Deja Blue (34 page)

Don’t move. Easy…easy does it. Mustn’t rustle a single leaf at this moment. Silence complete now. He’s within spitting distance.

Be patient. Easy…

Let him go out of sight in that direction.

He was moving off now, away from her, his tune with him. Everything was going to be all right.

Rae’s phone rang, piercing the quiet, bleating like a pained goat in the stillness, alerting the killer to her exact whereabouts. “Damn it!” she said and fumbled and worked to shut off the ring tone that played the theme from the Twilight Zone immediately. There was no time to answer a call from Quantico, Virginia now as he was coming straight for her now.

Rae ran back the way she’d come, back toward the light from the trailer and the other houses on Finch Lane. She ran faster than she thought herself capable of doing, but she could hear the dry crunch of leaves behind her telling her that he was gaining with his deadly weapon of choice raised and poised to come down at her skull. One strike to her head, and she could be incapacitated, and then he’d finish the job. She’d die like Marci Cottrill and his other victims had died.

She imagined the horrors he’d commit on her body, nails driven into her eyes, if she fell under his power. He likely had a pocketful of nails, brought with him from the get go. Sleepwalker indeed. This man was a cold-blooded killer, his steps premeditated. This man was the poster child for capital punishment.

Her mind raced as she worked to save herself. The neighbors. They were moments before to be avoided. Now they meant survival. But she feared she’d not get that far.

Rae had to survive. She feared Nia would be lost without her; Nia would lose her true self if raised by Tomi Yoshikani. She’d become a spoiled, shallow, and conceited adult with more concern for a diamond hairbrush than say brotherhood, friendship, loyalty, and such things as character and human life.

She heard the monster behind her, heaving and grunting like a razorback pig, and his panting sounded close. She looked for the blackest black hole she could find, and it presented itself. The trailer was raised off the ground on blocks, something she’d paid no attention to before this moment. Beneath the trailer, lie a thick, pitch black world. She rounded the house to throw him off. Here, she dived under the house so that he could not see precisely where she’d disappeared to as he rounded the corner.

Rae’s dive from sight had her disregarding the filth and spider webs along with the sound of scurrying vermin here beneath the trailer.

From her vantage point, Rae watched the agitated monster’s legs march to and fro as his eyes scanned a 380 degrees in search of her. The man showed anxiety chased by frustration, and his wolf-like howl of anger and venom sent a shiver through Rae.

Where she lay, no human eyes could penetrate. She now had the advantage. While some might think her hiding here foolish, she saw numerous escape routes going off in many directions, should he decide to come under and after her.

Rae’s legs, her shoulders, hands, body kept spiking inward each time she touched something awful here, or anything that came sniffing nearby, curious of this intrusion. Some of the ‘creatures’ turned out to be discarded empty tin cans or gooey substances she could not recognize by touch alone. A cat screeched, giving her away before it raced off into the night.

Once again, an outside source of noise had alerted a killer to her location. She wanted to scream in frustration, because now the maniac had gotten to his knees, and he next lowered himself and the hammer to the earth. Like a predatory animal, his eyes flashing in the blackness here, Hatfield was coming straight at Rae.

Rae recalled her key chain had a mace canister attached. She fumbled for the keys, and the rattle sent his eyes darting to precisely to where she lay. He moved like a lizard, intent on getting his claws—or rather those of the hammer—into her head. In any event, the reptile was onto her, slithering toward her.

Rae scrambled back and back toward one of the exits the other side of the house, rattling the keys intentionally now, guiding him ever closer, but he made animal-like moves and came at her so much faster than she’d hoped.

Still, when he came within inches, she opened the mace on him, hitting him directly in the eyes. The reaction was immediate, Hatfield screaming at the top of his lungs here in the confined, coffin-like space. The noise he made must send every insect, spider, and mouse racing away. He whelped like a mad dog, screeched in pain, screamed obscenities, all while Rae made her escape.

As soon as she emerged from beneath the house, Rae thought of racing off in a flight of terror, thought of playing Pauline as in the Perils of Pauline, but she missed her gun, missed its heft and weight and the feeling of security it’d always given her, and even as she recalled where it’d been left, she made steps toward the trailer door. Hatfield may’ve been reluctant to use the gun on her, reluctant to draw attention before he could get himself and his car out of the area, but she had no qualms about blowing him away. She need only get her hands on her weapon.

She burst back into the trailer, raced through the rooms and into the bedroom. She grabbed the gun where it had awaited her return. The feel of it, the solidness of it, and the purpose for its existence all made for a calmness that now flowed through Rae. She marched back through the trailer in a calm resolve, intent on either arresting or killing the Hammerhead killer, recalling that West Virginia was not going to put this man into a gas chamber or an electric chair.

It flashed through her mind that the man she now hunted could easily get off with an insanity plea, one that he’d carefully worked up from the beginning, or at least the day after murdering his sister Marci—who ‘d apparently died for her sins.

Rae burst back through the back door and crouched to point her gun at the monster beneath the trailer. She hesitated a moment, sizing up the situation. If she fired and killed him where he lay, someone might suggest she was not in any imminent danger, after all, when she blew him away. While she weighed up the various scenarios, she heard his car engine turn over. Hatfield was the other side of the trailer, intent on his own escape now, getting away.

She raced around to the other side of the trailer, fired two shots, and his retreating automobile reported back that she’d struck it. In fact, her rounds knocked out one light and put a hole in his trunk, but he was gone, and she was left standing on the gravel. Out of sheer fatigue, she went to her knees, her gun still held tightly in her two fists, while her mind configured not only what had happened but how she could prove it.

She stood and returned to the trailer where she sat on the stairs, shaking her head when her phone vibrated. She opened it, and answered the call from Quantico, Miranda Waldron.

Miranda perkily leapt into it. “Rae, darling, we got cut off, but no matter!”

“Listen to me, Miranda!”

“Rae, we’ve got great news! We intend to make that forty eight hour deadline that was so unfairly imposed on you.”

“I need to make an emergency call, Miranda,” she panted in return, out of breath.

The other woman kept going, not hearing. “The facts are irrefutable, Rae. The think tank has pieced together some valuable clues.”

“Listen to me, Miranda.”

“For one, we believe that your killer works in a hospital or hospital-like setting, and may in fact wear green scrubs.”

“Gee…Miranda, that’s great to know, but at the moment, I need immediate assistance, so ring me back in five—”

“But Rae!”

“I need to call out. Good-bye!”

The moment she hung up, she saw Orvison’s cruiser coming toward the trailer, and she was caught in his headlights like a stunned deer, her gun in one hand, her phone in the other. She watched as Kunati and Orvison got out of the car and came toward her.

“Where’s Dr. Hatfield?” asked Carl.

“You mean where’s the Hammerhead killer?” she replied.

Kunati scrunched up his face. “Whataya mean? And you look like you’ve been crawling around in a dumpster.”

“Hiding under this damn trailer.”

“Hiding?” Amos replied, confused. “What were those gunshots we heard?”

“Hatfield murdered his sister, and since then he’s been covering the murder by creating a fall-guy, a fake serial killer—his Sleepwalker.”

“Hatfield?”

“Roland?” Orvison’s mouth fell to his knees.

“Murdered his sister?”

The questions came fast and furiously. The two cops were incredulous, disbelieving.

“When he learned how much I was seeing, learning, that I was getting closer, he panicked, and he tried to kill me.”

“You came here to flush out the killer?” asked Amos.

“Yes, to flush out the killer, damn it, and I did!”

“Where is he now?” asked Kunati, still trying to digest this turn of events.

“I have no idea. I maced him when he tried to hammer my head in, and he somehow found his car and got away from me, before I could get my gun. Fact is, I put two bullets into his car as he was racing off.”

“Roland Hatfield,” repeated Orvison.

“Hatfield…killed his own sister out here? Juar snapped, I suppose. Hard to believe.”

“She was a drain on him, whether he acknowledge it or not consciously. Subconsciously, he must have been at war with himself. Said something about her being a drain on his family name, called her horrible things.”

“Where would he go?” asked Orvison. “Where to from here?”

“To his digs, his home,” suggested Kunati.

“If it’s true, God, think of it Amos, he…the killer had the evidence in his hands the entire time, and he was in a position to tweak it in any manner he saw fit.” Orvison still could not believe it. “This means every report, every item we’ve collected from the murder scenes is tainted evidence.”

“In fact, he has the hammer now,” Rae pointed out.

“God help us when it comes to building a case against him.”

“His master plan…land in the asylum, a year, maybe two, and a release,” she said. “Has been all along.”

“Then he’ll ditch the hammer,” said Kunati, “to make prosecuting him as difficult as possible.”

“We’d best get over to his place, now!”

Rae slipped into the passenger seat beside Kunati. Orvison drove his own car. They sped away from the trailer and were soon racing for Dr. Roland Hatfield’s luxurious home in Quarrier Creek Hills, a rich

neighborhood overlooking Charleston.

It wasn’t unusual for criminals to race for home when their crimes came to light; Rae had seen it before, and there were numerous examples in high profile cases such as the OJ case years ago. When people’s lives come unraveled, when they could not think straight by reason of an emotional tsunami, a home meant a place of comfort, a place to organize one’s thoughts, an environment he could relate to whereas the rest of the world had gotten totally out of control and too chaotic to handle.

But not this time.

Hatfield proved the exception. He hadn’t run home. The car was nowhere to be seen. His wife, completely unaware of what was going on, huddled at the door with their three children, terrified that something had happened to Daddy. “Carl,” said the wife to Orvison, “what is going on?”

Orvison quietly, calmly explained their suspicion that her husband had killed his sister, and after that several other women.”

“Roland? That’s impossible. It can’t be. You must be mistaken.” The whole time, she was whisking her children to the interior of the house.

“Have you seen him tonight?” asked Amos rather forcefully.

“No…no, well last night, he came by for a visit with the children.”

“Visit with the children?” asked Carl.

“We’ve been separated for over a month now. Estranged, I think is the word for it. His idea to move out.”

“Move out? Moved to where?” pressed Amos.

“Took an apartment in the city.”

“I need that address.”

She said, “This can’t be true, Carl. It can’t be true.”

“Mrs. Hatfield,” Rae said, “he tried to kill me tonight. I was lucky to escape with my life. He’s disturbed, truly disturbed. You must have known how he felt about his sister.”

“He was embarrassed by her.” She shrugged. “He tried everything to clean her up, but she

was…incorrigible.” “He had a fixation on fixing her, didn’t he?” Rae asked.

“It had recently become an obsession, yes. Should I be afraid…afraid for myself and my children?”