The Night Stalker (5 page)

‘Phillip? Who’s Phillip? Is that your boyfriend?’ the voice asked.

Katia shivered.

‘Who is this?’ she asked again, firmer this time.

Silence.

An uncomfortable sensation made the hairs on the back of Katia’s neck stand on end. ‘Look, I think you dialed the wrong number.’

‘I don’t think so.’ The man chuckled. ‘I’ve been dialing this number every day for the past two months.’

Katia breathed out, relieved. ‘See, now I’m sure you’ve got the wrong number. I’ve been away for a little while. I actually just got back.’

There was a pause.

‘It’s no big deal, it happens,’ Katia said kindly. ‘Look, I’m gonna put the phone down so you can redial.’

‘Don’t put the phone down,’ the man said calmly. ‘I haven’t dialed the wrong number. Have you checked your answering machine yet, Katia?’

The only phone in Katia’s apartment with an answering machine was the one at the far end of the worktop in the kitchen. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand and quickly made her way towards it. She hadn’t noticed the blinking red light until then. Sixty messages.

Katia gasped. ‘Who are you? How did you get this number?’

Another chuckle. ‘I’m . . .’ there was a click on the line again, ‘. . . a fan, I guess.’

‘A fan?’

‘A fan with resources. The kind of resources that make information very easy to come by.’

‘Information?’

‘I know you are a fantastic musician. You love your Lorenzo Guadagnini violin more than anything in this world. You live in a penthouse apartment in West Hollywood. You’re allergic to peanuts. Your favorite composer is Tchaikovsky and you love driving that torch red, convertible Mustang of yours.’ He paused. ‘And you’re having lunch with your father tomorrow at one o’clock at Mastro’s Steak House in Beverly Hills. Your favorite color is pink, just like the bathrobe you’re wearing now, and you were just about to open a bottle of white wine.’

Katia froze.

‘So how dedicated a fan am I, Katia?’

Instinctively, Katia’s eyes shot towards her kitchen window, but she knew she was too high up for anyone in one of the neighboring buildings to be able to spy on her.

‘Oh, I’m not peeping on you through the window,’ the man said with a sneer.

The light in the kitchen went out and the next voice Katia heard didn’t come from her phone.

‘I’m standing right behind you.’

On any given night Hunter’s insomnia would rob him of at least four hours of sleep. Last night, it had kept him awake for almost six.

It was after cancer took his mother from him when he was just seven years old that his sleeping problems started. Alone in his room, missing her, he would lie awake at night, too sad to fall asleep, too scared to close his eyes, too proud to cry. Hunter grew up as an only child in an underprivileged neighborhood of South Los Angeles. His father made the decision never to remarry, and even with two jobs, he struggled to cope with the demands of raising a child on his own.

To banish the bad dreams, Hunter kept his mind occupied in a different way – he read ferociously, devouring books as if they empowered him.

Hunter had always been different. Even as a child, his brain seemed to work through problems faster than anyone else’s. At the age of twelve, after a battery of exams and tests suggested by the principal of his school in Compton, he was accepted into the Mirman School for the Gifted on Mulholland Drive as an eighth-grader.

But even a special school’s curriculum wasn’t enough to slow his progress down.

By the age of fifteen, Hunter had glided through Mirman, condensing four years of high school into two, and amazing all of his teachers. With recommendations from everyone, he was accepted as a ‘special circumstances’ student at Stanford on its Psychology School Program.

In college, his advancement was just as impressive, and Hunter received his PhD in Criminal Behavior Analysis and Biopsychology at the age of twenty-three. And that was when his world was shattered for a second time. His father, who at the time was working as a security guard for a branch of the Bank of America in downtown Los Angeles, was shot dead during a robbery gone wrong. Hunter’s nightmares and insomnia came back then – even more forcefully, and they hadn’t left him since.

Hunter stood by the window in his living room, staring at a distant nothing. His eyes felt gritty and the headache that had started at the rear of his skull was quickly spreading. No matter how hard he tried, he simply couldn’t shake the images of the woman’s face from his mind. Her eyes open in horror, her lips swollen and sealed together. Did she wake up alone in that butcher’s shop and try to scream? Was that why the thread had dug so deep into the flesh around her lips? Did she claw at her mouth in desperate panic? Was she awake when the killer placed a bomb inside her before sewing her shut? The questions were coming at him like tidal waves.

Hunter blinked and the woman’s face was substituted by Doctor Winston’s and the video images they’d retrieved from the morgue – his eyes wide in shock as he finally understood what he was holding in his hand, as he finally realized that death had caught up with him, and there was nothing he could do. Hunter closed his eyes. His friend was gone, and he had no clue why.

A distant police siren brought Hunter out of his daze and he shivered with anger. What he saw on the ceiling of the butcher’s shop last night changed everything. The bomb was meant for no one else but the woman who was left there. Doctor Winston, his friend, someone he considered family, had died for no reason – a tragic mistake.

Hunter felt a pain start in his right forearm. Only then did he realize he’d been clutching his fist so tight blood couldn’t find its way to his arm. He swore to himself that whatever happened, he’d make this killer pay for what he’d done.

Due to the sensitivity of Hunter’s investigation, the entire operation was moved from the third to the fifth floor of Parker Center, LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division HQ in North Los Angeles Street. The new room was spacious enough for two detectives, but with only a small window on the south wall it felt claustrophobic. When Hunter arrived, Garcia was studying the crime-scene photographs that had been placed on a large magnetic board to the right of Hunter’s desk.

‘We’re a little stuck when it comes to identifying her,’ Garcia said as Hunter fired up his computer. ‘The crime-scene team got several close-up shots of the stitches to her lips, but only one shot that shows her entire face.’ He pointed to the top photograph on the board. ‘And as you can see, it isn’t a great one.’

The photo had been taken at an angle and the left side of the victim’s face was partially obscured. ‘Apart from the video, we’ve got no pictures from the autopsy room,’ Garcia continued. ‘This is all we have to work with. If she was local to where she was found, we can’t really go around asking people and showing them a photograph of someone with her lips stitched shut. It’ll creep the hell out of everybody. And someone would no doubt talk to the media.’ He stepped back from the board.

‘Missing Persons?’ Hunter asked.

‘I got in touch with them last night, but because this is the only photo we have, and the stitches and swelling to her lips are so prominent, the face-recognition software they use won’t work. If they run this picture against their database and she happens to be in there, they’ll never get a match. We needed a better picture.’

‘Sketch artists?’

Garcia nodded, checking his watch. ‘They aren’t in yet, neither are the computer guys. But you know they can perform miracles with airbrushing and retouching, so there’s hope. The problem is, it can take a while.’

‘We don’t have a while,’ Hunter replied.

Garcia scratched his chin. ‘I know, Robert, but without an autopsy report, a DNA profile, or the knowledge of any specific physical marks that could help us identify her, we’re stuck.’

‘We’ve gotta start somewhere, and right now the only place we can start is with the Missing Persons files and those pictures,’ Hunter said, clicking away on his computer. ‘The two of us will have to go through them manually until we get something from the composite drawing team.’

‘The two of us? Manually? Are you serious? Do you know how many people get reported missing in LA every week?’

Hunter nodded. ‘On average eight hundred, but we can narrow the search down using what we already know – Caucasian woman, brunette, hazel eyes, age between twenty-seven and thirty-three. Judging by the length of the counter and the position the body was left, I’d say she was somewhere between five five and five eight. Let’s start the search with women who have been missing for anywhere up to two weeks. If we get nothing, we’ll go back further.’

‘I’ll get right on it.’

‘How about her fingerprints?’

Garcia quickly shook his head. ‘I’ve checked with Forensics. They’ve been running them against the National Automated Fingerprint ID System since last night. So far no matches. She doesn’t seem to be in the system.’

Hunter had a feeling she wouldn’t be.

Garcia poured himself some coffee from the machine on the counter. ‘Any clues from the butcher’s shop?’

Hunter had emailed himself the photo of the ceiling he’d taken with his cell phone last night. When the file downloaded, he hit the print button.

‘Yes, this.’ He showed Garcia the printout.

‘Graffiti?’ Garcia asked after studying the photograph for a moment.

Hunter nodded. ‘I took this picture while lying on the counter in the same position the victim was found.’

Garcia raised an eyebrow. ‘You lay on that?’ He pointed to the photograph of the dirty metal counter on the pictures board, but didn’t wait for a reply. ‘What exactly am I looking at here?’

‘Blended with the graffiti colors, Carlos. Look for the different lettering.’

A moment later Garcia saw it and his whole body tensed. ‘Well, I’ll be dipped in shit.’

Hidden amongst the colors and shapes, a line of small spray-painted black letters seemed out of place. It read: IT’S INSIDE YOU.

Before Garcia could ask anything further, Captain Blake entered the room without knocking.

Barbara Blake had taken over the Los Angeles Robbery Homicide Division’s leadership after the retirement of its long-standing captain, William Bolter, two years earlier. Her name had been put forward for captaincy by Bolter himself, upsetting a long list of candidates. She was an intriguing woman – elegant, attractive, with long black hair and mysterious dark eyes that never gave anything away. Despite reservations by some at the division, she had quickly gained a reputation for being a no-nonsense, iron-fist captain. She wasn’t easily intimidated, took shit from no one, and she didn’t mind upsetting high-powered politicians or government officials if it meant sticking to what she believed was right. In just a few months she had earned the trust and respect of every detective under her command.

Captain Blake and Doctor Winston’s friendship went back a long way – over twenty years. The news of his death had hit her like a sucker punch to the gut, and she wanted answers.

As she stepped into the room, she instantly picked up on the tension coming from Garcia. Her eyebrows rose. ‘What happened? Have we got something already?’

Garcia handed her the printout. ‘From the butcher’s shop.’

Just like Garcia, she didn’t see it at first. ‘What the hell am I looking at?’

Garcia pointed at the letters.

The captain’s eyes shot in Hunter’s direction. ‘This was on the wall in the shop?’

‘On the ceiling. Directly above where the victim was left.’

‘But the ceiling is covered in graffiti. Why do you think these words have anything to do with our victim?’

‘Two reasons. One, that’s not graffiti like the rest of the ceiling, that’s a handwritten message. Two, the paint was more vivid than the rest of the graffiti, too fresh.’

The captain’s eyes returned to the printout.

Hunter paused and all of a sudden started searching his desk.

‘What are you looking for?’ the captain asked.

‘The DVD with the video file we got from the morgue yesterday. I want to check something.’ He found it and popped it into his computer’s disk drive.

Garcia and Captain Blake joined Hunter by his desk.

As the video started playing, Hunter fast-forwarded it to the scene where Doctor Winston retrieved the bomb from inside the stitched victim. The player application in Hunter’s computer didn’t have a frame-by-frame function. He had to keep on clicking the play/pause button to slowly advance it to the exact spot he wanted. He watched a small segment a couple of times before turning to face Garcia and the captain.

‘His back is towards the camera, so we have to guess the correct moment,’ Hunter said, ‘but look at Doctor Winston’s arm movement right here.’

All eyes were glued to the screen.

Hunter rewound and played the sequence twice over.

‘There’s a small jerk.’ Garcia nodded. ‘As if his hand came unstuck.’