Deja Blue

by Walker, Robert W.

  “Looks like a lot of garbled gobbledygook out of a bad B-horror movie,” replied Dr. Cable Gaston, staring up at the screen, watching the black shadow image once again. They had all seen the ‘stage’ play with its Cirque Soliel appearance several times now. They’d all remarked on the stark, bare existence of the victim, judging from her “domicile” as Gaston put it.

  “Yeah,” agreed Dr. Singe Olynx, a good-looking woman for a professor of sociology with a whiskey voice that reverberated through the room. “Ever see the film Freaks?”

  Some laughter followed.

  “Anything constructive anyone?” pushed Miranda. “I find it interesting that the creatures in this particular circus are so fluid, as if made of…well liquid,” added Dr. Okebe, the African archeologist and mythology expert. “Anyone else notice how they move? So like dancers before a fire but fluid like water.”

  “More like ballerinas on a dance floor, except that these ballerinas are ugly as sin,” added Singe with a slight grimace.

  “Something psycho-sexual about the whole thing, especially the floating woman and his ahhh…nailing her,” added the forensic psychiatrist. “A definite woman hater. No doubt someone who’s nurtured a seething anger for mother over the years.”

  “That seems rather trite given the circumstances,” replied the symbologists. “You are not interpreting the act or the actors as symbols, sir, but rather filling in the blanks with clichés and biases.”

  “I resent that!” he shot back.

  “You’re allowing your confusion with the images sway over your common sense.”

  “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this woman—”

  “Which!” she shouted for emphasis. “Which makes your conclusions circumspect.”

  “I stand by my conclusions!” the forensic psychiatrist replied as if throwing down the gauntlet.

  “So what do you make of the so-called symbols here? Like the black shadow at the end, that Zorro-caped thing?” challenged Miranda.

  The symbologists, Dr. Naomi Shulatte cleared her throat. “I am not sure about the black figure, but we all know what black portends—the grave, death, yet this is no ordinary circumstance, you must all see. You must all dig deeper. In the case of this shadowy figure, we have a representation of the psychic herself—Rae.”

  “What?” chorused a number of the others, including Miranda Waldron.

  “This is not an outward manifestation but a manifestation of her inner demons, inner fears, guilt, regrets, remorse.”

  “Rae is throwing off sparks of guilt?” asked the forensics man, nodding. “Perhaps, yes.”

  “Surely if so, Rae is unaware of it.” “She may not know it consciously, but we must.”

  At least they’re talking now , Miranda thought to herself, even though I can’t accept the directions they’re headed in.”

  “How do you get that from what little we have?” challenged Singe.

  “She lost someone close to her on her last case. This is a manifestation of that loss, no more and no less.” Naomi Shulatte stood her ground.

  “What about the creatures, the gargoyles?” asked Dr. Gaston. “Indigestion?”

  “These are the demons that beset the killer,” Shulatte replied, pushing aside hair covering her eyes. “Notice how they hover about the image of the human monster with the hammer in his hand. Notice how much more horrid they are to Rae’s demon, the one that crawled up out of her, and did that little thing at the end of the taping.”

  “I think we should concentrate on the song lyrics,” said Dr. Willeta Hiesing, and expert in literature and biblical imagery. She and Shulatte had much in common. “Contact the man who wrote the song. See what was behind the lyrics.”

  “Pretty obvious, isn’t it?” asked Dr. Lee Madden, the former marine and parapsychologist and resident rebel. “Float through the sky…been too long…troubles and I….”

  “What’re you getting from the lyrics, Lee?” asked Miranda Waldron.

  “Suicidal wish…this guy is looking for suicide by cop. Wants to be caught and wants to be put down. Everything he has done is an effort to get caught and end it.”

  “Then why’s he killing women?” asked Willeta. “Why not pick up a gun and walk into a police precinct?”

  Naomi jumped in with, “How many now, seven, eight?”

  “It’s all an elaborate if confused effort to be caught and put out of his misery,” replied Lee Madden.

  “Are you saying,” began Gaston, “that the women, the murders mean nothing to him?”

  “No more so than…than—staging, the bodies mere props to an end.”

  “Bodies a means to an end?”

  Madden sighed heavily. “The murders and the brutality of them…part and parcel of his sick sleight-ofhand.”

  “Possibly…” considered Waldron.

  Naomi Shulatte rained on Lee’s conclusions. “But just as possibly, this is all a maniac’s fantasy, which makes the hammer and the nails, the ritual of it all, very important to the perpetrator.”

  “The hammer and nails are just more props,” added Madden.

  Willeta Hiesing nodded, adding, “So reading reason into this man’s actions may be going down the proverbial primrose lane, Dr. Madden, Dr. Waldron.”

  “Just as assuming that he is killing momma over and over again may be a false lead?” countered Madden, lifting a pitcher of water and pouring for himself and then for Hiesing who held her glass up.

  “I don’t feel we’re getting much done here, people,” said Miranda, sipping at her own water.

  Lee Madden held up his glass as if to toast, saying, “Perhaps if we were drinking beer or Jack Daniels instead of water, we’d find more answers.”

  “Amen,” agreed Dr. Walter Roberts, the psychologist. “We finally find common ground, Lee.”

  “You’ve been unusually quiet on the images, Dr. Roberts,” said Miranda, ignoring the remarks about beer guzzling. “Any thoughts?”

  “Well the hammer and the nails is what strikes me more than anything else in the imagery.”

  “That’s the one thing we know is real in the scene, isn’t it?” asked the historian in the group, Dr. Maria Sendak.

  “There goes Walter again,” said Lee. “Why don’t you just tell us, Walter, that the hammer represents the power of the male member, and that our killer is unable to get it up, or anywhere near’s hard as blue steel, and his driving nails into the orifices of the face and head of a woman is what he’d like to be doing with his wang, but he can’t manage to do it with his wang, so he’s doing it with— ”

  “It’s not an inconceivable theory of the crime,” countered Dr. Roberts to the groans of others in the room as the images sent from Rae continued on a loop on the giant plasma screen. “You all know how powerful the human drive to climax is, and if he gets off on pain and traumatizing women, if it is the only way he can manage an erection and an ejaculation, then—”

  “Does put a new perspective on that hammer the man holds overhead and drives down into her,” said Dr. Sendak. “I mean if our automobiles can be seen as an extension of maleness, even the size of our computer screens…well?”

  And so it went on. For hours it went on this way. Until nightfall and exhaustion set in, it went on, the debate over cause, effect, reason, purpose, meaning, none of it coming clear.

  “We don’t have much we’ve agreed on,” said Waldron just before adjourning for the night. “Certainly nothing in the way of a report back to Rae, and so long as that is the case, everyone, we’re failing her again.”

  “Hold on!”

  “Whoa up, there Dr. Waldron.”

  “We…we didn’t fail her last time.”

  “Your precious psychic failed us!”

  The room had erupted with what had been seething underneath all along.

  Lee Madden added, “Those damn images she sent from Phoenix were grainy at best.”

  “The references were also obscure as hell,” agreed Singe.

  “And-A
nd yet we…well our art historian that is, amazingly enough, determined the images were paintings, obscure paintings at that!”

  “Hanging in obscure museums across the Atlantic!” finished Madden.

  Waldron shut them all up, saying, “And we didn’t do our job in time enough to be of help to anyone, not to Rae, not to Gene, not to the victims of the Carnivore Man, and I shouldn’t have to remind you of it!” She slammed down her gavel, an action she rarely took, declared they could all take an hour’s break in which to inform loved ones they weren’t coming home and that they were eating in. She finished with, “I hope you all like Chinese.”

  This was met by a room fast filling up with groans and excuses and dodges.

  Miranda handled each in turn, maintaining her calm in the face of a room full of upset geniuses.

  EIGHTEEN

  Rae had gotten rest, and by late afternoon, she was back at Charleston’s main police headquarters downtown. Work, work, work. She’d always been a workaholic, driven to do better than anyone else competing for the prize. Part of her nature. In the genes.

  At headquarters, she’d been given a temporary office desk out in the open room where all the detectives worked various homicide cases. Consequently, the situation was far from perfect. The Charleston detectives and every uniformed officer was ostensibly on the Sleepwalker-slash-Hammerhead case as in any high profile murder spree or serial killings. Add to this the fact they’d already been briefed by profilers and behavioral scientists out of the same FBI that had sent Rae, and she knew the resentment must be doubled. All this with no results save the tacked up notes and typed up protocols that detailed the kind of man the killer might or might not be. The kind of behaviors that marked the killer had supposedly been pinpointed. All in the effort to focus and direct the search. Rae had read these reports with detached interest, and while she respected what the BS Unit did, their limitations ended where her wings began.

  The list of attributes seemed familiar, as if an itemization of clichés:

  The unsubperp would be in his mid to late thirties, perhaps early forties.

  He either lived alone or with a mother or wife who made him feel subservient and little.

  He will have marginal contacts with women other than the mother or spouse.

  He will have average to high intelligence, but working a menial job, a job that he feels is below him.

  He’d be a high school dropout, and an underachiever, despite his intelligence. He would have problems with authority figures.

  He might put on an outward face of being a regular guy and have superficial friendships at best.

  His social skills would be nil, yet he is capable of luring victims with falsehoods and feints. He may play upon his victims’ weaknesses and their kindnesses.

  He’s a stalker and has mastered the skills to locate his victims in their homes.

  And so it went, ending with: He’s a master at picking locks.

  These suggestions had set the Charleston detectives and police onto the trail of every locksmith in the city and surrounding villages. When this failed to bear fruit, the local authorities had gone after blue-collar workers, unhappy in their work, who had dropped out of one of the local schools. When nothing came of this, they’d begun investigating and ruling out blue-collar workers whose spouses had called in tips suggesting a husband might be the Hammerhead killer—given that her man was out to all hours of the night.

  Who knows, she thought as she reviewed this information and some of the interrogation tapes so far, maybe the roulette wheel’ll turn up someone for the crimes.

  “So when’re you gonna to tell Hatfield that his sister is in a good place?” It was Orvison, standing over her temporary desk, his eyes boring into her.

  “I suppose next time I see him.”

  “Hopefully, that won’t be over another corpse with nails driven into the head and eyes.”

  “What do you make of the song lyrics, Chief? You think it’s really a suicidal plea to leave this world? What if it’s more a eulogy?”

  “Eulogy?”

  “To his victims.”

  “Never heard of a serial killer providing a eulogy to his victims.” Orvison frowned and scratched behind his ear.

  “I think he wants us to think well of him, that he’s complicated, sensitive even.”

  Orvison’s laugh was derisive.

  “I mean if we just turn our thinking about the song lyrics away from the monster and apply the words to his victims, they might make more sense. The floating woman in my visions is not our killer, and the song’s refrain is ‘float through the sky’ is it not?”

  “My troubles and I,” he solemnly added.

  “Suppose he’s really a nice guy inside his own head, and that he’s sending over these poor women who need his help, that he sees it that way?”

  “Sounds like a possibility. One the other agents before you hadn’t considered.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” she replied, her arresting black left eye and right blue eye holding his stare, “to bring a fresh perspective to things.”

  “So how does it help us to know that this creep believes he’s doing good?”

  “Maybe he even believes it’s the work of God.”

  “Please, a religious nutcase?” “I know…the worst kind.”

  “Be it worship of the Devil, or killing for the Lord,” he replied.

  “Add one more trait to the list—he’s a churchgoer, maybe.”

  “A churchgoing serial killer?” “An unhappy fellow working at a menial job, or what he perceives as menial, below him, living alone with his mother or a dominant spouse who acts the part of mother to him, a smart fellow, who frequents a meeting hall or church and is working from some religious fanaticism, maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Don’t know what is more vague, your psychic visions or your profiling techniques.”

  “I don’t see him as anything but vague and green and without shape.”

  “Green?”

  “He’s formless, shapeless like a man in a mechanic’s overalls. This may well be how he feels…sees himself. That he is without form; that he is lost, perhaps.”

  “Damn so many ways of seeing a thing,” he muttered in reply. “Gives a man the bends.”

  She persisted, adding, “But…but he’s surrounded by the color green in some manner or other.”

  “Hey, you don’t think he’s the Green Grass man, do you?”

  “Green Grass man?” “Turn on any TV set in Charleston, wait fifteen minutes, and you’ll see an ad for the Greenup Company and the Green Grass man. He almost looks the part of the Green Giant, you know peas. But this fellow turns your lawn from yellow-brown to a glowing, eye-popping green.”

  “Hmmm…well what kind of overalls does he wear?”

  “Uniform is green slacks, green shirt, green hat, and a damn big green thumb.”

  “A lot of blue collar workers work in green uniforms.”

  “Was it a uniform you saw in your visions?”

  “No…well, yes, and no. But everything one sees in a vision must be evaluated many times over. The symbolic often takes many twists in meaning. What appears clothing may well be an emotion.”

  He scratched at his ear. “Again it’s a which is it?”

  “I got the impression more of a jumpsuit, kind of like a sweat suit. Quite baggy, but as I say, it may not pertain to clothing at all.”

  “I see. Kinda lets the Greenup man off the hook.”

  “Well…actually the chemicals they use to green up lawns are bio-hazardous in nature, and I do recall the distinct feeling of suffocation around this guy, so...”

  “So again who knows? Then we begin to look at everyone in the area who works for Greenup? Come on, this is Chemical Valley here. DuPont and half a dozen other plants other than the coal companies operate here. You see those smokestacks we passed going out to St. Albans?”

  “It’s reaching, I know, and yes, I sa
w the billowing gases spewing forth.”

  “I’ll put Hodges and Dicarpanella on it.”

  She nodded. She’d had a polite introduction to the other two detectives earlier. “Any other green men in the area you know of, Chief?”

  “Actually, there is another company I know of where the employees switch off from a brown to a green suit of sorts, and they certainly deal in chemicals.”

  “A chemistry lab?”