by Hadena James
I did not sit down. My gaze looked at the shattered and shocked remnants of the SCTU and VCU and could not find the willpower to sit down. I closed my eyes, trying to fight the rage that swelled beneath the calm. It fought back, gaining momentum from the tears that had been shed in recent months. Three people were just gone and Malachi was still recovering. We were losing the battle because we were losing people faster than we could gain them. The most elite federal officers in the country were being eliminated and we couldn’t seem to do a damn thing about it.
My hands shook. I left the conference room, refusing to look at anyone. The door shuddered in the frame as it slammed behind me. Marshals moved out of the way, as I moved down the hall. My brain grabbed at threads of thought, trying to rein in some sanity. The sunshine was warm against my face as I exited the building. The only thing that saved this door from a fate like its brother was the pneumatic hinge at the top.
I entered the alleyway and ducked further into the back, moving quickly, determined. The alley opened up on a parking lot. The first vehicle was the shitty van that had picked us up on the first day we had arrived. It felt like years since we had come to New Orleans. My body ached with the need for release. I walked past it and several others to the back of the lot. The building that butted up to the lot on the other side was a warehouse. I punched the wall. It did nothing to calm my rage. I punched it again. Blood ran from my knuckles and still the rage kept building. It didn’t want my blood, refused to be satiated by it. It wanted the blood of others, but I had no one to bleed. I leaned against the wall, letting the cold brick jab my forehead with its uneven surface. Still the rage beat away inside me, screaming to be sated, demanding a sacrifice before it would scurry back to hide in the darkened calm that was my real personality.
“Fight it,” Green said quietly behind me. His voice was soothing, soft, and too close. “If you lose control today, you will not be able to take any of it back and then you will be of no use to Malachi or Lucas. You have to fight it.”
I spun around, drawing my gun without even realizing it. Green’s eyes widened just a hair. His mouth formed an O. I tossed the gun at his feet, afraid to handle it. I did the same with all my other weapons. When I was disarmed, I turned back to the brick wall, willing it to come to life and swallow me.
“No one does what you do, Aislinn Cain. No one. Not even Malachi can manage your control. You have got to harness that uniqueness and use it.” His voice was still soft and soothing. “Push the rage back down into the darkness. Store it for later.”
I slammed my palms into the building, dying to feel some kind of pain. I felt nothing except bricks. My hands should have been screaming. They should have been too tender to take such abuse. I slammed them against the building again. This was why Malachi had shot himself in the foot. To force himself to feel something else. Pain was a great substitution for rage. My palms hit the brick again, hard. Blood streaked the side of the building. It had begun to drip slowly down my forehead.
“Aislinn…”
“Shut the fuck up, Caleb.” I pressed harder, the sharp edges tearing at my skin. “Shut up and fucking hit me with my Taser.”
“I can’t…”
“Do it now, or so help me, I’m going to turn around and tear you apart.” My own blood was now feeding the rage more. I steeled myself for more argument. My jaw clenched hard, snapping my teeth together with an audible thunderclap of a click. Then there was a twinge. The prongs of the Taser entered my back. The electricity surged through me, forcing my teeth together harder. My knees weakened. A false tooth cracked within the dentures. The plate cracked. My brain screamed at me to push down the rage. My knees buckled. My arms twitched. I crumbled into a heap upon the ground and the electricity continued to flow, forcing my muscles to twitch and jerk. Then the calm came upon me. Everything still twitched, jerked, and trembled, but the rage was gone. I waited for the pain, but there was only a mild sting in my hands and the electricity was causing no pain.
My heart skipped a beat. My brain screamed for the electricity to stop. My heart skipped another beat, then another. My breath caught on the inhale. Whatever my brain was trying to tell my body died before it hit my central nervous system.
It stopped. My brain stopped trying to communicate through the electrical surge that contorted my body. The electricity stopped. My breath left my lungs and took in another. They exhaled. I concentrated only on that. My heart rhythm became regular again. The prongs in my back should have hurt. They had no doubt burned my skin, but it didn’t. The only pain was the mild sting in my hands. I continued to breathe. My eyes suddenly focused on the sky above me.
Thick black clouds hung low overhead. There was no sign of lightning. No claps of thunder. Yet the air smelled of rain. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I spit out the broken denture plate that annoyed my tongue and hampered my breathing. The pieces rattled to the ground. It was the only movement I dare make for fear of the rage returning. I was still in the world of nothingness and I knew it. The calm kept me from being angry about the Tasering. It kept me from feeling much of the pain I should have been feeling. It blocked out the world that beat against me with unrelenting eagerness to break me down.
My brain had always admitted that I liked killing. It had never admitted that it didn’t necessarily need to kill just for survival. The calm now let that thought enter my brain. My brain attempted to reject it and couldn’t. The monster I had faced in the mirror had wanted to tear out Caleb Green’s throat, because it could. My controls had not worked. My predatory instincts had been stronger this time. If he had not been willing to Taser me, I might have done exactly what I had wanted to do. Thankfully, he had, and we would never know how close I had actually come to killing him. I liked Caleb, when non-raging me had shown back up, it would not have been happy about my choice of victims.
“Need a hand up?” Caleb asked. I rolled my eyes backwards and then forced my head to tilt back as well, so I could look at him.
“No, I’m good here.” I laid there and stared at him. Yeah, it would be a shame to kill Caleb.
“If it makes you feel any better, I’ve had to use some pretty serious force to bring Malachi back from the edge.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“Oh, well, Malachi once had to shoot me to stop from killing a guy. We wrote it up as an accident.”
“No one else would have hesitated. The moment I tossed my weapons at their feet, they would have tasered my ass.”
“Malachi speaks very highly of your control and ability to be talked down from that ledge.” Caleb looked away from me, probably tired of seeing my words as I spoke. “I figured if he could do it, I could do it.”
“Malachi has never been able to do it. Nyleena, Nyleena can do it. My mother has the power. That’s about it.” I considered getting up and decided I wasn’t ready yet. “Sometimes Xavier can because even in my worst state, I think of him as fragile. No one else in the SCTU can.” Michael could, but Michael was gone. Another of his super powers lost to the SCTU. “However, I do not do it very often.”
“It’s been a rough year,” Caleb sighed and sat down on the concrete. “One psychopath to a sociopath, Malachi and I have both had some trouble lately. Me more than him, since he’s pretty much bedridden at the moment. It isn’t just you.”
”Aside from the bombing, what has been going on?”
“We’d lost Michael and Greg because of that fucking sniper that Patterson killed. Then Malachi and you had to track down Patterson, which was sort of fucked. We were all kind of glad that he killed James Okafor. Plus, the stuff with Malachi’s personal life. Your grandfathers might be totally different types of assholes, but they’re both still screwed up assholes. The biggest difference is that his is dead and yours is still fucking up people’s lives. Plus, your brain tumor coming so soon after we lost Michael and Greg, and that messed up deal in Detroit with the multiple serial killers and gang wars. Now, I’ve found o
ut that my little sister is using Krokodil. I’d never even heard of the shit until we were in Detroit. How the hell did she find out about it? Our own screwed up serial killer chases coming one right after the other. For every one we arrest or kill, it’s like two spring up to take their place. Alejandro just delivered the coup de grace with his fucking bomb.”
“I do not believe I have ever heard you swear that much.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I swear more when I am pissed off too. I just did not think about all the shit that you guys have been dealing with too. We need a better solution. This divided agency stuff is a disaster. We should disband the VCU and make more SCTU groups. Move you guys to a new SCT unit. We all need to rebuild our ranks. Find more experts and specialists to work on these cases. We are spread too thin and have giant fucking targets on our backs.”
“I agree,” Gabriel’s voice suddenly joined us. “I’ve put in the request to do exactly that. I did it after the bombing. The problem is finding candidates for this fucked up job. How badly did you injure yourself?”
“I do not know. I think it is mostly superficial. It was not enough to stop it.”
“I saw.” Gabriel moved closer, so I could see him. “I think you and I need to discuss what I expect out of you. I think that will help your situation.”
Twenty-three
Gabriel and I sat outside on the concrete, our backs against the brick building. He lit a cigarette and handed it to me as Xavier checked me over. He tutted a few times, but let it be. Nothing seemed broken or dislocated, just cut. Those cuts had already scabbed over. One or two might leave a new souvenir on my hand. Once he was finished, he moved away, standing sentry with Fiona and Caleb.
“I should have done this a long time ago,” he started. Smoke wafted from his lips as he spoke. “My expectations are that you are going to be you. I don’t give a shit if John Doe, who likes chopping up women in his spare time, files a complaint against you because you bashed his head into a wall, repeatedly. I don’t care if you occasionally decide that the only way for you to win a fight is to slice open someone’s abdomen in front of news crews. I can handle all of that. I expect you to be a know it all. I expect you to disagree from time to time with the other experts on this team. I expect that when we are about to enter the lair of a serial killer, you go all creepy and calm and lead the charge. I have contingency plans in place for moments when you derail and the rage overtakes you and turns you into a goddamn monster that cannot be let loose on the public for fear of hurting innocent people. I have them because I expect that once in a while, the rage that burns under that calm will overcome it and turn you from functional sociopath to dysfunctional psychopath. I can deal with all that and never bat an eyelash. The politics are for me to worry about. That’s my job. What I cannot have from you is self-doubt. I can’t have you forcing down what makes you, you, because you think you’re a danger to yourself and others. If we need to kill Patterson to get you back on track, I’ll make some calls. If we need to kill Alejandro to do it, consider it done.”
“You would condone murder?”
“To make sure you remember that you are a sociopath first and a person second? In a heartbeat. You are only damaging yourself by trying to prove that you aren’t Patterson. Everyone around you sees the difference. Everyone around you sees the control you can maintain. But lately, Ace, you’ve become a wreck. Your control has slipped. The more you fight it, the worse it becomes. Since it isn’t another brain tumor, it has to be a physical manifestation of your mental battle. The more you fight being a sociopath, the more dangerous you become. I saw you look at Caleb. You were considering killing him. That’s why you gave him your weapons. You are turning on us as well as yourself, and I can’t have that either. Under normal circumstances, you would not have needed for him to Taser you to regain control. Now, I understand you’re different from Caleb or Malachi and that you might in fact be more dangerous than either of them. But part of that danger comes from your ability to control your bloodlust. When you lose that control, you become just like them. It weakens you, mentally and physically to lose that control. No more pep talks. No more ego stroking. No more hand holding. I need you to be the sociopath that you were before you started trying to prove you aren’t Patterson. The next time you think you are like Patterson, I want you to compare your victim counts. Not just the numbers, but also the people behind the numbers. I want you to drop the mask and stare at the real you in a mirror. You are terrifying and we need you to be terrifying. Instead of thinking of yourself as a serial killer, I want you to stare into that face and see what we all see. Serial killers have a boogeyman and her name is Aislinn Cain.”
“I thought you said no more pep talks.”
“It isn’t a pep talk. It’s a fact, and one that you seem to have forgotten. The biggest, baddest, meanest motherfuckers on the planet are afraid of you. They write you fan mail and start clubs to discuss how much bigger and badder you are than them. When they aren’t scared of you, it’s because they’re too stupid to understand exactly what you can do. So stop. You aren’t Patterson. You aren’t a serial killer. You are what they have nightmares about. You aren’t a big, bad wolf. You’re the person that hunts the big, bad wolves because you can. And you should not be ashamed of that.”
“It feels like a pep talk,” I pointed out.
“I know. I can’t seem to figure out how to tell you to pull your head out of your ass and be the sociopath that you’ve always been without it sounding like a pep talk.”
“That was pretty effective.”
“You just had to be tasered. You’ll have to excuse me for not wanting to be blunt.”
“You are excused,” I answered and took a drag off the cigarette that had been burning between my fingers. “At least you had guards while you did it. So, what is our new theory on Valerie McGregor’s attacker and the person carving people up for their tattoos?”
“In her original report, the attacker was a well to do male in his mid to late twenties.”
“How did she know he was well off?”
“He had associates with him. She seemed to think they were getting a paycheck for it and she believes one of them reported her being in the warehouse. Police agree, but the attacker and caller were never identified.”
“Why do they agree?” I asked.
“Because no one else would have been out there and the caller refused to say how he knew. They thought it was a prank, but sent an officer just in case.”
“Great,” I dragged the syllables out. We were going to have to dig through Valerie’s life and see if we could find a stalker. I still wasn’t sure how we found serial killers, a stalker wasn’t going to be any easier. “How do we find a stalker?”
“Same way we find a serial killer,” Gabriel told me.
“I admit I’m not even sure how we do that.”
“Well, if they don’t come to you first, we sift through crime scenes and the lives of the victims and anything else that might point in a good direction.”
“What do I usually do while you guys search for a serial killer?” I asked.
“Sit there looking bored and offering snide remarks and disturbing opinions from time to time.”
“Are you entirely sure I participate in this part?” I still wasn’t entirely sure what that meant and I couldn’t remember ever doing it.
“Yes, you participate.” Gabriel stood up, dropped his cigarette butt on the ground, and squished it out. He held a hand out to me. I took it and let him help me to my feet. “It’s going to rain.”
“Yep.” I inhaled deeply and let the smell of rain cleanse my olfactory palate. Rain is actually the absence of everyday smells. Out on the plains or in the desert, you can’t smell rain. Smelling it is limited to areas of population. It got stronger if there was pollution. Otherwise, the only smell with rain was a burnt air smell that accompanied lightning. Long ago, I had realized if I could smell the rain, it was already raining somewhere nearby. We all
stomped across the parking lot and back into the Marshals building.
Few people were willing to make eye contact with me. I carried a cloud of doom and gloom with me everywhere I went. It was stronger now, despite the rage being suppressed. I didn’t take it personal. It was hard not to agree. Death and destruction did occasionally follow me, like a gremlin hoping for a taste of something bloody. Other times, I was the one who called them and invited them to the party.
The chair in the conference room was no more or less comfortable than the day before, but I couldn’t seem to get comfortable. I had been handed several folders that contained every suspect the LA Police had talked to during the investigation the last time Valerie McGregor had been attacked. I was checking to see if they had moved in the last five years to New Orleans. I understood why I couldn’t remember doing investigative work, it was monotonous. The names and faces were liable to remain committed to memory for eternity if I put too much thought into it.
This was an area, which provoked arguments. I wasn’t entirely sure that memories didn’t have a capacity. If I filled mine up with useless names and faces, where would I store the important ones? This concept irritated Xavier, who believed the memory of a person wasn’t like the memory of a computer and therefore could not get filled to capacity. We agreed to disagree, like with water.
By the time I got through all eighty-two people, my eyes burned. They were dry from staring at the computer screen. One of my lower functioning motor skills allowed for my body to forget that it needed to blink. My knuckles rubbed at them, spreading around as much moisture as could be found. The burning lessened and I consciously blinked several times for good measure. Not a single one of the eighty-two people who had been suspects had moved to New Orleans. None had even moved to Louisiana. A few had moved to Texas, but that wasn’t all that special or significant. People moved in and out of large cities all the time. It seemed odder that none had moved to New Orleans or Baton Rouge than that a few had moved to Dallas and Houston.