by Hadena James
“I’ve heard you are eccentric, but hanging up on me while I talked to your team leader was unexpected,” the voice on the other end of the line had a Bostonian accent. It was rich and cultured, reminding me of speeches I’d heard from the Kennedy’s during high school history classes.
“Sir, it wasn’t,” I started.
“I am aware that Marshal Hendricks was not responsible for hanging up on me. Special Agent Blake informed me that you had a pet-peeve about phones during meal times,” he paused and I didn’t know whether to say something or not, so I held my tongue. “My wife has the same rule. Usually, it only applies to our children, but she has given me looks when my work phone has rang during meals. This means I understand how important you consider meal times with your team and I admire that. Since you aren’t working a case, we’ll ignore it this time. But if you ever do that while working, you can bet your ass that I will become your worst enemy.”
“Thank you, sir,” I handed the phone back quickly to Gabriel. The urge to argue that there was no way the director of the US Marshals could become my worst enemy was boiling below the surface. I had enemies. Most of them were a whole lot scarier than the director.
Gabriel said a few things and hung up the phone. He set it down between Xavier and himself. For several minutes, he said nothing. He stared at his sandwich, waiting for his own temper to settle down before jumping my case.
“You are so lucky,” Gabriel finally spoke. A wide smile appeared on his face. “And somehow, managed to keep my ass out of the sling. I’m guessing this is partially Malachi’s doing, so I’ll thank him later.”
“Good plan,” I unwrapped the sub and began eating again.
“After lunch, we head to the house where you grew up,” Xavier said.
“John isn’t feeling well, so he can stay here and sleep,” Gabriel informed me.
“Ill?” I raised an eyebrow. I had a flash of something, remembering Michael who seemed constantly on the mend from some injury or illness. Inexplicably, Michael seemed more important now that he was dead. I found myself thinking of him more often than I had when he was alive. I didn’t know how to explain this, so I ignored it.
“Sleep deprivation,” Xavier clarified. “It would appear the Secret Service kept more stable hours than us.”
I shrugged. We’d been up about thirty hours when we went head on with our Amish serial killer. It had taken us another eight to get away from the Marshals’ office in Pittsburgh and get to our hotel in Columbia. It probably did require some getting used to, unless you just didn’t really sleep much to begin with.
“I’m stuffed,” I pushed back from the table. A stray mushroom was all that remained in the foil. I debated picking it up and eating it. A mushroom was a terrible thing to waste, a mushroom with cheese stuck to it was even worse. Eating it would probably mean that my pants wouldn’t want to button. Not eating it would be wasting food. I snatched it up and tossed it into my mouth. I chewed quickly, resolved to eat it before I exploded like Mr. Creosote from The Meaning of Life.
“Then go get dressed, we have places to go,” Xavier took another bite. I was stuck. I went and got dressed.
Four
Being in my hometown didn’t create feelings of nostalgia. I’d grown up in Columbia, but I had also been kidnapped once and nearly killed several times. Despite these incidents, the city had rather low crime figures. For me, it had always seemed like crime came in waves. There’d be a serial killer or something and it would rage for a year or so, then it would go back to simple, petty crimes. Then the rate would soar again as another violent criminal went on the loose.
I jumped on the highway and headed south. The roads were mostly clear, a sprinkling of snow and ice had been blackened by cinders and road salts. Driving there was easy, I remembered the address and the location. It didn’t matter that things had changed in the last twelve years or so.
The SUV turned into the subdivision. Gabriel sat next to me. Xavier was straining against the seatbelt in the back to get a better view.
The subdivision was like a thousand others. It was too old to be made of cookie cutter houses, but that was its only distinguishing feature. The houses had once been considered spacious and the neighborhood swanky, inhabited by the wealthy. However, that had been long before I was born. The wealthy had moved on to better areas, leaving this one to the working classes.
I turned onto a side road and stopped next to the curb. Across the road was a one-story ranch-style house with a brick front, a one car garage and a front yard only slightly bigger than a postcard. The snow in the front yard was untouched. The drive had been shoveled. I frowned at it.
“Is this the childhood home of the infamous Aislinn Cain?” Xavier had slipped out of his seat belt.
“It is,” I frowned harder.
I wasn’t a big fan of change. The house had definitely changed though. Light blue vinyl trim had been put on the sides, replacing the muted pink clapboard siding that had been on it when I was young. The shutters were now painted a dark brown. They had been burgundy. The snow wasn’t deep enough to hide the missing brick-ringed flowerbeds that my mother had created and cultivated. My brother’s basketball hoop was gone from over the garage door. A feat to be sure since my father had not only screwed it in with about a hundred screws, but then siliconed it to make sure that it couldn’t break loose if one of us decided to be stupid and hang from it.
“We should go,” I said. “We look like stalkers.”
“We look like cops,” Gabriel told me. “Weird cops, but cops all the same.”
“Knowing Ace’s luck, the house is probably a meth lab now and they are currently arming themselves for a full on assault,” Xavier gave one of his inappropriate giggles.
“Or that,” Gabriel agreed. I started the car and turned around. Half way down the block, I stopped again. My attention drawn above the road. My frown deepened and I could feel it tugging at my ears. I tried to relax my face and failed.
“What?” Xavier asked.
“I’ve seen tennis shoes thrown over power lines before, but never socks,” I told him, slipping the car into park and getting out. I heard the other doors of the SUV open and shut. The three of us stood in the cold in front of the running vehicle and stared up.
“There’s something in them,” Gabriel said.
“Yeah and it’s foot shaped,” Xavier sounded weird. I looked at him. He was frowning. A faint scent caught my nose, like frozen meat being taken out of the freezer.
“What’s the temp?” I asked.
“What?” Both men said in unison, turning to look at me. I meet their gaze and held it.
“What is the temperature?” I said the words slowly.
“About forty,” Xavier answered. “Why?”
“I smell,” I shrugged. It was hard to explain what meat smelled like when it thawed. It was slightly greasy smelling. “I smell...” I shrugged.
“You smell what?” Gabriel prodded.
“Meat,” I finally answered. “I smell meat, like someone took a roast out of the freezer to let thaw. It’s sort of a sickly, greasy smell.”
“Great,” Xavier said. “You know, you could pretend you don’t have a super nose and we could just drive on, go back to Kansas City.”
“I don’t have a super nose,” I informed him.
“You can smell decay better than a vulture,” Gabriel quipped. “We all have to shower after sex or risk you making a comment about it because you can smell it on us.”
“That sounds creepy,” I told him. “I have never done that.”
“It is creepy,” Xavier answered. “And you have done it. Hell, sometimes showering doesn’t even work.”
“Try using soap,” I retorted. “Everyone can smell sex.”
“No, Ace, they can’t. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you,” Xavier said. “It took us a while to figure out how you knew, then you commented about something none of us could smell one time. We put the pieces together after that and agr
eed to shower from then on.”
“Ok, fine, I have weird olfactory abilities. I still smell meat. It’s very faint. So, either something is dead and starting to thaw in a front yard nearby or those feet shaped things in those socks are probably feet.”
“You’re call, Gabriel. We can get in the SUV and drive back to the hotel or we can call the police and fire department and get someone down here to investigate Ace’s nose.” Xavier wrapped his arms around himself.
“Why would someone tie up feet in socks and throw them over a power line?” I asked.
“Because the world is full of sick and twisted people,” Gabriel was digging for his cell phone.
“No, that’s extreme, even for a world of sick and twisted people. They will freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw, in a cycle that will slow decomp while terrorizing the people of the neighborhood because there are weird things hanging from a power line. In a few weeks, they’ll have a break from the cold that lasts more than a few days and the decay smell will spread like fires in a dry corn field.” Something nagged at me. I ignored it.
“We have people coming to investigate,” Gabriel hung up the phone. “We should block off the street and wait for them in the SUV.”
“I’ll wait in the SUV,” I didn’t wait for a reply. I turned and walked back to the warmth of the running vehicle. Perhaps the neighborhood hadn’t changed all that much. We’d never found a pair of feet hanging from a utility line, but we had lived a few blocks from a serial killer. The nagging became more intense. The memory associated with it appeared to be missing. There was just the nagging sense that I knew something about the feet on the wire.
Sirens became louder. A fire truck responded first. Gabriel talked to the men as they climbed from the massive red truck that flashed and made too much noise. A handful of squad cars pulled up within seconds of the fire truck. That was unexpected. Socks on a line didn’t require multiple squad cars. A final car pulled up. This one was unmarked and two men, wearing suits, stepped out. One was older, greying with a paunch that was beginning to make his waistband disappear. The other was younger, his face didn’t have the lines and marks that the older man’s had. They had to be detectives. This meant that this wasn’t the first time they had found feet in socks thrown over a wire.
The older man looked vaguely familiar. I searched the database in my brain for names and faces but came up blank. Gabriel motioned to me. Reluctantly, I exited the vehicle as if walking towards a guillotine ready for use.
“Aislinn Cain, my you’ve really grown up,” the older detective said to me.
“This is Aislinn Cain?” The younger man asked. “The Aislinn Cain?”
“It’s just Aislinn Cain, no ‘the’ required,” I informed the younger man. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember you.”
“It’s been a long time,” the older man said. “I started the force with your dad. He was a good man. I helped work your disappearance. I was actually one of the officers that interviewed Callow when we did the door to door search.”
“My apologies, but I don’t remember much from that,” I lied.
“Oh, yeah, sorry,” the older man looked embarrassed. “Detective Troy Russell.” He extended his hand out for shaking. I squashed the repulsion it brought on and shook his hand. He’d known my father, I could at least show him some courtesy. Gabriel looked like he’d been bitten by a plague-carrying prairie dog. “It appears that you’ve stumbled into a hornet’s nest.”
“How so?” I asked.
“This is the sixth set of socks we’ve found. They always contain a pair of feet,” Detective Russell informed me. His partner scowled. Russell ignored him.
“Xavier, this is all your fault,” I informed my cohort.
“How is it my fault?” Xavier protested.
“You wanted to see where I grew up.” I didn’t add the duh that formed at the end of the sentence. “We didn’t find a meth lab, we found a serial killer. So, thank you, thank you so very much.”
“Who said anything about a serial killer?” The younger partner asked. The quickest flash of a smile appeared on Russell’s face. If I hadn’t been watching him, I might have missed it.
“The Aislinn Cain grew up to work the US Marshals Serial Crimes Tracking Unit,” Russell told him. “If you need an expert on serial killers, you’re looking at them.” Russell had a moment when he looked confused. “However, I thought there were more of you.”
“We’re a five-person unit,” Gabriel confirmed. “But one is recovering from injuries sustained on another case, the other is jet-lagged. Since we didn’t intend to find a serial killer looking at Ace’s old house, we left him at the hotel to sleep.”
“Which house used to be yours?” The younger man asked.
“The pink one,” I stopped. “No, it’s blue now.” I corrected myself.
“You grew up in a pink house?” Xavier raised an eyebrow.
“It was a dusty pink, not hot pink and back then, it was kind of cool.” I answered.
“It was never cool,” Xavier informed me.
Searching
Patterson Clachan was here on personal business to see his sister. He wanted his knife back. He wanted his life back. She’d been trying to act like his puppeteer for far too long. It was time she learned her place.
Of course, he’d lost all semblance of a normal life years ago. He couldn’t get it back, but he could get revenge. All those years ago, Gertrude had tried to convince him to take the boy and raise him as his own. He had his own children to think about and when she’d failed to manage talking him into it, she’d turned his wife against him. He’d never forgiven his sister.
The fight that night about the young bastard child that belonged to his sister. It had raged into the night. Lila had been all for taking the child in, raising him with their own children, doing what was best for him. Gertrude and Lee couldn’t provide for him, especially with the amputated foot. The following day, after lunch, while the children were all at school, the fight had resumed. Lila had even hinted that the accident had been his fault.
It was his fault, but it wasn’t an accident. He’d tried to explain his reasons to her, but she’d been so damned stubborn and then, Gertrude had called. Lila and her had talked for a while and when they hung up, Lila laid into him like never before. The normally respectful woman he’d married had been replaced by a harpie of his sister’s creating.
In the beginning, he hadn’t meant to kill her. It had just happened. They’d been fighting in the kitchen and he’d grabbed the knife. Next thing he knew, he was chasing Lila around the house.
This led to his children being raised by his brother, Fritz who was better known by the nickname, Chub. The only good thing was that they hadn’t gone to live with Gertrude and her horrid son.
August had been damaged from birth. He could see that. He’d caught the toddler masturbating over a dead chicken. A few days later, the family dog had gone missing and August had been found covered in its blood. At the time, he couldn’t think of anything else to do, he’d tried to feed August to the hogs. He hadn’t planned on Lee being within ear shot. He’d had to kill the hog and save the boy.
That led up to the incident with Lila only a week later. He’d been living under assumed names ever since. He didn’t mind so much. He did miss his family, but he watched his granddaughters from afar and tried to keep them safe. Not that either needed much guardian angel bullshit, they were tough as nails those two, able to take care of themselves.
Now, one of them was in town, looking into the murders of her deranged cousin and didn’t know it. He tried to warn her off, but the message was intercepted by someone on her team named John. He’d tried to tell her it was August Clachan doing the killings, but that was also foiled by the 911 dispatcher. After all, August Clachan was listed as dead.
Since, his granddaughter, Aislinn Cain, was working the case of a voraphiliac, he felt the need to stick around. If he could find the location of August’s lair, he’d kill him and save her th
e trouble.
So, he sat in a cold car in January, waiting for his sister to slip up and lead the way to the bastard son whom she was protecting.
As the hours slipped by, memories fluttered in and out of his mind. It wasn’t Gertrude’s fault that she and Nina had been raped. It had been Lee’s. Lee was supposed to have been there, escorting them to that stupid party where someone had been spiking drinks with LSD. He’d found the host a few months after the party and slit him like the pig he was, after he confessed to being the one dosing the women.
Nearly forty years had passed before he’d had a chance to kill the son of a bitch that had fathered the monster. And that had been pure luck, thanks mostly in part to his granddaughter Aislinn and her friendship with Malachi Blake. The moment he laid eyes on Malachi Blake, he knew someone in that family was responsible for creating August Clachan. They each had deep green eyes, greener and darker than any prized emerald. So green, they nearly glowed in the dark. After that, it had just been a process of elimination.
Elimination had led to Tennyson Unger, Malachi Blake’s maternal grandfather. The old man had died an undignified death. Begging and pleading for forgiveness, willing to do whatever to make up for creating August. However, the only redemption was death and they had both known it. He’d broken Tennyson’s legs and let the mongrel dog that Tennyson abused have at it. It was poetic, considering August liked to watch people be eaten alive.
He’d meant to go after August a few years ago, after finding out he’d faked his own death. However, Aislinn had kept him hopping. Her night time visitors were a pain in the ass. Then she’d joined the Marshals and it was even harder to keep track of her. Years ago, he’d managed to get a GPS tracker and install it in her Charger, but she rarely drove it, so it was nearly pointless.
With Patterson’s grandchildren, there was always something. He’d been quietly hiding in the house of a killer when Eric had climbed on top of a building and started shooting people. While he was proud of his grandson’s ambition, if he’d just waited a few hours, Patterson would have taken care of the miscarriage of justice. His plan had been to wait for the family to come home and go to sleep, then he was going to kill everyone quickly except the actual man that had brutally murdered his granddaughter and son. He’d planned a slow, agonizing death for him. But Eric had beaten him to the job, putting a bullet in his head instead. The death had been too quick for Patterson’s taste.
