A tangy scent filled my nose; sweet tomatoes, minty cilantro, a hint of lemon, and the bite of onion. In other words, someone had fresh Pico de Gallo in my room. This could mean only one thing, someone had Mexican food in my room. My eyelids didn’t want to come apart. My head felt foggy. My body felt tired.
However, there was hot Mexican food in my room. More smells were starting to filter through the tang of the Pico; chicken, lightly seasoned, grilled corn, green peppers, rice, sour cream, beef, and flour tortillas, to name a few. I pried my eyelids open. A box sat inches from my face, the lid open. It contained all sorts of goodies; a grilled chicken taco still wrapped in foil sat in the lid, Mexican rice, a cheese enchilada smothered in enchilada sauce, and a quesadilla stuffed with mushrooms and onions were in the bottom part. Also in the bottom, on top of everything was sour cream, Pico, lettuce and cheese dip. I felt like crap, but at least I had something good to wake up to.
I shrugged off the covers and forced myself to sit up. Malachi came into view. He picked up the box and moved it to the table.
“How do you feel?”
“You’re a jerk,” I answered. “But at least you brought me Mexican.”
“It’s Tex-Mex, technically, from a Chevy’s across the street. I figured if it couldn’t wake you up, nothing could.”
“How long did I sleep?” I stood up, my legs feeling wobbly.
“Twenty-seven hours, thirty-five minutes, and approximately, forty-seven seconds, give or take a few seconds,” he answered. “The good news is that Patterson hasn’t killed anyone in that twenty-seven hours. He’s called you six times, but he hangs up every time I answer.”
“That’s because he knows you’re a jerk too.” I bit into the food, savoring the flavors and smells. Malachi stared at me, his food untouched. He kept fiddling with a paperclip. I knew something was on his mind, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to discuss it. I wanted to eat and then, I wanted to track down Patterson Clachan.
“Are we going to talk about the elephant in the room?”
“What elephant?” I asked, annoyed that I was only half way through my meal.
“August is my uncle and your cousin.”
“So?” I looked at him blankly. “You and I are not related. You would have to be related to Gertrude or me to Tennyson for there to be a familial connection between the two of us. It’s a fluke. Think about all the people in Columbia that we have turned out to be related to over the years. Remember that girl in junior high that you dated for a week before finding out she was your second cousin on your father’s side, twice removed or some such nonsense? Our families have deep roots in a town of 100,000 people. It really is not that surprising that we share a relative.”
“It doesn’t bother you that Tennyson fathered August?”
“Nope, Gertrude and Tennyson would have made a perfect couple. They should have married. They could have spit out dozens of miniature serial killers, all of them sadistic cannibals. Then maybe they all would have been arrested long before now. Why does it bother you?”
“I don’t know,” Malachi answered, putting the paperclip down, but not picking up his fork. I stared at my friend of more than twenty years and found concern in his face.
“You are not Tennyson, Malachi. You share one trait with the man, a genetic mutation, nothing more. Do not get me wrong, you can be an amazing jerk, but you are not your grandfather. Every time you need to be reminded, look at me. You’ve never physically tortured me, attempted to rape me, or just beat me up because you could and you’ve had twenty plus years to do it. We’ll ignore the psychological mind games you play just to watch people squirm, I realize that everyone needs a hobby and that happens to be yours. I do not take it personally when you do it to me.” I thought for a moment, “and when you get too out of control, there’s always a Taser handy.”
Malachi smiled at me; a genuine smile. I had, in fact, Tasered Malachi more times than either of us cared to remember. Most of them had not been because he was physically out of control, it was almost always a mental thing with him. Like all good psychopaths, he could be charming, devious, and manipulative. I hated the “charming” Malachi more than I hated the “manipulative” Malachi, but it was the manipulative Malachi that sometimes needed to be Tasered. It was a reminder that real people had feelings and pressing their buttons could cause them emotional pain and turmoil. When you didn’t feel emotion, and Malachi felt less than I did, physical pain was the only thing that penetrated the darkness.
“We have a reprieve from Patterson, but I believe it is a short reprieve. How do we use it to our advantage?” Malachi asked after a few minutes.
“Beats me, you know more about him than I do. I get that I’m a weakness, but I do not believe it is the same type of weakness as yours. If it was you, I would set a trap at the hospital, because you would come see me. However, Patterson has never attempted to visit me in the hospital. Did you get the crime scene photos for me? Did you figure out the Freon leak?”
“Yes and yes,” Malachi pulled out a folder from under the table. “The Freon leak was coming from the basement. It would appear that our pedophile was a little paranoid. All the windows were taped. Not just the bottom sill, but the entire window frame. And I know you’re going to give me what for about it, but there’s another interesting aspect. Our victim claimed to see a UFO a few nights ago. He reported it to the police.”
“Did the paper run the story?” I asked, not yet opening the folder. I could eat and look at crime scene photos, I’d even adjusted to eating around dead bodies. However, when I had a choice, I didn’t mix the two.
“They did. It was the headliner for four days. It appears several people in the area spotted a UFO and then the cattle mutilations turned up, then Patterson turned up.”
“Well, I do not believe Patterson is connected to the UFO sightings or the cattle mutilations. That would require him to be an alien and my DNA is on file. If part of the DNA was extraterrestrial, I think someone would have said something. However, that could be how Patterson found the victim.”
“You think he’s scanning newspapers for headlines of UFO sightings?”
“No, but I think he’s well-read and I believe he keeps up on current events. Also, he probably does internet searches for the names on his hit list. The real question then becomes, why did he suspect our victim was a pedophile?” I asked.
Despite having vocalized the question, I knew the answer. Either Patterson had a personal connection to the pedophile or he had one with a victim. Even in a world where philanthropists were just as likely to be serial killers as crack addicts, people never really suspected their neighbor of being capable of such atrocities. When they did get suspicious, they still didn’t voice it for fear of being wrong. You didn’t tell people you thought your pastor was a serial killer unless he was captured, then you said things like “I always thought there was something off about him” or “he’s such a nice guy, I can’t believe he could be responsible.” Either were acceptable answers that eliminated any responsibility on the person with the suspicion. I’d heard both statements so often, they irritated me. If I had a quarter for every time I’d heard that, I’d have been a billionaire.
Finding out whether Patterson had known the teacher or a victim was the key. With this in mind, I opened the folder with the crime scene photos. I had to give kudos to Patterson, all his crime scenes were bloody, gory, and gruesome. The ceiling was the only thing without spatters of blood. The restraint system on the recliner was very similar to the restraints that had been on the bed of James Okafor. The last picture was of the basement where several window air conditioner units were sitting on the floor. Fluid had pooled around a few of them. I held up the picture.
“Perhaps he hallucinated the UFO and Freon poisoning can lead to paranoia.” I suggested.
“The fact that there’s still liquid on the floor rules that out. If it had been punctured several days earlier, it would have evaporated. It seems that the victim was in the process of working on them the day before and then Patterson came into his life sometime during the night.”
I shrugged and went back to the pictures. Crime scene photos can only give up so much information. There was nothing frenzied about the attack, the lack of blood on the ceiling proved that. Castrating a person is a bloody affair. In most cases, there would be arterial spray. Arterial spray is high velocity spurting that can go ten or fifteen feet into the air or across a room. With the victim in a reclining position, it seemed almost impossible for the spray not to hit the ceiling, unless Patterson had done something to ensure it didn’t.
The missing arterial spray bothered me. We knew the victim was alive when he was castrated, so how had Patterson not gotten spray on the ceiling? And why had he bothered? The answer dawned on me slowly, as I stared at the photo of the ceiling. The spray would have landed on him.
It was one thing to get spray from the neck or the thigh on yourself. It was messy, but it was just blood. The same could not be said if the spray came from the penis. If I was Patterson, I wouldn’t want that on me.