Deja Blue (13 page)

“I see.”

“DeVane was right on when he tried to tell our local K-Mart manager that a certain clerk would snap unless his workload were reduced.”

Dr. Hatfield piped in with, “Leroy DeVane does work on the side with some rock bands and starlet types too. Informs them when and if a so-called ‘fan’ has become a ‘fanatic’ and needs be slapped with a court order to stay the hell away.”

“Your experts notwithstanding, I’d like to examine the documents myself.”

“By all means,” said Orvison.

“The one we just took out of our most recent victim will take a while to get under glass, but the others are in the vault.”

“The vault?” she asked.

“We keep secrets that we want kept secret in a bank vault downtown,” said Orvison. “Chase building.”

“So what’s holding us up?” she asked.

“Not a thing. Let’s get out of here.”

“Good luck with what we talked about, Dr. Hiyakawa,” said Dr. Hatfield.

“I’ll run it by you before it goes public.”

Orvison firmly added, “Whatever you cook up, Dr. Hiaykawa, it goes through me, understood?”

“I’ll explain what I have in mind on the way to the vault.”

They parted company with Hatfield, whose sunken eyes didn’t return to the autopsy at hand until the doors closed behind Orvison and Rae.

THIRTEEN

The vault items secreted out of the police department, welldocumented to maintain chain of evidence, despite the unusual decision to use a bank vault—proved a confusing series of cryptic lines from the killer’s hand. A handful of notes from both Kunati and this fellow DeVane with the university listed conclusions made by what passed as handwriting experts in the Charleston area, a university professor and a detective who’d taken a course in graphology.

At best graphology was more art than science, but Rae knew enough of its tenets to put together her own series of notes on the killer’s actual handwriting and what it might say of his psychological makeup. She decided to put the notes from Kunati and DeVane aside so as to not be prejudiced by any of their remarks. She told Chief Orvison that it’d be far better to compare the three sets of notes after the fact to see where they overlapped and agreed, not to mention where they might disagree.

The first victim’s throat revealed the folded message that was a single line: flowt thru the sky…flowt thru the sky… On the backside of the folded note, the line read: been to long together with my troubles and I.

Spelling and usage problems aside, the killer had a marked problem writing in a straight line, following a median. His f’s, l’s, t’s, h’s, y’s, g’s, and b’s flourished with life compared to the letters not rising and lowering below the erratic mid-line. The other letters, mostly the consonants and vowels that did not have heads and bottoms on them came off as halting and small, stuttering in a sense. O’s shone marred. Dirtied with ink spots by stabbing at the looping top end of each O used. This marked the author\killer as less than truthful. Haltings, slowdowns showed at crucial points along the forward moving line. Little to no attention given to margins or end of page. No attention to care given in an almost intentional child’s scrawl, an attempt to hide his true script, perhaps?

Orvison stood nearby, looking over her shoulder, occasionally asking, “Whataya

make of it?” to which she’d grunt until ready to speak.

Finally, she turned to Orvison and shared her thoughts about the handwriting itself. “He’s a pathological liar and cover-up artist.”

“No kidding.”

“Leans toward paranoia, perhaps even

schizophrenia, and he feeds on people believing his lies.”

“What else you got?” Orvison’s voice reverberated here in the vault.

“Lies have become a way of life for our unknown killer. His earliest transgressions were small lies, small transgressions, but as he got away with his crimes, they grew in severity and daring, even as a kid.”

“You saying he’s a Charleston boy? Born and bred here?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Damn it to hell. Was hoping he was relocated from someplace like Chicago.”

“He has a sense of the grandiose about himself and his mission. He may well even be lying to himself and believing his own lies at this time in his life.”

“Can a person do that?”

“Do what?”

“Lie to himself and actually believe his own lies? I mean if he’s making it up, doesn’t he know it?”

“Do the names O.J. Simpson, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dalhmer, Adolf Hitler mean anything to you?”

“I take your point, but how do you see that in the writing? Not even DeVane got that.”

“He’s not FBI trained in graphology. I am.”

“Oh…and here I thought it was you being, you know, psychic.”

“Haven’t got that far yet.”

“I see.”

“I work with what is physical and at hand first, same as you, Orvison.”

“You mean when there’s an elephant in the room, you can’t ignore it for a more exotic answer?”

“Exactly.”

“So what now?”

“So be quiet and let me go beyond the elephant.”

The specimens from the killer were under glass. She needed them in her hands. She slipped open the brass clips holding the glass plates together, and in a moment, she had the first note left by the killer in hand, against her skin.

Rae quietly went into a trance state. She believed something kinetic might yet have imbued the paper with a psychic message—an image or images. Something useful. Something she could take to the ‘bank’ if she weren’t already at the bank.

When she placed her hands to hover over the note itself, she felt an immediate sense of oppressiveness and fear, of choking and struggle and pain, near unbearable pain. She could hear the nails being driven through her own skull. A bone-cracking melon-splitting sound filled her ears.

She pushed away from the paper, its once tightly folded edges still creasing the paper in a pattern of squares. The note slid to one side, half on, half off the glass as Orvison caught Rae, about to go over backward in the chair she sat in, as if forced back by some invisible hand.

“Doctor! Are you all right?”

She shivered from a deathly chill. “Yes, all right. Thank you. Caught me by surprise.”

“What? What was that?”

“For a second there, I was her.”

“Her?”

“The victim; his first. Felt her tremendous pain shoot through me, and the only thing worse than the pain.”

“The fear?”

Rae nodded, “The startled fear, yes.”

“I’m not without empathy.” Orvison let out a long breath of air. “Did you see her attacker’s face?”

“No, nothing so helpful as that. The God of psychics is seldom to never that giving.”

“Hmmm…too bad.”

“Besides, the view from inside my head…it went to her, straight to her, to her internal feelings at the time of death. Clock beside her bed said 3:02”

“Something you picked up in the ME’s report?”

“It was there in black and white, but I saw it in a green light emitting diode just now.”

“Yeah…it got pulled from the wall. Stopped at 3:02.”

“A time when most of us feel safe and snug in our beds-a-night.”

“This monster prefers his witching hour. You sure he’s a West Virginian?”

She felt as if her skin had gone white, and from the look he gave her, she imagined her normally rosy cheeks had indeed gone ashen. She leaned against a wall now but said nothing.

“Maybe we’d best take the other notes slower,” he offered. “Give it more time?”

“No…now. I want to see them all and…and test each for any images that might jump out at me, and I want permission to conduct any further experiments with my CRAWL device to send any impressions back to Virginia for analysis by my team there.”

“Do you trust them to keep our secret about the lyrics?”

“I do. They follow orders.”

“By all means then, beam your images to your think tank people, if you feel up to it.”

“You can bet the farm on it.” She then asked, “When can I meet the daughter of Amiee Wynn?”

“She’s up to her eyeballs at the moment making arrangements, and she’s without funds. Trying to get her mother’s insurance to pay up, and there’s something about a pension, but she will come in soon, I’m confident.”

“Sheriff, it could be of vital importance that I talk to her.”

“I’ll see to it, Doctor. I will.”

“First, the other notes.” She began digging out the second death note.

# # #

His mirror had been attacked, but he couldn’t recall having taken his hammer to it. Cracks ran in every direction. He felt badly about having done it, having taken hammer to an item of furniture that had once belonged to his mother, but he honestly could not recall having done the damage.

While he could still see his reflection in the mirror, he must work at it. It was distorted, disfigured, hardly recognizable in and among the jagged lines. He was hardly recognizable.

The fractured image reflected his fractured mind. What in God’s name have I been playing at, he asked himself. God, came the answer. Playing God, of course.

“All of us…everyone…everybody…each and every one of us,” the killer said to himself, staring at the stranger in the mirror, “we’re all a little crazy at three in the morning.”

You got that right, replied his reflection, its voice in his head, cracked and distorted like the image in the mirror.

“Wait a minute! I didn’t do this, you did!” You didn’t do a thing wrong. Wasn’t you. Never was you, replied his calm reflection in his dead mother’s cracked mirror. He studied the lips, eyes, chin, ears all moving independent of him here in the looking glass, a strange fascination coming over him each time they spoke this way.

The Dream Killer, the name he’d guided the press to adopt, had begun to catch on. It’d been one purpose of writing them. The other was to explain his innocence. It’d taken some time, but finally the authorities had begun to take him seriously. He knew that they had found the lyrics that he’d placed in the throats of victims. Autopsy procedures being what they were.

Better catch some Z’sssssssssssssssssssza, pal. You gotta be bushed after a hard night’s work.

“How the hell am I ‘spose to sleep?” he shouted at the distorted reflection, a crease dividing his features straight down the middle if he stood in this position. “I got work, a job to attend to, and I have another murder to atone for.”

Jeeezus! What a loser. You’re not going to that stupid job, and you’re certainly going to stay the hell outta that church and confessional.

“That’s my waking life. Mine! T-t-o do with as I please. M-m-y time off from you! So you just butt out!” he shouted to the laughing reflection of the Hyde-like character in the looking glass. “By the way, you look like hell.”

So do you…so do you … More laughter came from inside the mirror, from that other place that had cornered him.

He fell back onto his bed, hiding from the man in the mirror, squealing, “G-get outta my life! Outta my head!”

He worked at changing, dressing. Monday. Monday meant his green suit, his uniform to the world, his look for society. He’d follow his usual routine. In by nine with one stop for a latte at Starbucks next door. In by nine, ready for work, the day shift.

As he dressed, the killer struggled to ignore anything in the house that might cast a reflection. He had taped up all the glass surfaces in the kitchen and any framed photos on the walls, and he’d pulled all the curtains on every window. He had sometime earlier smashed the bathroom mirror and pulled out all the broken parts, thrown them into a trash can, so that now every shard lay somewhere in the landfill.

The only mirror or reflecting surface remaining was the mirror on the bureau drawer which had belonged to Mother, so he’d been reluctant to destroy it, but now he knew that during one of his dark rages. Now he must disassemble it, and turn it to the wall behind the bureau so that he could no longer see the man in the glass. The stranger.