Dreams and Reality Set 3: Cannibal Dreams and Butchered Dreams

by Hadena James

  “What type of iPhone?”

  “Um, I do not know. It’s got a screen and a case on it.”

  “Is it an iPhone 4 or 5?”

  “How do I find out?”

  “What size is the hole for the charger?” She sighed.

  “Small,” I answered.

  “I’ll do this, but it’s going to cost you.”

  “Great, I have money here,” I told her. She hung up on me and I wondered if I really did have money here. I pressed the “call button” on my bed. Kelsey the Bubbly responded very quickly, within seconds. I’d never had a dedicated nurse. I wondered what this was costing someone. I knew the hospital wasn’t paying for it out of the kindness of their hearts.

  “What do you need?” She asked, smiling. She practically radiated positive energy and sunshine.

  “I need my wallet.” I told her. My phone beeped and died on the bed next to me. “I have someone bringing me a charger for my phone and some puzzle books so I do not go insane thinking about myself.”

  “Why would thinking about yourself make you go insane?”

  “I do not do well when I have downtime. I tend to do a lot of soul searching and it is not pretty.”

  “You don’t seem so bad to me,” Kelsey said.

  “I nearly ripped a guy’s jaw off and broke my hand beating him with a chain.”

  “Yeah, but he deserved it and he was really high, I doubt he even noticed.”

  “Nothing gets to you, does it?”

  “Not really,” Kelsey pulled out a plastic bag from somewhere mystical. Inside were my clothes, including my wallet. “You know, we sell phone chargers and puzzle books in the gift shop.”

  “I know, but my wallboard says I cannot leave the room.”

  “True, but if you had called me, we could have called the gift shop and charged the items and I could have gone down, gotten them and brought them back up to you.”

  “Well hell,” I groaned. “Instead, I’m getting another visitor.”

  “Who’d you call?” Kelsey handed me the bag and I dug through it getting my wallet. I did have cash.

  “My aunt. She is not real happy about coming to see me.”

  “Why would your aunt not be happy to see you?”

  “Her husband shot me a week or so ago and was arrested as a result. He was an evil minion of my great aunt who was arrested for helping her son cover up the fact that he was a serial killer who had faked his own death.”

  “I know, I read the papers.” Kelsey looked at me strangely for a moment. “And watch the news. I’m guessing she doesn’t like you enough to bring you Arby’s.”

  “If she brought me Arby’s, she’d make sure it had arsenic in it first, but it’s the only phone number I can remember.” I didn’t tell her why I could remember it.

  “Hey, Ms. Cain,” Kelsey gave me that strange look again.

  “It’s Aislinn or Ace,” I responded then looked at my Demerol drip again. How much of this shit were they pumping into me? I never told anyone to call me Ace.

  “Ok, Aislinn,” Kelsey averted her eyes. “I want to thank you. Because of you, I’m a happy person.”

  “That’s strange,” I told her, raising my eyebrow and frowning.

  “My family knew Mark Callow. He worked with my dad. He abducted my sister, Kari, after a workplace, family oriented picnic thing. I didn’t know it then, I had to look it up later, but he did have a type. You and my sister both fit it. But, if you hadn’t killed him, it would have been me. It would have been my other sister, too. He could have killed for years without detection and my parents would have been devastated by the loss of all three daughters. I was only a year younger than Kari. My sister Karen is two years younger than me. So, thank you for getting justice for Kari and saving my sister Karen and me from a similar fate.”

  “Um, you are welcome,” I said hesitantly. Callow had come before the serial killer laws were enacted and before the concept for The Fortress was even thought about. He would have ended up in a plain old prison, which would have served him right. Although, while The Fortress was good for holding serial killers and channeling their intelligent behaviors, it suffered the same problem as other prisons, the inmates did not like pedophiles. Most pedophiliac serial killers were being sent to a converted facility while they built a second prison like The Fortress, to house those sorts of killers. Their life expectancy, even within the confines of The Fortress, wasn’t long. August would end up in the new one, eventually, if he lived that long.

  Twenty-One

  My wallet contained a $20 and two $100 bills. My aunt laid claim to both of the hundreds as she dropped off two puzzle books, a package of ink pens and a cheap iPhone charger that was definitely not a genuine Apple product. I didn’t complain, she had never liked me. For some reason, it was one of the few phone numbers I had memorized.

  Malachi’s visit was just as short. He handed me a bag from Sonic, not Arby’s and a manila folder that was stuffed with materials. He promised to return after they got done with whatever they were doing.

  I didn’t press him for information. Theoretically, I was getting out tomorrow. He’d have to catch me up on everything at that time.

  The Sonic wasn’t Arby’s. It was good, but I had my heart set on an Arby’s Philly cheesesteak. Kelsey came in while I ate and made small talk. I wasn’t really sure what to say to her at this point. It amazed me that she could have this sunny disposition after losing a sister to the brutality of Callow.

  She left, taking my trash with her and replacing my empty soda with a fresh can. My agitation had lessened. I couldn’t be mean to her knowing that Callow had touched her life as well. When I left Columbia this time, I hoped not to return for a while. Shakespeare’s would ship frozen cheese pizzas all over the country, I’d have to make do with those.

  My attention went to the folder. I didn’t know what goodies were inside of it yet. However, a stamp on the back side told me it was from our forensics team. I opened the file.

  When opening a file folder, the first thing you should see is a piece of paper with typing and hand scribbled notes. In this case, it was a vivid photo of James Okafor’s body on his bed, beaten to a bloody pulp. The next forty items were more photos. I moved past these quickly, deciding I didn’t really want to look at them again.

  After some searching, I found the report summary on James Okafor’s murder. Cause of death was multiple blows from a small, blunt, heavy object, in other words, blunt force trauma. The forensics team had even gone so far as to draw an interpretation of what had caused the blunt force trauma. It was a small rectangle, roughly two inches long, tapering towards the top. There was a second piece of vital information. While the majority of the blows had been landed this rectangular object, some had been created by a second object and it had left a different impression in the skull. They had cast the impression and taken a photo of it. It was a face, the face of a Green Man.

  The Green Men are basically a nature symbol. It is the face of a man, sometimes made out of leaves, sometimes with leaves surrounding it. There are depictions of Green Men growing branches or vines from different parts of their face or from behind their head.

  Green Men are found in many cultures. However, most modern depictions are based on the Celtic symbol. My house was filled with them, Trevor had carved them into my bed and into my table and chair set. I found the Green Man unsettling. My personal fascination with Green Men had begun when I was a kid. There had been a book on Celtic myths in my house. The fairies had been interesting. The dragons had been dragons. But the Green Men had piqued my interest and captured my attention. I still didn’t understand why.

  The idea that Patterson had a Green Man on something heavy enough to leave an impression on bone, gave me pause. Did he know of my fascination? If so, why did he have such a thing in his possession? Did he have an obsession with Green Men as well? What did that say about me? The next line of the report summary captured me. It stated that the scientists were fairly certain that
the flat end was the rear of the cane handle and the Green Man was on the front of the handle. I had imagined the cane to have the standard rounded handle, not the bar-style handle that could be decorated at the front and back to show off to people.

  Traces of carbon steel and titanium had been found in the wounds. That explained the weight and durability of the cane head, but it didn’t explain why the cane itself hadn’t broken. They found no other particulates within the wounds that could not be explained away as dust.

  They also hadn’t found a rifle. Not finding a rifle was problematic. If he was indeed our sniper, why didn’t he have the rifle? They found bullets for the rifle. I decided to come back to the missing firearm.

  Someone had interviewed Nick the Bomber. Nick knew James Okafor. Nick had worked with a guy named George, who was in fact, our third victim. George had been friends with James. They had both been in his house on multiple occasions. This strengthened the idea that James Okafor was the sniper, but the missing gun was a problem.

  The final piece of information was that James was here on an asylum visa. His friend, George was as well. There was no information about why they were being granted asylum, but their home country was listed as Zaire. Only Zaire had failed to exist as a country in 1997 and had officially been renamed to The Democratic Republic of Congo. We already suspected that James and George had been involved with the Congolese death squads, but why they had been granted asylum was an interesting question. It was also way above my pay grade. I could bug every official on the planet and never get an answer. There were two options, I could obsess about this missing information that was likely to be completely pointless, or I could get hung up on it and miss the important things. I filed it away for later contemplation.

  The next report summary was about George. George hadn’t been beaten to death. He’d been gutted, in more common Patterson fashion. There was no information regarding why George had been a target, unless he had just picked the wrong people to be friends with. However, in this day and age, it was hard to know who was normal and who was a serial killer. Holding that against a person would result in a whole lot of dead people.

  George’s death had been much faster. He’d died after only a few minutes, the report stated that he had been slit from stem to sternum and that his liver was the first thing to have been removed. While a person could live for a while without a liver, the shock of having it ripped from your body while you bled profusely from being cutting open would lead to a quick death.

  He’d died only an hour after James Okafor. It had been bloody. They’d found biological material in the shower and a set of men’s clothing that didn’t belong to George in his bathroom. That sounded like Patterson. It was also the end of the report. Part of me wondered how many sets of clothes Patterson went through in a year, since he seemed to like to discard of them at crime scenes.

  The third summary was about the FBI agent. They’d found traces of blood and vaginal fluid on his body. Considering his wife was two-hundred miles away, I was guessing neither was hers. That raised questions for me. My impression was that Patterson had been intent on killing at least one of the agents and this guy had made himself the primary target. Blood, vaginal fluid, and no wife screamed prostitute. Going with my gut, I was willing to bet he was beating up a prostitute and Patterson walked in to save the day.

  This gave me an idea. I texted Malachi asking to put out a request for information from prostitutes in St. Charles that might have encountered our FBI agent. If I was right, she might be able to give a better description of Patterson or she may be totally useless, but I had found prostitutes to be fairly good at remembering physical details of a person. I chalked it up to being part of their job.

  This might seem like a strange assumption, but when a person really started thinking about it, it made sense. Prostitutes were really good at knowing there was a serial killer at work long before anyone else, if they were targeting prostitutes. They shared information about abusive clients and clients that were just too weird to be trusted. They had to be able to provide descriptions of the client, their normal mode of transportation and on more than one occasion, the SCTU had discovered they could also remember license plate numbers.

  Like George, the FBI agent had been cut up. His hands were removed, lending more credence to my abuse theory. His thighs had been shredded with a blade. Some cuts had been made to the chest deep enough to show his ribs through them. Cause of death was blood loss. This seemed about right, given his injuries. The real evidence that it was a Patterson kill were the missing eyes and there were clothes on the bathroom floor that didn’t belong to the dead agent.

  The final report was on the mugger. He was killed by two blows to the head. Both bore the emblem of the Green Man, imprinted on the bone. His death had been the quickest yet. He had no other damage except the removal of his eyes and the stab wound going through his chin.

  Closing the folder, I leaned back against the bed. I still didn’t know what Malachi and Rollins were doing. I had a feeling they were dealing with a dead body. The curiosity of whose dead body was almost overwhelming.

  Normally an unknown dead body killed by The Butcher would be rather consuming. At the moment though, another thought was worming its way into my brain. The cane. How many old men walked around with decorative canes? I tried to recall the last time I had been to a grocery store and how many people there had used canes. There were a few, to be sure, but they hadn’t been ornate, they had been functional. Standard metal shaft with rubber on the head and foot. Some even had four feet. None of them had wooden shafts or metal grips.

  Yet, my great uncle Virgil had been using a cane with a wooden shaft and metal handle. His hands had covered the front of it, even while he walked, but I had noticed grooves etched into the metal.

  My mind latched onto the movie The Usual Suspects. It replayed the scene of Verbal Kint, walking out of the police station, unfolding his crippled hand and leg, changing the way he stood, the way he walked, even the way he held his cigarette. In those few seconds, he’d gone from being Verbal Kint to Keyser Söze.

  The details were still fuzzy, but like Verbal Kint’s transformation into Keyser Söze, Virgil Clachan and Patterson Clachan were one in the same. My gut told me that Virgil had died, probably before Patterson grew into adulthood and Patterson, returning from war, and worried about his urges, had created a new Virgil. A Virgil that could commit murder and disappear, like mist on a lake. However, things had gone awry when Patterson had killed his wife and he’d become Virgil Clachan full time.

  Now, I had two tasks. The first was easy, find out everything I could about Virgil Clachan. The second was not, remember what the old man had looked like and start removing the bits of him that were a disguise. Patterson wasn’t bald and he didn’t have blue eyes. If these features were fake, I was sure there were more.

  Twenty-Two

  “Patterson is Keyser Söze,” I told Malachi and Rollins as they arrived to pick me up from the hospital. Kelsey the Bubbly bounced around the room, collecting my things and telling everyone what a good patient I was. Since I was many things, good patient not among them, I figured it was because she was one of the few truly good people that always saw the silver lining and believed in fairies. Of course, believing in fairies wasn’t actually a bad thing, if a few more people believed in fairies, we would probably have fewer serial killers. It was a great example of chaos theory in action.

  “What?” Rollins asked.

  “Keyser,” I started.

  “For those that don’t speak Aislinn Cain,” Malachi interrupted, “it’s from the movie The Usual Suspects. Kevin Spacey plays a criminal named Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint and tells this huge story about how a group of criminals were lured to LA to do some dirty work for a madman named Keyser Söze. The entire time, everyone is trying to convince him the madman is a myth, then when Spacey leaves the police station, you discover that he is actually Söze. So, who is Patterson ‘Verbal Kint’?” Malachi asked.
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  “Virgil Clachan,” I answered. “I have not worked out all the details, but it makes sense.”

  “The descriptions are similar, but they aren’t a match,” Rollins reminded me.

  “That’s because the best disguises are not particularly elaborate, especially when assuming a whole new identity. Remove the wig and the colored contacts and you have a man with lush black hair and brown eyes. Stop limping and you have a man that carries a cane for effect, not need. It is pretty ingenious. He could easily pass as one of the brothers. Only one went bald, but several of them have the light blue eyes and having a limp or stoop at his age is not going to be questioned, just accepted. If it was not for that damn cane, I would not have figured it out.” I told Rollins.

  “The cane?” Rollins frowned.

  “We’ve established that Patterson Clachan carries one for effect, not need. If you’re going to carry a cane, but not need it, you do not want one of those modern metallic doohickeys. You want something that is ornate, beautiful, and attractive. Virgil Clachan theoretically needs the cane, but he does not carry one of those metal ones, he carries one that is beautiful and ornate, something to be admired. A hundred years ago, it would not have been given a second look, but now, you do not see many ornate, functional canes. They have the metal body and rubber no-slip grips.” I said excitedly, leaving the room and waving good-bye to Kelsey the Bubbly. She waved back.

  “Did you two bond?” Malachi asked.

  “Her sister was a victim of Callow. She’s fairly normal, a little too happy and optimistic, but I cannot help feeling something for her. I do not know that I would call it bonding, but we had a common foe that I vanquished, and it means something to both of us.” I shrugged.

  “So, you bonded,” Malachi replied.

  “Sure,” I sounded less confident in his assessment of the situation. Any time I met someone touched by Callow, I had a feeling I couldn’t explain, but it made me determined to like the person, regardless of how much their personality was in direct conflict with my own.