One by One (18 page)

Still silence from Hunter and Garcia.

‘But even after being told that hundreds of wasp stings deformed her entire body . . . even as you read that note, neither of you showed the slightest of reactions. So, you both are either the coldest motherfuckers I’ve ever met, or you were expecting this. So let me ask you again. What the hell is going on? Has this happened before?’

A tense moment passed.

‘Not exactly like this,’ Hunter finally replied. ‘But yes, it has happened before, and, yes, we were expecting it.’

Sanchez was clearly debating something in his head. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know any more details. The circumstances dictated that the case wouldn’t end up on his desk anymore, and truthfully he was glad. He ran his thumb and index finger over his mustache while staring back at the location where the body was found.

‘Do you know what?’ he said. ‘I can’t wait for retirement. I can’t wait to get the hell away from this city. Last week we arrested a father, who threw his own baby daughter out the window of his tenth-floor apartment just because she was crying too much. When, just seconds later, his girlfriend realized what had happened and started freaking out, he threw her as well. When we kicked his door down, he was sitting in his living room, watching a baseball game and eating cornflakes. The daughter died. The girlfriend is a vegetable in a hospital bed. Her brain is gone. She has no insurance, so they’re already talking about turning off the machines. The guy couldn’t give a damn either way.’

Sanchez straightened his white cuffs under his suit jacket, and then his tie. ‘This city has no conscience. It has no mercy. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the end you find out that whoever did this did it just for the fun of it.’

Forty-Three

California oaks shaded the road as Hunter turned into Loma Vista Drive from West 8th Street in Long Beach. The house they were looking for was almost at the end of the drive. Sat back from the street, it had a pale yellow front that contrasted nicely against the white door and window frames. A low wrought-iron fence surrounded the house. Behind it, a neatly mowed front lawn. The narrow driveway on the left led to the one-car garage at the back of the house. The driveway gates were open. A metallic-blue Toyota Matrix was parked just outside the garage. The license plate number matched the one they had for Christina Stevenson’s car.

According to the research team, Christina had left the
LA Times
headquarters on Thursday evening. She had taken Friday and Saturday off, but they were expecting to see her back on Sunday. She never turned up, but that wasn’t surprising. Reporters had a tendency of disappearing for days, depending on the story they were working on.

Hunter parked on the street, directly in front of the house. On a Monday afternoon the road was quiet. No kids playing. No one tending to their gardens or lawns. No one sitting out on their porches, enjoying the day.

They entered the property grounds via the driveway gates. Hunter knocked, and then tried the front door – locked. Both front windows were also locked, with their curtains drawn shut.

Garcia had carried on down the driveway in the direction of the blue Toyota. He gloved up and checked the car doors first, before moving onto the garage – all locked.

‘Everything up front is locked,’ Hunter said, joining Garcia. ‘Curtains are all shut.’

‘Same on this side of the house,’ Garcia replied. ‘Car and garage are locked too. But she obviously came back home on Thursday evening after she left the paper.’

They both made their way around toward the back of the house. The fence to the right of the garage wasn’t just for decoration like the one up front. This one was solid wood and about eight feet high, with a sturdy-looking door. Hunter tried the door handle. The door clicked open.

‘That’s not a good sign,’ Garcia said.

They walked through to the house’s ample patio, where a rectangular swimming pool was its main feature. Four sun loungers were arranged on one side of the pool. A small shelter at the north end of the patio housed a barbecue grill. The house was to their right, where the entire back façade was completely made of glass. There were two sliding doors leading back into the house. One led back into the living room, the other back into a bedroom. The one closer to them, leading back into the bedroom, was wide open. They started moving toward it, and at that exact moment a strong gust of wind blew east, in the direction of the house. The floral curtain behind the open door flew back just enough for them to catch a glimpse of the inside of the room. It was enough to make both detectives stop and look at each other.

‘I’ll call forensics,’ Garcia said, reaching for his phone.

Forty-Four

Christina Stevenson’s house was spacious, bigger than most in that part of town, but for the moment Mike Brindle and his forensics team were concentrating all their efforts in processing her bedroom.

The room was large and comfortable, overflowing with girly touches – from the pink dresser to the stuffed toys – but it looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. The toys, the bed pillows and several colorful cushions were scattered all over the floor. The bed covers had been partially pulled off, as if someone had grabbed at them with both hands while being forcefully dragged away from the bed. The bed itself was twisted out of position, and that had knocked the bedside table on its side. The bedside lamp had hit the floor and shattered into tens of tiny pieces. A bottle of Dom Ruinart 1998 champagne was tipped over, lying next to the bedside table. Most of the bubbly liquid had spilled out onto the floor. Some of it had seeped through the wooden floorboards; the rest had pretty much evaporated, leaving just a tiny pool by the bottle’s neck. A smashed champagne flute was lying just inches away from the bottle.

The pink dresser looked as if somebody had kicked it in a fit of rage. Perfume flasks and hair product bottles had been knocked over, and most of them were now on the floor, together with an MP3 speaker docking system, a hair dryer and various makeup items. The dresser mirror was cracked. Though they hadn’t found any blood anywhere yet, the entire room screamed one word at everyone –
struggle.

But to a forensics team, a crime scene marked by a struggle was almost like hitting the jackpot. A struggle meant that the victim resisted, fought back in some way. Even if the assailant was prepared for it, with rivers of adrenaline rushing through the victim’s veins no one could predict how long or how intense that struggle would be. A struggle would always cause more evidence to be left behind – more clothes fibers lost, maybe a hair follicle, or an eyelash. A bump against the sharp corner of a bedside table or a dresser could cause a micro cut, invisible to the naked eye, but nevertheless leaving behind traces of blood and skin, and consequently DNA. Ironic as it might sound, forensically speaking a struggle was a great thing.

A forensics agent in white Tyvek hooded coveralls was dusting the glass door that Hunter and Garcia had found wide open. A second agent was slowly moving about the place, tagging and photographing every item in the room. Mike Brindle was working the bed and the area immediately around it.

Hunter and Garcia had also suited up in hooded coveralls, and were now checking the living room. The space was pleasantly decorated. The furniture was elegant and expensive-looking. A well-equipped open-plan kitchen was located at the south end of the room. To the right of the front door, three portraits were arranged next to a bowl of fake fruit on top of a stylish black sideboard.

The living room and the kitchen were in perfect order. Nothing seemed out of place. The struggle had happened only inside the bedroom.

They had found Christina Stevenson’s bag on the floor by the sideboard. Her wallet was in there, together with her driver’s license, her credit cards, her car keys and her cellphone, which had run out of battery.

Garcia was looking around the kitchen when his smart-phone beeped.

‘We’ve got a file on Ms. Stevenson,’ he announced, checking his email application.

Hunter was studying the three pictures on the sideboard. One was of Christina sitting on a beach somewhere. In the second one, a kind-faced woman with vivid blue eyes and full lips was smiling. Christina had definitely inherited her mother’s eyes, strong nose, high cheekbones and the small mole under her bottom lip. The woman on the picture had an almost identical one. The last picture showed Christina in a black and gray cocktail dress, holding a glass of champagne and talking to an elegantly dressed group of people.

‘What do we have?’ Hunter asked, turning to face Garcia.

‘OK, I’ll skip what we already know,’ Garcia said. ‘Christina Stevenson was born right here in LA. She grew up in Northridge, where she lived with her mother, Andrea. No brothers or sisters. Her father is unknown, and according to this, Christina never had a legal stepfather. Her mother never married. She went to Granada Hills High School, and it looks like she was a good enough student – good grades, never in trouble. She was part of the cheerleaders’ team from her sophomore to her senior year.’ Garcia scrolled down on his phone application. ‘Her mother died of a brain aneurysm seven years ago, on the exact same day Christina received her degree in journalism from UCLA.’

Reflexively Hunter’s gaze returned to the portrait of the smiling woman on the sideboard.

‘It looks like her mother’s death knocked the life out of her,’ Garcia moved on. ‘Because we’ve got nothing for a whole year here. After that, she managed to land an intern’s job with the
LA Times
and has been with the paper ever since.’

‘Was she always with the entertainment desk?’ Hunter asked.

‘Nope. She spent four years jumping from desk to desk – city, international, politics, economy, current affairs, crime, even sports. She only settled into her own when she joined the entertainment desk two years ago. Never married. No kids. There’s no mention of any boyfriends here either. No records of drug use. They’re still checking her financial records, but the mortgage on this house is almost paid off. She earned a very decent salary from the paper.’ Garcia scrolled down a little more. ‘She had a big story published yesterday, in the Sunday edition of the
LA Times.
Probably the story Emilio was talking about.’

‘What was the story?’

More scrolling followed by a surprised look from Garcia.

‘Listen to this. It was a scoop on a Hollywood celebrity who’d been fooling around with her kid’s teacher while her husband, who is also a celebrity, was away, recording the latest episodes for the TV series he stars in. The story made the front cover of the entertainment supplement, with a sizable “call” on the paper’s front page.’ Garcia put his smartphone away. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s the kind of story that can get you a whole bunch of new enemies. The kind that can break up marriages and destroy lives.’

‘Who was the celebrity?’ Hunter asked.

Before Garcia could answer, Mike Brindle poked his head through the living-room door. ‘Robert, Carlos, you better come have a look at this.’

Forty-Five

The atmosphere inside the FBI Cybercrime Division was one of triumph. Smiles and congratulations were going around the room like a carousel. Even the FBI director in charge of the Los Angeles field office had called Michelle Kelly to express his satisfaction. He had two small daughters of his own and he couldn’t even begin to imagine what he would do if either of them ever fell victim to an Internet pedophile.

Sitting at her computer, Michelle brought up Bobby’s case file. On its front page she right-clicked on the empty square in the top right-hand corner that said ‘‘photo file’’, and selected ‘add’ from the pop-up menu. Harry Mills had already transferred a series of mugshots taken after Bobby’s arrest into the FBI’s mainframe computer. Michelle selected one, and clicked ‘add’.

She then placed the cursor over the ‘Name’ field and typed in Bobby’s real name –
Gregory Burke.

Bobby was no longer a faceless, nameless threat to young kids anymore.

Michelle moved the cursor over to the
Investigation Status
field, deleted the word ‘open’, and as she typed in ‘closed – subject arrested’, she felt enormous satisfaction run through her. But she knew that that feeling wouldn’t last long.

Unfortunately there were way too many ‘Bobbys’ out there, stalking social network sites, chat rooms, games websites or wherever kids would gather to socialize in cyberspace. Michelle and the FBI CCD were doing the best they could, but the simple truth was that they were hugely outnumbered, and the ratio grew the wrong way year after year. She knew that putting Bobby away was only a small victory in a war they’d been losing since the early days of the Internet, but even so it was days like today that made the fight worthwhile.

‘You OK?’ Harry asked, coming up behind her.

‘I’m great.’ She clicked the ‘save’ button.

‘How’s the lip?’

Michelle brought her fingertips to her swollen bottom lip. ‘It hurts a little, but I’ll live. A small price to pay for sending one more scumbag to prison.’

‘And I hope he rots in there.’

Michelle chuckled, more out of relief than amusement. ‘With what we have on him, I’m sure he will.’

It had taken the FBI less than two hours to discover the small hotel Bobby had booked for the day. It was only three blocks away from Venice Beach, where he was arrested. Inside the room they had found personal documents, credit cards, money, sex paraphernalia, pills, alcohol and a small, medicine-sized bottle containing some clear liquid. The bottle was already with the FBI forensics lab, and everyone had their money on the liquid testing positive for some sort of homemade date-rape drug, like gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. But the real finding came from a small black case by the bed. Inside it they’d found Bobby’s personal laptop computer with hundreds of images and video clips, together with a digital video camera.

To Michelle’s delight, Bobby hadn’t had a chance to transfer the contents of the camera’s memory card to his laptop – an unedited, twelve-minute video clip filmed only two days ago. The clip clearly showed Bobby with a girl who looked no older than eleven.