Deja Blue (30 page)

Whatever the catalyst, the eyes saw clear through from the grave to him.

Else it was all an illusion, a trick on the part of Dr. Hiyakawa, the psychic called in to hunt him down. Perhaps she was, after all, the genuine article; perhaps it was her eyes seeing clear through space and time to study him. Perhaps she’d already, at least subconsciously, recognized him. And if not, she might soon do so. Most certainly, she was busily speculating. God, he thought, where might her speculations take her?

He feared the worst had come.

Even thought Mother screamed through his brain that it hadn’t, that the psychic knew nothing.

But the killer couldn’t convince himself and neither could Mother. So far as he believed, there was now someone who finally saw him for what he had become. What his acts had made of him. What Mother, ultimately had made of him when she won the tug of war with his soul.

He believed the psychic saw everything; saw him now. Saw it all—warts and all, murderous hands and all.

The question was had she told anyone else? The question of time entered his mind. Had she seen all of it now, in the past, or was this a harbinger of the future? And if the future, he may well have time to stop this from happening, keep Hiyakawa from going to what seemed the inevitable future.

He must waste no time; he must kill the psychic.

# # #

As Aurelia primped and dressed for the day, she considered each step in her plan, a plan that could fall apart so easily at any number of stages. So many moving parts in motion at once, like the shaft of a helicopter blade at full throttle. If she made the wrong move, the entire mechanization could come crashing down like badly constructed scaffolding. She didn’t savor the role circumstances had placed her in, the lone investigator, isolated from the group, and she indeed felt cut off. Cut off even from Quantico.

Hell and for sure Raule would soon be calling. She felt fearful of a call at any time from Raule telling her it was up, over, done with, kaput in Charleston, and that it was time for her to immediately get on a plane for home. She didn’t care for this role of the Machiavellian either. Any means to an end. She much preferred the straight, the narrow, the honest approach, but under such extremes, having now less than forty-eight hours to work a miracle, she must do what she must do. She knew she wasn’t racing home with her tail between her legs like some whipped cur.

She must not rush off headlong into her plan of action either, and certainly not blindly; she instead stared at her image in the mirror, half hoping to see some familiar faces orbiting around her own image, encouraging her onward with bully and cheering of a Teddy Roosevelt nature, boisterous and ear-shattering. But nothing of the sort came. Not from Gene, not from Father, nor from Mother.

The nearby empty Jacuzzi reflected in the mirror was loudly speaking, however. It said, ‘Hop in, relax…what can you accomplish in forty-eight freaking ours, kiddo. Drop the crusade and let’s make with the champagne, the bubbles, and the steam’.

“No way,” she answered back and scrunching her nose, she next spoke to her reflection in the mirror. “Now I’m talking to a Jacuzzi?”

Still in her slip, she applied lipstick.

Getting evidence from a lockup was no easy task nowadays even if you did carry an FBI badge. Certainly not so easy since 9/11; certainly not as in the old days when cops were king. Nowadays it required not one but two badges displayed, and two signatures just to examine evidence in lockup. This way if something went awry or there happened to be a screw up with the evidence in question at a later court hearing, not one but two people could be questioned and one could be played against the other. Still, Rae understood the need for tighter protocol on evidence. Too often in the past drugs, guns, and sometimes crucial serum, toxins, and DNA evidence went for a walk all on its own. Missing evidence, often the end result of an overworked and understaffed lab.

It was not unheard of for a crime lab to toss out evidence along with bio-waste. It’d occurred at the smallest of departments in the wee hamlets and at the highest, most sophisticated crime lab in the country, the FBI’s own, tainting the agency’s reputation now for years.

As a result, few people had the clout these days to remove evidence from a safe lockup or vault in a bank. Carl Orvison’s having seen to placing the killer’s notes not only under glass, but in a bank vault, underscored the fact that Charleston was no different in this regard than DC or Quantico these days.

Rae had earlier gotten onto the phone with an FBI medical examiner with whom she’d worked in the past, and with whom she shared a close knit bond, Dr. Jessica Coran. Coran had proven herself a many-times-over forensics genius—a rare breed actually, despite all the cop shows and Hollywood depictions, as few true geniuses in the field existed.

Coran had solved some of the most bizarre cases on the FBI blotter. As a result, Jessica had a huge reputation in law enforcement circles in general and among her colleagues in the IFS and the FAA—the International Forensics Society and the Forensic Association of America in particular. It stood to reason that she’d have some pull with Dr. Roland Hatfield in Charleston, and ultimately, Hatfield controlled much of the physical evidence in the case causing Rae sleepless nights here.

In fact, the heavy-duty evidence was under Dr. Hatfield’s control and not Orvison’s, evidence such as the hammer from the Cottrill killing.

Rae telephoned Quantico herself, but not to speak with Raule; rather, she got through to Dr. Coran. Once outlining the case she was working on, Rae listened to Jessica. Coran clearly wanted to help out in any way she could, although she had her hands full working a number of cases of her own. “However.” Jessica added, “I’ve read and heard all about the monster you’re chasing there, and Rae, learning you’re on the case sets my mind at some ease, but at the same time, I fear for your safety.”

“So far I’m batting zip, and the killer’s gotta know it, so I don’t feel any sense of danger at all, Jess.”

“I’d love to contribute. How can I help?”

“I need you to make a phone call and put all your powers of persuasion into getting me access to the hammer used in the first murder, a woman named Marci Cottrill.”

“And Hatfield has it under lock and key?” “You got it.”

“You got it. Will do everything I can to persuade this Dr. Hatfield, Rae, you know that.”

“That’s all I ask. I need him on board with a plan I’m hatching.”

“I know of Roland Hatfield, but I wouldn’t say he’s a friend or even an acquaintance. Spoke once at the bar at a convention. He’d given a talk on a new saw that might replace the Stryker. That’s about the extent of it.”

“But you can speak to him ME to ME, right?” “I will. Promise.”

“Soon? My time is limited.”

“You expect the killer to strike again? Soon?”

“That, too, but it’s that…well, they’ve given me forty-eight hours to show any results.”

“Bastards. I’ll call Hatfield soon as you hang up.”

Rae gave Jessica the number and they exchanged a few pleasantries, Rae asking how Richard was doing, and Jessica asking about Nia.”

“Nia’s doing just fine,” she lied.

While Dr. Jessica Coran was a forensics guru, practical and scientific minded, she and Rae had worked on a case involving pre-Katrina New Orleans, and Jessica had learned during that cooperative effort that psi powers could play a significant role in catching a killer. In fact, in that instance, with Rae working remote out of her Quantico pyramid and Coran in the field with a second psychic, Dr. Kim Desinor, they’d ended the career of not one but two serial killers—the Queen of Hearts killer and Mad Matthew Matisak.

Dr. Desinor, a native of New Orleans with a Cajun background, had returned to the Big Easy after Hurricane Katrina, and Desinor now worked in the rebuilding of the New Orleans Police Department. The NOPD had been fortunate indeed to get Dr. Desinor, a woman who’d taught Rae a great lesson about the sort of gift they shared. A lesson in caution, in listening to signs, and something of humility—that there’s more between heaven and hell than dreamt of in science.

Rae completed her eyeliner and now slipped on her sexiest fishnet stockings.

Dr. Kim Desinor so long ago had insisted that Rae never lose sight of herself and the dangers that awaited her while in trance state. Dangers that lurked in the netherworld of the paranormal. Kim had been the first person with psi powers to point out to Rae that that the dead who’d led lives of a degenerate and predatory nature, remained true to their ugly bedrock character in the afterlife. That evil, in all its infinite permutations within and without the human heart, did not necessarily change or even shift due to death. That if love could transcend death, then so could hatred and evil.

In all its permutations.

Gene Kiley had seconded Dr. Desinor on the subject when Rae had once brought it up in discussion in their Quantico lab.

Rae now put on her sexiest push-up bra. All ammunition in her plan.

As Rae finished her ensemble off with a slick black skirt and a perfectly fitted, slendering black blouse, she recalled how Desinor had shown her scars that day she’d spoken of the transcendent nature of evil. Scars from a disease that once ravaged her body and placed her in a hospital, scars from an undiagnosed ‘psychically induced’ disease that’d almost killed Kim. It’d been a gangrenous decay that’d decimated her, all as a result of psychically slipping into the mind of a victim who’d been lashed to the decaying body of a man. The victim was being punished by decay in an eye for an eye vengeance against her, in the manner Roman law. The Romans dealt with a murderer by lashing the victim, decay and all, to the man proven a killer. The biblical proportions of this torture came to light late in the case as Doctors Coran and Desinor hunted down the avenging father of a son who’d been executed by the state of Texas by order of the abducted, lashed to the victim woman—a judge. The case had made national headlines and had won fame for Dr. Coran and for Kim Desinor, whose combined efforts through forensic science and psychic detection saved the judge from this unthinkable death.

Rae never forgot the healed over scars on Desinor’s body. Indeed a picture worth a thousand words. Illustration enough that psi powers could create a backlash to harm the messenger—the psychic medium, doing terrible damage and sometimes unremitting and permanent damage, not only physically but mentally. Desinor, according to Dr. Coran, was never the same after the unnatural, brutal psychic attack she’d suffered. She’d remained with the FBI long enough to break in a few newbies in the proposed PSI Unit at the time, Rae being the most promising. After that, Kim’d gone home to New Orleans, taking her scars and ghosts with her.

It’d been more than a year later that Katrina hit, and this bombshell had brought Dr. Kim Desinor back into the world of crime fighting and detection with the NOPD.

But Kim had not slinked away quietly when she’d left the FBI. She’d not gone before she made Rae and the others truly ‘see’ that theirs was a frightful power to possess, and that it could and had rebounded on some who’d come before them. After this display, they lost some of the few recruits they had for the program. In fact, before it was over, Gene Kiley and Raule Aproestini had been left with only one confident psychic at that time, Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa. Since then, two others had come on board, but neither had Rae’s experience nor had ever met Kim Desinor.

She stood now, her outfit and makeup complete. She rushed out for the adventure ahead.

TWENTY FIVE

The brisk walk from hotel to Dr. Roland Hatfield’s autopsy lab felt good to Rae, invigorating. She’d found a surprise had awaited her the entire time outside—a bright blue morning. Clean, crisp air had rushed into the Kanawha Valley to whisk and undulate it clean, giving the broad river valley an opportunity to breathe anew, as if the city might inhale now, find brief respite from plants such as DuPont, Dow, and other chemical-producing companies sporting choking, belching smokestacks. The only worst US city she’d ever visited for pollution had been Birmingham, Alabama. Charleston’s only saving grace in this department was the fact the Chemical Valley plants had been spread out, unlike the congested counterparts in Birmingham.

Rae snatched out her cell phone and dialed Hatfield, telling him what she needed and vaguely why, saying she must have the hammer and nails from the first crime scene to kinetically read them, but that she needed to do the reading at a remote location; that in essence, she needed the items taken from the crime scene to travel off-site with her.

The man listened intently, saying nothing. Rae felt and believed that she had intrigued Hatfield without going into the fine print.

Then the phone went dead.

Dropped call? What? She wanted to throw the phone under an oncoming bus. Instead she checked the battery, realizing it could well’ve been that Hatfield had simply hung up on her. Stranger things had happened.

She now hoped it was a dropped call.

She quickened her pace for the forensics lab and Hatfield. She felt completely flummoxed; she’d expected the ME to rattle off a series of questions, perhaps a word of caution or two, some inane rules or comments about protocol, all in machine-gun fashion but no. Instead, he hangs up? ME’s as a rule proved to be characters with unusual habits and methods of proceeding. Why should Roland be any different?