Belladonna Dreams

by Hadena James

  “Skinwalker Ranch is in Utah and another hotspot for cattle mutilations,” I said.

  “So, aliens are killing people with belladonna and Alejandro is paranoid enough to pull a play from X-Files?” Lucas said.

  “No, Skinwalker Ranch, while being a UFO hotspot and cattle mutilation mecca, is also bordered by Ute territory,” I said.

  “Why do you know this?” Xavier asked.

  “Malachi has a room in his house dedicated to cattle mutilations. He puts little pins in it whenever he hears of one. He saw one up close and personal that did not look like a person could have done it. Oddly, it was also near Ute territory, in Arizona.”

  “How ironic,” Fiona looked at me. “Because I have a case of an unknown cause of death, on Ute territory in Arizona that matches the pattern of our first serial killer. And the first case, a woman in Lakota territory, supposedly ate nine LSD tablets by accident and died in Nebraska.”

  “Really?” I asked, peering at the screen over her shoulder. The file was marked classified. “How did you get this information?”

  “Former NSA analyst.” Fiona’s tone implied there was a “duh” at the end of her sentence. “Only once is Alejandro mentioned by name, but it does seem weird that he, as a tribal police officer, went to another reservation to look into a death that appeared to be part of a pattern.”

  “Alejandro thought he was chasing a serial killer preying on tribes,” Lucas said.

  “A person does not accidentally eat nine LSD tablets,” I said. “She either did not know they had LSD in them or it was intentional.”

  “It was the 90’s,” Xavier said. “LSD wasn’t the drug of choice during that time period. And it has some wicked side effects besides just hallucinations. For example, it raises your core body temperature. Of course, it is also been found to be effective in treating cluster migraines to some degree.”

  “LSD was popular when I was young,” I pointed out. “Blotter paper was the rage.”

  “Blotter paper rarely contains LSD. It’s a completely different chemical compound with different effects, but is still hallucinogenic,” Xavier informed me. “Plus, LSD on blotter paper is enough to kill a person. It is one of the few drugs measured in micrograms, not milligrams. A grain of sand could hold enough LSD to get a person very high. I’m inclined to believe that there was a serial killer at work and Alejandro was chasing him.”

  “It would explain how he got to be FBI and then SCTU,” Gabriel said. “You don’t apply for this job, you get picked.”

  “I applied,” Fiona responded.

  “No, you transferred and you have a history, just like the rest of us.” I looked at her. “The only thing we all have in common is that we have seen the monsters up close, and survived it, even when we should not have, and long before we became law enforcement officials.”

  Fiona nodded once, a look crossing her face, a reaction to a memory being triggered. Her demon lay deep, but it would surface eventually. They all did.

  “So, why now in South Dakota?” I asked.

  “Because someone that is connected with the case is here,” Fiona turned back to her screen. “The bar owner lived in all these places. He’s a Ute and before he owned a bar, he was a drug dealer.”

  “Too obvious,” Lucas said automatically. “I’m sure he was the focus of the investigation, given his history, but drug dealers aren’t usually serial killers. Plus, just because he’s Ute, doesn’t mean he’d be welcome by all the Ute nations. They are divided by regional differences, no different than a New Yorker and a Georgian.”

  “Then why show up in all these places?” I asked.

  “You may have answered your own question,” Fiona answered, clacking the keys of her keyboard. “He’s a conspiracy theorist and UFO enthusiast according to his online activity. He visits an average of ten sites a day that deal with UFOs. He’s also a prolific poster to boards and forums on UFOs. It seems he moved here because of an incident near Skinwalker Ranch in which he claimed he was abducted by aliens and the tribal council believed he was taking too much of his own stuff. They essentially ostracized him for it. He found a woman who made similar claims here in South Dakota, came up to meet her, married her within a week, bought the bar, and now runs a business that the DEA believes he deals out of.”

  “This suddenly became a Malachi case. He loves this shit,” I sighed. “I prefer the kind of killer that just cuts people up.”

  “Mental instability is not the norm for a serial killer on the lam,” Lucas said. “It further leads me to believe he was never the killer they were chasing.”

  “He might not have been,” Fiona frowned. “There was another guy with him in all these places. His name was Gavin. He died from a stab wound around the time the killings stopped, but he refused to say how he got the wound.”

  “Gavin?” Xavier asked. “Is there a last name?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not going to say it out loud because I’ll feel like an idiot.” Fiona pointed at her screen. His last name was officially listed as Wolfenstein. I rubbed a hand down my face. It was an alias; it had to be, probably because his family name of him was Runs with Stupid, or something. Suddenly, I realized that despite all my history training, I knew very little about modern day Native Americans. His nationality was listed as Lakota.

  “My guess, he picked it when he was a teen and needed a driver’s license,” Lucas said. “Native Americans are given surnames by the government or asked to pick one when they need federal IDs. Most of the time, they use a family moniker when they are on the reservation. Alejandro went by Gui because it was easy to spell.”

  “He has family, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah, at least three siblings,” Xavier answered. “There could be more, but he didn’t really talk about them. I just know his sister was his emergency contact and her last name was not Gui.”

  “Okay, this is going to be complicated, so stay with me. If Alejandro picked his own last name, it would not be out of the question for the rest of his siblings to do the same for government documents. What if they all picked different last names? We would have a hard time connecting all the dots. So, what is the sister’s last name?”

  “Smith, she was living in Nebraska when Alejandro was injured,” Xavier answered.

  “Any chance she moved?” I asked.

  “I suppose.” Xavier shrugged. “I didn’t keep up with her. Alejandro wasn’t a great loss to the SCTU.”

  “Why would she move?” Lucas asked.

  “Because her younger brother is buried in Lakota territory here in South Dakota,” I answered. “What if Alejandro was called in by the Ute because Gavin was the suspected serial killer, not the bar owner?”

  “That will be very hard to prove,” Gabriel told me.

  “Yes it will, but it would explain everything,” I answered. “It would also explain why Alejandro is killing now.”

  “How?” Gabriel asked.

  “Because he wants to clear his brother’s memory,” Lucas answered. “By replicating the murders, he is essentially removing blame from Gavin. We know psychopathology runs in families, so it isn’t a stretch to believe that Alejandro and Gavin could both be psychopaths. Who knows, maybe Alejandro really believes that the bar owner was responsible for not only the murders of the women, but of his brother.”

  “This all hinges on Alejandro and Gavin being brothers,” Gabriel said.

  “Yep, but we can test that,” Xavier was already doing something on his smart phone. “We all have our DNA cataloged in case our bodies turn up unrecognizable, Alejandro isn’t an exception. They also would have taken DNA swabs to see if there were any clues in Gavin’s murder case.”

  Twenty-Six

  It did not come as a surprise when Gavin and Alejandro turned out to be brothers. It did come as a surprise when the computer popped up a partial match to semen taken from a rape kit of Rachel, one of our new murder victims. She had been one of the women dosed in the club. There had not been any visible signs of rap
e, but there were signs of intercourse, so the medical examiner had sampled it, just for good measure.

  Gavin was dead. Alejandro wasn’t a perfect match. However, someone with a familial DNA connection had sex with Rachel within a day of her death. A theory was forming in my head. It was a stretch, to be sure, but the what if scenario was unfolding before my eyes, opening up the possibility that there were more than just a few coincidences in South Dakota.

  Anita had shown up in South Dakota, pregnant, around the time the first murder occurred on the Lakota Reservation in Nebraska. She hadn’t listed a father, nor had she named him to anyone as far as we could tell. It was likely that she was hiding from the father. I believed the father was Gavin.

  After Anita left, Gavin became unhinged. He hooked up with the crackpot UFO hunting drug dealer and the two began making their way around reservations. The crackpot was too concerned about his drug income to notice that Gavin was killing or if he did notice, he didn’t care. The pair kept moving until they reached South Dakota. Here, Gavin found Anita and their son. Anita rejected him again; he killed her and a few others, before being killed himself. Gavin’s murder was the only one I felt the bar owner was responsible for.

  Alejandro became disabled, and he moved to South Dakota with his sister to be closer to their brother’s child. Alejandro realized the bar owner was the good for nothing Gavin was running around with and the one Alejandro suspected of being a serial killer, so he began killing to get the case reopened. It might not make sense to a normal person, but in my sociopathic mind, it made perfect sense. Because I had learned long ago that psychopaths and sociopaths do not think like normal people. Our cause and effect is a little off, as is our sense of morality.

  I was also pretty sure that Rachel had dated Gavin’s son and that’s why Alejandro had killed her. Again, it might not make sense in the normal world, but to me, it fit perfectly. To cover Rachel’s murder, Alejandro committed more murders. Then he took the opportunity to strike at the VCU. He had already started killing, there was no reason not to include a few more people he imagined had wronged him. Then he came after me. Realizing it was too obvious, he poisoned a bunch of bottles at a gas station.

  Everyone else thought I was nuts, except Christian Hunter. It was a hokey theory, full of holes in their opinion. Unfortunately for them, it did make sense to Hunter, which reinforced my point that just because it was hokey and full of holes, didn’t mean it wasn’t perfectly reasonable logic for a psychopath.

  Sadly, Hunter couldn’t win with me. His affirmation that this did seem logical irritated me. I was a snob, plain and simple. He was a borderline, and I was an ASPD. To me, he wasn’t a true psychopath, which I held against him.

  Now, we needed proof, some cooperation, and a whole lot of luck. Gabriel was going to take the DNA results back to the council and tribal police. Maybe they could be persuaded to turn over Alejandro. They had never come out and said he was there, but from what I understood, they hadn’t denied it either. They had mostly ignored it.

  Of course, that didn’t answer who had killed Violet or the other witnesses to Anita’s disappearance. It seemed unlikely that it was Alejandro. Gavin had already been dead by then. The piece seemed to belong to a completely different puzzle. Gavin had been nearly as tall as his brother, making it likely that gigantism and psychopathology ran in the family.

  I was back outdoors. Not because I loved the beautiful city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota or because I enjoyed people watching that much, it was still an escape. I didn’t like Hunter and I didn’t want to be around him. He was unsettling. Then there was Xavier, arm still in a sling, still my fault, regardless of what drugs I had been on at the time. Lucas wasn’t here to analyze me anymore and for that, I was grateful.

  A father and two little boys walked past me. The boys, not yet teenagers, were talking fast. However, they caught my attention because they were wearing matching T-shirts. Maroon in color, the shirts featured a tractor called Sweet Pain, located in some place called Menno, South Dakota.

  While the shirt and the triple engine tractor it featured were interesting enough to gain a glance, it was what it represented that made me watch them. The truck and tractor pull was the jewel in the crown for most county fairs. I’d witnessed the carnage of bombs exploding at the frenzied height of that event. That had happened nearly a year ago. It was June again, the start of fair season.

  I had never been to a truck and tractor pull, but I understood the appeal. Monstrous machines tried to one up each other in an attempt to claim King of the Hill. Those with the most money and ingenuity were usually victorious. Also, like most contests of will, it was an exhibition similar to gladiators battling in the arenas of old.

  However, as I watched the maroon-shirted boys move out of my line of vision, all I could think about were broken bodies. One might argue that this was still similar to gladiators, but for me, it was about my psychological makeup. I didn’t know if people like me could suffer from PTSD, but if they could, I had a case. Once, I had associated fairs with loud noises, flashing lights, and hot weather. Now, I associated them with death, destruction, broken people, and twisted machinery.

  Even after the boys and their father had disappeared, I continued to stare at the last spot where I had seen them. My thoughts had turned to Malachi. Bombs were tricky things. They were easier to make than the average person believed, but harder to make than most would-be bombers had thought. They were also not practical. Bombers tended to accidentally blow themselves up. Yet, Malachi still had a bomb explode in his house. A bomber managed to blow up several county fairs just a year ago.

  Wheelchair bound or not, Alejandro could make a bomb. I had little doubt of that. He had training that most of us didn’t know about. I had seen it in his movements during the short time I had worked with him. If our relationship had continued, I would have learned how to fight, as opposed to the street brawling that I excelled in at the moment.

  “Do you care that we have a lead on Tyler Hudson?” Xavier cut into my rambling thoughts.

  “Sure, who is Tyler Hudson?” I asked.

  “The adopted son of Maya Hudson.”

  “Great,” I stubbed out my cigarette.

  “Oh, it gets better. Maya Hudson and Anita Merritt were cousins. So, Tyler and Maya are related. He’s in Florida with family. A few Marshals are at the house, informing him of Maya and Rachel’s murders. He was on a plane when Rachel was dosed at the club, so we are putting him in protective custody and he’s agreed to give us a DNA sample to see if we can compare it against Gavin.”

  “Wow, that a lot of progress.”

  “You’ve been out here for a while. We decided to let you be. You’ve had a couple of hard days.”

  “Hey, do you think sociopaths and psychopaths can suffer from PTSD?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, sounds like a Lucas question.”

  “Not that important.”

  “Why do you ask?” He looked at me suspiciously.

  “Curiosity.”

  “Something’s on your mind.”

  “It is the start of fair season. I saw a shirt for some kind of super tractor and my mind instantly brought back the pictures of Palmyra.”

  “Do you have nightmares about it? Do you have panic attacks when you go to the fair?”

  “No, and I still do not go to fairs, although, I do love funnel cakes.”

  “There’s really only one way to find out. For now though, I’d say it’s still the residual effects of the poison and LSD.” He looked like he was going to say more but stopped, pursing his lips.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well, I was going to point out the similarities, but decided it was a bad idea.”

  “I did not stab you at the fair in Adams County.”

  “No, I was impaled by flying debris and you saved my life. You’ve saved my life several times. I’d forgive you for stabbing me, but I don’t hold you responsible, so there is nothing to forgive. I’m still fascinated by t
he fact that you thought you were hitting me with a cupcake. As a matter of fact, I find it far more important to talk about what you were seeing and thought during your time on acid than the fact that I was stabbed. You’re a case study to begin with, the first known hybrid. Putting mind altering drugs like LSD in your body is an opportunity that would make most researchers lick their chops at the possibility of studying how it affects you.”

  “Including you?”

  “Hell yeah,” Xavier answered. “You hallucinated goblins, cupcakes, and clowns. That’s wild because it doesn’t make sense. They aren’t related. People see demons or watch the stripes on the couch grow or talk to dead people when they are tripping. They don’t do all of them at once. You had a bad trip and you managed to have multiple types of hallucinations at the same time. I’m very curious as to how it worked. But I’m too nice to start interrogating you about the incident.”

  “I do not remember most of it.”

  “Also unusual.” Xavier shrugged at me. “We don’t understand how the brains of psychopaths and sociopaths work, let alone a brain with a psychopathic structure, but sociopathic neural connections. There’s a very steep learning curve involved. You on LSD and suffering from belladonna poisoning made that curve suddenly steeper. I still don’t understand why it lasted as long as it did. You responded to the anti-poison just fine, but the LSD stayed in your system for a prolonged period of time. It should have been out of your system in twenty-four hours, but it wasn’t. I believe that even if the best neuroscientist in the world examined the test results that I saw, they would still be baffled at the results.”

  “When I die, I will donate my body to science.”

  “Ace, you don’t have to be dead. I’m always collecting data on you,” Xavier said.

  Twenty-Seven

  The asylum had a funny smell. It wasn’t pleasant. There were hints of body odor, urine, feces, vomit, disinfectant, sausage, eggs, bacon, potatoes, cantaloupe, a multitude of different body lotions, soaps, deodorants, colognes, perfumes, chocolate cake, tapioca pudding, and disturbingly, decay, all floating on the forced air currents that circulated through the long, disorienting corridors. While I understood that most of these scents were related to the people or the dinner meal, I couldn’t figure out where the smell of decay was coming from. Also, it seemed to come and go, as we wound our way around the building. I kept looking at patients, expecting to see bedsores or skin necrosis, but my eyes weren’t finding them.