The man was at least courteous, and his concern seemed genuine. “What’s your concern, Detective?” “Such an undertaking…well, alone is not advisable.”
“Ahhh…you’re worried that hobgoblins will abduct me to another dimension?”
Orvison laughed at this.
“That I’ll fall into some psychic vortex or sinkhole?” she continued teasing.
Orvison laughed harder.
Kunati frowned at the frivolity. “My concern is what if he knows you’re here…alone?”
“How could he know?”
“You’re picture’s in every paper, and he could’ve seen you on the tube.”
“TV? Really, you think?” She smiled to let him know she was kidding. “I haven’t announced my movements. Have either of you?”
“No.” “No way,” added Orvison, “but thanks to all those cameras at the airport and at the Dunbar sight…well suppose Amos is right?”
“Right about what?”
“Suppose he’s been shadowing our movements,” said Kunati, “because he believes in what you do and fears you’re getting close?”
Orvison added over his shoulder at the wheel, “Real close, too close for his comfort?”
Kunati chorused the point. “Suppose he’s waiting to get you alone?”
She lifted her Smith and Wesson for Kunati to see. “And I know how to use it.”
“And if he gets hold of it before you?”
“I have a black belt in Jujitsu. Lucy Lu’s got nothing on me. Besides, I’m FBI trained.” She realized that she used the phrase FBI trained as a panacea for everything.
It was 11PM by the time she finally got Orvison and Kunati to agree that if her ‘experiment’ were to work, that she must work it alone, that they must leave. It’d taken all of her powers of persuasion to get the two would-be heroes out of the trailer and out of her hair.
Finally, from the tattered sash at the moldy, termiteinvested windowsill, Rae caught sight of the Charleston authorities cruising off down the grass and stone lane to find the main road. They had acted in the end like typical men, all gall and gallantry. They feared for the woman among them, weaker of the sex, in a kind of decoy situation, and they wanted her to know they were a phone call away. Wanted her to know that if she liked, one of them could remain behind with her. Wanted her to know she was safe, and that a man could make her safe, or at least feel safe.
For a moment there, she was unsure if she’d be able to convince the ‘boys’ that she didn’t need them hanging about, either one of them, and that this was something she needed to do alone. Orvison had even pulled his camera out, saying, “We really ought to have anything you do here on tape. It was one of the conditions of having you on the case.”
“Sometimes you’ve just got to put all the gadgets away, Chief, and go by instinct alone,” she’d replied. Then she held up the CRAWL palm pilot. “Besides, this will be activated.”
Kunati surprised her, saying, “Instinct, intuition…that’s good.”
Now she wondered if she’d been wrong, seeing the last of the cruiser’s taillights blink behind trees and fade in the distance, signaling that she was indeed alone on her lonely hill. Behind the house, stood a huge cratered section of massive black coal where the side of the hill had been carved out for the trailer home to sit on even land. As a result, in the night, the black backyard proved pitch dark.
Completely alone now and feeling it, she imagined how Marci must have felt living in isolation. She tried to get into Marci’s head before some maniac had used it for an anvil.
Earlier, she had stopped along the way to purchase a sleeping bag as she truly did not wish to spend the entire night in the victim’s bed. In fact, she didn’t plan on spending the entire night in the murder room at all. In fact, she didn’t intend spending the entire night in the dreadful trailer if she could help things along at the clip she wished. If so, she’d call for a taxi and leave soon after 3PM.
As calm and as brave a face as she’d put on it, Orvison had stopped on the stairs on his way out, grabbed her for a private moment, and had asked if she were sure she didn’t want him in the bushes. Again, she’d declined any ‘backup’ as he put it.
“The only backup I need right now can’t be here,” she’d replied, “and besides, I have my cell phone, and you’re both on my voice dial.”
“Dr. Hiyakawa, one of the victims got a photograph of him on her cell phone,” Orvison shared this news which had also been held back.
“You have a cell phone photo of the Sleepwalker?”
“Yes, but in the bad light, we couldn’t make anything of consequence out, but now…with your input, we know that the grainy green object in the photo didn’t get the face but rather a shapeless green form. Perhaps as you said, overalls or a uniform of sorts.”
After waving the men off, Rae spread open the sleeping bag across the floor in the living room area. She set the timer on her watch and slipped into the bag, keeping her clothes on. She needed sleep, but she also needed to be awake at 3AM. The one constant in all of these killings was the time of death. Hatfield had placed the time of death as at or around 3AM. One victim’s clock had been smashed by a hammer blow, stopped at 3:02 as she recalled. The so-called Sleepwalking Killer knew how to tell time, it would appear.
For now, Rae settled snugly into the sleeping bag with her cell phone at the ready, and she dialed home, hoping to talk to Nia. It rang and rang. She got no answer at the house. Odd, it was well past Nia’s bedtime on a school night. Where could she be? And why wasn’t Enriqui answering? A litany of horrors ran through Rae’s mind in answer to these two simple questions: Nia’s come to harm. She’s wrecked the car she wasn’t allowed to drive; she’s lying somewhere in a ditch, bleeding and in pain. She’s in a hospital, fighting for her life, the depression-calledNia’s life having overwhelmed her, the diagnosis an overdose of drugs, or would it be anorexia? Or a combination of both?
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 betwee
n 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 q
uail, 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.
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