  Lucas made another notation to check the national crime files for any information on professional hits or hit men who used a crossbow or bow and arrow. It seemed as far-fetched as finding an alien hit man or a Geronimo out of time, but it could sound off some bleeps and alarms, so he'd give it a try. But then, perhaps Dr. Sanger had already done as much. He didn't want to ask her, however. Instead, he wanted to dig a little deeper before committing himself to her little covert operation.

  Just as in the hit movie Pulp Fiction, hit men did come in all sizes, shapes, colors, sexes, and brainpan sizes these days; perhaps there was one out there with a Robin Hood fetish? Maybe he or she even wore tights? If it was a she, that might explain how she had gotten so close to two men—at their bedsides—with a deadly weapon the size of a shotgun.

  Lucas needed a break. The information was coming in too fast for him, and his legs needed stretching, and his back was beginning to trouble him again. If he was going to be behind a desk for as many hours as this a day, he would have to get a contoured, expensive-as-hell chair like the one Johnnie Cochran and the rest of the O. J. dream team had had for the duration of what had become the longest trial in the history of jurisprudence in America and the world.

  On a notepad, he jotted down the name of Palmer's fiancee—Alisha Reynolds—along with a note about her parents, Dick and Mildred Reynolds of 1224 Cherry Lane Drive, Marietta, Georgia. By now they could have moved out of the country, or out of life, he reminded himself even as he wrote. Still, he'd have to find out what he could about the would-be in-laws. Most crime started in the home, in one fashion or another.

  Lucas pondered further what he'd learned about the similarities in the Mootry and Palmer cases. Why were these supposed good men, pillars of the community, targeted for murder in such heinous fashion? What did both men have in common? What clubs did they belong to? Did Mootry know something about the Palmer case? Had he known Dr. Palmer? Had he known of Palmer's murder? What did he know about the earlier problem in Georgia, when Palmer's fiancee was killed? Was Mootry dispatched for what he knew about Palmer? Had the judge ever been to Georgia? Did the judge know Alisha Reynolds's parents, perhaps? Perhaps.

  While the cleanly efficient method of dispatching both men seemed wholly practiced and professional, why decapitate and remove hands and feet and private parts? That was not the sort of work your usual hit man bought into. He didn't want to leave the scene covered in blood; he didn't want to make a mess. So why the mutilation of the two bodies? It certainly didn't seem to be for reasons a hit man would enjoy. Hit men and women worked on one principle and it was called lucrative payment. They were mercenaries, pure and simple. Lucas had a hard time imagining a pro who would have anything to do with gratuitous bloodletting, unless... unless he was paid a great deal more for the extra show?

  Whether a hired killer or just a nutcase, was the after-death mutilation a
n effort on the part of the murderer to shock authorities, confuse or slow the process of identification? If so, why leave the torso in the dead man's home? And how did the killer gain entrance? And did his victim know him, even trust him?

  “Damn that Meredyth Sanger,” he muttered to himself. Without knowing it, she had hooked him like a marlin.

  He wondered if he ought to simply call her and tell her that he knew she was withholding information about Palmer's fiancee and facts surrounding that case just to keep him on her damned string.

  Instead, Lucas stood now, stretched, and decided that since it couldn't be Miller time yet, he'd locate the coffee station upstairs, take a break and come back at this thing fresh. It hadn't surprised him that neither Captain Phillip Lawrence, Duty Sergeant Stanley Kelton, nor anyone else for that matter, had interrupted him all afternoon. This place was not inviting; in fact, it was ignored, the pretense being that it didn't exist, and by extension, neither did he.

  He went for that coffee.

  The coffee station stood alongside the active homicide board, on which the names of victims were placed in red ink alongside the name of the detective in charge of the case. Cases in red ink meant they were open; cases placed on the left-hand side of the board, scripted in black ink, meant they were closed. There was no pen color or place on the board for the cases that went unsolved. They merely disappeared from the board when Lawrence decided it was time to call a halt to the “waste of taxpayers' money” on a case that wasn't ever going to be solved, usually when it was two or three years old. Many cases came in with the name of the perpetrator all but emblazoned on them, but what cops termed a stone-hard mystery was that rare case in which whodunit is unclear and sometimes completely invisible. Sometimes, many times, even the stone-hard mystery could be solved, but often it took years to do so. More and more, departments were unwilling or unable to apportion manpower and man hours of that duration to a single case, so that rooms like Lucas's had begun to swell at the seams.

  Every city in America had such cases; every precinct in the city had such cases. For the Thirty-first Precinct, such homicides wound up as dust collectors in what was now Lucas Stonecoat's necromancy collection. It had always been referred to as the Dungeon, the Graveyard and the Cold Room, but already the cops upstairs were referring to it in various cute ways for Lucas's benefit, names such as Lucas's Lodge and, Stonecoat's X-Files. They were also calling Lucas “Spooky” just to further annoy him.

  NINE

  A LONELY STRETCH OP INTERSTATE 5 OUTSIDE ROGUE RIVER, OREGON

  Timothy Kenneth Little felt a dull, pounding throb tolling with the rhythmic back-and-forth of a bell against his temple. It'd been a trying day, and the long trip to the Rogue River plant had required a two-junket flight that got him only as far as Medford's little municipal airport. Eugene, Oregon, was just too bloody far from the plant to be of any damned use whatsoever, and he cursed himself these days for not having had the foresight to've leased a similar parcel of property in Eugene in the early days rather than taking the cheaper route and building in Rogue River. But back then every dollar had to be accounted for. End result? A plant full of people in Rogue River had jobs, thanks to him, and there was no taking those jobs elsewhere now. Bottom line? He now had one helluva long, difficult drive ahead of him, and his back was acting up, and his neck was killing him. Turning fifty was a bitch, and that, too, was preying on his mind.

  At least he'd done something with his life. Not like his brother, Thorn, who was still cutting other people's lawns and frying eggs, bacon and ham as a short-order cook in San Francisco, where when he wasn't working he was catching the latest wave, a ridiculous, aging surfer.

  Timothy Little had never stood a surfboard, had never been athletic at anything in his life, but he had been a careful investor, and now he owned sixteen plants around the nation, plants that made aircraft parts which were always in demand—the convenient little kitchen apparatuses needed aboard every jet airliner. He'd tried to get Thom interested in the business, but Thom declared he'd go homeless before he'd take charity from his little brother.

  He wasn't by any stretch the wealthiest man on the continent, but if this were France, maybe... Still, his loved ones didn't want for a thing. All the boys were grown up, following careers of their own, each with a family of his own, nice houses and cars, and they all owed it to their pop, a man who'd been as a pre-teen and teen what all the other kids in school called a pencil-carrying nerd. Thank God his interest in science and gadgetry never waned, paying off handsomely in the long run. Where were the jocks who'd bullied him throughout high school now? He curiously wondered as yet another discourteous driver the other side of the highway blinded him with high beams.

  “Bastard!” he uselessly shouted while flipping his own brights on and off—another useless gesture.

  The brights hitting his eyes conspired with the thumping headache to make him feel a creeping nausea rising within him. He tried to concentrate on the importance of the trip, the big merger with ASCAN, and how best to break it to the people at the plant, put the most positive spin on it. Hell, he wasn't getting any younger. And if something should happen to him, God forbid, say a heart attack? Where would it leave the company? If he sold out, and if ASCAN followed through on its promises, everyone—not just him—would benefit in the long run. It would mean more overtime, more money for everyone all around, and he could retire, begin to enjoy the fruits of all the years of intensive labor he'd put in.

  He felt good about himself and the direction his life had taken him. Thought briefly about Lenore back in California, waiting for his call, no doubt. They had had another argument about money. He had wanted to, as they say, “give some back,” and Lenore had always supported him in his charitable donations in the past, but for some reason she had had a strange and urgent dislike for an old acquaintance from college who had contacted him for a donation, suggesting that he leave part of his estate to the religious organization his old friend now represented.

  Timothy and Lenore Little were of the same faith, after all, and so why shouldn't he be charitable toward his church? Lenore simply didn't like the approach his college friend had taken.

  Without telling Lenore, he'd gone ahead and made the donation, along with others to organizations he believed in and supported. For his old friend, he had gone a step further, signing over one of his many life insurance policies to the friend, who was now a Jesuit priest in Texas. His friend had contacted him via computer modem to tell him of their needs in Texas.

  The dusk of evening was giving way to that twilight moment when visibility was at its worst. Timothy Little kept his eyes on the road, popped a cassette of relaxing, old-time piano music by Billy Vaughn into the player, and took a deep, long breath of air. On his left, on the grass median between the divided high way, he noticed a silver-gray van that might be in trouble. But what next caught his attention was the man atop the van on his belly. He was dressed all in black, like someone out of a Bruce Willis Die Hard film, like someone wanting to blend in with the night.

  “My God, if he doesn't look like some sort of commando sniper preparing to fire,” Little said to himself.

  Then Timothy saw movement at the base of the van on either side, two additional black-clad men. They truly did look like bloody assassins out of a Hollywood action-hero movie or something. Each man was holding up some sort of telescope or weapon; he could not tell for sure. He was moving sixty miles per hour, the car on cruise control, careful at all times to obey the traffic laws and speed limits, but now for some insane reason, he thought these strange, alien-looking creatures on the grassy knoll ahead were going to fire high-powered rifles at him. So he instantly forced the gas pedal to the floor.

  The speedometer on the Olds Cutlass immediately rose to sixty-five, then seventy. Suddenly the windshield shattered in front of Timothy, glass and blood showering his line of vision, his right arm throbbing, but a second powerful blow, like a fist to his chest negated all sight and feeling, sav
e the cold numbness and dark blindness that spread through him like a moving current. My God, he thought, they've killed me... but who... who are they?

  He didn't know that his car was skidding off the road or that he'd blacked out all in the space of a nanosecond.

  One of two arrows pierced his heart, which sprayed forth blood across the wheel and dash as the car careened out of control, first veering into the median, heading straight for the van, just barely missing it and sheering off before bumping back up onto the shoulder tarmac from which it had come, decelerating as it went into the right-hand ditch, bumping along this trench for another forty yards before coming to an abrupt, dead standstill, thanks to a tree. The impact sent Timothy Little's body lurching forward, but the body was saved any meeting with the jagged, shattered windshield not by the air bag or the seat belt but by the two steel arrows that had pinned him in place like a marionette.

  The assassins brought the van around behind the wrecked vehicle, and like dark vultures they descended on Timothy Little. They had to wrench him from the car seat, where both his chest and an arm were pinned to the cushions by the steel shafts of the arrows that'd killed him. His heart was still pumping blood, but he was in such a state of shock and dying that he didn't feel a thing when they tore him from the cab, laid him out across the hood, and efficiently went to work on removing his extremities.