Touch of Hell

Two profilers share a bond and an affinity for saving lives, but soon find they may be upsetting a balance between good and evil.

There is nothing more abrupt than death, even when it is expected. The body, mind, and human essence simply cease to exist at a definitive point in time. There is just no more of you, when you die, nothing that our Earthbound senses experience, anyway. For over ten years, death became our lives. We did not think of it in complicated or ethereal ways. We were in the death business. It was what we knew best, and we tried not to think about it off the clock, if there was such a thing in our line of work.

My partner Rhona and I met in the academy in Quantico Virginia years ago. Everyone quickly saw our bond. We were inseparable and of the same mind. It was not a romantic communion, it was inconceivable. Romance seemed frivolous at the time, in general.

We were embarking on a part of our lives in which clarity of the mind was absolutely necessary. We kept each other focused. It was as if I met the extension of my own brain, inside someone else, in my Rhona. However, there was always something malevolent that gazed back at me in her eyes, in her smile, as her dimples formed when telling a cold-hearted joke.

In the academy, recruits did not have friends, they had inherent adversaries. People they knew might very well upstage them and come between their dreams of becoming agents. Rhona and I never saw anyone as an adversary. It was as if we knew nothing would stand in our way. So we studied together, practiced together, and always sought each other out for tandem training projects during the academy.

We helped each other quiet our minds. I helped her quiet the world around her and become one of the best shots in the class. She helped me silence my inner doubt and make swift decisions in mock investigations. We got each other through the academy and were sworn in as Field Agents together. And that is when we lost ourselves, even though we never lost each other. Something was compelling us down this path, and looking back, whatever it was could not have been a righteous calling from above as we had speculated, but something with a far more nuanced motive.

We worked exceedingly well as a team and performed flawlessly enough to request assignments in the same field office. We were both at the top of our class in Behavioral Forensics. We knew people better than they knew themselves. With that ability, we began to receive invitations from all over the country to consult on murder investigations. Death became us.

We went on to investigate and solve hundreds of murders. More importantly to us, and as I know now, not only us, but we caught dozens of serial murderers before they had a chance to kill again. We saved so very many lives, but at what cost?

As time went along, the cold eyes staring back at us, from the victims and then the cold eyes leering into our souls from the killers, it began to change us and our dynamic. I could feel Rhona begin to descend into darkness. I did not know much about her past but I could feel her fighting off destructive tendencies. I walked in on her once with a razor blade to her leg, after a night of drinking. I grabbed it from her hand, cutting mine in the process, and threw it in the trash. I took hold of her face with my bloody hand and kissed her for the first time, as if my passion would distract her from whatever was entering her mind.

“Do it, you better do it!” , she screamed, as she turned her back to me and put her palms on the bathroom wall.

Every time we were intimate, after that night, I did not feel love from the person that I knew loved me more than anyone. I felt rage, anger, and something that was not the Rhona I knew.  I felt as if she would have killed me during those passionate times, if the circumstance would have arisen. I was always more naïve than she was, and as my heart was becoming more connected to hers, I watched, in her eyes, as she slipped farther away from being human.

As the months went on, she became more vicious in the field, putting both of us in increasingly more dangerous situations. Upon arriving on scene at an apartment complex where a suspect was thought to be imprisoning three young women, preparing to murder them, she refused to wait for the tactical team to arrive and scan the apartments with infrared. She went in on her own, and I, the consistently naïve one, followed.

We glided past each apartment, listening for screams or whimpers. A door facing us at the end of the hallway flung open and swayed, fluttered, like someone winking at us. We heard a faint cry,

“You b*****d!”

Rhona took off running with her gun drawn.

“There!”

I ran behind her, trying to pass her, to be the first to enter, but she was being propelled by a force stronger than me. As she stormed through the doorway, an arm hooked her neck and cinched in a choke hold. There were no orders for me to put my gun down, no hesitation, the un-sub slowly slid a knife in her side, through her Kevlar vest. She closed her eyes and winced. She never screamed, or cried out. It was like she was waiting for it, it was as if all three of us knew that moment was coming our whole lives.

He laid her on the ground delicately, as if she were a sleeping child he was putting to bed. He looked at me with a blank glare, and then once over at a screaming, half naked girl, crouched in the corner. He then put the knife to his throat. I gasped and exclaimed,

“No you don’t!”

I immediately unloaded my duty weapon, 17 rounds to his face. Three while he was still standing and another fourteen through his face, and through the floor as he was on the ground.

For four long months my life was unrecognizable. But at the end, Rhona had made a full recovery and I was off my suspension. She did not speak, nor did she eat or sleep. She was recovered from her wounds but was not herself. It was as if she was angry to be alive. She detached herself from the world. I did not personally see her leave the house for months. We did not communicate while I was at work or out of town on cases. I wanted to give her space and time to work through it.

One night, as I slept, I felt her presence on the side of my bed and snapped awake. I knew something was wrong. We were roommates but the time had long passed for there to be any reason for her to be in my bedroom, in the middle of the night. As she sat on the side of my bed, washed in darkness, what she told me felt like something I knew deep down all along, subconsciously.

“There can be no bliss without sorrow, the can be no pleasure without pain, but most importantly, there can be no heaven without a touch of hell.”

I knew what she was saying before she said it, and I knew we had made a decades long mistake by being the best at what we did, at stopping murderers.

“I have seen the darkness, it has to be fed. That little bit of darkness allows the light to thrive.”

We stopped murders that were supposed to happen. The killers were necessary to maintain balance in this world and we interrupted that balance for years, disproportionally. Rhona died several times on the operating table, and she came back with more knowledge of the darkness than our Earthly senses ever thought possible.

“I had to make it right”, she said, as my hand crept towards my bedside lamp. But I waited, hoping there was some way I was wrong, some way to put us back to the way we were.

“If I keep satisfying the darkness, giving back to it what we took, one day I’ll finally be free.”

I switched my light on to witness Rhona, covered in blood, from head to toe. I did not need to be a profiler to know that the blood was not hers. The battle between the light and the dark has raged since the beginning of time, however, my battle for my life was just beginning as she raised a knife to me and lunged, with an ungodly shriek.