Deja Blue (17 page)

It was true that Nia hadn’t seemed to be eating, and recently, she’d lost weight at an alarming rate. In fact, she looked alarmingly thin like that new rav actress Lisa Lockley. The one whose life was spiraling out of control.

She dialed Nia’s cell phone. It rang and rang and rang until Nia’s voice finally came on, her answering reply, a happy-sounding message, all smiles—something Rae had never heard before as she’d never known Nia not to pounce on the first ring. Panicked now, Rae dialed Enriquiana. The housekeeper’s phone rang twice, three times when finally, Enriqui answered with a question, “Dr. Hiyakawa? Do you know what time it is in Virginia?”

She checked her watch. “Same as here, 11:45.”

“You wake me up, why?” “I tried calling the house and then Nia’s cell, and I got no answer either way. Where can she be?”

“She is home.”

“She’s not answering. Can you go up to her room and check on her, please for me?”

“I can’t do that, Doctor.”

“Do so and call me back, yes?” “I can’t,” she repeated. “I am at my-jown house.”

“What do you mean? You’re supposed to be at my house with Nia.”

“I couldn’t stay.”

This threw Rae off. “Hold on. I asked you to stay at the house with her, but you left Nia alone?”

“She told me to go home.”

“You don’t take orders from her, Enriqui. You take orders from me.”

“She not at the house, Doctor.” “Will you please start making sense, Enriqui?”

“She has gone to spend time with her father.”

“What?” Rae saw stars. Big red stars.

Enriquiana added, “She and Mr. Tomi said it was good idea. Good time to visit, Nia say. She call her father.”

“Great…just great.”

“I’m sorry, Doctor. I didn’t know nothing else to do. I try calling you, but Mr. Tomi, he say no. Told me I gotta mind my own business. Said he would call you.”

“No one’s called.” The long silence that built up between them was broken by Enriqui’s sniffling and quietly crying.

“I’m so sorry,” Enriqui announced. “I know…I should’ve call you.”

“Never leave anything up to Tomi Yoshikane,” Rae replied, sighing heavily into the phone. “He’s totally irresponsible.” What worried her most was her daughter’s misguided notion that Tomi, with all his money, was a perfect father and a better parent than her. He could buy that school that Rae had put Nia in, and he could most certainly buy a fifteen-year-old’s allegiance. “So why isn’t she answering her phone?”

“I dunno…the shower maybe?”

“She does spend a lot of time in the shower.”

“She may be asleep,” suggested Enriquiana, “like me. Like I was.”

“Or out on the town with her father who’s likely bought her a better phone, and maybe a car by now.” “Maybe.”

“No maybe. Fact.”

“I am sorry, Dr. Hiyakawa.”

“Tomi will call me, I’m sure, Enriqui. It’s not your fault. I’m not blaming you. Go back to bed and sleep well, dear.”

Enriqui thanked her and said goodnight, adding, “You get good night’s sleep, too, Doctor.” Rae’s housekeeper hung up.

“Yeah, will do that sometime else,” she replied to the hang up. She gritted her teeth at events at home. No doubt Nia had called her father and had planned to do so from the moment she learned Rae was going out of town.

Nia still somehow managed to blame Rae for the dissolution of the family, regardless of Tomi’s philandering ways and his abuse. Nia certainly had the right to love her father, despite the fact that her mother believed him a toad and a despicable one at that. All the same, Rae didn’t have to like it. Perhaps one day, Nia would take the emotional blinders off…see first hand her father’s true nature. Sure he was industrious and a financial genius, but he was also a controlling, self-serving, egotistical, megalomaniac who enjoyed nothing more than holding sway and power over other people, and not above using his own daughter in this manner. The man indeed craved for power over those in his sphere, including his ex-wife, and if using Nia to lord it over Rae, so be it in his mind. Tomi needed adolation as others needed air and water.

With Nia, the snake proved subtle, but how hard was it to pull the wool over the eyes of a fifteen-year-old who wanted only his love? Tomi provided that love in the form of comfort, riches, expensive trips and presents—lots of presents.

It’d been unfortunate and traumatic that day long ago when Tomi had hit Rae once too often, when Nia walked in only to see her mother threatening to kill the jerk with her Glock 9mm. Tomi hadn’t wanted her to work; had wanted a trophy wife instead. When she determined that she wanted to train as an FBI agent, he’d blocked her at every juncture but one. She’d taken up the preferred weapon of the FBI agent and had learned to fire it at a firing range even before she’d gotten the go signal from the Bureau. Tomi had laughed at her insistence after 9-11 of wanting to make a difference, of wanting to play a part out in the real world, a world beyond his lavish lifestyle. He’d not taken her seriously until the moment she showed him her targets from the range, every shot a bulls-eye. That’s when he went to work on her, putting her in her place, until she pulled the gun from its secure hiding place and put it in his face.

She hadn’t even loaded the gun, but he didn’t know this, and before his young daughter, twelve at the time, he cringed and showed a cowardice that Rae had not expected. Perhaps, deep down, staring at her blackened eye, Tomi knew he had it coming and half expected her to pull the trigger.

Instead, she had backed him to the door and through it, locking it behind him. With Nia looking on, crying, shouting at her, Rae had called that divorce lawyer she’d been thinking of calling, the one her girlfriend Etta Pace had insisted she see.

Later, Rae won the divorce but lost the settlement. Tomi had arrayed an army of lawyers from his firm against her, and he had clout and pull in places she’d never guessed possible. In fact, Etta’s lawyer friend was still, after four years, trying to get an equitable deal out of the situation for Rae, a thing she’d long since given up on.

She put the problem aside for now, her attention turning toward the here and now. She most certainly needed to be in the moment in this dark domicile where she’d situated herself inside a sleeping bag. She felt relatively helpless should, for whatever reason, an attacker come after her as feared by Kunati, but not quite, as she held her firearm at hand. Still, the best laid plans of mice, men, and mediums oft go astray, and she mentally said a sarcastic thanks to Kunati for putting that idea in her head.

She lay staring up at the ceiling where she’d spread the sleeping bag out on what passed for a living room floor. She had to work herself up to what she must do, and she hoped to feel Gene Kiley’s spirit nearby, encouraging, along with her parents. “Need all the help I can get here,” she confided to the empty home.

She felt rest was necessary. Again checking to see that she’d correctly set her watch for 2:45PM to be awake at exactly 3PM, she rolled onto her side within the cocoon she’d prepared. The Glock pinched until she rearranged both it and herself with an audible, “Ummph!”

Sleep did not come easy. Every creek, every whistling wind, every tin can knocked over by a cat, every restless night owl screech rang in her ears as if amplified by a Bose radio. Then her watch alarm went off, making her sit straight up in the bag, mummy-fashion. For a millisecond, she thought it might be Nia, calling from Tomi’s home in Arlington, answering the message left by Rae. It couldn’t be her watch alarm, as she’d just set it moments ago.

No such luck. While her brain said it’d only been a moment ago, reality check and a look at her watch said otherwise: 2:45AM. Time flies when you’re having fun, she silently mused and zipped her sleeping bag open. She gave a thought to how utterly vulnerable she’d been for the past several hours. “Talk about live bait,” she muttered. Rae then clamored to her feet, still muttering to herself. “Time to go to work. Earn it.”

SIXTEEN

Rae entered the bedroom with a sheet and the hand-held Crawl with its electrode hookups in hand. She entered nude and a little chilled, and over the old mattress, smeared with brown, encrusted blood, she spread a cheap Dollar General store sheet she’d purchased. The sheet billowed up and over the soiled mattress, something to go between her skin and the exact spot where the victim, Marci Hatfield Cottrill, had spent her last dying breath, according to all the diagrams Rae had seen, and the now brown stains left behind by the CSI team. Unlike film and TV crime scene investigators, real life investigators left a hell of a lot behind for others to clean up. In fact, in major cities and most communities cleaning businesses vied for the lucrative city or state contract business of coming in to clean up after crime scenes once released by the authorities. It could be a privately owned place that typically specialized in cleaning offices and buildings after hours that took on specialized cleaning situations on the side, or it could be that a cleaning chain might take it on as in Maid For U or a more well known and established company such as Stanley Steamer, used in and around DC for such matters. Where city and state contracts for such cleanliness didn’t exist, the private sector took over. Called in by those left behind, or a realtor interested in unloading a piece of property, anyone willing to foot the bill.

She gave a thought to how long the trailer had sat unclean like this, and she imagined that perhaps it was too painful yet for the family to contemplate such mundane matters. Medical Examiner Roland Hatfield definitely didn’t want the entire mattress taking up room at his morgue or lab; instead small samples, swaths cut in neat little squares were taken along with the more easily bagged and transported sheets and bedding. For the same good sense, he’d seen no reason to cart the bureau mirror into custody.

Moments before having lain down on the mattress, Rae had set the palm-held CRAWL to operate. She’d attached the electrodes to her temples and scalp to tap into the forebrain, to trap the images she hunted. Images like scattering quail, skittish and racing for cover. She felt like a hunter armed with only her mind as winged phantoms and images swept about this haunted place, then next swept above her, perching on the ceiling fan. If she could reach it, she’d’ve turned on the switch just to piss off these unruly phantoms.

Here they came now, going below and around the bed and Rae like so many banshees on broomsticks. She imagined some going up a chimney in the living area in the next room, escaping out into the wider world.

Rae stared up at the ceiling to a lifeless fan here in the dark room. Electricty and water had been shut off. She breathed deeply, smelling the hint of blood odor remaining, and next she eased into a trance. When she wished it, Rae Hiyakwa could focus her mind like a laser beam at a single target.

Eyes closed, still her undivided attention went to the night of the murder here at or around 3AM. She sensed the dead woman’s presence here with her…hovering, restless, pacing over ethereal ground…pacing without feet, without body…corporeal and yet not corporeal, rather like a photographic negative of a flesh and blood creature. A black shadow. Yet, while this form represented Marci Cottrill, it was not her; not even her spirit, but rather the residue of her shape, her form left indelibly imprinted on this deathbed where she’d met so traumatic an end.

On the one hand, Rae felt relief for the victim’s soul. Relieved that the woman’s actual spirit had apparently escaped from here—this plane, this material world, and the scene of her anguish—while on the other hand, Rae knew the peace Marci had found meant tonight’s experiment would prove less fruitful as a result.

Still, of the two choices, she’d much prefer knowing that the victim’s soul had moved on, choosing in the end the freedom of soul to the enslavement of flesh and any heightened sense of emotion as in vengeance, hatred, and anger. Such poor souls lived in a kind of counterfeit world. A life of perdition. The freedom that came with understanding and being honest to one’s self even if it meant accepting death’s hand extended into the netherworld.

This meant she was not trapped in a continuous loop of suffering. For Marci it meant a wondrous future. For Rae it meant much harder work tonight.

Determining exactly what had happened from moment to moment here where Marci Cottrill’s blood had pooled meant large gaps would have to be filled in by Rae’s own imagination, as the residue of her was as insubstantial as a shadow. Rae saw it out the side of her mind’s eye. The dark, empty creature wandered the room as if confused, in a state of chaos. It wondered who it was, wondered who Rae was, and on some level, it may have wondered what it was doing here. Most certainly this itthing-shadow must wonder why Rae was lying here now in its place, invading its space.

Momentarily and with a flash of rebellion, the shadow reclaimed its place on the bed, moving through Rae, until it lay beneath her, impossibly attempting to push her away and having no luck whatsoever. Rae could almost hear the words struggling from the formless, shadow mouth. “Get out! Get out!”