Rowan Gant - Perfect Trust Part 36

We travel in darkness, then pa.s.s beneath another streetlamp. My roaming eye catches a glimpse of an envelope.

Darkness falls.

Again, for a fleeting instant, the glow of a streetlamp.

Mister something.

Darkness.

I count out the thrum of the tires in my head, keeping my eye focused on the spot where the envelope lay.

Three, two, one.

The light floods the interior for a split second.

Seventy-five...

Darkness, three, two, one...

Thirty-four...

Darkness, three, two, one...

No, thirty-four is the stamp.

Darkness, three, two, one...Seventy-five again...

Darkness, three, two, one...

Thirty-four again. Was it the stamp again? I don't know...

Two, one...

Mister something again.

Concentrate!

Darkness, three, two, one...

Seventy-five thirty-four something...

I can feel the car slowing...

Darkness, three, two, one...

The car quickly arcs into a turn, and then bounces over a curb just as the streetlamp's glow fills the cabin.

The envelope shifts.

I shift.

I catch a final glimpse as a fast food bag falls in front of it.

Mister and Ash something...

Mister Ash?

Mister Ash what?

The darkness remains and I can feel that the car is moving very slowly now.

We stop.

His voice reaches my ears again. "It's okay honey. You're home now."

CHAPTER 23.

Sudden calmness enveloped me, followed immediately by the screaming pain of a midnight leg cramp-only this leg cramp encompa.s.sed my entire body. I could feel myself double forward, then without warning propelling backward with explosive force.

And then, the cramp-like pain melted away, leaving behind the sickening, dull ache that usually accompanies a bad hangover. In the span of a heartbeat, I felt myself slowly sinking into a murky darkness that was deepening with each pa.s.sing second.

For some unknown reason, I had been summarily expelled from Heather Burke's nightmare. Or it had reached its end. Or maybe I had been unceremoniously, butpurposefully extracted? I wasn't sure. Whatever the case, I was grateful for the relief.

The psychic hangover was dissipating and as I continued to sink, I began to feel warm and comfortable. Had it not been for the sharp noise that suddenly stabbed its way through my eardrums, I think I could have simply gone to sleep.

I was once again swimming in an inky void, the atmosphere thick around me like water. I wanted to do nothing more than relax and allow the calmness of the dark to overtake me, but the echo in my ears told me that such comfort wasn't to be.

Stark awareness seeped in to replace the drowsy feeling and poked at my grey matter with an annoying finger. It started by reminding me that I was once again Rowan Linden Gant, and that I really needed to wake up.

The sharp noise shot into my left ear once again and rattled around inside my skull without remorse. It sounded for all the world like someone with a speech impediment saying 'yo-yo'. It took a moment for me to realize that the words were actually "Yo, Row."

A dim light in the distance seemed to beckon me and I aimed myself toward it.

Again, darkness began bleeding away, leaving in its wake first indigo, then blue, then charcoal grey. In a psychedelic explosion, color bloomed before me and settled slowly into the proper hues of reality. As if I didn't have enough to deal with, the ethereal hangover returned, and followed me into this plane of existence. Something told me that aspirin wouldn't help.

Heather Burke was seated across from me, quietly sobbing, her face buried deeply into her hands. Her shoulders heaved and she sucked in a breath before advancing the level of her grief another octave up the scale.

I knew exactly how she felt.

Utter violation permeated me. I felt disgusted, sickened, and even in a way, filthy.

I felt as though something had been taken from me. And worst of all, I still felt fear.

"You okay, Row?" Ben's voice came from behind as he rested a large hand on my shoulder.

"Yeah," I choked past a rising lump in my throat. "I'm okay, but we'd better get someone for Ms. Burke here to talk to. We've... She's got a lot to deal with."

"I'm not one hundred percent positive," I told Ben and Charlee, "but I think we might be looking for someone with the last name Ash, or Ash-something. It's also possible that his street number is seventy-five thirty-four."

We were all back in my friend's van, me riding shotgun this time. We were on our way to police headquarters after having finally reached someone to look after Heather Burke. I felt terrible just leaving her after dredging up the chemically repressed memories, but we had no choice. I'd obtained information that we needed to go over and decipher. I don't know why, but something told me that time was a commodity that we simply did not have in abundance.Still, before we left I gave her my home number and told her to feel free to call me if she wanted to talk about anything at all. I wasn't exactly qualified to help her in a clinical sense, but for all intents and purposes we had shared the exact same experience. Sometimes that kind of understanding can be worth far more than the highest priced sheepskin.

"How'd you come up with that?" Detective McLaughlin asked.

"When he was taking her home he had her on the back seat of his car," I explained. "At some point when he hit the brakes suddenly, she rolled off into the floorboards. He's a bit of a slob so she ended up on top of a lot of trash, and it just happened that one of the things that was staring her in the face was an envelope."

"And she read the address from it?"

"Actually, she more or less tried to. How conscious the effort was, I can't be sure. It seemed like it was, but she was still under the influence of the drugs. She was at a severe disadvantage. At any rate it ended up as a latent memory that I was able to pick up. Unfortunately due to the darkness and shifting from the motion of the vehicle, she only made out a small part of it."

"Sheesh, Storm was right," she exclaimed. "You are spooky."

"You get used to him after a while, Chuck," Ben offered, then turned his attention to me. "Do you know for a fact that it was his name and address she was looking at?"

"No, not for a fact," I admitted.

"So the envelope coulda just been some trash that wasn't even his mail?"

"I suppose, but it's worth looking into, right?"

"Yeah, we'll check it out, but you gotta figure there's gonna be a h.e.l.l of a lotta Ash's and Ash-whatever's in the phone book."

"Shouldn't the address help pin it down?" I submitted.

"Maybe," he answered, "if it really is the address. If it was on an envelope it could be a piece of a zip code or somethin'."

"Plus, we don't know if he actually lives in Saint Louis," Charlee added. "We know he gets around, so he could live outside of the metro area in another county, or even in Illinois."

"I thought I actually had something," I said in a dejected tone.

"You might," she returned. "But we can't chase it as if it were our only clue."

"Ya'know, eggs, basket, all that s.h.i.t," Ben expressed. "So, what else did'ya come up with?"

"He's dressing them up and taking photographs of them."

"You already said that much before the mumbo-jumbo," Ben returned.

"I said he was taking pictures," I reminded him. "What I'm telling you now is thathe is not just taking pictures, he's dressing them up in order to take the pictures."

"Like how?" McLaughlin asked.

"Well, I only remember a couple of the outfits, but one was lingerie. A garter belt and stockings is what I saw for certain. The other was a party dress or something of that sort."

"So this guy has a kink for prettying up his victims," Ben offered rhetorically.

"It's more than that." I shook my head. "He does something with their hair. I'm not sure what, but from the sensation I'm thinking he may put a wig on them."

"So the a.s.shole really is playing 'dolls' then," he harrumphed.

"In a way, yes," I acknowledged. "He even put something in her eyes, and I'm betting they were tinted contact lenses. He's doing all this with a specific purpose in mind..."

"What? Is he trying to make the 'perfect woman'?" Charlee asked in a disgusted tone.

"No, it really feels like more than that. Helen would be more qualified to judge on this than I would, but he kept flip-flopping. Like a bipolar disorder stuck in overdrive. One minute it would be like he was worshipping her. He'd say things like 'She's almost perfect', then he would suddenly shift into an abusive mode and scream at her, saying things like 'You're not her'."

"Any idea who 'her' is?" Ben asked.

"No clue." I shook my head again. "I can't even tell you what she is supposed to look like. I never actually saw how he had Burke made up. Just bits and pieces of the outfits, although he mentioned something about makeup."

"You mentioned somethin' about that earlier, right Chuck?"

"Yeah. So far all the victims have had smeared makeup on their faces that they didn't put on," she answered, then offered thoughtfully, "You know, all of the victims have pretty much resembled one another. More than just their size and hair. I mean, not dead ringers or anything, but close enough that at a distance they could be mistaken for one another..."

"Especially if he did a makeover on 'em?" Ben added the question more as a comment.

"Exactly," I agreed. "They must fit the profile of the woman he is trying to re-create. Maybe it's a former girlfriend who dumped him, or even a wife who pa.s.sed away."

"Yeah," Ben ran down his own list, "or a woman who works in his office, or at the deli down the street, or the star of his favorite TV show. Or a model out of a magazine, his sister, his mother..."

"Maybe the first few, but this is definitely s.e.xual in nature. I'd rule out siblings or matriarchal figures.""What rock you been hidin' under?" he retorted as he hooked the van through a light that was somewhere between yellow and red. "Ever hear of Oedipus? This guy's a whack job. This might be his way of doin' sis or mom, or both for that matter."

"I'd rather not think about that, Ben," I said.

"Yeah, well it comes with the territory. If it turns out to be a lead then we hafta look at the big picture, not just what we wanna see. Anyway, this is all fine and wonderful but it doesn't get us really any closer to who this a.s.shole is."

"Sorry," I told him. "I'm just telling you what I saw."

"I'm not complainin'. I'm just tellin' it like it is. So, I don't suppose you saw the a.s.shole's face."

"No, just shadows."

"So that's a dead end," Charlee chimed in from the back.

"Is there anything else?" Ben pressed.

I concentrated for a moment but drew a blank. I was still fighting off some severe emotional effects from the entire episode. On top of that, the nagging feeling that I was being watched had returned, and it was starting to occupy my mind to the exclusion of all else.

"Maybe... I don't know... It kept fading in and out, so I'm not sure I'm remembering everything."

"You mean like you were talkin' earlier about feelin' the effects of the roofies?"