Ashes to Ashes (36 page)

What had Scott done?

“Yes, sir,” Oscar said. “I’m on my way there,
sir. Thank you, sir.” He hit a button and ended the call. “Ginger.
I want you to head back to the lab. You’ve been away from there
long enough. I’m sure you have a ton of work to get to. I want you
to put your own eyes on and through the evidence pulled from
Scott’s room. Ashe. Leave your car here, you are coming with me. We
have another crime scene.”

“Scott?”

“Yep,” Oscar replied.

“How do you know for sure?” Ashe asked.

“He left a bleeding man and a whole lot of
witnesses behind,” Oscar explained. “And this time he took someone
with
him…at gunpoint.”

“A hostage?”

“More like a prisoner,” Oscar replied. “He is
now a kidnapper, too.”

“Shit!” Ashe exclaimed.

“Did I tell you to get back to your lab,”
Oscar ordered Ginger. “Vamonos.”

“You’re taking me with you?” Ashe inquired,
making sure he had heard his old friend correctly.

“Yes,” Oscar clarified. “We are together on
this from here on out.”

The psychologist nodded agreement.

“I’ll take care of the check,” Oscar told
them. “Let’s hurry. I have a feeling it might start raining
again.

“Where are we going?” Ashe asked.

“Cleveland.”

“Great.”

Chapter 42

The yellow man sat up straight and true and
spoke. “Good day, Amber. I’m glad to see you are well. And that you
are putting your grandmother’s old house to good use.” The smirk
never left his lips. “Didn’t know you had a boyfriend. But it is
not like we talk anymore. Good to see you again, honey. It has been
too long.”

“Not long enough…dad.”

PART THREE

“Hell begins on the day when God grants us a
clear vision of all that we might have achieved, of all the gifts
which we have wasted, of all that we might have done which we did
not do”

--Gian Carlo Menotti

Chapter 43

Before following Oscar to his car, Ashe made
the detective pause while he grabbed an item from his own Mazda.
The dream journal. Ever since he stumbled upon the spiral notebook,
it had been given Ashe a headache, taunting him with vague,
abstract visions and images, ones documenting Scott’s dreams.
Dreams were nothing more than shadows of the day’s happenings,
images and ideas left over once consciousness had ceased.

However, the conversation between Ginger,
Oscar, and himself had brought his mind back to the journal. The
black and gold container had held a vital clue, a pivotal piece to
the scattered puzzle that Scott had left in his wake. Understanding
the drug, its effects and its implications along with other crimes
where the black and gold container had made an appearance, had been
a leap for Ashe, bringing him closer to the truth, closer to
completing the puzzle.

And there apparently were two more clues.

Ashe could not for the life of him comprehend
what Scott had believed the so-called clues would achieve, as if
everything that was happening was part of a novel or the script to
a tight lipped mystery movie, where detectives follow a line of
clues in order to find the bad guy and save the innocent people.
But true life was never that neat. Clues rarely lined up straight,
creating a neat path from beginning to the end, from the act to the
arrest. It just never went down that way.

Yet, the container had worked as a clue. Ashe
couldn’t help but to wonder what the other clues may hold for him,
which caused him to give the dream journal another chance. He would
have to suffer the dreams in order to find what Scott had intended
him to discover. Inside the pages, somewhere in the words, was
another piece of the scattered puzzle.

Tucking the journal beneath his arm, Ashe
followed his old friend to his car. He got inside and buckled
himself in tight. It would be around an hour to drive up to the new
crime scene and he would have plenty of time to scan through the
rest of the notebook.

Oscar entered the car and immediately asked
about the notebook. “What do you got there? Feel free to doodle
during the drive up. I will listen to the radio.”

“It’s not for doodling,” Ashe replied.

“Sudoku?”

“Nope. It’s something else that I stole from
your crime scene,” Ashe blurted, trying to add humor to the
self-incriminating words. “Want to arrest me now?”

“For stealing class notes from a college
student? I will pass,” Oscar replied, before igniting the car’s
engine.

“It’s not exactly notes,” Ashe told him.
“It’s a dream journal.”

“If you say so,” Oscar said. He put the car
into drive and began the trek up north, toward Lake Erie and the
city of Cleveland.

“Are you playing dumb, now?” Ashe said and
laughed. “Scott did learn a few things from his old man, Oscar.
Dreams can be important when dealing with a person’s inner thoughts
and fears. It can show what that person is dealing with in their
lives at the time of the dream. If someone is dealing with
overwhelming anxiety, documenting their dreams might show the root
of that anxiety, like a bad boyfriend or stress at their job. Scott
enjoys putting down his dreams, especially ones that occur over and
over. Let me ask you something. What do you dream about? And when
you wake up in the morning, how long does it take for your dreams
to fade?”

“Not long,” Oscar replied. “If I remember
what I dream at all. Sometimes I don’t think I do dream.”

“That is probably because you never sleep,”
Ashe told him.

“That could be,” Oscar groaned. “When I do
dream…it is never a pretty sight. I never get to dream about fluffy
things like clouds and youth. Only ugliness.”

“That is because your daily life is filled
with ugliness,” Ashe replied. “Ugliness begets ugliness.”

Oscar nodded. “Why do you think that that
journal is important?”

Ashe explained. “I’m still convinced that
Scott saw something…or believed that he saw something. A
hallucination due to the pill. I just don’t know what. But he
pointed out this journal when he called me, calling it another
clue. It’s filled with images. Incoherent, mostly. Maybe he wrote
down his hallucination in here somewhere. I haven’t been giving it
the attention that it deserves…or that I hope it deserves.”

“Clues!” Oscar spat. “You can have your
journal of dreams. The only
clues
I am interested in is this
new scene and the bleeding man Scott left behind. Maybe this guy
has some information for us…if he doesn’t die before we get
there.”

“Any chance of him dying?” Ashe asked.

“Not sure,” Oscar answered. “The boss didn’t
give me a lot of details. We will find out when we get there, I
figure.”

Sometimes Ashe forgot that Oscar had a boss
too, someone watching down on him, picking apart everything that he
did and didn’t do. Maybe it was because Oscar always appeared to be
in charge, absolutely and completely, as if the only person above
him, when it came to catching killers, was God himself. But, as
Ashe should already know, everyone has a boss. Perhaps even God had
a boss, someone to judge and punish him when things went wrong.

“So,” Oscar continued, “you can have your
little dream journal and I will focus on the blood stains that I
can see and touch.”

“I think that was exactly what Scott had in
mind,” Ashe replied. “You focus on the bullets and I will analyze
the dreams. Ying and yang. Tit for tat. Man of science. Man of
faith. As it always should be.”

“If you say so,” Oscar said. “I have missed
you too…partner. I can’t stand working with Geiring one more day.
Asshole.”

“Fucking asshole,” Ashe added, smiling. Part
of him had missed riding with Oscar, heading toward a fresh crime
scene, even if he hadn’t realized it. He just wished the scene was
going to be different and the suspect was not his own son.

Oscar leaned forward and turned on the radio.
Latin music spilled from the speakers, giving Ashe his cue to dive
into the dream journal.

Even though it was technically day time, the
world was dark, forcing Ashe to bring out his cell phone so he can
once again use its light to see. He thought about asking Oscar to
use the light from the visor, but decided against it. The cell
light was lower and dimmer and wouldn’t distract the detective, who
had become entirely focused on the road.

Instead of turning the page he had previously
ended on, Ashe did something that he should have done in the first
place. He opened the notebook and flipped to the last written page,
because he was suddenly certain that the change in Scott was not
gradual but sudden. It was a drug induced reaction to the mystery
pill. And the final entry, the final words, would best reflect the
shift in his mind, the change from normal to paranoid.

Possibly.

Ashe hoped that he was right, but knew that
he was heavily relying on Scott’s claim that the journal was one of
the so-called clues.

Finding the most recent entry, he began to
read. His eyes fell upon the first word on the page and his heart
stopped. A clue indeed, he almost said out loud. The page must have
been added either the moment Scott had decided to kill Owen or
immediately after he shot his roommate. Either…or…he knew the
following paragraph had been written for
him
.

Dad—I know that you must be confused but I
swear to you that I am not out of my mind or crazy. And, even
though this is a dream journal, that it was not some dream, because
dreams are fiction and what I saw was real and going to happen. So
I had to stop it from coming true. It was a vision. I don’t know
where the vision came from, but I cannot believe it was anything
other than a prediction.

I took the pill. I shouldn’t have but I did.
I can’t say for sure why.

I don’t think that I passed out because Bam
had said that I never fell over. I just left the world, floated
away in a blinding white light. I had no body or matter of any
kind. I was a ghost, flying away. Into the light. And when I came
back to the world I was back in my apartment. I was in the kitchen.
There was someone else in the kitchen and I don’t believe they
could see me or tell that I was floating right behind them.

I never landed. Not completely. At first I
didn’t know who the person was because I could only see his back.
But it didn’t take long before I knew it was Owen. He glanced
around the kitchen and I could see his face. It was sweaty and his
eyes were wild, like he gets when he is out of his mind high. I
could smell the sweat.

Owen was holding a handgun. I could smell the
gun powder or what I thought was gunpowder. He looked freaked out.
Strange. I didn’t know why. But then I smelled the blood. It was a
rotten smell. When I smelled the blood, I forced myself to float
higher so that I could see over and around Owen.

There was a body.

It was horrid.

The dead man had been shot in the stomach.
Blood pooled beneath him. It almost looked like wings. Like a death
angel. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The dead man’s face
was my face. It was me. I was dead.

While I floated there, Owen turned back to my
dead self and fired another shot. The bullet hit me in the
forehead, the dead me. It was just wrong. More blood. There was
more blood. The blood made Owen sick too. He threw up next to my
body.

I went back to my real body. Bam was staring
at me. I didn’t know what to tell her. I don’t understand why. You
need to help me. I don’t understand it. And you can help me find
the truth. Please, dad.

“Jesus Christ,” Ashe said when he finished
reading.

The light curse caught Oscar’s attention,
drawing him away from whatever deep thought that he had plunged
into. From the corner of his eye, he gave the psychologist a brief
glance. “Why are you using my lord’s name in vain, Ashe?”

“Scott,” he mumbled. “It might be worse than
we had realized.”

“How do you mean?”

“I was right about the hallucination,” Ashe
continued. “Only…Scott doesn’t see it as a hallucination. He sees
as something else, something more concrete, something a lot more
dangerous.”

“What did he see?”

“He thinks that he saw…” Ashe began but
paused. “Scott thinks he saw his own death…by the hands of Owen.
The only problem is…that he doesn’t see it as a drug induced
symptom, even though he knows that the pill had caused what he
saw.”

“What the hell does he think, then?”

“He thinks it was prophecy,” Ashe told
him.

“Jesus Christ,” Oscar exclaimed.

“This type of thinking, Oscar, can be pretty
serious,” Ashe said. Scott had had run-ins with Owen, in which Owen
had threatened him while on drugs. The events must have stayed with
Scott, kept somewhere in the back of his mind. When Scott took the
mystery pill, the drug used that incident and conjured some kind of
image or images. “This type of conviction is hard to sway. He is
certain that he caught a glimpse beyond the veil, if you know what
I mean. There is a reason why more blood is shed because of
religion or religious interpretation than any other reason in
history. Religion is built on faith and conviction. Scott doesn’t
mention God, but his beliefs follow the same idea. He thinks that
someone or something has shown him his own death…and he believes
that he had stopped it by killing Owen. Self-defense. Just like the
guys in the park.”

“Just like the titan Cronus,” Oscar said and
surprised Ashe.

“Cronus?”

“It was prophesized that one of Cronus’
children would kill him,” Oscar continued, “so he ate them one by
one. It was his wife that had saved Zeus, replacing him with a rock
when Cronus came for him.”

“Insightful.”

“Thank you. What about the scene we are
heading for?” Oscar asked. “What does kidnapping have to do with
what he saw in his vision?”