Deja Blue

by Walker, Robert W.

  “Kids…they don’t think past the deed to the consequences.”

  “And who’s to blame a kid nowadays, given all the irresponsible acts of our so-called leaders.”

  He shrugged. “Or those depicted on TV and movie screens that pass for comics just poking fun, heh? Brings down any notions of glory and the American way these days?”

  “The adult world has created plenty of confusion in their world, and plenty to be confused about—beyond the usual confusion of adolescence.”

  “Nice speech but I’m going to teach this one kid a damn lesson she won’t forget any time soon.”

  “Your call.”

  “Damned right it is.” He pulled from the curb, returned to McCorkle and shot onto I-64 for downtown and Rae’s hotel. They traveled in a silence thick with what Rae silently characterized as ‘a grinding-teeth atmosphere’ wherein each wanted to say something but both remained stubbornly quiet.

  Silent the entire way. Until he pulled into the circle at the hotel. “This thing with Amos has got to me.” “I can well imagine.”

  “He’s not acting rational, and he’s made a career decision he’ll regret someday… possibly as soon as tomorrow when light of day filters into his thick skull.”

  “You like Amos, despite his being a pain in the ass, heh, Carl?”

  “I’d’ve given him a great lot of mentoring if he’d’ve been receptive. Damn but I tried.”

  It dawned on her now. He’d treated the other man like a son. “Tell me, Carl, you got children? A son somewhere?”

  A deep silence overtook the chief now. Something so thick it could be cut with only a bone saw, she thought. She’d hit a nerve.

  “You lose a son? In Iraq maybe?”

  “Don’t start pulling your magic act on me, Doctor. You read up on me somewhere along the line.”

  “No…this is just intuition, reading your body language, the things you don’t say…the between the lines stuff. And as for the rift between you and Amos, while I know I’m not personally responsible, it sure sounds as if the breaking point was your having to call me in on the case.”

  “Frankly, it wasn’t that so much as…well, he thought I should’ve run my department the way I saw fit, and not at the beck and call of the mayor’s office, but that’s an unreasonable and idyllic notion that doesn’t work in practice.”

  “You’d think he’d understand command structure, that you answer to those up the ladder.”

  “He’s a fool if he thinks he’ll find it any different in the county system.”

  “Perhaps over time, he’ll realize how much you tried to do for him, Carl.”

  “Yeah…maybe, given time.” “Time wounds all heels, right?”

  He chuckled lightly at this. “Time is the formula for a lot of cures.”

  “Wonder what our killer thinks about when he thinks about time,” she mused. “Wonder what it is in the mirror that he can’t take.”

  “From the tenor of his notes to the press, he thinks he’s going to be immortal one day, that he’s doing the work of a higher power.”

  “Perhaps, when he looks in the mirror, he knows the truth. No one, in the end, will remember him, no more than anyone aside from film buffs remembering how much Raymond Massey looked the part of Abe Lincoln.”

  “Fame is fleeting.”

  Rae had read all the files on all of Marci Cottrill’s boyfriends and her ex. Any one of them was capable of doing her in, but none seemed capable of brutalizing her to the extent that the Hammer-man chose to do. Rae had gone on to study the monster’s letters to the editor, and his cryptic lyrics from first victim to last. By now she had closely studied their man’s handwriting as well.

  “From all I gather,” she replied, wiping a loose strand of hair from her eyes, “he has delusions of grandeur, that he is in some manner an agent of his god, an avenging angel, and each victim has been chosen not by him—why hell, he’s asleep, in an altered state of consciousness the entire time—or so he is trying to convince us and perhaps himself.”

  “Claims he’s just a conduit.”

  “Yeah, that he’s channeling a higher power, the one who selects those whose time it is to cross over. Read all that bull. So the murder victims weren’t killed by him at all but by his god.”

  “But he’s still got the reality staring him in the face—his face in the mirror.”

  “Exactly. It’s his face in the mirror, not his god or this being telling him what to do.”

  “Precisely,” agreed Carl, nodding. “His god’s failed to appear to him.”

  “Must be tough on a lunatic. Meanwhile, this maniac is going about our community with his hands clean so far as he believes. Only makes him more invisible. He won’t be a fidgeter, won’t show any sign whatsoever of being a changed man, not so much as a nervous twitch or stomach—if he’s convinced himself he’s truly innocent in all this.”

  “A rationale for being sociopathic. A higher power dictates. I’m just following orders, and doing so in my sleep.”

  “Imagine a co-worker who has murdered someone, a husband, a son, a brother who has killed someone. You’d expect to see a transformation, a change in demeanor, but not with this guy, no way. Hell…he wasn’t even there when he did it.”

  “Exactly.” She opened the car door, saying, “We’d both best get some rest.”

  He held her for a moment in a sad stare. “Every night I lay my head down, Rae, I wonder if while I sleep, if he will strike again. Doesn’t exactly make for peaceful slumber.”

  “What can you do? When they learned that the Atlanta Child Murderer always dumped his victims’ bodies in rivers, they posted teams at every bridge. You can’t post a man at every bedside.”

  “But we do have our secret weapon, now don’t we?” he asked, meaning her and sounding a sarcastic note.

  “I’m here to do my best, same as you, Carl.” She climbed from the car and slammed the door shut, and without a wave, she rushed for the revolving doors. Carl made the old cruiser scream, its tires leaving their mark behind.

  # # #

  Instead of going straight for her room, Rae entered the hotel bar where she ordered a Whiskey Sour and pulled out her cell phone. She had heard nothing in all this time from either Tomi Yoshikani or Nia. She now dialed her daughter’s cell number, unaware that the bartender was checking her out.

  When Nia came on, Rae took a deep breath and said, “It’s me. Why didn’t you call to tell me you’d gone to your father’s?”

  “I didn’t wanna fight on my hands, Mother.”

  “You presuppose we will fight every time your father’s involved, Nia.”

  “It’s called conditioning, Mom.”

  “Look…Nia, I was worried about you. You weren’t answering at the house.”

  “I’m fine, Mom. What about you? How is your case going?”

  “Nia, you’re not making plans to stay with your father, are you?”

  “No…I mean I dunno.”

  “Is that a maybe?” “A definite maybe.”

  A Cole Porter tune played in the background, a song from a bygone time. “You’re growing up so fast as it is, Nia; you and me…we only have so much time together. You’ll be off to college in a few years.”

  “Yeah…I know, and Dad?” Was that a question, she wondered but remained silent.

  “Dad says the same thing as you do…about our time left together. Always fussing how we haven’t enough of that stuff.”

  “Time is our most precious commodity, sweetheart—that and our love for one another.” “If that’s so…why do you spend so much of it away from me?” Nia hung up on this shot to the heart.

  Rae finished her drink and went up to bed. Tonight she knew she’d worry about Nia and her, their relationship, the possibility that Tomi had already won her over with both charm and money. She’d cry herself to sleep over it all, and the truth that hurt so much—what Nia said about Rae’s spending too much time away.

  TWENTY THREE

  The fo
llowing day at police headquarters

  Rae had not slept well, her worries and hopes and dreams for Nia consuming her night. Now she had consumed far too much caffeine all this day long, as she’d spent hours pouring over more facsimiles of the killer’s handwritten notes, all of which she’d handled earlier in original form in an effort to telekinetically catch any glimpses she might of the killer or his mind. She’d only gotten a vague sense that he was on a tightrope, his nerves shattering daily.

  Still, could she trust this ‘knowledge’? The telekinesis (TK) always proved iffy. While iffy was not a technological term, nor even a PSI word, it was most assuredly a human word associated with guesses, hunches, such things as maybes and perhapses all the way to the end of the scale to intuition and instinct. Iffy-ness figured into all psychic considerations after all, something Gene, her loving mentor, had railed about all the time. “You can’t ever take the if out of things,” he’d say. “And you must keep an open mind to the what ifs as well.”

  Today’s TK session had proven poor in the extreme. Too much if this and if that figured into the images coming from her touch. Nothing to send back via the palm-held Crawl. Nothing worthwhile. Nothing to write home about. Nothing on the killer’s physical appearance for sure—except the color green, some notion of precision tools—at odds with a hammer and nail to be sure.

  On the other hand, a major what if raised its curiously green head, asking for attention. What if…the killer was working out of an overwhelming sense of mission? The question demanded she wrestle with it. It was something coming off the killer via his written notes— an obsessive drive to fulfill a kind of contract, living it out, filled with the emotion of duty, loyalty to this calling, however sick said calling might appear to anyone outside his head. This amounted to what psychiatrist and those who studied aberrant minds as a fantasy—a killer’s fantasy world. While fantasy in the usual sense might mean a pleasant fairy tale, in the mind of a sociopath, a fantasy was neither a fantasy nor a fairy tale. This sort of fantasy was a killer’s wish, a killer’s plans, desires, his goals, what made him come both mentally and physically—his sick fantasy. And often there were no sicker thoughts on the planet than those inside a psychopath’s head.

  When she’d finally tired of the attempt to gain any further, more in-depth knowledge of the killer via telekinesis, she’d gone to Orvison with the lack of results. “However, I can report to you, Carl, about this sense of mission I’d gotten, as if he takes on these killings as a fevered messenger or disciple.”

  “Disciple of what?” he asked.

  She shook her head, her eyes tired. “Precisely…a disciple of what or whom could tell us a lot about him, but I can’t say, at least not yet.”

  Carl took the news in solemn retrospection, but in the end, he’d skeptically said, “That’s some stretch.” It was said in that sarcastic manner he’d adopted since Amos Kunati had quit him. More and more, as the day had worn on and worn down, Orvison had begun sounding like Kunati. He’d inherited the duty of being the doubter and the skeptic, it seemed.

  Orivson had added, “Our best handwriting guys aren’t even sure if all the letters to the press and the notes found in the victims’ throats are even from the same guy, Rae. So how can you be sure? You could be getting crosscross whataya-ma-call-its.”

  “Definitely the same hand at work,” she replied in no uncertain terms, “despite an obvious attempt to disguise it. The loops and whorls, the ups, the downs, the O’s, T’s., and P’s in particular do not lie.”

  She’d wanted to keep hold of the originals handled by the monster, to keep working at the telekinetic path that might open wider, the longer she handled that which the killer handled, but Orvison and others withheld the documents on the very honest issue of their being irreplaceable pieces of evidence if and when the killer were apprehended. Chain of evidence issues, all that.

  As a result, and feeling a need to get away from Orvison for awhile, Rae had gone in search of Dr. Roland Hatfield to allay any fears and to get special dispensation from him on the matter, but he’d been out on a domestic dispute turned ugly case. Learning this, she returned to her temporary desk to pack everything she wished to take with her tonight.

  She knew working with the facsimiles proved useless in a telepathic sense, that she could only use the science behind graphology with the duplicates. Even so, the duplicates had had much to say about the level of angst and bitterness brewing and seething within this monster with each stroke of his pen. I don’t hate women, he’d written in one communiqué. In fact, I love women; it’s why my Lord picks them to cross over. When it is my turn, they will greet me with open arms on the other side as a friend, as one who gave them freedom.

  “Don’t count on it, Mister Sleepwalker-killer,” she said to her temporary desk where Kunati’s empty desk stood staring across at her.

  The day turned to evening, and Rae packed up all the facsimiles and decided she must catch up the missed sleep. She buzzed Chief Orvison and explained her plans, saying she’d get a cab to the Embassy Suites. He wouldn’t hear of it, instead ordering Hodges to drive her ‘home’ for the day.

  # # #

  The Jacuzzi relaxed Rae along with some small bottles of wine she’d pilfered from the fridge. In robe now, she took another stab at the handwriting analysis, but her eyes soon became bleary and unresponsive.

  Putting aside the handwriting analysis for now, Rae leaned back into her pillows and went over every moment she’d spent in the haunted trailer that had given her the only narrow glimpse of the killer she’d gotten in all her time in Charleston. So far, her greatest ally in Charleston had been that spider-webbed old bureau mirror. Her mind wandered, however, to an imagined place—a kind of morgue or rather medical laboratory wherein all the gathered evidence looked more like a collection of arcane bed springs and antique furniture and clothing than it did a place of microscopes, Bunsen burners, sinks, and freezers. No this was a regular pawnshop window, the sort you could stare through for days and never see all that filled this space. This storehouse of treasures large and small flitted in and out of her vision. All manner of items had been forced into every niche and crevasse, and appeared on multiple tiers, shelves, and boxes.

  Rae blinked at the dusty, grime-laden window, something out of her childhood in LA, a pawnshop window filled with baseball trophies, crumpled ties, belts, clothes, shoes, ceramic bric-a-brac, telephones, TV’s, books, travel brochures, debris of lost political campaigns, tools, both household tools like screwdrivers and hammers, and the precision tools of dentists and doctors. There were candles, dishware, lamps, bottles, radios, more. In fact, the list seemed endless.

  Rae now saw an old woman who seemed the caretaker of this world, and this woman, a dark crow that scratched about the sometimes dusty, sometimes shiny objects brought to this strange place, she knew as the curator of this museum. The woman had spent a lifetime gathering it all into her huge, elaborate, labyrinthine nest, a nest made of many tentacles, all of which entwined the old woman wrapped in a boa with every color of the rainbow about her throat and against her pale gray skin and dead eyes.

  The yellow-beaked woman had darting eyes; eyes that darted like a frightened and overwhelmed barn owl unable to find its next meal. As the features coalesced into distinct parts, there came a startling revelation. The turkey hen of a woman was an age-enhanced replica of Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa at perhaps seventy or eighty. Impossible to be exact.

  She gasped at the surprise.

  She’d felt certain the pawnshop and the old woman were clues in the Hammerhead case.

  Now she wondered at its meaning.

  Dreams in her worldview had deep meaning that must be analyzed. Sometimes you were meant to act on such dreams.

  The elderly Rae stood on the inside of that pawnshop window—inside and trapped among her things, a lifetime’s collection of things. Objects. Materials. All the objects of the dead, the objects she had touched over the years, and into the future. Her future. Fill
ed with the objects of her cases. What she looked at was a frightful future, that she was alone with her objects and her work— that in fact she’d become the ugly work that she did, that her profession had become her and she it, and she had no other life. All her relationships had fallen away, replaced by the emptiness and horror of being alone with the objects of death.

  She at once feared and yet wished to examine more closely this image and this world. Is it my future? Does it make sense? Can it be altered?

  She hadn’t seen any joy in the features, and she had seen no sign of Nia in this future.

  Unsure now if she were awake or asleep, Rae’s eyes continued to pour over the image of her future self while her mind raced with questions: Is this what Nia keeps harping on, that one day I’ll wake up and find myself alone with ‘important’ work. Did it mean she’d end up a bitter and imprisoned old hen behind a wall of memories and a collection of cases? Every item she’d ever laid hands on in her paranormal forensics laboratory laid out in her future window?