Elysium Dreams

Fifteen

A really smart serial killer would wait until I had injected myself with DHE before trying to kill me. Then again, I was smarter than that. I never injected it when I was alone. They'd have to kill Malachi or Nyleena first.

At some point, Lucas picked me up and carried me from the bathroom to the bed. I woke up enough to realize it was happening, but not enough to care.

Morning did not bring an annoyingly happy and shiny Gabriel into my room. It brought a very concerned Xavier with a bag full of tools and Lucas with a Mountain Dew. Xavier was taking my blood pressure. All the lights were still out, Lucas was holding a flashlight for him.

"I'm fine," I told them for the millionth time.

"That's twice already this year that you have injected yourself with DHE," Xavier said without looking up from the pressurizing cuff.

"It happens," I answered.

"Yes, but it shouldn't happen. Agent Gentry said you had no warning," Xavier continued.

"Bad lighting and vending machine food, Xavier. You know how I am under those conditions," I pleaded my case.

"You should have ordered in lunch, not eaten from a vending machine. And you should have turned the lights off for a while. You know these things, Ace, why the fuck can't you follow them?"

I couldn't really argue with him on that. I did know these things. The lights in the Marshals' office were terrible for me, and a bag of chips and a thing of trail mix did not equal lunch.

"I will do better today," I told him.

"Because you aren't leaving this room, I imagine you will do better today," Xavier nodded to Lucas. Lucas turned the flashlight off and began flipping on lights. "It's almost noon. We're going to make sure you have lunch, a real lunch, then bring in some case files for you to look through."

"What?" I let myself sound as enraged as I felt, nearly yelling the question at him.

"If you hadn't taken DHE last night, we'd let you come into the office, but you did. We can't risk you having a rebound migraine with DHE in your system. I am staying with you. Gabriel and Michael are already at the Marshals' office, and Michael has set up a video session so we can hear what they are doing."

"This is bullshit," I flopped back into the pillows.

"No, Ace, this was your decision. Agent Gentry says you tried to send her away last night. Luckily, she wouldn't budge. We didn't get back until well after one in the morning, you would have been here alone for over four hours with that poison coursing through your veins. Michael was zonked out. He wouldn't have been any good had you reacted poorly to the medicine. So we are taking all precautions. We need you at 100% and not worrying about rebound migraines or the fact that the drug is still in your system. You could still have a bad reaction to it," Xavier pulled away from me.

"Then what are we doing today?" I frowned at him.

"We are going through associates," Xavier handed me a stack of print outs. "This is a list of anyone that has been connected to more than three of the victims."

"Great," I grumbled.

"You could be doing nothing," Lucas told me.

"That's true, bring it on," I tried to feign some enthusiasm.

"So what I did was build a different geographical profile. Since we didn't learn much from the original profile, I had the idea to track their debit or credit card usage. I mapped out each purchase for the six months prior to their deaths," Michael said through the computer.