The Night Stalker (33 page)

‘Where’s Carlos?’ Doctor Hove asked. ‘I thought he was waiting for you outside.’

Hunter didn’t reply, didn’t move, didn’t breathe. He just stood perfectly still, his eyes fixed on the brunette’s face. Her skin had turned a light shade of purple, indicating blood pooling. Like the two previous victims, the lower part of her face had swollen, due to the stitches to her mouth. But even so, there was something familiar about her. Hunter felt his skin burn as adrenalin ran through him.

‘Robert,’ the doctor called again.

Hunter’s eyes finally refocused on her.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Where’s Carlos? I thought he’d be with you.’

‘I’m here,’ Garcia said as he walked through the door behind Hunter. He looked a little paler than a moment ago. The strange, faint smell they’d picked up outside was more prominent in the room. Garcia brought his hand to his mouth and cringed as he fought to keep his stomach from erupting again.

Hunter approached the body in silence and crouched down next to it. Her face was starting to puff up. He didn’t need to touch her to know that her body was now in full rigor mortis. She’d been dead for at least twelve hours. Her eyes were closed, but everything about her features looked familiar. The nose, the cheekbone structure, the shape of the chin. Hunter moved closer still and had a look at her hands and fingers. Most of her fingernails were broken or chipped. Despite the purpling of the skin, at first glance Hunter could see no severe hematomas. There were no cuts or abrasions either. The swelling to her body wasn’t due to physical abuse.

Hunter moved around to the other side. She had a single-color tribal tattoo on her right shoulder.

Garcia was studying the body in silence from a standing position, his hand still covering his nose and mouth.

‘Do you know who she is?’ the doctor asked, noticing the way Hunter kept looking back at her face. ‘Is she another painter from your list of missing persons?’

Garcia shook his head. ‘I can’t place her. I know the face is a little swollen, but I don’t think she was on the lists.’

‘She’s not a painter,’ Hunter said, standing back up again. ‘She’s a musician.’

Garcia’s eyes returned to her face and he frowned. He’d had a very good look at Katia Kudrov’s photographs since Hunter told him about her. The woman on the floor didn’t look like Katia.

‘It’s not Katia Kudrov,’ Hunter said, reading what his partner was thinking.

Garcia frowned harder.

‘You know her?’ he asked.

‘She looks familiar. I’ve seen her before, I’m just not sure where.’

‘So how do you know she’s a musician?’ Brindle this time.

‘She’s got calluses on all the fingertips of her left hand, except her thumb, where the callus is on the first joint.’

Brindle looked hesitant.

‘String instrument musicians get those,’ Hunter explained. ‘The fingertip ones from pressing down on the strings, and the thumb joint one from sliding their hands up and down the instrument’s arm, like a violin, cello, guitar, bass, whatever.’

Doctor Hove nodded. ‘One of my Forensics technicians is learning to play the guitar. He’s always complaining his fingertips hurt like hell and keeps on picking off the loose skin.’

Hunter turned around and looked in the direction of the room he came in from. ‘She was found in this room?’

Brindle nodded. ‘At the exact location she is right now. Unlike the victim from Glassell Park, we didn’t need to turn her over to use the X-ray machine. She was found on her back. There’s no indication that anyone has touched the body either.’

Hunter looked around at the ceiling and walls for an instant. ‘What’s in that room?’ He nodded towards the next chamber.

‘Same as in here and the previous room,’ Doctor Hove replied. ‘More graffiti and garbage.’

Hunter moved closer and pulled the creaking door open. The forensic light was strong enough to illuminate most of the next chamber.

‘There’s no bed, or table, or counter, or anything? She was just left in here on the floor?’

‘No,’ Brindle clarified. His head tilted back a fraction and his eyes moved towards the ceiling. ‘Upstairs.’

Hunter peeked inside the third room again. The staircase was to the left of the door, hugging the wall.

‘I’ve got two agents up there working the scene,’ Brindle continued. ‘It looks like she was left on a wooden table.’ He knew what Hunter would ask next and nodded before the question came. ‘The table was lifted about a foot off the ground by wooden blocks, just like in Glassell Park.’

‘The words . . . ?’

Brindle nodded again. ‘
It’s inside you.
Painted onto the ceiling this time.’

Garcia had a quick look inside the next room. ‘So she managed to get off the table, come all the way down those stairs, and out here before finally dying?’

‘Before collapsing,’ Doctor Hove said, grabbing both detectives’ attention again. ‘Death took a while to come, but not before tremendous suffering.’

‘And she probably crawled her way down here,’ Brindle took over. ‘She must’ve been a very strong woman, physically and mentally. Her will to stay alive was nothing short of exceptional. The kind of pain she went through, most people wouldn’t have been able to move at all, never mind make it all the way down here.’

Hunter’s stare moved to the X-ray unit on the floor and the laptop screen. It seemed to be turned off.

Brindle and Doctor Hove followed his gaze. ‘Given what we know and the fact that the MO and signatures are the same,’ the doctor said, ‘I’m sure the killer used the same trigger mechanism he used before, but this time it didn’t trigger a fan-out knife or a bomb. Let me show you.’

Garcia cleared his throat uncomfortably while the doctor brought the laptop back to life.

‘We’d just finished capturing this when you arrived,’ Brindle explained.

As the image of the object left inside her body materialized on the screen, both detectives moved closer.

No one said a word.

Hunter and Garcia squinted at the same time, trying to make sense of what they were looking at.

‘No way,’ Hunter said. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

Brindle and Doctor Hove nodded in unison. ‘We think so.’

A couple more seconds and Garcia finally saw it, his eyes widening in disbelief.

The digital clock on Hunter’s microwave read 3:42 a.m. when he stepped back into his apartment and closed the door behind him. He wasted no time walking into every room and turning on all the lights. For now he just didn’t want any more darkness. He was tired, but for the first time he welcomed insomnia. He wasn’t sure he’d have the strength to deal with the nightmares he knew would come as soon as he closed his eyes.

After the body had been removed and taken to the morgue, Hunter and Garcia had spent a long time looking around the old depot, especially the room upstairs. It was a large chamber, which had probably been used as one of the main storage areas. Two of the walls were lined from floor to ceiling with long wooden shelves. A large carpenter’s workbench occupied the center of the floor. As Brindle had said, it had been raised about a foot off the ground by wooden blocks. There was so much garbage and debris around the place, Forensics could take weeks analyzing it, and maybe months to process it all. The exact same words as before – IT’S INSIDE YOU – had been spray-painted onto the ceiling, just like in the butcher’s shop. If there’d been any tire tracks on the soft ground outside, the rain did a good job of washing them away.

The homeless man who’d found the body was in his late sixties, frail and undernourished. He’d walked a long way, hoping to have a roof over his head for the night and escape the rain that he had smelled in the air an hour before it started. He never saw anyone around the old depot. Just the girl lying on the floor, naked, with her mouth stitched up like a ragdoll. He never touched her. He never even got close to her. And by the time Hunter talked to him, he still hadn’t stopped shaking.

It had been exactly seven days since they had found the body of Laura Mitchell. Kelly Jensen’s body was discovered three days after that, and now they had a new unidentified female victim. Counting Doctor Winston and the young Forensics assistant who died in the explosion in the autopsy room, they had five victims in one week. Hunter knew that while their investigation was moving at a snail’s pace, the killer was sailing with the wind.

In the kitchen, Hunter poured himself a glass of water and drank it down in large gulps, as if trying to put out a fire somewhere inside him. He was sweating as if he’d just run five miles. He reached for his cell phone and dialed Whitney Myers’ number before walking over to his living room window. The rain had only stopped ten minutes before. The sky was dark and dull. Not a single star.

‘Hello . . .’ Myers answered after a single ring.

‘It’s not her . . .’ His voice was heavy. ‘It’s not Katia.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive.’

An uneasy pause.

‘Do you know who she is?’ Myers pushed. ‘Is she on the MP list?’

‘No, she’s not on the list. But she looks familiar.’

‘Familiar? In what way?’

‘I think I’ve seen her before. I just can’t think where.’

‘Police environment . . . ?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Court of law . . . ? Witness . . . ? Victim . . . ?’

‘No, somewhere else.’

‘A bar . . . ?’

‘I don’t know.’ Hunter ran his hand through his hair and let his fingertips rest at the back of his neck. Unconsciously they traced the contour of his ugly scar. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met her or seen her on the streets or in a bar or anywhere like that. I think I’ve seen a picture of her. Maybe in a magazine or an advertisement . . .’

‘She’s that famous?’

‘I don’t know. I might be wrong. I’m wracking my brain here trying to remember, but I’ve got nothing, and I’m dead tired.’

Myers said nothing.

Hunter moved away from the window and started pacing his living room.

‘If you get me a photo of her, maybe I can help,’ Myers offered.

‘No one will recognize her from the crime-scene photos. She’s been dead for over twelve hours. The killer could’ve dumped her there yesterday, or even the day before. We were lucky that a homeless drifter wanted to use the place for shelter tonight, or else she could’ve been decomposing by the time we got to her.’ Hunter paused by his bookcase, absentmindedly browsing through the titles. His eyes stopped as he reached the fifth book on the top shelf. ‘Shit!’

‘What? What happened?’

Hunter ran his hand over the spine of the book.

‘I know where I’ve seen her before.’

Hunter had to wait until 7:30 a.m. to find out for certain who the latest victim was. The central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library on West 5th Street could easily be called Hunter’s home away from home, he spent so much time in there. Its opening time was 10:00 a.m., but he knew most of the staff, and he knew that one of them in particular, Maria Torres from Archives, was always there very early.

Hunter was right. He’d seen the victim’s face before. He’d passed her picture many times as he walked through the Arts, Music and Recreation department on the library’s second floor. One of her CDs,
Fingerwalking,
was featured on the middle shelf of the ‘we recommend’ display in the jazz guitar section. The display faced the main walkway. Its cover was a black-and-white close-up of her face.

From the library, Hunter made it to the LA morgue twenty minutes after Doctor Hove had called him saying she was done with the autopsy. Garcia was already there.

The doctor looked more than exhausted. No amount of make-up could disguise the black circles under her eyes, and they looked as if they’d sunken deeper into her skull. Her skin looked tired, with the pallor of someone who hadn’t seen the sun in months. Her shoulders were hunched forward, as if she was having trouble carrying the invisible weight on them.

‘I guess none of us had much sleep,’ Garcia said, noticing Hunter’s heavy-looking eyelids as he joined them by the entrance to the autopsy room. ‘I tried you at home . . .’

Hunter nodded. ‘I was in the library.’

Garcia pulled a face and checked his watch. ‘Ran out of books at home?’

‘I knew I’d seen the victim before,’ Hunter said. ‘Her name is Jessica Black.’ He pulled a CD case from his pocket.

Garcia and Doctor Hove took turns looking at the cover.

‘There’s another picture inside,’ Hunter said.

The doctor pulled the cover booklet out and flipped it open. Inside there was a full body picture of Jessica. She was standing with her back against a brick wall. Her guitar resting against it by her side. She had on a sleeveless black shirt, blue jeans and black cowboy boots. The tattoo on her right shoulder was clearly visible. Doctor Hove didn’t need to check it again. She knew it was exactly the same tattoo the victim on her autopsy table had on her shoulder. She’d looked at it for long enough.