Deja Blue by Robert W Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

where she knew that Dr. Miranda Waldron and her team of assembled geniuses from every field of inquiry known to man had been working the cold case file, “perhaps you and your think-tank can do something with what little we got from the reading, but I’ve got nothing more to send, and that last bit with the floating woman, I really, really don’t believe it has anything to do with the case.”
     
    Miranda replied, “Understood, Rae. You go, get some R&R, come back refreshed.” Such catch phrases and sentiments seemed to be the order of the day. Rae wondered if all confidence in her had been lost, never to be regained.
     
    Rae believed that while Miranda was the epitome of sincerity at all times, that reading between her lines might be in order. Perhaps she’d come back too soon after Phoenix, too soon since Gene Kiley’s death in the line of duty. Perhaps it was affecting her ability to do her job as before. And maybe this unspoken truth was dead on. She thanked Ashley Phillips out of force of habit more than anything else, and then Rae walked away, going for the shower and her street clothes. A part of her wondered if things would ever be the same again; a part of her wondered if she should not tender her resignation. It might make a lot of people happy, and first in line for the happy dance would be Rae’s daughter, Nia.
     
    She was stopped for a moment at the exit from the chamber when Miranda Waldron said over the intercom, “Are you absolutely sure, Rae, that the floating woman has nothing to do with the Bradley case?”
     
“If I know anything today, it’s that, Miranda. Bank on it.”
     
“If you’re sure.”
     
“I said I’m sure, damn it!” she exploded, pushing through the exit door, feeling Ashley Phillips’s cold stare following her out.
     

 
    SEVEN
     
     
     
    Rae had taken her brown bag lunch out to the tables beneath the trees outside to clear her head. She had a right to exhibit frustration. Once again, a case of multiple murder had been brought to the PSI Unit, step-sister of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Division only after it’d gone cold. Once again, the powers that be had managed to make Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa feel like the proverbial veterinarian no one wanted to take their sick animal to until it was hopelessly ill. Once they did bring the case to her— in the form of a series of dead victims—so much injury had been done that said case came in as weak and sad as a kitten born without legs. In short, a case that could not survive under anyone’s care. And as in all things psychic—thought, meditations, conscience and unconscious images, symbols and metaphor—it all went the way of smoke unless you had the gift of nailing fog to a wall.
     
    A thing that CRAWL literally did as Rae’s mind images were in fact thrown up on a plasma screen the size of a billboard for the experts to study.
     
    Ever the optimist, Rae Hiyakawa had the ability, she knew, and she had the tools—the psychic nail and hammer to do the job, but creating sense of chaos, no matter if one had the right tools, was no simple task, and certainly not always successful. Not always.
     
    If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the mornin’…I’d hammer in the evenin’ buzzed the popular tune through her brain.
     
    What the devil did the floating woman over the busy street have to do with her last case, the cold case for which they had not enough to work with? Nothing. What it had to do with the case just brought to her—she suspected everything.
     
    The cold-blooded killer had used a hammer on his victims. Bashing in their brains while they slept. Had stood over them and killed each in her sleep. Eight women now according to a call that’d come only this morning.
     
    A ninth woman had died in similar fashion but there’d been distinct differences. The most notable being she did not live alone. Her husband had been in the house, asleep in another room, and this man, Malachi Spielman, was now under