Summoned Dreams

by Hadena James

  “I had thought of that,” Malachi replied. “I don’t believe it has slowed down the serial killers though.”

  “Nothing slows down a serial killer, except a good Taser and a shotgun,” I told him. “They all think they are invincible. Some sort of He-Man hybrid that can’t be caught until they are and then they really resent being caught by a woman. Stupid assholes. Even the elusive female serial killers resent being caught by a female. Like a girl isn’t smart enough, strong enough, or fast enough to track down a female psychopath.”

  “Why?” Hunter asked.

  “Because they are apex predators and apex predators aren’t female,” Malachi told him. “However, I’d wager a paycheck that Aislinn can take on any predator she meets and come out alive.”

  “I’ll take that bet,” I told him.

  “You can’t take the bet. You’d be betting against yourself,” Malachi told me.

  “True, but somewhere out there is a serial killer who has my number.” I pointed at the car as a girl got into it. “I don’t think we’ll be meeting him today though.”

  “Even you’re biased, believing that the serial killer that bests you has to be male,” Green pointed out.

  “That’s also true.” I gave a quick glance at Malachi. He knew my weaknesses. If he ever fell off the edge, he could probably beat me.

  The car was easy to follow. It was bright yellow. In a sea of white, grey, and silver cars, it was noticeable. It wound its way through downtown, onto some highway and into a darker part of town. The area was surrounded by warehouses. Malachi flipped off his lights before exiting the highway. We drove the darkened roads, following only the headlights in front of us. Detroit was by far the darkest city I had ever been in. Most cities invested in lighting and things, Detroit was doing the opposite. It was no wonder the place was rife with crime. It was easier to get away with things in the dark.

  The car pulled to a stop outside an old warehouse. The occupants did not get out. A groan escaped me before I could stop it.

  “So, do we bust them for prostitution or wait for him to kill her?” Green asked. Malachi seemed to think about this for a minute.

  “We can’t wait for him to kill her,” I admonished his slow decision-making. One life was not an acceptable casualty rate in my opinion. “Stay here for a moment.”

  I did my best saunter. I was fairly certain it looked like a drunken limp. Exuding sex appeal wasn’t one of my talents. It was hard to exude something that was as mysterious as the darkest corners of the universe.

  About half way to the car, I gave up on the saunter. My new ruse was to ask for a light. I pulled a cigarette out of my pack and stuck it between my lips. The car was now rocking and I knew they had no idea I was there. The shocks squeaked. The girl had disappeared, but my suspect was still sitting in his seat. I hit the window once, with the back of my hand, hard enough to make both people jump.

  “What the hell!” The man shouted as he fumbled for something.

  “I need a light,” I shouted at him through the glass.

  “I don’t smoke, you crazy bitch,” he shouted back, pulling out a gun. He aimed it at me. “Now back away.”

  “I think not.” I grabbed the door handle and jerked it open. The safety was still on. He could try to shoot me, but he would fail miserably. Guns were meant to be scary. That was their entire purpose. However, in my world, a guy with a knife was much scarier. It meant he wanted to get up close and personal. I thought about the fact that he had a gun as I jerked him out of the car by his shirt. His pants fell down around his ankles. “Are you alright?” I asked the shocked woman inside.

  “Yeah,” she mumbled.

  “Good,” I shut the door on her. “US Marshals Service, are you Mr. Brian Yates?” I asked, kicking the gun away from him.

  “What do you want?” He asked, grappling with his pants.

  “I just want to arrest you,” I answered.

  “For what?” He asked.

  “Besides pulling a gun on a federal agent?” I asked.

  “You hadn’t identified yourself.”

  “Oh, the hat and jacket don’t give it away? It isn’t like the federal government hands out hats with the SCTU lettered on them to everyone who wants one.” I touched my head and realized I wasn’t wearing the hat. “Okay, so maybe I forgot the hat. I still have on a jacket with a badge on the breast of it. What kind of person takes a prostitute to a darkened warehouse district for a blowjob? You could have gotten that in any of the alleys. Do you come here often?”

  “I’m confused. Why is the US Marshals Service busting prostitutes and their customers?” He asked.

  “I don’t do that. Technically, I can’t do that. I can arrest you for possession of a firearm and hold you on suspicion of multiple murders,” I told him.

  “Why do you say that?” Malachi asked. “It always gets their hackles up. You say multiple murders and it offends people. That’s why you aren’t very well liked.”

  “Hey, that’s not true. Lots of people like me. I have a fan club,” I reminded him.

  “Serial killers sending you birthday cards is not a ringing endorsement as a people person,” Malachi informed me. “Mr. Gates? I’m Special Agent Malachi Blake with the Violent Crimes Unit. This is Marshal Aislinn Cain with the Serial Crimes Tracking Unit. We would like to talk to you about our presence here. It seems that over the last three months, seventeen prostitutes have been found dead in this district. Do you frequently come here?”

  The others joined us. However, their presence was more as an oversight committee. Malachi and I fed off each other’s brutality. Individually, we were dangerous; together we were terrifying. We should never be allowed to work together. It was a recipe for disaster, destruction, and death.

  “Well?” I asked, tapping my foot against the ground. “Do you?”

  “Do I what?” Mr. Gates asked.

  “Come here often,” I said the words loudly and slowly.

  “That’s a lot of dead hookers,” Malachi said quietly. “And Marshal Cain doesn’t need a warrant or consent to search your vehicle.”

  “Prostitutes,” I corrected. “Hooker sounds so low, like they are disposable and they aren’t. Prostitutes are people too.”

  “Fine, that’s a lot of dead prostitutes. Do you see other people when you come here?” Malachi turned back to Gates.

  “What is going on?” Gates asked.

  “You are being interrogated, rather poorly, if I might add, by my less than stable colleagues,” Green stepped up to the plate. “Special Agent Green with the VCU. Have you seen anything suspicious around here on your visits?”

  I decided I was tired of messing around. I turned and started stomping towards the car. If he were a serial killer, there would be evidence. There always was. I opened the door. Gates started shouting at me that I didn’t have probable cause.

  “Hi again,” I said as I opened the door. “What’s your name?”

  “Candy,” she answered.

  “What’s your real name?” I asked. She frowned at me. “Look, I can’t arrest you for conducting business. I just want to know your real first name. I hate using fake names. It feels so impersonal.”

  “Alice,” she answered.

  “Alice, my name is US Marshal Aislinn Cain. I would like to search this vehicle. I believe the man that picked you up tonight is a serial killer. Would you kindly step out of the vehicle and not run away?”

  “Why can’t I leave if I’m not under arrest?” She asked.

  “Because this is no place for a woman to be wandering at night. If we’re wrong, there’s still a guy killing prostitutes in this area. You could run into him. That would suck,” I told her, sticking my hand down next to the driver’s seat. I pulled out a long, hunting knife with a compass in the end of it. There was blood on the blade. “Shit.” I dropped the knife in the seat. I had forgotten gloves.

  She got out of the car and took a few steps away, but she didn’t run. I stood up, still shaking my head. I
didn’t know why I could never remember gloves, just that I couldn’t. I pulled a pair of black leather ones out of my pocket and put them on. I had already contaminated the knife. I didn’t want to do any more damage to the scene.

  “Someone put Mr. Gates in handcuffs,” I shouted as I ducked back inside the car. I found another gun, a bottle of lubricant, and a box of condoms. Most people don’t realize it, but these were standard items when dealing with necrophilia.

  Behind me, there was a commotion. I turned in time to see muzzle flash. It stung my eyes as the smell of cordite reached my nose. I ran towards the chaos, gun drawn.

  Hunter was holding his gun out. Ballard was bleeding from his mouth. At first, I thought Hunter had shot Ballard. Then I saw Mr. Brian Gates had a large hole in his head. Malachi was shaking with anger.

  “Ballard?” I asked. Ballard looked at me, his eyes a little glazed. “You okay?”

  “I think so.” He got off the dead suspect. “A little shocked, I think.”

  Malachi suddenly exploded with movement. He reached Hunter in two long strides. His hand shot out like a viper attacking prey and in the blink of an eye, he had disarmed the Marshal. Malachi held the gun in his hand as he began yelling at the other man.

  My phone rang. Gabriel’s number flashed up on the screen.

  “Hello?” I answered.

  “Go get Bellamy Schneider,” Gabriel instructed me.

  “Well, I would, but Hunter just shot a suspect in the head,” I replied.

  “Jesus Christ!” Gabriel hung up on me.

  “How’s Henders’ investigation going?” Green asked.

  “Well, if we didn’t have a dead serial killer in front of us, we would be on our way to pick up Bellamy Schneider and take him into custody.” I shrugged.

  Twenty-Five

  It is very hard to explain how someone getting an elbow to the mouth results in a suspect, who is partially handcuffed, being shot right between the eyes. It looked like an execution. Surprisingly, Alice was our best witness that we weren’t doing things like that.

  She was even helpful enough to explain why my fingerprints were on the knife. The fact that she completely lied about it was something that would have made a more moral person cringe, didn’t bother me. She told them I was trying to calm her down and get her out of the car when my hand slipped in between the seats and found it. She was under the impression I had pulled it out not sure what it was.

  Her mostly fictitious account of what had happened during the entire ordeal made it so we could go back to our hotel rooms without much ado. Ballard went to the hospital to make sure he wasn’t bleeding. It was hard to tell since he was covered in head goo. The shooting was declared terribly unlucky for Brian Gates, but lucky for Agent Ballard. A few inches higher and he would have had a bullet in his abdomen.

  Malachi was refusing to give Hunter back his gun. I couldn’t really say I blamed him. Hunter had taken a serious risk discharging his firearm while Ballard struggled with the suspect. Plus, the SCTU and VCU both had come to the decision that it was better not to kill suspects. It raised a lot of questions. We would have investigators crawling up our procedures and down our protocols until the cows came home.

  On another day, it would be no problem for us to take our somewhat unreliable evidence and make an arrest of Father Schneider. Immediately following the death of a suspect in our custody and it was a little more difficult. A new Special Investigator with the Department of Justice would be joining us in a few hours.

  Gabriel and Lucas were already back. They were strategizing with Malachi on the best way to trap Father Schneider since we had no evidence and he was unlikely to confess. I wasn’t an investigator or a psychologist. Xavier had me at the hospital.

  The MRI he had sworn I had to get when we returned to Missouri had been moved up. We had time to kill. He really wanted to look at my brain. I had protested, but he was insistent and Gabriel had eventually ordered me to go get it done.

  The machine clicked, clanked, and trilled as it worked. I had my eyes closed, concentrating on my breathing. I had never been buried alive, but I was pretty sure it was like this, only quieter. His voice, eerily pumped into the machine and distorted by the speakers, told me I had less than two minutes left. This was good, since I was ready to start clawing at the sides of the machine. As a general rule, I’m not claustrophobic, but MRIs were an exception. I didn’t like being wrapped up in a giant magnet that could tear itself apart if it decided to have a bad day. Besides, I also ran the possibility of having bits of shrapnel left in me. My imagination had no trouble flashing images of my skin shredding as the metal was torn from my body.

  The machine gave a few clicks and clanks and then became silent. A few moments later, I was being pulled out of the tube of death. My socked feet hit the floor with more noise than I had intended. My breathing was slightly irregular and my heart was beating too fast. Despite knowing the danger was over, I was still reacting to it. I tried to quell my response, but my body refused to either go to the calm place or stop pumping adrenaline into my bloodstream.

  “You can come look at them with me,” Xavier told me through the speakers of the room. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see my brain. It was probably a mess. I had suffered multiple head injuries over the last several years. Xavier was staring and muttering at the screens. It showed multiple views and sections of my brain. One area was a dense white color. It was this spot that Xavier was muttering at.

  I knew white spots were a bad sign. It was abnormal tissue growth due to a number of different causes. In my case, it was probably traumatic brain injury.

  “Well?” I asked as Xavier sat down.

  “Well,” Xavier frowned at me, “we have a problem.”

  “Don’t keep it to yourself,” I told him, finding myself irritated.

  “That is your temporal lobe. It is responsible for a lot of things, including personality. That white spot has been there every time I have scanned your brain,” he told me. “This smaller white spot, back here,” he pointed to another section of my brain, “is completely new. This region is partially responsible for the function of the adrenal glands. If you had symptoms of Cushing’s or some other neurological disorder, I would say that cortisol was flooding your system and we needed to investigate. Unfortunately, you have no evidence of Cushing’s.”

  “And that’s bad?” I asked, not sure what Cushing’s was.

  “In your case, yes,” he answered. “I have no idea what that spot is or what it is doing to you. Lab work over the last couple of months shows that you aren’t producing adrenaline like you used to. If I had to guess, I’d say that spot is the reason why. Normally, you maintain a high level of epinephrine and norepinephrine in your bloodstream. Using other known ASPD patients, I know this to be normal for someone with your condition. Your body thrives off it instead of sending you into a tail spin of terrible side effects. However, yours has slowly been dropping. It might be why you can now fight the darkness and you aren’t as fast with your fight or flight response. In other words, your body is becoming too lethargic for your condition. Since these sorts of studies are all relatively new, we don’t know what that will do to you, physically or mentally. We will need to run more tests. It might be scar tissue from an injury, but more likely, it’s a brain tumor, since it has increased in size.”

  “Really? I have brain cancer?” The irony was not lost on me.

  “Probably not,” Xavier answered. “I said tumor, not cancer. Without digging into your brain, I don’t know for sure that it’s a tumor at all. I can run more tests, do more MRIs, but your brain isn’t like most brains. The white spot on the front is definitely scar tissue, but it doesn’t look like other scar tissue I’ve seen on the brain. Yours isn’t as dense, despite being profound. This looks denser, which gives me cause for concern. The good news is that, if it is a tumor, we can remove it. It might be worse news if it’s scar tissue.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “How long what?” H
e countered.

  “Before you have to cut into my brain?”

  “I will not be doing the cutting myself,” Xavier corrected me. “I’ll be in the room. You are going to freak out, because you are going to have to be awake. But I am not personally going to cut into that giant, overstuffed piece of matter you value so dearly. We will have a trained neurosurgeon do it and I will start making arrangements for our return to Kansas City.”

  “I have a serial killer to catch tomorrow.”

  “Uh, no, you don’t,” Xavier looked at me. “You are technically not working at one hundred percent. You are not going on the hunt tomorrow.”

  “How’d I manage to yank a guy out of a car if I wasn’t getting my usual dose of adrenaline?”

  “Because you can still surge when the occasion arises.”

  “Then it will surge tomorrow,” I told him.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Xavier explained.

  “If this is going to be my last case, I want to finish it.”

  “Damn it,” Xavier leaned back in his chair. “If you feel different in any way, I expect you to tell me immediately. And I have to tell Gabriel.”

  It didn’t take long for me to be in a room with Gabriel and Xavier, each looking at me as if I was made of glass. I didn’t like the pity or their notion that I might somehow be fragile. I hadn’t actually killed anyone. That had been Christian Hunter.

  After a long silence filled with staring, Gabriel looked at the print out of the MRI again. His finger traced the white section that concerned Xavier. His face told me it concerned him as well.

  “I can’t use Xavier,” he finally sighed. “I would prefer you go back to KC, get the tests run and if a biopsy is necessary, do the biopsy. The two of you could be there, running tests by tomorrow morning.”

  “Or I could finish this case, then head home tomorrow afternoon with everyone else and start the tests after a good night’s sleep,” I told him.

  “How impaired is she?” Gabriel asked.