Deja Blue (12 page)

“And hello to you, Mother,” she said and raised her wine glass as if in toast, but her mother had no glass, no wine, just a word of advice.

Nia needs you now more than ever, and—

“Damn it, Mother! Stop butting in with—”

—and traipsing off after some maniac in order to save the world—

“Charleston, West Virginia is hardly the world, Mother.”

—is… is not doing my little granddaughter any good.

“Sheeze, Mother, you’re still telling me how to live my life?”

I’m a concerned grandmother is all.

“You’re telling me!”

Don’t take that tone with me, young woman.

“But Ma, it’s not fair.”

What’s not fair?

“You, that from the grave, you’re still telling me how to raise my kid!”

You will lower your tone, young lady.

“Oh please, I’m doing my best with Nia and this world, so if you don’t mind, unless you have a kind word to say, or something leaning toward encouragement, get out of my bath and my business.”

Maureen Murphy Hiyakwa telepathically said to Rae, And a fine way to speak of your mother…and the dead!

Then she was gone as suddenly as she’d appeared, wafting off in the rising steam of the Jacuzzi.

“Don’t go away mad! I love you, too, Mom! Know your heart’s in the right place!” Rae called to the ceiling while thinking, even though it ticks me off, and then she wondered if her mother and father in the beyond could read her thoughts. Then she wondered if Gene Kiley could read her thoughts from beyond. If so, she knew that he knew that she missed him enormously, right along with her parents.

Another thought filled her now, one of a double-edged nature. Even when alone, I’m never truly alone, now am I?

TWELVE

Early the next day, Rae met with the greater Charleston area medical examiner, a Dr. Roland Thomas Hatfield, a rail thin man whose emaciated, yellowed skin and sharply angular, rugged face—the face of pioneer stock—begged for a beard and a stovetop hat to complete the image of Abraham Lincoln. Who could argue with such a cadaverous looking man who worked on cadavers? Who might question him where he stood with scalpel in one hand, bone saw gripped in second skeletal hand? Indeed his hands were like an Edward Gorey depiction, eight fingers as long as decorator matchsticks, thumbs a pair of bottlenecks.

Dr. Hatfield appeared old enough to have retired twice over, his snow white brows, and what was left of his wispy white-to-gray hair, the picture of Santa with AIDS, a Santa who’d long ago forgotten how to smile, much less erupt with the occasional ho-ho-ho.

Instead, Rae was given a perfunctory glance, no welcome aboard on the case, not the slightest professional courtesy, but then Rae’s credentials were at odds with his own, he being a pure medico-legal, scientific investigator, she being a psychic sensory investigator. Rae had come to expect such an attitude. She’d normally swallow hard and push on. This time, she scrunched up her nose as the good doctor went back to work dissecting the dead grandma-san that Rae had held hands with at the murder scene.

Orvison had arranged for her to be on hand for the autopsy, and she’d accepted, primarily to learn more about the notes left in the victim’s throat and those that’d come before, something the copycat killer, failing to know about, had left out of his repertoire when he’d had his wife bludgeoned to death in this horrid fashion. It’d been a wise move on the part of Orvison’s department to keep news of the handwritten notes stuffed into the mouths of each victim under wraps.

Dr. Hatfield had his own agenda this morning; he meant to completely disgust and make ill the intruder on his case—Dr. Hiyakawa. It was a right of passage that many an ME presented to a newcomer, no matter who she might be, to determine at what point the medico-legal person could make the lay person throw up her breakfast. This was done by unnecessarily placing all the contents of the victim’s insides, what was commonly called the ‘rack’ of organs in the face; in this case, in Rae’s face.

The rack consisted of the viscera array of organs that made up the inner torso and intestines. It came out with the bone cutting around the ribs, and if an ME or an assistant lifting it out were the least bit careless, one or more of the organs, thanks to gravity, might fall off and slither about the floor in a show of mock life. She knew it the moment one the deceased’s large intestine came chasing after her ankles that Hatfield had allowed it to happen. At the same time, he pushed the dead woman’s left lung at her and said, “Take a good whiff of this! What’s it smell like? Huh?”

She’d smelled smokers’ lungs before in far more controlled situations. “Like the bottom of a bottomless ashtray,” she calmly replied, bent, and lifted the runaway intestines in her gloved hands. Presenting it to Hatfield, she added, “I think you misplaced these?”

He gave her a closer, longer look than before, a glint of respect in his jaundiced eye. She thought his coloration not only bad but a condition of liver damage; she guessed him a heavy, heavy drinker indeed, and that his condition was this self-inflicted addiction. “They tell me, Dr. Hiyakawa,” he began as he continued to work, “that you’re one of these mentalists who helps the police out in baffling cases where there’re no clues and where all else fails.” Including forensics, she heard his thought. “Is that so?”

“I’m no magician, Dr. Hatfield, simply a person who relies strongly on inner monologue, intuition, and P-SI.”

“PS-what?”

“Psychic Sensory Investigation.”

“Ahhh…I see, like holding hands with the dead?”

He’d been told this by whom, she wondered. She guessed Kunati. She wondered what in Kunati’s past had so dead set him against anything of a paranormal or psychic nature. She would’ve imagined that if he were of African heritage, that it’d be just the opposite. No race on the planet had more invested in “magic” in all its permutations than did the African, unless it was the Asians or the lucky Irish.

“Yes, I hold hands with the dead, and I touch their craniums, eyes, heart, the chakas to determine if there are any messages they wish to convey,” she said to Dr. Hatfield.

“There’re enough people in these Appalachian mountains who already believe in spirits and hobgoblins,” he retorted. “We really don’t need adding to the ‘haint’ population by importing people who talk to ghosts.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“People in the mountains here’re about as advanced as their ancestors from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Many of ‘em work in the mines here like their forefathers did in Wales. Their practical about all matters save the spirit, so far as I can see.”

“So you feel it was a mistake asking me in on the Dream Killer murders?”

“It’ll only fuel the newspaper and TV accounts of just how ‘supernatural’ this killer is.”

“Supernatural?” she asked.

He went to a nearby table where the morning Gazette lay and he tossed it into her gloved hands. “That’s what they’re saying now, yeah.”

She glanced over the headlines. Hatfield was right. The press had painted Hammerhead now as some kind of phantom, unseeable…untouchable.”

Hatfieled grumbled, “A ‘haint’ who comes and goes through walls, invisible till he strikes, superhuman. All bull crap, if you know what I mean. Meanwhile making folks all over the county and state terrified to go to sleep at night.”

“I should think every reasonable person must know the killer is human and not some sort of banshee creature that slips in through a chimney,” she countered, replacing the newspaper on his desk. “Forced entry tells us that much. Phantoms don’t pick locks.”

“You ever argue with a mountain person about spirits?”

“Well…no, not really.” “My point is that they believe in spirits as much as they do angels and the bible stories and Satan, and they believe in evil spirits, and evil spirits do things like this monster roaming among us, and if it picks locks, its just to throw us foolish scientific and educated types off.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.” Rae did not know any words to help here.

Hatfield frowned at her. “Thought you government types had all the answers. Look, so long as they believe he’s more supernatural than natural, that he’s some sort of avenging angel of death, or something out of a Hollywood B-movie, the more terror he strikes in their hearts.”

The cadaverous old man made a lot of sense.

“So let’s work together to unmask this fiend,” Rae suggested, including Orvison in her gaze now. “Show everyone exactly how petty and little and mean and human he really is.”

“That’s a goal worth going for,” replied Dr. Halstead. “How do you propose we go about it, Dr. Hiyakawa?”

“We start by putting it out there exactly what we believe about him.”

“Run it in the papers, on TV broadcasts?” asked Orvison.

“Use the media, yes.” “Strike back in a manner of speaking,” said Hatfield, thoughtfully rubbing his long, angular chin. “He’s getting good press, so it makes sense we shove back.”

She asked Orvison, “We all on board with the idea?”

“Expose him. Profile him in the press?” Orvison continued to think it over.

“With a few digs at his ego, yes.”

“You think, Orvison, that your superiors’ll go for it?” asked Hatfield, now giving Rae more attention than the corpse.

“I think I can convince them, especially, sir, if I can say that you agree with this course of action.”

“It’s a means to an end.” He nodded vigorously. “I’m ahhh on board with it.”

“Then I’ll draft a press release and run it by you and Orvison. Insult the hell outta this pervert. See what comes of it.”

“I like your take charge attitude, Dr. Hiyakawa.”

And the fact I neither vomited nor flinched at your antics? she thought but did not say.

Just then Orvison, behind a surgical mask, rubber gloves, shoes covered with booties, said. “I’m glad you two are getting on well.”

“We are,” agreed Hatfield.

“We’re to make a formidable team, the three of us,” suggested Rae. “We’ve already formulated some strategies.”

“I’ll have to run your idea by my superiors,” cautioned Orvison.

“Good…good.” “And here I was worried how you two might get along,” added Orvison.

“What’s not to like?” asked Hatfield, indicating the good-looking FBI psychic detective beside him. “She’s quite sharp, Orvison; you might want to offer her twice what the government is paying her. Get her on your payroll.” Sarcasm had returned to the autopsy man.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” cried out Rae, a smile creasing her features.

“I would,” replied Hatfield.

“Well now, I am impressed,” countered Orvison, turning to Rae. “Anyone who can gain Dr. Hatfield’s trust—even temporarily and shakily, and in such short order, and especially a woman coming in on his case—” “Enough!” declared Hatfield.

“--well impresses hell outta me.”

“Wasn’t so hard finding common ground,” said Rae. “We all want the same results. An end to this kill spree.”

“Glad to hear it.” Orvison inspected the work already done on the body as if he might be an attending physician. Obviously, he’d seen and experienced many a Hatfield autopsy.

“I’d really like to see all the notes the killer left in their throats,” she calmly said. “There might be something useful I can pull from them since they were handled by the killer.”

“He left nothing of himself on the notes, no fingerprints, no DNA,” replied Hatfield.

“We surmise he wore gloves, probably throughout. We’ve found not one usable print at any of the crime scenes.”

“If he wrote out the notes longhand, then he left something of himself,” she countered.

“You mean like graphology?” asked Hatfield.

“We have a couple of handwriting analysis people deciphering the notes,” added Orvison. “One being Kunati.”

“Kunati is an handwriting expert?”

“He’s taken courses, yes.”

“And the other expert?”

“A college professor named DeVane at Mountain State University in the criminal justice department.”

“Sounds all measures have been taken…all to the good but—”

“Oh, this guy is good. Been called in by everyone from Auto Zone to Toys ’R Us to determine which employee sexually harasses others, which one steals from the company, or out of lockers and fridges, and which might go postal if he remains under current levels of stress, that sort of thing.”