The killer , she quaked inside, holding her breath. Just an image of him; not really him, she admonished herself for the fear.
A second form lay on the bed below the covers, but she hadn’t seen it or the covers until this apparition shot in a total reflex to the hammer blow. Marci Cotrrill grabbed hold of the hammer and fought for it as she might a snake that’d bitten her, but dazed, she could do little to make it a fair struggle.
“What’s going on?” cried out Orvison. “What’re you seeing?”
Kunati remained dubious, silent, brooding in the doorway.
Rae began telling the two detectives and the camera recorder what she was seeing in the distorted mirror. “He…the killer is putting his knee on her…holding her down for the second blow…putting a great force on her windpipe, nearly choking her to death as he now drives in the nails, first two into each eye, three more into the brain. Five in all to her screams and thrashing.
“That’s a damn accurate account of what went on,” said Orvison.
Amos Kunati agreed only sarcastically. “ME’s report on this one showed the bruise to the throat and thorax where he held her down with his knee.”
Rae readily nodded her agreement. “I am allowed to read the autopsy reports, Detective. But there’s something here not in the reports.”
“What’s’sat?” asked Carl Orivison.
“She wears contacts…often falls asleep with them still in. Her glasses…they are driven through with the nails. They reflect him back in her dying gaze; he sees himself in her eyes. Reflective in the weakest light. The killer drives nails into their eyes for the same reason he destroyed this mirror, to in a sense kill or destroy his own reflection.”
“A killer afraid of his own reflection?” asked Orvison.
“Is that anything like being afraid of your own shadow?” asked Kunati.
“It’s a phobia, an obsession with him,” she declared, “like many another. But if he’s sleepwalking when he kills like he’d have us believe, how can he be ‘conscience’ of a phobia?”
“How can you know if he has a phobia?” asked Kunati.
“Attacking mirrors is evidence enough of it, but I also knew she had lenses in her eyes.”
Orvison considered this. “First case set the tone.
“That sleepwalker defense nonsense is absurd,” said Kunati, and she felt he meant to add and so are you, Dr. Hiyakawa, for that matter.
“Men have gone free on crazier defenses,” she replied. “We have to prove he was awake and fully functional when he killed, and this mirror thing…well this might be the key element in charging the bastard.”
“You think so?” asked Kunati, tongue-in-cheek. “My sentiments exactly,” said Orvison, his eyes alight with certainty. “I mean this could shut down any silly-assed defense about not being aware and conscience when the killing took place.”
“If only the courts accepted psychic hearsay,” said Kunati, eyes rolling, head shaking.
“For once we agree,” Rae replied to Kunati. “No court’s going to accept anything merely on my say so. However, if I can scare this madman, if he thinks I can read him, he may just throw up his hands and confess.”
“Good sound reasoning,” said Orvison.
“So how does a sleeping man strike out at his prey and yet find himself so repugnant in the act that he can’t look at himself in a mirror?” She paced before the cracked mirror, her image reflecting back at ten separate angles.
“His defense attorney’ll just say the killing act wakes him from the catatonic state,” replied Orvison, still filming, “and seeing the deed, and in seeing himself bloody, hard, and sexually aroused, he strikes out at the mirrors.”
“You getting anything else?” Kunati asked her. “Can we get out of this creepy hole now?”
“The killer is my height or thereabouts, reasonably well built, strong, Caucasian, and he wears some sort of overalls or uniform. His clothes make him somewhat shapeless.”
“Shapeless in overalls but well built; how can you know if he’s shapeless.”
“I said reasonably well built; tall, not greatly overweight so far as I can tell. Bald, hairless, no facial hair.”
“So far as you can tell? But how can you tell at all?” Kunati had returned to his normal doubting Thomas pose.
“So far as what the mirror tells me,” she replied, pointing to the myriad cracks staring back at the men. “One of my best things. It’s called kinetic energy, psychic kinesis.”
“Anything else? You getting anything else?” asked Orvison, still filming.
“No…nothing more coming through. Sorry…I know it’s anticlimactic, but that’s it…all that’s here,” she lied.
FIFTEEN
On the drive to the second victim’s home, Rae relaxed in the seat alongside Orvison. Kunati followed in his car. Still, the drive was accentuated by a deep silence. Outside, a gray empty sky had moved in to cover the area in a grim light, mournful and dull in its every aspect. Finally, she asked, “How much time elapsed between the Hatfield killing, that is Marci Cottrill, and the second such murder?”
“Three, three and a half weeks. I’d have to check to be sure, but I recall it was just under a month.” Chief Orvison had made a beeline to an entirely different part of town, a place Orvison called Kanawha City, the community hugging the river on one side, a strip of restaurant chains, motels, gas stations, and malls along McCorkle Avenue on the other, all of it crisscrossed by train tracks, while overhead loomed the interstate and toll road exits and entrances. A huge, ugly green metal bridge spanned the river here, dominating the view. This, she was told, was Yeager Bridge. All a raw mix of concrete, steel, and commercial strip malls, the main thoroughfare lined with the signs of every food chain imaginable while the bridge looked on.
Shortly, Orvison pulled into the crunchy gravel driveway of a nondescript home back of the Auto Zone and the Kroger’s Grocery, where a small neighborhood slept tucked from sight until now, until they’d turned down secondary streets with numbers for names.
“Tell me, Chief, did the killer again smash mirrors in this victim’s home?” she asked, staring at the small brick and mortar home with its cottage appearance, a pinnacled roof over a red door, hedges covering most of the exterior.
“Yes, he did.”
“As I suspected.”
“I suspect you’re right about the reason for the broken mirrors.”
“I saw him, Orvison…in that mirror; I saw the killer’s vague outline.”
“If you’re sure it was him…perhaps we should confiscate the mirror, have you take it to your pyramid at Quantico, maybe.”
“No…no, if it’s going to give up any more detail, it’ll be in that room.”
“What’re you suggesting?”
“I need to spend a night in that trailer.”
“Are you serious?”
“Deadly so.”
“When?” “Tonight.”
“Tonight?”
Kunati pulled in behind them, got out of his car and came toward the house as Rae and Orvison climbed from the other car. She caught Kunati’s black, red-streaked eyes in her own black and blue orbs and she spoke directly to him. “Whataya think, Detective Kunati about our monster sleepwalking from the St. Albans area where he chose that trailer to hit to this location?”
“What’re you getting at?” he asked, giving her a stare, his bloodshot eyes clearing a bit.
Orvison watched her work Kunati.
“This home is flanked on two sides by other homes of a similar style and size. Nothing hidden. If he drove up as we did, he might easily have been noticed.”
“So he’s become bolder, less cautious. Letting out all the stops.”
“Exactly. Asleep or awake, our monster has taken a much bolder step here. Maybe he thinks he’s invincible by this point, early in his career as it is.”
“He is more deliberate, perhaps, while taking more risks, you mean?”
“Yes, deliberation. Under the cont
rol of Morpheus, God of Sleep? I don’t buy it. On some level, this creep knows his every step.”
“You think he came on foot to this door, don’t you?” asked Kunati.
“I believe he did so, yes. Might’ve parked in the KMart lot we passed. Could easily have walked here from the bowling alley with his burglar tools, and his killing hammer and nails.”
“That’s been my take on it all along.” Kunati smiled at Orvison as if he’d scored points with the chief.
“I know,” she replied, and her response widened the younger man’s eyes. “I know.”
# # #
The second location of murder proved far less psychically charged, the geography simply not as energized than had been the trailer with the huge broken mirror. However, it impressed upon Rae that the first murder had far more significance to the killer than the one that had followed several weeks later. Exactly how significant or why more significant escaped her for the moment. She just knew that from the moment of walking into the second murder scene that she’d get nothing useful here. In fact, she was right, and the trio left like house hunters in a depressed market.
As the day wore on, each scene was revisited by Kunati and Orvison in Rae’s company, and as the day grew longer, less and less psychic ‘residue’ was discovered. Rae chalked it up to the fact that less such residue remained to begin with, but she didn’t expect the men to understand this. This same fact, however, made a great impression on Rae. It meant something important; it meant that killer and victim in St. Albans might well be far more connected than victims found at other locations. Else she was reading everything all wrong.
Still, even if she were spot on right, what that connection might be remained elusive. But it could crack this case; it could be the pivotal answer. An answer which lay in the life and times of Marci Cottrill. Every detail of her past must be examined; every story, rumor, remark out of her past must be scrutinized. Somehow, she held the key that would unlock the entire mystery. If I’m right, she cautioned herself.
Rae had little choice. She’d have to question Dr. Hatfield extensively about his sister’s history, habits, friends, relatives, indeed her entire resume while on the planet. She’d have to peel back every layer, no matter what it might reveal about the ME’s sister.
Once the locations were exhausted, Rae assessed the situation even further, and the idea that answers awaited at the first site had anchored her to a direction she felt necessary. Still, she gave this serious thought. It would take some nerve to do what she contemplated. But she must. Her thoughts on the matter were interrupted by Orvison as they drove back for the heart of Charleston’s downtown where the streets buzzed with life and activity natural to a city this size, and so in contrast to the death scenes she’d walked through.
With her mind on what she must do, Rae had only an inkling of an idea that the police radio in the car had crackled to life, that a dispatcher had called for the chief’s immediate attention.
“Did you get that?” Orvison asked her, realizing she’d been ‘somewhere else’ although right beside him.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “Get what?”
“They say that Amanda Winfield’s daughter, Carrie Winfield is at headquarters prepared to take any of our questions, you know, about her mother’s murder.”
“Oh, yes, definitely wanna talk to her. Her mother’s the odd one out.”
“Odd one out?” he asked. “I don’t think you wanna refer to her quite in those terms to the grieving daughter, Doc.”
“Sorry, don’t mean to be crude. In victimology training, one learns to work to find the links among those killed or raped, the victims of violence.”
“Sure, understood.”
“And so far, there’s been a great deal in common among the victims.”
“Their pets, their living alone, their ages, and their general appearance,” he supplied the examples. “So why did the killer change his target on the last victim?”
The question hung in the air between them. Orvison raced for headquarters
# # #
The stopover at police headquarters proved especially important, and Rae knew this the moment she saw the daughter, her little girl in tow. Carrie Windfield looked far more like the victims of this so-called, wannabe Sleepwalker killer than she did her mother, and Rae instantly decided that she—and not her mother—had been the intended target of murder the night the grandmother died.
She imagined a scenario in which the killer may’ve followed Carrie from the local Kroger or K-Mart to her mother’s house, where Amanda Winfield babysat the grandchild. The killer may well have mistook the residence for Carrie’s, perhaps moved too fast this time. In the dark bedroom, he’d killed not Carrie but Amanda. Or so logic insisted at the moment.
A handful of questions directed at Carrie about the final twenty-four hours of her mother’s life, and Rae’s imaginings came into the realm of fact.
“Chief,” Rae said, turning to Carl Orvison, “this woman needs to be placed in protective custody until we catch this creep.”
Both Carrie Winfield and Orvison, in unison, asked, “What?”
Rae explained her concern, and the details brought fresh tears to Carrie Winfield’s eyes. “I…you mean, I somehow caused this?”
“No…no, not at all. I am suggesting that while you were out shopping or involved in any number of innocent doings—like walking your dog—someone was watching.”
“My God.”
“Someone just over your shoulder, someone who is attracted to your general appearance, body type, skin tone, race.”
“What? What’re you saying?”
“Your general height, weight, color of hair, how you dress, wear your clothes, walk, hand gestures—who knows. Look, look, Carrie, and I suspect he followed you home—”
“Home? He knows where I live?”
“No, not your home—your mother’s, thinking it was your home. And he returned later that night, fully expecting, possibly even believing afterwards that he had indeed killed you.”
“And not your mother,” added Orvison to bring home the point.
The woman remained stunned, tripping over her words and thoughts at once, asking, “Wha-What am I to-to do? What can I do?”
Orvison assured her, “You and your child, Mrs. Winfield, you’ll be made safe until this maniac is captured and behind bars.”
If not killed outright, Rae added only in thought, knowing life in prison was too good for this monster.
Orvison called on two of his men to start procedures for a safe house and to escort Ms. Winfield to her house to pack a bag and some necessities and toys for the child.
“He’s going for an insanity plea even before he’s caught, Carl,” Rae said to Orvison as they went for Carl’s office.”
He didn’t answer.
Rae pursued him and persisted. “Don’t you get it? He believes he can win a seat in an asylum, serve a couple of years, be declared a ‘cured’ man and returned to society, a free man.”
“Not if I get a shot at the bastard first,” replied Orvison. “We sometimes get lucky that way in West Virginia.”
# # #
At the end of the day, Rae had returned to the Embassy Suites to pick up a few incidentals and necessities of her own—for the night in the haunted trailer out in St. Albans. Orvison returned two hours later, and she arrived at the death trailer by 10PM, prepared to spend a nigh, to hopefully learn far more for her troubles or else. She admitted, she didn’t know about the or else. What next might they pursue, should her overnight fail to net any results.
She did know that she’d have only the CRAWL mechanism to hold onto should things get shaky.
Rae was surprised to see that Kunati had returned with Orvison, and she felt less negativity coming off him; perhaps she’d made a favorable impression during the day after all. Else her determination to sit out a night in the first murder scene—a show of guts?—had impressed him. She couldn’t be sure. But Kunati complimented her on
the wisdom of placing Carrie Winfield in a safe house, and the connection she’d made that pointed to the killer having targeted her and not her mother.
“Safe house was the Chief’s idea,” she informed him.
“Still, smart catch on the mother-daughter thing.”
Wow, she thought, a breakthrough with Kunati. It felt good.
The drive back to the trailer in St. Albans was quiet, the police ban creating an anthem for the solemnity of the moment. Rae sat in the rear once again, and when the darkness of the dead end trailer on Finch Lane became a reality, Kunati turned in his seat, stared at her, and said, “Are you sure, Dr. Hiyakawa, that you wanna do this?”
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