I Am Death (36 page)

‘That’s exactly what he did,’ Doctor Snyder confirmed.

The killer had cut open the victim’s abdomen, reached inside and gutted her while she was still alive.

As Garcia breathed in, he felt his body shiver.

‘I’ve seen disemboweled bodies before,’ he said, his voice restrained, ‘but I’ve never seen one where the intestines have been completely stretched out this way.
How long can it get to?’

Doctor Snyder kept his eyes on Alison Atkins’ eviscerated body for a moment longer before following Garcia’s.

‘Both intestines together will measure about twenty-five feet in length,’ he said, the tone of his voice matching the detective’s.

The killer hadn’t only dragged her small and large intestines out of her abdominal cavity. He had also stretched them to their full extent, twisting and looping them around at points. The
visual result was as unbelievable as it was grotesque. As the victim hung in the air with her arms stretched out above her head, the entirety of her lower gastrointestinal tract could be seen
exiting her body as if it were an oversized, alien, umbilical cord. It then lay extended, twisted and looped outside her body, splashed on to the floor, lying in an enormous pool of blood.

But what boggled the mind was that all this had been done while she was still alive and, most probably, conscious. Death would’ve come very slowly and in agonizing pain. Neither Hunter nor
Garcia needed to ask. They both knew those facts very well.

‘I wanted both of you to see her
in situ
before we cut her down,’ Doctor Snyder said. ‘As you can tell, this place feels a like a sauna, which will speed up the
decomposition process. Rigor mortis had just started to set in when we got here, which means that the killer waited for her to die before making the call. She died no more than three to five hours
ago.’

Hunter finally allowed his attention to deviate from Alison. Garcia did the same. As they turned around and faced the large doors behind them, they paused.

There it was.

Written in blood across the inside of both doors was the killer’s signature – I AM DEATH.

‘Do you think he filmed it again?’ Doctor Snyder asked, also facing the morbid script.

‘Probably,’ Garcia replied. ‘Filming it, or taking pictures, or whatever, is his token. His trophy. His sick way of keeping them alive for ever. To him, the recording itself
would be just as important as the attack, or the victim, or the violence.’

In silence, all three of them looked around for another full minute before the doctor spoke again.

‘The place is an absolute mess. It’s been abandoned for years. There’s debris here dating back to who knows when. If we decide to look at everything, we might be here for
days.’ He paused and made a face.

Hunter had no idea if they’d find anything in there. If they did, it was because the killer wanted them to, but it now made no difference. What the killer didn’t know was that they
already knew who he was. They just needed to find him.

Hunter and Garcia spent the rest of the afternoon at the crime scene in the Angeles National Forest. They watched as Alison Atkins was freed from her shackles, placed inside a
body bag and loaded into a coroner’s van. Her intestines were carefully collected by one of Doctor Snyder’s forensic agents. Despite all his years of experience, at times he looked like
he was about to be sick.

Both detectives were still checking their phones every five minutes or so. Still no sign of Mat Hade. Hunter had also checked with the State of California Department of Motor Vehicles –
Mathew Hade had no vehicles registered under his name at present. His last one had been a used 2003 black Ford Escape, which he’d acquired in February 2007 and kept until October 2014. After
that, nothing. He also had no outstanding fines.

At 8:30 p.m. Hunter and Garcia received another call from Doctor Snyder. He had the first of the two test results they’d been waiting for – the pen ink analyses. Forensics had first
collected a small ink sample from the note the killer had sent Mayor Bailey and chemically compared it to the ink in the BIC Cristal Garcia had found inside Mat Hade’s apartment. The result
had been inconclusive. But forensics hadn’t given up. They’d placed the ballpoint pen under a Leica digital microscope and found out that the roller ball at its tip had a couple of
faults – scratches. Those scratches, though invisible to the naked eye, would certainly show on any sort of stroke made by the pen. When they’d placed the note under the same
microscope, they’d got a perfect match. The killer’s note had been written with that exact same pen.

They had their guy.

They just didn’t have their guy
yet.

With this new discovery, a new APB had also been sent out. Orders had been updated from ‘observe and inform the case detectives’ to ‘carefully approach and apprehend’.
All they had to do now was sit and wait until Mat Hade was arrested. They just had to hope that this would happen before he claimed another victim.

Garcia went home at around 9:00 p.m., but only after Hunter practically ordered him to.

‘Get the hell out of here, Carlos,’ he said, pointing at the door. ‘Because if you don’t, Anna won’t be angry with you, she’ll be angry with me. And I’d
rather face the wrath of a serial killer any day than that of a pissed-off woman, especially Anna.’

‘That is a very wise decision, my friend,’ Garcia said as he powered down his computer. ‘Because when she gets angry, she could make the devil look like Casper the friendly
ghost.’ He paused as he reached the office door. ‘How about you, Robert? You’re not going to spend the night in here again, are you? There’s nothing else we can do but wait.
He’ll get picked up soon enough. We have the whole of the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department looking for him. He can’t hide for ever.’

‘Yeah, I know. I’ll be leaving soon. I just need to check on a few more things first and I’ll be right behind you. Ten, fifteen minutes max.’

‘Do you need any help?’

‘No, man, I’ll be fine. Send Anna my love, will you?’

Over an hour later and Hunter was still at his desk.

He swiveled his chair around to look at the picture board again. They had already added several new items to it – the two photographs they had of Mathew Hade and a number of new
crime-scene shots from that afternoon. Operations was still gathering a full dossier on Alison Atkins.

Hunter breathed out as he stared at the crime-scene shots. He hadn’t exactly known Alison, but he had seen her go about her job, full of life, smiling at every customer, and that had
inevitably altered the way in which seeing her hanging from that wood beam had affected him – first total sadness, then absolute rage.

‘Where the fuck are you, you piece of shit?’ Hunter said between clenched teeth, moving his attention to Mat Hade’s photographs.

He checked his cellphone again. Still nothing.

He pushed his chair away from his desk, leaned back and rubbed his face with both hands. He felt tired, hungry and drained. Garcia was right. There was nothing else they could do. Maybe it was
time to go home, but as that thought entered his mind he remembered something he’d forgotten about – the 911 call. The killer had been the one who had called it in, using Alison
Atkins’ phone.

Hunter needed to listen to that recording.

He quickly pulled his chair back to his desk and began typing commands and navigating through folders and locations. It took him just over a minute to find it. He cranked up the volume on his
computer speakers and double-clicked on the sound file.

As he listened to the recording and to how calm and collected the killer sounded, Hunter could feel his heartrate doubling because he knew that Mat Hade had just eviscerated Alison Atkins prior
to making that call. As he’d spoken to the 911 operator he had probably been standing in a pool of her blood, treading over her gutted intestines and staring at her lifeless face.

How could anyone be that cold, that senseless?

Once the recording had played, Hunter rewound it and played it again. Then again. Then again. That was when something struck him as odd.

‘Wait a second,’ Hunter whispered to himself as he played the call one more time.

‘Why?’ he said out loud, mulling over something specific the killer had said to the operator. ‘Why would he do this? It makes no sense.’

Hunter got up, approached the picture board and reread the note the killer had pushed under his door.

Something began moving the gears inside his head.

He stepped back and stared at the whole board for a minute. Then his eyes began moving from victim to victim to victim. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

He read the note one more time. The gears in his head were now moving at full speed.

‘That is one dumb idea, Robert,’ he said, shaking his head to try to ban a new thought.

It didn’t work.

He looked at the wall clock – 10:48 p.m. ‘Fuck!’ he said as he sat back at his computer. ‘Here goes nothing.’ He began searching.

Whatever result it was that Hunter had first imagined he’d get from his search, it sure as hell wasn’t what appeared on his screen. As pages and pages of material
began loading, he leaned forward, placed both elbows on his desk and rested his chin on his knuckles.

Hunter was a fast reader. Actually, he was a very fast reader and as soon as he began devouring the chunks and chunks of information he knew he had stumbled upon a complete minefield.

And then the first bomb went off.

He reread the paragraph twice over before he was certain he had it right. And it staggered him.

The second bomb followed almost immediately.

Hunter had to pause and take a deep breath. He could practically hear adrenalin dripping into his veins – and then he found the images. They came at him like an angry heavyweight champion
and hidden among them was the knockout punch.

As the final image loaded on to his screen, he felt a sickening shiver kiss the nape of his neck.

‘This can’t be.’

And then that was it.

No more information.

With the same speed with which it had all appeared, it all stopped.

Hunter tried something else. Being a Special LAPD Detective had its perks but the words that came up on his screen made him jerk back.

RESTRICTED ACCESS.

‘What the fuck?’

He tried again.

RESTRICTED ACCESS.

One more time.

RESTRICTED ACCESS.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’

He backtracked and reread some of the information he’d gotten from his initial search.

And then it dawned on him.

Just like the killer’s note to Mayor Bailey, the information had mentioned the FBI.

Hunter checked his watch – 11:58 p.m. In Virginia it would be 02:58 a.m. It didn’t matter.

Hunter reached for his phone.

Adrian Kennedy was the head of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and its Behavioral Analysis Unit. He was also a good friend of
Hunter’s.

Despite the late hour, Kennedy didn’t even blink when his cellphone rang inside his jacket pocket. As the head of the NCAVC he was used to getting calls at godforsaken hours. Sleep was a
luxury that didn’t come as part of his job description.

He reached for the phone and was very surprised to see Hunter’s name on the display screen.

‘Robert?’ he answered it, still sounding a little unsure.

‘Hello, Adrian.’

‘Well, this is a surprise.’ His naturally hoarse voice, made worse by over thirty years of smoking, sounded tired but relaxed. ‘Are you back in LA?’

‘I am.’

Kennedy checked his watch. ‘What time is it there? About midnight?’

‘That’s about right, yes.’

‘So I guess you’re not calling for a chitchat.’ Adrian coughed a laugh. ‘What can I do for you, old friend?’

‘Are you in your office?’

‘Well, I’m sure as hell not home in bed where I should be.’

‘I need to ask you for a favor,’ Hunter said.

Kennedy’s interest grew. If there was one thing he knew about Robert Hunter, it was that he wasn’t a man who asked many people for favors.

‘What do you need?’ Kennedy leaned back in his leather chair.

Without going into too much detail, Hunter told him.

Kennedy sat forward. ‘Are you kidding?’

‘Not even a little bit.’

‘There’s no way, Robert.’ Kennedy’s voice turned morbidly serious. ‘That kind of information is as restricted as it gets. It’s under the same sort of lock and
key as our witness protection program.’

‘To someone like me, yes,’ Hunter replied. ‘But not to the head of the NCAVC.’

‘Still, Robert. We have protocols and rules here.’

‘Yeah, I have an egg.’

Kennedy frowned. ‘Excuse me?’

‘I thought that we were just mentioning things that we can easily break.’

‘Oh, that’s cute.’

Hunter said nothing.

‘Listen, Robert, I can’t just go accessing that sort of information without leaving a log trail as long as Route Sixty-Six.’

‘So? Leave a trail.’

‘Easy for you to say.’

‘What difference would that make to you, Adrian? All you’ll be accessing is information and that’s what your job demands, isn’t it? Acquiring it, processing it and
understanding it. No one will care.’

‘I will. I’ll still be breaking protocol to access extremely restricted information to then pass it on.’

‘To a fellow law enforcement officer, Adrian. What do you think I’m going to do with it, sell it to the press? And, after all, you owe me.’

Kennedy did owe Hunter. He also knew the LAPD detective well enough to know that he wouldn’t ask for anything unless it was absolutely imperative. He breathed out.

‘This is more than I owe you, old friend.’

Hunter remained quiet.

‘OK. Fuck it,’ Kennedy finally said. ‘Give me about half an hour.’

Hunter spent the next twenty-two minutes rereading everything he had found, and for him it only served to underline something he already knew – that reality was much,
much more perverted than fiction. The problem was, if he were right in his hunch, reality was just about to get a lot more twisted.