Deja Blue

by Walker, Robert W.

  She sat dejected and staring around at the green room, and she moaned “God…how damned awful is this?” She didn’t expect an answer sitting here at the desk, but she got several in succession, beginning with her father’s image in the mirror before her.

  When the bridge falls— she watched his lips move and heard his voice in her head— beneath one’s feet, grab your feet. Her father’s voice resonated around the room, but his meaning fell flat. It made sense only if she imagined feet to mean ego and self.

  Her father’s image morphed into her mother’s features, and her apparition said: When one door c loses, another will open.

  She must have read Rae’s unimpressed features pinch into a frown, as now her mother added: When the road fails to rise up to meet you, you take another road.

  “Yeah, thanks Mom. I’ll do that.” Nice to see that Mom had some new material, she said to herself.

  I heard that . Her mother’s frown faded with her image, as both parents appeared to have swept off for some erstwhile spectral appointment. With them gone, Rae cried. In the midst of her tears and pacing and wiping her nose, she heard a third voice, Gene’s voice say in her ear: When counted out by the many, count on one.”

  “Oh, great. Now Gene is speaking in epitaphs. Do you mean count on myself?” she asked.

  The number of focus , she heard him say. She’d heard him say it every time he prepared her for a trance. Gene had in an instant and without hesitation seconded her plan, the plan to go after a killer via her mind, the psychic intervention. The secret of her gift, the secrete of life, to focus on one thing. To do one thing and to do it well.

  The young girl who had claimed that her dog had attacked a man who’d broken in to drive nails into her eyes had, in her way, intervened on the case; her dog had supposedly intervened to save her. Rae wondered if she could save a real victim, if she could intervene, take a psychic bite out of crime, and if so, perhaps prove to the powers that be that debunking her and psychic sensory investigation amounted to undermining their own investigation. In short, she meant to make Carl Orvison eat his words and his deeds.

  Show ‘em what you’ve got, Gene said now, something he said each time he’d acted as her spotter.

  She looked for him in every reflective surface but could not find him. Finally, she replied, “I will, but meantime, I really suck at reading people. You know that, Gene.”

  Too often, she felt, she really did suck at reading people on this plane.

  She felt a generalized feeling that said she shouldn’t be so hard on herself, that life and people were

  complicated, that personalities were as layered as onions, and that the core traits of an individual remained hidden in deep stratums of emotion and guile and gray matter—much of which had a connection to DNA imprinting dating back to the time of the caveman. Little wonder people were hard to read. How much of life could be understood, really so long as ancestral fears and primordial emotions ruled a species? Little wonder, no one proved an open book.

  “Still, I suck at reading people,” she moaned. “The ones who might can help—” she thought of Kunati who might’ve forewarned her had she worked harder at the clues she now realized he’d been putting out— “or the ones who can only hurt you.” She thought of Carl Orvison again and just how subtly he’d operated on her. “Just try to read a politician.”

  Still, while Orvison had proven now to be the deliberate and conniving one the entire time, Kunati had had several opportunities to speak openly with Rae. How many times had they been alone. What was the fencing all about? But he’d not been frank with her. He’d squandered several chances to give her some indication of the true nature of his and Carl’s visit to Quantico to shop for a reputable psychic. Instead, he simply jumped ship himself.

  She wondered, does it make sense? How much in human behavior ever does…make sense?

  She wiped her eyes and set about thinking how she could get hold of that hammer, how she would work around Orvison.

  Replay , said her mother’s voice. She was back? Or had she simply not left? And what the devil did she mean by replay?

  Rerun, her father corrected mother.

  Reverse, Gene corrected them both. “Reverse.”

  The word reverberated through her ear, but Rae was unsure what this meant, and scratching her head, awaiting more input, she remained patient. She dabbed at her final tears. The room felt empty again, the silence like the depth of an ocean, the density of a mountain. She knew they’d all gone; in fact, she wondered if they’d been in the room at all, if it hadn’t all been her neediness for them talking through her.

  But whatever the truth, what they’d said had given her courage.

  I’m going for it, she told herself, still wondering what could reverse have meant in this context. Believing that those who loved her most, from the other side, were guiding her in the right direction. She believed she must revisit the haunted trailer, but that she must do so smartly. Yes, she told herself, that’s it. The only way she might beat Carl Orvison’s timeframe. That’s what Gene’s trying to say, and Mother, and Father. Then she reminded herself that it’s all right to listen to voices in one’s head so long as those voices are benign.

  Rae worked out her plan in her now quiet head, every detail. She stopped only to pour another cup of coffee from the urn, still hot and steaming as if no time at all had passed, and perhaps it hadn’t. The coffee certainly didn’t taste as bitter as bile anymore. In fact, it had a pleasant, easy aroma, and it went down smoothly. Coffee with attitude. Or rather her attitude had changed, making the coffee great.

  She smiled at the genius of her plan. It must work this psychic stakeout.

  TWENTY FOUR

  The Sleepwalker killer didn’t like the press calling him the Hammerhead killer or the Hammerhead Shark, trolling for victims. He’d written then to cease and desist calling him anything other than The Sleepwalker, but now he had more serious matters to contend with.

  Again, he’d broken out in a sweat from a strange feeling of being watched by someone, someone closing in on him, someone nearby, and he whipped around, but he was alone, alone in his office. He’d pulled all the blinds to end any fear of the windows and any reflection he might see in them. He had done all he could in his workplace to cut down on such items, but much of the work here involved glass items, Petri dishes, stainless steel surfaces, test tubes—all of which reflected him and what he did all day long.

  Outside his office, the walls were an institutional green as was the lab. He worked now for years in a laboratory setting, doing good work, but everything had changed since Mother’s death. She’d died heartbroken over her three other children, what they’d become and what they’d failed to become. Mother had made him promise to make good on it all, and to take care of all the things she had had no control over. He’d made the promise, and he’d lived up to it.

  But now he kept feeling his skin prickle, feeling the ghosts of his victims move around and sometimes through him. He felt eyes on him, eyes he’d nailed shut, still somehow watching…seeing…waiting…watching him slowly fall apart if he were not careful. Eyes watching, yes, all guided by some intelligence he did not recognize.

  The eyes had been shut down in this world, on this plane, but they somehow regained sight in the next, and they had returned with a vengeance—stirred up, no doubt by that damned psychic. Undoubtedly, Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa was the intelligence behind them, the catalyst. Still, he had no true evidence of this only a vague sense of it.

  Whatever the catalyst, the eyes saw clear through from the grave to him.

  Else it was all an illusion, a trick on the part of Dr. Hiyakawa, the psychic called in to hunt him down. Perhaps she was, after all, the genuine article; perhaps it was her eyes seeing clear through space and time to study him. Perhaps she’d already, at least subconsciously, recognized him. And if not, she might soon do so. Most certainly, she was busily speculating. God, he thought, where might her speculations take her?

&
nbsp; He feared the worst had come.

  Even thought Mother screamed through his brain that it hadn’t, that the psychic knew nothing.

  But the killer couldn’t convince himself and neither could Mother. So far as he believed, there was now someone who finally saw him for what he had become. What his acts had made of him. What Mother, ultimately had made of him when she won the tug of war with his soul.

  He believed the psychic saw everything; saw him now. Saw it all—warts and all, murderous hands and all.

  The question was had she told anyone else? The question of time entered his mind. Had she seen all of it now, in the past, or was this a harbinger of the future? And if the future, he may well have time to stop this from happening, keep Hiyakawa from going to what seemed the inevitable future.

  He must waste no time; he must kill the psychic.

  # # #

  As Aurelia primped and dressed for the day, she considered each step in her plan, a plan that could fall apart so easily at any number of stages. So many moving parts in motion at once, like the shaft of a helicopter blade at full throttle. If she made the wrong move, the entire mechanization could come crashing down like badly constructed scaffolding. She didn’t savor the role circumstances had placed her in, the lone investigator, isolated from the group, and she indeed felt cut off. Cut off even from Quantico.

  Hell and for sure Raule would soon be calling. She felt fearful of a call at any time from Raule telling her it was up, over, done with, kaput in Charleston, and that it was time for her to immediately get on a plane for home. She didn’t care for this role of the Machiavellian either. Any means to an end. She much preferred the straight, the narrow, the honest approach, but under such extremes, having now less than forty-eight hours to work a miracle, she must do what she must do. She knew she wasn’t racing home with her tail between her legs like some whipped cur.

  She must not rush off headlong into her plan of action either, and certainly not blindly; she instead stared at her image in the mirror, half hoping to see some familiar faces orbiting around her own image, encouraging her onward with bully and cheering of a Teddy Roosevelt nature, boisterous and ear-shattering. But nothing of the sort came. Not from Gene, not from Father, nor from Mother.

  The nearby empty Jacuzzi reflected in the mirror was loudly speaking, however. It said, ‘Hop in, relax…what can you accomplish in forty-eight freaking ours, kiddo. Drop the crusade and let’s make with the champagne, the bubbles, and the steam’.

  “No way,” she answered back and scrunching her nose, she next spoke to her reflection in the mirror. “Now I’m talking to a Jacuzzi?”

  Still in her slip, she applied lipstick.

  Getting evidence from a lockup was no easy task nowadays even if you did carry an FBI badge. Certainly not so easy since 9/11; certainly not as in the old days when cops were king. Nowadays it required not one but two badges displayed, and two signatures just to examine evidence in lockup. This way if something went awry or there happened to be a screw up with the evidence in question at a later court hearing, not one but two people could be questioned and one could be played against the other. Still, Rae understood the need for tighter protocol on evidence. Too often in the past drugs, guns, and sometimes crucial serum, toxins, and DNA evidence went for a walk all on its own. Missing evidence, often the end result of an overworked and understaffed lab.

  It was not unheard of for a crime lab to toss out evidence along with bio-waste. It’d occurred at the smallest of departments in the wee hamlets and at the highest, most sophisticated crime lab in the country, the FBI’s own, tainting the agency’s reputation now for years.

  As a result, few people had the clout these days to remove evidence from a safe lockup or vault in a bank. Carl Orvison’s having seen to placing the killer’s notes not only under glass, but in a bank vault, underscored the fact that Charleston was no different in this regard than DC or Quantico these days.

  Rae had earlier gotten onto the phone with an FBI medical examiner with whom she’d worked in the past, and with whom she shared a close knit bond, Dr. Jessica Coran. Coran had proven herself a many-times-over forensics genius—a rare breed actually, despite all the cop shows and Hollywood depictions, as few true geniuses in the field existed.

  Coran had solved some of the most bizarre cases on the FBI blotter. As a result, Jessica had a huge reputation in law enforcement circles in general and among her colleagues in the IFS and the FAA—the International Forensics Society and the Forensic Association of America in particular. It stood to reason that she’d have some pull with Dr. Roland Hatfield in Charleston, and ultimately, Hatfield controlled much of the physical evidence in the case causing Rae sleepless nights here.

  In fact, the heavy-duty evidence was under Dr. Hatfield’s control and not Orvison’s, evidence such as the hammer from the Cottrill killing.

  Rae telephoned Quantico herself, but not to speak with Raule; rather, she got through to Dr. Coran. Once outlining the case she was working on, Rae listened to Jessica. Coran clearly wanted to help out in any way she could, although she had her hands full working a number of cases of her own. “However.” Jessica added, “I’ve read and heard all about the monster you’re chasing there, and Rae, learning you’re on the case sets my mind at some ease, but at the same time, I fear for your safety.”

  “So far I’m batting zip, and the killer’s gotta know it, so I don’t feel any sense of danger at all, Jess.”

  “I’d love to contribute. How can I help?”

  “I need you to make a phone call and put all your powers of persuasion into getting me access to the hammer used in the first murder, a woman named Marci Cottrill.”

  “And Hatfield has it under lock and key?” “You got it.”

  “You got it. Will do everything I can to persuade this Dr. Hatfield, Rae, you know that.”

  “That’s all I ask. I need him on board with a plan I’m hatching.”

  “I know of Roland Hatfield, but I wouldn’t say he’s a friend or even an acquaintance. Spoke once at the bar at a convention. He’d given a talk on a new saw that might replace the Stryker. That’s about the extent of it.”

  “But you can speak to him ME to ME, right?” “I will. Promise.”

  “Soon? My time is limited.”

  “You expect the killer to strike again? Soon?”

  “That, too, but it’s that…well, they’ve given me forty-eight hours to show any results.”

  “Bastards. I’ll call Hatfield soon as you hang up.”

  Rae gave Jessica the number and they exchanged a few pleasantries, Rae asking how Richard was doing, and Jessica asking about Nia.”

  “Nia’s doing just fine,” she lied.

  While Dr. Jessica Coran was a forensics guru, practical and scientific minded, she and Rae had worked on a case involving pre-Katrina New Orleans, and Jessica had learned during that cooperative effort that psi powers could play a significant role in catching a killer. In fact, in that instance, with Rae working remote out of her Quantico pyramid and Coran in the field with a second psychic, Dr. Kim Desinor, they’d ended the career of not one but two serial killers—the Queen of Hearts killer and Mad Matthew Matisak.

  Dr. Desinor, a native of New Orleans with a Cajun background, had returned to the Big Easy after Hurricane Katrina, and Desinor now worked in the rebuilding of the New Orleans Police Department. The NOPD had been fortunate indeed to get Dr. Desinor, a woman who’d taught Rae a great lesson about the sort of gift they shared. A lesson in caution, in listening to signs, and something of humility—that there’s more between heaven and hell than dreamt of in science.

  Rae completed her eyeliner and now slipped on her sexiest fishnet stockings.

  Dr. Kim Desinor so long ago had insisted that Rae never lose sight of herself and the dangers that awaited her while in trance state. Dangers that lurked in the netherworld of the paranormal. Kim had been the first person with psi powers to point out to Rae that that the dead who’d led lives of a dege
nerate and predatory nature, remained true to their ugly bedrock character in the afterlife. That evil, in all its infinite permutations within and without the human heart, did not necessarily change or even shift due to death. That if love could transcend death, then so could hatred and evil.

  In all its permutations.

  Gene Kiley had seconded Dr. Desinor on the subject when Rae had once brought it up in discussion in their Quantico lab.

  Rae now put on her sexiest push-up bra. All ammunition in her plan.

  As Rae finished her ensemble off with a slick black skirt and a perfectly fitted, slendering black blouse, she recalled how Desinor had shown her scars that day she’d spoken of the transcendent nature of evil. Scars from a disease that once ravaged her body and placed her in a hospital, scars from an undiagnosed ‘psychically induced’ disease that’d almost killed Kim. It’d been a gangrenous decay that’d decimated her, all as a result of psychically slipping into the mind of a victim who’d been lashed to the decaying body of a man. The victim was being punished by decay in an eye for an eye vengeance against her, in the manner Roman law. The Romans dealt with a murderer by lashing the victim, decay and all, to the man proven a killer. The biblical proportions of this torture came to light late in the case as Doctors Coran and Desinor hunted down the avenging father of a son who’d been executed by the state of Texas by order of the abducted, lashed to the victim woman—a judge. The case had made national headlines and had won fame for Dr. Coran and for Kim Desinor, whose combined efforts through forensic science and psychic detection saved the judge from this unthinkable death.