Deja Blue (29 page)

She needed something that the monster had handled extensively, something solid and not just words on paper. Something hefty, weighty, stamped with his indelible being. The more the killer had handled the item, the better. The notes, she imagined, he’d written out before going on his deadly mission as there were no bloodstains, not so much as a smear of a single blood droplet on the papers, not on a single one of them. She had to believe he’d kept them wadded up inside a pocket the entire time, another good indication that his work was hardly activated at the moment of the kill, that he’d taken all sorts of premeditated steps. Steps that would put him away forever once they cornered him.

However, how long did it take to scribble a few sentences? He’d have handled that first hammer left at the first scene of the crime, possibly a hammer he’d owned for years, far more and with far more emotion coursing through his hand and into the wood handle. Psychic energy that might well be trapped in that handle and in the toothed anvil of metal itself.

And that object was indeed precisely what she needed now.

She got dressed, sipped a few more times at the cooled coffee, another nibble of toast. She felt a sense of purpose now. She felt a plan coming into focus. A plan which, while hinging on unpredictable paranormal parameters like a pinwheel in the wind, she believed in the possibilities. She must. It was who she was. Was all she had.

She mulled it over again in her head: A simple plan, a plan to unhinge a murderer.

She dialed Carl Orvison and quickly outlined her needs, telling him she wanted that hammer in her hands.” “What? When?”

“Tonight.”

“You want to take it out of evidence lockup and put it to use, you say? You gonna build something?”

“Exactly, I mean nothing physical. I intend building something of an intangible nature, a psychic trap, and I need that hammer to make it happen.”

Silence at the other end.

“This is how I best operate, Chief. You saw what happened at the trailer…things he touched that I touch—the mirror, remember how I used the mirror?”

“I didn’t see any of it, and neither did the film I made. It’s just all you, Dr. Hiyakawa. No ghosts, no spirits, no invisibles. Just you and empty space.”

“Did you for a moment think that a digital camera could pick up a paranormal visitation? Apparitions are shy of any camera at the ready, and they don’t photograph well in the best of circumstances.”

“No, no I didn’t really expect to get anything, and I didn’t.”

“Then why the filming at all if not simply to prove me a phony?” Her eyes darted around the green room. Sunrays filtered in through the creases in the curtains, softening the green.

Carl’s voice over the phone hardly sounded like the same man. “I’m sure you mean well, Doctor, and you believe everything that—”

“Give me this chance to prove you wrong, Carl. You brought me all the way here, so let’s go for the brass ring. Take a chance!”

“You’ve been given forty-eight hours, Doctor, and—”

“Forty eight, you say. No kidding.”

“—and if…if we have no results by then, we wave you good-bye, no harm, no foul, and—”

“You ran the film to your superiors, and you’ve given the paranormal approach a good faith effort. Right, right?”

“It was always to be that way; wasn’t my idea.”

“Orders, sure. I understand.” Nothing seemed to be Carl’s doing, she thought.

A long silence followed. Carl cleared his throat, stuttered a half-formed apology he did not feel and said, “If it’s any consolation, I like you, Rae, on a personal level. I really do.”

“The film was for the governor to see and to hold over the mayor’s head?”

“That’s about it.”

“Secured your job, did it?” “It did.”

“And Amos knew all along, and he quit over this, didn’t he?”

“Amos’s reasons are neither here nor there.”

“But it contributed?”

“I suppose it did, perhaps.”

“He knew you’d clenched the job, and that no amount of stumping or money could wrench it from you, not after filming that documentary of me looking the fool at each location where the victims died.” She hadn’t bothered to see the films. “I’m sure I look like the worst mime on record.”

“Look…I’m sorry about your being used as a pawn in all this, Doctor, but I had little choice.”

“ Ahhh…a local psychic wouldn’t do. No palm readers for the Charleston Police Department. No…you guys had to have the best; you needed the FBI to make it look good…a good faith effort. And once over, you can concentrate on the case at hand. I get it clearly now. Must’ve gotten a good laugh at pulling one over on me like this.”

“I can arrange a plane back to Quantico, and Doctor, I’m sorry the way it went.”

“I’m not quite ready to board a plane back to Quantico just yet. You said I have a forty-eight hour window. I intend to use that window.” She hung up, angry now. Here she had been blind to what had really been going on all along between Chief Orvison and Detective Kunati. Carl Orvison proved far, far more cunning and clever than had Kunati or Rae, a real conniver, mired in his local politics as a lizard in a marsh. In a sense, the series of killings were of far less concern to the man than his position on the ladder. He’d been protecting his rung the entire time. Even his coming out to the trailer to ostensibly ‘save’ the foolish young half-Asian weaker-sexed female psychic at three in the morning from whatever lurked there had been a ruse, a pose. Amos Kunati had at least been up front.

She sat dejected and staring around at the green room, and she moaned “God…how damned awful is this?” She didn’t expect an answer sitting here at the desk, but she got several in succession, beginning with her father’s image in the mirror before her.

When the bridge falls— she watched his lips move and heard his voice in her head— beneath one’s feet, grab your feet. Her father’s voice resonated around the room, but his meaning fell flat. It made sense only if she imagined feet to mean ego and self.

Her father’s image morphed into her mother’s features, and her apparition said: When one door c loses, another will open.

She must have read Rae’s unimpressed features pinch into a frown, as now her mother added: When the road fails to rise up to meet you, you take another road.

“Yeah, thanks Mom. I’ll do that.” Nice to see that Mom had some new material, she said to herself.

I heard that . Her mother’s frown faded with her image, as both parents appeared to have swept off for some erstwhile spectral appointment. With them gone, Rae cried. In the midst of her tears and pacing and wiping her nose, she heard a third voice, Gene’s voice say in her ear: When counted out by the many, count on one.”

“Oh, great. Now Gene is speaking in epitaphs. Do you mean count on myself?” she asked.

The number of focus , she heard him say. She’d heard him say it every time he prepared her for a trance. Gene had in an instant and without hesitation seconded her plan, the plan to go after a killer via her mind, the psychic intervention. The secret of her gift, the secrete of life, to focus on one thing. To do one thing and to do it well.

The young girl who had claimed that her dog had attacked a man who’d broken in to drive nails into her eyes had, in her way, intervened on the case; her dog had supposedly intervened to save her. Rae wondered if she could save a real victim, if she could intervene, take a psychic bite out of crime, and if so, perhaps prove to the powers that be that debunking her and psychic sensory investigation amounted to undermining their own investigation. In short, she meant to make Carl Orvison eat his words and his deeds.

Show ‘em what you’ve got, Gene said now, something he said each time he’d acted as her spotter.

She looked for him in every reflective surface but could not find him. Finally, she replied, “I will, but meantime, I really suck at reading people. You know that, Gene.”

Too often, she felt, she really did suck at reading people on this plane.

She felt a generalized feeling that said she shouldn’t be so hard on herself, that life and people were

complicated, that personalities were as layered as onions, and that the core traits of an individual remained hidden in deep stratums of emotion and guile and gray matter—much of which had a connection to DNA imprinting dating back to the time of the caveman. Little wonder people were hard to read. How much of life could be understood, really so long as ancestral fears and primordial emotions ruled a species? Little wonder, no one proved an open book.

“Still, I suck at reading people,” she moaned. “The ones who might can help—” she thought of Kunati who might’ve forewarned her had she worked harder at the clues she now realized he’d been putting out— “or the ones who can only hurt you.” She thought of Carl Orvison again and just how subtly he’d operated on her. “Just try to read a politician.”

Still, while Orvison had proven now to be the deliberate and conniving one the entire time, Kunati had had several opportunities to speak openly with Rae. How many times had they been alone. What was the fencing all about? But he’d not been frank with her. He’d squandered several chances to give her some indication of the true nature of his and Carl’s visit to Quantico to shop for a reputable psychic. Instead, he simply jumped ship himself.

She wondered, does it make sense? How much in human behavior ever does…make sense?

She wiped her eyes and set about thinking how she could get hold of that hammer, how she would work around Orvison.

Replay , said her mother’s voice. She was back? Or had she simply not left? And what the devil did she mean by replay?

Rerun, her father corrected mother.

Reverse, Gene corrected them both. “Reverse.”

The word reverberated through her ear, but Rae was unsure what this meant, and scratching her head, awaiting more input, she remained patient. She dabbed at her final tears. The room felt empty again, the silence like the depth of an ocean, the density of a mountain. She knew they’d all gone; in fact, she wondered if they’d been in the room at all, if it hadn’t all been her neediness for them talking through her.

But whatever the truth, what they’d said had given her courage.

I’m going for it, she told herself, still wondering what could reverse have meant in this context. Believing that those who loved her most, from the other side, were guiding her in the right direction. She believed she must revisit the haunted trailer, but that she must do so smartly. Yes, she told herself, that’s it. The only way she might beat Carl Orvison’s timeframe. That’s what Gene’s trying to say, and Mother, and Father. Then she reminded herself that it’s all right to listen to voices in one’s head so long as those voices are benign.

Rae worked out her plan in her now quiet head, every detail. She stopped only to pour another cup of coffee from the urn, still hot and steaming as if no time at all had passed, and perhaps it hadn’t. The coffee certainly didn’t taste as bitter as bile anymore. In fact, it had a pleasant, easy aroma, and it went down smoothly. Coffee with attitude. Or rather her attitude had changed, making the coffee great.

She smiled at the genius of her plan. It must work this psychic stakeout.

TWENTY FOUR

The Sleepwalker killer didn’t like the press calling him the Hammerhead killer or the Hammerhead Shark, trolling for victims. He’d written then to cease and desist calling him anything other than The Sleepwalker, but now he had more serious matters to contend with.

Again, he’d broken out in a sweat from a strange feeling of being watched by someone, someone closing in on him, someone nearby, and he whipped around, but he was alone, alone in his office. He’d pulled all the blinds to end any fear of the windows and any reflection he might see in them. He had done all he could in his workplace to cut down on such items, but much of the work here involved glass items, Petri dishes, stainless steel surfaces, test tubes—all of which reflected him and what he did all day long.

Outside his office, the walls were an institutional green as was the lab. He worked now for years in a laboratory setting, doing good work, but everything had changed since Mother’s death. She’d died heartbroken over her three other children, what they’d become and what they’d failed to become. Mother had made him promise to make good on it all, and to take care of all the things she had had no control over. He’d made the promise, and he’d lived up to it.

But now he kept feeling his skin prickle, feeling the ghosts of his victims move around and sometimes through him. He felt eyes on him, eyes he’d nailed shut, still somehow watching…seeing…waiting…watching him slowly fall apart if he were not careful. Eyes watching, yes, all guided by some intelligence he did not recognize.

The eyes had been shut down in this world, on this plane, but they somehow regained sight in the next, and they had returned with a vengeance—stirred up, no doubt by that damned psychic. Undoubtedly, Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa was the intelligence behind them, the catalyst. Still, he had no true evidence of this only a vague sense of it.