Deja Blue

by Walker, Robert W.

  Rae never forgot the healed over scars on Desinor’s body. Indeed a picture worth a thousand words. Illustration enough that psi powers could create a backlash to harm the messenger—the psychic medium, doing terrible damage and sometimes unremitting and permanent damage, not only physically but mentally. Desinor, according to Dr. Coran, was never the same after the unnatural, brutal psychic attack she’d suffered. She’d remained with the FBI long enough to break in a few newbies in the proposed PSI Unit at the time, Rae being the most promising. After that, Kim’d gone home to New Orleans, taking her scars and ghosts with her.

  It’d been more than a year later that Katrina hit, and this bombshell had brought Dr. Kim Desinor back into the world of crime fighting and detection with the NOPD.

  But Kim had not slinked away quietly when she’d left the FBI. She’d not gone before she made Rae and the others truly ‘see’ that theirs was a frightful power to possess, and that it could and had rebounded on some who’d come before them. After this display, they lost some of the few recruits they had for the program. In fact, before it was over, Gene Kiley and Raule Aproestini had been left with only one confident psychic at that time, Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa. Since then, two others had come on board, but neither had Rae’s experience nor had ever met Kim Desinor.

  She stood now, her outfit and makeup complete. She rushed out for the adventure ahead.

  TWENTY FIVE

  The brisk walk from hotel to Dr. Roland Hatfield’s autopsy lab felt good to Rae, invigorating. She’d found a surprise had awaited her the entire time outside—a bright blue morning. Clean, crisp air had rushed into the Kanawha Valley to whisk and undulate it clean, giving the broad river valley an opportunity to breathe anew, as if the city might inhale now, find brief respite from plants such as DuPont, Dow, and other chemical-producing companies sporting choking, belching smokestacks. The only worst US city she’d ever visited for pollution had been Birmingham, Alabama. Charleston’s only saving grace in this department was the fact the Chemical Valley plants had been spread out, unlike the congested counterparts in Birmingham.

  Rae snatched out her cell phone and dialed Hatfield, telling him what she needed and vaguely why, saying she must have the hammer and nails from the first crime scene to kinetically read them, but that she needed to do the reading at a remote location; that in essence, she needed the items taken from the crime scene to travel off-site with her.

  The man listened intently, saying nothing. Rae felt and believed that she had intrigued Hatfield without going into the fine print.

  Then the phone went dead.

  Dropped call? What? She wanted to throw the phone under an oncoming bus. Instead she checked the battery, realizing it could well’ve been that Hatfield had simply hung up on her. Stranger things had happened.

  She now hoped it was a dropped call.

  She quickened her pace for the forensics lab and Hatfield. She felt completely flummoxed; she’d expected the ME to rattle off a series of questions, perhaps a word of caution or two, some inane rules or comments about protocol, all in machine-gun fashion but no. Instead, he hangs up? ME’s as a rule proved to be characters with unusual habits and methods of proceeding. Why should Roland be any different?

  # # #

  She found Hatfield at his work, and instantly asked him, “Are you going to help me out or not, Doctor?”

  The medical examiner was busy hefting a pasty, nearly liquefied spleen from a corpse and sloshing it onto an overhanging scale, and recording the weight and coloring. “You are direct, Agent Hiaykawa. Give you that. Here I thought it was a West Virginia trait. That we had cornered the market on being direct.” His body language said no, that he wasn’t in the least interested in helping her out, and that his turning over evidence for a ‘séance’ just was not going to happen. It reinforced the idea that he’d simply hung up on her.

  “It’s an Irish trait along with stubbornness,” she replied, in gown and gloves and looking over his shoulder at the ongoing autopsy. “My mother’s side of the family,” she shot back. “Did you hang up on me?”

  He kept talking to the recorder instead, now taking the measure of a puncture wound to the victim’s kidney.

  She pursued him, going from body to scale again. “Doctor Hatfield, tell me that you did get a call before mine…a call from Dr. Coran, Dr. Jessica Cor—”

  “I did. We talked.” “You know who she is? Her reputation?”

  “Of course. Read one of her books once. Impressive woman. Hit on her once in a bar.” He sounded out the last words as if to mean that Rae was, by comparison, not an impressive woman or anyone he might hit on in a bar. This made Rae more self-conscious of her pushed up breasts and the fishnet stockings.

  “Dr. Hatfield, did Jess…ahhh, Dr. Coran impress upon you the importance of my work here?”

  “She had very nice things to say about you.” Hatfield hardly looked at Rae, and she got the sinking feeling that her push up bra and fishnets were wasted on the elderly medical professional. She imagined him much younger when he’d met Coran in that bar.

  “All right, then what about the killing hammer and the damn nails?” she shot back.

  “I’m not too keen on turning out evidence to anyone once it is in my care, Dr. Hiyakawa, and besides, ruffling Orvison’s feathers has never been pleasant in the past, and given how experience wires our brains to avoid

  unpleasantness—”

  “This is bullshit. Unadulterated—”

  He snapped off his recorder and stared at her as if she’d brought a live snake into his sterile lab. “Call it what you will, there’s no taking evidence out of here, cold evidence at that.”

  “I don’t understand your reluctance, Doctor. I’m an FBI agent working this case. I have some rank here, and besides, I was called in on the case by you people.”

  “That’s not going to sway me. You may as well leave, Dr. Hiyakawa.”

  “If need be, I can have my boss, Chief Raule Asp— ”

  “Won’t help.”

  “Then I’ll have him call the governor of the state, and failing that, I can get a federal warrant, but that seems rather ridiculous since we’re all on the same team here, Doctor, and we’re desperately trying to solve your sister’s murder.”

  This hit Hatfield hard. He paced, averting his eyes, obviously upset. “I tried so many times to help her out. She…she had a…an addictive personality, you know.”

  “I haven’t had time to tell you how sorry I am, and that—” she was about to explain to him that his sister’s soul was quite at peace, but he cut her off.

  “Last Carl Orvison spoke to me, you were off the case, so handing over any—”

  “No, no, no! Not off the case. He gave me forty eight hours.”

  “Forty eight hours?”

  “I’m very much still on the case.”

  His face scrunched into quizzical consternation. “Not exactly what he told me.”

  “Whatever,” Rae used her daughter’s favorite word. “Look, Dr. Hatfield, there’s something I haven’t shared with you, something to do with your sister out there at that trailer in St. Albans.”

  “My sister? What about her?”

  “So Carl didn’t tell you then?” “What’re you talking about?”

  “Your sister, the first victim to fall to this madman. I suspect she had a connection of some sort to him.”

  Hatfield instantly wheeled and looked at her for the first time, really looked at her, push up, fishnets, everything. “Connection? What sort of…connection?”

  “Unsure, but it might’ve been stronger than all the other victims put together.”

  “Someone she knew?” He looked stunned now. “You mean, someone she actually knew who did this to her? Knew him from before that night?”

  “She may have known him only in passing, perhaps more than that…perhaps even trusted him. He may’ve been a service man looking at her plumbing, or her grocer, any number of possibilities.”

  “Or her late
st idea of a boyfriend? Some abusive SOB? But how would you…how could you know that?”

  “Orvison didn’t tell you about my overnight in the trailer? Nothing of it?”

  “Not a word. Are you telling me you spent a night in that place?” His stunned eyes turned to incredulous orbs, widening each moment.

  “Nothing about the mirror? Carl’s told you nothing about what I saw in the mirror out there?”

  “What?” Associates in white lab coats came and went, asking for guidance from Hatfield, asking after a proper form, or to let him know of a particular arrival of a corpse or that another corpse had been placed in a freezer compartment. Hatfield took care of each problem efficiently if absently.

  Finally, alone again, he tore away the rubber gloves, tossed them into a biohazard chute, and he gently took Aurelia by the arm. She took this as a good sign, allowing the ME to guide her into his private office.

  In the semi-darkness of his office, his features cut in two by the single desk lamp, Hatfield said, “The mirror you’re talking about was cracked and spider-webbed beyond all use.”

  “Not in the psychic world it wasn’t.”

  “What precisely do you think you saw?”

  “I saw the killer…at least—”

  “You saw the Sleepwalker?” “I thought we were calling him Hammerhead.”

  “Never mind what we call him. Did you actually see him?”

  “Outline—saw his outline.”

  “Outline?”

  “He wore a green, baggy overall or uniform of some sort.”

  “Green uniform?” Hatfield was instantly more interested.

  “Yes, loose fitting, making him rather shapeless. Couldn’t make out his features, but general build, size.”

  Hatfield looked vulnerable for the first time she’d known him. He appeared shaken. “This is good…a good thing, and yet Orvison is pulling you off?”

  “Some political crapola, trust me.”

  “ Ahhh, yes, Charleston is rife with politics even in the police department. Even tries to infiltrate here in the ME’s office.”

  She cautiously continued. “But what’s more important is that I felt an honest, true connection with your sister…and that some residue of her, you see—”

  “My sister…connection? You made contact with Marci?”

  “Not exactly, but I felt her…felt that something of her, well, remains in that place.” Rae felt she must lie to some extent to gain his assistance.

  “Her remains were laid to rest. She’s quite at peace.” He did not sound convinced of the words coming out of his mouth.

  “I’m afraid, sir, that her physical remains are all that you buried.”

  He stiffened at this, jaw quivering as if he might break into tears. “Are you saying she’s not resting easy; that she’s still trapped in that damned trailer?”

  “I am.” She gulped down the frothing lie, rationalizing it on the basis of need. She must have his complete confidence and cooperation, his help, and attention, and she had less than forty eight hours remaining. The clock ticked on.

  “So you want to handle the hammer that killed Marci.”

  “Yes, to hold in my hands while in that trailer.”

  “A-And the nails I had Charles remove from my sister’s head and face?”

  She recalled his creepy assistant, Charles Sowards as she recalled, a man whose eyes went everywhere but never once met anyone else’s so far as she could tell. The man’s eyes darted here and there, landed on your lapel, perhaps your ear, your brow, but never one’s eyes. How could anyone be so damnably shy as to be unable to meet your gaze, she wondered. “That’s about the gist of it, yes,” Rae finally replied.

  “Think you can get something of a psychic clue from these objects?” His voice almost broke. This was clearly emotional for Roland.

  “It’s my hope and my job to do so, yes.”

  Charles had to use an old fashioned set of pliers to remove those nails from Marci’s skull.”

  She gave a final thought to the assistant, the heavyset Charles, shapeless in his green scrubs, and she realized for the first time just how green the environment here at the ME’s lab and morgue happened to be. She imagined this illusive Charles having the onerous work of pulling out the 3-Penny nails from the bodies to bag as evidence. She shivered and said, “It’s important, Dr. Hatfield, sir.” She tried to speak as gently as she could to assuage the hurt. It could not be easy to speak of his sister as victim to the fiend who’d so obliterated her features. “I can’t absolutely promise, sir, but in the end, this exercise could possibly give your sister a final peace.”

  “Did she…did she say…I mean, had you words with her?” The look of anticipation on his face made her fear he’d faint if she said the wrong thing.

  Poor man. He hadn’t taken time to truly grieve, she thought. She didn’t know what to say next.

  He prattled on instead, adding, “Is she in pain and suffering still?” Hatfield’s eyes pleaded more loudly than his words.

  Damn him for his questions , she thought. Each one required her lie to become more elaborate, but it could not be helped. Her ‘words’ to Rae and the entire feel of it all had the woman gone over and at peace entirely, but Rae needed her brother, for the time being, to believe otherwise. “She ahhh…she is trapped in a loop.”

  “A loop?”

  “It’s a psychic moment in time, a powerful hold that trauma causes a victim.”

  “A loop,” he repeated, trying to imagine it. “Like a parabola?”

  He glared deep into her eyes. “A psychic parabola?”

  “A double looping action, sort of yes? Something like that. A psychic current of sorts.”

  “Current?”

  “Wave if you will. Imagine our reality as one shore, one dimension, the netherworld as the ocean, a second dimension, and each has a line that does not normally get crossed except in an unnatural death. Each dimension crossing, kissing at the point of meeting, and within that moment, a paranormal occurrence happens, and it is caught up in that continuous wave action.”

  “I see…you mean that Marci is imprisoned on this plane.”

  “Now you’re there,” she gently added.

  “Trapped. I think I understand trapped.”

  He seems to be taking this instruction well, she thought, and me…I’m a stinker, an absolute fake at this moment, a liar. Still, gotta bull my way through. “Not always but sometimes a traumatic death imprisons a confused spirit into reliving the incident in a constant state of replay or rerun, or reverse order.” She used her parents words, and she used Gene’s word. “We call it a loop. Imagine a constantly replaying film.”

  “My sister is eternally stuck in that damn awful drama in that bloody trailer on…on this plane…suffering through her murder over and over again like some video on YouTube?”

  God, she hated to punish the poor man this way with such a bald face lie, but she saw no alternative to getting her hands on that hammer and nails. She grimly nodded. “And she has been all this time, since her murder, but I’m sure I can set her free.”

  “If there’s a ghost of a chance, we…you must try.”

  “I suspect it— the loop—occurs each night at around the actual time of the murder, you see, so I want to take the hammer and nails there tonight and at the exact right time—”

  “Three AM?”

  “Yes…at least, that’s when I saw it in the mirror…occurring.” This much at least is no lie, she thought.

  He stood frozen for some time. Then he paced and scoured the lab from his office window, seemingly for who else was on hand. “I have some time coming to me. I want to be with you, at your side, the entire way, do you understand?”

  “Dr. Hatfield, it could get…well it could get messy.”