The Death Sculptor (23 page)

The waitress returned with Stokes’s breakfast. ‘Are you sure I can’t get you anything?’ she asked Hunter.

‘No thanks, I’m fine.’

‘OK, let me know if you change your mind.’ The waitress gave Hunter a charming wink before turning on the balls of her feet and walking away again.

Hunter gently scratched the bullet-wound scar on his right triceps. Though it was over two years old, sometimes it still itched like mad. ‘Whoever this killer is,’ he said, ‘he had a lot of hate towards Nashorn. And that’s why I’m here. You worked with him. You were part of the same division. Can you think back to any of the cases you investigated together, anyone who comes to mind who you think would be capable of something like this?’

Stokes cut a piece off his Spanish omelet and held it as if it were a slice of pizza. ‘After we talked on the phone last night, I knew that question would be coming my way. I gave it some thought. And the only motherfucker I can think of is Raul Escobedo.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Serial rapist. Convicted for attacking three women in Lynwood Park and Paramount in the space of eight months. The truth is, we think he attacked and raped closer to ten victims, but only three testified. Sadistic fucker too. Liked to rough ’em up real good before doing his business. We caught him because he made a mistake without knowing it.’

‘Which was?’ Hunter’s interest grew.

‘You see, Escobedo was born right here in LA, but his parents were from a small state in Mexico called Colima.’

‘Home to the Colima volcano.’

‘That’s right. Did you know that already?’

Hunter nodded.

‘Huh, I had to look that up. Anyway, Escobedo’s parents immigrated to the US before his mother became pregnant with him. They came from a small town called Santa Inés. Though Escobedo grew up in Paramount, in his house they only spoke Spanish. His problem was, people from Santa Inés speak with a distinct accent. I can’t tell the difference, but there you go.’ Stokes had another bite of his omelet. ‘He had never been to his parent’s hometown, but Escobedo picked up the Santa Inés accent like a native. And that’s what fucked him. His mistake was he liked to talk dirty while raping his victims. The last woman he raped was from Las Conchas, which is the next town along from Santa Inés.’

‘She recognized his accent,’ Hunter said.

‘She did better than that.’ Stokes chuckled. ‘Escobedo used to work for the US postal service as a cashier. Two weeks after the attack, this last victim was staying with a friend in South Gate. It was the week before Mother’s Day in Mexico, so they went down to their local post office to post a card to her friend’s mother. Lo and behold, Escobedo was the one who served them. As soon as the woman heard his voice, she started shivering and all, but she did good. She didn’t lose her cool. Instead of panicking and scaring him away, she left the post office, found a payphone, and got back to us. We put a sting operation on him and
boom
– three weeks later we caught him red-handed, just about to rape someone else. Andy and I were the detectives who arrested him.’ Stokes returned to his coffee and Hunter sensed his hesitation. There was something he wasn’t telling him.

‘What happened with the arrest?’

Stokes put down the Spanish omelet slice he was holding, brought a napkin to his mouth and assessed Hunter from across the table. ‘From cop to cop?’

Hunter gave Stokes a confident nod. ‘From cop to cop.’

‘Well, we roughed him up a little when we caught him.’

‘Roughed him up?’

‘You know how it is, man. When everything went down, adrenalin was pumping like bad blood. Andy got to him first. Escobedo had dragged this 18-year-old girl into a disused Salvation Army building in Lynwood. Andy always had a temper on him, and his fuse . . .’ Stokes twisted his mouth to one side and followed the movement with his head. ‘Simply non-existent. He used to get shit from our captain all the time for losing his head. He wasn’t exactly a loose cannon, but he was pretty borderline, you know what I’m saying? When he got to the building, Escobedo had already ripped the girl’s blouse off and beat her up pretty good. That was the cue for Andy to transform himself into the Incredible Punching Man, fuck being a cop, you know what I mean?’

Hunter didn’t reply, and silence took over for several seconds.

‘The truth is . . .’ Stokes finally carried on, ‘. . . the bastard deserved every punch he got. Andy made a mess of his face.’

Hunter sipped his coffee calmly. ‘So where’s he now? Where’s Escobedo?’

‘I have no idea. This all happened twelve years ago. Escobedo got ten inside and served every second of it. The last I heard, he was released two years ago.’

Something like an electric charge ran up Hunter’s spine.

‘And I’ll tell you right now,’ Stokes moved on, ‘if that sack of shit is the one who took Andy down then . . .’

‘Where did he go?’ Hunter interrupted Stokes, scooting up to the edge of his seat.

‘What?’ Stokes squinted and pushed back a strand of floppy hair off his forehead.

‘Escobedo, which prison did he go to?’

‘The state prison in Los Angeles County.’

‘In Lancaster?’

‘That’s right.’

Same prison as Ken Sands
, Hunter thought.

‘Seriously, if Escobedo did this, I . . .’

‘You’re not going to do anything,’ Hunter cut him off again. The last thing he wanted was for Stokes to leave that café thinking that he had a tip on LA’s newest cop killer. That bogus information would leak like water through a sieve, and by lunchtime Hunter would have half of the cops in the city out on a vendetta hunt. He needed to dissuade Stokes. ‘Look, Seb, if Escobedo is the only guy you can think of, then we’ll look into him, but at the moment he isn’t even a suspect. He’s just a name on a list. We have nothing to link him to the crime scene – no fingerprints, no DNA, no fibers found, no witnesses. We don’t even know where he was the day Nashorn was murdered, or if he possesses the skills to do what was done.’ Hunter allowed a couple of seconds for his words to sink in. ‘You’re a good detective. I read your file. You know exactly how investigations work. If a rumor starts circulating now, this whole investigation will be jeopardized. And when that happens, it gives guilty people a chance to walk. You know that.’

‘This motherfucker ain’t walking.’

‘You’re right, no he isn’t. And if Escobedo is our guy, I’ll get him.’

The conviction in Hunter’s voice softened the hard look in Stokes’s eyes.

Hunter placed a card on the table and pushed it over towards Stokes. ‘If you think of anyone else other than Escobedo, give me a call.’ He stopped as he stood up. ‘And listen, humor me and stay alert, OK? This guy is smarter than your average perp.’

Stokes smiled. ‘And as I said . . .’ he patted the bulge under his suit jacket, ‘. . . let him come.’

Garcia had just finished reading the files Alice had given him when Hunter pushed the office door open. The drive back from the Grub café to the PAB took him longer than he expected.

‘You’ve gotta read this,’ Garcia said, even before Hunter got to his desk.

‘What is it?’

‘Alfredo Ortega and Ken Sands’s prison files and visitation records.’

Hunter frowned and looked at Alice, who was pouring herself a cup of coffee.

‘The captain said get a move on; I got a move on,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘You hacked into the California prison-system database?’

Alice gave him an almost imperceptible shrug.

‘What?’ Garcia chuckled at the question. ‘You said that these reports were one of the perks of having the DA, the Mayor of Los Angeles, and the Chief of Police on our side.’

Alice gave him a sideways look followed by a smile. ‘I lied. I’m sorry. I didn’t know how you would react to the fact that I broke protocol. Some cops are very strict in their ways.’

Garcia smiled back. ‘Not in this office.’

‘OK then, what have we got?’ Hunter asked Garcia.

Garcia flipped back a few pages on the first file. Alfredo Ortega went to prison eleven years before Ken Sands, who, as Alice told us yesterday, was named by Ortega as his next of kin. During those eleven years between Ortega going to prison and Sands getting arrested, Ken Sands visited Alfredo Ortega no less than thirty-three times.’

Hunter leaned back against the front edge of his desk. ‘Three times a year.’

‘Three times a year,’ Garcia repeated, nodding. ‘Because of the heinous nature of Ortega’s crime, he was what is called a “Condemned Grade B” prisoner, and that means that they may only receive non-contact visits.’

‘All “Condemned” visits take place in a secured booth and involve the prisoner being escorted in handcuffs,’ Alice explained.

‘Visits to death-row inmates are restricted to availability; usually one visit every three to five months,’ Garcia carried on. ‘They can last from one to two hours. We have Ortega’s entire visitation history here. Every time Sands visited him, he stayed for the maximum duration.’

‘OK, anyone else visited Ortega?’ Hunter asked.

‘When it got closer to Ortega’s execution date, then he got the usual visitors – reporters, members of capital-punishment abolishment groups, someone wanting to write a book about him, the prison priest . . . you know how it goes.’ Garcia flipped another page on the report. ‘But during his first eleven years of incarceration, Sands was his only visitor. Not a single other soul.’ Garcia closed the file and handed it to Hunter.

‘We could’ve guessed Sands would have visited Ortega,’ Hunter said, leafing through the pages. ‘From Alice’s research we knew they were like brothers, so that was expected. Is that all we got?’

‘Ortega’s visitation files simply serve to confirm that Sands kept in contact with him for all those years,’ Alice said from the corner of the room, sipping her coffee. ‘Visitations are supervised, but the conversations are private. They could’ve talked about anything. And no, that’s not all we got.’ She moved her gaze from Hunter to Garcia as if to say ‘show him’.

Garcia reached for the second file and flipped it open.

‘This is Ken Sands’s prison file,’ he explained. ‘And here is where it gets a lot more interesting.’

Garcia pulled a new A4 report sheet out of the second folder and handed it to Hunter.

‘Sands’s prison-visitation file is pretty unimpressive. He received four visits a year during the first six years of his jail sentence, all by the same person.’

Hunter checked the report. ‘His mother.’

‘That’s right. His father never visited him, but that isn’t surprising given what their relationship was like. During the remaining three and a half years of his prison term, Sands had no visitors whatsoever.’

‘Not a very popular guy, huh?’

‘Not really. His only real friend was Ortega, and he was in San Quentin.’

‘Cellmates?’ Hunter asked.

‘Yep, a hard-as-nails guy called Guri Krasniqi,’ Alice replied.

‘Albanian, kind of a big ringleader,’ Hunter said. ‘I’ve heard of him.’

‘That’s him, all right.’

Garcia chuckled. ‘Well, we have a better chance of stepping on unicorn shit on our way out of the office than getting an Albanian crime lord talking.’

Despite the joke, Hunter knew Garcia was right.

‘Sands’s life received a double hit during his sixth year of incarceration,’ Alice said. ‘First, Ortega’s sentence was carried out and he was executed after sixteen years on death row – lethal injection. Sixth months later, Sands’s mother passed away from a brain aneurysm. That’s why the visits stopped. He was allowed to go to her funeral under a heavy guard escort. There were only ten people there. He didn’t say a word to his father. And apparently he showed no emotions. Not a single tear.’

Hunter wasn’t surprised. Ken Sands was known as a
tough guy
, and to tough guys, pride is everything. He would never have given his father, or his guard escorts, the pleasure of seeing him crying or hurting, even if it was over his dead mother. If he cried, he did it on his own, back in his prison cell.

Garcia stood up and moved to the center of the room. ‘OK, all that’s very interesting, but not as interesting as this next part.’ He nodded at the report in his hands. ‘You do know that the state penitentiary, as a rehabilitation institution, provides its inmates with courses, apprenticeships and work experience when possible, right? They call it
educational/vocational programming
, and according to their mission statement, it’s designed to encourage productivity, inmate responsibility and self-improvement. It never quite works that way, though.’

‘OK.’ Hunter folded his arms.

‘Some inmates can also, by request, and if approved, take a correspondence course. Several US universities have joined this program, offering inmates a vast choice of higher-level degrees.’

‘Sands took one of those courses,’ Hunter deducted.

‘He took two, achieving two university degrees while inside.’

Hunter’s eyebrows lifted.

‘Sands obtained a degree in psychology from the College of Arts and Sciences, part of the American University in Washington DC, and . . .’ Garcia stole a peek at Alice, holding the suspense, ‘a minor degree in Nursing and Patient Care from the University of Massachusetts. No practical experience with patients is needed to graduate, but the course would’ve allowed him to request medical study books. Books that weren’t available in the prison library.’

Hunter felt a tingle run through him.

‘Remember . . .’ Alice asked, ‘. . . when I said that Sands’s school grades were much better than one would expect from such a disruptive student?’

‘Yeah.’

‘He aced both courses. Honorable mention at the conclusion of his psychology degree, and outstanding grades throughout his nursing degree.’ She started fidgeting with the silver charms bracelet on her right wrist. ‘So if it’s medical knowledge we’re looking for, Sands sure as hell fits the bill.’ Alice sipped her coffee while holding Hunter’s stare. ‘But that still ain’t all.’

Hunter questioned Garcia with a look.

‘Spare time in prison . . .’ Garcia read on, returning to his desk, ‘. . . is very rarely spent at an inmates’ own leisure. They are all encouraged to do something useful with their time, like reading, painting or whatever. Several –’ Garcia made quotation marks in the air with his fingers – ‘“personality-enhancing activities” are organized by the California State Prison in Lancaster. Sands read a lot, checking books out of the library on a regular basis.’