by Hadena James
flipping on lights. “It’s almost noon. We’re going to make sure you have lunch, a real lunch, then bring in some case files for you to look through.”
“What?” I let myself sound as enraged as I felt. Nearly yelling the question at him.
“If you hadn’t taken DHE last night, we’d let you come into the office, but you did. We can’t risk you having a rebound migraine with DHE in your system. I am staying with you. Gabriel and Michael are already at the Marshals’ office and Michael has set up a video session so we can hear what they are doing.”
“This is bullshit,” I flopped back into the pillows.
“No, Ace, this was your decision. Agent Gentry says you tried to send her away last night. Luckily, she wouldn’t budge. We didn’t get back until well after one in the morning, you would have been here alone for over four hours with that poison coursing through your veins. Michael was zonked out. He wouldn’t have been any good had you reacted poorly to the medicine. So we are taking all precautions. We need you at 100% and not worrying about rebound migraines or the fact that the drug is still in your system. You could still have a bad reaction to it,” Xavier pulled away from me.
“Then what are we doing today?” I frowned at him.
“We are going through associates,” Xavier handed me a stack of print outs. “This is a list of anyone that has been connected to more than three of the victims.”
“Great,” I grumbled.
“You could be doing nothing,” Lucas told me.
“That’s true, bring it on,” I tried to feign some enthusiasm.
“So what I did was build a different geographical profile. Since we didn’t learn much from the original profile, I had the idea to track their debit or credit card usage. I mapped out each purchase for the six months prior to their deaths,” Michael said through the computer.
I frowned at the computer screen. I wasn’t sure when it had been installed and connected. The migraine had caused a loss of time for me. Everything had been set up and linked while I had slept in the bed not seven feet from it.
“And that does what for us?” I asked.
“Think about it,” Michael looked confused. “Humans are creatures of habit. We stop at the same gas stations, get coffee from the same coffee shops, etc. Everything we do is part of a routine. Even the most varied individuals still create patterns. If I were to analyze your debit and credit card usages...”
“Yeah, I get it,” I said interrupting him to stop him from pointing out how boring my life really was.
“So, we’ll add the victims’ purchases one person at a time,” Michael said. On a second computer, a map appeared. Green dots began to appear. Then a second set of green dots. Where they crossed, the dots turned darker. Slowly, the city of Anchorage began to turn green.
“We can’t check all those employees,” I said before we had gotten very far.
“That’s the beauty of it, we don’t have to,” Gabriel came into view. He pointed at a dark green dot that was almost black, “This is a coffee shop. Fifteen of our victims visited this coffee shop. That makes it statistically significant. Whereas this dot is much lighter, only three of our victims visited this fast food restaurant in the six months prior to their deaths. Therefore, it is not statistically significant.”
“Still seems like a lot of people,” I pointed out.
“It is, but we can start to whittle down employees pretty quickly,” Michael pushed some buttons on his side. Something popped up in place of the map. It had a list of names on it.
“These are all the employees of the coffee shop,” Gabriel said. “We can automatically remove all the female employees.”
All but five of the names disappeared. Lucas printed out several sheets. Xavier went to work on yet another computer. I was beginning to wonder how many laptops we had between the five of us. I knew we all carried one, but I was beginning to think that the others might carry two or in Michael’s case, more.
Xavier hit the print button and a second, unseen printer came to life. I glared at them. For the first time, I realized the amount of furniture in my room had swelled. While I’d been sleeping, another table had been dragged in and my bed had been moved, probably with me in it.
“Should I be around all these electromagnetic fields?” I asked.
“Are you EMF sensitive?” Xavier grabbed something from the printer I couldn’t see.
“I don’t know,” I told him.
“I think it’s fine,” he handed me a stack of papers. “Read these and tell me what you think.”
The papers turned out to be background reports on each of the five names from the coffee shop. The first person proved why I wasn’t on the internet much. Xavier or more likely, Michael, had scoured the internet and brought up crap that should have been private. He was an avid hunter and an anarchist according to his online profile. He couldn’t seem to hold down a job, switching from one menial task to another every couple of months. He spent far too much time gaming. I had information about his avatars from World of Warcraft and Halo. They were violent. I pushed it aside.
“Not him?” Lucas asked.
“Not organized enough,” I said. “Besides, according to his World of Warcraft stats, he spends too much time online to take the time to kill anyone that isn’t in the video game. Do I want to know how we got his WoW information?”
“Probably not,” Michael answered.
“Ok,” I moved to the next file.
He was an assistant manager. Married with one child, age three. No online gaming, but he had several online profiles, including a dating profile. I raised my eyebrow at that, but moved on through the file. I wasn’t the marriage police and they could have an alternate lifestyle. His career was steady but average. Nothing seemed to stick out about him. I added it to a different pile, close to Lucas. Lucas looked at it.
“That would be the ‘maybe’ pile,” I told him. Lucas picked it up and thumbed through the paperwork as I moved onto the next file.
By the time dinner arrived, my eyes hurt. We had four piles. One was my ‘maybe our serial killer’ pile , one was my ‘should be investigated for other crimes’ pile, one was ‘ok’ and the final one was ‘might be a different serial killer’ pile. Lucas was currently thumbing through the final pile.
I had sorted through an unknown number of lives. I had also remembered why I wasn’t a people person. People were just unfathomable to me. I couldn’t believe the stuff we had dug up on the males we had taken the time to investigate. It wasn’t hard to imagine everyone having secrets, which I got, I had my own, but putting them out to be discovered by someone looking was a whole different story.
“You get the vegetarian meal tonight,” Xavier handed me a container. I opened it and discovered pasta with white sauce, mushrooms, black olives and onions. At least they had an understanding of what I liked.
There were seventeen people in our “might be our serial killer” pile. The others were much thicker. I stared at the files as I ate my pasta.
“What’s wrong?” Xavier asked.
“There’s a 50/50 chance that someone in that stack is going to go out tonight and skin a human being alive while we sleep. And tomorrow, we’re going to be back in the Pine-Sol saturated autopsy room with Dr. Ericson wondering what we should have done to speed up the process,” I told him.
“Sometimes, your affinity for humanity is almost encouraging,” Xavier smiled at me.
“I’m not an alien,” I defended myself.
“You might as well be. You are as different from most people as ET was from Drew Barrymore,” Xavier bit into a large meatball.
“Well,” I shrugged. “I just think all life should be considered sacred. Serial killers break that rule, which pisses me off.”
“Uh huh,” Lucas looked up at me. “There’s only seventeen. They’ll be knocking on doors tonight. Most of these people will spend the night in an interview room dealing with
Gabriel or myself.”
“Michael is going to have a live feed for us to watch the interviews,” Xavier told me.
“I can’t even go to the police station?” I asked.
“Nope,” Xavier chewed noisily. “You screwed the pooch when you decided to inject DHE a mere two hours after injecting sumatriptan. I’m not real happy with Dr. Ericson for giving you a prescription for the stuff without consulting me. But I’ll deal with him at another time.”
“He has a medical license,” I pointed out.
“So do I,” Xavier said defensively.
“Yes, but it only applies to us. It is a special case medical license. You couldn’t write a prescription for Nyleena and not get in trouble,” I reminded him.
The government seemed to have this theory that it was fine for Xavier to medicate us. It saved on doctor visits for simple things as well as allowing him to prescribe and monitor any medication we might need while working. They were not convinced that he wouldn’t become an “Angel of Death” if he could prescribe to anyone else.
“You just like to needle me,” he smiled. Xavier was pretty damaged too. We got along great.
“Agent Gentry asked me what your story was,” I suddenly remembered.
“Did you tell her?” Xavier asked.
“Nope, I figure it isn’t any of her business,” I answered.
“Thanks,” Xavier seemed to sigh in relief.
“I did tell her Michael’s and she sort of knew Lucas’,” I added.
“Profilers suck,” Lucas said