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

lock and key, awaiting trial for his part in the contract killing of his wife. A second man had been arrested in relation to this particular “dream-killer hammering” murder, and the second suspect had turned state’s evidence. Forensics pointed to an intruder, but given the problems between Spielman and his wife, and a recent insurance policy taken out on her life, the prosecution, armed with telephone records and a connection between the two men, believed Spielman had set it all up; that he’d paid the other to reproduce the eerie footsteps of the psycho-killer with hammer and nails, a monster who’d been in the news for a month and a half now in the city of Charleston, West Virginia, population 64,213. Add the scattered communities around Charleston and you got another 307,000 souls, half or more women, all of whom slept fitfully these nights as a result of the predator known only as The Dream Killer.
     
    Population break down for Charleston proper was 31,100 males, 33,113 females. The median resident age was 42.8 years. Median household income: 36,180. Median house value: $110,600. Racial breakdown in the city was: White non-Hispanic 80.1%, Black 15.1%, mixed race, 1.9%, American Indian 0.9%. Hispanic 0.8%. From all accounts, the capitol city of West Virginia looked like many others its size, and it likely had as many problems as any city in the country. The chamber of commerce listing found on Google displayed an idyllic hamlet nestled in the former valley of the Kanawha Indian tribe, but in truth the valley had been paved over and littered with every commercial sign and chain franchise imaginable.
     
    Charleston indeed sat nestled among the
     
    Appalachian Mountains, which remained resolutely wild and towering around the city, defiant and as green a place as any on the planet. The wide expanse of the Kanawha River snaked through the city, a tributary of the Ohio River. The Kanawah acted as a major artery for the coal industry. Daily shipments of coal plied the waterway, tugs pushing huge, blocks-long barges heaped to brimming with coal. Alongside the river, train cars carried tons of coal on the rails. All this within what some called the Chemical Valley, thanks to the number of chemical firms that’d staked out acreage along the river.
     
    Rae had done some homework. Charleston, the capitol of West Virginia, proved on the map some four, four-and-a half hours by car from FBI headquarters at Quantico, Virginia. A brief chopper ride over the river ways, if she could get the bean counters to loosen up. Not that she wanted to go to Charleston, but she predicted—as had Copernicus—that it would likely come down to a ground operation in this heated investigation, intensifying now as two victims had fallen prey in the past week.
     
    As she ate below a blue sky, Rae gave thought to the copycat guy. Perhaps the Jewish West Virginian, Malachi Spielman, had indeed taken advantage of the frenzy over the serial killer’s being in the midst of West Virginia’s Capitol city, and if so, Spielman deserved the chair, but West Virginia remained one of eleven states without the death penalty, so even if convicted Spielman was looking at life imprisonment. The same held true for the sick SOB who was the real hammer and nail wielder.
     
    The pressure to come to some understanding of the killer, and to end his reign of terror in and around Charleston proved near unbearable for those in the Behavioral Science Unit, as they’d exhausted all their charts and graphs and profiling techniques to no good end. One of their number had secretly confided to Rae that their profile of the killer might be the proverbial ‘Everyman’ and so rendered rather useless. Most of the details the profilers had come up with proved rather trite and clichéd.
     
    These were not simple killings, despite the simplicity in executing people in their sleep. Rae imagined a victim at her most vulnerable moment in her life—in REM sleep, deep slumber, as