“But Rae!”
“I need to call out. Good-bye!”
The moment she hung up, she saw Orvison’s cruiser coming toward the trailer, and she was caught in his headlights like a stunned deer, her gun in one hand, her phone in the other. She watched as Kunati and Orvison got out of the car and came toward her.
“Where’s Dr. Hatfield?” asked Carl.
“You mean where’s the Hammerhead killer?” she replied.
Kunati scrunched up his face. “Whataya mean? And you look like you’ve been crawling around in a dumpster.”
“Hiding under this damn trailer.”
“Hiding?” Amos replied, confused. “What were those gunshots we heard?”
“Hatfield murdered his sister, and since then he’s been covering the murder by creating a fall-guy, a fake serial killer—his Sleepwalker.”
“Hatfield?”
“Roland?” Orvison’s mouth fell to his knees.
“Murdered his sister?”
The questions came fast and furiously. The two cops were incredulous, disbelieving.
“When he learned how much I was seeing, learning, that I was getting closer, he panicked, and he tried to kill me.”
“You came here to flush out the killer?” asked Amos.
“Yes, to flush out the killer, damn it, and I did!”
“Where is he now?” asked Kunati, still trying to digest this turn of events.
“I have no idea. I maced him when he tried to hammer my head in, and he somehow found his car and got away from me, before I could get my gun. Fact is, I put two bullets into his car as he was racing off.”
“Roland Hatfield,” repeated Orvison.
“Hatfield…killed his own sister out here? Juar snapped, I suppose. Hard to believe.”
“She was a drain on him, whether he acknowledge it or not consciously. Subconsciously, he must have been at war with himself. Said something about her being a drain on his family name, called her horrible things.”
“Where would he go?” asked Orvison. “Where to from here?”
“To his digs, his home,” suggested Kunati.
“If it’s true, God, think of it Amos, he…the killer had the evidence in his hands the entire time, and he was in a position to tweak it in any manner he saw fit.” Orvison still could not believe it. “This means every report, every item we’ve collected from the murder scenes is tainted evidence.”
“In fact, he has the hammer now,” Rae pointed out.
“God help us when it comes to building a case against him.”
“His master plan…land in the asylum, a year, maybe two, and a release,” she said. “Has been all along.”
“Then he’ll ditch the hammer,” said Kunati, “to make prosecuting him as difficult as possible.”
“We’d best get over to his place, now!”
Rae slipped into the passenger seat beside Kunati. Orvison drove his own car. They sped away from the trailer and were soon racing for Dr. Roland Hatfield’s luxurious home in Quarrier Creek Hills, a rich
neighborhood overlooking Charleston.
It wasn’t unusual for criminals to race for home when their crimes came to light; Rae had seen it before, and there were numerous examples in high profile cases such as the OJ case years ago. When people’s lives come unraveled, when they could not think straight by reason of an emotional tsunami, a home meant a place of comfort, a place to organize one’s thoughts, an environment he could relate to whereas the rest of the world had gotten totally out of control and too chaotic to handle.
But not this time.
Hatfield proved the exception. He hadn’t run home. The car was nowhere to be seen. His wife, completely unaware of what was going on, huddled at the door with their three children, terrified that something had happened to Daddy. “Carl,” said the wife to Orvison, “what is going on?”
Orvison quietly, calmly explained their suspicion that her husband had killed his sister, and after that several other women.”
“Roland? That’s impossible. It can’t be. You must be mistaken.” The whole time, she was whisking her children to the interior of the house.
“Have you seen him tonight?” asked Amos rather forcefully.
“No…no, well last night, he came by for a visit with the children.”
“Visit with the children?” asked Carl.
“We’ve been separated for over a month now. Estranged, I think is the word for it. His idea to move out.”
“Move out? Moved to where?” pressed Amos.
“Took an apartment in the city.”
“I need that address.”
She said, “This can’t be true, Carl. It can’t be true.”
“Mrs. Hatfield,” Rae said, “he tried to kill me tonight. I was lucky to escape with my life. He’s disturbed, truly disturbed. You must have known how he felt about his sister.”
“He was embarrassed by her.” She shrugged. “He tried everything to clean her up, but she
was…incorrigible.” “He had a fixation on fixing her, didn’t he?” Rae asked.
“It had recently become an obsession, yes. Should I be afraid…afraid for myself and my children?”
Carl was already on his phone, calling for a guard to come to the house and set up a perimeter to protect the family.
TWENTY EIGHT
From the Hatfield home, Rae, Amos, and Carl rushed for the city and Dr. Hatfield’s apartment at Summer andVirginia, the Chase Towers. Several squad cars had already encircled the place before they’d arrived. Everyone was on the lookout for Dr. Roland Thomas Hatfield as an all points bulletin had been put out on him as armed and dangerous, and possibly in a state of confusion. They’d withheld using terms such as suspect in a murder investigation, and they’d come up short of naming him the Sleepwalker aka Hammerhead killer.
Behind a small contingent of SWAT officers, Rae and the others raided the medical man’s apartment, finding him cringing in a closet.
He had the hammer in hand and was hitting himself with brutal strokes to the cranium, one nail through his skull, his eyes fixed and dilated, his body shivering and sweating at once. “Mother made me do it; she made me do it.” Hatfield was in a completely demoralized state when Kunati slapped on the handcuffs, and the medics were called in to strap him to a gurney and wheel him out and down the elevator and to a waiting ambulance.
News cameras took it all in, and most of Charleston as this point knew something awful had occurred with their ME, but they didn’t know just how bad it was, not yet. Carl, Amos, and Rae looked about the apartment, finding smashed mirrors, turned pictures, a destroyed bureau mirror that had been turned away to the wall.
“One part of him couldn’t look at himself any longer,” she decisively said.
“He’ll stand trial for multiple murder,” said Kunati. “But he’ll most likely be sent to a prison for the criminally insane,” added Orvison.
“True enough, and he will have gotten away with multiple murder,” she replied, angry at the thought of it.
Carl leaned in again the sofa edge, a bit dazed by all that’d happened. “His only personal target had been Marci, but once he killed her…”
Rae reminded Carl and Amos that the signs were all there. “I believe you when you say it was a ghastly mess of a murder scene—far worse than any of the others where the killer had been far more meticulous and in and out.”
Amos added, “He felt compelled to cover his sister’s murder up, by creating the Sleepwalker killer.”
“I began to notice that Hatfield referred to the case as that—the Sleepwalker case.”
Carl nodded. “The original scene was a crime between people in close proximity, a crime of passion, this time between a brother and sister.”
“Almost the perfect crime since the ME himself processed his own kill sites.”
“All but Marci’s, handled by his assistant, Sowards,” corrected Carl.
“Still,” continued Rae, “to perpetuate his findings of som
e stranger killing by some kind of fiend, he went out and targeted young women who resembled Marci and took more life.”
“To…to create the Sleepwalker killer,” said Amos, sitting now. “The letters to the editor, the wadded up notes in the throats, all part of his ruse.”
“And the older woman,” added Carl, sighing heavily. “Like you said, an error in the dark, the hammer meant for her daughter.”
“Turns my stomach that he might get away with it.” Rae wanted to run from here, get on a plane for home, and forget about this nightmare. She began thinking again of Nia, wondering where she might be at this moment. Her watch read 6AM.
“Working the system from the beginning,” Kunati said of Roland Hatfield, up again and looking anew about the apartment for any useful incriminating evidence. He lifted a book from a bedside table below the lamp. It was Dr. Jessica Coran’s non-fictional account of her early cases entitled Evil Intent. It’d been a bestseller years before.
“Hold on. Don’t handle the book!” shouted Rae. “I mean, handle it as evidence. Bag it. We need to show his prints on the pages.”
“What’s up with the book?” asked Amos.
“There’s a chapter devoted to a similar case in that book.”
“How similar?” asked Carl.
“A case a few years back in which the killer created a series of murders in order to cover his footsteps in the murder of his estranged girlfriend. This could prove he had planned this all along, that he’s hardly the insane maniac he is presenting himself to be—nail to his head notwithstanding.”
“Bag the book, Amos.”
“Hey, you forget. I work for the county now. If I bag it, it goes in county evidence lockup. You’d best bag it, Carl.”
“At the moment, with Charles Sowards, Hatfield’s dutiful assistant on the job, I believe I’d trust county above our lab right now. Bag it.”
“OK, but don’t order me around. I’m not your detective anymore.”
“And a sad thing it is, too.”
Before Kunati grabbed a bag from the kit he’d brought in with him, Rae, her hands now in gloves, snatched Evil Intent and opened it, flipping through to anything that might be written in the margins, anything highlighted or underscored. “I’m right. Case I’m talking about is marked up and highlighted like a textbook. I’d say Roland showed considerable interest in this case.” She carefully fanned through the rest of the book. “No other section’s been given this sort of intense attention, and the handwriting in the margins—”
“Is it a match?” asked Amos. “It matches in several respects.”
She then handed the book over to Amos, confident that this would get Roland Hatfield a suite at a prison and not a prison asylum.
It brought a confident smile to her lips. “I think we’ve got him, Carl, but this book must be carefully preserved and presented at trial.”
“Sure, if it helps nail the bastard—no pun intended.”
“You’ll—you need only call me back for the trial. If all three of us testify to having found this here at his bedside, marked up as it is, no jury is going to fall for his charm to—”
“Or his lies,” added Amos.
“—to send him off to a country club-hopefully.”
“Some bedtime reading,” commented Carl.
“County has a good record with evidence handling, Dr. Hiyakawa,” Amos assured her. “Not to worry.”
And she didn’t. For the first time in all these days, she felt a great weight lifted from her. So much had been riding on this case for the PSI Unit at Quantico, and for her personally after what had happened in Phoenix.
When they had exited the building and stood on the street where News cameras followed their every move, and newsmen and women shouted for some comment from them, Carl said in Rae’s ear, “I owe you major apologies, Rae.”
Questions were flying like jumping fish. Carl stopped and pulled Rae beside him. “You want some answers?” he shouted to the newshounds. “I’ll lay it out for you.” He quickly tossed out three sentences that summed up the situation, calling Dr. Roland Hatfield a horrible excuse for a man, a man capable of killing innocent women in their beds at night in a depraved manner merely to cover up an initial killing, a killing he had committed against his sister. He finished with, “The man has clearly shown the depth of his depravity and will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. A case like this begs for the reinstatement of capital punishment in our state. Write your Congressmen and legislators.”
He then introduced FBI Agent Dr. Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa to the crowd, explaining, “Dr. Hiyakawa has pretty much single-handedly solved the case for the CPD.”
“What precisely does that mean?” asked one aggressive female reporter.
Carl smiled and replied, “Without Dr. Hiyakawa and her psychic help, we’d still be searching for the killer, and no doubt in my mind that he’d still be executing innocent victims in that particularly brutal fashion he’d chosen.”
# # #
Twenty four hours later in Quantico, Virginia
Rae had left Charleston, West Virginia without any fanfare, leaving the city to heal now that the so-called Sleepwalker had been safely put away. When the truth came out about Dr. Roland Hatfield, that he was indeed the Hammerhead killer—alleged, of course—everyone who had known him, a native of the area, a success story, could hardly believe it. No one wanted to believe it. In fact, the news was filled with testimonials from people who didn’t for a moment believe it, certain that their police had once again made the capitol city a laughing stock. Rae knew better.
He had done his level best to kill her in the same manner as his earlier victims, and he might’ve succeeded had she not gotten hold of her gun.
She also knew she had a good ton of paperwork to fill out on the case. Details, the chief would want every excruciating detail, even those she wasn’t proud of.
She put it out of her mind for now, glad to be home. Despite the fact her home was falling down around her. The Queen Anne Bed and Breakfast, as the place was called, needed so much attention and so much money, money she ought to have in her bank account if only it weren’t for the army of lawyers arrayed against her in the divorce settlement. On paper, she was, while not filthy wealthy like Tomi, well off, but it remained on paper. Tomi’s lawyers, shrewd to a man, knew how to hide funds even from the court, and how to slow the process to a snail’s pace. They made a mockery of it, in fact.
The Queen Anne needed rewiring, needed new plumbing, needed painting inside and out. It needed experts to save the woodwork and the beautiful Waterford crystal chandeliers, and the stained glass windows, one panel of which, over the door, remained broken, patched with plywood, thanks to a tantrum Nia had thrown.
Despite it all, coming home was coming home; few feelings proved as wonderful as stepping through the door after the kind of stress and near death experience she’d had in the field. She believed it would be a cold day in hell before she’d ever return to Charleston save for the day when her testimony would help drive the nails into Roland Hatfield’s coffin: life imprisonment.
Her big, rambling Victorian home felt cold inside. Empty. The emptiness quadrupled as she moved from room to empty room, until she found herself standing in Nia’s room. It’d been cleaned out. Not completely and utterly but enough of her things were gone that it appeared there’d been a burglary and the burglar only wanted stuffed a favored set of sheets and spread, animals, matching outfits, shoes—Nia’s stuff. She’d even taken her cat with her, further ramping up the silence here, the emptiness. No living thing in the place except Aurelia, a mother abandoned by her own child.
Rae dropped to her knees, and crumpled against her daughter’s bed, stripped of its bedclothes. She cried. She cried for a long time.
Something deep within wanted to come to the surface, something dark and quite sinister, something that wanted to hurt Tomi Yoshikani and hurt him to his core, but to let this Grendel rise from out of her, a power so strong and ugly
that it frightened Rae herself, she knew it’d turn on her, possibly harm others as well as Tomi, possibly even Nia. She must not give in to hatred and a desire for vengeance.
Still she felt violated. She was the primary care giver here, the biological mother, but Nia had, obviously chosen Tomi and life with Tomi over Rae and a life with her mother.
Rae cried on, the sobs rocking her body. “This…this is how you get out of that school, Nia? You uproot yourself entirely, and you break my heart?”
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