by Dale Mayer
Yes, he knew he couldn’t force others to act. Yet he wished he could at least talk to them, get them to open up, maybe see the fallacy in their thinking.
It wasn’t fair; it really wasn’t. What was the point of having a gift like this? People called it a gift, but he thought it a curse, since he couldn’t do anything to change the outcome. As he lay here in the darkness, he heard his grandmother’s voice rolling through him. You can only observe. You cannot change.
He remembered yelling at her back then, hearing this in real time, saying he didn’t want anything to do with it. What was the point of seeing things if you couldn’t affect the outcome? She’d given him a sad smile, saying, “It’s just the way it is.”
“I don’t like it,” he yelled back at her.
She nodded slowly. “In time, you will learn to live with it.”
“No.” He backed up, heading outside to play with his friends. “I’m not going to,” he’d snapped. It was pretty rough just hearing and even observing some of the things his grandmother had gone through. He could do nothing to help her, even as such a young child already with this “gift,” even when growing into a teen with more confirmation of his “gift.” All he could do was avoid these discussions with his grandmother. She never called him back, never told him how to help those in the visions, or what he could do to stop anything like that from filling his mind.
Now he wished that he had stuck around and had had her take him under her wing, tutoring him in the ways of this craziness. At one point in time, she had just given him a sad smile. “You will find your way. No one can help you, but you will find your way.”
He had to wonder if that was even possible. Sitting in this craziness and listening to a woman gently sob, he couldn’t even find out the reason for it. He reached across the divide and whispered to her, “Tell me what’s wrong.”
But there was no answer.
He wasn’t even sure that she heard him. It was quite possible that her earlier response was to something completely different. How egotistical of him to think that it was a reply to his question, but, given the circumstances, he hadn’t known how else to deal with it.
Frustrated and almost on the verge of anger again, he lay here quietly in the darkness and listened to her sob. When she finally stopped and fell asleep, he followed her into dreamland, wishing with all his might that this could go away and never come back.
Chapter 14
When Kate woke up the next morning, her eyes opened, and her brain clicked on. To think that the two recent murders of Candy and Paula were connected to the death of Sally on her bike was something completely different. And it surprised Kate that the killer had positioned Candy’s body near Sally’s crime scene. Was that deliberate or accidental? Were there two killers?
At the same time, Kate wondered how much of Candy’s death scene was a copycat of Sally’s, and how much might be that the killer had seen Candy and Paula at Sally’s crime scene and had chosen his next victim then. Just so many options. She bolted out of bed and dressed quickly, realizing again that she still didn’t have any groceries and couldn’t keep existing on the leftovers from Simon.
She walked to work, her steps rapid and purposeful. Her mind buzzed with possible connections, possible links. But she needed to track them down and see if she could toss some of them out. Maybe if she got lucky, another autopsy would have been completed by now.
She thought about turning around, grabbing her vehicle, and heading up to the morgue, but changed her mind, as she should wait until the coroner came back with his reports for her. She stopped, picked up one more of those absolutely lovely pretzels that she really shouldn’t be eating all the time, and carried it into the station, still warm and steaming.
Grabbing some coffee, she sat down at her desk and brought up her emails. No autopsy report. It wasn’t even eight o’clock, so it was early yet. With her notepad, she wrote down all the possible scenarios she could come up with. Then she set up some searches. Way more computing power should be here than there was, but she would do what she could. She wondered if their analyst, Reese, had bigger and better tools at her disposal. Kate needed to remember to ask that of someone later.
Right now she started searching for more history on these bullying kids and then brought up anything that looked like UBC complaints in the local media. She was still trying to sort through the last cyclist-related accidents that had happened in the previous ten years in that same area, then widened the search to include a ten-block radius.
She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for, just a connection. The fact that she had a second ice-bullet victim now at the same intersection within four days—not one year later—meant something different was going on. That it was connected to these students was something else again. She just didn’t know quite what it was. Her computer hummed along steadily, as she wrote down notes.
When Rodney walked in, he stopped and looked at her. “Stop being so damn early all the time.”
“I woke up with my mind buzzing. I need to get some of this down on paper and rule out some of these scenarios.”
“Run them past me because I’m feeling like my brain is dead.” He went and got coffee, then sat beside her, as she went over her notes. “Yeah.” He contemplated her list of potential scenarios in front of her. “The connects are just pretty slim, don’t you think?”
“It’s possible the killer was watching the chaos after Sally, the first woman, died at that intersection recently. Maybe he saw Candy there. Maybe he saw the whole group of bullies, and they did something that pissed him off. I mean, they’re the kind of people who piss everyone off. They are callous and inconsiderate. They don’t give a damn about anyone else. For all we know, they may have laughed at our killer or something.” She was warming to the theory now. “Given the bullies penchant for pushing and hurting the disabled, what if our potential killer is in that group?”
Rodney turned and looked at her with respect. “Interesting notion.” He nodded.
“Not impossible, anyway,” she said.
“Sure, it’s a bit of a reach, but this kind of a killing is also distant. Or is this true for these ice-bullet pistols?” He swung over to his desk and punched in a speed-dial number. “Hey, Reese. Quick question. Are ice-bullet pistols long range or short?” He waited while keys clicked in the, background then nodded. “Thanks.”
“Wait,” Kate called out. “Ask her what her workload looks like?”
Rodney laughed. “Did you hear that?” he asked Reese. He paused. “Got it.” He hung up and swung around in his chair to face Kate. “She says heaped. If it’s important, she’ll get to your stuff fast. If not …”
Kate grimaced. “By that time, I’ll have slogged through it myself.”
“Impatient little devil, aren’t you?” Rodney laughed.
Kate waved him off. “What about the range of the ice-bullet gun?”
“Depends on the delivery mechanism used.”
“Of course,” Kate groaned, then motioned him over to her and her list again.
He pointed at one of her items. “But why are the dead cyclists always women?”
“I don’t know, unless of course a woman disabled our killer, our fictional killer, and put him on this revenge path.”
“It’s possible.” He nodded. “But … hmm. Let me check those witness photographs and see if anybody was obviously disabled. Like crutches, walkers, canes. Do you remember talking to anybody with a limp? Was anybody there missing a limb? Or had an obvious facial deformity?”
Kate shook her head. “Nobody immediately comes to mind, but I was more interested in their faces for ID confirmation purposes. You look at the photos, while I keep running this down.”
He nodded and swung his chair over to his computer. “I guess we don’t have anything on that kid Brandon, do we?”
“No, he’s at home, promising to stay in town.”
“Do we believe that?”
“Yes.”
“He pr
obably will. He can’t take a chance of getting kicked out of the university.”
“I’m sure his parents could buy his way back in again,” she said.
“Probably so, but they might be getting pretty damn tired of it. This is his third university.”
She jerked her head up, looked at him. “What? Why?”
“I contacted the Committee of Student Affairs at the University of Toronto, and let’s say they were more than happy he was moving.”
“Wow, same shit?”
He shrugged. “They wouldn’t go into any detail.”
“Of course not,” she said.
“He did say that the kid had little respect for life.”
“We’ve already seen that he’s just a sheer troublemaker. A spoiled punk-ass troublemaker.” She shook her head. “He needs to be knocked down a peg or two.”
“Maybe, but we have to make sure it sticks. Otherwise the family will get him off, and he’ll be laughing all the way out of the station, as he continues to pull more stunts like this.”
She agreed with him, but it just made her even angrier. The onus was always on them to prove their case, but it didn’t make it any easier when they were up against guys like this because they could always find ways to wiggle out of everything. An open-and-shut case was what she needed. But, so far, she didn’t have jack shit to make anything happen.
But she would, no way she wouldn’t.
“We’ve got the other three to deal with this morning?” Rodney asked her.
“Right. Tell me about that.”
“We did talk to them over conference calls yesterday. That was the best we could get at the time.”
“I wish we could have gotten them down here, so we could make sure Brandon didn’t talk to them.”
“We did get short statements from them, so they couldn’t change their tune, and they’re all coming in person this morning.”
“Good enough. What time are they starting?”
“Nine is the first one,” he said. Silence ensued for the next little bit, as they worked their way through the research, and then he went “Huh.”
She turned, looked at him. “What does that mean?”
“This vehicle here on the side of the road.”
“And?”
“I’d have to run the plates to see, but it looks like it’s been modified. It’s a convertible, and the gearshift has been extended up to the front dash.”
“And that would only happen why?”
He shrugged. “Somebody has a deformed arm maybe? There could be other modifications made on it too.”
“You’ve got the license plate?”
He shook his head. “No, but I have the make and model of the car. Let me work on that.”
He dove into that, while she sat back, with all her theories running. When she came to Brandon’s case history, it was clean. It was way too clean. As in scary clean. She realized that some history here had been secreted away, and somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure that nobody ever found it. And most likely he had a juvie record as well, but good luck getting that unsealed.
“Belongs to a student with a disability. According to the records, he has half a right arm. So makes sense on the gear shift.”
“Good catch.” Returning to her keyboard, while shaking her head, she pulled up an email and sent off a request. It would come back saying the records were sealed, but maybe that would be enough. That fact alone would give her a little ammunition. People had gone to great lengths to make sure nobody ever found out what the hell Brandon had been up to. Maybe the suggestion of a court order would be enough.
With that, she went back to her research on Paula. That was a whole different story. She was not the angel her mother had said she was, but her mother probably didn’t know about the depth of her problems since she’d hit the university. Drunk in class, drugs, misdemeanors, theft from other students, generally raising chaos and raising Cain. She’d been put on suspension once and had a second one written up. Kate frowned at that. “Looks like Paula was in trouble a lot,” she murmured.
“While hanging out with that crowd, I’m not surprised.”
She nodded. “I doubt the mother knew anything about any of this.”
“Paula would have done everything she could to keep that from them, just to stay here with her perfect boyfriend Brandon.”
“Of course, but she had to be pretty damn close to getting her ass kicked out,” Kate said, “and she didn’t have an attorney on retainer or someone standing by to make a nice big donation.”
“I’m sure the mother would blame this group.”
“I’m not sure that it wasn’t them either, but people still have to own their own decisions. You can’t just blame everybody else in life.”
“No, but obviously this Brandon kid had some weird control over the others.”
“We’ve seen it before.” Kate shook her head, ending with a sigh. “It’s like a weird mesmerizing personality that gets people to do what they wouldn’t do in any other circumstance. In this case, we’ve got two young women, vying for the same guy potentially, but, according to Brandon, having some attraction to each other, caught up in this triangle. The whole transvestite angle was definitely to derail us but also to soothe his ego. Can you imagine how Brandon would handle it if some hot girl dumped him for another girl?” Kate chuckled at that. “What a fragile sense of self. And neither of the women really fit into the bullying rich-guy group, but they sure were desperately trying, yet not succeeding.”
“And is there anything worse than failure in college?” he asked, looking at her. “Worse than high school. If you don’t make the popular group, they feel doomed forever.”
“Especially in a case like this,” she murmured. “Failure is not an option because, if you aren’t part of that group, what are you?”
“Pretty sad that they think that way,” he muttered.
“Right. You’d think they would have figured that out in high school,” she said.
“Nobody gets past that need. Human nature has an innate desire to belong to something, even if it’s the wrong group.”
*
Simon lay on his bed in the early morning, as he tried to figure out if it was safe to get up or not. For some reason he had a sense of impending pain. He hated that concept. There was absolutely no reason for it, as he looked around his bedroom, everything was suspect at the moment. His gaze narrowed, as he wondered where this information was coming from. Whenever something bizarre like that filtered through his brain, he had to stop and wonder if it was him or if it was a vision. The fact that he was even contemplating such things was enough to drive him crazy because it shouldn’t be visions. That was of his grandmother’s world, not his own. At least as far as he was concerned. But it didn’t seem to matter what he wanted these days.
As he rolled over to get out of bed, he banged his head against something. His night stand was where it always sat, out of the way and up against the wall. He should easily have gotten out of bed without hitting it. But he hadn’t seen it. He slowly got up and realized that he was struggling to see anything. He shook his head, and clarity came back again.
He kept on moving, got to the bathroom, turned on the hot water, and stepped in for a shower. Not for the first time, he wished he could talk to somebody. And though the time and opportunity had long past, his grandmother would have been the perfect person.
He stepped out, feeling better, yet these weird little cloudy wisps of another person’s life seemed attached to him. It filtered in and filtered out, so sometimes he thought it was his world, when it really wasn’t, and vice versa. It added chaos and confusion to his world. It was something he would have to work on. If he could get them to stop or could get the connection to that veil to strengthen, so that the visions or thoughts couldn’t cross so easily, it would help.
Not that he blamed whoever it was because he highly doubted they had a clue what they were doing either. If, in fact, they had done anything.
Somebody was just calling out in need. Unfortunately Simon was picking it up, as a receiver. And that just brought back memories of his grandmother because, of course, she’d been a receiver and had been able to do a lot.
His grandmother would flat-out say that it didn’t matter what he wanted; it mattered what the spirit wanted. She was a firm believer that this was all spirits at work. And, in her case, she believed in God.
He was on the fence about that. He couldn’t understand that a God was out there who would allow a child, like Simon at four years old, to be hurt the way he was, with nobody to give a damn. That had really bothered him growing up, especially when the church types had repeatedly told Simon that God was looking out for him because Simon knew in his heart of hearts that, after his grandmother’s death, there hadn’t been anybody looking out for him.
As an adult, he could now see why there had been so much belief in the world, especially for those whose faith had not yet been tested, but it didn’t make him ready to listen to it. His grandmother had just said it was the Great Spirit around them. That they were all part of the same. He’d never told her about what happened to him, but she seemed to have known, though not at the time it was happening, only later when they reconnected. It had taken a long time for him to make that connection happen, but, as soon as he’d seen her, he’d instinctively known who she was, and, being as special as she was, she had seen it too.
That’s when she’d also become worried about him, worried about the path already presenting itself in his life. Even though he told her that he didn’t want anything to do with his “gift” and that he didn’t even believe in it, there had been just enough psychic happenings where he couldn’t not believe. Whether she had shown him those things on purpose or not, he didn’t know, but she was certainly capable of such deceit, all in the name of giving him the facts of life.
