[Criminally Insane 01.0] Bad Karma

by Douglas Clegg

  A familiar voice, behind them, at the French doors to the patio, said, “My men have been looking all over for you two.”

  Trey glanced around. Through his own tears, he saw Oscar Arboles, pipe in mouth, shining with sweat. He was coming in from the pool area with a dark-haired woman. The woman had a camera in her hand. She would be the crime-scene photographer. She had a look on her face as if none of this blood spattering the room was anything out of the ordinary.

  Oscar looked as if he himself was hoping this was all just a nightmare from which to be awakened.

  Chapter Fifty

  “Your son is unharmed,” Oscar Arboles said. He was wearing a very sweat-stained blue suit, the collar of his shirt undone, his tie askew. He was on the patio, walking Trey and Carly around the pool. “Your daughter ran down to get help. She’s doing fine. A neighbor a few doors down called us. The murderer didn’t hurt your son. It was that woman from the asylum.”

  “Agnes Hatcher?” Trey said, feeling confused. “But she’s dead.” He knew even as he said it that within him he’d known it was true already. He’d known as soon as he’d run up the road to the cottage.

  He’d known as if he had some psychic link with Hatcher herself.

  Oscar stopped pacing. “Mr. Campbell, she’s very much alive.” Looking at both of them, he drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to Carly. “We received a report of a sighting of Hatcher at a harbor saloon in San Pedro. She was seen in several places, speaking with men at the bar. She found one, too. We’ve got him.”

  “We saw on the news that she died,” Carly interjected. She blew her nose into the handkerchief.

  Trey cussed a blue streak. “I should’ve known. It wasn’t her, was it? It was some victim of hers.”

  Oscar nodded. “She’s very clever.”

  “Clever? She’s a genius.” Trey cursed silently to himself. “How could I leave my kids alone like that?”

  Carly asked, “Can we go to them now? I want my babies.” Her eyes were filled with tears.

  Oscar nodded. He went inside and spoke briefly with one of the investigating officers. When he returned, he said, “Let’s go out the back gate. No use getting upset all over again walking through that…”

  Carly clung to Trey the whole way back to the police station.

  When Carly saw the state that Mark was in, she began weeping loudly. She went to him, hugging both him and Teresa. “Thank God, thank God, oh thank you God.” Teresa was doing fairly well. According to Oscar Arboles, their daughter had not witnessed too much. She had tried to get Mark to run, had pulled and pushed him, but he hadn’t budged. So she had just taken off, assuming that if she got help quickly enough, nothing bad would happen to her brother.

  Teresa hadn’t known what was wrong with Mark.

  “A mild catatonia,” Oscar said. “It happens sometimes. An event is so traumatic, the individual freezes. He’ll be fine in a day or so.”

  Trey picked his son up and held him. Mark’s chin rested against his shoulder. Trey had never in his life seen a sadder looking boy. His eyes were all dark and seemed to have sunken into his face, becoming smaller. His lips were thin, and in a tight line. He said nothing. He reacted to nothing.

  Teresa began crying, and Carly held her. Carly and Trey looked at each other. For a moment, he look stung. Trey didn’t know if his interpreting her expression was just his own guilt for not being with the children, or if Carly was genuinely angry with him for having the kind of job which would bring with it this kind of monster.

  “Although there’s a good chance Hatcher’s already off this island, I want to get all of you off-island tonight,” Oscar said. “I’ll have a couple of the mainlanders—cops—take you to Long Beach in a motor boat in half an hour. We can get your son to Long Beach Memorial for observation, but I’m certain he’ll come through with flying colors by morning.”

  Too numb to speak, Carly nodded.

  “What did Hatcher do up there?”

  After a few seconds, Oscar said, “She lived up to her various nicknames. Not a tale to be told in front of children.”

  Trey set Mark down beside his mother. He held Teresa for awhile, smelling her breath, feeling her heartbeat. He wanted to stay with them. They were a unit, not to be separated. He felt like an animal protecting its young, for he wanted to guard them for the rest of their lives. Leaving Teresa with her mother, he put his arm around Mark. Trey just wanted the warmth to pass through all of them. He didn’t want to ever leave their sides again.

  “Why don’t we go talk in my office, Mr. Campbell?” Oscar asked.

  Carly nodded to Trey. “I’ll stay here. Don’t worry. We’re fine.”

  A strange relief hung in the air between them. Almost an electrical charge. It was that monstrous human emotion of survival—self-survival.

  Two teenagers had been murdered brutally in the rental cottage, but they were part of another world of tragedy. In this world of his own family and of happy endings, Trey felt as if he and his family were lucky. They had been spared that horrible tragedy. They had somehow skirted it. Days later he and Carly might be back at their home in Redlands, both working in the yard on a day off. They might laugh while they watched Marky run under the sprinklers then. Or Terry might show them a chord change on the guitar she’d just learned. An overdue notice from Visa might come in and ruin the weekend for him. That would be the next tragedy—light and easy to take care of. It was horrible what Trey was thinking just then, and he wished his mind didn’t dredge up the thought:

  Thank god it wasn’t us. Thank god my children weren’t inside that house.

  Along with this, came the unspoken thought:

  Just don’t think about those other children, the older ones, Jenny and her friend, trapped by that monster, with no escape but death.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Five minutes later, in his glassed-in office, Oscar pushed a Styrofoam cup of coffee across the desk. “No cream, but you’ll live. You want doughnuts, we got cream-filled and glazed, no plain.” He slapped a pink box on a side table near his chair. He reached in and grabbed a crumbly half-doughnut, and took a bite. Oscar spoke while he chewed, “I used to see things on a par with this back in my Hollywood days, but not since. Even then, it wasn’t nearly so bloody. My local boys, they’ve never seen this before. Half my guys were losing their lunches. I suppose, working with these kinds of killers, you’ve been somewhat exposed to this.”

  “A bit,” Trey nodded. “But when it’s on the inside of Darden State, it doesn’t seem as terrible. Usually, they do it more to themselves than to others.”

  Trey stared at the coffee.

  Then, he picked up the cup and took a sip. It tasted sour. “She killed Jenny.”

  Oscar nodded his head, chewing the doughnut. “And a boy.”

  “I saw the body in the room. Who was it?”

  “Jenny Reed’s boyfriend, Tom Hyslop. They must’ve been surprised in the house. Jenny was in the kitchen. The boy was in the back bedroom.” Oscar finished off his doughnut and reached into his breast pocket. He withdrew his pipe, thrusting it between his lips. “It’s your wife with the asthma, am I right?”

  Trey nodded. “Feel free to light up.”

  “Gracias,” Oscar struck a match on the desk and cupped it in his hand around the pipe bowl.

  “De nada,” Trey replied.

  “You fool around with this Reed girl?” Oscar asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jenny Reed. She was pretty. A pretty babysitter. Many men might think about it. Maybe fantasize. She probably had a crush on you, no?”

  “What in god’s name are you driving at?”

  “Agnes Hatcher. Maybe she was jealous of this girl.”

  Trey almost laughed if he weren’t so insulted. “I guess character is something that nobody respects in southern California, but I’ve got some. I wouldn’t cheat on my wife even if the opportunity arose.”

  “But if it did arise…”

&n
bsp; “You don’t know Agnes Hatcher, either. She killed Jenny Reed because Jenny Reed was in the cottage. She would’ve killed Carly or Teresa or Mark if they’d been there.”

  “She didn’t touch your children. I take that back, she didn’t hurt your children. And you didn’t mention yourself. What do you think Hatcher would’ve done had you been there?”

  Trey thought a moment. His mind was a blank, short-circuited by the recent events. He said the first thing that came into his head. “I think she didn’t want me to be there, knowing her. Once she figured out where I was staying, she could’ve waited until I arrived. She could’ve hidden somewhere. But she didn’t. Unfortunately, she wanted to kill anyone else she came across.”

  “Just for the thrill?”

  Trey shook his head, setting the half-empty cup back on the desk. “No. She does get a thrill from it, but not for the reasons generally associated with psychopaths. She believes she’s collecting time in eternity for herself with each murder. She told me once that that was why the ancients sacrificed humans: to ransom their own souls. She had a whole theory about it.”

  “Why do you think she spared your son?”

  Without hesitation, Trey said, “He has my smell.”

  “Your smell?”

  “Agnes Hatcher studies people. She studied me for years, even after she stopped seeing me. She knew more about me than anyone but my immediate family by then. She remembered smells. She remembered faces. She once told me that she could tell if a person had the heart of a killer or not. She could smell that, too.”

  A grin rose from Oscar’s doughnut crumbed lips. “But, you knew she was insane.”

  Trey shrugged. “No. The courts called her that. She felt she was a different species from the rest of us. She may have been right.”

  “Does she think you have the heart of the killer?”

  Trey didn’t answer this.

  “In any case,” Oscar blew smoke from his pipe, “what she did to those teenagers was not just killing. It had the look of a ritual to it. We’re not even sure that all the internal organs are there with either body…”

  Trey wiped his face with his hand, remembering the skinned body in the bed. “God.”

  “I’m not going to go into detail about what was done to those kids. Suffice it to say, they didn’t suffer long. And we caught her accomplice.”

  “She usually works alone.”

  Oscar nodded. “Or she kills whoever helps her. He’s in the holding cell. He’s a wild one. Named Nathaniel Coker, but known around the waterfront in San Pedro as Cobra. Not very bright. He was suspected of several murders of a group of Vietnamese fishermen several years back, but there was nothing solid to connect him to the crimes. The Hatcher woman tried to get him, too. But she failed. It’s good to know she fails now and then, huh? She didn’t have the time, but she was going for his balls. She heard the girl screaming for help, though, so she got out of there fast. Our friend Cobra only got gouged a bit, but we patched him up.” Oscar winked, “Better than losing the ol’ cojones, eh?

  “She’s after me,” Trey said after he finished the cup of coffee.

  “I know,” Oscar said. “She told your son that. She told him that she wanted his daddy. We found him standing on the patio, shivering. She had left a nice little lipstick mark on his forehead. Only it wasn’t lipstick. It was blood. And it’s all he would tell us. ‘The lady wants my daddy.’ You ask him, he’ll probably tell you, too. It’s all he seems able to say at the moment.”

  For a second, Trey felt defensive of his son. Not just with Agnes Hatcher, but even with the police. He didn’t like the thought of Mark being questioned. Not after what he’d witnessed. He liked even less the idea of Mark being brought into court one day in the future to testify, while Agnes Hatcher sat there, watching the boy. If Agnes was ever caught. “Can’t you get a helicopter for my family? I want them back on the coast as quickly as possible.”

  “We could do an airlift,” Oscar said, re-lighting his pipe as if it would help him to think better. He tilted his head side-to-side, weighing this option. “I don’t think it’s necessary. Your son is strong. He’ll come out of this soon. There’s just something inside of him that’s keeping the door locked for awhile. Until he feels absolutely safe.” Oscar glanced at his watch. “We can have a helicopter here in thirty minutes, forty, tops. But you and your family can get on a boat in ten minutes and have two armed guards as an escort right now. If she could still be around on this island, I think you should go for the boat. Why wait and chance anything?”

  “I guess the boat’s fine,” Trey said. “But I’m staying.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “If you want to catch Agnes Hatcher,” Trey said. “You’re going to need me. Once she knows I’m off this island, she’s as good as slipped through your hands. I know her. I know what drives her.”

  “What drives her then?” Oscar leaned forward. The smoke from his pipe blew right into Trey’s eyes. Oscar apologized, fanning the air.

  Trey took five minutes and told Oscar about the Jack the Ripper reincarnation story. “She operates on the part of the body where she thinks the soul resides for each person. She claims that Jack taught her that when she finds this sacred place of the soul, that she gains another incarnation. That it’s like a sacrifice to the fates. She thinks she’s a different species. She believes I am, too. She believes that she and I have to come together again to resolve, I don’t know, some kind of karmic debt. We’re bound through eternity. Not to be too morbid, but I assume she cut out Jenny’s eyes.”

  Oscar leaned forward, pipe thrust firmly in mouth. “Why do you say that?”

  “Jenny had beautiful eyes. They were her best feature. Agnes probably intuited that from just seeing her once. So, she thought her soul resided in her eyes. I don’t know this boy, Tom, but if he were in bed, waiting for Jenny, Agnes must’ve cut off his genitals.”

  “Right on the money,” Oscar said, shaking his head. “With the Reed girl, it was more than just eyes.” He thrummed his fingers on his desk. “I trained in L.A., Mr. Campbell, when I was younger. I’ve seen the worst a human being can do to another human being.” He paused a beat. “This tops it. We know Hatcher took a quick shower to wash off the blood of her victims. We saw traces of her hair. It was red, and then, bits of it were blond. She used shampoo-in hair color. We also know she rummaged through your wife’s closet. Probably changed clothes, although we didn’t find Hatcher’s clothes. She did this in just a few minutes. She’s very fast as well as methodical. We assume, based on the time lag before we got the call for help from the neighbor, that she had about six minutes to get out of that house and avoid being seen by my men.”

  Trey covered his face with his hands. He remembered the kind of work that other killers in D Ward had done in the past. The images it brought up for him. Half of his job was repressing such memories. Carly was right; he was going to have to find another line of work. He didn’t want his children to grow up in this atmosphere.

  He didn’t want to ever again see a look like the one on Mark’s face that evening: the blank, empty gaze, the slight drool at the corner of his lips.

  “Let’s get your family on that boat,” Oscar said, pushing himself up from his desk. He wiped his hand across the bald spot, swiping at several stray black hairs. “I have worked on this island for thirty years, Mr. Campbell. I never imagined anything like this monster would come here. What can I do to help catch her?”

  Trey said the first thing that came into his mind. “Let me talk to the accomplice. Cobra.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Carly dried her tears, but could not bring herself to let go of either of her children. She looked into Mark’s eyes, and tried speaking to him, but he stared through her. She remembered when he was born, how they’d called him Tadpole for months before the formal name Mark took hold. How he still seemed like her little Tadpole now, a baby, so sweet and loving. She wished she had brought them with her and Trey for the afte
rnoon…If only she’d insisted on bringing the children. They’d have been safer on a horse trail than in the cottage.

  Teresa said, “I don’t know why he couldn’t run, Mommy.” Her voice seemed now to be of a much younger girl, as if the experience she’d been through had taken away any maturity she’d developed. She began crying softly, and then stopped again. “I tried to make him run. Maybe I shoulda stayed with him.” She nestled her head into her mother’s shoulder.

  “No, you did the right thing, Teresita,” Carly whispered. “You got help, and if you hadn’t’ve maybe things would’ve been worse.”

  “He saw it all,” Teresa said, gazing at her little brother. “I only saw the woman and the man and Jenny. I didn’t see what they did to her. Marky saw it.”

  “It was a horrible thing,” Carly said.

  “Poor Jenny,” Teresa said. “She’s dead. If we’d been in the house, we’d be dead, too.” She began crying. Carly felt the wetness of tears seep into her blouse. “Mommy, I want to go home.”

  “We will,” her mother cooed. “We will. Soon.” She glanced around the walls of the waiting area, and felt like Agnes Hatcher was there, waiting for them.

  The woman who had stolen her children’s innocence.

  If only Trey had never worked at that damn hospital, she thought. None of this would have ever happened.

  At that very moment, Trey stepped back into the room.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  “They’ve got a police escort for you and kids,” Trey told his wife. He had to steel himself for this. His instinct was to go with them, to not let them out of his sight. He was afraid, too. Afraid that Agnes Hatcher would get him, finally. That she would do to him what she did to others. He was having trouble even touching his wife. He was afraid that if he did, it would be too much like a goodbye.