The Night Stalker (18 page)

The woman’s lips had been stitched shut, and though her torso and legs were caked in blood, the black, thorn-like stitches to her lower body were clearly visible.

Doctor Hove approached them in silence and Hunter shot her a questioning look.

The doctor nodded in confirmation. ‘Judging by what we have in this room, I’d say it’s the same killer,’ she said in a hushed voice.

Hunter and Garcia did their best to avoid stepping into the pools of blood and approached the body on the floor. Captain Blake stayed by the door. Hunter crouched down and examined what he could of the woman without touching her. Garcia did the same but his eyes kept returning to her once attractive face, as if something was bothering him. A few seconds later he frowned at Hunter. ‘Jesus, she’s a carbon copy of Laura Mitchell. They could’ve been sisters.’

Hunter nodded. He’d noticed the uncanny resemblance from the door.

Captain Blake pinched the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She knew exactly what that meant.

Hunter turned to Doctor Hove. ‘Is this how you found the body?’

‘No,’ Mike Brindle replied, stepping closer. ‘We photographed everything and then turned her over. Her body was facing down; right cheek against the floor, facing left towards the wall. Her left arm was extended as if she was reaching for something. Her position gave us the impression that she was probably crawling towards the door, but lacked the strength to get there.’

Hunter’s eyes wandered the room again, taking in more of the scene. ‘The handprints?’

‘They’re hers,’ Brindle confirmed. ‘The few bloody sneaker shoeprints you saw on the floor outside and on the steps going up haven’t been confirmed yet. But judging by the runaway smear pattern in some of them, I’d say they belong to the scared teenager who dialed 911 – anonymously, he left no name and no address.’ He paused and his stare returned to the woman on the floor. ‘Rigor mortis started not long ago, but the heat and humidity in this room could have delayed it for up to five hours, maybe a little more.’

‘So she definitely died today?’ the captain asked.

Brindle nodded.

Garcia’s attention went from the body to the large distribution of blood on the floor. ‘She’s got no wounds I can see other than her stitches. Where did all this blood come from?’

Doctor Hove and Mike Brindle exchanged an uneasy glance. ‘I’ll have proper confirmation with the autopsy,’ the doctor replied, ‘but right now, all this indicates some sort of internal hemorrhage.’

Captain Blake’s eyes widened.

‘All this blood . . .’ the doctor shook her head as if she was struggling to find the right words, ‘ . . . dripped out of her through the stitches.’

‘Holy shit.’ Garcia rubbed his face with his right hand.

‘She’s also got tiny abrasions on both of her hands and knees,’ Doctor Hove continued. ‘We think she came off that table and collapsed to the ground. Maybe because she was dizzy or in tremendous pain, but she was still alive. The abrasions were probably caused by the fall and her crawling towards the door. Her prints are on that table, so we concluded that she was left there by the killer, but there isn’t a speck of blood on it. She didn’t start bleeding until she was on the ground.’

‘And then there’s this,’ Brindle said, walking over to where Captain Blake was standing. ‘Excuse me, Captain.’

She frowned and took a step to her right.

Brindle pointed to the wall directly behind where the captain was standing. Only then did they see the set of small spray-painted black letters – IT’S INSIDE YOU.

Captain Blake’s lips parted in disbelief. They were exactly the same words Hunter had found spray-painted on the ceiling in the butcher’s shop where Laura Mitchell’s body had been found. Her stare refocused onto the body on the floor for a moment before moving back to Doctor Hove.

‘OK, I thought what we had here was just suspicion and conjecture. I was obviously wrong. But if you knew this was the same killer, given that he placed a bomb inside his first victim that took the lives of two other people inside one of your autopsy rooms . . .’ she pointed to the letters on the wall, ‘ . . . and again he’s telling us he did the same here, what the hell are we doing in this room? Where’s the bomb squad? And why did you risk turning the body over?’

‘Because whatever it was the killer placed inside her this time,’ Hunter replied, gently rubbing between his eyebrows, ‘it’s already gone off inside her.’

‘Judging by where she bled from,’ the doctor added, ‘that’s exactly what we think. As we said, it all points to an internal hemorrhage, but not one we’ve ever seen before.’

‘What do you mean?’ Captain Blake asked.

‘Internal hemorrhages usually occur from traumatic injuries, blood vessel rupture or certain specific diseases, carcinoma being one of them. But the blood accumulates inside the body, hence the term
internal.
And the amount is just a fraction of what you see here. This woman bled as if she had been mutilated. Whatever it was that caused it, it was inside her.’

No one said anything for a moment.

‘There was nothing else in this room other than what you can see,’ Brindle took over. ‘The body, those old shelves on the walls and that stainless steel table.’ He gestured towards it. ‘There are no chains, no ropes or any sort of restraints anywhere. A closer look at the victim’s wrists and ankles shows no abrasions or marks. She wasn’t tied down. She also couldn’t have been locked in here because there’s no lock on that door.’ He shook his head as he considered it. ‘The truth is: we can’t find anything that suggests why she wasn’t allowed to just walk out of here. So far there are no indications that anyone else was in here with her when she died. It looks like the killer simply dumped her on that table and left. And as we said, she wasn’t bleeding then. But the killer somehow knew she would never get out of this room alive.’

Hunter had already noticed that the table in the room had been raised higher off the ground than normal. ‘Does this look strange to anyone?’ He pointed to the wooden blocks under each of the four table legs.

Everyone frowned.

‘The first victim, Laura Mitchell,’ he continued, ‘was left on a stainless steel counter inside a butcher’s shop in East LA. That counter had also been raised higher off the ground by bricks. First I thought that maybe the old butcher there had been some sort of a giant, but no, I checked. He was five foot eight.’

‘So you think the killer did this deliberately?’ the captain asked. ‘Why?’

‘I’m not sure yet.’

They all paused as they heard heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. A couple of seconds later a crime lab agent also dressed in white Tyvek coveralls pulled the door open. He brought with him a large, black plastic flight case.

‘It’s OK, Tom,’ Brindle said, reaching for the case. ‘I know how to set it up.’

The agent left the case with Brindle and exited the room.

‘This is why we had to turn her body over,’ Doctor Hove explained as Brindle undid the locks to the case and started unpacking its contents. ‘That’s a portable tactical X-ray unit. It’s mainly used for the investigation of small- to medium-sized objects like parcels, boxes and luggage. The picture it produces is not of the same quality as you’d get from a proper hospital X-ray machine, but it’ll serve our purposes here. We’re pretty confident that whatever was placed inside her has, as Robert said, gone off, and that’s what killed her. But we all know what this killer is capable of.’ She looked at Captain Blake. ‘I don’t wanna move her before I have an idea of what we’re dealing with.’

They all watched as Brindle set up the equipment. ‘Since we don’t have a tripod,’ he said, ‘can somebody hold the camera over her?’

‘I’ll do it,’ Garcia said, returning to the body and once again carefully avoiding the pools of blood. He took the small digital camera from Brindle.

‘Just keep it directed at her stomach. Two to three feet away will do,’ Brindle explained before approaching the laptop he’d set up on top of the black plastic flight case. ‘That’s all there is to it. The camera connects wirelessly to the computer and produces an X-ray image. You can press the on button now, Carlos.’

He did, and all eyes reverted to the laptop screen as the image materialized.

Brindle and Doctor Hove’s eyes widened in amazement and confusion, and they both craned their necks a little closer.

Hunter squinted, trying to understand what he was looking at.

Captain Blake’s jaw dropped and her mouth went instantly dry, but she was the only one who managed to ask the question in everyone’s mind.

‘In the name of God, what . . . the
hell
. . . is that . . . inside her . . . ?’

Hunter knew that with everything his brain was trying to process, sleep just wouldn’t come. And he’d have to wait until morning for any sort of answer. Forensics were still processing the basement room in the old preschool, though he didn’t hold out any great hopes about what they’d find. Doctor Hove would expedite the body’s autopsy, but that’d only be at first light.

He collected some files from his office before making his way back to his place and then onto Jay’s Rock Bar, a joint just two blocks away from his apartment. It was one of his favorite drinking spots. Great Scotch, fantastic rock music and friendly staff. He ordered a double dose of Glenturett 1997 with a single cube of ice and sat at a small table towards the back.

Hunter sipped his drink slowly for a minute, allowing its strong flavor to take over his palate. In front of him, spread out on the table, were all the photographs they’d received from Missing Persons. He scanned through them carefully, and despite the disfigurement to the new victim’s face caused by the rough stitches, he knew she wasn’t among them.

He needed to search the MPU database again, go back four, maybe five weeks, but as before, with the stitches and swelling, the face recognition software wouldn’t work. Doing it manually again would take too long. Hunter would have to wait until the end of the autopsy and use the new face close-ups once the stitches have been removed from the victim’s mouth.

He finished his drink and debated if he should have another one. His eyes rested on the wall closest to him and all its paintings and decorations. He observed them for a moment. That’s when a new thought entered his mind.

‘It can’t be . . .’ he whispered as he shook his head.

Hunter gathered all his files together and rushed back to his apartment.

Sitting at the table in his living room, he fired up his computer and accessed the MPU database. He knew the criteria he used for the new search would reduce the output result considerably. He wasn’t expecting any more than three, maybe five matches.

He was wrong.

Seconds later the screen flickered and the displayed table showed that his search had produced a single match. Hunter double-clicked it and waited for the file to upload.

As the new photograph materialized on his screen, Hunter let out a heavy breath.

Special autopsy room one was located down a different corridor, separate from all the other chambers. It was usually used for postmortem examinations of bodies that could still pose some sort of contamination threat – highly contagious viral diseases, exposure to radioactive materials and so on. The room, with its own cold storage facility and separate database system, was sometimes used during high-profile serial killer cases, like the Crucifix Killer investigation a few years ago – a security precaution to better contain sensitive information.

The image they got from the portable tactical X-ray unit in the basement of the disused preschool in Glassell Park didn’t reveal much, but whatever it was that the killer had placed inside his second victim, it sure as hell wasn’t a bomb, Doctor Hove had no doubt of that. The picture showed a solid, triangular shape with a rounded base. Something that resembled a large but very thin slice of pizza. She’d never seen anything like it, and the only way she could find out any more about it was by extracting it from the body.

Doctor Hove had had almost no sleep, and turned up at the LACDC even before the crack of dawn. She just wanted to get on with things. At that time in the morning she had to perform the autopsy of the new victim on her own, no assistant. It would take longer than usual.

It was just past 7:00 a.m. when Doctor Hove called Hunter’s cell.

During the short trip from Hunter’s apartment to the morgue, he heard a report of shots fired in Boyle Heights and another of an armed robbery in progress in Silver Lake through the police radio. He drove past three light-flashing, siren-wailing police cars and two ambulances. The day had barely started. How could such an incredible city be so saturated with insanity?

The main coroners building at the LACDC was an intriguing piece of architecture with hints of Renaissance styling. Terracotta bricks and light gray lintels gave it an Oxford college look. Its business hours were the same as any city office – Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Except under special request, no autopsies were ever carried out in the evenings or weekends. This was certainly one of those.