Elysium Dreams

normal noises that I associate with motels. Then a small, faint noise. Since the rooms next to me were empty, I wasn’t expecting anyone to be snoring and was surprised to hear a gentle snoring sound coming from Lucas’ room.

  I was at an impasse. I couldn’t check the bathroom and the bedroom with the adjacent door. I could wait for Lucas and hope that whatever was in my bathroom came out peacefully and that Sleeping Beauty remained sleeping. Or I could try to sneak back out the front door and call for more backup.

  Footsteps made the decision for me. They were fainter than the snoring. They stopped at my door and I rapped once on the table next to me. The footsteps didn’t move. There was a soft clicking noise and my door opened.

  Light spilled in around the huge dark figure. It obscured his features and made the short cut hair appear to glow. He did something with his hands. I pointed at the bathroom then at his bedroom door. He turned his head to the side, listening.

  He heard the noise, the snoring from his room. He stepped inside, closing the door quietly behind him. The latch catching was terrifyingly loud. We both waited, holding our breath.

  Nothing changed. The shadow continued to sway. The snoring continued, unbroken.

  I moved next to the bedroom door and peeked inside. There lay Sleeping Beauty, curled up in Xavier’s bed. I wondered if she’d had her tetanus shots. The dark brown curls spilled out over the top of the blanket and cascaded down the pillow. I sighed.

  Lucas gave me a look. I shook my head at him. We approached the bathroom. Lucas suddenly kicked in the door.

  The sound was deafening. Wood slivers flew through the air, raining down on the carpet. The door hit the sink, causing even more damage to it. The smell hit me, overwhelmed me. The decomposition process was already in full force. The smells emanating from the bathroom forced me to take a step back to keep from gagging.

  We’d found Agent Arons. His body was hanging from the shower rod. The thing creating the movement darted out between my legs.

  “That was a rat,” Lucas said to me.

  “Yeah, got that,” I told him, breathing shallowly through my mouth. I raced to shut the adjoining door. The curls continued to sleep. I didn’t know what drug she had in her system, but it was strong.

  “Ace, you might want to come here,” Lucas said.

  I was pretty sure I didn’t. I had only caught a glimpse of the dead body, but it had been enough. I opened the front door and called Gabriel.

  “I think Dr. Ericson knows we suspect him,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “His daughter is asleep in Lucas’ room. Agent Arons is dead in mine.”

  The rat, seeing outdoors, scurried past me. I watched it continue its strange running through the parking lot and then it disappeared into the snow and darkness.

  “Are you sure he’s dead?”

  “Oh yeah, he’s dead.”

  “On the way,” Gabriel hung up.

  Phone call made, I reluctantly approached the bathroom again. On the wall, written in black sharpie “Take care of my daughter”.

  “I already figured that was Grace,” I told Lucas.

  “And this?” He pointed at Agent Arons.

  He’d been gutted; the entrails lay on the floor and draped over the bathtub like party streamer from Hell. His eyes were clouding over, staring blankly at the mirror. The rat had been chewing on his bare feet. His manhood lay in the sink. Strangely, there was almost no blood and what was there, was black and clotted.

  “He was dead when he was hung up,” I left the bathroom.

  “How long were you gone?” He asked.

  “Not long enough for all this. We were at the Marshals’ office for two hours, then at Dr. Ericson’s, but Grace was there. It took us twenty minutes to get to the search area, we talked for maybe ten minutes, then fifteen minutes back here,” I told him.

  “How’d he do it then?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t know. Forty-five minutes to drug your child, drive here, slip her into bed, then gut the body, find a rat and throw it in with it. That seems pretty close to impossible.”

  “Not if you killed Arons while we were at the Marshals,” Lucas said. “He doesn’t expect to bring Grace here. He leaves Arons for us to find. You and Xavier pay him a visit and he realizes he’s done. So he brings Grace here, under sedation and leaves her. He must really love the girl.”

  “How’d he get him up there?”

  “Are you sure you actually stabbed him in the shoulder as opposed to just thinking you did? You had been drugged and were in the middle of a hectic situation.”

  “I didn’t imagine stabbing him, Lucas. I don’t have that kind of imagination.”

  Something nagged at me. Something terrible was forming in my mind.

  “How did he have time to put Arons in here before Xavier and I showed up at his house?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he couldn’t have hung the body before calling to report his wife missing. I was here, trying to sleep. So he does it after the call. When? Someone had to go interview him. Then when Xavier and I showed up, Sheriff Rybolt was there with Grace. When did he have time to hang the body?”

  “Are you implying that maybe he didn’t?” Lucas narrowed his eyes at me.

  “I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. The timeline just isn’t making sense to me.”

  “I’m going to go back with he’s a psychopath.”

  “Yes, but a borderline personality. He isn’t Malachi.”

  “Maybe he is and we just missed the clue for it?” Lucas frowned at me. “It’s easy, he calls in the missing wife. We instantly get notified and head to the Marshals. At that time, Arons is already dead, it takes maybe thirty minutes to get here, string up Arons and return to his house. He returns, a few minutes later, someone comes by to get his statement. That gets relayed to us. The sheriff and Grace show up. Then you and Xavier go to his house. Hell, they took most of his statement over the phone on a return call, he could have been here during the follow-up on his cell phone.”

  “Ok, we’ll go with that for now,” I sat down on the bed. The smell of death was filling the entire room. “Why did you get a sleeping child in your room and I got a hanging body in mine?”

  “I’m not a sociopath,” Lucas said like it answered everything.

  Twenty-Four

  Lucas and I were ushered into another room. Someone was trying to decontaminate us. We both smelled of death.

  “Well, he’s been dead for a while,” Xavier said. “Nice scar.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I’ll know more when I get him to the morgue. He was tasered, probably multiple times. There are burn marks on his chest. They are taking Grace Ericson to the hospital to let her wake up there. A psychologist is waiting and we’ve called Dr. Ericson’s brother,” Xavier continued. “She was drugged, but we don’t know what with.”

  “Not triazolam?” Lucas asked.

  “She’d be awake by now. This was something stronger,” Xavier answered.

  “As soon as the HAZMAT folks get done with us, I say we go to where his son’s body was found,” I hooked my finger at someone who had a scrub brush and a hose. They were encased in a white suit that covered everything from head to toe. I didn’t even know if the person scrubbing me was male or female. They kept pouring a chemical on me. It didn’t burn, but it smelled almost as bad.

  “Consider yourselves lucky, he could have found something predatory to shove in there,” Xavier said.

  “Rats are predatory, but in this case, I think it was just scavenging a meal. We might want to change hotels, considering Lucas’ phobia,” I said.

  “Nothing makes sense at the moment,” Xavier shrugged. “We will be checking Arons for pathogens and toxins during the autopsy. Ericson could have put anything on the body. I’d like to get the rat, but I’d say it is long gone. To answer your question about when he put Arons in yo
ur room, it took over an hour for a uniformed officer to stop by Ericson’s house after he made the call. Sheriff Rybolt showed up maybe half an hour later.

  “I’m starting to feel like Alice after she entered the looking glass,” I said.

  “Good news, we can get a warrant. Him leaving Grace in Lucas’ room convinced Judge Penelope Rybolt to give us carte blanche to search his house,” Gabriel was holding up a piece of paper.

  “This is not a peep show,” Lucas said. I looked over at him. “I would hate for them to become insecure over sizes.”

  Until that moment, I don’t think any of us had thought about the nudity of myself or Lucas. We all looked down, including the white-suited scrubber working to make me smell better.

  “You smell good enough, let’s get a move on,” Gabriel grabbed a robe and tossed it to me.

  “It isn’t for the smell,” Xavier said. “It’s for the exposure to unknown chemical agents. Decomposition has been sped up by something, hence the black blood clots everywhere.”

  “What?” I frowned.

  “His skin is starting to fall off too. That’s not normal. I don’t know what it is, so you are being decontaminated so that it doesn’t happen to you,” Xavier said.

  “Ugh,” I groaned.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Gabriel said. “How much longer?”

  “Almost done,” the scrubber went back to work. It was female judging by the voice.

  “Did you touch anything?” Xavier asked.

  “I’m not really in the habit of touching things I know to be dead,” I told him.

  “Me either,” Lucas said.

  “Then you should be good. If you feel any