The Night Stalker (7 page)

The intercom clicked off and a minute later the iron gates parted.

The driveway was flanked by millimeter-perfect trimmed hedges. Hunter parked his rusted Buick Lesabre next to a pearly white Lamborghini Gallardo, just in front of a six-car garage. He climbed up the steps to the main house, and as he reached the top, the door was opened by a six-foot-three, two-hundred-and-seventy-pound muscle-bound black man. The man frowned at Hunter’s car.

‘It’s an American classic,’ Hunter retorted.

Not even a ghost of a smile from the muscleman.

‘Please, follow me.’

The interior of the house was just as impressive as the outside. Twelve-feet-high ceilings, designer furniture and walls covered with oil paintings – some of them Dutch, a few of them French, all of them valuable.

As Hunter crossed the Italian-marbled floor in the living area, he noticed a jaw-droppingly beautiful black woman in a bright yellow bikini sitting among overstuffed cushions. She lifted her eyes from the glossy magazine in her hands and gave Hunter a warm smile. He politely nodded back and smiled internally.
Even rock stars and sports
superstars don’t have it this good.

The muscleman guided Hunter through a pair of sliding glass doors and out to the backyard and pool area. Four young and attractive topless women were by the edge of the pool, giggling and splashing water at each other. Three other musclemen in suits were strategically positioned around the yard. D-King was sitting at one of four artfully weathered teak tables at the poolside, under a white umbrella. His blue silk shirt was unbuttoned, revealing a muscular torso adorned with chains and diamonds. The blonde woman sitting with him was also topless. A single white gold loop ring pierced her left nipple.

‘Detective Robert Hunter?’ D-King said with a smile but without getting up. ‘Yo, wuz up, dawg? Now that’s a motherfucking surprise. How long has it been, three years?’ He indicated the chair opposite his.

Hunter took it. ‘Something like that.’ He nodded at the blonde woman, who replied with a wink.

‘Can I offer you something, Detective?’ D-King said, tilting his head towards his blonde friend. ‘Lisa here can mix you the most amazing cocktail.’

Hunter’s eyes stole a peek at Lisa, who smiled naughtily. ‘Anything you like.’

Hunter shook his head. ‘I’m fine for now, thanks.’

‘OK,’ D-King cut in, ‘so now that I know you’re not here for the company or the drinks, what can I do for you, Detective?’

Hunter’s eyes subtly moved to Lisa and then back to D-King. He got the hint.

‘Lisa, why don’t you go play with the other girls?’ He didn’t phrase it as a request. She undid the sarong around her waist and stood up. Only then Hunter realized that she was fully naked. Not a hint of embarrassment crossed her face as she paused in front of him for a long moment. Her body was as close to perfection as Hunter had ever seen. Lisa slowly turned and walked away, her hips swinging as if she were on a catwalk. The tattoo on her lower back read –
I know you’re looking.

‘That’s right, baby, dance it up,’ D-King called out before turning to Hunter. ‘Admit it, Detective,’ he teased, ‘I know how to live, don’t I? Hugh Heffner and Larry Flynt have got shit on me.
Playboy
and
Hustler
can kiss my black ass all the way to Mississippi. My girls are hotter.’

‘What do you know about homemade explosive devices?’

The smile vanished from D-King’s lips. ‘I know they go bang.’

Hunter kept a poker face.

‘Officially, notta thing.’

‘And unofficially?’

D-King scratched the small scar above his left eyebrow with his pinky while scrutinizing Hunter. ‘If you’re here unofficially, why don’t you have a drink?’

‘I’m not thirsty.’

They regarded each other for a few more seconds.

‘First time we met you bullshitted for a while before coming clean. I hope we’re past that crap. What’s this really about, Detective?’

Hunter leaned forward and placed a close-up photograph of the victim’s face on the table in front of him, rotating it around to face D-King.

‘Oh, hell no, dawg.’ He cringed and moved back. ‘Last time you showed me a picture of a dead woman, all fucking hell broke loose.’

‘Do you know who she is?’

‘And that’s exactly the question that started it all.’ His eyes moved back to the picture, and involuntarily D-King rubbed his lips with the tips of his fingers. ‘Oh damn. That’s some nasty shiiit. Some motherfucker stitched her mouth shut?’

‘Do you know who she is?’ Hunter asked again.

‘She ain’t none of my girls if that’s what you’re asking,’ he replied after a brief pause.

‘Could she have been on the game?’

‘Not looking like that.’ Instantly D-King’s hands came up in surrender. ‘Sorry, bad joke. Anybody could be on the game these days. She looks to have been attractive enough. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before though.’ He tried to read Hunter’s expressionless face and failed. ‘The problem is that nowadays a lot of girls are trying to go it alone, creating websites and all, doing their own thang, you know what I’m saying? It’s hard to be sure. But if she was a top working girl in the Hollywood area, I’d know.’

The other four women who were playing by the edge of the pool decided to join Lisa, who was now sitting on a floating chair sipping a colorful drink.

D-King’s eyes moved down to the picture again. ‘This is too fucking nasty, man. And knowing the kind of shit you get involved with, I’m sure whoever did this did it while she was still alive, right?’

‘Could this have been done by a gang?’ Hunter asked. ‘Or a pimp?’

D-King’s face clouded over. Helping the police was never part of his agenda. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he replied coldly.

‘C’mon, D-King, look at her.’ Hunter tapped the photograph on the table, but kept a steady voice. He was aware all three musclemen around the yard had their eyes on him. ‘Her mouth wasn’t the only part of her body that was stitched shut. Whoever did this did a real nasty job on her. And you were right. It was done while she was still alive.’

D-King shifted in his seat. Violence against women had a way of lighting a fuse inside him. His mother had been beaten to death by his own drunken father while he was locked in the closet. He was ten. D-King never forgot her screams and pleas for mercy. He had never forgotten the sound of her bones breaking as his father repeatedly hit her, over and over again. He heard those sounds almost every night in his dreams.

D-King sat back and looked at his fingernails, flicking the end of each one with his thumb. ‘You mean could this be some sort of trademark retaliation?’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows? Possibly. If she belonged to a homeboy and she either stole from him or decided to fuck around, I wouldn’t be surprised. Some people don’t look kindly at being fucked with. Examples have to be made, do you feel me? This could even be considered mild by some standards.’ He paused and looked at the picture again. ‘But if this is payback for her being somebody’s woman and getting dirty somewhere else, you can expect to get another body – the motherfucker she was doing it with. This kind of revenge comes in twos, Detective.’ He pushed the photo back towards Hunter. ‘What does this have to do with homemade explosive devices?’

‘More than it looks.’

D-King chuckled. ‘You never give anything away, do you?’ He had a sip of the dark green colored drink in front of him. ‘Actually, if last time we saw each other is anything to go by, I don’t really fucking wanna know what this is all about.’ He regarded Hunter like a poker player about to bet his whole stash before tapping the picture with his index finger. ‘But this is fucking offensive, man, and I owe you one anyway. Let me look into it and I’ll get back to you.’

Garcia turned on the fan and stood in front of it for a minute before going back to his desk. He couldn’t even imagine how hot that room would be during summer.

He’d been going over the crime-scene pictures in his computer, enhancing and scrutinizing them, looking for anything they could use to point them in the right direction as to the victim’s identity. So far, nothing. No tattoos or surgery scars. The moles and freckles he could see on her arms, stomach, neck and cleavage were too common and not prominent enough to really be classed as identifying marks. As far as he could tell, she was a natural brunette and her breasts were her own.

Her arms showed no signs of needle marks and her frame wasn’t skinny and wasted. If she was a junkie, she certainly didn’t look like one. Despite the small patches on her cheeks that carried that old-person’s-skin look Hunter had mentioned, the victim couldn’t have been any older than thirty-three, at a stretch. If the old saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul was true, then her soul was scared beyond belief when she died.

Garcia leaned forward, placed his elbows on his desk and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He reached for his coffee cup, but it had long gone cold. Before he could pour himself a new one, a clicking sound announcing the arrival of a new email came from his computer. The Missing Persons files he’d requested. They’d promised to send them over in forty-five minutes. That had been two hours ago.

Garcia read the email and let out a high-pitched whistle. Fifty-two brunette Caucasian women with hazel eyes, aged between twenty-seven and thirty-three, and somewhere between five five and five eight in height had been reported missing in the past two weeks. He unzipped the attachment containing all the files and started printing them out, first the photographs, then their personal information sheets.

He poured himself a new cup of coffee and gathered all the printouts into one pile. The photos would have been brought into the Missing Persons Unit by the person who reported them as missing. Even though Missing Persons would have asked for a recent picture, Garcia knew that some of those photographs could be over a year old, sometimes more. He’d have to allow for subtle changes in appearance such as hair length and style, and fullness of the face due to weight loss or gain.

The main problem Garcia faced was that he had only the close-up photo of the victim, the one from the crime scene, to compare them to. The swelling on the victim’s lips together with the thick black threaded stitches forcing them tightly together deformed the bottom half of her face. Matching any of the photographs sent from Missing Persons to that one would be a long and laborious task.

An hour later Garcia had reduced the possible matches from fifty-two to twelve, but his eyes were getting tired, and the more he looked at the pictures, the fewer distinguishing features he saw.

He spread the twelve printouts out on his desk, creating three lines of four with their respective information sheets next to them. The photos were all of reasonable quality. There were six face portraits, passport-style; three where the subject had been cropped from a group picture; one showed a wet-haired brunette sitting on a jet ski; another smiling brunette was by the pool; and the last picture showed a woman at a dinner table holding a glass of champagne.

Garcia was about to start the whole process again when Hunter walked through the door and saw him hunched over his desk, staring intensely at the group of neatly arranged photographs.

‘Are those from Missing Persons?’ Hunter asked.

Garcia nodded.

‘Anything?’

‘Well, I started with fifty-two possibilities and have been comparing them to our crime-scene photos for over an hour now. The swelling on our victim’s face makes things a lot harder. I’m now down to these,’ he nodded at the twelve photos on his desk, ‘but my eyes are starting to play tricks on me. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to look for any more.’

Hunter stood in front of Garcia’s desk and allowed his eyes to jump from photo to photo, spending several seconds on each one. A moment later his gaze settled on the facial close-up of the unidentified victim. He moved them all nearer together, making a new photo group before reaching for a blank sheet of paper.

‘Every face can be looked at in several ways,’ Hunter said, placing the sheet of paper over the first photo at the top of the group, covering two-thirds of it. ‘That’s how composite sketches are created. Individual characteristics added together one by one.’

Garcia moved closer.

‘The shape of the head and ears, the shape of the eyebrows, eyes and nose, the mouth, the jaw line, the chin . . .’ As he mentioned each facial feature, Hunter used the paper sheet to cover all the other ones. ‘We can very crudely use the same principle here.’

A few minutes later they had discarded another eight photographs.

‘I’d say our victim could be any of these four,’ Hunter said finally. ‘They share all the same physical features – oval face, small nose, almond-shaped eyes, arched eyebrows, prominent cheekbones . . . the same as our victim.’

Garcia agreed with a nod.

Hunter checked the personal fact sheets Garcia had stapled to the back of each picture. They’d all been reported missing over a week ago. Their home and work addresses were scattered all over town. At first glance there seemed to be no other similarities between the four women other than their looks.

Hunter glanced at his watch. ‘We’ve gotta check them all out today.’