Copycat Killer

by Hermione Stark

  I am choking. Blood is in my mouth. The smell of it fills my nose. I am trying to crawl off the bed to get away but the axe is in the killer’s fist and it arcs down, slicing into the flesh of my back. I feel its blade striking bone at the back of my ribs. I scream as the killer jerks it out.

  Someone seizes my arm and drags me away from the bed. Reeling from the images in my mind, I stare up at her. It is Remi.

  “What are you doing here?” she demands. She looks more curious than displeased to see me. The skinny, pasty-faced guy standing next to her looks equally curious.

  But my mind is on the vision. The overwhelming terror of it has left me feeling disorientated. She was a woman dying and she knew it. She was being hunted like a terrified animal in her own home. Is this how Magda felt? Knowing the end was here and there was nowhere left to run?

  “This is a crime scene,” complains the pasty-faced guy. “You’re contaminating it. How did you get in here?”

  “I was just passing through,” I mutter dazedly.

  Remi giggles. Then she does her best to look stern. “Finlay,” she says firmly, “I can handle this. Give us a moment.”

  Finlay grudgingly leaves the room.

  “That was Phineas Finlay,” she says in a low voice. “My least favorite crime scene tech.”

  “He gives me the creeps,” I say.

  “He was right though,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

  “Erm…Just between us, I had a little wager with your boss, Chief Santagar?” It comes out sounding like a question.

  Remi’s russet eyebrows shoot up towards her fabulous hairline. “Do tell,” she says eagerly.

  I tell her about it. She whistles. “Wow. Storm is not going to be happy. Neither is the chief. It sounds like you are most definitely not supposed to be here.”

  “But you’ll let me stay?” I ask hopefully.

  “I wouldn’t object to having you back on the team,” she says with a grin. “But you’d better stay out of Leo’s way. He is a stickler.”

  “I thought you guys were in France?”

  “We got back this morning.”

  “What about Storm?” I whisper, my heart beating faster at the thought he might be downstairs. So near. And so dangerous to my mission right now.

  She looks amused, as if she knows exactly how I am feeling. She shakes her head. “He’s at headquarters. He got called away.”

  “Oh. Good.” However I can’t help but feel a little disappointed.

  Remi raises an eyebrow. “So? Have you seen anything useful?”

  I open my mouth to tell her everything but then I snap it shut. Technically Remi is part of the competition, since my mission is to beat Storm’s team to finding the killer.

  “You can’t be serious,” she says. “I’m letting you stay. You have to give me something.”

  “Okay.” I gesture at the bed. “I saw Lynesse there. He was hacking her with an axe. She was terrified.”

  It feels like a stupid thing to say. What person isn’t terrified when they are dying.

  She goes to beside the bed and bends down to look at something. “Huh,” she says. “Good catch.”

  First I see just a patch of dark blood near the dust ruffle, and then I see the handle of a weapon is sticking out. Remi carefully lifts the dust ruffle a few inches. The weapon is an axe.

  My sense of satisfaction lasts only half a second. I turn to the wall beside the door and point at DCK’s mark. “It wasn’t DCK,” I tell her. “See how there are no gouge marks? It’s a copycat.”

  Her eyebrows draw together. She goes closer to scrutinize it. She looks as disappointed as I had felt when I had first realized. “Dammit,” she says.

  She snaps a photograph of it with her phone and taps out a text message.

  “Was that to Storm?” I ask.

  She nods. “We were told it was DCK. I suppose it’s good news if it isn’t. From a press perspective I mean.”

  “I suppose you’ve got more chance of catching the killer now,” I say miserably.

  DCK is the one I wanted to catch. I consider whether he might be trying to trick us, but I know immediately that it is just wishful thinking. DCK loves to boast about his kills. He has a signature style. He would never ever leave a fake mark on one of his own kills.

  Silly misery guts. This is fantastic news, says the little voice inside my head. You had a wager. And if it’s not DCK, you’ve got a much better chance of catching him, haven’t you?

  I realize she is right. It only makes me feel a tiny bit better. I really had wanted to catch DCK.

  You can get him next time, she says grimly. And if you really want to feel all heroic, this killer is just as evil. He had no right to take Lynesse’s life. You remember that.

  Her words make me feel better. Lynesse deserves justice just as much as Magda does.

  Vengeance, insists the little voice. Lynesse deserves vengeance. Trust me, it’s far tastier than justice.

  “You would tell me if you saw the killer in your vision, wouldn’t you?” says Remi.

  I nod.

  She looks satisfied. “You get any more impressions from the bedroom?”

  I shrug. The revelation that this was not DCK has left me feeling rather dejected.

  “Then we’d better head downstairs,” says Remi crisply. “If you want to cover that before Leo gets back from speaking to the fiancé.”

  I look at her gratefully. Nice to know someone is on my side. “Do you think I could speak to the fiancé?” I ask hopefully.

  Remi gives a brief snort of laughter. “No. I recommend you give the witnesses a wide berth. Storm is sure to find out. And it would make him really mad.”

  We go downstairs together. I see the skeevy crime scene tech through a doorway, snapping pictures of the kitchen. I’m glad he is not in the lounge. I don’t particularly want to talk to him.

  Remi seems to sense I need a moment to mull things over. She leaves me standing near the base of the stairs, from where I watch her walk around the lounge. She takes a close look at two wine glasses on the coffee table but does not touch them. She eyes up the couches and the luxuriant textured cushions on them. I feel a pang. Lynesse Jones had been sitting on those couch and laughing with the dead man just minutes before they were killed.

  Remi glances at me enquiringly. I shake my head. Nothing yet. I should do what she is doing and walk around. I follow in her footsteps.

  “It is best if you don’t touch anything,” she says. “Want some gloves?”

  I shake my head. I don’t think touching things through plastic gloves will help. I suspect my gift works best with skin-to-object contact. I feel pretty useless without it.

  Remi, with her thin rubber gloves on, is poking around the large hardback books on a side-table. They look like they’re more for effect than for reading. I glance at a huge canvass image on a wall. It is a pixelated painting of a nude woman’s body, her head out of shot.

  One entire wall of the room is a huge window overlooking an outdoor area where there is a beautiful rectangle of a perfect-blue pool and some pristine wooden deckchairs beside it that look like they belong in some sunny holiday spot. This house is like a little piece of heaven. An entire universe away from my own one-room studio apartment.

  It seems so sad that the murdered woman Lynesse had lived among such beauty only to have it snatched away. I wonder if she misses her things. If the man who bought her all these things did this to her.

  This thought makes me frown. Where was he when all this was happening? Why was some other man with his fiancée?

  Remi’s body language tells me that she is waiting for me to say something even though she is trying her hardest to give me time. Finally she turns to me with a raised brow.

  I shrug my shoulders, not knowing what to say to her. “I’ve got nothing.”

  “You must have some thoughts,” she says. “Let’s just start with your general impressions of the house.”

  “The guy who lived her
e was super-rich,” I mutter.

  She doesn’t laugh at me. “Do you think it’s a guy because you read it in the paper or for some other reason?”

  I roll my eyes. “If I hadn’t read it in the paper I would still know.” I gesture at the canvass on the wall.

  “Could be a woman who had a liking for the female form,” says Remi.

  I smile. It feels nice to banter with her like this. It doesn’t feel like she is testing me to see how stupid or not I am.

  “No, they’re his.” I point to some other paintings hung up near the entryway. They depict brightly colored objects and people from Otherworld. The colors are brilliant and jarring, the style almost confrontational. “Those are hers. She was keen on rediscovering her heritage. She was trying to put her stamp on the house and he was pushing back. He didn’t like them. I think it was a point of contention between them.”

  I don’t know how I know this. I feel like it comes from a combination of all of the details I am seeing and the feelings from them all melting together in my mind somehow to tell me I could bet my life that her fiancé is a controlling man who always has to have what he likes the way he likes it.

  “I bet he spends his money as fast as he makes it,” I mutter. “I bet he’s used to getting everything he wants.”

  “Now tell me something only a psychic sees,” she says.

  “It doesn’t work like that. What was the male victim’s name?”

  “Why? Do you sense anything about him?”

  I shake my head.

  But Remi is not one to give up so easily. “Do you think they were having an affair?”

  I think about it, then shake my head. “No. Their body language wasn’t like that in the dream. I’m sure they were just friends.”

  “What’s your theory of the crime?” Remi says. “What do you think the sequence of events was?”

  “I saw a bit in my dream. The killer was watching them through the window.” I point to it.

  Remi looks interested. She goes over to it and places a little sticker there. She makes a note on her notepad.

  I tell her the rest of what I saw. She nods and writes it all down. I don’t feel like I have told her anything she doesn’t already know. I feel like a complete amateur.

  “Who was he then? The dead guy?”

  “Who was she, is the question you should be asking,” says Leo behind me.

  I turn around startled, not having heard him come in. I smile at him, but golden Leo who was always sunny and friendly to me doesn’t smile back.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “You tell us.” He advances towards us. His phone is in his hand. He hands it to Remi, who reads something off the screen.

  She whistles. “I knew Monroe would be good,” she says to Leo. “You gotta admit that was fast.” She gives me a sympathetic look.

  “Well?” Leo says to me. His muscular arms are crossed over his chest.

  “I really don’t know what you mean. She was that actor Jared Everett’s fiancée. Was there something else?”

  “So you’re claiming you never knew Lynesse Jones?” says Leo. “Never met her?”

  I look from him to Remi, trying to figure out what is going on and why they are looking at me like that.

  “Am I a suspect?” I ask in disbelief. “You can’t be serious. When I’m not serving canapes, I’m dishing out fry-ups and washing dirty dishes. How on Earth would I know a woman like Lynesse Jones?”

  Leo thumbs his phone. He holds it out to me, showing me a picture of Lynesse. Just her face. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen her in the newspapers. I know what she looks like.”

  “You’ve never seen her with Dr Carrington?”

  That name is a slap in the face. I feel like a ghost from my past has risen from its grave and walloped me.

  I look from Leo to Remi and back again. “With Dr Carrington?” I ask faintly. “My psychiatrist? Are you saying she knew him?”

  Suddenly I get a queasy feeling in my stomach. If she knew him this looks bad for me. Really bad.

  “We can’t tell you that.” Leo takes a firm grip of my upper arm. “You’ll have to come with me now.”

  Chapter 9

  DIANA

  I expected Leo to drive us to Agency Headquarters to face my reckoning, but he has not. He has brought me to the morgue. Because Storm is here.

  Once we are inside, Leo leaves me in a waiting area while he goes into the autopsy room to speak to Storm. I am aware the bodies of both murder victims are currently inside the autopsy rooms and that the coroner will be telling Storm any information of interest.

  Storm has more interesting things to think about before he comes to dole out my punishment. No doubt my interrupting his focus on this case will doubly displease him. He is all about his work. Our last encounter proved that. I had thought he was in Paris. I thought I would have at least a day or two before he found out what I was up to. I pace the waiting room, wondering how bad his reaction will be.

  You could just walk in, suggests the little voice. And if you overhear anything useful then that’s a score for us.

  No, I tell her.

  Leo will be telling Storm that I trespassed on the crime scene. What if, like Leo, he thinks I am connected with the dead woman through Dr Carrington? How can Lynesse have known Dr Carrington? Is he the reason she is dead? There is no connection between me and Lynesse. If I run off now, it will make me look even guiltier.

  Realizing that my agitated pacing is disturbing the two other people sitting quietly in the waiting room, I abruptly stop. One is a fragile looking woman who keeps glancing at me intermittently, and quickly away. She looks distressed. My pacing is clearly upsetting her but she is too polite to say anything. Her tendrils of soft shiny red hair remind me strongly of a succubus from my past who worked for Dr Carrington and betrayed me.

  When the woman sees me looking at her, she offers me a small wavering smile and glances down at her lap. She must be here to see a deceased loved one. It is not her fault that she reminds me so much of someone who hurt me. Feeling guilty for my lack of consideration, I go to sit in a chair and try not to fidget.

  The other occupant of the room is a dazed looking man who is staring into space. He is sitting hunched forwards in his chair, wringing his fingers. He looks familiar. My sudden realization of who he is makes me sit up abruptly in my chair, causing its legs to clatter loudly. The woman shoots me a startled look. She is jumpy as a fawn.

  I murmur an apology to her, but my attention is already back on the man. He is the same man from my dream. The one who had his head bashed in by the murderer. Except it seems he is very much alive.

  If he’s not dead, who is?

  Feeling a bit perturbed by this, I go to sit on a chair not too far from him and clear my throat. The sound makes him look enquiringly at me. He sees me clearly wanting to talk to him, and he seems a little confused at this.

  He points to his chest. “Did you… Did you want me?” he says.

  The quavering uncertainty in his voice breaks my heart a little bit. Gone is the happy carefree man who had enjoyed a drink and much laughter with Lynesse in my dream. Her death has crushed him.

  “Sorry,’ I say quietly, aware the redheaded woman can hear every word. “I didn’t want to disturb you. I’m Diana.

  “I’m…” He pauses, grief stricken and unable to focus. He seems uncomfortable with his own grief. He rubs his face. “I’m… Raif.”

  I hesitate, knowing what I am about to say might come off insensitive, or worse downright rude. “Are you a friend of Lynesse Jones?”

  I half expect him to be angry and ask me if I am a journalist. Instead he leans forwards in his chair, looking at me intensely. “Are you with them?” he says, jerking his head in the direction of the autopsy room. “Can you help me?”

  I am relieved. “Yes. I do want to help. Do you know what happened to her?”

  “Can you tell her I have the key?” he says intensely.
>
  I frown. “Tell who?”

  “They won’t listen to me,” he says. “I’ve tried to tell them I need to speak to her, but they won’t help.”

  I bite my lip. He must not know that Lynesse is dead. He must be hoping that she is still alive.

  “Please,” he says. “I can’t wait long. I got the key for her just like I promised. She mustn’t wait any longer. She has to leave. Will you help her?”