by Hadena James
an amateur taxidermist and why would you stuff your mother?” I answered.
“We don’t know that it was his mother,” Xavier reminded me.
“True,” I answered, “but stuffing anyone is pretty creepy.”
“I’ll give you that,” Xavier looked at Arons. “Do you want us to go with you to check on the rest of his associates?”
“No, we’ll organize it. You concentrate on our killer,” Arons and the detective left.
We loaded up and headed back to the hotel.
I hate being trapped in a car. There is nowhere to run when people start asking you questions. I had found the same applied to showering. Lucas had a tendency to corner me in the shower if he wanted to know something that I didn’t want to talk about.
“Now, back to your drug use,” Gabriel said as the car pulled out of the parking lot.
“They aren’t drugs,” I said. “They are sleeping pills. I normally only take them when we aren’t on a case. The neighborhood we live in is secure enough that I should be able to get a good night’s sleep. My brain doesn’t let me. Between my past and the history I’m building as a Marshal, I’m having more nightmares. The pills keep the nightmares away. I don’t dream at all when I am on them or if I do, they never wake me and never let me remember them. It isn’t a problem. I took one tonight because I was having trouble erasing the image of the photos being smashed from my brain.”
“I need you completely functional, Aislinn,” Gabriel said from the front seat.
“And I am, Gabriel. Seriously, I am fully functional. However, I haven’t slept much since we arrived and was starting to feel the effects. I thought I’d get one night of sedated sleep and be back on the job tomorrow as my usual self. I never expected to have you walk into my room to tell me that they had caught a guy with bloody clothing in his car. I expected at seven or eight tomorrow morning you would burst in and tell me we had another victim in a tree. Since I average four hours of sleep on the pills, it wouldn’t have been a big deal.”
“How much sleep do you get off of them?” Gabriel pressed.
“When we are on a case? About two and they aren’t very restful. When we aren’t on a case, about four. Of course, my body reacts differently to the pills when we aren’t on a case and I can usually get six if I am home and in my bed.”
“Ace requires less sleep than most. She is at her best when she has between four and five hours of real sleep. That’s all the pills do,” Xavier defended me.
“And you’re sure that she is fine on them?” Gabriel continued.
“Her? Yes. Anyone else would be comatose. Aislinn doesn’t have any groggy side effects or feelings of slowness that is normally associated with these types of medications,” Xavier responded.
“What is she on?” Gabriel asked.
“Quazepam. It’s a benzodiazepine used to treat insomnia with very few side effects. Aislinn has no side effects and I write the script for thirty tablets but she only fills it every couple of months. She isn’t abusing it or misusing it,” Xavier assured our team leader. A weird look came over his face.
“What?” Gabriel asked.
“I had a thought,” Xavier turned to look at me. “You tried other benzos, didn’t you?”
“Several. I’ve been on and off them for years,” I answered.
“Ever try triazolam?”
“Yeah, it was terrible. It did not improve my sleep, something about the half-life. It would make me sleepy, but by the time I fell asleep, it only kept me asleep about ten minutes. While in college, I was on and off diazepam and clonazepam. It worked much better.”
“Don’t care about the others. Did they say why you had such problems with it?” Xavier asked.
“Yeah, I metabolized it too fast due to a stress induced high metabolism. The half-life is normally something like two hours, but for me, it was more like thirty minutes. As a result, I would fall asleep, but I would be awake within a few minutes.”
“If I injected you with triazolam, how long before you woke up?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe less.”
“That’s it,” Xavier looked at Gabriel. “There’s my fast acting, quick to leave the system sedative.”
“Speak English,” Gabriel told him.
“Well, I’d been racking my brain since we got the case about what sort of sedative it would take to keep them from fighting, but have them awake for the skinning. I was leaning towards full anesthetics, but while Ace would only sleep for twenty minutes or so, most would sleep for hours before it started wearing off. And triazolam, since it is such a fast-acting benzodiazepine, it wouldn’t take long for the drug to wear off and wake you up.”
“But I have failed drug tests because of benzos,” I told him. “Hell, I failed the Marshals drug test and had to get a note from my doctor in Washington that I did have a prescription for the Valium they found.”
“True and triazolam would stay in the body since they die within twelve hours of injection,” Xavier hung his head. “I’ll go back to thinking on it.”
“Glad my medication use could almost help,” I told him forcing myself to sound cheery.
“Yeah, well, it was a great thought. I hadn’t considered some of the weaker benzos because they aren’t used much in the US. Some are even banned,” Xavier told us all.
Indecision
He knew he had screwed up by smashing the pictures at the teacher’s place. Marshal McMichaels would have figured out that it was personal. He just hadn’t been able to help himself. To see his child smiling out at him from her photo had enraged him.
His Grace, smiling, staring out at him, with her fifth grade teacher behind her, also smiling. Grace had hated her. She had been mean and cruel. Grace had been sent to the office one day because she was sneezing in class and the bitch found it disruptive. But the bitch was the cause, Grace was allergic to cats, she always sneezed around them. And that bitch teacher had owned three of them at the time.
One by one, they had all disappeared from the teacher’s house during Grace’s time in her class. By the end of the year, Grace was back to being a healthy child.
She had even had the nerve to call him and his wife in to talk about Grace’s problem. Her suggestion had been homeschooling the girl if her allergies were that bad. But Grace’s only allergy was cats and she could handle them to some degree. She just couldn’t handle all the dander the teacher carried on her clothes.
Henry picked up a cigar and a photo album. He took both outdoors. The women in his house were sound asleep. He had ensured it. His original plan had been to go hunting, but that hadn’t worked out for him. He’d had a flat tire. It was the second time he’d been delayed this month. He wasn’t happy about it. He had a schedule to keep.
Instead, he would content himself with the album. There were two hundred pages in it. Each page could hold four, four inch by five inch photos. However, that wasn’t what was in the photo album.
Each photo holder carried a three inch by four inch swatch of skin. Under it, in meticulously neat handwriting was the name of the person the skin belonged to and the date they had died. He’d found it in his son’s things.
The first three swatches had his son’s illegible scrawl under them. It reminded him of Marshal Reece. His handwriting was nearly illegible on his autopsy notes.
His best estimate was another two weeks before they finally caught up to him. Marshal Reece had been muttering the entire time he had done the autopsy. Now the results of toxicology were going to go straight to the Marshal. And Marshal Reece, despite his unkempt appearance was a man who didn’t miss much.
Henry had been unable to stop the basic tox screens that identified the sedative he was using to subdue unruly victims. However, he had been able to make them disappear. It wasn’t hard. But Reece would see everything, find the clues. It would take a while to put it all together, but they would.
He had three women on his list. The
whore upstairs, snoring her head off, was among them. Maybe a fourth, if they figured out it was him and he could manage it, he’d get Marshal Cain before they arrested him. She hit all the wrong buttons. Her dismissive wave today had been irritating. She thought she was so smart and so superior to him. He’d show her.
The waitress was still on his list. If his fucking tire hadn’t been flat, she probably would have been on the menu tonight. The Marshals seemed to bring bad luck with them.
Tomorrow night would be her turn. After she was found, he’d go after the uppity bitch at the police department. The one that wrinkled her nose and walked away every time he came to talk about a case with her.
Then there was his secretary at the doctor’s office. She had the audacity to think he was hitting on her, flirting with her. She’d been with more men than anyone on the planet. He had treated her for several sexually transmitted diseases and yet the bitch still thought that he wanted her.
In response to these imagined sexual advances, she had taken him aside and quite firmly told him that she would never be with a man as small as him. His slight size told her that he would have a small dick. And she just couldn’t handle that.
She was just like the rest of them, convinced of her own superiority. He had almost fired her, but she threatened him with a lawsuit about sexual harassment if he did. That was the last thing he needed. This was the best solution.
And of course, the nag upstairs had been
