Deja Blue

by Walker, Robert W.

  “Messy…is that a psychic sensory investigator’s term, messy? Look here, the deal is I get the evidence into your hands, I stay with it and you the entire way. This way, no one can say it was out of my hands. Protocol…all that.”

  She swallowed hard as she hadn’t anticipated that he’d wish to be on hand should his sister be brought round.

  “Well?” he asked.

  Rae nodded her acceptance of the terms. At whatever cost, she must get her hands on the hammer and nails from the first murder. If this were the only way, so be it, but she didn’t like it. The man’s emotions coming off him here and now in the confines of his office over his sister were supercharged. What would his emotional state be like in the presence of his sister’s killer, in that bizarre haunted trailer. Still, Rae did not relish going back there alone.

  Hatfield continued to give her arguments for being on hand, stating that she ought to have a man with some experience in medicine with her, and finishing with, “This way, too, the hammer and nails are not technically ever out of chain of custody of the ME’s office, so long as they remain in my presence.”

  It was an irrefutable fact. Only a fool argued against cold rational reasoning of that sort. “Right…right you are.” She feared that her nodding as she was now doing made her look like a bobbing plaster doll with a pair of vacuous stunned eyes, and that he must surely see through her pretense as he had her sexy outfit.

  The situation with Dr. Hatfield called for major bad karma somewhere down the line for Aurelia, and she knew it.

  Most certainly, it was not ideal to lie in such an instance, but she’d take the deal now, and worry about the consequences when they came.

  TWENTY SIX

  The drive to the trailer where Dr. Roland Hatfield’s sister had been brutally murdered was solemn, save for a few comments about the general state of the weather and poor funding Hatfield received from the state to do his work—a common complaint among ME’s everywhere—little else was said. She noticed a Marshall University sticker affixed to the SUV he drove, a car that had seen better days. The Marshall sticker had likely been pressed onto the dashboard when Roland was still at the university, else since the now famous movie made surrounding the university, We Are Marshall. For a brief time, Rae fantasized about the lead actor, Matthew Mcconaughey.

  “I wanted to kill that no account husband of hers,” Roland suddenly erupted. I mean…when I learned she’d been attacked.”

  “You immediately assumed he did it?”

  “I did…given their history together.” “Stormy, huh?”

  “Violent, very.”

  “But I understand he was cleared of all suspicion…had an airtight alibi.”

  “So the investigators say.”

  “You still have your suspicions?”

  “I do.”

  “What kind of work does the guy do?”

  “Works in WV Waste Management—collects garbage.”

  Rae’s heart skipped a beat. She’d seen the huge green trucks of the WV Waste Management from time to time here. They looked like something out of the Charlton Heston science fiction thriller Solent Green. “What color uniform do those guys wear?”

  “Green, why?”

  “Ahhh…nothing, just curious.” “You see green around this guy, the one you saw in the mirror?”

  “Yeah, that’s right, but colors can mean so many different things, you know.”

  “I still have my doubts about George Wayne Cottrill. Guy was a loser from the day he was born. He’s capable of this. Kills Marci, then creates this whole elaborate thing with the Sleepwalking nonsense. All a charade, a lie, to cover his tracks. Hell, even my clumsy assistant, Charles, suggested as much.”

  “Charles said that?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Imagine that. A guy kills out of passion, and to cover his tracks, he goes out and systematically, without a lick of passion, kills several other women to cover up his reasons for the first kill. You really think this guy Cottrill is capable of that?”

  “Maybe…maybe not. Bears thinking about. Read somewhere where most serial killers bear the middle name Wayne.”

  Urban legend, she thought and said, “And just how well do you know Charles?”

  “Sowards, Charles Grisham Sowards? My man at the lab?”

  “I never felt comfortable around him, and he sure acted uncomfortable around me.”

  “That’s beyond me. Charles didn’t know Marci.”

  And his middle name’s not Wayne, she thought, so he’s cleared. “Did he know of Marci…that she was your sister?” “Charles? No…not until her body came in, so far as I know.”

  “Did he know she was bleeding money from you?”

  Now Roland’s eyes bore a hole in her. It had been a wild-stab guess, but it’d obviously hit home, and since he’d said she was chemically dependent, and he ran a lab, she thought she’d take the stab.

  “He may’ve overheard me complain once or twice, perhaps. I dunno. Can’t say for certain one way or the other, really.”

  “Let’s keep an open mind. We’ll see what the evidence reveals through my touch.”

  They’d arrived at the trailer she’d so hoped not to have to return to, but she had little choice. Time ran relentlessly ahead of her and would soon be out, the hourglass then upended.

  # # #

  Miranda Waldron and her team hadn’t much to offer Rae Hiyakawa whose time in the field had been terminated for reasons no one seemed to understand, and if Raule did know he wasn’t sharing. All Miranda knew was that Rae had approximately fourteen hours left to demonstrate a breakthrough or she was off the case.

  As a result, Waldron had locked down her team. They’d all telephoned home to inform loved ones or anyone needing to know that they wouldn’t be coming home any time soon. Miranda had food and drink brought in, and she arranged for breaks—both bathroom and cigarette breaks for those needing either. Other than this, they were in speed mode, lock down, until they came up with something—anything—of use to Rae and the case. “Things’re dragging one, people. Dragging on, and Rae needs our help now!” she had repeated more times than she cared to recall.

  At first, the team squabbled and carried on like children, upset at the lock down, and upset at being given an impossible deadline along with the moo-goo-gipan, fried rice, eggrolls, and fortune cookies with tea. Miranda’s fortune read: The race is not always to the swift. It made her wonder if the fortune cookie companies had run out of sayings from the Orient as this was decidedly Old English.

  The entire team vented to Miranda. Once passed this flood of complaints, they’d settled in with the hot drinks and the finest of Black Floyd’s Super Chinese Mart. Waldron now looked over a sea of tired people whose areas remained littered with the leavings of a late dinner, chopsticks, plastic ware, little boxes, Styrofoam cups like miniature sentinels marking off each genius’s area of the table. These expert minds, she thought, were as children— completely territorial and self-defeating. Their sandbox just happened to be a boardroom table.

  For a time, Miranda wanted to throw her hands up and shout them all out of the boardroom. She’d already become hoarse to a whisper from attempts to pump up these deflated, typically inflated, egos.

  An assistant now came up to her with a megaphone and handed it to her. She felt like a bloody cheerleader. She was about to shout at her charges again when the giant plasma screen erupted into life, and all eyes went to the image of a woman awaking to hammer blows. “Rae’s transmitting again! Study the images clow…closely…clows-ly!” came the mechanical-sounding voice via the megaphone, cracking and fading at the end.

  “It looks like the Cottrill woman again,” said Singe Olnyx, shaken at the image.

  “Hatfield’s sister…again,” added Lee Madden. “Is this a repeat?”

  “Replay,” said another.

  “It’s called a rerun,” corrected another.

  “No, no,” said Miranda, studying the images. “This is far more de
fined,”

  A flash of light blinded them, and then it turned into a soft, mottled gray-green. They watched as a green shapeless blob of a man drove a nail into the victim’s head.

  “These images are coming live, now.” She checked her watch and it read 3AM. “Rae is seeing what you are seeing this moment,” Miranda called out. “She’s giving it her last chance…our last chance. I can share with you all know that Rae is being taken off the case and sent back to us, which means she has less than thirty eight hours. I know you’re all exhausted and half asleep, but please, give it all you’ve got, please!”

  The images of medical paraphernalia of all sorts began floating amid the green backdrop of labyrinths within labyrinths. Doors. A barrage of doors followed. Doors of every size, shape, and color. Shuttered windows. Windows with blinds. Windows boarded up. Mirrors. A barrage of mirrors floated in and out, some cracked, some spider-webbed. The images of moving people now. Shapes of people moving through a green-walled, divided world, a world of green cells and barred windows. A house with many rooms…but what kind of house?

  “It’s an asylum,” suggested Walter the shrink, excited. “A lunatic asylum. They always have green walls—keeps the patients at peace.”

  “Greenpeace,” commented Willeta Hiesing absently.

  “It could as well be a prison,” interjected Cable Gaston.

  “Prison, asylum?” mused Dr. Naomi Shulatte, the symbologist. “No, it is a hospital of some sort.”

  “A hospital asylum then,” replied Walter, sounding triumphant. “Replete with bars on the windows?”

  “The bars may mean something entirely different, but suppose the killer suffered at some point in his life in a hospital?” asked Miranda, spurring them on. “Or suppose he works for a hospital? Or in a setting like a hospital?”

  “Hospital personnel often wear green scrubs,” commented Maria Sendak, the historian.

  Rae’s voice came through now, saying the oddest words: “Rolly-polly-wholly-molly-polly rolly.”

  The team saw that the session with Rae was over; the images had abruptly stopped with her little rap tune. They were used to the sudden end of her transmissions and thought little of such endings.

  As usual, the images were run back and played over several more times, and each time with a stop here, and forward there, another closer look, everyone began to agree that the images most dominant were of people in hospital hallways and rooms. Green rooms.

  Earlier they’d gotten that Rae was suspicious of Detective Amos Kunati, and as a result a thorough background check had been done on Kunati, but it had turned up no evidence of violent behavior. However, it had shown him in and out of hospitals all his early childhood life. “Can there be a connection here, people?” Waldron had set aside the megaphone, relying now on her ailing voice alone.

  “What I wanna know is what the hell was that song Rae was singing about Jolly Rogers?”

  “No, no, it was Rolly polly something or other.” “God, we’re at a loss, all of us!” shouted Lee over the others.

  “We’re not giving up. Replay!” ordered Miranda and the Crawl screen came alive again with images moving from the horrific to the sublime.

  # # #

  Carl Orvison had gone in search of Dr. Hatfield, thinking that if he hadn’t been told of his sister’s being at peace by the psychic, that it was time Roland heard it from someone. But on arriving at the ME’s office, Orvison learned that Roland and the hammer and nails used to kill Marci Cottrill had gone off with none other than Dr. Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa to some remote location.

  “Do you know where, precisely, they’ve gone?” he asked Hatfield’s assistant, Charles.

  “He didn’t say.” Sowards grunted. “Just told me what I told you.”

  Orvison studied Charles’s cadaverous features for any sign of guile but saw none. “All right, thanks.” He then rushed out, and as he did so, he grabbed up his ringing cell phone. A pressing problem had arisen at higher levels, and the governor wanted him to come running, a thing he was tiring of nowadays. Still, he must do so, and he must put aside any hope of locating Hatfield and Hiyakawa at this time.

  Now it’d become extremely late, 3AM in fact, and with the little matter of the governor’s immediate problem handled (his sister-in-law had been arrested for possession of meth amphetamines), Amos had come to a conclusion as to where Hiyakawa and ME Hatfield, his old friend, had got off to. What had been the center of Dr. Hiyakawa’s focus on the case, and desperate, running out of time, she’d likely return there.

  He had learned that the pair had taken items from the forensics lab lockup—the hammer and nails that’d killed Marci Cottrill. Carl had not known her well, only the occasional crumbs he picked up from Roland, who was typically angry with her. He and Roland had shared the pain of many an awful crime scene together, and drinks afterward, but none so horrible as at his sister’s ramshackle home. Roland had broken down at the scene, unable to continue. They’d made short work of the scene, and his assistant, Charlie Sowards did most of the collection while Roland remained outside.

  Carl didn’t know a great deal about Roland other than on the job, but he had thought them close enough that the other man would’ve contacted him before running off with Dr. Hiyakawa without leaving any word as to their destination.

  He still had Amos Kunati’s number on speed dial. He rang him.

  Kunati cursed into the phone before asking, “Carl, what in hell is it can’t wait at this hour? You drunk or something?”

  “I’m putting a stop to the psychic thing, Amos,” he confided. “Gave that woman forty eight hours yesterday, and her time is soon up.”

  “Why’re you telling me this, Carl?” “Thought you’d like to know, and Amos, there’s no reason we can’t remain amiable, is there?”

  “Good for you, Carl, getting rid of that female shaman, but at this hour, what can I do for you? Have you been drinking?” Kunati repeated, half expecting the man to begin to blubber and beg for him to return to the CPD.

  Instead, Orvison calmly said, “Meet me back out at the Cottrill trailer.”

  “Why?”

  “I have a feeling that Hiyakawa somehow convinced Roland Hatfield to go out there with her.”

  “So what?” Orvison could imagine the young black man’s shrug.

  “She’s drawing at straws, Amos, but now she’s dragged Roland in on it with her, and I may need your help to bring this thing to a close, now, tonight.”

  “Whataya mean, dragged Roland in on it? In on what? Another séance?”

  “He’s taken the murder weapon out there with him.”

  Amos’s silence said he had to think this over. “She’s doing a reading from the hammer and the nails?”

  “My guess, yes.”

  “Roland’s staying with the evidence in possession,” replied Amos, sniffling as if needing to blow his nose. “Smartest thing he could do.”

  “Not so smart. Allowing Hiyakawa to talk him into this.”

  “What do you propose to do about it?”

  “Raid the damn trailer and see to it that evidence is placed back in custody, and this time a proper lock up— mine, not Roland’s. Can I count on you for help?”

  “You’ve got a squad room full of guys to help you if all you need is muscle.”

  “I need you for this, Amos, you.”

  After a slight hesitation, Kunati relented. “I’ll meet you there, damn.”

  “Good…good, Amos, and thanks. I know you don’t take orders from me anymore, so thanks. Consider this a request from a friend.”

  “A request, got it.”

  TWENTY SEVEN

  3AM, Inside the Haunted Trailer

  Inside the trailer and inside Aurelia’s head, Rae had seen the same images as those floated via satellite to Quantico, and a curious dread had come over her, something she was not prepared to acknowledge as imminent danger, but damned close to it. Roland had stood nearby, watching as she took hammer and nails in hand from his reluc
tant fingers. She reclined on the exact same kill sight as before, on Marci’s deathbed with these items clenched in her hands, ostensibly ‘reading’ the hard wood handle, the claw and anvil, and each nail in turn—six in all.

  She saw a replay of that night with but a few added details, helped along by her clenching the murder weapon, holding it against her chest while in trance. She saw a hand reach out to her, a watch and a ring—both expensivelooking items. Then she had an overwhelming sense that Marci did indeed know her killer. She knew his presence, his essence, and then she screamed out a strange phrase— Rolly-polly, no!”