Mutilated Dreams

by Hadena James

  “A sexually motivated female mutilator,” Xavier said. “Damn, the world is going to hell. That’s our third female this year.”

  “And when she gets a taste for more than just the removal of tattoos, it is going to get messy, again. She might be in this for the skin, but taking skin is messy. I believe when she starts killing, it will be bloody,” I told him.

  “Why can’t women go back to poisoning people and men go back to using hatchets?” Xavier asked.

  “Women’s liberation,” I said. This got me a few stifled giggles. Even Fiona found it funny. She grew a little more likeable all the time.

  Seventeen

  My boots were covered with plastic booties that were stronger than cellophane but had similar flexibility. Peppermint balm had been rubbed under my nose and I could still smell all the blood. I didn’t point out that I was right or gloat. I was twisted, but I wasn’t that twisted.

  We were back in the abandoned Witch’s House. The owners had arrived, as intended, and we had crossed the crime scene tape expecting to find the same thing that had been there yesterday. Therefore, when the smell had hit us, it had been a surprise. Very few words can accurately describe the way death smells. Once you’ve smelled it, you never forget it, but until then, it is only marginally understandable. A fresh body does not smell like road kill. It smells better and worse. Road kill smells like decay, the insects and bacteria have begun to break down the tissues of the dead animal. It has bloated and exploded or just exploded, depending on what hit it, and the smell from the intestines and stomach are actually not as strong as the smell of the tissues breaking down.

  A fresh body smells like shit, literally. When a person dies, the first thing that happens is the relaxation of all muscles. This includes all the sphincters in the body. Bile is allowed to rise into the throat as the sphincter at the top of the stomach relaxes. The intestines release their contents through the anus. Urine is expelled as the bladder relaxes. These bodily functions, normally contained to rooms with ventilation, are the first thing to assault the olfactory system.

  If there is a gaping wound or multiple wounds, blood is the second. Blood smells a little different to everyone. Some people have trouble smelling it unless there is a ton of it. Xavier describes it as smelling a little spicy and a little metallic. I couldn’t smell the spiciness he spoke of, I smelled pennies. Large quantities of fresh blood smells like iron. Once it begins to dry and the minerals in the blood begin to oxidize, it smells more like copper and nickel than iron. If there is enough drying blood in a room, I can smell other minerals too, but copper and nickel are the prominent ones.

  Our body hadn’t just bled; he had lost nearly all his blood. There was arterial spray on the ceiling and all four walls. It had soaked into the carpet, which was why we had on plastic booties over our shoes. The carpet squelched when I stepped on it.

  He appeared to be in his twenties, but I was notoriously bad at guessing ages. He had two huge wounds, one on each leg. It was from these severed femoral arteries that the floor had been doused in blood. A final wound had sprayed the ceiling and walls. His head was lying about three feet from his body. For arterial spray to come from each of these wounds would have required someone to be very good with a blade because each would have had to have been made within seconds of each other. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been enough blood to spray from more than one of them. Death had happened in less than a minute.

  Now, I had another question. She had cleanly cut off his head in less than a minute. My knife skills were above average and I wasn’t sure I could have done it. I stared at the stump that used to be his neck and looked for hack marks. I found none. In the history of the world, cleanly severing a head with a single cut was rare. A person was more likely to win the lottery. In the modern world, only one such serial killer existed and he was a martial arts expert, master swordsman, and had handcrafted the sword he used to do it. The chances that Brent Timmons had escaped from the Fortress were nil. The chances that a second such expert existed in the world were mildly disconcerting. It could have been lucky. Sometimes luck trumped skill.

  “Wow,” Xavier finally said. He too was staring at the stump. “That is nearly impossible. There’s no way it was a small blade. We’re talking about katana precision.”

  “There are actually several swords capable of it. Beheading involves more than just the blade, although that is a big part of it. A claymore can do it simply because of the brute force that comes with wielding a claymore. The chances of a woman wandering New Orleans with a claymore and beheading people is about a million to one. A scimitar of all makes have the ability. Most Asian based swords could do it. Then there is an executioner’s sword and that works wonders if you know how to work it. Timmons used an executioner’s sword for some of his killings and a claymore for others. I have held a claymore and it is a damn fine sword, but it is cumbersome for someone of my stature, it would be sloppy.” I considered other options. “There is a rare three bladed knife from India that can do it using spring action. Essentially, you stab the victim in the throat, hit a button and one blade springs from each side of the main blade. If inserted correctly, it would decapitate someone.” What bothered me most wasn’t that the victim was missing his head, but the amount of rage needed for such a thing. In bygone days, it had happened on battlefields, but those were more likely to be lucky shots than great swordsmanship. Even executioners weren’t always great at decapitation, which was the reason most chose an axe over a sword. The axe created enough momentum to do it without the executioner being as strong as an ox. Also, beheadings didn’t normally have a person sitting up, it was easier when a person was kneeling and had resistance either on the front or back of their body.

  A rage-fueled female serial killer was bad. My brain brought up about a dozen cases in modern days, meaning after 1990. There was maybe a half dozen from before then. Women just didn’t go on rampages like men did. The thought might have been sexist, but it was true. Women just didn’t express rage in the same way men did. The most rage full female I had encountered had unleashed an antibiotic resistant strain of Bubonic Plague in a big city in Texas. That was what women did when they became enraged. They got even and that was more likely to be mass murder than blood soaked beheadings.

  I steadied myself as I squatted down to look at the victim’s legs. His ankles were bound to the chair using silk braided cord. I was sure his wrists were bound with the same cord. Silk was one of the few materials that actually became more durable when wet. The cords wouldn’t have abraded the flesh like nylon or hemp. He could have struggled for a long time against the material and only bruised his skin instead of the customary rope burns we normally dealt with. It was another indicator that it was a woman. Men didn’t think of things like using silk cords except in bondage and usually at their partner’s insistence.

  The question was no longer when she killed, but why she had killed. Something had set her off about this particular guy and she had cut off his tattoo and then successfully exsanguinated him and cut off his head. He had hit a nerve. Somehow, he had touched the core of why she was doing this to begin with and she had made him pay for it.

  “I retract my earlier statement. This is not sexual sadism.” I stood up carefully so that I didn’t touch the body. “Also, I do not care how much she liked it, she is not a sociopath or psychopath, she’s just really pissed off.”

  “Only a sociopath or psychopath could do this,” Xavier disagreed. “She cut his fucking head off with a single blow and he was sitting in a chair already bleeding to death when she did it.”

  “Great, my experts disagree.” Gabriel looked at Lucas.

  “There’s something seriously wrong with her head,” Lucas offered. “Ace’s right, she’s very pissed off at this guy, but I have to go with Xavier. There’s no way the average woman did this. There isn’t a single sign of remorse here and he was dying when she took off his head.” I looked at the big guy. Normally, I would agree that only a socio
path or psychopath could inflict this kind of damage, but I could only think of a few things to trigger this much rage. One of them had nothing to do with being a sociopath or a psychopath.

  I glared at him. He was a guy. Most guys thought all women reacted the same way to traumatic stress. We were expected to be fragile flowers. Once exposed to violence, we lost our bloom and wilted away in a darkened hole waiting for it to happen again. However, that image was outdated. Putting women in combat had proven that it was possible for a woman with post-traumatic stress disorder to become just as violent as a man could. We weren’t all volunteer victims, after all, even among those that were not crazy. I looked at Fiona. There was no way she would run and hide, just waiting for some imaginary phantom to attack again. We called these women survivors. Men seemed to forget they existed. An argument would have been futile at the moment though. I hadn’t been running at a hundred percent in a while. My judgments were in need of second-guessing at times. Only time would heal that rift.

  Eighteen

  We went back to the Marshals office no closer to catching our killer than we had been when we woke up. There was more evidence to be processed though and a body that needed to be examined. I declined to watch the autopsy. Normally, I sat on a countertop while Xavier cut into it and offered different opinions. Now was not normal though. My credit had been damaged a few times too many lately, most notably falling for the ruse of a female psychopath who had been manipulated to some degree by none other than Patterson Clachan. Needless to say, I was still missing part of that puzzle. I wasn’t sure how my grandfather had gotten involved in the life of Alejandro Gui’s sister. I also couldn’t figure out why, it had been going on prior to my taking a job with the SCTU. For his part, Patterson was keeping his mouth shut on his motives. My brother wasn’t any good there either. He couldn’t wring the information out of our grandfather any more than I could. I knew because I’d talked him into trying. Some part of me wondered if he had done it just because the head of the SCTU, the unit responsible for his case file, was unstable. Psychopaths did like to play mind games. It would make sense in some ways. Malachi Blake had been running the VCU for a long while and was essentially off-limits to Patterson, because of my connection to Malachi.

  My life had become incredibly complicated lately. I couldn’t help but notice that the complications had only arisen after Patterson Clachan, also known as The Butcher, had turned himself into police. There was a moment when I missed Michael. His death had left a void that I didn’t realize he had filled. Xavier and Lucas were doctors. They looked at everything through the lens of their given professions. Michael had just listened when it was needed and hadn’t offered physical or psychological advice. He’d existed in a world full of damaged people and had been one of the few who understood that sometimes not saying anything was exactly what was needed. I’d never used Fiona as a sounding board. I didn’t know if she could fulfill that position or not. However, I’d become entrenched in a world that ensured I could not use Nyleena for it. She could not be prejudiced by my working on the case. One of the things I had discovered fairly quickly was that the position had changed our relationship. Talking about me brought breakthroughs in cases, because it forced me to say things out loud that I rarely even admitted I thought. Michael had never flinched when I had said things like “I would kill a person this way, it would be easier, so there has to be some reason why Killer X is killing exactly like this.”

  That was where the medical degrees fell apart. Lucas and Xavier understood sociopaths and psychopaths from a medical standpoint. They could give me the physical reasons for such and such or the mental probabilities of something, but neither actually thought like a killer. They thought like a normal person thinking like a killer.

  I did not. I was not entirely sure I had ever been completely aware of it until now. Every victim I had ever looked at, whether they were strung up from a tree missing their skin or mauled by a jaguar, I had considered how I would kill them. That consideration had not been how would I do it if I was a killer, but how I would do it if I were their killer. I had killed and I had enjoyed it. No one around me could say the same thing or have the same dark thoughts that I had.

  Much like the man in the chair today. He had triggered her rage, most likely saying something to her that either mimicked her own attack, or perhaps something about the scars she was forced to wear. She had silenced him, not just by killing him, but also by removing his ability to speak. Taking his tongue would have been just as effective, but she had wanted to silence so many people that removing his head were the only logical way to do it. That I understood. I thought about all the comments I got about my scars. Most of the time, I could ignore them. Every once in a while, someone would hit one that was still raw though, and my rage would flow like blood. She may not have realized it, but she had symbolically silenced hundreds of people who had made hushed remarks about her.

  Her scars weakened her. Her physical appearance was an embarrassment to her, at the very least. She had lost more than just a few drops of blood; she had lost a piece of herself. She was filling the void by taking trophies of men that resembled her attacker. Now, she was silencing all of those voices by killing. The void would still be there, a hole that could never be filled, but we all tried to fix ourselves when we thought we were broken.

  If she were a sociopath or psychopath, it would have all been for fun. She wasn’t. The room had contained a few more smells in it, too faint for most people to notice. Her perfume, dabbed a little heavy handed and smelling strongly of cloves and roses. Makeup that had been smeared on the body and Xavier would no doubt find in the autopsy had been mascara and eyeliner, not things that came off easily. She had touched his body, probably with tear-streaked cheeks, to leave it. Meaning, she had regretted killing him. Then there had been the smell of urine in the corner of the room, hiding under all the blood and other bodily leaks. He shouldn’t have wet his pants in the corner. It seemed more logical for it to be hers, after the rage had passed, when she had seen the damage, her bladder had let go. It had soaked the floor beneath her. Her knees had probably given out. That’s when she would have started crying.

  I had wanted to point all of these things out at the crime scene. Prove myself superior, even in my own damaged state. Yet, I hadn’t. Not because I didn’t want to find the killer, but because I needed to regain the trust of my team and showing them up wasn’t the best way to do it. It just made me a know-it-all. It was almost unfathomable to think that a sociopath could attain personal growth, but working for the SCTU had caused that. I had grown as a person and a sociopath. One day, I might not separate the two, but for now, they were still two different entities, both living inside of me. People did not just turn on and off their emotions whenever it suited them. I did, which still meant I wasn’t a complete person. However, I was making strides to get there.

  Of course, I never would. I knew that there were limitations to how much I could grow as a person. I was still never going to be able to feel empathy. My emotions would still be felt at my discretion and most of them would never run deep. The sociopath would always stop me from completely becoming a whole person, but I wasn’t sure that was entirely a bad thing either. I had admitted and accepted the monster that lived inside me ages ago. Now, I had to learn to accept the person and the person was the confusing part. It was the part that was mad at my mother and resented Patterson for passing along his damaged genome to my father, my brother, and me.

  The person side of me recognized our killer as not being a sociopath or psychopath. There was nothing in her crimes except anger to indicate that she might be one. It was what was familiar to me and to all of us that led us to believe she was. One can only be around sociopathic and psychopathic killers so much before that’s all you see, all the time.

  The last time we had seen a non-sociopathic or psychopathic killer had been in Nevada. The artist had been neither. I still didn’t know why he did it. His dying hadn’t helped. It was a myster
y for the ages and very unsatisfying, but time had given me a new perspective on him and his death. At the time, I had believed him just to be another sociopath. He had been neither and I hadn’t understood him at all.

  Victims were more understandable than the average person was. A victim who kills does so to regain power and gain a piece of themselves back. They can’t, but it doesn’t stop them from trying. I had been a victim once. I had been filled with rage when I had killed my first time. I had also been a sociopath from birth, so I wasn’t a great example, but I did know what being a victim felt like, sort of. After killing Callow at the tender age of eight, I had never been a victim again. I’ had become a volunteer. In some ways, I had responded to being victimized in the exact same way that our killer had, by becoming angry. Unlike our killer, I would have turned out that way without Callow.

  “You’ve been in here for a while.” Fiona locked the door to the ladies’ bathroom where I had been staring into a mirror, trying to imagine myself as a victim. It was hard to do. It had been twenty years, maybe more since I had been a victim and I wasn’t capable of empathy, which made it more difficult. “Do you want to talk?”