The Night Stalker (25 page)

‘Yesterday.’

Li’s face paled. He checked his watch. ‘Even if I had a professional multi-DVD copier, which I don’t, it’d still take most of the day.’

Hunter thought about it for a beat. ‘Wait a second. You said that older files are stored in those external hard drives, right?’ He pointed at the black boxes. ‘Will the files from those dates be in one of them?’

Li quickly picked up on what Hunter was suggesting and his lips spread into a smile. ‘They will be, yes. Very good idea. You could take the whole hard drive. There’s nothing in them but archived CCTV footage. Nothing that my father would need, anyway. You can link the drive to any computer, easy. It will save you tons of time, but you’ll still have to uncompress the files on your side.’

‘We can do that.’

Li nodded. ‘Let me show you how to find them.’

Hunter made it back to Parker Center in less than half an hour and went straight into the Information Technology Division. Brian Doyle was at his desk, speed-reading through a pile of papers. He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday. His eyes were bloodshot and his face unshaven. An empty pizza box was by the edge of the desk and the coffee percolator in the corner was practically empty.

‘Have you been here all night?’ Hunter asked.

Doyle looked up but said nothing. His stare went straight through Hunter.

‘Are you OK?’

Doyle’s eyes finally focused. ‘Umm? Yeah, sorry, I’m fine.’ He placed the sheet he was reading on the desk. ‘Just understaffed and overworked. Everyone always needs everything ASAP. I’ve got cases piling up everywhere. And this afternoon there’s this huge sting operation going on.’ He leaned back in his chair and studied Hunter for a second. ‘What the hell happened to your face?’ He pointed at the cut above his eyebrow.

Hunter shook his head. ‘Walked into a door.’

‘Of course you did. Just hope the door isn’t gonna sue the department.’

‘She won’t.’

‘
She?
A
woman
did that to you?’

‘Long story.’

‘I bet.’ He cleared a space at the edge of his desk and leaned against it. ‘OK, Robert, for you to be here, it’s gotta be something urgent.’

Hunter nodded. ‘But I only need about three minutes of your time, Jack. Then I’m out of here.’

‘Is this about the psycho who killed Doctor Winston with that bomb?’

An almost imperceptible nod. Hunter felt his chest tighten around his heart as he remembered he’d never see his old friend again.

‘He was a good man. I met him a couple of times.’ Doyle checked his watch. ‘What do you need?’

Hunter handed him the high-capacity hard drive and waited while Doyle hooked it up to his PC. Unsurprisingly, all the directories in the hard drive were perfectly organized – first by camera location and then by date.

‘Can these files be uncompressed in bulk?’ Hunter asked.

‘Not simultaneously. They’re massive. It’d be too processor intensive and it’d crash any machine, but . . .’ Doyle lifted his index finger, ‘you could line them up inside an application. As soon as one file finishes uncompressing, it’ll automatically move to the next one in the list. That way you don’t even have to be there. Just leave it working and come back when it’s all done.’

‘That’ll work for me.’

Doyle smiled. ‘Please tell me you don’t need all of these files. There’re hundreds of them. This will take days.’

‘No.’ Hunter shook his head. ‘Just a handful of them – to start with.’

‘OK, in that case I’ll tell you the easiest thing to do. Because this is an external drive, I can link it up to an empty laptop instead of clogging up the machine in your office. That way you can work on your machine if you need to and just leave the laptop on the side, as it does its thing. Give me five minutes and I’ll have it all set up for you.’

The phone on Hunter’s desk rang almost the second he entered his office. It was Doctor Hove.

‘Robert, I’m about to send you some lab results on Jensen. I got my team to fast-track whatever they could.’

‘Thanks, Doc. What do we have?’ He gestured for Garcia, who’d just come in, to grab his phone and listen in.

‘OK, as we expected, the victim was sedated. We found traces of a drug called Estazolam in her blood. It’s a sleeping agent.’

‘Usually prescribed for short-term treatment of insomnia, right?’ Hunter confirmed.

Doctor Hove had forgotten that Hunter knew more about insomnia than most doctors.

‘That’s right. Now, given its relatively high concentration, we figured that’s what the killer used to sedate her on the day she died. Before dumping her in that basement. He didn’t overdo it, though. He used just enough to knock her out for a couple of hours or so.’

Hunter leaned back in his chair.

‘But the interesting thing is: we also found faint traces of another drug. Something called Mexitil. It’s an anti-arrhythmic drug.’

‘Anti- what?’ Garcia blurted.

‘A common drug used to treat a heart condition called ventricular arrhythmia.’

Hunter started leafing through sheets of paper on his desk.

‘If you’re looking for her medical records, Robert, don’t bother,’ the doctor said, recognizing the sound of pages turning. ‘Her heart was as strong as a racing horse’s. She didn’t have the condition.’

Hunter stopped and thought for a split second. ‘What are the side effects of this Mexitil, Doc?’

‘Very good, Robert. Mexitil is pharmacologically similar to Lidocaine, which as you know is a local anesthetic. Its major side effect is light drowsiness and confusion. But if taken by someone who doesn’t suffer from ventricular arrhythmia, that light drowsiness can become moderate to severe. And you don’t even need high doses of the drug to cause it. But that’s about all it does. It won’t knock you out. It won’t even make you doze off.’

Hunter considered it. It made sense. That was probably why neither of the victims had any restraint marks. If the killer kept them in a constant state of confusion and drowsiness, he didn’t need to immobilize them.

‘Would there be any other reason why the killer chose to use Mexitil?’ Hunter asked. ‘If he just wanted them high, he could’ve used a number of drugs.’

‘It’s an easy drug to obtain on the Internet.’

‘So are most drugs nowadays, Doc,’ Garcia countered.

‘True.’ There was a short pause. ‘There’s always the chance that he’s familiar with the drug. He might suffer from the condition himself.’

Hunter was already clicking away on his computer, searching the Internet for more information about the drug. ‘Could you check your database, Doc? Go back five . . . no, ten years. Look for any case where Mexitil was found in a murder victim’s blood?’

‘No problem.’ This time the sound of pages turning came from Doctor Hove’s side. ‘I’ve also got a result on the dark copper-colored dust retrieved from under the victim’s fingernails. It’s brick dust.’

Hunter’s eyebrows arched.

‘We might be able to identify exactly what kind of brick it is. I’ll let you know if we can.’ The doctor coughed to clear her throat. ‘At first I thought that maybe she tried to claw her way out of wherever she was kept. Somewhere with a brick wall. But as you well know, if that had been the case, she’d certainly have cracked and broken nails . . . maybe even missing ones. None were even chipped. They were filed down into claws, remember? Maybe the killer has a bizarre fetish for pointy fingernails.’

Hunter’s eyes quickly moved from his computer to the pictures board. ‘Nothing else was found under her nails?’

‘Yes, bits of her own skin,’ the doctor confirmed. ‘She scraped at her mouth, her groin and the stitches before dying.’

‘Only
her
skin?’

‘That’s right.’

Hunter nodded to himself. ‘OK, Doc. Call me if anything else comes up.’ He put the phone down and stared at his own fingernails for a moment. ‘A weapon,’ he whispered.

‘A what?’ Garcia asked, rolling his chair away from his desk.

‘A weapon. That’s why her fingernails were so claw-like.’ Hunter stood up and approached the pictures board. ‘Look at the crime-scene pictures of our first victim.’ He pointed to the ones of Laura Mitchell’s hands. There was nothing strange about her fingernails.

‘No filing,’ Garcia agreed.

‘Having pointy fingernails didn’t come from the killer, as the doctor suggested. Kelly used a brick wall to sharpen them herself. I think she wanted to attack her captor. In an empty cell, it was the only weapon she could think of.’

Garcia pinched his bottom lip. ‘But nothing else was found under her nails except brick dust and her own skin. So she never got the chance to use them.’

‘That’s right.’ Hunter had returned to his desk and was flipping through his notebook. ‘The doctor said that Kelly’s organs showed mild symptoms of dehydration and malnutrition, right? I think she starved herself.’

Garcia frowned.

‘Mexitil. Kelly had no needle marks on her, remember?’

‘He was feeding it to her through her food.’

Hunter leaned against his desk. ‘Most probably, and she figured out the food was drugged.’

‘So she stopped eating to get rid of the dizziness.’ Garcia picked up Hunter’s train of thought. ‘But wouldn’t that make her too weak to fight back?’

‘It would if she’d gone without food for a few days, but that wasn’t the case.’

‘One day only. That’s what Doctor Hove said, right?’

Hunter nodded. ‘Mexitil isn’t a proper sedative. Kelly would’ve only needed to be off it for a few hours.’

‘Enough to get rid of the dizziness, but not enough to take all of her strength away. But how would she know that?’

‘She didn’t. She gambled.’

‘So she filed her nails into the only weapon she could think of.’ Garcia ran a hand through his hair while exhaling. ‘She wanted out of there. She was trying to do something herself because she knew she was running out of time, and she’d run out of hope. She got tired of waiting for us to save her.’

Hunter’s cell phone started ringing.

‘Detective Hunter,’ he said, bringing the clamshell phone to his ear.

‘Detective, this is Tracy from the Special Operations switchboard. I’m managing the information line on the suspect you’re looking for, James Smith.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve got someone on the line who claims to be him.’

Hunter pulled a face. ‘Yeah, well, we’ve had about fifty of those so far. Just take his—’

‘Detective,’ Tracy interrupted, ‘I think you should take this call.’

Hunter snapped his fingers at his partner to get his attention. He didn’t have to; Garcia had already noticed the change in Hunter’s expression.

‘Start a trace?’ Hunter said to Tracy.

‘We’re all set here, Detective.’

Hunter nodded to himself. ‘OK, put him through.’

There was a click on the line followed by a second of static.

Hunter waited.

So did the person on the other end of the line.

‘This is Detective Robert Hunter.’ Hunter eventually broke the silence. He was in no mood for games.

‘Why are you after me?’ The sentence was delivered in a calm, unrushed tone. The voice was like a muffled whisper, as if his phone’s mouthpiece had been wrapped in several layers of cloth.

‘James Smith?’

There was a short pause. ‘Why are you after me?’ he repeated in the same cool tone.

‘You know why we’re after you.’ Hunter’s calm voice matched Smith’s. ‘That’s why you ran, isn’t it?’

‘The newspapers all across town have my picture in them. They say the police want to speak to me in relation to an ongoing investigation, but no other details are given. So I want you to tell me: why are you after me? How am I related to any ongoing investigation?’

‘Why don’t you come in, James? We can sit down and talk. I’ll tell you anything you wanna know.’

A bitter chuckle. ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that just now, Detective.’

‘Right now that’s your best option. What else can you do? You can’t run or hide forever. As you said, your photograph is all over the papers. And it’s going to stay there. Sooner or later someone will recognize you – on the streets, in a shop, driving around. You know you’re not invisible. Come in and let’s talk.’

‘The picture in the papers is crap and you know it – grainy, out of focus and partially obscured. It’s a desperate attempt. I had trouble recognizing myself. The newspapers won’t carry on publishing that picture forever, ’specially if you get no results from it. In a week’s time I could dance naked on Sunset Strip and no one would recognize me.’

Hunter didn’t reply. He knew it was only too true.

‘So I’m gonna ask you one more time, Detective. Why are you after me? And how am I related to a major ongoing investigation?’