by Chris Carter
‘Yes . . . it is.’
Hunter glanced at Marlon, who was standing just behind his mother. He had heard the question and now looked a little embarrassed.
‘How long now?’ Hunter asked. ‘How long has he been going to therapy?’
A deeper frown from Ms. Sloan this time.
‘I’m sorry, but I fail to see how that is any of your concern, Detective?’
‘It hasn’t helped a great deal, has it?’
Ms. Sloan looked offended.
‘You should stop with the therapist,’ Hunter said.
Behind his mother, Marlon came close to a smile.
‘Excuse me?’ Ms. Sloan said.
‘You should stop with the therapist,’ Hunter repeated.
‘And why on earth would I want to do that?’
Hunter’s gaze found Marlon before returning to the boy’s mother. ‘The sad truth is that therapy and shrink visits are mainly hogwash. It’s in their financial interest to keep their patients coming back. Marlon’s condition is a lot more common than you might think, Ms. Sloan. And though you might think you’re helping by being overly protective of your son, you’re not.’
Ms. Sloan glared at Hunter. Anger crept into her eyes.
He ignored her look and addressed Marlon. ‘Every week, just try to walk a block outside your comfort zone, Marlon, however far that might be. If you can’t manage a block, try half a block. Find a park bench and have a seat. When your breathing calms down, ask a passing stranger for the time. Next week, ask two. The week after that, three. Next month, walk another block outside your new-found comfort zone, and repeat what you did before. Before you know it, you’ll be making new friends and the whole anxiety thing will be behind you.’
Ms. Sloan’s glare morphed into an intrigued stare.
‘You don’t need a therapist’s mumbo-jumbo to crack this thing, Marlon. You can do it yourself. One small victory at a time.’
Thirty-Eight
Cautiously, Squirm raised his left hand and brought it to his face, but the tips of his fingers touched nothing. They paused less than half an inch from the swollen flesh that now surrounded his left eye.
Back in the projection room earlier that day, his trick had worked. By using both of his thumbs and index fingers, he had managed to force his eyes open and keep them that way while those horrific images played on the large screen before him. ‘The Monster’ didn’t seem to mind it. In fact, he had laughed out loud, telling Squirm it was an ingenious move.
‘I like that, Squirm,’ he said as he used his dirty fingernail to pick something from between his teeth. ‘You were faced with a problem, and you came up with a smart alternative. That’s clever. I like clever.’
Without noticing, Squirm’s breathing had become labored. He’d never seen so much blood. He’d never heard screams like the ones coming from that woman – guttural and overwhelmed with pain, drowning in terror, and completely void of hope.
Sharon, that was her name. The man had made him repeat it a number of times while the film played on. Squirm would never forget that name for as long as he lived.
On the screen, Sharon had finally passed out. Somehow she had managed to endure the pain for a lot longer than anyone would’ve imagined. Several minutes, in fact. Squirm actually thought that she’d finally let go of the desire to live and accepted the inevitable. That the film and her suffering would finally be over. But he couldn’t have been more wrong.
The images played on, and Squirm watched as ‘The Monster’ turned off the sander, placed it on the floor and walked over to where the camera was. Once he got to it, he zoomed in on the grotesque mess that her face was turning into. Lumps of skin and flesh hung loosely from her forehead and brow. Blood surged from her wounds in sheets. It ran down on to what was still left of her face, moving past her chin and down to her naked torso, but Squirm could see that Sharon was still breathing.
The ordeal was far from over.
‘Keep your eyes open, Squirm,’ ‘The Monster’ had said, excitement coating his words. ‘It’s just about to get really good.’
Squirm felt like something had gained life inside his stomach and had begun crawling its way up the inside of his chest. Shock had forced the boy’s mouth to fall half open. His hands were shaking and he had to keep readjusting his fingers so as not to let go of his eyelids. Cold sweat had begun trickling down his face and back.
The screen flicked to black for a moment, then it started again.
‘I had to stop filming.’ For some reason, the man sitting beside him had decided to explain. ‘It took me the best part of twenty minutes to wake her up again. But I’ll tell you something, Squirm, she was one tough bitch.’ He let out a croaked, over-enthusiastic laugh that made the boy’s skin crawl.
The new segment started from where the previous one had left off. More blood and tiny chunks of skin began flying up, propelled by the sander’s rotating disk, before cascading back down over everything like rain.
‘Next time, maybe you can watch it live, Squirm, what do you say? Wouldn’t you like to be in that room with us?’
Whatever had begun crawling its way through Squirm’s insides gained momentum. All of a sudden, it rushed up through his throat with incredible speed.
Squirm hadn’t thought it possible, but Sharon’s screams had gotten even louder, assaulting the boy’s ears with the effect of piercing needles. He was still doing his best to hold his eyes open, but there was no stopping the crawling creature from his stomach which had burst into the kid’s mouth in avalanche style.
Squirm’s body jerked forward violently and he projectile-vomited the little that he had in his gut all over the dark-gray linoleum floor. Some of it reached the screen.
‘You ungrateful sonofabitch,’ ‘The Monster’ had barked, jumping up from his seat. He was careful not to step on the mess Squirm had made on the floor.
The boy looked up at the man with total panic in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’ll clean it. I’m sorry.’ He fell to his knees and used his hands to try to collect what he had regurgitated on to the floor.
POW.
The man’s opened hand connected with the side of the kid’s face, just by his left eye, with such force it sent the boy tumbling across the floor. He only stopped when his head smashed against the wall. Squirm’s eyes rolled back into his head a fraction of a second before he collapsed on to the ground like an empty sack of potatoes.
Without caring, ‘The Monster’ grabbed the unconscious boy by the hair, dragged him downstairs and threw him back in his cell.
Thirty-Nine
‘What was that about?’ Garcia asked Hunter as both detectives joined Officer Woods by his black and white unit outside.
‘Nothing, really. Just trying to give the kid a tip.’
‘OK,’ Woods said as he finished writing something in his notepad. ‘I’ve just come off the radio with Operations. Before you guys got here, I had asked them to run a quick check on what Marlon had said. That was the info I was waiting for.’
Hunter and Garcia were quietly impressed by Officer Woods’ approach. Most officers would have left all the checking to the detectives.
‘Anything?’ Garcia asked.
‘You tell me,’ Woods began, reading from his notes. ‘There really was a fault with the phone lines reported last month. AT&T sent two engineers to fix it on the twelfth, and yes, they did have a basket-crane truck with them. The fault was fixed that same day. Since then, AT&T has had no other reports, and they have no knowledge of any other faults with the phone lines in this area. They also said that they did not send any other engineers up here for a subsequent check since the fault was fixed. Not on the fourteenth of last month, or at any other time for that matter, and that includes last week.’
‘And it couldn’t have been a different phone company?’ Garcia asked.
‘No,’ Woods replied. ‘No other supplier services this area.’ He closed his notepad. ‘It seems like you have got yourselves a mysterious telep
hone engineer.’
‘Marlon said that they were working on the telephone pole in front of property number eight-four-five-six,’ Hunter said, looking north.
‘That’s correct,’ Woods confirmed. ‘And that’s the one, right over there on the corner.’ He pointed at the T-shaped telephone pole directly in front of a white-fronted, single-storey house that sat right where Allenwood Road bent sharply left, about thirty yards north of where they were standing.
Hunter and Garcia walked over to have a better look. Officer Woods followed.
It was a regular-looking telephone pole, brown in color, and made of southern yellow pine. It stood somewhere between thirty-five and forty feet tall. A total of seven telephone cables ran through it – five at the very top, through the horizontal arm of the T, and the remaining two just a few feet beneath the first five, through the long, vertical arm.
Hunter and Garcia spent less than ten seconds looking up at the post before both of them came to the same conclusion.
To reach the first of the cables, an engineer would have to climb about thirty to thirty-five feet. No wonder the AT&T engineers used a basket-crane truck to get up there. On the other hand, a single engineer, even with a long telescopic ladder, would be facing a very tough and somewhat dangerous task.
Hunter walked around the pole, checking it from both sides.
‘Do those cables service this whole street?’ Garcia asked, still looking up at the pole.
‘I’m not sure,’ Woods replied. ‘But I would say so.’ He observed the two detectives for a moment.
‘Do you think it was him?’ Garcia asked his partner.
Hunter paused and looked north, where the road bent left and disappeared behind property 8456.
Garcia waited.
Hunter then looked south, in the direction of the Sloan and Bennett houses. If Marlon was at his bedroom window, Hunter wasn’t able to see him. The angle of the window in relation to the pole’s position, coupled with the way the light reflected off the glass, made it virtually impossible for anyone standing at the pole to see inside.
‘Yes,’ Hunter finally replied. ‘I think it was him.’
Garcia’s gaze moved to the telephone cables. ‘Do you think he bugged the phone lines?’
Hunter looked up at the pole one more time. ‘There’s no reason why he would’ve needed to do that,’ he replied. ‘If that’s what he wanted, then it would’ve been a lot easier, and less risky, to do it via the telephone exchange box.’
‘So if you think that this mysterious telephone engineer was your man,’ Woods said. ‘What was he doing up on the telephone pole?’
Hunter looked north again. Past the pole, the road bent sharply left and disappeared behind the house they were standing in front of, impeding his view. From where he was, he could see no other houses, which meant that no other houses could see him either. He then turned and looked south. From that point, he had a clear and unrestricted view of every house on Allenwood Road, including the Bennetts’.
Hunter finally answered Woods’ question with another question.
‘How difficult do you think it would be for someone to place some sort of camera up there?’
Forty
Night arrives slowly in the summertime, gently gaining ground like a silent soldier. First, lazy shadows find the alleyways, then they start creeping across sidewalks, up walls and through windows, until finally darkness takes hold. By the time Hunter and Garcia got to the coroner’s office, after receiving a phone call from Doctor Hove just half an hour earlier, darkness had stealthily found its way into almost every corner of Los Angeles, with the exception of a sliver of purple sky that still colored the horizon over Santa Monica, but that too was fading fast.
At the crime scene in Venice, besides the several bloody footprints retrieved from the carpet in the living room, forensics had also managed to collect a number of fibers, hairs and traces of dust. Everything had been bagged and taken back to the lab for further examination. Due to how careful they all knew this killer was, hopes weren’t high, but they weren’t dead yet either.
Sharon Barnard’s cabin crew suitcase had been left in the living room by the front door. Inside it they’d found a used change of clothes, a toiletries bag, a makeup bag, and a tablet computer, which was password protected. Her cellphone was found on the kitchen counter, its screen locked by a six-digit combination. Both electronic items had been passed to the LAPD Computer Forensics Unit.
Forensics had also discovered a large number of finger-prints all around the house, but just like the ones found on the front door and handle, an initial, naked-eye analysis by the forensics team expert told them that they probably came from only two sources, one of them almost certainly female. The natural conclusion was that the prints had probably come from Sharon Barnard herself and her housemate, Tom Hobbs. Due to the large number of fingerprints found, confirmation was only expected to come some time in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
Tom Hobbs was still in shock, and waves of anxiety, which were triggered by involuntary memory flashes, came and went throughout the day, throwing him into fits of tears and panic attacks. The LAPD had managed to get in contact with his parents, who came and took him with them back to Pomona Valley, but not before a medic was forced to sedate him. Hunter would try to interview him again tomorrow.
After identifying themselves to the receptionist sitting behind the counter at the LA County Coroner, Hunter and Garcia were told that Doctor Hove was waiting for them inside Autopsy Theater One, the same theater they were in the day before.
In silence, Hunter and Garcia navigated their way through the shiny corridors and double swinging doors until they reached the small anteroom leading to Autopsy Theater One. Hunter hit the buzzer by the electronic keypad to the right of the door. Five seconds later, the doors hissed open.
Despite knowing to expect it, the low temperature inside the autopsy room still made Garcia shiver as he stepped inside. It did every time.
‘Robert. Carlos.’ Doctor Hove greeted both detectives with a nod of her head. She wore a regular light-blue lab gown, with her nose mask hanging loosely around her neck. Her hair was pulled back and tied up in a bundle at the top of her head. She smiled, but there was no way of disguising the drained and exhausted look of someone who’d been working for hours on end under artificial light.
Sharon Barnard’s body was laid out, uncovered, on the stainless-steel examination table at the center of the room. The mess of muscle and flesh that her face had become had now taken on a brownish, dry-meat color. Her right eye, the one that had been spared by the handheld sander, had gone completely milky, and the rest of her skin now looked ghostly white.
Doctor Hove approached the instrument counter on the other side of the examination table. Hunter and Garcia were right behind her. She picked up two copies of the autopsy report and handed one to each detective.
‘Unfortunately,’ the doctor began, her voice sounding as tired as she looked, ‘this post mortem examination hasn’t revealed a great deal.’ She switched on the high-powered halogen lights above the autopsy table.
Hunter and Garcia blinked a couple of times while their eyes got used to the enhanced brightness.
‘As you can plainly see –’ she directed their attention to Sharon Barnard’s torso, arms and legs – ‘unlike the first victim, this one shows no signs of having been physically tortured prior to the total disfiguration of her face. No whipping marks or cuts of any kind. None to her back either.’ She turned and indicated the chart on the wall behind her, which itemized the weight of the deceased’s brain, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen. ‘All of her internal organs, including her brain, were in as good a condition as could be expected for a healthy twenty-two-year-old female.’
Hunter and Garcia flipped to the second page on the report. Just as the lead forensics agent at the crime scene, Doctor Brian Snyder, had guessed, the cause of death had been heart failure induced by acute loss of blood.
; ‘Again, unlike the first victim,’ Doctor Hove continued, ‘this one showed no indication of having been sexually assaulted.’
That discovery surprised Garcia a lot more than it did Hunter. In truth, Hunter was half expecting it. When he had examined Sharon Barnard’s body in situ that morning, he had seen no bruises or abrasions of any sort to her inner thighs, nor around her groin region.
‘Also,’ the doctor added, ‘this time there was no message. Nothing was left in her throat or anywhere else in her body.’
Garcia nodded as he explained, ‘The message was left on the carpet inside the victim’s house. Written in her own blood.’
Doctor Hove’s face was colored by intrigue. ‘What was the message?’
‘Same three words as before, Doc. I Am Death. That’s it. Nothing more. Written all in capital letters.’
The doctor’s gaze returned to Sharon Barnard, and to what should’ve been her face. ‘I will admit that, bar being shot in the face by a close-quarters shotgun, the trauma to her facial muscles and nerves was as severe as I’ve ever seen.’
‘The difference is,’ Hunter said in a somber voice, moving around to the other side of the table, ‘when you’re shot in the face by a close-quarters shotgun, chances are you’ll die instantly. No pain.’ He shook his head. ‘The killer didn’t want that to happen here.’
Everyone went quiet for a moment.
Garcia, whose gaze had returned to Sharon Barnard’s body on the examination table, let out a heartfelt breath.
‘I don’t get this. I don’t get any of this. How can a killer completely switch his MO this way? I’ve never heard of a case like this.’
‘That’s exactly the same thought that has been with me since I started the post mortem,’ Doctor Hove said. ‘If I hadn’t been told, I would’ve never guessed, or found out through the examination, that this victim belonged to the same killer who had tortured and murdered the victim from yesterday morning’s autopsy.’
‘Exactly,’ Garcia agreed, bowing his head in the doctor’s direction before looking at Hunter. ‘We’ve dealt with killers who like to experiment before, Robert. Killers whose MOs slightly change from one murder to the other, but this is nothing like that. Here, the break away from the previous MO is too severe. Like the Doc said, this could’ve been a completely different killer. If not for the fact that he likes to authenticate his work by signing it, we would’ve never known both murders were related. We wouldn’t even be in this autopsy room.’