by Hadena James
“He deviated, for whatever reason, he took the eyes before they died. Any ideas?” Malachi asked, trying to stay composed.
I looked out of our spot in the alley. The road wasn’t exactly busy. There wasn’t much around here.
“To keep him from getting a look at his car in case he survived,” I told Malachi.
“That would make sense,” Malachi agreed.
“Worried about his car and not his face?” Rollins asked.
“In stressful situations, witnesses tend to block faces. They do not tend to block car models, colors, or partial license plates,” I told him. “When we find a serial killer survivor, we just estimate that about fifty percent of the killer’s description is wrong, unless the survivor can prove otherwise. However, when they are describing houses, rooms, streets, cars, or other details, they have good memories. I worked a case over the summer where the woman could remember that a train passed by the window every morning. She did not know the time, just that the sun shined in the window a little before the train passed each day. She could feel it on her skin. However, despite looking at the guy when he kidnapped her, she could not pick him out of a line-up.”
“Nina told me that Patterson’s first kill came in 1932, he was seven years old. He’s been at this for a long time. He would know what witnesses remember the best.” Malachi looked at me. “For the record, I didn’t know that until Nina called me with the tip a few weeks ago. We’ll need to talk after this case is over, there’s a lot you should know.”
“And you’re the gatekeeper of these secrets?” I scowled.
“Some of them. I believe Nyleena is the other gatekeeper.” Malachi looked out onto the road. He was envisioning the same thing I was. For whatever reason, Patterson had stopped here or very close. This guy had tried to rob him and Patterson had killed him.
I pictured my grandfather driving a 1943 Ford pickup truck. Baby blue with whitewall tires and in perfect condition. I had no idea why I believed he would be driving this particularly make, model, or color of vehicle or even if whitewalls would fit a 1943 Ford truck.
Since I very much doubted this was the sniper, that meant the old man had made three kills in about 12 hours, give or take an hour or two. Being an octogenarian wasn’t slowing him down at all. If anything, an end of life urgency seemed to be making him work faster. But faster meant more tiredness at the end of it. When the adrenaline crash came, it would be swifter, harder, more consuming. The times I’d made it through a fight without an injury, I’d still been zonked out for six or seven hours. It was longer if I was badly injured. After killing the jackass in Alaska, I had slept for nearly fifteen hours. Of course, the crash had taken longer to hit. My adrenaline had continued to surge for a couple of hours after his death.
That meant, if grandfather and I had more in common than I wanted to admit, he was probably curled up somewhere sleeping it off. An adrenaline surge is a powerful thing, it’s a high like no other. And like all highs, there’s a crash at the end. The crash is slow at first. You feel a little tired, then bam! It slams into you like a freight train loaded with cargo and speeding down the tracks until they glowed white hot. Right up until that moment hits, you think, “this isn’t so bad.” Then it hits and all thoughts go out the window. Sleep is the only thing that you can think of, sleep and never feeling that way again. Of course, in my world, there is always another high waiting around the corner. Some might call me an adrenaline junky. I wouldn’t. Malachi was the junky. When he wasn’t chasing serial killers, he was skydiving, bull riding, and drag racing. When I wasn’t chasing serial killers, I was watching episodes of The Flying Circus and playing video games.
“Ok, so Patterson has to be curled up somewhere sleeping it off,” I told everyone. “Canvas hotels. I do not know what to look for except the silver cane and I’m not sure that’s a good enough description, but it is a place to start.”
“Why is he curled up somewhere?” Rollins asked.
“Ever killed anyone?” I countered.
“No,” Rollins answered.
“Killing is an adrenaline rush, even if you do not enjoy it. The fight or flight instinct takes over and as you fire your weapon or beat a man to death with your cane, the adrenaline just keeps pumping. Adrenaline is an endorphin, like a body’s natural form of morphine, it creates a high. It has all sorts of side-effects, including a crash. Eventually, it takes more and more adrenaline to cause the high, but the crash stays the same. When I crash, I go down hard, crawling to my bed is a monumental task. This attack was unplanned, meaning the adrenaline surge would have been much higher than the other two kills. He’s got to come down from it somewhere, which means he has access to a bed.”
“Adrenaline is why little old ladies’ find the strength to lift cars off their grandchildren,” Malachi clarified. “While it lasts, the brain feels no pain, no pain means no limitations to what you can do. We consider them superhuman feats of strength, but they really aren’t. Normally, the person lifting the car suffers all sorts of injuries that they feel only after it wears off.”
“Unless grandma is a psychopath,” I corrected. “Or rather, grandpa in this case.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Malachi asked me.
“You have not heard Lucas’s newest theory?” I frowned at him. “Lucas is using you and me in a case study. We do not suffer those sorts of injuries, because our bodies are used to performing above their accepted capacity. So, when I get pissed and lift a car, I might break an arm or tear a muscle, but it is not going to be to the extent that Rollins is going to have injuries. Same with you.”
“Interesting.” Malachi looked at me for a moment. “Where is Lucas getting said information, particularly my medical records?”
“From the powers that be,” I told him. “So, Patterson is holed up in a hotel or motel. Why would he be here? There are not any hotels nearby. There’s this gas station, a few fast food restaurants and some giant cube farms.”
“I’m guessing you mean the office buildings,” Malachi said.
“Yep, giant cube farms where people wither under florescent lighting, grow obese sitting in office chairs, eat foods from vending machines that contain more processed sugar than the entire country of Ecuador, and develop indigestion and migraines from stress; efficiently removing their will to live until they become numb, mindless zombies who pray for the coffee pot to be full and the supply closet to have staples.”
“That is dreary, even for you.” Malachi didn’t turn around.
“Our offices are cubicles,” Rollins interjected.
“And you are dressed in FBI required clothing that strips away your identity.” I told him. “The only thing keeping you from being one of those mindless zombies is field work. Check out the desk jockeys in your office next time you’re there and then rethink about what I said. You’ll find their spirits are broken and they are working very hard just to survive to retirement.”
“My office is not a cubicle,” Malachi informed me.
“Your office should be padded in rubber,” I told him.
“The floor is,” Malachi responded. He seemed distant, not looking at me while we talked. His eyes kept scanning the buildings and streets around us. I wondered what he saw that I didn’t and began to search too. “This had to be on his way from the sniper’s house to his hotel.”
“That would require housing,” I pointed out. “Patterson’s good, but I’m not sure he can keep a man from alerting neighbors in the next apartment while he beats him to death.”
“You’re absolutely correct,” Malachi finally turned back to us. “It would require a house. Preferably an empty house. He doesn’t enjoy killing children, he goes out of his way to avoid it. He left a child that could identify him alive once even though he sliced her father open. She said in her statement that he told her to go hide in her closet and not come out until police arrived. She did.”
“How did that work out?” I asked.
“The sketch looked lik
e Dracula.” Malachi said. “Literally, it looked like Bela Lugosi in the black and white movie.”
“That means we can all agree that he has dark hair, but then we already knew that. How does Bela Lugosi match with our most recent sketch?”
“Our most recent sketch looks like someone threw a bunch of pieces from an identi-kit onto the ground and randomly started picking them up. Did you see the Dumbo ears? Will Smith has smaller ears than our sketch. And if his nose is really that wide, the tip lines should be ringing off the hook. Since they aren’t,” Malachi sighed. “Our description is basically ‘old man, dark hair, has silver handled cane made of a strange wood that Nina couldn’t remember the name of.’”
“It’s not silver,” I told Malachi. “It’s just shiny like silver. No way is silver bashing in a skull like that unless this guy is the Wolfman.”
“Trace will be able to give us a better idea on what it is really made of,” Rollins offered. Malachi looked at him like he was roach that had just scurried from under a table. After a moment, the look disappeared and the mask everyone usually saw was back. Rollins noticed though, he took a step back from the taller man; whether he consciously realized it or not.
“Let’s go find a subdivision,” I announced, breaking the fear that had gripped Rollins at Malachi’s icy glance.
Six
We snaked through the nearest subdivision. The houses were all newer. Small, ranch style, single family homes for the working classes, with one car garages and an unsheltered spot for a second car, leaving any husband and wife couple to argue over who got to use the garage.
A few cars were in driveways, but most were gone. The neighborhood occupants off to cube farms to catch office-borne diseases, to factories to work with chemicals that would give them cancer, or to shops where they’d turn wrenches and bust open knuckles leading to tetanus shots and the occasional bout of blood poisoning. This was not a neighborhood for the elite. On the flip side, it also wasn’t a neighborhood for those making minimum wage. The house payments were too large, interest rates were too high, and even with energy efficient appliances, and the utilities would be unaffordable.
It was also a neighborhood that was aspiring to be better. Signs proclaimed a neighborhood watch was in effect. The similarity of color among the homes was testament to the neighborhood association enforcing “appearance” codes upon the near cookie cutter houses. There would be no pink houses, it would be offensive. Nor would there be bright red houses with yellow shutters, like the house Malachi had grown up in one street away from me. Flower beds and shrubs were neat, despite being dormant or dead for the winter. Yards weren’t littered with fallen leaves, left unraked from the autumn.
Rollins stopped the SUV. He put it in park, glancing up and down the street. His face was wrinkled with frown lines and worry about losing his job or his life. This was not his first choice of assignments, chasing serial killers rarely were. There was money in it, to be sure, the VCU and SCTU were the highest paid divisions of federal law enforcement. When the public stats had been released at the end of the year, I had actually made more than the Director of the US Marshals. Of course, my life expectancy was three years as an SCTU member. His was considerably longer as he sat behind his big comfy desk under crappy fluorescent lighting, talking on the phone, taking meetings, and barking orders at lower ranking Marshals. Malachi and Gabriel made nearly double what I made.
“What are we doing here?” Rollins asked. “If someone had reported a murder, we would have been notified.”
“That’s why we’re here. Maybe the murder hasn’t been discovered yet, but I believe Patterson Clachan really did beat this victim to death. That’s very messy.” Malachi got out of the SUV. I wasn’t going to follow. It was cold outside. My brain and body both agreed that the cold sucked. Walking the streets of this neighborhood peeping in windows for signs of blood wasn’t going to make me warmer, it was going to make me cranky. This wasn’t an area that I needed assistance in, cranky was a state of being for me.
“Do you understand what he’s doing?” Rollins asked me.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to help?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you two supposed to be,” Rollins paused, cocking his head to the side. I raised an eyebrow and glared at him.
“Supposed to be what, exactly?”
“Like friends with benefits.”
“Ah,” I frowned. “We are friends, there are no benefits.”
“So you aren’t romantically involved?”
“I would prefer to drink Kool-Aid with cyanide.” I got out of the SUV. Malachi had moved about half way down the street. He was looking for houses with cars still at home, most likely, parked in the garage. I didn’t run after him. Instead, I stood in the street and listened to the sounds around me. Traffic was minimal. A single car swung slowly around our SUV. The driver’s head pivoted to stare at me as he trudged past, no doubt wondering if Malachi and I were up to something nefarious.
I couldn’t blame him. If I hadn’t known us and had just seen Malachi running down the street with me standing in the middle of the road and an SUV idling with another man in it, I’d think we were up to no good as well. The car passed both of us. Malachi stopped and watched as he passed as well. The two men were exchanging glares. In our line of work, paranoia is required. I didn’t know the excuse the guy in the car had for such behavior.
He parked in a driveway a few houses away from Malachi. The exterior was a dark green vinyl siding with accented shutters. The yard was barren of the customary flower beds and shrubs, giving a clean line of sight to the road. I nodded at the house, hoping Malachi understood.
Even in our neighborhood, people had shrubs and flowerbeds. Not me, of course, that would require me to do yard work. I paid the neighbor kids to mow my yard, rake my leaves, shovel my snow, whatever needed to be done. As a result, I had the worst lawn on my street.
So did this guy. Laziness might explain it, but there were also no trees. My yard at least had trees to drop leaves. Trees helped with utility bills. They hid you from the prying eyes of nosy neighbors. One did not randomly remove all the trees without a reason.
Malachi nodded back and we started slowly towards the house. The man was out of his car now, beating his fist against the front door. He was a large, heavy set man. His face was red, either from the exertion of beating on the door or because he was unhappy with the occupant. The man put his face to the peep hole. Internally, I cringed, waiting for someone to push an ice pick through the small hole and take out the man’s eye. He yelled a name.
“Special Agent Malachi Blake with the FBI, this is US Marshal Aislinn Cain, may we help you?” Malachi gave his most charming smile to the man. He instantly relaxed. Malachi could charm a snake out of its skin. That smile made women swoon, I’d seen it. It annoyed me because it was even faker than his usual mask.
“Strange to have a US Marshal and an FBI agent in the same place.” The man commented.
“We’re looking for something,” Malachi picked his words carefully, deciding to say something instead of someone. Manhunts raised hackles; looking for drugs in storm drains, didn’t.
“Just a late employee. James was supposed to be at work an hour ago. I called, but he didn’t answer. In ten years, the man has never missed work. His car is in the garage.” The man shook his head. “I hope he didn’t have an accident.”
“What does James do?” I asked.
“He’s a bartender at Kirley’s,” the man said. “I’m Wilson Buck, I own the bar. James is my best bartender.”
“Let me see if I can find anything for you,” Malachi looked at me. Technically, Malachi and Agent Rollins needed a reason to enter the house. If I suspected there was a serial killer or a serial killer’s victim inside, I didn’t need a reason, I could just bust down the door. However, this situation would need tact, finesse. I lacked both. Instead, I walked around the yard as Malachi attempted to peep in windows.
The t
rees had definitely been removed. Small impressions were left where they had been planted. One was struggling to resurrect itself and a small trunk timidly peeked from the dirt. Only the truly paranoid removed all their trees. I wondered what James did in his spare time.
“Cain,” Malachi said my name softly. Rollins was moving towards us from the SUV. Malachi pointed to the ground near the side door. A perfect shoeprint was preserved. January had gotten brave, allowing a few days of 40 and 50 degree weather during the month. Yesterday, it had been 45. This morning, it had been 40. Right now, it was below freezing again. That was the way weather worked in Missouri.
“It looks,” I frowned at the foot print. “It looks small.” I placed my foot next to it. I wore a size seven shoe. Malachi required special order shoes at a nineteen. The print was just a little bit longer than my own, but it was considerably wider. It was the only print in the area.
“How tall is James?” Malachi asked Wilson Buck.
“Tall, at least 6 feet 3 inches,” Wilson answered, he’d moved around to the side with us.
“Too small for him,” I answered. “Ok, Mr. Buck, I’m going to ask you to move your car to the road and stay parked in it until we can ascertain the health of Mr.” I paused, I didn’t have a last name.
“Okafor, James Okafor,” Wilson Buck told me, as he walked away. Rollins was already on his phone, notifying someone.
“I am not supposed to be investigating,” I whispered to Malachi. “I think being the person making entry into the home qualifies as investigating.”
“Open the door, we’ll send Rollins in,” Malachi told me.
“That’s splitting hairs to a very fine point,” I said. “I’m still the one breaking down the door. And if we’re right, Rollins should not enter the house alone.”
“St. Charles police are on their way, we should have a warrant within the hour,” Rollins hung up. I sighed. I wasn’t going to stand in the cold and wait an hour for a warrant that may or may not show up. It was possible that James Okafor was sleeping off a bender in a ditch somewhere, but the shoe print made it unlikely. We’d been told Patterson Clachan was a short man. The small print matched that. The removal of the trees was an act of the paranoid, our sniper would be paranoid. It was possible our sniper wasn’t just paranoid, but had a military background. Either way, it was the only reason I could think to have the trees literally uprooted from the yard.