I See You (Arrington Mystery Book 1)

by Elle Gray

“And who was I meant to be? Your protege?”

  “If it helps you to see yourself in that role, so be it,” he replies. “But I see you as more of a kindred spirit, Paxton. You know how important the work I’m doing is. I’ve heard you speak about what a blight on the world people can be. Surely you understand what it is I’m doing.”

  My mind flashes to the forty faces on the whiteboard in the conference room, and anger wells up within me once more. I have to physically fight to keep it from boiling over. Seeing me on the verge of blowing up again, Brody gives me a ‘calm down’ gesture.

  “What is it you want from me, Hayes?”

  “I want you to ascend,” he says. “Like me, I want you to transform yourself and thus, help transform this world.”

  I realize at this point, I can stand here and bicker with him, which doesn’t put me a single step closer to saving Blake. Or I can play along with him and pick the best opportunity to take this guy out. But I know I have to play it right. I can’t sit here and pretend to be all in, or he’ll know I’m faking it. I have to be the reluctant dupe.

  “What is it going to take for me to get Blake out of there and to safety?” I ask.

  “Find her. All you have to do is find her,” he says.

  “And how am I going to do that?”

  “By finding me, of course,” he says, then lets out that creepy giggle of his.

  I cut a glance at Brody, who looks as dismayed by it as I do. I turn back to the phone and shake my head, wanting nothing more than to reach through the phone and strangle him.

  “You realize how circular that logic is, don’t you?” I ask.

  “Round and round,” he sings. Another eighties tune. “What comes around goes around.”

  Brody looks at me with wide eyes, his expression saying this is the most bizarre thing he’s ever heard. He’s not wrong. For as intelligent and cunning as this guy is, he’s also got more than a few screws loose.

  “It’s not as circular as you might think,” Hayes says. “If you find me, you will find her.”

  “Great,” I mutter. “Text me with an address and I’ll Google Map it now.”

  “There it is. There’s the lighthearted banter I was missing.” I can practically hear him beaming through the phone, and it takes all I have not to crush it in my hands. “Glad to have you back, Paxton.”

  I roll my eyes and blow out a frustrated breath. “If you’re not going to give me an address, how am I supposed to find you?”

  “Oh Paxton, do not disappoint me. I know you’re smarter than that,” he says. “You already have everything you need to know to find me. You just need to put on your deerstalker cap, grab a pipe, and put that big brain of yours to use.”

  “This isn’t a book, and I’m not Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Don’t I know it?” he titters again. “Sherlock would never be as dim as you’re being right now. But then, you probably already know that.”

  “I already have everything I need to know?” I ask. “What are you talking about? I don’t have—”

  “Daylight is burning, Paxton. You have until midnight tonight to crack the code. I want you to tell me the name of my very first kill,” he says. “Midnight, Paxton. And you know how I feel about punctuality. If you are not able to give me the name of my first kill by midnight, I am afraid we will all have to bid sayonara to Special Agent Wilder.”

  “Wait. Just wait,” I demand. “Prove to me she’s still alive. Let me talk to her.”

  “You know that I am a man of my word.”

  “I also know you kidnap children for a living,” I respond. “And you kill others for fun.”

  “No, no, no!” he roars. “I cleanse this world of the stains of humanity.”

  “If that’s what you need to tell yourself, fine by me. I’m not going to argue with you,” I tell him. “But I also won’t be doing anything you ask until you let me speak with Blake.”

  He lets out a frustrated breath. “Fine.”

  There’s a shuffling sound and the distant echo of voices. A moment later, I’m hit with a wave of relief deeper and more profound than anything I’ve ever felt before.

  “Don’t play his game, Pax,” comes Blake’s voice, slurred and weak. “Don’t do it.”

  “Blake,” I gasp. “I’m going to get you out of this. I swear it—”

  “Don’t, Pax—”

  Her voice is cut off and is quickly replaced by Hayes’. “Happy?”

  “Why does she sound like you drugged her?”

  “Well, because I did,” he replies. “I had to keep her compliant.”

  “Hayes, I swear—”

  “What did I tell you about making threats?” he snaps back. “And don’t worry, she will be fine. It’s just a sedative.”

  “Look, what if I come to you on my own. You can let her go and—”

  “That will not work,” he interrupts. “No cops. No FBI. Just you and your big brain, Arrington. If you call them, I will know, and that will be the end. No, I need you to prove yourself to me. To prove you are worthy.”

  It seems like I’ve been trying to prove myself to somebody all my life. First my father, and now to Hayes. I miss those days when I was with Veronica. When I didn’t have to prove myself to anybody. I could just be free.

  “Fine,” I say. “Just tell me—”

  “As I said, you have everything you need to find me already,” he says. “Apply yourself. Show me you are who I think you are. Become the person you were always meant to become, Paxton. Just… do it by midnight.”

  The line goes dead in my hand. I let out a roar of rage that makes Brody look like he’s about to jump out of his skin. I turn and hurl the phone against the plexiglass wall of my office, leaving a small scuff on it, but shattering the phone into a million pieces.

  Brody stares at the remnants of the phone lying scattered all over the floor of my office. She purses his lips and nods. “Okay well, I think I’m going to need to go and replace that.”

  Brody turns and heads for the elevators without another word. He’s about as non-confrontational of a guy as you’re going to find anywhere. He’s not too keen on big displays of emotion like that. I’ll have to apologize to him when he gets back. If he gets back. He may stay away for an hour or two just to give me a minute to calm down. Which isn’t exactly a bad idea.

  It’s a good thing I have a spare phone.

  Twenty-Five

  Arrington Investigations; Downtown Seattle

  I walk out of my office and into the conference room, dropping down into one of the chairs heavily. I check my backup phone and see that it’s eight forty-six in the morning. Which means I’ve got fifteen hours and fourteen minutes to crack the code and figure out where he’s holding Blake.

  I stare at the whiteboard, trying to decipher the tangled mess in front of me. Photographic evidence of human depravity. Of one man’s delusions and self-absorption. Hayes has appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner. The sole arbiter of what is good and what is right. Of what is moral and what is immoral. He’s decided to declare himself a god, deciding who gets to live and who must die based on nothing more than his personal interpretation of morality.

  I scrub my face with my hands and growl. All of these observations are great and all, but they get me no closer to finding him. To finding Blake.

  “Think, idiot,” I growl at myself. “Think.”

  I stand up and pace the conference room, looking at the board from different angles and distances. I stand on chairs, on the table, even going outside the conference room to stare in at the whiteboard from the other side of the glass. I don’t know if physically giving myself a different perspective will give me an actual different perspective, but at this point, I’m willing to try anything.

  What I need right now is Blake. She never has a problem thinking outside the box and figuring out a different way of attacking a situation. I am sometimes far too linear in my thinking. I lack the creativity Blake’s got in spades. It’s why we’ve made
such a great team. Muttering darkly under my breath, I walk back into the conference room and perch on the edge of the table, staring at the board, trying to will the answer to come forth.

  “I have everything I need to find him,” I repeat his words. “It’s all right here.”

  I stare at the pictures, the names, the stacks of paper, and case files. The answer is here somewhere; I just need to find a different way of looking at it all to tease it out. I clear the table and pick out all of the crime scene photos, laying them all out in one large grid for me to look at. Once I get them all laid out, I step back and fold my arms over my chest and look at the photos, taking a moment to study them all.

  At first, all I see are the torn, broken bodies. Nothing but blood, gore, and violence. But as I force myself to continue staring at the photos, I start to see past the slasher film quality of them and start to pick out details. Small details at first: the broken glass on the ground, the rusted tin can, or the corroded hole in the dumpster behind the body.

  And it’s as the fine details begin to emerge that I start to see things differently. I imagine this is what Blake must see and feel like all the time. She sees the fine details without even having to try. It’s second nature to her. And because she can, she can let her mind think creatively, to see things outside the normal way of thinking. It’s how I imagine she’s able to think so effectively outside the conventional box.

  I free my mind and let it take the lead. Instead of trying to think, trying to see, I let my subconscious do the work for me. And it immediately zeroes in on the flaming cross. No matter what else I look at, my mind comes back to the religious iconography. His trademark.

  There is no specific religious angle to the murders. Despite his proclamations of purity and sin and cleansing, Hayes is not a religious man. It is a symbol he uses to mark his work, but it carries no specific spiritual meaning for him personally. When I questioned him about it, he played it off. He moved on from it quickly. And as I replay the conversation in my mind, I see that maybe he played it off too quickly.

  At the time, I backed off the questioning because I wanted to keep him talking, and I feared he was on the verge of clamming up. And after that, I didn’t give it much thought. He obviously harbored some ill will for organized religion, but I wrote it off as childhood trauma. Some sort of angst or dislike that developed when he was young.

  At the time, I posited that he grew up in a religious family and didn’t have a very good experience. I can’t count the number of people for whom that is true. Bad experiences with something when you’re young, whether it’s religion, scary movies, or even clowns, can inform your biases and prejudices toward those things later in life. I think that’s true in almost every case. Something you viscerally dislike as an adult can often be traced back to some relatively traumatic experience with it when you were young.

  But now, my mind is forcing me to take another look at it. To see it differently. Although Hayes said there’s no relevance to the iconography, that doesn’t mean there’s not. I shouldn’t have taken him at his word and should have explored this angle further earlier on. Maybe if I had, Melanie Woods would still be alive and Blake—

  “No. Knock it off,” I growl at myself. “Stop thinking that way. It’s counterproductive, and there’s no way of knowing whether or not it’s true.”

  Grabbing my phone, I take a picture of the flaming cross and send it to my email account, then walk back to my office. I download the picture, call up the search engine, and do a reverse image search. As the computer works, I silently chastise myself once more for not thinking of doing this earlier. This should have been step number one.

  “Rookie mistake,” I mutter.

  The search results come up, and I stare at all of the different links that come up. News articles, blog posts, various other internet trash. I start to click through the links, reading quickly, and absorbing all of the information I’m taking in.

  All of the pieces I’ve read so far reference a single place that uses that specific symbol: The Everlasting Fire of Christ Church, based just outside of Kirkland, WA. I read on through some of the different pieces. Most of them paint a very bleak picture of the EFCC, as they call it. Well, most people call it something more vulgar, but I’ll stick with the EFCC.

  Most of the pieces I’m reading are newspaper articles from the digital archives of local papers. To say they’re unflattering would be an understatement. Most charge it with being on par with the grifting snake-oil salesmen of faith healing churches. Others go so far as to label it a cult, characterizations that hold true to some blog posts and newspaper articles from more recent times.

  I finally find an actual informational article about them and read closely. The EFCC has been around since the late 70’s and was founded by a husband and wife team, Jacob and Karen Perry. From what I’m gathering, back then, it was more of a free-love hippie commune than an actual religious outfit. People would come to the farm to live and pray and smoke weed all day, discussing all things metaphysical and philosophical. Some stayed on and lived there.

  According to some of the stories, the only true religious experiences in those early days came in the form of communing with God during an acid trip. Sounds like the First Church of Timothy Leary to me.

  Over the years, though, the EFCC has changed its reputation, moving away from what it was founded as, to more of a holy-rolling fundamentalist group steeped in big flashy shows of faith. Some people view the EFCC as a group of doomsday preppers, all of them waiting for the end of days. Others see them as another group like the Branch Davidians, arming themselves to the teeth to defend their freedom from what they see as an oppressive, anti-religious government. And still, others view them as a cult using the guise of religion to mask their depravity behind their tax-exempt status.

  There really is no consensus about the EFCC, what they are, or what they stand for. Which tells me the EFCC’s biggest crime is that they’re different. And people tend to reject those things that are different. Always labeling them and judging them harshly. It may be true, some of the things people are saying. But in my experience, the people who are the loudest in decrying this group or that group are the people who know the least about them. And the Internet is a place built for people to be loud.

  What I don’t see, though, is any mention of the Perrys themselves. I don’t see any follow-up articles about where they went or what became of them. At some point in the late eighties, it seems, they just vanished without a trace. At least their online footprint vanished without a trace. If they really are old hippies, they could be living out their golden years the same way they lived their life: off the grid.

  That symbol is important to Hayes. Important enough for him to use it as his calling card. The biggest question I have is whether or not it’s important because he belonged to the EFCC at some point— which might jibe with his anger toward religion— or whether he simply liked the look of their symbol and co-opted it for his own purposes.

  This is good. This potentially opens up a lot of areas of inquiry. Or it could be a dead end. Either way, it raises a lot of questions. And there’s only one way to get the answers.

  “Guess I’m going to Kirkland.”

  Twenty-Six

  Everlasting Fire of Christ Church; Kirkland, WA

  I pull into the gravel parking lot, listening to the small stones crunch beneath my tires as others plunk the inside of the wheel well. There are half a dozen other cars in the lot. I shut my engine off and sit back, taking it all in for a moment.

  The EFCC is tucked away on a small farm on the outskirts of Kirkland. The place looks to be much the same as when the church bought it all those years ago. It’s large and open. I see what look to be apple orchards in the distance, along with rows and rows of crops as well. Surprisingly, in one fenced-off section near the parking lot, I see rows of solar panels.

  Off to the western side of the property is what looks like a farmhouse. It’s tall, and the paint looks fresh
as if it’s been done in the last few weeks. It’s very well kept up, even more so than the other buildings on the property. I’m assuming it’s because that serves as the hub for their church.

  The farmhouse itself looks old fashioned. It’s three stories tall, painted white with green trim and shutters. There are some outbuildings beyond the main farmhouse. Bungalow style houses. Everything is neat and clean, buildings and fences are all in good repair, and there’s an air of freshness about the place.

  Far from being a compound that houses a secret cult or some anti-government militia, it looks like a self-sustaining group of people who prefer to live off the grid, in their own way. These people look like they’ve opted to eschew the high-tech conveniences of the modern world— and all of its problems— in favor of a simpler world. A simpler life. And as I look around, soaking in the peace and tranquility of the place, I can see the appeal.

  I make my way over to the farmhouse, and it’s there that I see it. Emblazoned on the front of the church, twenty feet tall, twenty feet wide: the flaming cross Hayes uses to tag his murders.

  I stare at it for a long moment and feel a peculiar sense of rightness wash over me. It’s thick and strong, and as I look at the logo on the barn, I know beyond a reasonable doubt that I’m going to find some answers here. I know it as well as I know my own name. They may not be the direct answers to my questions, and they may not be answers I was expecting, but I’m going to get some answers. I can feel it.

  I get out of my car and step into the cold air of the day. The sky overhead is slate gray, and a light mist falls from the clouds. A group of people are clustered together near the barn. They’re all looking at me with open curiosity. I straighten my jacket and walk toward them, watching them smile as I approach.

  A tall, broad-shouldered young man with dark hair and eyes steps forward, a welcoming expression on his face. He’s dressed in modern enough clothing— blue jeans, a dark hoodie, and a new pair of Nikes on his feet. So they apparently don’t eschew all of the modern world’s niceties. I can’t begrudge them that though. Who wants to wear wool pants you made yourself?