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Shy One Pearl

Robert W. Walker

Lucas Stonecoat kicked out at his desk. The sound sent a shot through the old police station, soon slated for demolition. The boom faded but the subsequent echo sounded like the sardonic laugh of a distant raven.

“You gonna bring the house down before the wrecking ball?” Dr. Meredyth Sanger of the Houston PD, to whom Lucas routinely went for profiling help. He’d asked her for any insights she might have about the kind of man who could abduct a fourteen-year-old kid, and then send little bloody pieces of her home to the family, making it clear he was chopping her up little by little.

“I just might.”

Quarrelsome was the single word most people leveled at Detective Stonecoat, full-blood Texas Cherokee; a man who proved that a Native American Indian could kick a stereotype, get off the reservation, and make a living in the white world, and still keep his identity. There was much to admire about the man besides his Jimmy Smits good looks, his 6’4” lean frame, and his mesmerizing eyes. Still, he’d become surly and contentious since Pearl Sanchez’s disappearance.

Lucas had gone over everything a hundred times. Everyone who worked for the father, everyone the mother had ever known, had their private lives turned inside out in the search for anyone seeking revenge. Whoever was behind this crime seemed to take great, abiding joy in the suffering of Pearl’s parents, but that was an assumption, Lucas knew. And assumptions were a dangerous way to proceed on any case.

Getting emotionally involved, especially to the degree he had, was also against everything in the book.

Maybe it was because Pearl looked a lot like the sister Lucas lost in childhood. Maybe it was just that Pearl was an only child, or the suffering etched on the faces of the Sanchez clan. Or maybe it was the horror of that mutilated flesh.

Who? Why? It stood to reason it’d be a disgruntled employee, after All Sanchez ran a high-powered business, employing hundreds. But none of these leads panned out. Meanwhile the clock ticked on for poor little Pearl.

Lucas had turned then in earnest to the mother, and he found things in her past she pleaded Lucas keep secret, things that even Sanchez didn’t know. Again none of the leads here panned out. He went back to Sanchez, tossing out the idea it was work-related, digging into his early background. Could it be someone he’d crossed as a child, as a teen, as a young man in college? Nothing.

So much time wasted and still nothing. The strike force had no better luck. The clock ticked on. Time was not on Pearl’s side.

Lucas finally had to cede to the notion the maniac who had Pearl was a total psycho with an agenda he alone understood. A mad agenda that had no connection to any map in the real world. This meant no sensible means of looking for a motive, and without a motive—if he had simply stalked her and lifted her off the street for no reason other than to chop her up and send her piece by piece home….how could they possibly catch the fiend? The horror that it might be random, the criminal a sociopath who snatched the first available child left no peace for Stonecoat, not even in sleep. Disturbing images of Pearl’s suffering floated in and out like a nasty, teasing fog.

The perpetrator remained faceless all this time. Left no clue, as corporeal as a phantom within the fog.

Then there came another small digit, arriving in a tidy box.

The parents wailed, as they recognized the knuckle and nail from an early scar, and the glitter still adhering to little Pearl’s nail.

Lucas feared the fiendishly evil crazed phantom might next take a hand, followed by a forearm, a foot, a leg.

And then, in the middle of it all, Lucas’s Chief, Aaron Phillips, recently having taken over the stationhouse that’d soon be leveled, got in Lucas’s face and ordered him off the case and to see a shrink other than his chum, Meredyth.

“For kicking a desk?”

“Just do it before this case overwhelms you!”

“Step down? See a shrink when the case is ongoing!” Lucas demanded.

“That’s an order! No excuses!”

“No goddam way, Chief, not now!”

“It’s an order!”

“I need to keep on the case, else Pearl—”

“Case’ll be waiting, Lucas.”

“Waiting? What the f—”

“Pearl’s case is going nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“Nowhere.”

It was too true. In every sense of the word, the Pearl Sanchez case was going nowhere. Lucas knew it yet she haunted his waking hours now as she did his sleep. A demon, reminding him of stories his grandfather told of that wicked Raven Mocker, stealing his thoughts, his detachment, his insight. The Chief was right. This time he was obsessed.

As soon as Chief Phillips turned his back, Lucas felt an attack coming on, one of his blackouts from a lingering condition from years past that only Meredyth Sanger knew of. He trusted Mere for this reason, but now she’s pushing me onto some other shrink I don’t know? And what gives with Chief Phillips, stopping me from doing my job in the middle of my investigation? That just isn’t done! Screw ‘em all! No way am I backing off.

The blackout ended as quickly as it had threatened to drop Lucas to his knees, when he saw it…saw it clearly. Something in the forensic workup on an odd fiber as thin as hair from the first package. The report said it proved to be metallic. Lucas put the idea of a metal thread together with the only disruption in Pearl’s routine.  

The new piano teacher?

How many times had he seen it in the paperwork. How many times had he ignored it?

He imagined Pearl locked away in her piano teacher’s basement or attic or crawl space. Little Pearl had been taking lessons for three years, and she played at the school pageant a regular prodigy the way he got it.  Her pictures revealed a beautiful young Hispanic girl, a smile as wide Texas sky, eyes friendly and inviting.  When Mr. Rogers, her piano teacher tragically died in a car accident, Pearl’d begun to go to a new piano teacher. It was a detail no one, including Lucas, had paid attention to. The school officials he’d interviewed even commented on how Pearl’s playing had progressed under the tutelage of her new instructor, who doted on the girl, attending her every performance, even working with the school’s musical director to ensure Pearl had every opportunity to shine. And shine she did. Pearl had been asked to perform with the Houston Young Artist’s Concert group—an honor that made her parents and the Hispanic community prouder than they’d ever admit. A star on her way, rising.

It made Lucas ill to think of such promise cut short, fingers and hands mangled. It had to be the instructor. Some sick fixation on the girl’s hands. A screw loose inside the tutor’s head.

Lucas cursed when he heard laughter, laugher he knew came from no human throat but from the Raven. The ungodly voice hissed, “Too late. Too late…”

The mocking laughter continued as Lucas raced from the old stationhouse in Mid-town Houston. He drove across the city with his strobe light flashing, horn blaring. He called for backup as he did so. The last package sent to her parents had held Pearl’s bloody left ear. The maniac could tire of the ‘game’ at any time.

“Anatomy is destiny,” Sigmund Freud had said. This was a twisted truism here. At what point would the piano teacher-turned-mutilator decide to take a piece of Pearl that would prove fatal?

He found the address that’d been in their files all along, the same address he’d subconsciously memorized. The piano teacher had been pleasant and had answered all the questions previous detectives working under Lucas had asked of her. Her alibi established, she’d claimed not to have seen Pearl for a week, not since her last session at the keys. It’d been written off as another dead end.

Now he stood pounding on the door. With no warrant save a hunch, Lucas must talk his way in, sift about the place, make small talk, find a reason to open the door to the basement he remembered from his interview, try to get a rise out of the bitch. If she should attack him and he subdued her, Lucas had full run of the place. No warrant for search and seizure necessary any longer.

He calmly did it all, and when he grabbed the door leading to the basement, Mrs. Louise Bohnheim came at him screaming like the demon he’d been hearing for weeks within his skull; came at him the way Lucas’s drunken father had once come at him—weilding a huge kitchen knife. When she attacked, Lucas grabbed her knife arm and holding it as bay. easily put her down with a brutal right to her temple. Tearing the door open, he took the rickety stairwell two and three steps at a time. Frantically searching the basement, praying he wasn’t too late as the demon insisted, he found Pearl.

Under a single light bulb dangling from the ceiling, Pearl sat bound hand and foot to a wooden chair, her eyes wide, her mouth moving below the gag, her bare body shivering in spite of the heat and humidity. The girl, shy about her nudity, was covered with small cuts, some scabbed over, some still bleeding where the mad woman had been at play. Seeing him, she shook her head and struggled wildly with the restraints looking panicked.

“Pearl?”

At the sound of her name, she nodded, moaned, and stopped struggling.

“I’m a police officer, you’re safe.” He talked to her calmly as he approached, “She can’t hurt you anymore, darlin’.” He tore away her bonds and gag, then lifted her into his arms.

She cried huge gulping breaths against his shoulder still shivering. “I was so scared,” she said between sobs.

As he carried her through the basement and up the stairs, he grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around her. In the car on the way to the hospital, he held her tightly against his body, warming her. Over and over he repeated, “You’re safe now, Pearl. You’re safe now. Safe.”

Huddling against him, she murmured, “Thank you,” over and over in a small tremulous voice.

***

“Is that the way you remember it, Detective Stonecoat?” asked Dr. Kari Martin, the police shrink he didn’t trust, despite kind things Meredyth had said about Martin.

“You can be sure she’s the best, Lucas. I would only find the best for you. I love you, remember?”

“Remember?” He looked up to see not Meredyth but Dr. Martin instead. “Hold on. Whataya mean, how I remember it. That’s how it was, just like I told you.”

“You spoke to Pearl when you found her?”

“Yes.”

“And she spoke back?”

“Yes.”

“Thanked you repeatedly, you say?”

“Repeatedly.”

“And when you got her to the hospital, she…her eyes were open and she was conscious?”

“Yes! How many g’damn times I gotta say it?”

“Until you get it right.”

“Right?”

“Meredyth said to keep at you until you get straight with this Pearl Sanchez business, detective.”

“Get straight?”

“Detective, the coroner has time of death for Pearl Sanchez at twenty-four hours before you reached her.”

He shook his head firmly….then more firmly. “That’s not how it happened.”

“No…not in your head, obviously.”

Lucas swallowed hard and stared at his large hands, the ones that had held her; they seemed far away, as if his arms were turned to rubber and stretching away from him. Martin finally broke the silence. “Detective, how long since the Sanchez case was closed?”

“Active yesterday, closed today.”

“Try six weeks, Lucas.”

“Six what?” Lucas looked around the office and past the office to the green walls of the institution. “Weeks? Six weeks?”

“That’s how long you’ve been with us here.”

Doctor and cop stared across at one another in a silence of infinite depth.

“You saying, I was…I’m committed?”

“Yes.”

“And Pearl Sanchez is dead?”

“Yes.”

“I carried her to the hospital in my arms. Gave her to the ER people.”

“Dead, Lucas. You carried her in dead.” Meredyth had sympathy in her voice.

“I did?”

“I’m sorry, but yes, dead. The doctor’s eyes never left him, “but at least for you, this is a good day.”

“A good day?”

“A breakthrough.”

“A breakthrough?”

“ Hey, you’re aware of your surroundings.”

“Pearl didn’t make it?”

“You had a break down, Lucas.”

“But she talked to me.”

“Perhaps on some level she did; perhaps you soothed her spirit, Lucas, but her body was gone when you arrived ahhh…too late.”

“Too late. But for six weeks now, playing it over and over in my mind….” Lucas again heard the malevolence of evil in his inner ear. He closed his eyes.. turning away from Martin.

“You saved Pearl. You weren’t too late.”

“I let her down in the real world.” He said with such finality, such resignation that Martin stared hard at the Lucas, as if she heard the voice inside him, too.

Martin looked unsure for the first time. “It’s a burden to be sure, detective, but one that we’re here to help you accept.”

“Accept?”

“The only way to free you.”

“Free me from this place or my guilt?”

“From your version of events…”

“Gotta accept the truth, you mean? Your version of it anyway?”

“Truth has many facets, like a diamond. Once you find one you can live with, Lucas, then we can talk about your going home and perhaps back.”

Lucas heard faint music playing somewhere the other side of the wall. He stood, pushed his chair away, and went toward the door. “I could’ve sworn I’d gotten to Pearl in time.”

“I’m sorry. Everyone is.”

“I never suspected the piano teacher.”

“No one did.”

“No. No one did in time.”

*** 

Quarrelsome was the single word most people used for Detective Lucas Stonecoat, surly and contentious ever since that ugly Pearl Sanchez business. Before that he’d been a quiet man, a serious tracker, a man one respected for amazing skills, a man little understood….and a man who’d once had a chance with Dr. Sanger. Not anymore. That Sanchez girl…Pearl, a shy one, yeah….he’d gotten there shy maybe twenty, twenty-four hours…had failed to break it in time. Now most who know him or have to work with Lucas Stonecoat assume that shy Pearl haunts the Indian, disturbing him still. But not even Dr. Martin, nor Meredyth Sanger, knew the truth…that the demon that drove the piano teacher haunted Lucas. He still blamed himself for his failure to intuit the teacher; the demon, like the trickster Raven had distracted Stonecoat.

Now his badge weighed heavy.

Copyright(c) 2006 by Robert W. Walker

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