Deja Blue (2 page)

“No children?” asked Rae, haltingly adding. “Are you sure?”

“Single…no children, but the brush is hers.”

“She is a strong-willed person, a person who people gravitate to because of her energy and bright eyes and wide smile, as large as a lion or tiger…so strong is her energy— even now.”

“She ahhh…collected ceramic lions and tigers and bears,” said Ashley, nervously clearing her throat after.

“Stuffed animals, you mean?” Rae lifted a bloodstained stuffed white tiger about the size of a water bottle, another sad souvenir of a deadly crime.

“No, mostly ceramics, collector’s items.”

Rae realized the stuffed little tiger was yet another decoy item, useless. She tossed it into a corner. “S-she fought for life. Wasn’t asleep when he killed her. She’d come awake before the hammer blow, and in her eyes…”

“What, Doctor? Go with that. What?”

“S-she photographed him.”

Again Ashley frowned. “Photographed? No camera was among the items found at the scene.”

“If there had been, he’d’ve taken it with him.”

“Right.” “Telephone camera, I think. I see it now. She-she kept it next to the bed at all times.”

“Not found.”

“But she had one.” “According to family, yes.”

“Nephews, nieces?”

“None. No children.”

“In my head, she’s surrounded by children and the colors of childhood.”

Ashley saw the images on the plasma screen as the Cerebral Remote Viewing & Language Stratagems or CRVLS, which everyone called The Crawl, scanned all of Aurelia’s mental images whenever she meditated below the brass pyramid she’d fashioned and insisted on using. A construct that Ashley Phillips believed a crutch, an unscientific mental crutch.

“What did she do…for a living?” asked Rae.

Isn’t that something you should be telling me , Ashley thought but did not say from her control desk outside the chamber. “Can you see her at her work?”

“At a desk…at a computer…works in an office at a university. No children.”

“I suggest, Doctor, you’ve had enough for one day. Suggest we shut down, come back at this tomorrow.”

“If I can get into her soul, I might have an image of him waiting for me there, an image as sharp as any on an photo.”

“Not sure what you mean, Doctor.”

“Ashley, you can call me Rae or Aurelia and dispense with Doctor.”

“Ahhh…of course, yes. Will do.”

Don’t know if this is working out between us, Ashley, Rae thought but said nothing. She looked up at the young woman, watched her at the board, the controls, and her heart clamped down. Rae so missed Gene in Ashley’s job. They’d been a team, a winning team in every respect.

Not so with Ashley…certainly not today. The two of them together was simply not working. Not Ashley’s fault really. Not Rae’s fault either. They were nervous, tentative with one another. Being a psychic handler was no simple task, and how terribly Rae missed Gene and his handling of her during such sessions only made it more difficult for Ashley. There were too many orbiting problems unresolved between them. Too many unspoken words hovering. Too many coils within the spirals that needed untangling.

On the plasma screen, both at the controls and on the boardroom wall where the think-tank geniuses watched, the image of a massive tangle of electrical cords and wires writhed about one another like a handful of snakes thrown together in a pile.

While many sessions were superficial at best and ended in little result—like today’s—other sessions went foraging deep into the psychic forests, below gnarled roots, down into labyrinthine mines of the seer’s own soul. Places a person could get lost in, places of terror, and places where answers lay buried like pirate treasure on a distant shore in a faraway place with a strange sounding name. A name that no one could pronounce at a place of precipice into which many a good man and woman had fallen, like the deep crevasses of a pitted glacier, a place in which even a psychic could disappear, never to again claw her way out. Every psychic knew of this place sometimes referred to as the Overmind; every psychic avoided it, yet felt its attraction, a powerful pull, at the same time, always there, always threatening. It was both terrifying and fascinating.

“You’re right, Ashley,” Rae finally said. “Not doing any good here.” Then she gasped and added, “Really, she had no children?”

“None.” “But she had students.”

“That’s right.” She worked with young people. “Duhhh…so in a sense, she did have children, don’t you see?”

Wow, super mind here at work , Ashley thought but again did not verbalize. “She worked with young adults. Taught archeology and anthropology.”

“Had no children of her own,” finished Rae. “But she loved her work; was a crusader about it,” added Rae.

“Quite possibly, yes.”

“Pay was lousy,” Rae commented. “Sonja Orman could have made more on the line at a Swift meat-packing plant. As a result, she was constantly behind on her bills, but she felt placed here on Earth to teach.”

“She sounds like a wonderful person. There’s a Swift meat-packing plant not far from Charleston, where the killings are happening. You may want to go with that.”

Rae heard the sarcasm in Ashley’s voice and tried to ignore it. “Teaching was Orman’s crusade, and in the end, the spirits of untold numbers of students, young minds, had been touched by her passion.” Rae again saw the weighted down, bedraggled wingless angelic children carrying off the wounded white bird, and now it made sense—at least it did to her. She imagined the geniuses in the other room were flummoxed by it.

Yeah…right , thought Ashley. She remained angry and hurt. In her opinion, Dr. Hiyakawa had gotten Ashley’s beloved teacher and mentor, Gene Kiley, killed. “Some psychic,” she’d said to others in the unit just loud enough for Rae to hear. “So good she gets people around here killed.”

Rae pushed aside all the victimology items in her way. Clamoring to her feet, she removed the electrodes that made her a part of CRAWL. Standing and stretching now, just outside the brass pipe pyramid in the isolation chamber, her eyes met Ashley’s, and she felt an icy response growing laser-like. The body language told a story of negativity, and the girl’s eyes emitted a ray of displeasure, what in ancient times was called the ‘evil eye’.

Not very professional , Rae thought as she held the young woman’s glare for some time before breaking it off. Their mutual stare was like a gauntlet thrown down. Young Phillips had essentially and psychically dared Rae to show her anything worthwhile, essentially believing she could do better work on this case herself. When Rae broke off the stare, she psychically replied, Perhaps you can, Ashley. Be my guest. Although no actual words came forth, the mental words were as clear and as real as the gravity around them.

Until now, Rae’d felt the chamber that’d been created to house her and CRAWL instrumentation was her office, her space, essentially hers and therefore sacrosanct, but Gene had always been a large part of that equation. It’d always been the one place where Rae’d felt, and been made to feel by Gene, to be as normal and as sane as anyone on the planet. Certainly Gene had made the environment here a safe one. In fact, Gene had seen to it that Rae, a halfAsian, half-Irish woman with one black and one blue eye, genuinely feel untouchable and in charge here. So much of it she’d thought her doing, but now she knew that so much of it was due to Gene Kiley’s efforts and attitude. He’d worked tirelessly to make her feel this place was home, a place where she was among like-minded people, folks who understood and accepted and didn’t make her feel like some kind of alien or freak. Gene had been a strong empathic support and a psychic in his own right.

Now his absence in the labs proved so strong, so overwhelming that she wondered if the isolation chamber would ever return to its former peaceful character—the place where she centered herself: her once perfect centering ground. She wondered if she must find another, a place without the high-tech gadgetry, a simple room with a mirror and a cocoon of safety, a place away from the accusing eyes of such as Ashley Phillips and others.

All she knew for certain was that she no longer felt at ease here in her workplace.

It certainly was no longer home.

As she retied the now loose belt about her white robe, beneath which she stood nude, Rae felt no reassurance, no hearty positive vibes as always Gene sent her way. Rae’s first few days back, she’d thought it her own guilt-ridden angst simply bouncing off the young woman, but today it’d come clear that it was more than inner turmoil at work here. It wasn’t coming from within but from without. It was in fact unadulterated anger undulating from and directed at Rae. All from Ashley.

This does nothing for our working relationship , Rae thought. A relationship required nurturing and care; it was hard work, harder than caring for a garden or a single tomato plant, or an individual flower. It must be nurtured by a caring hand and a careful balance of trust, but neither of the principals in this case had had time to establish any such ingredients, thus ruining the recipe. Trust being absolutely necessary, the lack of it deep-sixed the ability to work together, and it harmed the case at hand. What progress could possibly come about? It’s a wonder I got as far as I did, she thought now. It was one thing to work as a medium with a roomful of doubt and disbelief flowing from strangers as when the chief brought politicians and men with deep pockets to observe the program at work, but quite another when one’s closest working relationship is like a bridge crumbling beneath one’s feet.

She knew she’d have to put in a request to replace Ashley, that Raule must find her someone more suitable, and this meant more problems needing resolution, more time lost, all piled upon the many other difficulties and anxieties in her life right now; it meant another strand, too, in the restraints that bound her hands while she attempted to work the Dream killings.

She threw up her hands in a gesture of defeat for the moment. Everyone would simply have to come back another day as inconvenient as that might be for the think-tank champions in the other room. Rae ambled off to the showers to freshen up and change into clothes and get out of Quantico for the day. It’d been grueling, her third day back since returning off the trip she and her daughter, Nia, had taken to see the Grand Canyon together. As she found the showers and got in under the warm spray, she thought of how that trip after Phoenix had reestablished the mother-daughter relationship, and how much she had discovered about her daughter. Not to mention how much Nia had discovered about her, and how much together they’d discovered about Nia’s deceased grandparents, who’d shown up at the South rim of the canyon, and had in fact floated amid the sunset, amid reflecting clouds, hovering over the amazing site that had drawn Aurelia there to begin with—two spirits in eternal love.

THREE

Shower finished and Rae fully dressed before the mirror, her father’s marble black eye and her mother’s cerulean blue eye staring approvingly back at her choice of Macy’s latest in fashion for the professional woman, she stepped out into a modern cave: the corridors of Quantico’s FBI headquarters. Here so-called normal people from secretaries and groundskeepers to pipe fitters in green overalls, and accountants in impossible-to-wrinkle suits worked a nine-to-five day. These civilians went about their business largely unaware of those among the badge carrying operatives here with a license to kill.

She tried desperately to get the current case off her mind, and she knew the only way to do that was a stopover at the Tavern on the Green here in Quantico where she could relax with a martini or a Jack Daniels Whiskey Sour—or two, and to talk to the best ear in town, Joannie Childs. She’d tried to talk to others as freely as she palavered with Joannie, but even with her shrink, Dr. Lyn Polkabla, this proved impossible, despite the tortures that Dr. Polk-a-person, as Nia called the shrink, put her through. Tortures of being pelted by a series of ping-pong balls hurled at her when she sat glum and uncommunicative. Apparently, Nia, too, had gotten pelted on occasion as well, as after the harrowing incident in Phoenix and Gene Kiley’s death, Nia had seriously begun to see “Dr. P” on a regular basis.

Worse than the ping-pong ball barrage was the shrink’s grabbing up her accordion to play songs from Cats and Man of LaMancha badly and out of tune if a client chose to sit idle. Caterwauling, Nia had called this form of torture.

Aaurelia’s cell phone rang. She lifted it from her hip and saw it was Nia calling from school again, and she answered precisely as Dr. Polkabla had suggested. “Sweetheart, how is your day going?” This was a far cry from, “What now?”

“Awful,” Nia sniffed, “and I wanna come home.”

“Now?” “Now!”

# # #

They’d decided on Xavier Millbrook Stone Academy, a private school this time, one filled, Rae learned too late, with vile, mean girls. Girls who’d nothing better to do than dispense their venom on the newcomer. In this case, Nia Hiyakawa, her daughter.