Windows had locks; windows closed on things, but they could also open on things. She saw the old woman now below a dull brass pyramid—Rae’s brass pyramid back at Quantico. Am I all that I do and nothing more? Does my work define me, or do I define my work? Is it my addiction, and does it imprison me in the end?
It is me. I am it?
Just a bad dream. A compensatory dream. Compensating for the last conversation with Nia…about time. Yes, it’s about time itself…again.
Nia was with her father now. Not a single call back since she’d so rudely hung up on her mother. What did it portend? Rae had had to repeatedly call, to run her down. Was it already too late? Was the future vision of herself not the future at all but the here and now?
Rae’s subconscious turned all these matters over, slipping away from the case of the Sleepwalker, and slipping toward a deeper REM as well. But it proved a sleep that she sensed she might never achieve,
overshadowed by the larger goal she might never achieve— the goals she’d set for her daughter and herself. She slept, yes, but a part of her remained conscious, sitting above on an invisible branch, observing, questioning, wondering why she was here in a lonely Charleston, West Virginia hotel room instead of home with her daughter, working on this thing called the family unit.
# # #
Rae awoke but hardly refreshed. Such things as dread, tumult, and chaos had given chase about her mind the entire night. Dread wanted to overtake her. Tumult wanted to choke her. Chaos wanted to break her. All three had flitted about her head the entire night, competing for the right to take her. None of them had entirely won, but they had ganged up on her. She felt bruised on every level. She imagined her appearance only reflected the beating.
It’s a sad thing when slumber beats hell out of you, she thought.
In fact, the headache she awoke with made her rethink who’d won. Perhaps the trio aligned against her had scored a victory after all. The way she felt.
The clock read: 5:02AM, the witching hour, normally 3AM had come and gone, but the entire night for her had been the bitching hour.
She doubted that caffeine would strengthen her resolve against such enemies as chased her all night, but she certainly wanted a cup to find out, perhaps a pot. She called room service for coffee and wheat toast. Even as she made the call, she wondered if at or around 3AM last night, if the killer had dared strike again. Then as casually as imagining what she’d look like in a certain selection of clothing for the day, it came to Aurelia that yes, she must stake out every bedside within a twenty or thirty mile radius of her bedroom here at the Embassy Suites. That she must do a psychic stakeout.
A stakeout via a psychic intervention.
Would it work? Could it work? She had no idea, but perhaps it was worth a try, and perhaps it might save a life. A psychic intervention, she’d heard it called. Dangerous as hell.
Rae had never attempted one, but she’d heard Gene Kiley speak of such events while admitting that he hadn’t the ‘stuff’ to pull off a psychic intervention himself. He’d once given her a laundry list of readings on the subject, and she had read up on it, but that had been years ago, and even she had remained skeptical of the less than empirical evidence presented.
Still it might just have a chance with this case as the killer’s patterns had been revealed, particularly the timing of his deadly and insidious attacks.
Strike him at the exact right moment, when his defenses are down, and no telling what might happen, she insisted to herself. But it would take everything she had to give, and it could be dangerous to her in a back-flashover. Quite dangerous. Still, she’d somehow unconsciously and without direction or focus tapped into the mind of another killer, and she’d done so without any real effort on her part, and yet she’d shaken up and ‘spooked’ Carnivore Man in Phoenix, hadn’t she? Why not a directed, conscience effort to frighten hell out of the Charleston Hammerhead killer?
All the elements seemed right and ripe for this; everything felt in place. A long shot to be sure, but if it worked—pro-active intervention on a psychic plane—it could do wonders to throw a scare into the man Orvison had become convinced could not be frightened or dissuaded through any means but a bullet to the brain.
But just suppose she could prove Orvison wrong? Suppose she could give this bastard the shock of his life? A psychic shock? Suppose she could crawl into his head and tell him she was watching his every move. She began humming the Police tune, I’ll be Watching You.
A rap at the door made her jump, so rapt had she become in thoughts of antagonizing the killer on two fronts, that of the media and that of the mind.
“Room service!” came the voice the other side of the door.
Rae collected herself and then her coffee and toast, paid a gratuity, and wished the man in the green vest and baggy green trousers—the colors of the hotel personnel here at the Embassy, a good day.
The waiter looked at the two single bills in his hand and up again into her eyes, said thank you, and was off on his duty run. She’d noticed the thin, slack-jawed man’s name on his breastplate read Don Greene, and for a millisecond feared him. She dropped her gaze down the hall after Greene, thinking herself foolish. Then she closed the door.
Inside her room, she began to sing, “Green green, it’s green they say…far side of the hill.” She laughed at her bad rendition of the the ancient old English tune. She thought of the other ditty, Green Sleeves, and she wondered at all the greenery in her green house, and she realized that her room here at the Suites was decorated in a green on green motif—walls green with a hunter’s green stripe across the top, lighter green striped paper throughout; lime green carpet, bedspread of rich sea green, curtains matching, while the Jacuzzi was a mild blue-green same as in the bathroom. Even the paintings on the walls, all of English hunting dogs, horses, and fox hunts had a Kelly green dominating each scenario.
Only her towels and robe proved white in this green, green world. Green, the color of hope and faith and growth on the one hand, the color of decay and gangrene and death on the other.
Downing her first drams of coffee, munching the too crunchy for her taste toast, Rae reflected on the images of her holding forth in a paranormal pawnshop. The crumbs from her toast looked like the powdery dust of that imagined place, dust reminiscent of the substance that came off in the hand when touching a dead moth. She felt a sense of loss, a sense of being alone in the end, alone from all she loved, alone even from God. She felt a sad loss, imagining the clipped-winged creature overseeing the forest of forgotten trinkets, items, and dead men’s clothing filling that window of loathsome junk—all the myriad dreams of the dead now like so many skeletal remains of vermin. How much of it had she taken into her body, into her self over the years. How much of the dust of victims would she swallow over the coming years, filling her mind, heart, and gut with the dead and dying?
The dream would not leave her alone even now.
It could go either way, her brighter self reassured her.
She was not speaking of the case now but her life.
And how would the psychic intervention with the Hammerhead shark go?
She’d lost her appetite for the overdone toast, and her coffee refused to sit well on her stomach.
Wonder why, she thought.
Her mind wandered back to the greenness all round her in this case and in her room. She began to use it to focus on the killer. Gene Kiley often warned her that when she saw a thing, a number, a word, an image over and over in her waking life—anything repeating itself—that this could not be ignored. By the same token, Gene had always warned of “anticipation creation”—creating an importance around an image or say a number by anticipating it to show itself wherever you looked and making it come about by virtue of being more aware of it in the first place. Green was, in the natural world and in the man-made world, everywhere, so mightn’t it be expected…everywhere?
She’d conveyed this all to Waldron’s team at Quantico to no fanfare and
some dubious grunts.
Perhaps she had, in fact, created the anticipation of seeing this color crop up everywhere. After all, her deceased father’s spirit had posited the idea before she set foot in Charleston. Her antennae, her radar, her every sense, including her sixth sense honed on the color as once she’d done with the number 48—her father’s birth year. This argument certainly had validity. Anyone might acquire an obsessive belief surrounding say a lucky number, or a special name or word or color or gem as in one’s birthstone. By the same token, a particular number, item, or oddity that one never thought of suddenly springs up unbidden as if at every turn, as if demanding one’s attention, this certainly seemed to convey a higher meaning.
A siren sounds and she turns to the noise only to see the number 48 in huge red letters flying along at sixty miles an hour down a congested avenue. She flicks on a TV and watches two men in a fistfight knock in a door with the number 48 affixed to it. In the sky overhead a billboard screams huge numbers 48 in its advertisement. A coat she scans on a rack is a number 48, while a child’s racing toy is emblazoned with the same number as is the price of a bedspread she wants. This all in a matter of a few hours.
Was this the case with the color green now?
She wondered what Gene Kiley thought of this from wherever he might be now. Rae had no control over when and where and through what medium her parents might visit; she certainly had no way of controlling their visits. Most assuredly, she had not one idea of how she might conjure up Gene or any spirit. While she might be a magnet for certain kinds of kind souls and sometimes some not so kind souls, she was no conjurer in any true sense of the word. In fact, she strongly doubted any ability she might have of controlling an apparition. In double fact, Rae knew that her ability to make contact with the dead was hardly a skill, and that she had better luck with the living at a distance.
As in the Carnivore Man’s case. A case of making contact with the killer but not knowing it was so until it proved almost enough to get her killed. Her powers, if they could be called powers, were not always completely under her control. In a sense, she was the psychic who couldn’t shoot straight—not with her psi sight anyway. In Phoenix and even before she’d left for that city, Rae had been picking up powerful psychic emotions, sights, sounds, and images from what she thought had been the victim, when in fact, the images she’d been getting had been from the monster itself, the merciless killer.
Rae had also made contact via long distance imaging with victims. This had always been her strength, her gift. She’d saved kidnapped and missing children. She had saved that girl in Florida being held for ransom; held in a coffin below the earth. She had sent skeptical FBI agents right to the doorstep of her captor.
So perhaps…if she focused laser-like on this case, perhaps with something he himself had actually handled in her hot, willing, focused hands, she might actually disturb this creature in his lair if not his soul, upset what he considered his balanced space, his personal space, his relationships with others, and his relationship with his higher power— the thing that told him to kill.
Perhaps…just perhaps she’d already done so to some degree when she had him in her sights in the trailer…in that cracked mirror…trapped there for a moment in time.
She needed something that the monster had handled extensively, something solid and not just words on paper. Something hefty, weighty, stamped with his indelible being. The more the killer had handled the item, the better. The notes, she imagined, he’d written out before going on his deadly mission as there were no bloodstains, not so much as a smear of a single blood droplet on the papers, not on a single one of them. She had to believe he’d kept them wadded up inside a pocket the entire time, another good indication that his work was hardly activated at the moment of the kill, that he’d taken all sorts of premeditated steps. Steps that would put him away forever once they cornered him.
However, how long did it take to scribble a few sentences? He’d have handled that first hammer left at the first scene of the crime, possibly a hammer he’d owned for years, far more and with far more emotion coursing through his hand and into the wood handle. Psychic energy that might well be trapped in that handle and in the toothed anvil of metal itself.
And that object was indeed precisely what she needed now.
She got dressed, sipped a few more times at the cooled coffee, another nibble of toast. She felt a sense of purpose now. She felt a plan coming into focus. A plan which, while hinging on unpredictable paranormal parameters like a pinwheel in the wind, she believed in the possibilities. She must. It was who she was. Was all she had.
She mulled it over again in her head: A simple plan, a plan to unhinge a murderer.
She dialed Carl Orvison and quickly outlined her needs, telling him she wanted that hammer in her hands.” “What? When?”
“Tonight.”
“You want to take it out of evidence lockup and put it to use, you say? You gonna build something?”
“Exactly, I mean nothing physical. I intend building something of an intangible nature, a psychic trap, and I need that hammer to make it happen.”
Silence at the other end.
“This is how I best operate, Chief. You saw what happened at the trailer…things he touched that I touch—the mirror, remember how I used the mirror?”
“I didn’t see any of it, and neither did the film I made. It’s just all you, Dr. Hiyakawa. No ghosts, no spirits, no invisibles. Just you and empty space.”
“Did you for a moment think that a digital camera could pick up a paranormal visitation? Apparitions are shy of any camera at the ready, and they don’t photograph well in the best of circumstances.”
“No, no I didn’t really expect to get anything, and I didn’t.”
“Then why the filming at all if not simply to prove me a phony?” Her eyes darted around the green room. Sunrays filtered in through the creases in the curtains, softening the green.
Carl’s voice over the phone hardly sounded like the same man. “I’m sure you mean well, Doctor, and you believe everything that—”
“Give me this chance to prove you wrong, Carl. You brought me all the way here, so let’s go for the brass ring. Take a chance!”
“You’ve been given forty-eight hours, Doctor, and—”
“Forty eight, you say. No kidding.”
“—and if…if we have no results by then, we wave you good-bye, no harm, no foul, and—”
“You ran the film to your superiors, and you’ve given the paranormal approach a good faith effort. Right, right?”
“It was always to be that way; wasn’t my idea.”
“Orders, sure. I understand.” Nothing seemed to be Carl’s doing, she thought.
A long silence followed. Carl cleared his throat, stuttered a half-formed apology he did not feel and said, “If it’s any consolation, I like you, Rae, on a personal level. I really do.”
“The film was for the governor to see and to hold over the mayor’s head?”
“That’s about it.”
“Secured your job, did it?” “It did.”
“And Amos knew all along, and he quit over this, didn’t he?”
“Amos’s reasons are neither here nor there.”
“But it contributed?”
“I suppose it did, perhaps.”
“He knew you’d clenched the job, and that no amount of stumping or money could wrench it from you, not after filming that documentary of me looking the fool at each location where the victims died.” She hadn’t bothered to see the films. “I’m sure I look like the worst mime on record.”
“Look…I’m sorry about your being used as a pawn in all this, Doctor, but I had little choice.”
“ Ahhh…a local psychic wouldn’t do. No palm readers for the Charleston Police Department. No…you guys had to have the best; you needed the FBI to make it look good…a good faith effort. And once over, you can concentrate on the case at hand. I get it clearly now. Must’ve gotten a good la
ugh at pulling one over on me like this.”
“I can arrange a plane back to Quantico, and Doctor, I’m sorry the way it went.”
“I’m not quite ready to board a plane back to Quantico just yet. You said I have a forty-eight hour window. I intend to use that window.” She hung up, angry now. Here she had been blind to what had really been going on all along between Chief Orvison and Detective Kunati. Carl Orvison proved far, far more cunning and clever than had Kunati or Rae, a real conniver, mired in his local politics as a lizard in a marsh. In a sense, the series of killings were of far less concern to the man than his position on the ladder. He’d been protecting his rung the entire time. Even his coming out to the trailer to ostensibly ‘save’ the foolish young half-Asian weaker-sexed female psychic at three in the morning from whatever lurked there had been a ruse, a pose. Amos Kunati had at least been up front.
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