by Hadena James
Paramedics finally arrived. The police arrived about a minute later. Not that they mattered much, since most of the US Marshals building had emptied onto the street. They were surprisingly attempting to create some kind of crowd control. This was not normally the job of a US Marshal. Marshals tended to kick down doors or guard things.
“Hand,” Xavier said to me. I lifted it, showing him the exposed bones. He gently grabbed my wrist and began to examine my hand. I finally let myself look at the crowd. As expected, cell phones were pervasive. They were recording our every move. Onlookers that were still trying to get the action were holding them over the heads of US Marshals. A few people looked truly shocked. One had fainted, possibly because of the blood. “It doesn’t look broken, but you broke his cheek, so you had to break a bone or two in your hand doing it.”
“Why do I have to have broken my hand?” I asked.
“Creepy Cain.” Xavier frowned at me. “You broke something because the cheekbone and that baton are both harder than your fingers.”
“I have good bones,” I responded.
“It is physically impossible that you didn’t at least get some boxer fractures,” Xavier pointed at my finger, “or dislocate some of them.” My ring finger made a strange, almost 90-degree turn at the top knuckle.
“I hate hospitals.”
“They hate you back,” Xavier pointed to the van. “At least we have priority service. Get inside the van and let’s get you to the hospital so that this crowd will disperse and life can go back to some form of normalcy.”
“Did you notice the Russian with the mob tattoo?” I asked.
“No, I was too busy focusing on the guy with an ear brand that might be responsible for the rapes and murders of more than thirty women,” Xavier snipped. “Now get in the damn van.”
Eleven
All of my fingers were taped together with metal splints covering them. I had fractured all of them. The ER doctor had offered painkillers, but I had declined. Xavier had said if I needed them later, he’d write me a script. The doctor had accepted that, but hadn’t been happy about it. His face had blanched and then turned red when Xavier tried to stick me in an MRI machine only a few seconds later. It seemed that patients that needed them occupied all the MRIs. I hadn’t hit my head, so I was not a priority for the machines. I was fine with that. He’d be better off drawing blood anyway and I told him as much.
The ER doctor had huffed off while Xavier began searching for the procedures to get a phlebotomist into the room. In the end, he had a brown haired woman with an irritated expression draw six vials of my vital fluid. Not that the amount mattered, I had plenty of red blood cells to go around. Even being down a pint or two didn’t slow me down, because I still had tons of them to carry oxygen around. He gave her the information on where to send it for testing. She rolled her eyes but did it. My blood went to a special place for analysis. They were looking for something in it that might be useful, or at least, informative. Every ER visit, test, x-ray, MRI, PET scan, CT scan, and doctor’s checkup went there too. Xavier was attempting to build a biological profile of me. Even my DNA and Pap Smears were not sacred.
“Well, shit,” Gabriel said as I entered the restaurant where we had agreed to meet them. The place smelled like meat, blood, and something unpleasant, like bile, but less acidic.
“Our lab will run the DNA from Brand Man in the morning,” Lucas informed me as I sat down. “He isn’t talking at all. Of course, part of that might be because he has a broken cheekbone and fractures in the bone, both at his eye socket and his upper jaw. They are contemplating pulling some of his teeth because they were loosened in the socket when the fractures happened.”
“I broke my fingers,” I answered.
“About that, Lucas is keeping your baton for a while.” Gabriel handed me a menu. I took it with my unbroken fingers.
“Sure,” I shrugged.
“You don’t get it, do you?” Gabriel asked.
“No, I do not. Why am I being punished for using non-lethal force?” I asked.
“Because Ace, your brother killed someone inside The Fortress and the dead guy’s family is pushing the AG to investigate to make sure you didn’t give him orders to do it.”
“Oh,” I looked at him for a moment and blinked. This was because Eric Clachan had killed Nick the Bomber. “Why didn’t someone just tell me that?”
“How exactly does one broach that subject with a sociopathic US Marshal while her psychopathic platonic soul mate is playing poker with Death?” Xavier asked.
“Exactly like Gabriel said it,” I answered. “As for Malachi, he is not my soul mate, platonic or otherwise. There is a larger chance of him being a serial killer than my soul mate.”
“So, you are going to tone it down for a while,” Gabriel said to me. “Not just with the weapons, but with everything. I don’t want you busting down doors or kicking people’s teeth in. You are in defense mode only.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” I gave him a pathetic salute with my broken fingers and began to look at the menu. I was going to have to kick Eric’s ass. I just wasn’t sure how to accomplish it. It was a problem for another day though. Right now, I wanted food. The strange part of not feeling was that I didn’t always know if I was hungry. Hunger was both physical and mental. The physical part had been shut off like the pain that should be in my hand. The mental part said it was time to refuel. I ordered a chicken sandwich and fried mushrooms. The chicken was grilled which took away some of the problem of eating fried mushrooms. I tried to avoid fried foods, because they could trigger migraines, but I had a weakness for onion rings and fried mushrooms. For the first time, I wondered if the calm would take away a migraine. I had never tried before. “Xavier, next time I have a migraine, I want you to punch me in the face.”
“If someone else had said that,” Lucas looked at me. “Why exactly?”
“I cannot feel my hand or tell whether I am hungry. I am wondering if the calm would remove a migraine,” I told him.
“You’ve never tried in the past?” Xavier asked.
“I have never thought of it before. Usually when the migraine descends, all I think about is dying. However, some pieces just clicked. I thought of how awful fried mushrooms were for me, then I thought about my hand, then I thought about a migraine. It made sense to give it a try,” I answered.
“Thanks, but I think I’ll pass,” Xavier said. “You’re likely to shoot me. Have Fiona do it. You won’t shoot her.”
“Okay,” I shrugged. It didn’t really matter who hit me, I just felt like the calm would need a trigger during a migraine. I wasn’t sure I could switch it on without it.
“Great,” Fiona frowned. “So, they swabbed all the dried blood at the house. Still waiting on DNA to come back from that. Some of it wasn’t that old. Local cops say everyone avoids it. The owners are coming into town tomorrow morning. They stopped trying to rent it years ago because those interested always seemed shady. They inherited the house, but they’ve never lived in it. I’m not even sure they’ve stepped foot in it. It looks like the caretaker is the only person that goes there with any regularity. Many believe it is haunted, some believe it is cursed, and a few think it’s a portal to Hell. Even when cops have to respond to calls nearby, they won’t park in front of the place.”
“In other words, the boogeyman lives there,” I said.
“Something like that,” Fiona answered.
“Maybe you should rent the place,” Xavier smiled. “See which boogeyman is worse.”
“Why don’t they tear it down?” Lucas asked.
“Protected historic building,” Fiona answered.
“Then they really need an arsonist,” I said. “That would solve all the problems.”
“You realize if it catches fire and burns down while we are in town, we are all going to think it was you, right?” Gabriel asked.
“I have better things to do with my time than burn down crime scenes. Those blood stains were not consensual and
they were not from a chicken.” I leaned to the side as a waitress sat my sandwich in front of me. Her perfume was made from lilacs and carnations. It reminded me of little old ladies. Given that she appeared to be in her twenties, it seemed an odd choice for her. I wondered what it covered up and hoped it wasn’t strep throat. Some sulfur antibiotics created a garlicky smell that could only be hidden by very flowery perfumes.
“Have we got any leads at this point?” Gabriel asked.
“Not really,” Xavier answered. “Someone with access to drugs, but not a doctor. The wounds are good, but I think it’s more a case of practice making perfect.”
“I’ve begun looking for similar cases and found a few in Los Angeles. However, the victims are nothing like our current ones. Case is open, but it looks like it was gang related,” Fiona said.
“What year?” Lucas asked her.
“2007,” Fiona answered.
“Eight years is a long time,” Gabriel said.
“Not to mention the Los Angeles Massacre happened shortly after that,” Xavier said. The Los Angeles Massacre proved that humans could achieve anything when they worked together. I had been a grad student at the time, living in Seattle, but it had caught international attention. For three very long months, the streets of Los Angeles, particularly the poorer neighborhoods had been on the brink of imploding. It wasn’t due to riots or police brutality or even terrorism; it was due to serial killers. Twenty-seven serial killers to be exact. It was the highest number of serial killers ever to exist at one time in a single location, and they were all hunting from the same victim pool. Even the FBI and US Marshals had been at a loss as to how to stop it. In three months, over 900 victims were found. While the official records have twenty-seven serial killers preying upon Los Angeles, the actual number was probably much higher. However, they had caught twenty-seven.
Vigilantism had reached all-time highs and with good reason. People were actually paying gangs to hang out on their front porch and keep the monsters at bay. Sometimes, it had even worked. Malachi had been involved with the case and he was dealt some serious damage during it. A tall, scary white guy running around the projects at night had earned him a chest full of gunshots, gunshots that didn’t stop him. Only after he had taken six bullets to the chest did he identify himself as an FBI agent. The shooting stopped and no charges were filed in the case since the rounds came from a little old lady with a revolver. She had just been freaked out.
It had earned a reputation not just for the highest spontaneous generation of serial killers at one time, but it was also the first time the gangs were willing to help the police out. They wanted it stopped just as much as the average citizen did, primarily because a few of the serial killers were specifically hunting gang members. I went through my memory.
“Gang tattoos were taken from some of the victims there. Any chance they didn’t catch that particular serial killer?” I asked.
“Yes, but no one’s going to admit that,” Lucas told me.
“The official report says all the serial killers involved were caught,” Fiona answered. “I already checked.”
“And the unofficial version says that twenty-seven was a really low estimate,” Gabriel sneered. “I was there. There was no way those twenty-seven caused all that carnage. It also wasn’t spontaneous. They were organized. It wasn’t run like partnership killers or anything, but it was still organized. The victims, the way the killers hunted, where the killers hunted, it was all organized. The only reason we caught any of them was because someone discovered a pattern to it. Once they did, we became more efficient at hunting them. About half were trophy takers, but we never found all the trophies. If we’d found all the killers, we would have found all the trophies.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “Malachi believes the same thing. He still has profiles of killers he did not think were caught.”
“Then why ask?” Gabriel asked.
“Because I was not sure if he was crazy or not.” I shrugged. “Sometimes, Malachi can be a little too conspiracy theorist for me. The Los Angeles Massacre is one of them. He estimated that there were over fifty.”
“That’s what we thought,” Xavier said. “Maybe as many as a hundred. The taking of gang tattoos was never fully figured out. We caught a couple that was taking them, but not all of them, not by a long shot. Only two of the serial killers caught took the tattoos as trophies, yet we had over two hundred victims that were missing them. Two serial killers didn’t do that, but those higher up the food chain disagreed. The victims before the massacre, were they left alive?”
“Two were, but seven weren’t,” Fiona said.
“That makes you wonder which ones were the accidents,” I said.
Twelve
We had something to work with after dinner. A serial killer had escaped from Los Angeles eight years earlier. Gabriel had been a standard FBI agent at the time. Lucas and Xavier had been brand new to the US Marshals. Only Caleb Green and Malachi Blake had been full-fledged serial killer hunters during that time. I could call Malachi, but he couldn’t hop on a plane and get his butt to New Orleans. This meant calling Caleb.
I was conflicted about working another case with Caleb Green. He was a psychopath of the ASPD variety, which meant I could relate to him. He also liked me, romantically. I liked him, but it wasn’t romantic and nothing short of replacing my DNA was going to change that. I did not want to lead him on. He was a good guy who deserved to be with a woman who could love him. Most of the time, I was convinced Caleb understood that. However, most was not always. My personal feelings aside, Caleb was an excellent serial killer hunter. He had super powers of a sort. He wasn’t just a psychopath, he had synesthesia. He had rare forms of synesthesia. He could see the words people said, visually see them. They appeared in the air and hovered around in his field of vision until the next set of words appeared. It made him an excellent interrogator. It also meant that he had trouble keeping eye contact when he was attempting to have a normal conversation. One had to get used to having a conversation with him because he tended to look to the side of the face that was speaking to him. The second form also involved words; certain words would trigger a physical response. If someone said they were hot, he could start sweating as if he were suffering from some internal sweltering heat source.
On top of that, he was a tried and true psychopath. He was a little more emotionally connected than Malachi, but it was a personal choice. He had all the same strengths as Malachi, including the ability to ignore pain and turn off to the world around him. I believed the synesthesia was what made them different. Since Caleb could see people speak and experience sensations based on words, when he turned off, it was different from when Malachi did it, because he couldn’t turn off the synesthesia.
Gabriel called him and he hopped on a private jet to head our way. We were expecting him before midnight. While we waited, we stood on the street, staring down a sidewalk crowded with people enjoying the trap that was the French Quarter. All our victims had gone missing while in this area and turned up wandering all over the city. Our killer knew the city.
The crowd was a hodgepodge of different types of people. Most people distinguished groups by age and or race. I did not. Neither was important to me. I distinguished people by outward personalities. This meant how they dressed, how they carried themselves, the way they acted in groups, or if they were alone. It made more sense, at least for me, to do this. Serial killers were not trolling the French Quarter in packs. They would be alone or with a partner, not a group. They would not stand out. Serial killers blended in and they worked hard to maintain their normal appearance. It was unlikely that our killer would be heavily tattooed or pierced. They wouldn’t be dressed in apparel that would make people stare as they walked by, which ruled out quite a few people currently meandering.
There is an ideal that when the sun goes down on the French Quarter, it becomes weird and dark. This is a misconception. While it was true that some of the tourists currently walking the
sidewalks were here for the vampire legends and voodoo dolls, they were not the majority. The majority of people belonged in suburbia with white picket fences and 2.1 children. The standard dress wasn’t jeans and t-shirts, but it wasn’t fancy, gothic, or weird. Women wore dresses that showed off legs and shoulders with strappy sandals, after all, it was still summer and the humidity was oppressive. The primary dress for guys was shorts and polos. The crowd was younger, most of them in their twenties. A large number seemed to be consuming alcohol.
A narcissist caught my attention for a moment. The interesting thing about being a sociopath is being able to pick out certain traits in other people. We didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing ourselves, because that was a terrible idea, but others were fair game. This guy walked with his back straight and his chest puffed out just a little. His shirt was a little tight around his arms, chest, and loose over his flat stomach. His voice was louder than those in his group were. He’d spent time getting ready for a night of decadence and he was determined to find it by hook or by crook.
Normal people would consider him obnoxious, but as someone who also suffered from narcissism, I could recognize the signs. He was an alpha, the leader of his pack of drinking mates. If they found only one girl tonight, she would be leaving with him. Everyone understood this, even if it wasn’t vocalized. This type of guy was exactly the kind that raised my hackles. Narcissists believe the world revolves around them. As an alpha female and sociopath, I was fairly certain that it didn’t. I didn’t need to lock eyes or exchange glances with him to know that I would hate him. Being a narcissist was fine, but they always failed to recognize when they were out crazied. They were bold beyond their abilities and their mouth ran all the time spewing forth drivel that meant nothing when compared to the demons I fought on a daily basis.
