Deja Blue (6 page)

Rae snatched away the CRAVL electrodes, another nicety that Gene had always seen to, but not anymore. Gene Kiley would shut things down on her behalf whenever he felt she’d been pushed too far. Now with Gene gone, she’d pretty much been left to make this move on her own. While Ashley Phillips was empathic, she most certainly was not in touch with Rae’s deepest emotions. Being out of touch meant just that; Phillips could not know when to shut her down, because she was not in harmony with Rae. Perhaps she never would be.

“Hopefully, Miranda,” Rae’s full, rich voice came over the intercom to the next room where she knew that Dr. Miranda Waldron and her team of assembled geniuses from every field of inquiry known to man had been working the cold case file, “perhaps you and your think-tank can do something with what little we got from the reading, but I’ve got nothing more to send, and that last bit with the floating woman, I really, really don’t believe it has anything to do with the case.”

Miranda replied, “Understood, Rae. You go, get some R&R, come back refreshed.” Such catch phrases and sentiments seemed to be the order of the day. Rae wondered if all confidence in her had been lost, never to be regained.

Rae believed that while Miranda was the epitome of sincerity at all times, that reading between her lines might be in order. Perhaps she’d come back too soon after Phoenix, too soon since Gene Kiley’s death in the line of duty. Perhaps it was affecting her ability to do her job as before. And maybe this unspoken truth was dead on. She thanked Ashley Phillips out of force of habit more than anything else, and then Rae walked away, going for the shower and her street clothes. A part of her wondered if things would ever be the same again; a part of her wondered if she should not tender her resignation. It might make a lot of people happy, and first in line for the happy dance would be Rae’s daughter, Nia.

She was stopped for a moment at the exit from the chamber when Miranda Waldron said over the intercom, “Are you absolutely sure, Rae, that the floating woman has nothing to do with the Bradley case?”

“If I know anything today, it’s that, Miranda. Bank on it.”

“If you’re sure.”

“I said I’m sure, damn it!” she exploded, pushing through the exit door, feeling Ashley Phillips’s cold stare following her out.

SEVEN

Rae had taken her brown bag lunch out to the tables beneath the trees outside to clear her head. She had a right to exhibit frustration. Once again, a case of multiple murder had been brought to the PSI Unit, step-sister of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Division only after it’d gone cold. Once again, the powers that be had managed to make Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa feel like the proverbial veterinarian no one wanted to take their sick animal to until it was hopelessly ill. Once they did bring the case to her— in the form of a series of dead victims—so much injury had been done that said case came in as weak and sad as a kitten born without legs. In short, a case that could not survive under anyone’s care. And as in all things psychic—thought, meditations, conscience and unconscious images, symbols and metaphor—it all went the way of smoke unless you had the gift of nailing fog to a wall.

A thing that CRAWL literally did as Rae’s mind images were in fact thrown up on a plasma screen the size of a billboard for the experts to study.

Ever the optimist, Rae Hiyakawa had the ability, she knew, and she had the tools—the psychic nail and hammer to do the job, but creating sense of chaos, no matter if one had the right tools, was no simple task, and certainly not always successful. Not always.

If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the mornin’…I’d hammer in the evenin’ buzzed the popular tune through her brain.

What the devil did the floating woman over the busy street have to do with her last case, the cold case for which they had not enough to work with? Nothing. What it had to do with the case just brought to her—she suspected everything.

The cold-blooded killer had used a hammer on his victims. Bashing in their brains while they slept. Had stood over them and killed each in her sleep. Eight women now according to a call that’d come only this morning.

A ninth woman had died in similar fashion but there’d been distinct differences. The most notable being she did not live alone. Her husband had been in the house, asleep in another room, and this man, Malachi Spielman, was now under lock and key, awaiting trial for his part in the contract killing of his wife. A second man had been arrested in relation to this particular “dream-killer hammering” murder, and the second suspect had turned state’s evidence. Forensics pointed to an intruder, but given the problems between Spielman and his wife, and a recent insurance policy taken out on her life, the prosecution, armed with telephone records and a connection between the two men, believed Spielman had set it all up; that he’d paid the other to reproduce the eerie footsteps of the psycho-killer with hammer and nails, a monster who’d been in the news for a month and a half now in the city of Charleston, West Virginia, population 64,213. Add the scattered communities around Charleston and you got another 307,000 souls, half or more women, all of whom slept fitfully these nights as a result of the predator known only as The Dream Killer.

Population break down for Charleston proper was 31,100 males, 33,113 females. The median resident age was 42.8 years. Median household income: 36,180. Median house value: $110,600. Racial breakdown in the city was: White non-Hispanic 80.1%, Black 15.1%, mixed race, 1.9%, American Indian 0.9%. Hispanic 0.8%. From all accounts, the capitol city of West Virginia looked like many others its size, and it likely had as many problems as any city in the country. The chamber of commerce listing found on Google displayed an idyllic hamlet nestled in the former valley of the Kanawha Indian tribe, but in truth the valley had been paved over and littered with every commercial sign and chain franchise imaginable.

Charleston indeed sat nestled among the

Appalachian Mountains, which remained resolutely wild and towering around the city, defiant and as green a place as any on the planet. The wide expanse of the Kanawha River snaked through the city, a tributary of the Ohio River. The Kanawah acted as a major artery for the coal industry. Daily shipments of coal plied the waterway, tugs pushing huge, blocks-long barges heaped to brimming with coal. Alongside the river, train cars carried tons of coal on the rails. All this within what some called the Chemical Valley, thanks to the number of chemical firms that’d staked out acreage along the river.

Rae had done some homework. Charleston, the capitol of West Virginia, proved on the map some four, four-and-a half hours by car from FBI headquarters at Quantico, Virginia. A brief chopper ride over the river ways, if she could get the bean counters to loosen up. Not that she wanted to go to Charleston, but she predicted—as had Copernicus—that it would likely come down to a ground operation in this heated investigation, intensifying now as two victims had fallen prey in the past week.

As she ate below a blue sky, Rae gave thought to the copycat guy. Perhaps the Jewish West Virginian, Malachi Spielman, had indeed taken advantage of the frenzy over the serial killer’s being in the midst of West Virginia’s Capitol city, and if so, Spielman deserved the chair, but West Virginia remained one of eleven states without the death penalty, so even if convicted Spielman was looking at life imprisonment. The same held true for the sick SOB who was the real hammer and nail wielder.

The pressure to come to some understanding of the killer, and to end his reign of terror in and around Charleston proved near unbearable for those in the Behavioral Science Unit, as they’d exhausted all their charts and graphs and profiling techniques to no good end. One of their number had secretly confided to Rae that their profile of the killer might be the proverbial ‘Everyman’ and so rendered rather useless. Most of the details the profilers had come up with proved rather trite and clichéd.

These were not simple killings, despite the simplicity in executing people in their sleep. Rae imagined a victim at her most vulnerable moment in her life—in REM sleep, deep slumber, as the killings seemed to occur in and around 3AM. She kept seeing this exact time in bright green light-emitting diode fashion, the bedside clock.

Was nothing sacred anymore? Was no place safe anymore? Of all things, one would think sleep sacrosanct.

Sleep, the most at risk hours in anyone’s existence. Right up there with being in the shower since the film Psycho debuted. She had earlier wrongly supposed that it was for this reason that the murderer had been dubbed by press as the Dream Killer. As she was provided with more information, she learned the truth of it, that the killer had contacted the Charleston Gazette-Mail, calling himself the Dream Killer. He’d also told the press that he had no conscious memory of killing his victims “as the entire time of the murders, I was asleep myself—sleepwalking.”

Copernicus joined her at the table where she picked at her lunch. “Heard this nutcase in Charleston is professing his innocence due to sleepwalking.”

“The hell you say!” she erupted and frowned. “We both know that a true sleepwalking killer is the rarest form of humanity on the planet.”

“So you are unconvinced?” “I do.”

“You going to finish that egg salad sandwich?” he asked.

“Help yourself.”

He wolfed it down. His mouth still full, he said, “Despite his sincerity in those letters he sent to the local papers?”

“Yeah, right,” she replied and laughed. “Brahmin shit, a sleep-walking killer using a ball peen hammer and three-penny nails on his victims’ heads while off in la-laland, asleep and dreaming his own Pollyanna dreams as he kills? No way…don’t buy it, not for a DC minute.”

“Sucks rocks, I know,” Copernicus replied.

“What a defense. Built into the murders thanks to his ‘fessin’ up to the papers, heh? What a cover-your-ass deal.”

It’d only been this morning that finally the Chief of BSU, Raule Apreostini, had been given the green light to officially take the case to Rae. Belated to say the least. “Still, sounds so crazy it might be true.” Copernicus loved to play Devil’s advocate. He was a provocateur. “I mean truth is often stranger than—”

“—a nail to the brain? Even if we catch this maniac, he has laid out a case for not being responsible by virtue of not being there when it happened. Please. The weight of the hammer, the placing of the nails in the skull and eyes. The screams. Some alarm clock, yet nothing wakes him?”

“If any of it does wake him, it doesn’t stop him. Forensics places him at the scene for hours after the death, plying through the fridge, making sandwiches but apparently doing so with gloves on.” Copernicus snickered. “Kinda like the O.J. defense, this sleepwalking dodge. Still, given West Virginia’s stand on capital punishment, the best we can hope for is life imprisonment, if and when.”

He pulled out and spread out a US map. He then indicated on a map the states that had capital punishment and those that did not. West Virginia was an island of blue—no execution state—in a sea of orange—states that did execute.

“Unless he changes his venue and crosses into Kentucky or Ohio or Pennsylvania.”

“Good point.”

Unless local authorities called in FBI assistance on a case, the bureau’s collective hands were tied, unless the killer crossed state lines, at which point the Feds could dive in at will with all resources.

“Charleston’s only an hour from the Ohio-Kentucky borders,” he pointed out. “And hey, this time I know what you’re thinking,” he continued with a wry grin. “You want to contact authorities in all surrounding states to ask if they’ve had anything whatsoever resembling these killings in Charleston in their jurisdictions.”

“That’s real good, Eddy…ahhh, sorry, Copernicus! You got me. I don’t for a moment buy this crapola of he’s asleep when he kills them.”

“I agree but for the sake of argument, why do you say so?”

“Think about it. If he’s asleep…truly asleep— unconscious sleepwalking when he breaks and enters, how difficult is that? And there’s the dogs—how he dispatched

“It’s been known to happen.”

“And secondly, why only female victims living alone?”

“Hmmm…good point. One also pointed out by the BSU profilers.”

“I’ve read the files. Last night.”

“Raule’s already handed the files over to you then?”

“He has.”

Birds twittered and chased one another about the green grounds of Quantico.

“Besides,” she continued while watching a pair of chipmunks taking a moment to search through one another’s fur, “the killer must’ve cased the house for days to know their situation, and you can’t case a house in your g’damn sleep. These killings are premeditated as hell.”

“Are you sure? How much do we know about sleepwalking and this guy?”

“Enough to know he’s coming and going fully clothed, else he’d’ve created a sensation.”

“All grist for the prosecutors. Write it up and anything else you come up with, Rae. You know how we trust your instincts and insights around here.”

“Pmmmpf!” she’d blurted out. “Sure. That’s why I’m the last to get the case?”