[Criminally Insane 01.0] Bad Karma

by Douglas Clegg

  The kind of knife that she herself had used a few times to help Trey gut and clean the fish they’d caught.

  The policewoman held it against Mark’s throat.

  “You’re Agnes Hatcher,” Carly gasped. She didn’t want to move, for fear of what this madwoman would do to her son.

  “And you’re the whore who stole my Jack from me,” Agnes Hatcher said. “I can smell him all over you.”

  Part III

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Trey felt like he was moving through molasses, from the cell area to the door. He heard Cobra’s cynical laughter, and tasted the smoke in the air. He pushed through the door to the corridor which led to the offices of the police station. He passed a middle-aged man sitting at a desk, scribbling notes down from a phone call. He walked swiftly to Oscar’s office, knocking on the door.

  Through the glass, Oscar glanced up from his computer. He signaled for Trey to enter.

  Trey opened the door and said, triumphantly, “I know where she is. She’s at the caves. It’s because of the connection to the word Whitechapel. It’s a sign to her of where time and space will intersect. Where our karma will be resolved.”

  “Capilla Blanca,” Oscar said without hesitation. “Maybe that’s it. Glad our Cobra talked to somebody. None of my boys could get through to him. Anything else?”

  “He said she’s keeping souvenirs.”

  “Body parts? Organs?"

  Trey nodded.

  It was 9 p.m.

  Chapter Sixty

  “You stay here,” Oscar said, rising, grabbing his jacket from the coat rack. “Watch TV. or talk to Dinah out front. I’ll get ten men and some motor boats over there. We’d go up to the other end of the cliffs, but I already have men out on the road setting up blocks. I doubt she’d have had time to go that way. For all I know, she knows her way around in a boat. And if she’s there, I don’t want her finding you. How’d you get our friend in the cell to tell you this?”

  “I’ve worked with sociopaths for years,” Trey said. “I understood him.”

  Oscar lip-farted at this, as if Trey were just some bleeding heart.

  “You’ll never find her without me,” Trey said.

  Oscar turned, and pointed at him. “You think too much of yourself. You need some rest. There’s a couch out front. Use it.”

  Trey felt stunned by the authoritative command from him.

  Several minutes later, he went to sit on the green couch in the front office. Dinah, the dispatch officer, listened to the police band, which she kept on low volume. She smiled occasionally when Trey looked her way, but kept her head down.

  He watched the silent television. There was no news about the murders. He wondered how sensational a murder had to be to make the news.

  He closed his eyes. He wished he’d gone with Carly. He wasn’t needed here. Whether or not Agnes Hatcher was after him, he didn’t need to be there for her. He should be there for his family.

  He imagined Carly playing with Mark out at the swimming pool. Teresa, diving off the far edge.

  Mark afraid of his own reflection which lurked at the bottom of the pool.

  Without wanting to, Trey Campbell fell asleep.

  He dreamed.

  A chess game in hell, between him and Agnes Hatcher. All around them, fire.

  She was picking her queen up and moving it towards his knight.

  “You can’t win like that,” he said.

  Agnes Hatcher grinned. Her teeth were blood-stained. “I don’t have a strategy,” she said. “Do you, Mr. Campbell? Mr. Campbell?” she asked, her voice melting into another voice, lighter and sweeter.

  Trey awoke when he heard his name being called.

  It was Dinah. “Mr. Campbell?”

  His eyes fluttered open. He oriented himself to the room. The front office of the Catalina police station. He sat up. His back was all sweaty from lying against the leather couch. He wiped at his neck.

  “Mr. Campbell?” Dinah repeated. She stood up from behind her desk.

  He nodded. “Uh huh.”

  Dinah turned up the dispatch radio a bit, but it sounded like several voices speaking in monotones all at once. She turned it down again. “Oscar wants me to tell you they’ve caught her.”

  Trey glanced up at the clock on the wall.

  It was almost ten p.m.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Half an hour later, Oscar stepped into the police station, soaked to the skin.

  “The damn waves,” he said, “I was either throwing up or getting soaked. We could barely see anything because the fog’s coming in. I was sure we were going to crash into each other.”

  Trey had been pacing for almost a half hour. “So what’s the story?”

  Oscar glanced at him like he was the last person in the world he wanted to see. “The story is just about the way I’d’ve played it. We went out to those caves. My men and women are already coming down with colds, and the ones out of San Pedro think I’m a joke. We spend an hour and a half shining flashlights up and down the slimy walls of Capilla Blanca. Although I must admit, that central room, the round one with the well in the middle, is pretty interesting. I’ve lived here for fifteen years, and never went through there. It’s amazing how those monks lived…” Realizing he was getting off the subject, he backtracked. “So we spend half the night looking there, and I get this call. Not on the general police band, but on my private band. Turns out the coast guard picked up a woman matching Hatcher’s description, soaked in blood, on a sloop just up out to sea a bit. She was easy to subdue, and they’re taking her to the mainland. So, we’re all a little furious we ran off on a tip from a paranoiac. And I don’t mean our friend Cobra.” Oscar sneezed, and walked past Trey.

  Trey stood there in the center of the office.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said.

  Oscar stopped at the door to his own office. He shook his head. “Believe it, Campbell. All I can say is, I hope they fry that woman. She deserves worse, but if there’s a hell, she’ll work out her damn karma from there.”

  “It’s not her, Oscar,” Trey said. “I know it.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Instinct,” Trey said.

  Defeated, Trey walked out the door, out of the police station, into the cool night. He passed the closed up storefronts where Carly had window-shopped earlier that same evening. The ice cream stand, where he’d been sitting, thinking how good life could be. It can all turn on a dime. He remembered a biblical quote: In the twinkling of an eye. He wished he could step back through time, to that moment in the morning when he had forbidden Mark from coming horseback riding. If he’d followed through on Carly’s plan, even Jenny and her boyfriend would still be alive, because the cottage would’ve been empty. Then, he might’ve been able to prevent those murders. And he would’ve prevented his son and daughter from having been exposed to that…creature. The thought gave him shivers: Agnes Hatcher kissing her son on his forehead. Like an animal cleaning another before the kill.

  The Gorgon was in his life again. For all the good he tried to do her, none of it mattered. He had tried to understand her pathology when she’d been first admitted to Darden. He had been young and idealistic and essentially, stupid. He had given her information which fueled her fantasies.

  Trey could not have felt worse.

  He walked down the street to the docks. When he reached the pier, he sat down and gazed out at the night. The fog was light, and he could see the darkness of sea. He closed his eyes, sending a prayer out for Mark to get better.

  And then, with sudden clarity, he remembered something that Agnes Hatcher had once told him.

  He’d been sitting with her playing chess. She was a much better chess player than he’d ever be. It was in the recreation room at Darden State. Orderlies were standing guard at the doors. Agnes was rarely allowed around any other patients.

  She wore the hospital gown, and green slippers. Her hair sparkled in the sunlight which cut thro
ugh the barred windows.

  He leaned back in the chair. It was his move, but he couldn’t figure out for the life of him how to get around her queen.

  She said, “It’s a strategy.”

  He grinned, back then. He was only twenty-three, and he still believed that people could be saved from themselves. From their past, their psyches.

  “What is?”

  “This,” she indicated the plastic chess pieces. “It’s my strategy. You don’t have one. You’re just reacting to mine. That’s not how anyone wins.”

  “How can I win? You’re going to put me in check soon. You always do.”

  She looked quite seriously at him. “I would never do anything to hurt you. I don’t want you to lose this game.” She said it then as if what she were saying was of some great importance. “I want you to win.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you understand.”

  “About chess?”

  “About how all of it is one. Chess, life, death. You’re not like the others. You have special knowledge. Only you need to open the door to it. You need the key. I am the key.”

  He let this go. There were some things the patients said which were indecipherable.

  Then, she said, “Remember this. In this game, I moved my men around to this side, and so you followed. And then, to the other side, and then, you followed again. And back and forth. But if you watch the pattern of what I did, you’ll see a thread through the middle. This is where I moved my queen. I wouldn’t call this strategy.”

  “Right where you started. All your other moves were distractions from that main move,” he nodded. “I wished I had noticed it. I’m dumb and you’re smart.”

  “No,” she said, leaning across the board to touch his hand. “My strategy is making you see that there is no strategy. All of it is chance. Fate. Fate is the guiding star. I believe Fate guides us to where we need to go. I may appear to win this game, and you may appear to lose it.”

  The warmth of her hand grew stronger until he wanted to draw back from her touch. It was too warm. Too inviting.

  “But Fate is what draws my queen to her destination. The men may go to the left to fight, and to the right, but the players move where they are meant to, regardless. Your castle is mine, your kingdom, because it was meant to be mine.”

  With that, she moved her queen, and won the game.

  He opened his eyes. The bay at Avalon was before him. He stood up on the pier. He tried to look out to the bend of the island, but could not see any of the Kirk In The Rocks.

  The men may go to the left to fight and to the right.

  But the players move where they are meant to.

  My strategy is no strategy.

  Fate is the guiding star.

  Your castle is mine.

  Your kingdom.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Agnes knelt in darkness on the deck. She waited until the last patrol boat had rounded the curve of the island. She had used the boat’s police radio, and, from her years lecturing to police academies, she knew which band to use to make the frequency appear distant enough to fool the local police. She had spent most of her childhood and youth observing and studying the police. It always came in handy.

  She was less exhausted than exhilarated from the day’s kill. Operating on the boy and girl at the cottage had been refreshing, and she had showered in the spray from the teenaged girl. When she heard the other girl, the little one, go running and screaming, she knew she had to get out of the cottage fast. She did not intend to be caught before she attained fulfillment.

  She would’ve taken his son, then.

  The beautiful boy, so much like his father’s smell.

  But there had been no time that afternoon.

  Instead, she had gone back inside the cottage, pulled some clothes from the woman’s closet and changed into them. They were long for her, the shorts and T-shirt, but she had no time to worry about such things. She wrapped her jeans and sweater in a bundle with the soul-catchers. Then, she went out the front door of the cottage, leaving Cobra shivering in a corner of the kitchen, spineless man that he was.

  Since the little girl was screaming at the road behind the cottage, no one seemed to notice the woman in shorts and T-shirt jogging down the side-path, as if she were just out for exercise.

  The policewoman was easy to take care of. She was down at the docks, totally inexperienced, young, too—perhaps only twenty-one.

  She was alone, because all the other cops had gone up to the cottage. Except Paula Stouffer had not wanted to. She’s been scared. She’d never done more, probably, than catch a teenager shoplifting. She might have even known the girl and boy who had been slaughtered up the hill.

  It was easy to approach her as a tourist and tell her that there was someone funny in the restrooms at the pier. Someone funny, not too scary. Just a weirdo.

  “I’ll go with you,” Agnes had said. “I just think there’s something wrong with the poor man.”

  Paula Stouffer was undoubtedly relieved that she didn’t have to deal with murder and mayhem. Only someone funny, perhaps a homeless person, in the women’s restroom.

  When Agnes had her inside the filthy walls, she ripped the knife across Paula Stouffer’s throat, using her own sweater to sop up the blood so that it didn’t ruin the police uniform.

  She stuffed the body into the last stall. Covered her with one of the dark plastic bags that was used to line the restroom garbage can. She closed the stall door, locking it from the inside. Then she climbed over the top of the stall.

  But only after she scalped her, for Paula had beautiful auburn hair.

  It had been that simple. She knew that there would be a boat to the mainland with his family on board. She’d been hoping he would come too. But it was enough that she had his family.

  Their lives, their sacrifice, would be more crucial toward immortality than any others.

  There was no moon that night. The fog came and went as if an unfelt wind moved it along. The boat was dark, too, for she’d shut off all the controls.

  But even so, against the stars and mist and indigo sky, she saw the great Church of Fate rising, triumphant.

  She glanced at the silhouettes of her prisoners:

  The woman handcuffed to the girl, and the boy. The woman was gagged, and Agnes had draped a piece of cloth, torn from Officer Erskine’s shirt, over her face. She would feel what Agnes had felt all those years. She would know what Agnes had been through.

  And the boy. So like his father. He would not try and escape. She knew that.

  She held tight to the fishing knife. It was so much like the knife they had used together in the fall of 1888. The taste of the blood that day had reminded her of all the lives they’d captured then.

  Of all the lifetimes they had acquired.

  He would come to her now.

  He would come.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  “She is there,” Trey said.

  Oscar glanced up. “Mr. Campbell.” He didn’t seem as furious as Trey had expected him to be.

  The police chief looked sad, his eyes bloodshot.

  “We were wrong,” Oscar said. “There was no Coast Guard pick up. I located the frequency of the call—the one that claimed that Agnes Hatcher had been caught. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

  Trey stood still.

  “Your family hasn’t been sighted near the mainland. They should’ve been close to docking by now.” Oscar said, “She somehow managed to take the boat. Overcome the officers. We found one of them, dead, scalped. Paula Stouffer. In the beach restroom, in a locked stall, covered with a garbage bag. Hatcher’s been out to sea almost four hours. She destroyed any equipment on board, so we can’t track her. She has your family.”

  Trey Campbell said, “I know. That was her goal all along. Checkmate."

  Oscar looked at him, perplexed.

  “She’s at Capilla Blanca.”

  “No,” Oscar said. “We went over every inc
h of that place. I’m sorry. She’s probably on the mainland by now, or near it. Maybe she’s hiding up at San José Island. Maybe she’s on the western side of our own island. We have helicopters coming from Los Angeles to check the local harbors. No more goose chases. I’m sorry. It’s out of my jurisdiction now. The state boys will have her shortly, I’m sure.”

  Oscar said this as if even he didn’t believe it.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Trey ran down the streets of Avalon, his mind racing ahead of him. He had no one to turn to now. He was going to get no help from the police. They had their own agenda, their own strategy when it came to catching killers like Agnes. It often took days to track down such killers. By then, she might have added three more victims to her list. Usually, police were not that effective in the short term, for they didn’t understand the nature of the beast they were hunting. Trey felt a cold sweat break out along his scalp and neck. He had to do something.

  Time was running out. His family may already have been killed. But that wasn’t what Agnes Hatcher would use them for. She would use them for drawing him out.

  She wants you, not them.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  “Out,” Agnes said.

  She had the boy handcuffed to her left wrist.

  She motioned with the fishing knife towards the small beach of pebbles at the sea entrance to Capilla Blanca. The waves crashed just beyond the larger boulders, but she’d been able to maneuver around them because the police boat was just small enough. But if they stayed in the boat much longer, a wave was likely to come over the rocks and do more than just spray them.

  “I said ‘out’.” Agnes took the knife and held it against the boy’s neck.

  The little girl, handcuffed to the woman, moved. Agnes could tell she was afraid of stepping out of the rocking boat. The girl’s mother, her face covered, her mouth gagged, made no sound whatsoever.