One by One (39 page)

The woman fought the wave of nausea that came over her and looked down at the scissors.

‘I am giving you a
choice.
Do this and you are free. Don’t do it and . . .’ He left the mystery of the consequences at the mercy of her already terrified imagination.

She took a mouth full of air, but this time courage did not come with it.

‘Do it,’ he said firmly.

Her gaze moved to her left hand, still firmly tied to the chair.

‘Do it. That’s the price of your freedom.’

Hesitantly she spread the fingers on her left hand wide.

‘That’s it. Do it. Show me you are strong.’

She placed the scissors’ blades around her trembling left pinky finger.

‘That’s it. They are laser-sharp. Just squeeze the handles hard and fast and the blades will do the rest.’

She couldn’t move.

‘CUT YOUR FINGERS OFF.’ His yell was so loud and surprising, she wet herself. The sound of his voice reverberated against the walls and ceiling for what seemed like an eternity.

Tears started coming down the woman’s cheeks. The blades were so sharp that only brushing against them was enough to produce a cut. She saw a small drop of blood color the skin around her finger.

‘DO IT.’ Another loud and angry yell.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

The man smiled.

The woman threw the scissors on the floor.

‘I can’t, I just can’t.’ She brought her shaking right hand to her face, sobbing. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t.’

The man laughed. ‘You thought that I wanted to rape you, didn’t you?’ he asked. He didn’t require a reply. ‘And that’s why you said that you would do anything I wanted you to. You figured that all you had to do was lay back and spread your legs. Put up with this monster entering you for a few minutes.’ He faintly came into view again. ‘If I wanted to rape you, what makes you think I needed your permission or cooperation for it?’

The woman didn’t answer. Her sobs became more intense.

‘Relax,’ he said. ‘I have no intention of raping you.’

In her mind she was filled with agony and embarrassment, exposed and lost.

‘Wha . . . What are you going to do to me?’ The little girl inside her spoke again.

The man disappeared back into the shadows. His reply came in a whisper to her right ear. ‘I’m going to kill you.’

She gasped for air. Her body now convulsing with fear.

The man laughed. ‘If that scares you,’ he paused for effect, ‘wait until you find out how I’m going to do it.’

Ninety-Four

The rain came in spurts as the evening began, falling heavily, with thunder blows and lightning strikes out over the ocean, before tapering off into a steady, irritating drizzle. As the storm passed, the temperature dropped a few degrees, giving the night an uncomfortable chill that seemed totally out of place in a city like Los Angeles.

By the end of the afternoon, Hunter and Garcia had received the phone records they had requested for Christina Stevenson and Ethan Walsh. The records went back only three months, and neither of the two victims had called the other during that period. At least not via their cellphones. Hunter was forced to request a new batch of phone records, this time going back a whole year, but it would be at least another day before they had those.

Instead of driving home at the end of the day and spend another night struggling with his thoughts and fighting insomnia, Hunter decided to revisit Christina Stevenson’s house. He knew for sure that Christina had been abducted from inside her bedroom, and abduction locations, just like crime scenes, always had more to offer than simple physical evidence. Hunter had a gift when it came to understanding them, and maybe, being there alone, away from any distractions, would help him see something he’d missed.

He spent almost two hours in her house, most of it inside her bedroom. He tried to imagine what had happened that night, and role-played along with the images that came to him.

He positioned himself behind the flowery curtain in Christina’s bedroom, exactly where he figured the killer had hid. Hunter knew that the killer hadn’t attacked Christina immediately as she entered the room; her clothes scattered around the floor, together with the champagne flute and bottle, told him that. She was drinking alone. Judging by how expensive a bottle of Dom Ruinart was, Christina must’ve been celebrating something special. Probably her article making the front cover of the entertainment supplement that Sunday.

The killer took his time watching her, either waiting for the perfect moment to strike or enjoying the show as she undressed. Either way, the moment came when she squeezed herself under her bed to retrieve her watch, Hunter guessed. He had a feeling that while Christina was under the bed, she had spotted the killer’s shoes as he hid behind the curtain. Then everything happened in a flash. Within a minute she had been dragged out from under the bed and subdued. The killer most certainly had a syringe with the appropriate dosage of phenoperidine ready. Christina had fought as hard as she could, kicking and screaming. Signs of her struggle were all over the room, but her attacker was strong, and the drug stronger.

Despite reliving the entire scene in his mind, and meticulously moving about the house, Hunter picked up no new clues, nothing that answered any of the many questions screaming at him from inside his head.

After leaving Christina’s place, he sat in his car for a long while, wondering what to do next, wondering if they would be able to move even an inch closer to this killer before he killed again. And Hunter was certain he would kill again.

He checked his watch and decided that he still wasn’t ready to go home yet. Instead, he drove around the city aimlessly, looking for nothing, heading nowhere. In West Hollywood the bright neon lights and the busy streets made him feel a little more alive. It was always good to see people smiling, laughing and enjoying life.

From there he drove east for a while, past Echo Lake and the concrete bulk that was the Dodgers’ stadium, before heading south through central Los Angeles. All of a sudden, Hunter had an urge to go to the beach, see the ocean, maybe walk barefoot on the sand. He loved the sea breeze at night. It reminded him of his parents and of when he was a little kid. A happier time, perhaps. He turned west and headed toward Santa Monica Beach, deciding to avoid the freeways. For once, he wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere.

He passed the turn for the 4th Street Bridge and carried on down South Mission Road. Those streets were as familiar to him as the inside of his apartment, and he took no notice of any street signs, specially the large one overhead.

Then it happened, similar to a wayward domino that has suddenly lost its balance, tumbling against all the other pieces and triggering a great linked chain reaction. First, his subconscious registered it. Then, about a second later, as his subconscious mind communicated with his conscious one, a warning bell sounded inside Hunter’s head. It took just another millisecond for his brain to send a signal down to the muscles in his body via his nervous system. Adrenaline rushed through him like a tidal wave, and Hunter finally slammed on the brakes, hard. His old Buick LeSabre swerved left before coming to an abrupt stop in the middle of the road. He was lucky that there wasn’t another vehicle right behind him.

Hunter shot out of the car like a bullet. His breath catching on his throat as his eyes focused on the large green road sign he’d just driven under. His mind was working at a thousand miles per hour, searching for memories, trying to slot them into place. As he started recalling, his mind segmented the memory into pictures, and he felt a shiver gradually climb up his spine.

‘It can’t be this,’ he said to no one, but his words had little meaning, because the more he remembered, the more certain he was.

All the clues the killer had thrown at them had been real.

Ninety-Five

Hunter drove straight back to his office in the PAB and immediately fired up his computer. The first thing he noticed after it booted up was that he had received an email from Pamela Hays, Christina Stevenson’s editor at the
LA Times
entertainment desk. Attached was a zip file – Christina’s crime articles he had requested earlier.

‘Great!’ Hunter whispered before setting those aside for the time being, knowing that he would soon be coming back to them.

His priority at that moment was to find an old incident file. He couldn’t remember the victim’s name, or the exact date, but he was certain of the year – that would be good enough. He called up the internal search engine for the LAPD Incidents Database, entered the year he could remember, the incident type and the officer’s name. The single result came back in about 0.23 seconds.

‘Bingo!’ Hunter smiled.

He clicked on the link and read through the incident report. Adrenaline and excitement pumped through his veins.

Hunter went back to Pamela Hays’ email and uncompressed the attached archive. There were two hundred and fifty-nine files in total, but just like the first articles archive he had received a few days ago, these also weren’t searchable text files. They were scanned images of the newspaper pages with the published articles. No file titles, just published dates, but this time Hunter didn’t have to read them all. He now knew the exact date he was looking for. The incident file gave him that. He quickly found the specific article and double clicked the image.

It wasn’t a very long piece, only around five hundred words or so. The article also contained four photographs. Three of them were of poor quality; the fourth was a good-quality portrait, and absolutely shocking. The article had featured on the second page of the
LA Times
crime supplement on a Thursday morning, almost two and a half years ago.

The title of the article alone made Hunter pause for breath, forcing him to reread it a couple of times. Things were starting to make a dreadful kind of sense.

A side note at the end of the article revealed how the newspaper had acquired the three poor-quality photographs that accompanied the piece, and Hunter choked for the second time.

‘No way,’ he said out loud in the quiet of the room. The room echoed around him. Hunter felt almost dizzy at how quickly the pieces were now slotting into place.

He made a printout of the scanned image and placed it on his desk, taking another moment to think about what to search for next. Then he remembered the camcorder the killer had left inside the trashcan out in City Hall Park, and just like that his mind made the connection.

‘Sonofabitch.’

He brought up his web browser and took a moment to think about what words to type into the search engine. He quickly decided on a four-word sentence. The result came back almost instantly – about 6 million results in 0.36 seconds.

Because he had used a four-word sentence as his search criterion, the search engine would first look for all the words together, and in the order Hunter had typed them in. Those results would be placed at the top of the results list. Once the search engine had run out of matches for all the words in that specific order, it would then automatically start searching for any of the four individual words, or combination of them, in or out of order. That’s why it had returned so many results.

Hunter clicked on the topmost result, which took him to a specialized website. He spent some time there, browsing through its pages and searching its archives, but didn’t find what he was looking for.

He returned to the results page and tried the second link from the top. Again, after spending several minutes searching the site’s archives, he got nowhere.

He repeated the unfruitful process eighteen more times, until he finally came across an obscure website. The strange thing was that as soon as the website’s front page loaded onto his screen, Hunter felt an odd tingle scratch at the back of his neck. He shook the sensation away and used the site’s internal search engine, typing in a combination of key words and a date. It returned fifteen files. The site’s search engine wasn’t very good, and entering a date made no difference whatsoever. He decided that the easiest thing to do was to check all fifteen results.

He didn’t have to. The one he was looking for was the fourth one.

He sat back and rubbed his face with both hands. The images on his screen collided with the memories inside his head with absurd force.

The file had been uploaded by someone who called him/herself DarkXX1000. Hunter tried all he could to find out the real identity for the person behind that Internet handle, but didn’t get very far. He decided to go back to it later.

He spent the next hour and a half doing a combination search between the Internet and general-public-restricted files, which, as an LAPD officer, he was able to access. They didn’t reveal much either.

His eyes were itching and watering from squinting at the screen for so long. He took a bathroom break before pouring himself another cup of strong black coffee. Pacing the room, Hunter allowed his mind to go through everything he had uncovered up to that point – a lot, but many details were still missing. What he needed was help. Disregarding the late hour, he reached for his cellphone and dialed Michelle’s number. She answered after the third ring.

‘Michelle,’ Hunter said. ‘My turn to apologize for calling you so late and out of office hours.’

Michelle chuckled. ‘Well, the term “office hours” does not apply to the FBI. My shift started the day I was hired, and it’s only due to finish in about—’ she paused, as if calculating how long ‘—forty-five years.’

‘That’s a long shift.’

‘You’re telling me?’ Another chuckle. ‘OK, so what’s up?’

Hunter told her about everything he’d found so far, and what he was still after. When he was done, Michelle was speechless.

‘Michelle, are you still there?’

‘Um . . . yeah. Are you sure about this?’

‘As sure as I will ever be.’

‘OK. I’ll see what I can find out and I’ll call you back. It might be late . . . or early, depending on how you look at it.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’