I sat on the very edge of my couch. My legs and butt had healed, but my back was still tender. Sitting all the way back caused more pain than I cared to deal with today.
Spread out on the coffee table were all the evidence pictures they had taken from Nick Baldwin’s house and the bomb shelter. The irony of our bomber hiding out in a bomb shelter had made me laugh. The fact that he had survived, surprised me. It surprised Nyleena even more.
The trial was due to start in a few weeks. There had been no other fair queen killings since VCU and SCTU had captured the bomber. A few enterprising prosecutors were trying to pin all the killings on the mass murderer.
There was a possibility that I was going to have to testify. I had seen him at the fair during the bombing. However, I was sure there was enough evidence from his house that I would be unnecessary.
“I have cheeseburgers!” Xavier announced, walking into my house without knocking.
I’d been out of the hospital for a little over a week. I had not had a fast food cheeseburger. My doctor had let me have a few sodas, but he had nixed the cheeseburgers. It hadn’t stopped Xavier from trying every day.
“When do Malachi and Gabriel get back?”
“Tomorrow,” Xavier pulled out a cheeseburger with enough grease that the wrapper was becoming transparent.
Trevor came in the door as Xavier handed me a different burger. I unwrapped it and found it was exactly what I had ordered. It even had cheese sauce on top of sliced cheese. I took a bite. Trevor sat down at the small dining room table. Lucas hobbled in behind him. He wasn’t walking so great. I hadn’t asked, but I got the impression his graft donor area wasn’t healing as well as mine had. Or maybe he just moved slowly because he felt old. I knew I felt old, very old. I moved a little slower than normal too. Walking actually sucked. Every muscle in the legs were connected to the back. The skin graft was sore, but moving was still worse.
“Hey big guy,” I said as Lucas sat down next to me. Like me, he didn’t lean back.
“Hey,” he smiled at me. “How are you feeling?”
“Old,” I told him. “When I stand up, I feel like I’m three thousand years old. When I walk, I feel like I’m even older.”
“Me too. I think I’m developing a stoop from this.”
“You are both healing as expected,” Xavier shoved a bite of the extra greasy cheeseburger into his mouth. “Except Ace, she’s healing a little faster.”
“I didn’t get my head roasted,” I pointed out.
“For one meal, I would like to not talk about death, injuries, blood or gore,” Trevor said, picking at a salad.
“Good luck,” Xavier grinned at him. I put away the pictures, haphazardly piling them up and sticking them under a folder.
“Thank you,” Trevor moved into the living room with the rest of us. Normally, I would have thrown a fit about eating in the living room. That’s what dining rooms were for. However, since sitting in a dining room chair was pure torture, I was learning to make an exception while two of us were still recovering.
“What are we going to talk about if we aren’t comparing battle scars or talking about cases?” I asked.
“Well, it’s September,” Trevor said. “There’s football, the end of summer, the coming of fall, the new neighbors.”
It was September. I hadn’t seen a single football game. I missed football. Unfortunately, it was a Wednesday so there wasn’t a football game tonight. There was tomorrow night though. Nyleena was planning on bringing junk food over and hanging out with me. I had decided to go into the weekend with unabashed enthusiasm, ditching my restrictive diet for a more lax one that allowed for junk food and would probably cause me to spend Monday in bed with a migraine. However, I was good with that.
“What’s our record this year?” I asked Trevor. He kept up with the Chiefs like I did.
“Two and one for regular season,” Trevor answered. “Four and zero in the preseason. Our loss was to Denver, of course.”
“We’ll get them this year, at least one game,” I told him. “Then we can beat them in the playoffs.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Xavier chewed and talked. It was a habit I had gotten used to with Xavier. He was always talking with his mouth full. Before our death experience, I might have gotten onto him about it. Now that he’d died and been resurrected, it bothered me a lot less. It was amazing how easy one’s perspective could change.
“It’s good to have a goal,” I quipped.
“Do you have one?” Trevor asked me.
“I think so. The specialist I’m seeing thinks I’ll be able to return to work in late October or early November.” I gave a sideways glance to Lucas. He would not be able to return until after the New Year.
“I think I need your blood,” Lucas said. “Maybe I’d be further along in the healing process.”
“I thought we agreed on no injury talk,” Xavier said.
“Trevor wanted it, but then he brought it up. Agreement terminated,” I said. This got a laugh out of everyone.
“Good, what about our sniper?” Xavier asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “He’s disappeared temporarily and I don’t know why.”
“Waiting,” Lucas said.
“For what?” Trevor asked.
“The next fair season,” Lucas answered. “His obsessive need was to kill fair queens, he deviated during the Quincy bombing, but I think he’ll go back to it now.”
“We don’t do unresolved cases,” I pointed out.
“It isn’t unresolved,” Lucas countered. “It’s just in limbo for a few months while we all get our feet back under us. Half the SCTU is down until at least October. Gabriel and Xavier are in the best shape and frankly, Xavier’s faking it. He’s still bothered by the new injuries.”
“Really?” I looked at Xavier. Xavier gave Lucas a dirty look. He lifted his shirt. A large red gash was visible on his chest. It streaked a jagged line that started about an inch under his nipple and continued around his ribs. “What’s that?”
“Shrapnel,” Xavier said. “It wasn’t bleeding externally at the scene because the metal rod was still inside me when I got to the hospital. It broke all my ribs on that side and punctured my spleen. However, I didn’t want you to worry about it while you were in the hospital.”
“I’ve been out for a week,” I protested.
“Hey, you have injuries you didn’t tell us about,” Xavier said.
I bit my lip. It was only a minor wound. However, he was right, I hadn’t told them about the metal rod in my leg that nearly shattered my femur and missed the femoral artery by less than an inch.
“Yep, exactly,” Lucas smirked. “We were all trying to hide what happened to spare the others. Only Gabriel got a full catalogue of injuries and he got that from the hospital.”
We fell silent after this. Each of us eating, thinking silent thoughts about things better left unsaid. My thoughts turned to our serial killer. He’d gotten lucky three times. Nick had been in jail on DUI, but he’d been planning to bomb the Shelby County Fair.
It wasn’t coincidence. It couldn’t be. Somehow our serial killer had known which fairs were going to be bombed. Yet, they hadn’t worked as a team. The photos held no evidence of a second person being involved with Nick.
If they hadn’t been working together though, how had the serial killer known? My hands automatically took the photos from under the file folder. There had been a computer rendering of the Quincy fairgrounds.
Surely, Michael had checked the computer for spyware or some other sort of thing. My fingers found the picture of the laptop. It had been destroyed. Not just wiped, but actually broken to pieces. The hard drive had been melted. So, maybe Michael hadn’t checked it for spyware. That raised the question of whether it was our bomber or our sniper that had destroyed the computer.
It was an effective way to cover your tracks. No computer, no evidence. Michael had told me that even wiping a computer didn’t remove all the data. Some bits were always recoverable and Michael had the skills for it.
“What happened to the computer?” I asked.
“It blew itself up,” Xavier answered. “Literally. When Michael attempted to boot it, there was a small explosion. Michael jumped backwards just in time to miss getting hit by a larger explosion. Although, he did lose his eye brows and eyelashes and the front part of his hair. It will all grow back.
“I hate fire,” I said. “And bombs,” I added quickly. If I had a phobia it was of burning to death. Not dying in a fire, but actually burning to death. I had seen it happen once when I was a teenager. A man engulfed in a gas station fire. He’d screamed for eternity, before finally collapsing to his knees. It was all surreal and slow. My fear of burning to death had officially started at that moment. I couldn’t think of a more painful or dreadful way to die.
The serial killer had deviated on the last one. Shooting down helicopters was a long way from putting holes in fair queens. It didn’t make sense. Serial killers deviated only when they were devolving. I wasn’t entirely sure I understood the term as Lucas used it, but I knew it was the moment that serial killers began to fall apart. When they reached that stage, they became spree killers. This one hadn’t.
Death and incarceration were the two things that stopped serial killers. On rare occasions they went dormant for a prolonged period of time for whatever reason. But those really were the rare occasions and when they went dormant, their cases went cold. We’d never had a case go cold.
My own vanity aside, cold cases were bad news. The return of the serial killer was never good. It was hard to connect them to the original case unless they did something so unique, it couldn’t be duplicated by anyone else. Or they were caught and confessed.
Their vanity meant that a confession was usually available. Sometimes they even claimed kills that weren’t their own. This was more likely when the killer went dormant, because inquiring minds always wanted to know what the killer had been doing for the past x amount of years. Living life with a family and a few kids and working a day job just didn’t seem to be enough.
We had a very limited window to catch this serial or he’d go dormant until only the gods knew when.