Flawless Dreams

by Hadena James

  Personally, he hated goat’s milk in every form; same with eggs and chickens. Chickens were smelly, foul creatures who would eat other chickens if they didn’t have enough room. Their eggs were covered in chicken droppings when he collected them. The coops smelled to high heaven and the open air shelters also stank. He had to clean them all once a week. They were smellier than the insects.

  However, his daddy had farmed chickens and goats. His granddaddy had farmed chicken and goats. They were known for their humane treatment of their animals. In the past, it had been seen as silly, but in modern times, the long history was considered a boon. The reputation of Janson’s Farm was incredible and had opened many doors to keep the money coming in.

  Keirnan had two hired hands he was so busy. They helped with the livestock and the crops. The insect farm was his hobby, he didn’t need them to help there. The first was his cousin, Charlie. Charlie had been in an accident as a kid that caused severe trauma to the brain. His thinking was a little slow, his speech a little slurred, but once he learned a task, he could work the day away just fine. If he hadn’t worked for Keirnan and lived with his momma across the road, he probably would have lived in a group home. Keirnan felt the same way about group homes as he did chickens and their living quarters. Charlie had only been a year younger than Keirnan. The accident could have happened to anyone, Charlie was a boy after all and boys did things like climb trees and ride bicycles down gravel roads as fast as they could. Charlie was family and Keirnan could help, so he did. That was the way things were done. Besides, he liked Charlie, even after Charlie got kicked in the head by a horse.

  His other farm hand was an older man that had been helping on the farm for as long as Keirnan could remember. He was getting slower as he aged, but he could still do more work than most young men these days. Plus, he was an excellent mechanic. Keirnan didn’t know anything about Lewis’s past and he didn’t care. The man had seen a rough life. That Keirnan could tell from looking at him, not just farm work either. He had scars that told of a past life full of pain and misery.

  When Keirnan’s father had disappeared about fifteen years ago, the police had arrested Lewis as a murder suspect. However, there had been no evidence of murder and Lewis had come back to the farm about five days after the police arrested him. He’d begged Keirnan’s mother not to fire him and she hadn’t. Most people believed that Keirnan’s father had just up and left. He’d talked about it more than once down at the local bar. He talked about it every time he got drunk.

  What Myron Janson didn’t talk about was how his three year old son had die. Keirnan had been twelve, but he couldn’t disagree with his father when his father told everyone that William crawled through the fence into the hog pen. For starters, Keirnan wasn’t supposed to be there that day. He’d skipped school and been hiding behind the hog lot. William had been sick for nearly a week with an ear infection and Myron just got tired of his screaming. Keirnan watched his father pick the little boy up and toss him over the fence and walk away.

  Myron had been a mean son of a bitch at times. He would beat Keirnan half to death for simply coughing during dinner or failing to tie his shoes correctly. As Keirnan had gotten older and bigger than his daddy, Myron had started to abuse Susan, Keirnan’s momma and Myron’s wife of nearly twenty years.

  That was the final straw for Keirnan. He’d come home from school in the middle of the day and found his momma covered in blood on the living room floor, her dress all messed up, his daddy naked. Momma had been crying and telling his daddy no as he forced himself on her. Keirnan had quietly walked back outside and sat down. He could still hear his momma crying and screaming. Myron whistling as he beat and raped the woman he supposedly loved. He was nicer to the livestock than his own family.

  Later that night, Keirnan had taken his momma to the hospital while Myron had gone drinking. She had been admitted. Keirnan went home to wait.

  Myron came home earlier than normal. Maybe he was going to apologize like he usually did after something like this. Maybe he was just too happy with himself to drink too much. Keirnan didn’t ask any questions. He’d met his daddy in the yard and requested he follow him to the barn, one of the goats was sick and he didn’t know what to do.

  His daddy had followed him. Once inside, Keirnan, who had broken the leg of one of the goats, waited for his daddy to bend over. Then he looped a noose around his neck and pulled with all his might. The noose had been attached to a pulley and Myron had come off his feet before he even knew what was happening.

  Keirnan had hoisted his father about ten feet in the air and stood by to watch. The man had kicked and gulped for air. He’d struggled and clawed at the rope above his head and the noose around his neck. The teenaged boy had thought it would be fast, but it hadn’t been. His father had kicked and gurgled for nearly twenty minutes before finally suffocating.

  He left him up there for another hour, just to be sure. During that time, he took his daddy’s truck and drove it into the Missouri River nearby. It had sank quickly and the currents would wash it downstream, despite its size. It could stay hidden for decades in the Muddy Missouri as people liked to call it.

  After that, he had walked back home, let his father’s corpse down and had spent another hour just staring at it. He’d thought about burying him, but they’d search the farm. In the end, he’d put his father’s body in the trunk of his car and driven it down the road about three miles. There, he had pushed it into an old well that had been covered for decades and then he’d resealed the well.

  At the time, he had thought it was a good hiding place. When the police came asking about Myron, he had second thoughts. Surely, they would be searching places like the wells. When Lewis was arrested, Keirnan was positive they had found the body. It had taken sheer will power not to go check. His momma getting out of the hospital had helped there. She’d needed him to take care of her.

  However, they never searched them and Keirnan got over the urge to go see if the body was still there. The injuries from that day would lead to his momma’s death just a year later. Her arm had been broken so badly, they amputated it, and her spine had been broken in two places, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down. One day, during the harvest, she had tipped the kitchen table over on herself. It had knocked her out of her chair and crushed her to death. He’d found the body when he came in around midnight. She was already cold. Keirnan realized in that moment, that his hatred for his father ran much deeper than he had imagined. He wanted to go get his skeleton and kill him all over again.

  However, that was nonsense. He couldn’t kill a skeleton. Instead, he had gone and gotten the bones from the well, drove several hundred miles with them in a duffle bag in his trunk and put them on display in a park in Dodge City, Kansas. He had whistled while he arranged the bones. He had whistled the exact same song his father had whistled the day he sealed his fate and unleashed the darkness that Keirnan had been fighting all his life.

  Six

  While I waited for Fiona to work her magic with the geographical profile and a general idea of a suspect description, I played solitaire. Not the kind you play on your phone or on a computer, but with a real deck of cards. It was one of things I preferred to do the old fashioned way. I found shuffling cards to be somewhat therapeutic for my rage. It wasn’t that it had increased in recent months, but that I had less control over it. Some part of me was still pissed off about something that I hadn’t quite put my finger on and until I did, it fed the rage that always lurked in the depths of my being.

  Fiona soothed her own irritation with music. We surprisingly had the same taste and she had introduced me to some new songs and bands that I enjoyed. As I shuffled her phone shuffled and found a different song, Sail by AWOLNATION came on and I began to nod my head to the beat without any thought. She sang along as I dealt the cards and her fingers dashed across the keyboard. I had been surprised to learn that Fiona could sing. I wasn’t sure why it surprised me, but it did. Her voice made me think she wa
s in the wrong line of work and should have been singing the lead of some intense opera that made people cry. It was beautiful, one of the few I had heard that seemed to enter my armor-encased soul. There were lots of reasons I had become so attached to Fiona and as she sang the odd lyrics that accompanied the music, I added this one to the list.

  She nudged me and I added my inability to hold a tune to her voice. Together we sang and rocked out a bit while she searched for a serial killer to fill my time. Very few people could get me let my guard down, she was now among the list. But she was giving me something, someone in return for my inharmonic singing. Someone to fill the void that would stretch into an endless night as we prepared for a stakeout of a park.

  “Got it,” she slide the computer to me. Our toys had gotten bigger and badder, a gift from the US government that included some serious facial recognition software that was probably illegal.

  “Good, I was told to give Rachael a trial by fire, this one looks like a good place to start.” I looked at the grinning face on the screen. His social media said he was going to a concert later tonight. I had serious doubts about him making it tonight or any other night. The composite sketch and his profile picture bore an eerie resemblance. His listed interests made no mention of raping and killing women, but that wasn’t something most people advertised. I shook my head at the thought. There were exceptions to every rule and a few social media profiles did make these proclamations. Some people were too stupid for their own good.

  “Ace, she’s a soldier, this is her first time hunting a serial killer, don’t let her die because she makes a mistake or two. There’s a steep learning curve for this job.”

  “I would never intentionally let someone die because they made a mistake,” I looked at her. “If it makes you feel any better, this guy is probably a sociopath, not a psychopath. This means he will not have all the attributes that our bone cleaner will. Better to start with a small fish than a shark.”

  “That, coming from you, was compassionate,” Fiona smiled at me. I smiled back and she didn’t grimace even though it was real. As much as she had grown on me, I had grown on her as well. Her friendship was a sad reminder of what I had lost with Nyleena. It had been so gradual I hadn’t realized it was happening until it was too late. Our proximity had been closer, but our friendship had been more distant in the year or so since I joined the SCTU. Our jobs were in conflict and I had yet to reconcile how to make our friendship last without talking to her about my work. I did not have interests like most people, reading, but Nyleena didn’t read the same books as I did anymore. Her presence in Australia and my lack of contact was proof of how distant we had become. I was beginning to believe she was a causality of my job, even though she was still breathing.

  If people only knew how often their pictures were taken on a daily basis. There were traffic cameras, ATM cameras, accidental appearances in the vain and glorified selfie that everyone under twenty-five seemed to take about every two or three minutes and were obligated to instantly upload to some social media site, scanning identification for purchases or entering secured buildings, not to mention all the closed circuit security systems in the city. Since my reluctant joining of a social media site to help me keep up with my family, I now knew more about what my niece Cassie did almost hourly than I did every conquest ever made by Ramses the Great. In fifty thousand years, we wouldn’t need archeologists, they would just have to delve into the digital media to figure out what we were like. That was if we lasted that long. I had serious doubts, but hated to sound paranoid about the next few generations wiping out humanity with selfies and serial killers.

  It wasn’t even dark when we rolled up on our suspected rapist and serial killer. The drive had been nearly silent. Fiona had filled in the particulars while I had maneuvered our hearse-like SUV to the apartment complex. His name was Robert Timothy Wayne. It did not conjure up images of the Dark Knight avenging the wrongs of the people of Gotham City. It made me think of suicidal teenagers left devastated by the loss of self-caused by sexual assaults. I would have preferred Batman, but my mind just didn’t work that way.

  “Hmmm,” Fiona looked at me. I ignored her, knowing that the change had descended upon me. I felt the emptiness.

  It was a dark place that was lit only by rage. In the average person, I imagined it was the equivalent of being so mad they couldn’t see or could only see red. As a sociopath, this calm heightened my senses and stilled the inner workings of my mind. It was as if time itself slowed down. Once upon a time, I had considered it a calm. That had been incorrect. I wasn’t calm, that implied some sort of Zen feeling. In this state, I felt nothing except rage and even that wasn’t what others would consider rage. I had seen rage on the face of others and it wasn’t like my own. In the past few months, I had learned that what I was really doing was shutting down my humanity. Dropping the mask of sanity and letting my own madness peek from within could terrify others. To me, it was the only time I looked in the mirror and recognized myself. Self-awareness in a sociopath was rare, let alone understanding and growth, but there it was. The thing I had fought for all my life finally made sense to me and with that came clarity.

  From the corner of my eye, I caught Caleb give a small shake of his head. He was one to talk, he was a full-fledged psychopath and understood exactly what had happened. It would probably happen to him before the night was over. That was the way it worked. We could only hold ourselves together for so long, eventually, we had to let the mask fall and our humanity with it. It was what kept us alive and the others screaming in pain.

  “This will not be the same as the sociopaths you encountered in the past, they were working and using their difference to help with their jobs. This guy will be all rage, vanity, and violence,” Xavier told Rachael. “This is going to sound weird, but our jobs are really to make sure that Ace and Caleb don’t die. If they go down, we can hold this one, but we may not be able to hold the next one. Do you understand?”

  “Don’t let Ace or Caleb get injured?” Rachael asked. Caleb gave a short bark of laughter.

  “It would take an army to make sure Ace and I don’t get injured. Your goal is to make sure that if we go down, he doesn’t kill us or anyone else. In our unit, it will be Malachi and I. In this unit, it’s Ace and Lucas, with Aislinn always talking lead because she has the differences that Lucas doesn’t. Malachi, Aislinn, and I, we’re more like physically related to the serial killers than to the people around us. You’ll train a few times with Ace and I,” Caleb seemed to think for a moment. “I don’t know how to word what I want to say. Malachi and Ace are equally scary once they stop pretending to care. I don’t know how to describe what you are going to see with her. You will see it though and at the end of it…”

  “In the end, you’ll be glad to be with Malachi and Caleb. Caleb’s less scary and Malachi is more susceptible to external controls,” Fiona chimed in. “Consider all three of them like The Incredible Hulk. Once they stop caring, they are the closest thing to invincible you will ever see. However, both the guys are easier to get back to feeling things than Ace.”

  “Done talking about me?” I asked her.

  “Probably not,” Caleb said. “If you go in there, baton drawn, Rachael may need therapy and she’s going to have a ton of questions, if it doesn’t fracture her mind instantly.”

  “I am a psychiatrist. I do understand sociopaths and psychopaths,” Rachael defended herself.

  “Ever dealt with one outside of a monitored room?” Xavier asked. Rachael didn’t answer. “It’s different out here; good sociopaths and psychopaths are like superheroes and bad sociopaths and psychopaths are like arch villains. And it is a very blurry line.”

  I pulled into a parking space and was out of the car before the others had time to react. The complex was quiet, but it was three on a Tuesday afternoon. Most office workers were still at work. Families were at schools picking up kids or the kids were riding home on busses. The few people that were around made themselves sc
arce quickly upon my exit. I was known from newspapers and things. The rest of the group climbed out behind me.

  Seven

  Robert Timothy Wayne was home because he didn’t seem to have a real job. His social media profile had said he was an “entrepreneur,” but it looked like he was probably a drug dealer. Which might have been the final nail in his coffin, so to speak. Nothing like a drug-dealing, serial killing rapist to irritate a sociopath that hunted serial criminals.

  Caleb took one side of the door and I took the other. We didn’t draw our guns. We had a policy of trying to bring them in alive. However, Xavier, Fiona, and Rachael all drew guns standing behind us. Like the guys had explained, we were the first line of defense. We could take more punishment than they could. If we went down, then shooting them wasn’t such a bad idea.

  “US Marshals Service,” Caleb announced as I kicked the door. It gave at the knob, sending splinters of wood into the air around us. The door crashed against the wall and Caleb was already there, keeping it from rebounding on us. He landed against his shoulder hard and bounced back to the wall, enlarging the hole the knob had punched in it the first time.

  Wayne was naked on his floor. There was a girl under him. Makeup darkened the tears that ran from her eyes. Several layers of duct tape were covering her mouth, making her noises no louder than a whimper. Her hands were above her head and attached with handcuffs to the underside of his couch. From the look of her, I didn’t think she was there voluntarily and I didn’t think the sexual interactions were consensual.

  “SCTU, surrender is your best option,” I told him.

  Caleb was over six feet tall. He was broad shoulder without washboard abs or a narrow waist. He wasn’t fat, he just looked like the average guy. He was holding a baton like my own. I was around five feet three inches tall, averaging one-hundred and twenty-five pounds and covered with scars. In other words, despite being naked, when Robert Wayne surveyed us, he decided he could take us out because he didn’t seem to realize that we were insane. It was a mistake I was going to make him pay for.