by Pandora Pine
“There’s volcanic rage here. I never read anything on this level from Jacobson. Whoever killed this boy burned white hot with a wrath that I’ve never encountered before.” Tennyson turned to Fitzgibbon and Davidson. “There have only been a few days in between this killing and the first one. I remember Ronan telling me during the original case that when a serial killer takes a victim, it calms the beast inside of them. They go dormant, like a volcano, for a while until the need to kill again builds to the point where they erupt. I realize I’m just a psychic consultant here, but I think we need to get word of this copycat out to the media now. Put a curfew in effect for teenage boys or something to keep these kids safe.”
“Not bad, Ronan. I remembered when you and Abruzzi used to shout the walls down,” Davidson wore a wistful grin.
Ronan beamed with pride. Tennyson always listened to everything he taught him about police work. He was the one who wasn’t always the best student when it came to listening to Ten about things to do with the spirit world.
“Oh, these two shout the walls down, all right.” Fitzgibbon rolled his eyes.
“I’m serious, captain. This guy isn’t done. He’s just warming up.” Tennyson’s tone was serious as a heart attack.
Despite the fact that it was near eighty degrees and humid as hell, Ronan felt chilled to the bone.
19
The boy had a headache that he wished would kill him. It felt like it was centered in the middle of his brain and was radiating outward. He was so nauseous that he couldn’t even open his eyes.
What a fucking pussy…
Grunting, the boy ignored the voice. He wasn’t in the mood for its attitude when he was this sick.
Once, when he was in elementary school, he’d seen a video of a chicken hatching out of an egg. That’s what he thought was going to happen to his skull, that whatever was inside it was going to cause hairline fractures in the soft bone that would eventually cause fault lines to race around his head. Eventually the cracks would get bigger and bigger until whatever was inside could burst out into the open and be free.
He put his hands over both ears and pressed hard, hoping that the pressure would keep his brain from oozing out through the cracks. Pain radiated through his arms as he held his hands against the side of his head. His arms weren’t sore when…
I wonder why your arms are sore… The voice started to laugh.
“Shut up! Just shut up! Shut the fuck up!” The boy angry-whispered.
Wait a minute! The boy slowly opened his eyes. His bedroom was lit up like Fenway Park during a night game. When he’d come in here after supper, the sun had been about to set. If his room was this bright it must mean that he’d slept through the night.
He scrambled to sit up. All of his muscles screamed in protest. He must have slept twisted up like a pretzel all night long. He also realized that he had to piss like a racehorse.
Looking himself over, he noticed that he was wearing a different tee-shirt and pair of cargo shorts than he’d had on yesterday. He didn’t remember changing. Where the hell were his old clothes?
I know where they are…
Throwing his legs over the side of the bed, he was swamped by nausea. He slammed his eyes shut again. When he didn’t feel like he was going to blow chunks, he reached for his phone.
When he hit the home key, he discovered there were twenty-two text messages waiting for him and three voicemails. “What the fuck?” He asked the empty room. How had he managed to sleep through all of the text jingles and the phone ringing three times? He’d never been a heavy sleeper, but last night, he’d slept like the dead.
If he were being honest with himself, it wasn’t just last night when he slept like nuclear war wouldn’t have woken him up. This was the third time it had happened, but this was the longest time he’d been out for.
Out seemed to be the best way to describe what had happened to him. He clearly remembered having dinner. He clearly remembered working on his computer. He clearly remembered logging on to his favorite message board and chatting with friends.
Looking over at his computer, he could see that it was sitting where it always sat with the cover closed. That meant that the laptop was locked and his privacy was intact. He just didn’t remember logging out of the message board or off the computer. He also didn’t remember getting into bed or falling asleep.
He managed to stand up. He wobbled on his feet for a second but managed to grab his computer. He half-fell back onto the bed. Typing in his password, the computer opened to his desktop. He surfed to The Boston Globe’s website where the headline jumped out at him: BODY FOUND IN CHELSEA’S HIGHLAND PARK.
Despite the headache threatening to split his skull apart, the boy ravenously devoured the article. It sounded like his work. There was no mention of a number being written on the victim’s chest in the killer’s spunk, but he’d bet money that it was there.
Number sixteen…
“Did you do this?” the boy asked the voice. Dead silence.
“Did you?” Still no reply.
He rolled his aching shoulders and stood up on his still wobbly legs. “Did I do this?” the boy wondered out loud.
Now there’s an interesting question…
20
Tennyson
Tennyson felt like he could sleep for a week. While Ronan had stayed in Chelsea with Fitzgibbon and Davidson, Tennyson had gotten a ride back to Salem courtesy of Jace Lincoln. Fitzgibbon had sent a secretive text message, and the next thing Ten knew, there was Lincoln in his ten-year-old Honda Accord to chauffer him home.
It made Ten love the man so much more that he was swimming in his father’s millions and he was still driving that old Honda. As much as he wanted to dish with Jace about Captain Fitzgibbon, he’d fallen asleep the second after his seatbelt had clicked.
Jace had woken him up and walked him to his front door when they got back to Salem. All Ten could do at that point was thank him for his help and offer to have him over real soon for dinner. It was 7:45am and he had an 8am reading at West Side Magick.
He briefly considered calling his client to cancel, but at this late hour, that just wouldn’t be fair. After stopping to wash his hands so he could give Dixie a quick cuddle, Ten raced up the stairs to take a lightning-fast shower before he had to leave the house. Thankfully, the shop was only five minutes away.
“Look what the cat dragged in!” Carson smiled broadly at him while Cole whistled.
“Someone had a late night.” Cole elbowed Ten before wrapping an arm around his shoulders.
Usually, Ten ate this kind of attention up, but this morning, he wasn’t in the mood. “I don’t suppose either of you Neanderthals read the morning paper or watched the news?”
The Craig brothers exchanged one of those Oh-shit-we-stuck-our-foot-in-it-now looks.
Carson was the first to rebound. “What happened?”
“Another body was found, this time on a soccer field in Chelsea. Ronan and I got the call-out a little after 4am. Jace Lincoln had to give me a ride so I’d be back in Salem in time for this reading.”
“Shit, man, we’re sorry for acting like assholes,” Cole said.
“Was it number sixteen?” Carson asked gently.
Ten nodded. In his mind’s eye, he could see the teenager’s body lying in the grass, his throat horribly slashed. “I was standing there when Vann Hoffman pulled out the black light.”
Carson exchanged a wordless look with his brother. “Have you been able to speak to either of these kids like you did in the Justin Wilson case?”
Ten shook his head no. It was the spirit of Justin Wilson visiting him here at the shop and then in his bedroom that kicked off that case. Justin had been unable to communicate with him at first, but once the young ghost had been able to tell Ten his name, he’d been able to go to Ronan with that information and get the investigation rolling. Thanks to Bertha Craig’s help from the other side, he’d been able to speak to some of Rod Jacobson’s other victims.
<
br /> “I’ll talk to Mom about that today when she pops in for her afternoon chat.” Carson grinned. “She’s been stopping in to see me when the babies wake up from their naps and they’re cranky and full of shit and vinegar.”
“Isn’t the phrase ‘piss and vinegar’?” Tennyson laughed.
Carson barked out a laugh. “No! You’ve been there after naptime. Those kids always wake up with bad attitudes and loaded diapers.”
Ten grimaced. He had a weak gag reflex when it came to baby shit. “You’d have a bad attitude too if you woke up with shit in your pants.”
“I keep trying to get them to use the toilet but they’re very willful children.” Carson crossed his arms over his chest.
Cole threw his hands in the air. “Carson, they’re six months old, for Christ’s sake!”
“And, your point is?” Carson raised a speculative eyebrow.
“They’re barely crawling. How the hell are they going to haul themselves up on to a kiddy toilet?”
“They can do their business on training pads and newspaper like Dixie.”
Tennyson loved the banter between the brothers. He was about to jump in with a line about leaving Dixie, his little pixie, alone when he got violently dizzy again. The room was spinning so violently that Carson and Cole were only blurs of color. “Guys!” Tennyson didn’t know if he whispered or shouted.
He had that weird sensation of feeling like he was falling through space. It reminded him of that scene in the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland when Alice fell through the looking glass and she was free-falling.
When Tennyson finally felt like he wasn’t falling any longer, he was afraid to open his eyes. He didn’t want to see Zach Ryan lying on that soccer pitch in Chelsea last night. He didn’t want the teenager’s dead body to reanimate and speak to him like Max Harmon’s had done.
Maybe if he took a minute to uses his other senses, he could figure out what was going on. He took a big breath in through his nose and thought he could smell flowers. He wasn’t sure what kind of flowers they were. To the best of his recollection, this scent was not present in the park last night.
It was also a lot warmer wherever he was now and he could feel what he thought were the rays of the sun beating down on his face. Ten supposed it could be the high-powered spotlight that was at the crime scene last night, but he didn’t hear the roar of the generator that powered it. What he heard instead was birdsong.
Screwing up every ounce of courage he had, Ten opened his eyes. He gasped softly. This was his neighborhood. From where he was standing, he could see Carson and Truman’s front door. If he was facing their house, what was going on behind him at his and Ronan’s front door?
Fear pounded through his entire body. Cold sweat trickled down his spine. Ten’s heart was beating so hard, he was afraid he was going to stroke out right here in the middle of this vision. In the middle of his own neighborhood.
Turn around… He urged himself.
Tennyson didn’t obey.
One more second… He couldn’t help thinking, his life was going to be forever changed when he turned around and saw whatever was behind him. How could it not be? This was his neighborhood. His house was to his back. Was it Ronan? Dixie? Carson? Truman? One or all of their babies? Fitzgibbon or Greeley? Himself? The only way to know for certain was to turn around.
Taking a deep breath, Tennyson turned around. What he saw made his heart stop beating in his chest. Time stood still. It seemed like blinking took minutes rather than microns of a second. Ronan was lying crumpled, face down at the bottom of their stairs in a pool of his own blood.
“RONAN!” Tennyson screamed. He tried to run to his fiancé’s side but it was like he was running through quicksand. His legs weren’t moving as fast as they should be moving. In fact, he was barely moving at all.
Ten’s lungs were working though, and he kept screaming at the top of his lungs. It wasn’t helping. Ronan wasn’t budging. None of their neighbors were coming out of their houses to help. No police cars or an ambulance seemed to be responding to the scene. There were no sirens shattering the peace of their neighborhood.
When he finally reached Ronan’s body, he knelt down beside him in the pool of blood. This was a vision, it wasn’t like he could contaminate the scene. Ronan was dead weight. It was almost impossible to move him. Ten managed to shift him enough to see that his chest was drenched in blood. There were no marks on his back, so if he had been shot, that meant the bullet or bullets were still inside of him. It also meant he could have been stabbed, which would make identifying the weapon and the potential killer more difficult.
“Hey, Nostradamus, I’m not dead yet!” Ronan’s cheery voice said from behind him.
Tennyson spun around, losing his grip on Ronan’s blood-soaked torso in the process.
“You wanna watch it? My face just hit the steps.” Ronan rocked back on his heels.
Ten slowly got to his feet on rubbery legs. “Ronan…” How is this possible? How are you here? All of these questions ran through Tennyson’s head, but at this moment, all he could do was move to Ronan and hold him. It could be his last chance.
“Don’t think like that babe.” Ronan’s bright blue eyes glittered as he gently pushed Ten back from him. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
“You sent me this vision?” Ten took a deep breath to try to get his fraying emotions back under control.
Ronan nodded, wiping away tears Tennyson wasn’t even aware he was crying. “You need to take a good look at me. Memorize as many details as you can.” Ronan turned Tennyson’s head back to his prone body.
Ten took a deep breath and looked at what Ronan was wearing. Jeans and a blue button down. It was the same outfit he’d left the house in this morning when they went to the Chelsea crime scene, but, to be fair, Ronan had a lot of blue button downs.
“Keep looking,” Ronan urged.
“There are no exit wounds on your back. Jesus, Christ, Ronan! Were you shot or stabbed.”
“Shot, babe. Three times. At close range. The bastard walked right up to me. Spoke to me and clipped me three times in the chest before I could get my gun out of the holster.”
“Oh my God! Your gun!” Tennyson pulled away from him without a second thought and ran back to Ronan’s body. The holster was still on his right hip, but his gun was missing. “It’s gone. Whoever shot you stole your gun.” Ten looked up at Ronan, who didn’t look as solid as he had when Tennyson had been holding on to him. “Who did this to you? Who shot you, Ronan? I’ll find him and kill him myself. Did you know him?”
Ronan nodded sadly then vanished.
“TENNYSON!” Carson screeched.
Ten felt himself being shaken as if he were a fallen leaf in a tornado. He tried to open his eyes, but they felt glued shut. “No,” he managed to whisper.
“He’s back,” Cole said, sounding relieved.
Ten pried his eyes open. “Ronan! I’ve got to get to Ronan before it’s too late; before he gets shot.” Ten tried to sit up but his body wouldn’t respond. It was like he was back in the vision again, like his body was stuck in quicksand.
“Ten, it’s okay. Ronan’s fine. Look!” Carson held up his phone. Ronan was standing in front of a podium with the Boston Police Department logo on the front of it. He was wearing the blue button down Ten had just seen stained with Ronan’s blood. Ronan was alive and he was breathing. It was up to Tennyson to keep him that way. “He gave a press conference a little while ago about the killings.”
“What happened? Did you have another vision?” Cole asked, helping him to sit up.
Ten nodded, trying to catch his breath. “I was standing on our street.” He looked up at Carson and pointed to his phone. “Ronan was wearing that outfit and was lying in a pool of blood at the foot of our stairs. He’d been shot three times. He was about to tell me who did it when you pulled me out of the vision.”
“I’m dialing his number now.” Carson said, looking scared.
“Is
he answering the phone?”
Carson shook his head no.
Ronan always answered his phone when Carson called him, even when he was driving. He felt his eyes roll back in his head and then everything faded to black.
21
Ronan
It was all happening faster than Ronan could keep up with. One minute he was in the DNA lab with Lyric Vaughn trying to get her to hurry up the processing of the Max Harmon and Zach Ryan evidence and the next, he was looking at picture after picture of Lyric’s wife and infant daughter.
Thankfully, just as Lyric was about to bust out ideas for Astrid’s first birthday party, Fitzgibbon was texting him to get his ass back upstairs and into his office. Ronan didn’t know if he was coming or going. The captain didn’t usually order him around like this.
When he got back up to the squad room, Fitzgibbon was standing in the door to his office. He was waving Ronan down like some limo driver waving to a fare at the airport. He ran to his desk to grab a notebook and hustled his ass to Fitzgibbon’s office. He wasn’t surprised to see Captain Davidson sitting inside.
“Captains!” Ronan greeted. “This is a nice surprise.”
“Is any of the DNA evidence in yet?” Davidson asked.
“I’m great, thank you for asking.” Ronan raised an eyebrow at his old captain and took the empty chair next to him. It was the chair Tennyson usually sat in when they came in here to meet with Fitzgibbon. “No, there’s no DNA yet on the Harmon or Ryan cases.”
“That’s a shame.” Davidson clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You’re just going to have to go on without it.”
Ronan was confused. “Go on to what?” He turned to Fitzgibbon. “On to another investigation?” He tried to keep the growing disappointment from showing on his face.
“No, Ronan. On the air. We agreed with Tennyson’s idea of letting the media in on this one before any other teenagers can become victims. The press conference starts at 3pm.”