Deja Blue

by Walker, Robert W.

  Ever the optimist, Rae Hiyakawa had the ability, she knew, and she had the tools—the psychic nail and hammer to do the job, but creating sense of chaos, no matter if one had the right tools, was no simple task, and certainly not always successful. Not always.

  If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the mornin’…I’d hammer in the evenin’ buzzed the popular tune through her brain.

  What the devil did the floating woman over the busy street have to do with her last case, the cold case for which they had not enough to work with? Nothing. What it had to do with the case just brought to her—she suspected everything.

  The cold-blooded killer had used a hammer on his victims. Bashing in their brains while they slept. Had stood over them and killed each in her sleep. Eight women now according to a call that’d come only this morning.

  A ninth woman had died in similar fashion but there’d been distinct differences. The most notable being she did not live alone. Her husband had been in the house, asleep in another room, and this man, Malachi Spielman, was now under lock and key, awaiting trial for his part in the contract killing of his wife. A second man had been arrested in relation to this particular “dream-killer hammering” murder, and the second suspect had turned state’s evidence. Forensics pointed to an intruder, but given the problems between Spielman and his wife, and a recent insurance policy taken out on her life, the prosecution, armed with telephone records and a connection between the two men, believed Spielman had set it all up; that he’d paid the other to reproduce the eerie footsteps of the psycho-killer with hammer and nails, a monster who’d been in the news for a month and a half now in the city of Charleston, West Virginia, population 64,213. Add the scattered communities around Charleston and you got another 307,000 souls, half or more women, all of whom slept fitfully these nights as a result of the predator known only as The Dream Killer.

  Population break down for Charleston proper was 31,100 males, 33,113 females. The median resident age was 42.8 years. Median household income: 36,180. Median house value: $110,600. Racial breakdown in the city was: White non-Hispanic 80.1%, Black 15.1%, mixed race, 1.9%, American Indian 0.9%. Hispanic 0.8%. From all accounts, the capitol city of West Virginia looked like many others its size, and it likely had as many problems as any city in the country. The chamber of commerce listing found on Google displayed an idyllic hamlet nestled in the former valley of the Kanawha Indian tribe, but in truth the valley had been paved over and littered with every commercial sign and chain franchise imaginable.

  Charleston indeed sat nestled among the

  Appalachian Mountains, which remained resolutely wild and towering around the city, defiant and as green a place as any on the planet. The wide expanse of the Kanawha River snaked through the city, a tributary of the Ohio River. The Kanawah acted as a major artery for the coal industry. Daily shipments of coal plied the waterway, tugs pushing huge, blocks-long barges heaped to brimming with coal. Alongside the river, train cars carried tons of coal on the rails. All this within what some called the Chemical Valley, thanks to the number of chemical firms that’d staked out acreage along the river.

  Rae had done some homework. Charleston, the capitol of West Virginia, proved on the map some four, four-and-a half hours by car from FBI headquarters at Quantico, Virginia. A brief chopper ride over the river ways, if she could get the bean counters to loosen up. Not that she wanted to go to Charleston, but she predicted—as had Copernicus—that it would likely come down to a ground operation in this heated investigation, intensifying now as two victims had fallen prey in the past week.

  As she ate below a blue sky, Rae gave thought to the copycat guy. Perhaps the Jewish West Virginian, Malachi Spielman, had indeed taken advantage of the frenzy over the serial killer’s being in the midst of West Virginia’s Capitol city, and if so, Spielman deserved the chair, but West Virginia remained one of eleven states without the death penalty, so even if convicted Spielman was looking at life imprisonment. The same held true for the sick SOB who was the real hammer and nail wielder.

  The pressure to come to some understanding of the killer, and to end his reign of terror in and around Charleston proved near unbearable for those in the Behavioral Science Unit, as they’d exhausted all their charts and graphs and profiling techniques to no good end. One of their number had secretly confided to Rae that their profile of the killer might be the proverbial ‘Everyman’ and so rendered rather useless. Most of the details the profilers had come up with proved rather trite and clichéd.

  These were not simple killings, despite the simplicity in executing people in their sleep. Rae imagined a victim at her most vulnerable moment in her life—in REM sleep, deep slumber, as the killings seemed to occur in and around 3AM. She kept seeing this exact time in bright green light-emitting diode fashion, the bedside clock.

  Was nothing sacred anymore? Was no place safe anymore? Of all things, one would think sleep sacrosanct.

  Sleep, the most at risk hours in anyone’s existence. Right up there with being in the shower since the film Psycho debuted. She had earlier wrongly supposed that it was for this reason that the murderer had been dubbed by press as the Dream Killer. As she was provided with more information, she learned the truth of it, that the killer had contacted the Charleston Gazette-Mail, calling himself the Dream Killer. He’d also told the press that he had no conscious memory of killing his victims “as the entire time of the murders, I was asleep myself—sleepwalking.”

  Copernicus joined her at the table where she picked at her lunch. “Heard this nutcase in Charleston is professing his innocence due to sleepwalking.”

  “The hell you say!” she erupted and frowned. “We both know that a true sleepwalking killer is the rarest form of humanity on the planet.”

  “So you are unconvinced?” “I do.”

  “You going to finish that egg salad sandwich?” he asked.

  “Help yourself.”

  He wolfed it down. His mouth still full, he said, “Despite his sincerity in those letters he sent to the local papers?”

  “Yeah, right,” she replied and laughed. “Brahmin shit, a sleep-walking killer using a ball peen hammer and three-penny nails on his victims’ heads while off in la-laland, asleep and dreaming his own Pollyanna dreams as he kills? No way…don’t buy it, not for a DC minute.”

  “Sucks rocks, I know,” Copernicus replied.

  “What a defense. Built into the murders thanks to his ‘fessin’ up to the papers, heh? What a cover-your-ass deal.”

  It’d only been this morning that finally the Chief of BSU, Raule Apreostini, had been given the green light to officially take the case to Rae. Belated to say the least. “Still, sounds so crazy it might be true.” Copernicus loved to play Devil’s advocate. He was a provocateur. “I mean truth is often stranger than—”

  “—a nail to the brain? Even if we catch this maniac, he has laid out a case for not being responsible by virtue of not being there when it happened. Please. The weight of the hammer, the placing of the nails in the skull and eyes. The screams. Some alarm clock, yet nothing wakes him?”

  “If any of it does wake him, it doesn’t stop him. Forensics places him at the scene for hours after the death, plying through the fridge, making sandwiches but apparently doing so with gloves on.” Copernicus snickered. “Kinda like the O.J. defense, this sleepwalking dodge. Still, given West Virginia’s stand on capital punishment, the best we can hope for is life imprisonment, if and when.”

  He pulled out and spread out a US map. He then indicated on a map the states that had capital punishment and those that did not. West Virginia was an island of blue—no execution state—in a sea of orange—states that did execute.

  “Unless he changes his venue and crosses into Kentucky or Ohio or Pennsylvania.”

  “Good point.”

  Unless local authorities called in FBI assistance on a case, the bureau’s collective hands were tied, unless the killer crossed state lines, at which point the Feds could dive in at will with
all resources.

  “Charleston’s only an hour from the Ohio-Kentucky borders,” he pointed out. “And hey, this time I know what you’re thinking,” he continued with a wry grin. “You want to contact authorities in all surrounding states to ask if they’ve had anything whatsoever resembling these killings in Charleston in their jurisdictions.”

  “That’s real good, Eddy…ahhh, sorry, Copernicus! You got me. I don’t for a moment buy this crapola of he’s asleep when he kills them.”

  “I agree but for the sake of argument, why do you say so?”

  “Think about it. If he’s asleep…truly asleep— unconscious sleepwalking when he breaks and enters, how difficult is that? And there’s the dogs—how he dispatched

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  “And secondly, why only female victims living alone?”

  “Hmmm…good point. One also pointed out by the BSU profilers.”

  “I’ve read the files. Last night.”

  “Raule’s already handed the files over to you then?”

  “He has.”

  Birds twittered and chased one another about the green grounds of Quantico.

  “Besides,” she continued while watching a pair of chipmunks taking a moment to search through one another’s fur, “the killer must’ve cased the house for days to know their situation, and you can’t case a house in your g’damn sleep. These killings are premeditated as hell.”

  “Are you sure? How much do we know about sleepwalking and this guy?”

  “Enough to know he’s coming and going fully clothed, else he’d’ve created a sensation.”

  “All grist for the prosecutors. Write it up and anything else you come up with, Rae. You know how we trust your instincts and insights around here.”

  “Pmmmpf!” she’d blurted out. “Sure. That’s why I’m the last to get the case?”

  “Protocol they call it. Sorry. Much as Raule believes in you, the FBI has never been comfortable with psi powers behind the agency’s emblem.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Still worried about their image.”

  “Meanwhile, over seventy percent of the American population believes in psychic powers, among other otherworldly powers and paranormal events, such as apparitions, angels—”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, Rae.”

  “And I’m sick of apologizing for the screw ups in the Carnivore Man case.”

  “Rae, we lost a man during that case.” “We…at least you say it was us and not me alone lost Gene.”

  “Just that everybody loved Kiley.”

  “A kinder man never lived. Gene, my close friend, advisor, mentor, and trance-helpmate died saving me and my daughter in Phoenix. Something he wanted to be remembered for, and instead everyone’s thinking he messed up and blaming me for his death.”

  “It was our first field operation. We were all being tested. On the spot.”

  “And we made some spectacular, spot on significant, unquestioned ‘hits’.”

  “However.”

  “Yes, however… but… yet…Gene died in the bargain, thanks to Carnivore Man.

  Adding salt to the wound, official reports held her partially responsible for Gene Kiley’s death. Official reports asked questions of her ‘normal perceptions’ perhaps short-circuited by her paranormal perceptions. Official reports second-guessed her intuition, steps she had taken, steps she had not taken.

  The report had gone on to question the time it’d taken to collect, analyze, and interpret her visions, saying this slow process had cost more than time, as that time lost had cost lives, lives other than that of a valuable agent…the lives of victims. The report had said nothing whatsoever of how late the case had been handed over to Rae in the first place. Still it did praise her on one point. She had indeed localized the geography of the killer, and she had located his latest victim, and she had saved young Julian Redondo’s life, or at least her team had been given credit for this.

  To date this injured, tortured Phoenix kid, Julian, had made a remarkable recovery. The boy continued working to rebuild his life and psyche, thanks in large measure to her following up on his progress. Not much in the official report on that fact, and nothing indicating that she had seen to getting him the best psychiatric help available. Success and failure all in the matter of a single moment in time; a moment that had proven Rae’s powers while paradoxically calling her psychic sensory investigatory powers into serious question among some colleagues.

  “Aurelia, you’ve gotta quit beating yourself up over the past. We all made mistakes, and it does no one any good to be asking what he might’ve or may’ve or could’ve or should’ve or would’ve done differently.”

  “I should’ve never placed Nia in such a situation.”

  “Had you the foresight, maybe. Who knew?”

  “Odd thing about being a psychic.”

  “What’s that?” “It’s as if the gods of the psychic predetermined that at no time could the ‘gift’ be used for personal gain or for saving one’s own kid!” “As I recall it, Nia saved you.”

  Since the events in Phoenix, she and Nia had become closer. Death of a mutual loved one either parted people or bonded them, often as a result of the lynch pin that the deceased had represented. And so much depended on the character of those left behind to grieve. Fortunately, something good had come out of Phoenix. In fact, her broken down relationship with Nia had come out of the ashes of that nightmare, much as the winged phoenix of mythology. Not that it’d meant an end to their tiffs and troubles.

  “Concentrate on the here and now,” Copernicus firmly suggested. “Focus on the Dream Killer case.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Heard you walked out of another session,” he then said.

  “I did. Wasn’t getting anywhere.”

  “Give it time and another shot.” He placed a hand over hers. “You’re still the best, Rae, and you always will be.”

  “Raule send you out here to give me a pep talk?” “He did, yes, but I wanted to; I care a great deal about you, Rae.”

  “Been too many changes too fast, but I’ll go back at it, for you, Copernicus, and for the victims.”

  EIGHT

  The field techs, what TV viewers knew as the CSI team, had managed to get hold of some items from the victims bedrooms where they’d died, and these items were spread before Aurelia Hiyakawa like offerings to a Buddhist monk.

  Some of the items collected by the CSI team and finally turned over for a kinetic examination at Rae’s fingertips proved soft—useless really, even if from the victim’s room the night of her murder—while other items proved hard—useful and imprinted with images of that night, images embedded in one hammer forgotten and left behind by the killer at the scene believed to be his first killing. He’d gotten careless, messy. At that time, the BSU would have labeled him a disorganized killer, his actions random, brought on by opportunity and perhaps passions out of control, suggesting a possible relationship to the victim beyond that of the hunted.

  She immediately set aside a second ‘control’ hammer that’d been brought in as a ‘ringer’. An array of brushes, lipstick tubes, fake fingernails used by the victim along with hair spray, rings, necklaces and other jewelry, and a carefully arrayed set of Ace Hardware nails, one a three-penny sized nail, and the only one that sent a chill through Aurelia. A chill so shocking as to make her drop it.

  She carefully raised it between two fingers again, laid it before her and allowed her hands to circle the nail. In her mind’s eye it was dripping blood. The image of it being viciously driven into the skull of a victim flashed before Rae. Her gasp came over the Comlink, freezing everyone. All eyes went to Rae, anticipating a breakthrough.

  # # #

  Two hours later

  “Aurelia!” the chief called out to her and indicated his office.

  “Great, what’d I do now?” she said to passers-by.

  One, a BSU agent, Tina Snyder joked, “What didn
’t you do?”

  Inside Apreostini’s office, she was greeted by authorities from Charleston, West Virginia, two men, one calling himself Chief of Police Carlton Orvison, a wry look of knowing on his experienced, creased face, and his detective, Amos Kunati, young, smooth-faced, coffee and cream complexion, not a wrinkle to speak of, not even on his forehead or his suit.

  Orvison and Kunati both exuded a good nature, but Orvison kept a check on his smile, whereas the black Kunati, of African heritage, she assumed, had a smile as wide and as pleasant as the actor Sydney Poitier, but there seemed something reserved in the eyes. Where Orvison was solid and stout and short of build, Kunati proved tall, lithe, and he made movements as if he were liquid. She guessed him a former member of a basketball team somewhere, as he possessed an athletic grace. Most likely a Charleston team, perhaps a one-time hometown hero who’d been recruited from a faraway place, say Nigeria or Sierra Leone, or so her mind quickly sped through first impressions.