I Am Death (30 page)

‘Was she sexually assaulted?’ Garcia again.

‘Repeatedly, but the assailant was smart enough to use a rubber. No semen was found. Unfortunately, the autopsy examination uncovered nothing else that could be construed as a clue to her
killer’s identity. The investigation hit a wall.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘She suffocated. The coroner couldn’t be any more specific as to how it happened but it wasn’t by strangulation.’

Sanders gave Hunter and Garcia a moment to read over the autopsy report.

‘But it doesn’t end there,’ he proceeded. ‘A year after Ms. Oliver’s body was found, Mathew Hade relocated to Sacramento. Six months after the relocation, a
twenty-year-old woman named Grace Lansing went missing in River Park, on the east side of the city. She was taken from inside her parents’ house while they were away on a weekend break. Just
like Tracy Dillard, the college student who went missing in Fresno, Grace has also never been found.’

‘Did Mathew Hade make the POI list in Sacramento again?’ Garcia asked.

‘He did,’ Hunter was the one who answered, reading from the file.

‘Working in the proximities?’ Garcia half questioned, half guessed.

Sanders nodded. ‘He had found a job with a roofing company. The company was making repairs to one of the houses in the same street as Grace Lansing’s parents’. Once again,
Mathew Hade had no alibi for the night Ms. Lansing went missing but, once again, the police couldn’t get anything concrete on him to justify an arrest.’

Hunter continued reading the file.

‘I know that all of this might mean absolutely nothing,’ Sanders said, lifting up both palms. ‘It could all be just a coincidence, but I wanted to bring the file to you and let
you decide. Especially because of the last photograph.’

Hunter and Garcia turned to it. It was a mugshot of Mathew Hade. With the exception of maybe a wrinkle or two, he looked exactly the same as he did in the file’s first
photograph.’

‘A mugshot?’ Garcia said.

Sanders nodded. ‘That mugshot was taken seven months ago. Mathew Hade was taken in because he got involved in an altercation at a bar . . .’ Sanders paused.

‘OK,’ Garcia said.

‘In East Los Angeles,’ Sanders added. ‘Mathew Hade isn’t in Sacramento anymore. He’s here.’

‘The Monster’ is lying.

That had been Squirm’s first thought after hearing the man’s words.

He must be lying. Of course my father reported me missing.

The man could see the boy’s demeanor changing. He returned to his seat, placed his elbows on the table and interlaced his fingers together, his hands directly in front of his chin.

‘You don’t believe me, do you, Squirm?’ he said, looking at the kid. ‘I don’t blame you. Why would you? But let me tell you a quick story which might change your
mind.’

Squirm kept his gaze on ‘The Monster’.

‘A few months ago, I was having a quiet drink in this rundown joint not that far from your school. It was late, sometime between one and two in the morning, I think. The place wasn’t
busy at all. I’d say maybe five or six people, max. I was just there, sitting at the bar, minding my own business, when one of the regulars walks in. The reason I know he was a regular was
because the bartender greeted him by name – Pete. Well, this guy, Pete, already looked to be pretty hammered, but since he was a regular, the bartender didn’t seem to mind it.

‘Pete ordered a bourbon, neat, and took the stool next to where I was sitting. Strange, as the bar was pretty fucking empty, but hey, it’s a free country and a man has the right to
sit wherever he likes, as long as he isn’t bothering anyone.’

Keeping his fingers interlaced, the man used his thumbs to rub his chin.

‘Once the bartender brought Pete his drink, he looked at me, probably because I was the only other person sitting at the bar, lifted his glass and in a stroppy way mumbled the word
“Cheers”. Now I’m a polite guy, so in return I raised my glass and we both had a sip of our drinks. Pete then put his glass down, turned on his stool and slowly looked at me from
head to toe. In a seedy bar like that, full of drunken people, that was all that was needed to either start a fight or a conversation. Well, I wasn’t in the mood for a fight so that night it
was a conversation.

‘We shot the breeze for a while, then ended up moving the conversation from the bar to one of the tables, all the while Pete is drinking neat bourbon and I’m drinking cheap whiskey.
Once we took the table, Pete began telling me how he hated his life, how his wife had left him years ago for no good reason, and how she had left him stuck with this boy.’

The man was tracking Squirm’s reactions, but the boy looked as if he had gone into some sort of trance, with his good eye wide open staring back at his captor. The man continued without
missing a beat.

‘Pete went on and on, telling me how much of a pain in the ass the boy was, that he had been a mistake that should never have happened and so on. In short, Pete blamed this boy for
everything bad that had happened to him in his life. I’m telling you, Squirm, this guy
hated
his son with a divine passion. He told me that there’d been many nights that
he’d gotten back home and almost strangled the boy in his sleep. I asked him “Why hadn’t he?” and he told me that if he thought he could get away with it, he
would.’

The man paused, reached for the bacon rasher that Squirm had failed to eat and placed the whole thing in his mouth. He continued only when he was done chewing.

‘That was when I told Pete that there were plenty of ways one could get away with murder. One just needed to know what to do.’

Those words seemed to fill the room with a cold, discomforting air.

‘This Pete guy looks back at me,’ the man continued, ‘and his next few words came out sounding like a challenge.’ ‘The Monster’ spoke with a deep sounding
voice. ‘“Oh, really? OK, big shot, if it’s so easy, why don’t you do it for me?”’

‘The Monster’ let those words hang in the air for a moment, giving the boy a chance to take in every syllable.

‘I said nothing in return, but this Pete guy didn’t want to let go, he kept on pushing. “I’m serious, man. You do the kid and I’ll pay you.”’ ‘The
Monster’ smiled at the boy. ‘Obviously Pete had no idea who he was talking to, so I looked him deep in the eye and asked him how much he was willing to pay me. Now, I must admit that I
thought that all that crap about getting rid of his boy was just the alcohol talking, that deep down he didn’t really mean it, but fuck, was I wrong? He meant every single word.’

Squirm kept his gaze on the man sitting at the head of the table, but his thoughts were elsewhere. In his mind he could picture the bar scene perfectly, and as he did so he felt something come
alive inside his stomach. All the food he’d just eaten threatened to come back up, but this time he didn’t care.

‘So once we’d established that neither of us were joking,’ ‘The Monster’ continued with his story, ‘we began to discuss a figure. Would you like to know what
that figure was, Squirm? Would you like to know how much your father paid me to take you away and kill you?’

Detective Sanders was right, Mathew Hade could be nothing more than one enormous coincidence. After all, neither Fresno PD nor Sacramento PD had managed to gather enough
evidence on him to substantiate any sort of arrest, despite all the suspicions. But then again, neither Hunter nor Garcia subscribed to the ‘coincidence’ fan club, especially when those
coincidences began to accumulate in the way that they had. The fan club that both detectives did subscribe to, however, was the ‘check absolutely everything’ one.

As soon as Sanders had left their office, Garcia asked Operations to compile a detailed profile on Mathew Hade, tracing him all the way back to his childhood. The file would take at least
twenty-four hours to compile, so at the moment all they had was the little information contained in the dossier Sanders had handed them. Not much, but definitely a start.

The address listed on Mathew Hade’s arrest sheet was somewhere in East Los Angeles, not that far from the bar in which he had gotten arrested for getting into a fight. The drive took
Hunter and Garcia a little over thirty minutes.

For the duration of the ride, Hunter kept Hade’s file open on his lap. He had read and reread the dossier twice over, and every now and then Hunter would flip back to Hade’s mugshot
and portrait, as if he needed to verify something against both photographs.

‘You know,’ Garcia said, as he exited Santa Ana Freeway, heading north. He couldn’t help but notice how often Hunter had checked Hade’s photographs. ‘There’s
something about him that bothers me too.’ He jabbed at the mugshot. ‘Something about the look in his eyes.’

‘Like what?’

‘I’m not sure, but just look at them. Look at that stare.’

Hunter did, for the zillionth time.

‘It’s a dead, cold stare. Full of anger and –’ Garcia had to pause and think of the best word to use – ‘Determination.’

Hunter nodded his agreement, but said nothing in return. Garcia didn’t need to explain what he meant. He and Hunter had come across that sort of stare more times than they would’ve
liked to. It was the kind of stare they both knew never to overlook.

Garcia glanced at Hunter from the corner of his eyes. ‘But that wasn’t what you were looking at, was it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘C’mon, Robert, you’ve been staring at those pictures as if you’re looking for Wally. Well, let me tell you, he’s not there. So what is it?’

Hunter regarded the photographs one more time. ‘Nothing, really. Just something the killer mentioned in his second note.’

This time Garcia didn’t glance at Hunter. He turned to look at him.

‘Shit!’ he said before quoting: ‘“If they looked straight into my eyes, would they see the truth inside them? Would they see what I have become, or would they
falter?”’

Garcia had also memorized the killer’s note.

‘I had forgotten about that,’ he admitted. ‘But now that you’ve mentioned it, and looking at those photos, one thing is for damn sure – those eyes can certainly
tell a story on their own.’

‘Well, these are just photographs,’ Hunter said, finally closing the file. ‘We’ll get a better idea once we meet him face to face . . .’

‘. . . and look into his eyes,’ Garcia finished.

Consciousness returned to Alison like waves breaking over a beach, but the pain was always there whether she was conscious or not. It was an odd kind of pain, a dull ache that
started on the left side of her neck and spread with the resolve of soldier ants to the rest of her body, but the worst pain came from her wrists – a burning soreness that felt like her hands
were being sawn off with a blunt hacksaw.

Her head was slumped forward with her chin almost touching her chest. During periods of consciousness Alison’s eyes would flicker and every now and then she could see red toenails resting
against the floor. It took her some time to realize that they were her own toenails. She had been stripped naked.

Alison had no idea where she was but it was somewhere dark and hot, with thick rubber foam sheets glued to the walls and metal pipes above her head.

Instinctively she tried moving, but that only served to sharpen the pain in her arms. Something dug deeper into her wrists, as if thin metal rods were being forced between her joints and then
twisted to one side. The pain quickly moved up her arm before settling on her shoulders. Right then, she truly believed that her arms were being slowly pulled from their sockets.

Trying to better understand what was happening to her, Alison lifted her chin, a movement that sent waves of nausea rippling through her stomach. Her eyes rolled back into her head and her lids
flickered again. She had to summon all of her strength not to fall back into the abyss of unconsciousness.

With great effort, Alison managed to focus on her arms, which were stretched high above her head. Only then did she finally understand why they hurt so much. Her wrists were shackled by a metal
chain speckled with blood. The chain had been looped over a thick metal pipe that ran across the ceiling. All of her weight was being supported by her thin arms and the chain was biting deeply into
her bloody wrists.

Time dragged interminably. She tried to remember what had happened. Why was she in this hellhole? But the incessant throbbing in her head made thinking an impossible task. Her throat had swollen
up so much that she had to practically force every breath into her lungs, and that had caused her mouth to go bone dry.

Braving the pain, Alison looked up once again and studied her restraints as best as she could. The chain around her wrists was fastened by a small, brass padlock. A bigger padlock kept the loop
around the ceiling pipe in place.

What the hell is going on? Where was she?

Nothing made sense.

Her eyes had gotten a little more used to the poor lighting, enabling her to look around her surroundings. The floor of the room she was in was made of concrete. It was covered in stains of
different sizes but Alison couldn’t tell what had created them – oil, water, blood?

Over to her left she saw a short flight of stairs leading up to a closed door. There were no windows in the room, which led her to believe that she was in some sort of sordid basement. To her
right, a little more hidden in the shadows, she could see part of a workshop table. Several tools and instruments were lying on its surface. She couldn’t make them all out but the ones she
saw froze her heart – a circular handheld sander, a pair of bolt cutters, pruning shears, a bullwhip and a selection of medical scalpels and forceps.

She tried to use her feet to push herself up and lessen the stress on her arms but they could barely touch the ground. All she could do was teeter on her toes. The effort produced the exact
opposite effect to the one she was looking for, straining her arms even further. The pain made her scream, but the rubber foam that lined the walls muffled the noise as if she were underwater.