The Night Stalker (38 page)

Hunter nodded his thanks.

‘OK. Ted Jenkins. He’s the editor for the
Healdsburg Tribune.
Back then he was just a reporter. I had a drink with him last night after I got off the phone with you. He certainly remembers what happened. A terrible case where a cheated husband lost his head and killed his wife, his kid, the wife’s lover and then blew his own head off with a shotgun. Huge for a place like Healdsburg, but for an LA cop . . . ?’ Chief Suarez leaned forward, placed both hands on his desk and interlaced his fingers. ‘One of the reasons I made chief of police is because I’m a very curious man, Detective. And your phone call yesterday got my curiosity steaming.’ He paused and took a sip of his coffee. ‘I looked you up. Had a quick chat with your captain this morning too.’

Hunter said nothing.

The chief reached for his reading glasses and his eyes moved to a notepad on his desk. ‘Los Angeles Police Department – Homicide Special Section. Your specialty – ultra-violent crimes. Now that’s something us folks over here only see in movies.’ His eyes returned to Hunter over his spectacles. ‘Your captain told me you’re the best there is. And that got my old brain thinking. Everyone knows Los Angeles is a crazy town, Detective. Gangs, drugs, drive-by shoot-outs, serial killers, mass murderers, killing sprees, and worse. Why would a murder case that happened twenty years ago in a small town like Healdsburg interest the Homicide Special Section in LA?’

Hunter sipped his coffee.

‘So late last night I went down to our archives room to look for the case files. Turns out that anything older than ten years was stuck under piles and piles of junk inside unmarked cardboard boxes at the back of a smelly and cobweb-filled room. It took me and an officer nearly five hours to find them.’ He tapped a very old-looking paper folder next to his desktop PC.

Hunter moved to the edge of his seat.

‘Imagine my surprise when I saw the pictures and read the reports of what had
really
happened.’ He handed the file to Hunter.

Hunter flipped it open and the first photograph he saw made his heart skip a beat.

The woman was in her late twenties, early thirties. It was hard to tell from the photo because her face was swollen and battered, but even so, Hunter could see she’d been pretty, very pretty.

A large bruise covered the left side of her forehead, eye and cheekbone. Her shoulder-length black hair was wet and sticking to her face. Her large hazel eyes, that Hunter was sure had once dazzled many men, were wide open. Her terrifying fear was frozen in them like a snapshot. Just like Laura, Kelly and Jessica, her lips had been stitched tightly shut with thick black thread, but the stitches were neat and tidy, unlike those on the victims in Los Angeles. Blood had seeped through the needle punctures and run down to her chin and neck. She was alive when he stitched her up. A brownish substance had also accumulated between her lips and at the corners of her mouth – vomit. She had been sick and the discharge had had nowhere to go.

The second picture was a close-up of the words that had been written the wall – HE’S INSIDE YOU. Ray Harper had used blood to write them. The third picture showed the next set of stitches on her body. Her groin and inner thighs were also smeared with blood that had seeped through the puncture wounds. She’d been tied to the bed by her wrists and ankles in a spread-eagled position. But the bed had been tipped on its end and pushed up against a wall, placing the victim in a standing position and facing the inside of the room.

Hunter moved to the next picture – a male body lying on the floor directly in front of the bed and the female victim. His entire head and most of his neck were missing. A double-barreled shotgun was lying partly over his torso and partly in an enormous pool of blood. Both of his hands were resting on the gun’s stock. From the destruction to his head, Hunter knew he’d discharged both rounds simultaneously, and that the barrel ends had been placed under his chin.

Hunter skipped the rest of the photos and skimmed over the report and the autopsy files. He finally found what he was looking for as he got to the last page inside the folder – the crime-scene log sheet. Eight different people had had direct access to the Harper crime scene that day – the county coroner, a county forensic investigator, the county sheriff together with two of his deputies, Chief Cooper and two other Healdsburg police officers.

‘Are Officer Perez or Officer Kimble still with the police department?’ he asked Chief Suarez.

The chief scratched a thin scar under his chin. ‘Officer Perez retired four years ago. He lives just down the road from me. His son is with the fire department. Officer Kimble passed away a few years back. Pancreatic cancer won that battle.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Hunter’s attention returned to the log sheet. ‘Do you know any of these deputies from the County Sheriff’s Office, Peter Edmunds or Joseph Hale?’

The chief nodded. ‘Sure, but they aren’t deputies any more. Peter Edmunds is Captain of Field Services and Operations and Joseph Hale is Assistant Sheriff of the Law Enforcement Division. They both live in Santa Rosa. They’re great guys.’

Hunter rubbed his eyes for an instant. The county coroner, the county forensic investigator, the county sheriff, and Healdsburg old chief of police, Chief Cooper, would all be over sixty-five years of age today. It wasn’t impossible but there was very little chance any of them would’ve become a serial killer in their old age. That meant that everyone who had attended the crime scene was accounted for, unless someone hadn’t been logged in. But if that was the case, Hunter had no way of finding out who else had seen the scene. Instinctively he flipped through the files and the pictures again and suddenly frowned. Something caught his eye. He returned to the photographs, this time studying every picture attentively. When he reached the last one, he flicked back to the files and scanned them again, all the way to the last page.

‘Are these all the case files or is there another folder somewhere in your archives room?’ he asked.

‘That’s it. Nothing else.’

‘Are you sure?’

Chief Suarez arched his eyebrows. ‘Yes I’m sure. I told you, it took us five hours to find those files. We’ve been through every single one of the old boxes, and believe me, there were quite a few of them. Why?’

Hunter closed the folder on his lap.

‘Because there’s something missing.’

The drive to Chief Cooper’s house took Hunter less than fifteen minutes.

He stepped out of the car, and as he closed the door behind him, a woman came out onto the house’s porch. She was in her mid-sixties, slender but not skinny. She wore a simple blue dress and a pocketed apron. She had a long angular face framed by straight gray hair falling to her shoulders.

‘Morning,’ she said with a smile. Her voice was a little hoarse, as if she’d been fighting off a cold. ‘You must be the detective from Los Angeles Tom mentioned.’ Her blue eyes fixed on Hunter’s face. They were as tender as her voice.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Hunter said, approaching her. He produced his credentials and she scrutinized them like a seasoned pro.

‘My name is Mary,’ she offered, extending her hand. ‘Tom’s wife.’

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am.’

They shook hands and Hunter was surprised by how much strength she packed in her tiny hand.

‘Tom is down by the lake, fishing.’ She shook her head in a mock-disapproving way. ‘He’s always fishing. Well . . .’ she laughed, ‘at least it gives him something to do. Or else he’d be hammering things in the house all day long.’

Hunter smiled back politely.

‘Just follow that path over there all the way down the small hill,’ she said, pointing to a narrow trail that seemed to lead deep into the woods to the right of the house. ‘You can’t miss him.’ She paused and quickly assessed the sky. ‘Do you have a raincoat in that car of yours?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

Mary gave him a sweet smile. ‘Wait just a minute, then.’ She walked back into the house. A few seconds later she reappeared carrying a police-issue raincoat. ‘Rain ain’t far away, you better take this or you might catch a cold.’ She handed him the coat. ‘Tom’s got enough coffee and cakes with him to feed the two of you for a day and a half.’

Hunter thanked her again and disappeared down the trail. It twisted left and right several times, getting steeper the deeper Hunter moved into the forest. It led down to a secluded spot by Lake Sonoma. He paused as he reached a rock and dirt landing at the bottom of the path. There was no one there. The lake was placid, still even. Hunter took a step back and listened for a moment. Something didn’t seem right.

Suddenly he swung around, drawing his gun.

‘Woah, easy.’ The man standing about five feet from him with his hands up in the air was in his late-sixties, tall and lean. He had two tiny tuffs of white hair over his ears, black rimmed glasses pushed up all the way to the bridge of his nose, and a cotton white moustache that seemed way too thick for his thin face and lips. Despite his age, he still looked like he could handle himself in any sort of fight.

‘You heard me coming up behind you?’ His voice was commanding.

‘Something like that,’ Hunter replied, his gun still targeting the old man.

‘Damn, I’m either losing my touch or you’ve got fantastic hearing. And that was a fast draw if I’ve ever seen one.’ He waited a few seconds. ‘I’m Tom Cooper. You must be Detective Robert Hunter from the Los Angeles Robbery Homicide Division. Do you mind if I lower my hands?’

‘Yeah, sorry about that.’ Hunter flicked the safety into place and holstered his gun.

‘You’re not very light on your feet, though. I could hear you coming from halfway down the hill.’

Hunter looked down at his now dirt-covered boots. ‘I wasn’t expecting a stealth exercise.’

Chief Cooper smiled. ‘Sorry, old habits die hard.’ He offered his hand.

Hunter shook it firmly.

‘I’m all set up over here.’ He pointed to another trail that went around some trees and to the left. Hunter followed him into a second clearance where a fisherman’s chair and a small weave basket packed with food were arranged by the water. ‘Help yourself to some coffee and cake if you like. Do you fish?’

‘I tried it once when I was a kid.’ Hunter shook his head as he poured coffee from one of the two large thermal flasks into a cup. ‘I wasn’t any good at it.’

Chief Cooper laughed. ‘No one is good at it if you only do it once. I’ve been doing it for years and I still have a lot to learn.’ He reached for a thin fishing rod, grabbed a couple of live black lugworms from a container, and pushed their slimy bodies through the hook. ‘I prefer live bait, it’s . . .’

‘Nicer for the fish,’ Hunter finished. ‘And since you don’t keep them, might as well give them a nice treat in exchange for having their mouths hooked.’ He had a sip of his coffee and nodded. It was just as good as the one he had back at the police station.

The chief studied Hunter curiously before looking at his setup. ‘No fish net or containers to take my catch back up to the house.’ He nodded. ‘You’re observant, but I guess you wouldn’t be a detective if you weren’t.’ He swung his hook into the lake. ‘OK, I know you didn’t come all this way to learn about fishing or to shoot the breeze. You said on the phone that you needed to talk to me about the Harper case.’

Hunter nodded. ‘Do you remember it well?’

Chief Cooper stared back at Hunter and his playful tone had vanished. ‘You don’t forget a crime scene like that, Detective. I don’t care how experienced you are. I know you’ve been through the station first ’cause Chief Suarez just called me. You saw the pictures, right? Could anyone forget those images?’

Hunter said nothing.

‘You didn’t tell me much over the phone, but I guess you didn’t have to. The way I see it, the only reason the LAPD RHD would be interested in a 20-year-old case from a small town is because you guys must have something down there that’s pretty close to what happened here.’

Hunter stared at his reflection in the water for a moment. ‘If I’m right, Chief, it’s a lot closer than you think.’

Chief Cooper slotted his fishing rod into the appropriate hook next to his chair and turned to face Hunter.

‘When I left LA this morning, my main concern was finding the log sheet for the Harper crime scene. There are only eight names on it.’ He retrieved his notebook from his jacket pocket. ‘Yours and two of your officers, Kimble and Perez. The Sonoma County sheriff at the time, Sheriff Hudson and two of his deputies, Edmunds and Hale. The county coroner at the time, Doctor Bennett and a forensic investigator, Gustavo Ortiz. Is that right?’

Chief Cooper didn’t have to think about it. He nodded immediately.

‘Can you remember if anyone else saw that scene, anyone at all? Someone who somehow wasn’t logged onto the sheet?’

The chief shook his head firmly. ‘No one else saw the scene. Not once we got there.’ He poured himself some more coffee. ‘The Harper house was only about a block away from the old police station. Tito, their neighbor at the time, called the station saying he heard a gunshot. Tito was, and still is, a pretty accomplished hunter. So when he said he heard a shotgun being fired, I knew it couldn’t have been a mistake. I was at the station when he called. It took me less than a minute to get there. I was first at the scene.’ He paused and looked away. ‘I’d never seen anything like it. Not even in case studies. And to tell you the truth, I hope I never see anything like it again.’