Dreamcast 2, p.3
Dreamcast 2, page 3
An apt analogy. “But he doesn’t know me. I couldn’t have been the intended target.”
“No. In this case you were the innocent bystander. A bit of collateral damage. The killer obviously used the technique to stun the girls so he could do whatever he wanted with them. Were you not sensitive, it wouldn’t have affected you. It didn’t touch me.”
“Yes, that sounds about right.” I was on my feet again, taking quick turns up and down. “But you know what this means? He must have some paranormal abilities.” That was a horrendous thought. “Stronger than mine.” We both pondered the implications of that.
A killer with ESP? Well, why not? In spite of all my previous experience with it, I still didn’t know much about extrasensory perception, but if I could receive, then someone might be able to send. A pulse strong enough to disable a chosen target, at the very least to confuse and incapacitate it briefly. Like the sperm whale and the squid. Didn’t SWAT teams use stun grenades to disorient opponents? The larger question remaining was what other abilities did the murderer have? It was not an idle consideration—always obey the prime dictum: know your adversary.
“Would you like to draw me?” Amanda suddenly broke into my thoughts.
“What??” Of course, I wanted to. I had asked her repeatedly before but she had always declined. She was afraid of ending up as public property on a gallery wall, she said. I had drawn her from memory, or from quick glimpses, but couldn’t get her to pose formally for me. It occurred to me to ask why she was offering all of a sudden. To distract me from the hole I dug for myself? To transition me to a more normal state? You have to love such a woman: she is a real treasure.
I got my sketch book, set up in the living room, made her comfortable on the couch and started sketching. She sat there quietly in a loose-fitting summer dress, the material sometimes hiding, sometimes accentuating her contours. Two hours flew by as I enjoyed the luxury of uninterrupted access to her. Before I knew it I had a dozen drawings of her from different perspectives and degrees of refinement. I was especially pleased with one that I felt captured her expression successfully, but on reviewing the work afterwards, she preferred a more dynamic but rougher rendering.
“Why?” I asked.
“I suppose because it depicts me as a person with energy and impact... not so refined and inhibited by good manners and etiquette. I’ve always admired a person who feels free to speak her mind regardless of circumstances. In my profession I have to be overly conscious of my effect. Since I’m a doctor, people are over impressed by my title and status.” She made waving motions with her hands. “But sometimes I wish I could swear like a truck driver and not be taken so seriously all the time.”
“I could teach you to swear,” I said, teasing her.
“I know how to swear. I just choose not to,” she retorted somewhat haughtily.
“All right. Then say fuck.”
“No.”
“Because you can’t.”
“Because I won’t!”
I pressed, she refused. I ended up tickling her, then she was running away from me, and somehow we ended up in the bedroom, having a different sort of conversation.
Chapter 2
On Friday morning, I met Smythe at the County Medical. He looked tired and out of sorts. “Homicide is too small. Just Maclure and me. Sometimes we get a uniform assigned to us, but with town bursting with Mardi Gras, all our departments are scrambling to keep their heads above water. We can never enjoy the festivities. If we aren’t investigating murder, we have to serve as traffic cops and hand out parking tickets.”
“I thought that in the interest of promoting tourism, the town overlooked parking violations during Mardi Gras.”
“They do. It was just an expression of being saddled with trivial duties.” Smythe sounded irritated.
We did not see anyone until we arrived at the morgue, then it was the same man who was there the last time. He wanted to refuse, he tried to refuse, but Smythe bullied him into letting us in. He opened two doors, pulled out two metal trays covered with sheets, then with disapproval expressed by every body part, he left us alone.
Smythe drew back the sheets to let me have a look. It was always a shock to see cadavers laid out, stiff and inert, a strange hue to their skin, the expression slack, eyes sightlessly staring into eternity. Naked, they had no privacy, no more choices to make, the property of the state, at least until the coroner released them to their families.
“Have their relatives been notified?” I asked Smythe.
“She, yes,” he replied, pointing. “But the other’s out of state and there’s some difficulty locating her next of kin.”
“Do we know anything new?” I moved between the trays, comparing the bodies.
“We have their identities. Both were with friends, leapfrogging from one bar to the next when they got separated and were not seen again. They don’t seem connected.”
“That’s not much.”
“No. But if you look you can see that they’re nothing special. I mean, not beautiful or sexy. That one, Ruth, is actually quite dumpy. Hard to see how they could have attracted much attention.”
“Often opportunity leads to a crime and control is the main motive, not looks,” I said a little too pedantically—as if he didn’t know.
“Yes. Policing 101 at the Academy,” Smythe fired back caustically.
“Sorry. I was really reminding myself.”
I walked from one tray to the other, looking for something to focus on. I inspected the bodies more critically, trying to find motive there, but Smythe was right, there was little to arouse interest. But then without a personality the body was just limp flesh.
Then stiffening my resolve, I prepared myself, trying to find the mind of the one called Ruth. There was only a cold emptiness, like putting a hand in ice water. I shuddered. I touched her head trying to extract something. There was nothing beyond a vestige of surprise. I walked to the other girl, looked questioningly at Smythe, who merely said, “Carrie.”
I touched her too, but came up with the same result. “I don’t feel any pain or anxiety even. It’s likely that they were ambushed and incapacitated before they knew what hit them.” I attempted to find residual emotions and sorted through confused shadows, obscured as if by a heavy fog, nothing recognizable. I shook my head in disgust. Working with ESP requires confidence, and in this situation I had none. I stepped back and nodded at Smythe, who covered up the corpses, pushed the trays back in the holes and locked the doors. The metallic sounds rang hollow in the long hall.
“Any forensics?” I asked on the way out.
“Not much. Both bodies were completely drained of blood. Somewhere else.” He looked significantly at me in a rather peculiar way which prompted me to ask, “And... what else?”
“You know how we thought animals got to the bodies?” I nodded, coyotes. “Well it wasn’t animals.” He paused to let that sink in. “Both livers were missing, taken through rather crude cuts.”
“Organ harvest for transplants?” International agencies warned about illegal trafficking in body parts, but it was regarded as more of a Third World phenomenon—one didn’t expect it in the continental United States.
“The coroner ruled that out definitively. The extraction was too crude, without any surgical care. More like they were simply ripped out.”
“Has the ME offered an opinion?”
“Nothing beyond the cause and time of death, due to massive bleeding from a severed artery.”
“Any evidence of the perpetrator?”
“No. None.” Smythe spat on the sidewalk in disgust. “There were no clothes near the bodies. No transference from the murderer to the victims. Nothing.”
And I had nothing either. “What did the data base come up with?”
“Zero. No correlation with bloodletting and excised, missing livers.”
We climbed into the car and drove back to the police station. We walked into Homicide and found Maclure pounding the table with his fists. His face was flushed and worry lines framed his eyes.
“What’s up, Pete?” Smythe asked concerned.
“I just got off the phone with Ruth Nadral’s parents. They are devastated by their daughter’s murder. The mother was sobbing into the phone... The father wanted to know what we’re doing about it. What could I tell them? Nothing. There is no evidence, no suspect, no persons of interest, no leads.” He hit the table again—hard. “All we have are two bodies.” He looked despairingly at us.
Toma hurried in with a pitcher of ice water. She poured Maclure a glass and shushed him, her hand resting on his shoulder. There was a soft, sympathetic expression on her face, and by that look I knew that they would make it as a couple.
“I so wanted to give them something.”
When Maclure settled down I asked him for the files. He pushed two folders across to me. I flipped open the first and read the bio of Ruth Nadral. 26, graduate of Thorwald School of Business, working as a mid-level office manager for Suskin Medical Supplies. She was single, no current boyfriend, did volunteer work for the Salvation Army on the weekends. No trouble with the law. Had $1,328.12 in a checking account and about $3,380 in savings. Two credit cards and a Sears account. Lived in an apartment in the better part of town. Was a member of several book clubs and of a fitness center. She left behind a white toy poodle named Blossom.
On the night of her disappearance she had been with friends from the office as they bar-hopped along Brandywine, stopping in bistros along the way. A lot was happening that night; a dense crowd flowed both ways, trying to take in the Mardi Gras. At the Mystic Cat, she got separated from the rest and was never seen again. Her Ford Escape was found parked at the municipal parking lot north of where the friends had originally started their evening. There were more detailed statements from each of the group, but nothing to shed any light on her disappearance. By all accounts she was a quiet, somewhat shy person, security conscious on the whole. That night she had a few glasses of wine, no one was sure how many, but when last seen, she was still reasonably sober. Everyone affirmed that it would be unlikely that she would try to get picked up.
The second victim, Carrie Sanderson, a Public Utilities office worker from New York State, was also here with two other girls from her workplace. They had been staying at the Wyatt for a week, and the three of them were cruising the strip when Carrie disappeared. After canvassing the area, the uniformed police could not unearth any eyewitnesses who remembered noticing her. The three girls together were recalled: of course, how could a bevy of three blondes be overlooked?
From her coworkers’ descriptions, Carrie was more of a risk-taker than Ruth, more socially adept, more adventuresome. She was also more self-assured, sometimes turning confrontational. She too had a few drinks but was not drunk.
I reread the files, trying to get a sense of the women. I could not see any commonality between the victims, other than that both had become separated from their parties. The looks were different, personalities certainly so, suggesting more than ever that we were dealing with a crime of opportunity.
Maclure reported further, “I’ve been over every incident report filed by officers out on patrol over the past week. Just the usual stuff. Drunkenness, public mischief, a few pickpockets, aggressive prostitution, drug busts. No mention of women being accosted anywhere, except for two incidents of date rape and sexual interference of a minor. All of the perpetrators in those cases are accounted for at the times of the two murders. Aside from some money issues, customers stiffing an establishment, the bar, restaurant and hotel staff noted nothing unusual. A big, fat zero.” With disgust, Maclure threw a sheaf of papers onto the table.
“Where does that leave us?” I asked, personally feeling the full weight of responsibility for solving the case.
“I guess we just keep on digging,” Smythe said, shrugging his shoulders.
I regarded my partners with civilian eyes. The police tended to classify the general public into police and non-police. Into an us-and-them mentality. The them was further split into the law-abiding and the criminal. But since they dealt mostly with lawbreakers, the cops developed a rather low opinion of humanity and regarded almost everyone with professional suspicion. Early in their careers they were impressed by this rather negative view of the world and reacted with automatic bias. Experience, however, had taught them to hide behind protocol, and everything had to be done by the book, but half of the book wasn’t written. In the case of a post-mortem of an investigation, when one had to justify why one had or hadn’t done a needful thing, one covered one’s ass by writing a report at each step of the way. In fact every case was wallpapered with such ass-covering reports, often of dubious value and regarded with widespread skepticism both inside and outside the force. But one played the game with the cards one had been dealt.
I went home, ate lunch which I didn’t taste or remember, and as soon as I could, reverted to pacing out the kitchen, just as I had learned to work through my problems during my stint in jail. Up and down, I measured out the open space.
“Travis, stop pacing.” Amanda threw in my way.
“I can’t!” I snapped back irritated.
“You’re as nervous as a cat in a dog pound.” I had never heard that expression. I sat down, but my fingers immediately started drumming on the table.
“You’re... expecting another attack,” Amanda concluded, trying to maintain a neutral tone to calm me.
“Ridiculous...” But it was true, I realized, as soon as she said it. I had been tense throughout the day, my neck stiff with apprehension. Any moment it could come, throw me to the floor, and bring the knowledge that another victim had found an untimely end. Yes, I was nervous.
“Trav, you’re not afraid, are you?”
“No...” but I had to amend that, “Yes, I am... I think the guy is more powerful than me.”
“You have abilities—”
“Sure, passive abilities. I’m not able to use the paranormal as a weapon of attack.”
“Yet you did.” I did? “When you paralyzed Tex by unleashing all his fears at once.” True. “Then you communicated with Sarah and gained her help.” True again. “You are selling yourself short.”
I was on my feet once more, adding and subtracting.
“Trav,” she interrupted my obsessing. “Trav, I want you to hit me.”
“What?”
“Hit me as he hit you. Mentally. Use me for target practice.”
“Are you crazy? I couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I might hurt you, that’s why.”
“You can’t argue from both sides of your mouth. Claiming that you’re too weak and then saying you could hurt me. Either you have power or you’re harmless. Which is it? We have to find out.”
“I don’t know how,” I confessed.
“Think of it... as a javelin. Balance it, aim it and throw it. Like you described it to me, remember?”
I tried to form the thought of a javelin, aimed at her and cast it. She blinked, but that was all. I tried again with no better result. “See, weak as a bloody kitten.”
“Trav,” she motioned me to her. Puzzled, I leaned closer. She slapped me hard. My adrenaline spiked. “Now hit me!”
I was mad, my whole system revved into critical. I hit her with a nasty thought, “Fuck you!” Her head jerked back.
“Ouch! I felt that!” she reported in a jubilant tone. “You are a lot stronger than you think. Now, hit me again!”
“No!”
“Don’t be such a pussy!” (She never used language like that.)
Almost out of reflex, I hit her. Her head slammed back and she cried out. Both her hands flew to her face protectively.
“I’m sorry, honey—”
“Never mind that now. Hit me again!” I just shook my head.
“Hit me!” she yelled into my face. I just shook my head. She hauled back and punched me squarely on the nose. Instantly the pain radiated out into my face. Instinctively I lashed out, sending her chair back, spilling her to the floor.
“I really felt that,” she said triumphantly, getting up.
“I’m so s... sorry...” I stuttered, horrified.
“No. It’s excellent that you did.” She was feeling her face trying to localize the point of impact. “You know, it’s vital that YOU know what weapons you have. How to use them. How to be instantly ready.”
She was right, of course. She had proven that I was not as harmless as I had thought. I felt bad, but couldn’t get over my admiration that she had the courage to take the pain just to show me that.
“You know, I don’t know how far away he was when he used the technique on the girls. But it had to be an expanding sphere, like a compression wave from an explosion, weakening as it moved away from the center. He must be enormously powerful...”
“Or you’re enormously sensitive. Have you thought of that?” No I hadn’t. She was again re-framing my worries into something more constructive. So was he all powerful or was I inordinately sensitive? It would be good to know which, one way or another.
“Now hit me again!” I shook my head, enough was enough. “With less force, but right away to practice speed. Hit me when I snap my fingers.” She snapped and I threw my mental bolt. We drilled. After a dozen times, the latency decreased as I reacted faster and faster to her signals. By the twentieth attempt she could barely squeeze a blink between her snap and my bolt.
“Now that’s much better,” she praised. “I can maybe stop worrying about you.” I was beginning to feel like a gunslinger in the old West waiting for high noon. Ready? Shoot!
But in an hour I was exhausted and nursing a headache. Amanda wrapped some crushed ice in a towel and placed it on my throbbing temples. I leaned back into the cushions of the living room sofa, trying to relax. I was, however, greatly encouraged. With a new awareness of my offensive capabilities I felt less vulnerable. I still wasn’t any closer to explaining the process, but who cared, as long as I could use it.
