Blood Trance

  PRAISE FOR R.D. ZIMMERMAN AND HIS DAZZLING NEW MYSTERY BLOOD TRANCE

  “R. D. Zimmerman is one of the best!”

  —Roger L. Simon, creator of the Moses Wine series

  “R. D. Zimmerman shows a great talent for suspense.”

  —Daily News (New York)

  “ORIGINAL AND SOPHISTICATED. The combination of crime and science involved in its detection has launched books in their series by Jonathan Keller-man and Patricia Cornwell to recent best-seller lists. Those same readers should love this new ‘Trance’ series.”

  —Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

  “RIVETING… Zimmerman's risks pay off… the narrative momentum is further accelerated by accruing family secrets that finally trigger the story's startling conclusion.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Zimmerman is a superb writer, building suspense through genuine surprises while creating believable characters.”

  —Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel

  “Zimmerman’s writing is breathless!”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “If you enjoyed Maddy and Alex's first adventure, you're sure to love the second entry as R. D. [Zimmerman] avoided a sophomore jinx by topping his first effort.”

  —The Blotter

  “The real test of a detective or mystery novel is its ability to hold the reader's interest and keep those pages turning. Zimmerman succeeds at this quite well.”

  —TriCity Herald

  “Utterly fascinating… a unique and promising sleuth if ever there was one.”

  —Mystery Loves Company

  “I love R. D. Zimmerman's novels because they're right on the cutting edge. That's where he keeps his fans, too—on the cutting edge of our seats!”

  —Nancy Pickard, author of But I Wouldn't Want to Die There

  “[Zimmerman's] exploration of hypnosis as a method of detection takes crime-solving in an intriguing new direction in which the terrors of the past manifest themselves into present danger. I am fascinated by his work.”

  —Sharyn McCrumb, author of The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

  “I am most impressed by this young writer.”

  —East Baltimore Guide

  “Brings us back to the intriguing world of hypnotic detection…. The way the Phillipses work together is partly what gives this series its zing… the mystery is strong, and I will definitely go on to read the next book.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “A most unusual heroine in…an intriguing series.”

  —True Tales from Scotland Yard

  “R. D. Zimmerman dramatizes hypnosis as excitingly and realistically as Dick Francis writes horses in a race to uncloak man's past before it kills him.”

  —Justin Scott, author of Rampage and Normandie Triangle

  ALSO BY R.D. ZIMMERMAN

  Closet

  Innuendo

  Outburst

  Hostage

  Tribe

  Red Trance

  Death Trance

  Mindscream

  Red Encounter

  Blood Russian

  The Cross and the Sickle

  And by R.D. Zimmerman writing as Robert Alexander

  When Dad Came Back As My Dog

  The Romanov Bride

  Rasputin's Daughter

  The Kitchen Boy

  Deadfall in Berlin

  Blood Trance

  A Novel of Hypnotic Detection

  by

  R.D. Zimmerman

  ScribblePub

  Minneapolis, MN

  the most original of the original™

  Blood Trance

  Copyright © 1993 by R.D. Zimmerman

  MOBI ISBN: 978-1-61-446025-1

  EPUB ISBN: 978-1-61-446024-4

  Published in the United States of America

  All rights reserved

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the authors or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Cover Design by Christopher Bohnet / www.xt4inc.com

  Digital Editions produced by BookNook.biz.

  Contact us: hitch@booknook.biz

  eBook design by Rickhardt Capidamonte.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe a great many thanks to a great many people, in particular to Nanette and The Suspenders (Stephen, Kate, and Mary). Dr. Don Houge offered a great deal of assistance and advice on all matters hypnotic, and his help was invaluable. And a belated, special thanks to Lisa Queen and Leslie Schnur.

  For Lars

  Blood Trance

  A Novel of Hypnotic Detection

  Chapter 1

  I stood in the entry, right there on the dark slate stones, the gusty May day blowing through the open door behind me, and all I could think of was how could so much blood come from one corpse. When I stepped through the door of Loretta's rambler in suburban Chicago, that was the thing that surprised me the most, the amount of blood from the old woman's body. There was one big shot of it sprayed up and across the yellow and light blue couch, then another big pool spreading across the carpet. That short white carpet that had looked so incredibly perfect just yesterday, but was now being flooded with blood. Was the human body nothing more than a huge, walking vessel of viscous fluid, or were there in fact two bodies? Could Loretta, who'd phoned me not even thirty minutes ago, be dead as well?

  I tried to speak, to call out for her, but I couldn't loosen the knotted mass in my throat. I took a deep breath, calmly closed the door behind me, turned back, and made my way to the very edge of the slate. There was a half-wall there, a divider with a built-in trough of plants that separated the entry from the yellow-wallpapered living room, and I leaned against it. Something brushed my arm, and I looked down, saw big, green, heart-shaped leaves stroking me. Wasn't this plant just like the ivy I'd had since college, the one that was now some nineteen years old and had withstood nearly a dozen moves?

  I coughed a couple of times, and tried again, “Loretta? Loretta, are you all right? It's me, Alex.” Wondering if her younger brother or sister might be here, I called, “Billy? Carol Marie?”

  I looked beyond the massacred figure of Loretta's stepmother and I heard movement, quick and faint. Next nothing, then once more something akin to a squirrel hiding in a pile of dry oak leaves and twitching furtively. That could be her, probably was, for Loretta Long, a former patient of my sister, was so horribly agoraphobic that she'd spent twenty years, or so Maddy had told me, hiding from society. Then again, I realized, if that wasn't her in some far corner, if instead Loretta was lying dead somewhere else in this rambler, what I heard could be the murderer, for this was most certainly a fresh kill. Turn around right now, I told myself. Get the hell out of here.

  Just past a side chair all done up in blue and yellow floral print, I saw an arm emerge from the hall that led to the three bedrooms. Then a figure, not very tall, rather heavy, hair long and mouseish gray. In a flash, the person streaked past the opening, charging into that very formal dining room. Farther to the left, just past the couch, was another doorway, and that mad figure went whooshing past, disappearing into the kitchen.

  “Loretta!” I shouted.

  I rushed forward, my feet sinking into the white carpeting, then froze just short of the ever-widening pool of blood. Loretta's stepmother lay right in front of the polished mahogany coffee table that was replete with silver candlestick and
crystal ashtray. I'd instantly disliked Helen when I met her this week for the first time, but did she deserve this? Did anyone? I looked at the body, saw what appeared to be three stab wounds— one in the neck, two in the chest—and my stomach rolled like a huge wave ready to burst from my gut.

  “I killed her.”

  Loretta. She was there, emerging from the kitchen doorway, wearing a loose corduroy jumper, a beige one, and a white blouse. Face perhaps once pretty, now heavy and sagging. And pale. Dark eyes that had always looked depressed but never mean. Not until now, anyway. Earlier in the week, when we'd first met, I'd studied her and imagined she'd once had beautiful brunette hair. Now it was mostly gray and haggard-looking. So dry and poorly cut.

  She lifted up the knife in her right hand. “I did it with this.”

  It was a very long piece of cutlery. Blade long and thin and slightly arched, a meat or fish knife. All shiny, too.

  “I always hated her,” said Loretta, stepping around the edge of the couch and pausing in front of a large print of an English garden.

  “Put down the knife.”

  “So I killed her.”

  “Put it down, Loretta.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Maddy would want you to.”

  Invoking the name of my revered sister made Loretta pause, but only momentarily. Then she smiled, rushed forward, and dropped to her knees right next to the coffee table and just across the body from me.

  “It doesn't make any difference what Maddy thinks,” she said, unable to hide her anger. “If Maddy cared, she wouldn't have left me.”

  “Loretta, that bus nearly killed her.”

  “She never even said good-bye.”

  It was pointless, absurd, to be arguing like this, that corpse between us, the bloom of blood now touching the edge of Loretta's dress. Beige corduroy wicking it up, turning a dark, purplish brown. Loretta dropped the knife into the blood, then leaned forward and pressed both hands fully and flatly into the red stain.

  “Loretta, no! Stop it!”

  An insane finger painter, she gazed up at me and laughed. God, I had to call the police, get them here at once. I was turning to bolt for the phone, when I noticed her picking up the knife in both her heavily stained hands. I saw the madness carving her eyes deep and dark, pressing her flat mouth wide. My heart clenched, feared the next mad moment.

  And then Loretta, a compulsive reader who in the week since I'd met her had always been clutching a book the way a child clutched a security blanket, recited in a surprisingly calm voice:

  “Poor hand, why quiver'st thou in this decree?

  Honour thyself to rid me of this shame;

  For if I die, my honour lives in thee,

  But if I live, thou liv'st in my defame.”

  I knew that tragic drama, that hideous monologue, and I instantly knew Loretta's intentions. For a serious moment I wondered if I should let her succeed.

  “Loretta, stop!”

  I took one step through the blood, then another, and jumped over the body just as Loretta was lifting that long blade over her own chest. I landed just beyond Helen, my hands swooping down, swinging at Loretta's fists. I hit the knife from her hands, grabbed at her, and pulled her back and away from the body.

  “No!” she shrieked. “Let me go!”

  She was like a monkey or a cat, some odd creature once domesticated but suddenly turned horribly wild, hands clawing, whipping. I stood above her, she on her knees, and her nails dug into my calf as she scrambled for the bloodied knife that lay by a side table. This person, this thing, was scratching through my jeans, heaving me aside, and I felt myself about to fall. She screamed, voice piercingly high.

  And I shouted, “Loretta!”

  I pushed against her shoulder, but it had minor effect, and she bulldozed against me, reached desperately through my legs. The knife lay just a yard or so beyond her grip, and I knew she wanted nothing more than to plunge that instrument into her own chest, perhaps slash me in the process. She rammed against my knees, and I lifted my hand, brought it down, smacked her on the cheek. It only enraged her further, and she lunged forward, mouth open, head slightly turned, and chomped down on my calf.

  “Jesus!” I yelled as her teeth sunk through my pants and into flesh and muscle.

  I tried to jerk away, but couldn't, so firm was her bite. And so I punched her. It was my most immediate reaction. My fist came down, smashing her on the jaw, stunning her at once, causing her mouth to go loose. I shoved her off me, leaned down, hurled her back, and then stepped over and kicked the knife, sending it spinning and streaking across the white carpet and under a chair.

  I turned back, and she lay there all crumpled up, knees folded in, head buried in her arms. A discarded human body, rising and falling, pounding with each dry sob.

  Finally she moaned, “Oh, God!”

  I knelt down to her, reached out, touched her on the back. She didn't react, just went on shaking and sobbing, each breath more stretched with pain than the last. I wanted to apologize for hitting her. I wanted to tell her things would be all right. But I'd had to do the first, and the second would have been a gross lie. Nothing in Loretta's twisted life would ever be the same again.

  I glanced back at the butchered body of Helen. What I had to do now was call the police, and I started to rise. Suddenly Loretta was lurching out at me again, this time clutching me around the ankles and embracing me desperately as if I were the Savior Himself.

  “I… I have to be the bad girl,” she sobbed.

  I didn't know what to say, what to do. I just stood there, staring down at her brittle hair, her pathetic body.

  And Loretta begged, “Please… please, just let me be the bad girl.”

  Chapter 2

  “Okay, Alex, that's good,” called a very distant voice. “What else can you tell me about that day?”

  Christ, what was that? Who was that?

  “It's me, Maddy.”

  Oh. Oh, yeah. I wasn't down in some rinky-dink Chicago suburb, and I hadn't just walked into the Long home and found that body, all that blood. Nor had Loretta just been clinging to my legs. No, all that had taken place some three weeks ago, and I was just going over it one more time, recounting to Maddy exactly what I'd seen, what had happened. This was a trance, wasn't it? I was under, wasn't I, and wasn't that my sister talking to me from the pitifully conscious and self-conscious world?

  “That's right, Alex, You're in a deep hypnotic trance, and you're an excellent subject. You've gone back through time to that afternoon when you walked in and discovered the body in the living room. Now, is there anything else you'd like to tell me? Anything else you might have noticed that day?”

  God, hadn't we gone over it enough? Hadn't we poked and poked not only at the grisly murder scene but at the many layers of lies Loretta's family had worked so hard to conceal? Yes, I believed in hypnosis, in its remarkable abilities to probe the subconscious and bring to light details and insights previously left unnoticed. But there wasn't, I was sure, anything left to reveal in this trance of blood.

  “Just bear with me, Alex. I want to be certain that we haven't missed anything. Now take a deep breath,” coached my older sister. “In… out. Deep, deep relaxation.”

  I saw myself—dark curly hair, brown eyes, not quite six feet tall and not quite forty—lying there on the recliner next to my sister. I was in that huge attic room of my sister's house, that huge house on her island not far from the coast of Michigan. That's where I was literally, anyway. Hypnotically I was elsewhere. Or at least I was supposed to be. I took a deep breath, exhaled. Back through time, through trance. Go on, Alex, I told myself. Fly back to that Chicago suburb, fly back to that morning when Loretta had emerged from the kitchen, clutching a Chicago-brand stainless-steel knife.

  “Breathe in, breathe out…”

  I inhaled, held it, let out as much air as I could. What had happened? Loretta. Yes, the murder. But we'd been over and over this, both in and out of trance. There wa
s nothing else I knew, nothing left to fish to the surface of consciousness.

  “But you just did—the knife.”

  What did Maddy mean, the knife?

  “Chicago Cutlery.”

  I laughed. It had been a Chicago Cutlery-brand knife, most definitely so because I had several of them and recognized it by its distinctive wooden handle. So what? What good did that do? The police, of course, certainly knew it was Chicago Cutlery, for they'd found it right where I'd kicked it under that chair.

  “Yes, but there was something else,” nudged my psychic detective. “You said it was all shiny when you first saw it.”

  My mind flipped and my memory skidded back through time as I lay there. When the police had gathered the knife, it had been all covered with blood and Loretta's fingerprints, for she'd dropped it in that pondish stain of blood on the carpet, smeared it around. Prior to that, however, Loretta had raced from the hallway, through the dining room, into the kitchen, and emerged with…

  “A clean knife.”

  Exactly. I took a deep breath, plunged myself deeper into hypnosis, into tranquillity, into thought. I felt myself not back in Chicago, yet not there on the recliner at my sister's, either. I was somewhere above and beyond in some sort of dark heaven, in some sort of deep state of concentration where I was smarter, more alert, more capable.

  And there was something really weird about all this. I'd arrived and Loretta had raced into the kitchen and come out with a clean knife. Clean because she'd washed it after she'd killed her stepmother? Or clean because that really hadn't been the murder weapon? I sensed the latter was true, for if she'd cleaned the knife just after the murder, why would she soil it again by dropping it into the blood? Why would she do that at all unless that knife hadn't been anything but a clean kitchen tool she'd wanted to make look like the real murder weapon? And if that wasn't the knife that had really killed Helen, what had and where was it?