by Hadena James
“True, but Xavier can prescribe you some really good drugs that no one will question if you tell him you are feeling stressed.”
“Nah, thanks, but I think we should just get really drunk after this case ends. You and me. We’ll do a girl’s thing. Girls who chase bad guys and kick their asses. I’ve been told I need to work on my skills as a field agent.”
“Yeah, about that,” I started.
“I believe in being nonviolent, nothing more. However, the more I do this job, the more I realize I’m the only one playing by that rule. You were shot point blank in the chest today. The guys are good back-up, but sometimes, a girl needs to have another girl’s back and I have been letting you down in that department.”
“Fiona, I do not expect any woman to do what I do. It hurts like hell.”
“I’m sure it does, but maybe if I helped, it would happen a little less often.” She turned and left. I finished my cigarette and waited for a reply from Gabriel. It really bothered me that I hadn’t heard back from them.
Seventeen
At the two-hour mark, I was ready to send out a search party for Gabriel and Lucas. At the three-hour mark, I was organizing said search party, which consisted of Fiona, Xavier, Christian Hunter, and myself. I was not happy about the Christian Hunter part, but beggars can’t be choosy, so I was willing to let him tag along. Plus, his last name was Hunter, so he might live up to the namesake. At the three and a half hour mark, as we were loading up into vehicles, I finally got a response.
Didn’t find Alejandro. Was all Gabriel wrote. I wanted to send a long message back about how rude it was not to contact us. I didn’t, because that would be an admission that I had been worried. That was a hassle I did not need. In my head, Lucas was singing Sandra Bullock’s little rhyme from the end of Miss Congeniality. I would rather deal with serial killers than have a giant homosexual sing Sandra Bullock show-tunes at me. Actually, I did not want anyone singing at me. It was on my list of things not to experience.
We all climbed back out of vehicles. Xavier was frowning at me. I was sort of used to Xavier frowning at me. He either frowned or he giggled, there wasn’t much in between with him. However, this frown seemed more purposeful than normal.
“What?” I finally asked, trying not to yell at him.
“You have issues,” he told me. It was my turn to frown. We all knew I had issues. It was kind of my thing, being a female sociopath locked in the body of a psychopath. “You’re projecting again and I don’t want to have to keep you from bleeding to death as a result of those unresolved feelings.”
“Oh, come on, there is a seven feet tall serial killer and you do not even think there is a smidgeon of a chance that it is Alejandro?”
“Alejandro is wheelchair bound and our killer doesn’t have to be seven feet tall, just much taller than the average population, which is five feet, ten inches. Malachi fits into that description.” Xavier said. “It seems like a better solution to look at the victims.”
“I’ve done that,” Fiona said.
“Both sets?” I asked.
“As in both together?” Fiona said.
“Yes, do any victims from group one and group two cross over?”
“They are almost twenty years apart and they only found skeletons,” Xavier told me, defending Fiona.
“Does not mean they will not have things in common.” I shrugged. “If you have a better suggestion, I am open to it. Otherwise, we either need to try to connect dots or we are going to focus on Alejandro.”
“You’re being obsessive with this Alejandro thing,” Xavier pointed out.
“That is because he was always just one stressor away from being a serial killer.” I thought for a moment. “Of course, I always figured he would be a torturer and rapist when that stressor occurred, but suffering from muscle death might have changed that.”
“Why? He’d still be able to get erections. He’d still be powerful enough to overwhelm his victims, even from a wheelchair. I won’t disagree that the man could be a serial killer. I’m just arguing that this isn’t his type of killing, especially since he still has the strength to do the other.” Xavier watched me for a few minutes after he finished. “Smoke a cigarette and stop fidgeting,” he finally snipped at me.
“It has been less than an hour since my last one. I am not fidgety because I need nicotine,” I snipped back.
“Then stop thinking about whatever it is you’re thinking about,” Xavier gave me a very pointed look, “because whatever it is, it’s bad.”
“I am thinking about monsters, the kind we chase. Don’t human beings have enough ways to die without being dosed with belladonna at a bar or drinking it in their soda? The very nature of the human condition is that we mere mortals are frail. We do not need serial killers to keep reminding us.”
“So, you are really thinking about Malachi,” Xavier sighed. “If it makes you feel any better, some of the ATF guys we worked with in Detroit are handling the case.”
“That does make me feel better.” I stared past Xavier. Cars were moving down the street. Rush hour in Sioux Falls reminded me of rush hour in my hometown. I wouldn’t lie to myself and say that my life had once been simpler, it hadn’t.
For just a moment though, I yearned for the days of school, when I knew Malachi or Nyleena would be waiting in long lines at the school pick-up spot to take me home. Days when we would go hang out after school, talk about the important things in life, like what the universe was expanding into. Malachi and I could have been anything we wanted. He could have been an astrophysicist or nuclear engineer. I could have been an archeologists or conspiracy theorist. I would have been good at either, but probably better as a conspiracy theorist.
Alas, that was not what the Fates had in store for us. We both chased serial killers and mass murderers and we both had paid the price for it on numerous occasions, but this was the first in which our physical weaknesses had been revealed. It could just have easily been me, lying in a hospital, tubes coming out of my chest, and the staff on standby just in case I coded. I didn’t know if my will to survive was as strong as Malachi’s. I didn’t know if my brain would flood my body with enough natural epinephrine to make my heart start beating despite my body’s attempts to die. Malachi and I were similar, but not the same. I felt more physical pain than he did. He could feel empathy and I could not. No one, not even those of us with the conditions, really knew the ramifications of such things.
If I thought too long or too hard about it, I would drive myself mad. Sociopaths did not do well with introspection. It was our own form of kryptonite. I had the ability to think myself into believing that I was ten feet tall and bullet proof; not exactly a good way to stay alive in my line of work. I avoided introspection whenever possible, but sometimes it crept in, hijacking my brain and forcing it to confront the dark recesses that existed within my brain.
I tore my gaze from the traffic, the trigger that was sending my brain down the rabbit hole. If I allowed it to continue, I would end up stuck in my own head. We couldn’t afford that.
“Let’s go look for some lines between these dots,” I said rather suddenly. Fiona jumped a little at the sound of my voice. She had her own demons and sometimes, she seemed to get stuck with them in her head as well.
I wasn’t sure it was a physical condition like mine, but emotional damage could wreak its own havoc. I was sure there was more to her story than she ever admitted. Things that she did not want to confront, the Fiona version of Gabriel’s wendigo. I had figured out that Xavier was brilliant, but brain damaged, as the result of a sniper’s bullet. I wasn’t sure how much of his brain had suffered damage, but I knew it was more than just his frontal lobe. Lucas had grown up in the shadow of a dead brother, a brother he could never be better than, because death put people on pedestals. Even after moving in with Xavier’s family, he had been chased by his brother’s ghost, forcing him to become big enough, strong enough, and valiant enough to save the lives of others in an attempt to a
tone for the life he couldn’t save.
My thoughts returned to Gabriel’s wendigo. I was fairly certain that wendigos existed in the same realm as werewolves and vampires. I would never tell Gabriel that. He needed wendigos to be real and I understood that more than most people. I didn’t believe he had escaped some human monster preying on children, but I did believe he had caught a human monster doing it. Someone close to him, considering the replacement of the face with that of the monstrous wendigo, had attacked and chewed on a little boy and Gabriel had seen it.
Now, Fiona had given us a clue with her story about belladonna pie. If her aunt was willing to feed her family with such a deadly treat, perhaps the madness hadn’t stopped with her aunt. It was possible, even plausible, that someone else in her family was also off the deep end, killing their nearest and dearest. It was even possible they had attempted to kill her. It would explain her need to cleanse the evil from places and people. Little by little, her puzzle pieces were falling into place for me and the mystery that had once surrounded her being chosen as an SCTU member was being uncovered.
“You’re doing it again,” Xavier’s voice cut through my thoughts.
“No, I was chasing other rabbits, not my own. It is not nearly as dangerous,” I admitted.
Eighteen
Sometimes, it’s the smallest things that make the most impact. I was currently staring at a little thing. Amber Braun had a sister named Violet. Violet had died ten years earlier, overdosing on LSD and Xanax. However, her death, and the fact that she and her sister had both had “colorful” names, was not the important part. The important part was that Violet had been out with Anita Merritt the night of Anita’s disappearance. She had even given statements to the police about Anita acting strangely that night. It appeared that Violet had tried to get Anita to leave the bar, because Anita had been acting very drunk.
Anita had been a twenty-two year old single mother of one. Amber had agreed to babysit so the women, there were four total, could go out to celebrate Violet getting engaged. The other two women gave statements similar to Violet’s regarding Anita’s behavior.
Strangely, they were both dead now as well. One had died in a house fire of undetermined origin and suspicious circumstances about six years ago. The other had been murdered eight years earlier. The ME had recorded over two hundred stab wounds, the majority of which had been buried to the hilt, because the bruise was visible on the body. The knife had not been identified. One side was serrated, the other was smooth, but still maintained a razor sharp cutting edge and it had a hilt stop, which was what made the bruising. The purpose of a hilt stop was to keep the hand of the user from sliding down the blade.
We had a connection, of sorts. Amber had known Anita Merritt. Furthermore, everyone involved with the night Anita Merritt had disappeared was now dead. Amber, the babysitter for Anita’s son, was the last link in that chain.
It could mean nothing or it could mean everything. The killer of Anita Merritt could have been cleaning up after the fact, by killing all those who came into contact with Anita that night. Or it could be revenge, someone blaming these women for Anita’s disappearance and subsequent murder. Or it could be a coincidence because the city of Sioux Falls only had a population of 150,000 people and that meant that lines of acquaintanceship were bound to cross.
A new problem was becoming apparent. Anita Merritt had been a Native American. However, despite her son, she really didn’t have much in the way of family. Her son had been born in 1996, making him nineteen now, but he would have been nine when Violet overdosed, eleven when the other woman was murdered, and thirteen when the last one died. Eleven year olds could be violent, but to stab someone two hundred times was a lot. Stabbing was exhausting. It required rage, lots of it, and the ability to maintain a frenzied attack for a prolonged period of time. I wasn’t sure an eleven year old psychopath could do it. I wasn’t even sure how well an adult psychopath would do in that situation.
Stabbing a person requires brute strength. Contrary to what most people think, pulling the knife back out, once it has been buried to the hilt is hard work. The body responds to stab wounds using suction, this leads to it holding onto the blade. Not only does one have to be strong enough to shove the knife into a body repeatedly, but be able to pull it back out, usually by twisting it. To do that two hundred times was incredible. Either her killer was The Hulk or there was more than one. Given that the stab wounds were fairly uniform in depth and the lack of any hesitation stabs, I was more willing to believe the Hulk killed her than a motley crew of thrill killers.
Ruling out her son as a possible suspect in the subsequent deaths left almost no one. It was possible that someone in the tribal community had taken revenge, but that seemed unlikely. Her death, much like her life, was a bit of a misadventure. Anita had left the tribe and returned only when she was pregnant. Her son’s birth certificate had no father listed. A woman named Maya Hudson had raised him. Maya’s records were a little incomplete. There were no records indicating arrests, marriages, or children. She did not even have a birth certificate of her own. She just sort of appeared, as a child, enrolled in the tribal school and went on to college. How someone went to college without a birth certificate was beyond me, but I did not know much about the laws as they applied to Native Americans. If the US government was smart, they mostly did not apply. We had done enough double-dealing and sweet-talking to their ancestors. I was of the opinion that the government should mostly leave them alone.
However, if Maya Hudson was any indication, the government was in the process of doing exactly that. It was a slippery slope. I currently wanted to know about the woman who had raised a murder victim’s son, but her records were incomplete and no one was going to fix that because she was a Native American. Even in my own head, I could not come to an agreement on what to do about it.
Of course, Maya Hudson probably was not important either. The chances of her stabbing another woman two hundred times were slim. My opinion was not based on the principle that women were not violent, they were, sometimes even more so than men, particularly with their own sex. Instead, I was trying to picture a woman of Fiona’s height and weight stabbing someone two hundred times. It didn’t jive. Psychopathic women who wanted to commit violence usually used an object to beat their victims to death, or they shot them way more than necessary. Stabbing was not really a woman’s thing. There were exceptions to be sure, but none of them could claim anything near two hundred stab wounds.
So, it was a man’s crime. Only there were not any men to associate with Anita Merritt. I was chasing more rabbits; rabbits with waistcoats and pocket watches who complained about being late all the time. I preferred the demonic rabbits that led me to dark places. At least they could be useful.
It was more likely that someone she knew had killed the stabbed woman; most likely an ex-boyfriend or husband, or perhaps a stalker. Stabbings were intimate and intimidating, because the kills were very hands on. It was hard to accumulate that much rage towards a woman the killer did not intimately know. As for Violet and the other woman, well, overdoses and house fires happened. Lots of people mixed drugs. Cocaine was enough of a stimulant to ward off the effects of alcohol and alcohol was enough of a depressant to ward off some of the effects of cocaine. It was not all that uncommon to see the two mixed. Taking an upper and a downer at the same time were supposed to neutralize the negative effects of both. It was an effective combination. It was also a good way to overdose and kill yourself accidentally. House fires of unknown and suspicious origins really just meant that they didn’t know how or why the fire had started. They simply did not have the evidence to say it was or was not an accident.
My brain started churning through all the true crime I had read. There had been a case once where a fire had started in a garage. Wiring in the wall, most likely chewed on by rodents, had sparked. In a case of seriously bad luck, an old couch cushion, full of foam, was leaning against the wall where the fire started and on the other s
ide of the couch cushion was a full, five gallon jug of gasoline. The investigators had ruled it arson with the couch cushion as the point of origin. Someone had gone to jail for several years before new technology had proved that bad wiring and bad luck started the fire.
It was one of those cases that proved coincidences, no matter how intentional they appear to be, do happen. I looked up from the computer screen full of information about dead women. Fiona was typing on her keyboard, preparing to send me another round.
“Hey, Fiona,” I called to her, “in the first set of murders, how many people who gave statements are now deceased?”
“Do you want to be more specific?”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Do you want to know only those murdered, or only those that committed suicide?”
“No, I want the entire list. I’m looking at probabilities at the moment.”
“The probability of what?” She asked.
“How likely is it that all three women out with Anita Merritt the night she disappeared would now be dead?”
“How did they die?” Christian Hunter asked.
“One was murdered, one died of an overdose, and one was caught in a house fire,” I answered.
“Was the house fire during the day or at night?” Hunter asked.
“Night.”
“Was the murderer caught?”
“No.”
“What was the overdose’s drug of choice?”
“Cocaine and Xanax.”
“Ouch, that’s a rough one,” Hunter answered as he began typing things into his computer. After a few moments, he stopped. “Not all that improbable actually. Nighttime house fires are almost eighty percent more deadly than daytime house fires. Cocaine and Xanax have a history of being a lethal combination. And murders happen, even when a serial killer isn’t involved. In fact, single murders are less likely to be solved than multiple murders. Now, if two of them had died in similar fashion, it would be highly improbable that they were not connected, but based on that information it seems like a very probable coincidence. Also, when you factor in the number of people involved with each disappearance and the amount of time that has passed, it becomes even more probable that some have died, even under mysterious circumstances.”