Deja Blue (20 page)

“Sure…sure. Understood, Doc—ahhh…Rae.”

She heard his cruiser screech away behind her as she pushed through the revolving door to the hotel nightlife. A piano bar sent out waves of bluesy jazz, enticing her to enter, to have a drink, and to let the music waft over her. When she peeked in, she realized it the place was empty save for a bartender asleep at the bar and a small gathering of jazz musicians—most likely on a sleep by day, work and play by night schedule. Her watch read 4:45AM. “Uggh…gotta get some sleep.”

# # #

Late afternoon, same day, FBI headquarters, Quantico, Virginia

Miranda Palmer Waldron paced before the elite, a room filled with experts from every field, people far superior in their own areas of expertise than she; still, Miranda knew not a single one of them could orchestrate the lot of them into a working team as she had done for the past several years.

Alongside the PSI unit, Miranda’s think tank had evolved, and she liked to believe it a symbiotic relationship, and a damn near perfect one at that.

Miranda used a laser beam to pinpoint and highlighted any areas of the huge, overhead images on the flat plasma screen that dominated the board room, specially built, to accommodate the PSI unit’s work and Aurelia Hiyakawa’s unique psychic sensory images. Images currently sent in from Charleston, West Virginia via satellite from the new and improved handheld CRVL or Crawl as everyone had long ago begun to call the device perfected by Edwin Arlington Coffin, now known as Copernicus, who remained conspicuously absent during such sessions unless called in on a technical question about the CRVL and its new cousin the palm-sized field unit. Originally a part of the think tank here to interpret Rae’s hits and misses, Miranda soon learned that the young man, while brilliant, had an Achilles’ heel—little to no imagination outside of the technical aspects of life, and he had next to no background in any of the ten plus fields represented in the room, including and especially literature and symbolism. Else he was faking it to get out of such grueling duty as faced by the think tank personnel, and if so, she didn’t want him on hand on his terms anyway. Besides, he didn’t share well or fight fair.

The last field operation required a hastily got up CRVL field nerve center, but since then the genius, Copernicus, had Y5’ved it somehow to beam directly to the satellite whenever Rae Hiyakawa wished to feed the input to them.

Around the mahogany oval conference table, the assembled geniuses strained to follow and make sense of the images being beamed to them. Here were the professionals in parapsychology pitted in a sense with their arch nemesis, psychologists and psychiatrists, profilers, criminologists, sociologists, historians, men of literature, folklorists, anthropologists, archeologists, chemists, biologists, and symbologists alongside graphologists, and the latest addition a graphic arts genius. These mental giants burned out quickly and often had to bow out, to be replaced by those on Miranda’s B-list, all of whom were great minds as well.

This formed the PSI interpretive team, on call at any time. Waldron had carte blanche to call in any additional expert should she feel the need, as in once having to call in a documents expert. He was found in a neighboring FBI unit. She’d been sleeping with him ever since.

The team’s job was to take the often confusing, chaotic images working through the medium, Rae, and to interpret them as accurately as humanly possible. The ultimate goal, after egos were set aside, was to correctly read the information as boggling a task as that at first seemed.

During Rae’s last case in Phoenix, Arizona, the information was interpreted correctly but the time it took meant it’d come too late to be of good service to Aurelia and the team in the field, and as a result a good man was lost. Miranda Waldron felt the weight of this failure squarely on her shoulders, and as a result, she’d come very near a meltdown, but after seeing Dr. Lisha Zangari, tops in her field, Miranda had begun to accept the fact she was only human and not quite the superwoman she’d painted herself for herself. It’d been a difficult self-image to let go of, but even more difficult and dangerous to maintain. She’d managed getting over it thanks only to weeks and weeks of therapy, and she knew that unless she remained ever vigilant, she could slip again, and if she did so in a public arena, her time with the FBI was finished.

“Any thoughts?” Miranda shouted to the assembled geniuses. “Anything, anyone?”

She was met with a wave of grunts, sighs, raised eyebrows and shoulders heaving, all leaving Miranda wishing she could curse. “Come on, people. This isn’t a MENSA convention. Time to earn your keep. What do you make of Aurelia’s sojourn of a night at the first victim’s location?” A major part of Miranda Waldron’s job was as cheerleader, encourager, enabler, facilitator.

More silence save for the rustle of a few papers and pens. A handful were jotting down thoughts but no one felt comfortable sharing just yet. Miranda felt a keen awareness of how this sort of dilly-dallying last time costs precious hours, hours no one could retrieve, hours in which Agent Gene Kiley lost his life. She was also keenly aware that Rae had taken the brunt of the blame for Kiley’s demise, which she completely and loudly disagreed with, but to little avail.

She shouted more harshly now, “People! We’ve sent Aurelia into deepest darkest Appalachia, or pretty near it, a place not one of us is likely planning a trip to soon. So let’s give her a hand here, shall we?”

One smart ass began to clap and then he asked, “What? You asked for a hand.”

Unamused at the lame joke, Miranda continued. “We have a lot to work with. We have the handwriting aspect, the song lyrics, the weapon of choice, and now these images from the trailer home of the first victim.”

Still nothing from her assembled experts. “All right, do the images have any correlation to anything in your sphere of reference, ladies, gentlemen? Anything at all you can relate to in whole or in part?”

“Looks like a lot of garbled gobbledygook out of a bad B-horror movie,” replied Dr. Cable Gaston, staring up at the screen, watching the black shadow image once again. They had all seen the ‘stage’ play with its Cirque Soliel appearance several times now. They’d all remarked on the stark, bare existence of the victim, judging from her “domicile” as Gaston put it.

“Yeah,” agreed Dr. Singe Olynx, a good-looking woman for a professor of sociology with a whiskey voice that reverberated through the room. “Ever see the film Freaks?”

Some laughter followed.

“Anything constructive anyone?” pushed Miranda. “I find it interesting that the creatures in this particular circus are so fluid, as if made of…well liquid,” added Dr. Okebe, the African archeologist and mythology expert. “Anyone else notice how they move? So like dancers before a fire but fluid like water.”

“More like ballerinas on a dance floor, except that these ballerinas are ugly as sin,” added Singe with a slight grimace.

“Something psycho-sexual about the whole thing, especially the floating woman and his ahhh…nailing her,” added the forensic psychiatrist. “A definite woman hater. No doubt someone who’s nurtured a seething anger for mother over the years.”

“That seems rather trite given the circumstances,” replied the symbologists. “You are not interpreting the act or the actors as symbols, sir, but rather filling in the blanks with clichés and biases.”

“I resent that!” he shot back.

“You’re allowing your confusion with the images sway over your common sense.”

“I don’t have to sit here and listen to this woman—”

“Which!” she shouted for emphasis. “Which makes your conclusions circumspect.”

“I stand by my conclusions!” the forensic psychiatrist replied as if throwing down the gauntlet.

“So what do you make of the so-called symbols here? Like the black shadow at the end, that Zorro-caped thing?” challenged Miranda.

The symbologists, Dr. Naomi Shulatte cleared her throat. “I am not sure about the black figure, but we all know what black portends—the grave, death, yet this is no ordinary circumstance, you must all see. You must all dig deeper. In the case of this shadowy figure, we have a representation of the psychic herself—Rae.”

“What?” chorused a number of the others, including Miranda Waldron.

“This is not an outward manifestation but a manifestation of her inner demons, inner fears, guilt, regrets, remorse.”

“Rae is throwing off sparks of guilt?” asked the forensics man, nodding. “Perhaps, yes.”

“Surely if so, Rae is unaware of it.” “She may not know it consciously, but we must.”

At least they’re talking now , Miranda thought to herself, even though I can’t accept the directions they’re headed in.”

“How do you get that from what little we have?” challenged Singe.

“She lost someone close to her on her last case. This is a manifestation of that loss, no more and no less.” Naomi Shulatte stood her ground.

“What about the creatures, the gargoyles?” asked Dr. Gaston. “Indigestion?”

“These are the demons that beset the killer,” Shulatte replied, pushing aside hair covering her eyes. “Notice how they hover about the image of the human monster with the hammer in his hand. Notice how much more horrid they are to Rae’s demon, the one that crawled up out of her, and did that little thing at the end of the taping.”

“I think we should concentrate on the song lyrics,” said Dr. Willeta Hiesing, and expert in literature and biblical imagery. She and Shulatte had much in common. “Contact the man who wrote the song. See what was behind the lyrics.”

“Pretty obvious, isn’t it?” asked Dr. Lee Madden, the former marine and parapsychologist and resident rebel. “Float through the sky…been too long…troubles and I….”

“What’re you getting from the lyrics, Lee?” asked Miranda Waldron.

“Suicidal wish…this guy is looking for suicide by cop. Wants to be caught and wants to be put down. Everything he has done is an effort to get caught and end it.”

“Then why’s he killing women?” asked Willeta. “Why not pick up a gun and walk into a police precinct?”

Naomi jumped in with, “How many now, seven, eight?”

“It’s all an elaborate if confused effort to be caught and put out of his misery,” replied Lee Madden.

“Are you saying,” began Gaston, “that the women, the murders mean nothing to him?”

“No more so than…than—staging, the bodies mere props to an end.”

“Bodies a means to an end?”

Madden sighed heavily. “The murders and the brutality of them…part and parcel of his sick sleight-ofhand.”

“Possibly…” considered Waldron.

Naomi Shulatte rained on Lee’s conclusions. “But just as possibly, this is all a maniac’s fantasy, which makes the hammer and the nails, the ritual of it all, very important to the perpetrator.”

“The hammer and nails are just more props,” added Madden.

Willeta Hiesing nodded, adding, “So reading reason into this man’s actions may be going down the proverbial primrose lane, Dr. Madden, Dr. Waldron.”

“Just as assuming that he is killing momma over and over again may be a false lead?” countered Madden, lifting a pitcher of water and pouring for himself and then for Hiesing who held her glass up.

“I don’t feel we’re getting much done here, people,” said Miranda, sipping at her own water.

Lee Madden held up his glass as if to toast, saying, “Perhaps if we were drinking beer or Jack Daniels instead of water, we’d find more answers.”

“Amen,” agreed Dr. Walter Roberts, the psychologist. “We finally find common ground, Lee.”

“You’ve been unusually quiet on the images, Dr. Roberts,” said Miranda, ignoring the remarks about beer guzzling. “Any thoughts?”

“Well the hammer and the nails is what strikes me more than anything else in the imagery.”

“That’s the one thing we know is real in the scene, isn’t it?” asked the historian in the group, Dr. Maria Sendak.

“There goes Walter again,” said Lee. “Why don’t you just tell us, Walter, that the hammer represents the power of the male member, and that our killer is unable to get it up, or anywhere near’s hard as blue steel, and his driving nails into the orifices of the face and head of a woman is what he’d like to be doing with his wang, but he can’t manage to do it with his wang, so he’s doing it with— ”

“It’s not an inconceivable theory of the crime,” countered Dr. Roberts to the groans of others in the room as the images sent from Rae continued on a loop on the giant plasma screen. “You all know how powerful the human drive to climax is, and if he gets off on pain and traumatizing women, if it is the only way he can manage an erection and an ejaculation, then—”

“Does put a new perspective on that hammer the man holds overhead and drives down into her,” said Dr. Sendak. “I mean if our automobiles can be seen as an extension of maleness, even the size of our computer screens…well?”