by Hadena James
He picked up the burner phone and dialed the only number in it. It rang twice.
“Have you made a decision?” The male voice on the other end asked. It didn’t sound as if it had been sleeping.
“There is no amount of money to make this contract worth it,” Apex answered.
“Is it a moral dilemma because he’s a Marshal?” The last word was hissed.
“No, it has nothing to do with morality. Any idiot that takes this job will be signing his own death certificate. I am not willing to sign my own death certificate.”
“Only if you get caught would you be in any trouble.”
“You obviously have not dealt with the SCTU personally. Let me assure you, there is no place on earth to hide from them.”
“I wanted the best, but obviously that isn’t you.” The man hung up. Apex turned the phone off and put it into a baggy. It was amazing where people could get DNA from these days. He was scheduled to leave in the morning, but dawn seemed like a long time from now. He scribbled a note for the maid and put a hundred-dollar bill with it. He scribbled a second note and sealed the envelope. It had Lucas McMichaels’ name on it. The maid was supposed to take it over to their hotel when she found it. Hopefully, she did. He considered doing it himself, but the risk was too high.
His luggage was packed in a matter of minutes. Aislinn Cain and Lucas McMichaels were still on the street below him. He moved away from the window and waited. His eye began to twitch.
Fifteen
“It’s another damn woman,” I sighed at the ceiling. My migraine was gone. My identity crisis was solved. Our serial mutilator was a woman, which said all sorts of things about the serial killer population in general. And I was still questioning the encounter from the night before. I would have sworn the man walking towards us had been carrying a short knife blade. It was too hot for long sleeves, yet he’d been wearing them. I was also pretty sure the guy on the balcony had saved me from being stabbed. A killer might have been able to take Lucas, but he wouldn’t have gotten to the witness on the balcony before the cops were called. Why some random person on the street would try to stab me, was an entirely different matter. Of course, I had a question or two about the guy on the balcony as well. He’d been terribly focused on Lucas. I had wanted to shout out that Lucas was a taken man, but that seemed rude.
“Hello? Did you forget about me?” Nyleena’s voice came through the speakerphone.
“Yes,” I admitted. “So, I’m a little pissed at my mom because she has always known that Patterson was The Butcher.”
“Do you think it would have made you feel better to know that your serial killer stalker was your grandfather?”
“Probably not.”
“Then why are you pissed about it?”
“Because it seems like I should have been told.”
“Yeah, because you do so well with that kind of information. You’ve spent your entire life trying to prove you aren’t going to become a serial killer. Finding out your grandfather is a serial killer who is alive and stalking you is probably not information you could have handled when you were younger.”
“I’ve always known that Patterson was a serial killer,” I reminded her.
“Yes, but not that he was The Butcher.” She sighed. “Let’s face it, Aislinn; you were so busy trying to survive your teen years that finding out Patterson and The Butcher were the same person would probably have gone badly for you. And all that work you put in to not becoming a serial killer would have gone up in a puff of smoke.”
“So you think she did it to protect me? She could not stop Patterson from writing me, but she could control some of the information.”
“Yes,” Nyleena nearly exclaimed.
“Did you know?”
“No.”
“So, my mother is misguided, but a good person.”
“You almost sound disappointed.”
“I can Taser people who suck.”
“You would not Taser your mother.”
“No, no I would not, but it sounded like a good way to deal with it.”
“The best way to deal with it is to tell her how you feel. I know you aren’t comfortable with talking about feelings, but it’s your mom and she would walk through the fires of hell with a smile on her face to help you.” Nyleena repeated Lucas, almost verbatim, which was irritating. “Now, you’ve had many revelations, including one about a serial killer, so I’m going to hang up. Good session, we’ll talk when you get back.”
“Now you sound even more like Lucas.”
“Lucas is a smart guy and a good psychiatrist.”
“He is a smart guy and a good psychiatrist.”
“And you definitely need a good psychiatrist, even if you are a highly functional sociopath.”
“Point taken, sociopaths should not look into their own psyche. Go do work stuff and I will go do work stuff. By the way, I hate female serial killers almost more than I do men, because they are a giant pain in the ass to capture. Guys give up after a couple of gunshots, women always want to appeal to your better nature.”
“That is a terrible gender bias and you do not have a better nature to appeal to, so it’s moot.” She hung up on me. I continued to stare at the ceiling in my hotel room. Nyleena had a lot in common with Jiminy Cricket, particularly their ability to point out faulty logic and be annoying. She was right about both my mother and my decision that women serial killers were harder to capture than male serial killers were. This was a fallacy, to be sure, but it sounded good in my head. I also didn’t hate female serial killers any more than any other type of killer. I was just tired of dealing with them. I’d dealt with four in the last year, which was about three more than usual. Also, not a single one of them had been normal in the sense of being predictable.
Women were less likely to kill with a lot of blood and gore. Historically, they liked poisons. However, it had started in the spring with two separate female serial killers in Texas. In the defense of one, she was using poison of a sort, well, bubonic plague, but that’s kind of like a poison. The other had been a teenager that had started by stabbing her victims and ended with beating them to death. Beating someone to death requires a lot of energy and adrenaline. It also demanded that a person not be squeamish. For these reasons, women did not beat people to death, even with baseball bats. They were more likely to shoot them than beat them.
I think mostly I was tired of dealing with weird cases. Why mutilate a person but not kill them? Where’s the fun in that? And what’s the trophy for, if the victim is still alive? I understood serial killers a lot better than most serial killers.
“Wakey, wakey.” Xavier knocked. I groaned and he opened the door. He carried a large bottle of Mountain Dew. I required caffeine in huge quantities. I don’t really sleep much without it, so I might as well be good and caffeinated for the hours I’m going to be awake.
“We have another female assailant,” I told him, taking the bottle of soda.
“Yeah, we were discussing that about ten minutes ago,” he told me. “There’s breakfast in the meeting room if you want anything.”
“Good.” I slipped out of bed. Today I was wearing pajamas, KC Chiefs pajama pants and a sleeping shirt with a bear on it and said, “Hiburrnation Rocks.” I agreed with the statement, I wouldn’t mind hibernating either. “Is everyone up but me?”
“No, Caleb had a hard time sleeping last night. I finally gave him a sleeping pill around two in the morning.”
“Orange lights when he closed his eyes,” I stated, remembering the night before. “And possibly a funky odor.”
“Yes, stop doing that to him, it’s mean.”
“Yes it is,” I agreed. “So, no vital sign checking this morning?”
“Your blood pressure is normal, pupils normal, reflexes normal, and you slept the drugs and migraine off.”
“How do you know?”
“Lucas told us about the guy on the street and the guy on the balcony,” Xavier answered. “The fact tha
t you were able to comprehend the dangers while stoned has me scratching my head a little bit.”
“So, Lucas thinks he had a knife too?”
“Yes, he’s pretty sure of it.”
“Good, I wasn’t hallucinating then.” I stood up and looked around. My offensive Gogol Bordello shirt was gone.
“It’s with my luggage as are your jeans and undergarments.”
“So, I can remember telling Caleb to see bright orange, but I don’t remember undressing?”
“Fiona assisted with the undressing, and no, you practically passed out when you came into the room after you chain smoked four cigarettes and drank an entire jug of 5-Hour Energy.” Xavier frowned at me.
“Ah, that’s what this is about.” I didn’t remember the energy drink either.
“You know how that stuff impacts you,” Xavier said.
“I do not know why I drank it or where I got it,” I admitted. “Some parts are fuzzy. Probably the parts when the drug was strongest in my system. You dosed me with oxymorphine.”
“I was out of other things.” Xavier shrugged. “It worked.”
“Stop experimenting on me.”
“No guarantees.” Xavier stood up and left the room. I got dressed. They already knew our attacker was a woman and I wasn’t sure I could add to that. Thankfully, that wasn’t in my job description. I was just required to think like the psychopaths and sociopaths, kick down doors, and try to convince people they should just surrender to us. I was really good at two of these things.
Sixteen
Let there be no delusions, I am not a good investigator. I’m smart and I can see things others can’t, but I don’t have any patience. Also, I lack the drive actually to spend time putting a puzzle together. This new decision that our attacker was a woman was just information to me. I had some questions, but they were obvious questions. For instance, once drugged, how was she managing to get them to wherever she was planning to go with them? Dead weight is dead weight and people are awkward to move. It always looks easy in the movies, but a living person doesn’t get rigor mortis, they remain flexible. Wrapping people up in a carpet is also not a fast and friendly way to dispose of a body. The carpet helps with the flexibility issue, but you still have to put the person in it, roll it up, seal it, and then drag it.
Once, I had done something akin to rolling a person up in carpet to transport them. This was not the sort of information one shared with just anyone and that included members of the SCTU. They would have questions and the answers would expose more truths about people in my life than I cared to share. I rarely kept secrets, but this was a secret worth dying over.
Therefore, I said nothing and munched on a muffin. The fact that I had thought about murder and continued to eat a muffin as if I had been thinking about the morning crossword said all sorts of things about me, none of them good. However, I was past my identity crisis. The difference between Patterson and me might have been splitting hairs to some people, but to me, they were as different as galaxies. One day, that solitary incident might catch up to me. It might not either, and I was willing to let it rot in the ground.
Fiona brought up the biggest question, which led to some serious brainstorming. The drugs in the guys’ systems were memory altering. They would be in a weakened state, possibly incapacitated completely. She wanted to know how a woman would be able to lug these men around as much as I did. Everyone looked at me and I shook my head. Physically, I was closer to a psychopath than a sociopath, but there was no way I was getting away with dragging drugged men around, even in the French Quarter. It was a huge hole in the theory.
The other problem was the Los Angeles thing. The killer taking tattoos as trophies had definitely been killing people, so why change just to maiming them now? It made no sense. Worse, it seemed unlikely even a psychopathic female could get close enough to gang members to kill them and cut off their tattoos. Most gang members were mentally damaged. Those higher up in the hierarchies were mostly sociopaths and psychopaths.
Gangs worked like any other societal circle. They entered for whatever reason and then you rose in the ranks depending on your ability to fit in and comply. Killing people didn’t necessarily require you to be a sociopath or a psychopath, every day people did do it, but it wasn’t easy if you weren’t mentally different. Even in survival situations, the average person still suffered from guilt, remorse, and depression. The peer support and pressure to new recruits in gangs helped ease their guilt and remorse, until they eventually became sociopaths or psychopaths with Borderline Personality Disorder. At that point, they would no longer feel either of those emotions, which allowed them to rise to the top of the hierarchy.
Holes were a problem for my logical mind. I needed something to fill them in. With this case, there wasn’t anything. The person who killed in Los Angeles wasn’t doing it in New Orleans now. I had no idea what that person was doing. I didn’t even remember a case file from the database that resembled it. I made a mental note to look into it and then typed it into the notes function on my phone. Everyone looked at me as I did it.
“What?” I asked.
“You snorted,” Gabriel said.
“Sorry,” I shrugged, not remembering it. I wondered if Xavier’s experimental migraine treatments were causing something like blackouts.
“Do you have any thoughts?” Gabriel asked.
“Lots, but not many about this case. I do not know how she is doing it. She was not doing it in LA or if she was, it was not being reported. The LA tattoo keeper was killing victims. She is not because she has not worked up to that yet,” I told them. “When we have a dead body, we might learn something new. Her choice of murder weapon will be interesting.”
“We’d like to prevent finding dead bodies,” Gabriel reminded me.
“True, but a dead body does make it easier to catch a killer. Right now, she is sort of in Limbo Land for me. I cannot figure out if she is deranged or damaged, or just an average girl with a very serious grudge.” I put my phone down and looked at him. “I cannot think like her. In my mind, it is easier to kill them than take their tattoos. Living people flop and scream. The only reason not to kill them is to make a statement, but the statement is lost on me. I do not do causes.” This was true. I had once received a piece of mail telling me that Only I Could Save the Giant Panda From Extinction. I’d sent a check. If more was required, I was going to miss pandas, but they were going to go extinct. Like most sociopaths and psychopaths, there were few things on the planet that could hit my passion button. Learning and catching killers, that was it. Everything else was nothing more than a fleeting interest and heaven forbid I have to expend any energy on it. If one thought about it, sociopaths and psychopaths were incredibly dull people. We didn’t have hobbies, not really. Malachi had his X-Files fascination and catching serial killers, that was it for him. His real personality was like chalk, bland. Mine too for that matter. My only saving grace was a desire to learn everything I possibly could. I was still struggling with figuring out what the universe was expanding into and how people functioned as people, but the rest of it could be nicely figured out by reading the right books, watching the right documentaries, and good old fashion observation. Knowing a lot meant I could talk about a lot, which made me more interesting. Malachi talked about aliens and serial killers when he wasn’t trying to get in some girl’s thong. I didn’t even have that going for me. I didn’t understand sex either. I had tried it, once, and it hadn’t been all that interesting and had required a lot of energy. By the time we were done with foreplay, I was bored out of my brains and the night had ended with him taking a cold shower alone and me going to my apartment wondering what all the fuss was about. “Okay, so what if it is sexual?” I suddenly blurted.
“You rarely think killings are sexually motivated,” Lucas pointed out to me.
“That is because they rarely are. Just because a killer gets off on it does not mean it was motivated by sex, it just meant the killer enjoyed it. Nyleena trea
ts cheesecake like serial killers treat victims. However, maybe the taking of flesh is some sort of symbolic sexual thing.”
“Symbolic sexual thing?” Xavier smiled at me.
“Yeah, like,” I thought for a minute. I had no idea. “Well, I don’t know, like a foot fetish or something. She uses the flesh to masturbate or something.”
“Do you know anything about sex that didn’t come from a book?” Green asked me.
“Yes,” I answered. I considered pointing out that I owned an adult toy, but was worried they might ask me how often I used it. Since it was still in the packaging, I didn’t want to answer that question. I tried really hard not to outright lie. It was a bad habit for a sociopath to adopt. For a while, Nyleena had thought being asexual was a phase I’d grow out of. She was still somewhat shocked that I hadn’t. Honestly, most people found it stranger that I was asexual than that I was a sociopath. Our society was doomed. “Plus, sexually motivated would explain why I am completely in the dark about the end game to mutilating people. If it was just for giggles, there are easier ways to do it. Since she is not killing them, they are not exactly trophies. Also, she is settling at times for birthmarks and scars. There are plenty of tattooed men on this planet that she should not have to settle for the other. Meaning that it has more to do with the guy than with the physical deformation of their skin. Serial killers only get that picky when they are symbolically killing someone they hate and cannot kill, or when they have a sexual motivation. That is why most killers are motivated by killing, not sexual gratification. Getting off on it is a side effect of the endorphin rush that gets released by killing someone.”
“But not all serial killers have an orgasm when they kill,” Lucas pointed out.
“That is because some serial killers do not respond to the endorphin rush with a physical reaction,” I answered. I didn’t. There was no sexual thrill. The endorphins that flooded my veins did not flood my loins. Instead, it was a mental reaction. I felt like a god when I had to kill someone and the endorphins put me in a state of euphoria unlike any other on the planet. Euphoria was hard to achieve, especially as a sociopath. However, voicing that was like explaining what the universe was expanding in to. Normal people were able to experience euphoria when good things happened, I’d seen it on their faces at the birth of a child or grandchild or a promotion or a new house. Sociopaths and psychopaths did not get euphoric from such pedestrian events. Dying or almost dying could do it, which was probably why I enjoyed busting down doors when I knew the serial killer was on the other side armed to the teeth.