by Carter Chris
‘I had dinner with you guys at your place three weeks ago.’
‘I know, but that’s how she is. And she knows that if I’m not sleeping well, that means you probably aren’t sleeping at all. She cares, Robert. It’s in her nature.’
Hunter’s smile was full of tenderness. ‘Yes, I know. Tell her I’m OK.’
‘I do, but she knows better.’ Garcia started fidgeting with a paper napkin, folding its edges. ‘You know, she can’t understand how come you’re not with someone.’
Hunter scratched just under his right ear and felt a small, painful lump on his skin. A stress zit was just starting to come up. He left it alone. ‘Yeah, I know, she keeps on trying to introduce me to some of her friends.’
Garcia laughed. ‘And you keep on sneakily getting out of it. But, you know, maybe she’s got a point.’
Hunter looked at his partner funny.
Garcia matched his stare. ‘She really likes you, you know? Alice.’
‘What?’ Hunter had no idea where that came from.
‘You know she really likes you, don’t you?’
Hunter studied Garcia for an instant. ‘And you know this how?’
‘Because I’ve got eyes. Don’t even need to be a detective to pick that one up. Don’t play the blind man, Robert.’
Hunter said nothing and reached for his glass again.
‘Seriously, she likes you. It’s in the way she looks at you when you’re not looking. It’s in the way she looks at you when you are looking. It reminds me of school. You know, when you have a crush on someone, but you’re just too shy to say something. I know because I was that shy. It took me ages to finally ask Anna out.’ Garcia allowed the moment to breathe. ‘Maybe you should take her out for a drink, dinner even. She’s a nice girl. Attractive, intelligent, determined . . . I can’t think of a reason any single man wouldn’t like to take her out. And no offense, but Anna is right, you could do with a steady relationship.’
‘Thanks, Dr. Love, but I do fine the way I am.’
‘I know you do fine. I’ve seen the way women look at you.’ Every time the bartender walked past, her eyes lingered on Hunter for a moment. Hunter and Garcia had both noticed it.
‘Look, don’t get me wrong, I’m really not trying to play matchmaker here. I suck at it, and your personal life is none of my business. All I’m saying is, take Alice out for a friendly drink. Get to know her out of our work environment – which, I might add, is filled with pictures of dead people. Who knows? You guys might just click.’
Hunter swirled his whisky around in his glass. ‘Do you want to hear something funny?’ he said. ‘We knew each other from before.’
‘Who? You and Alice?’
Hunter nodded.
‘What? Really?’
Hunter nodded.
‘From where?’
Hunter told him.
‘Wow, that’s a coincidence. So she was a prodigy kid as well? Boy, do I feel like the dumb one in the box now.’
Hunter smiled and finished his Scotch. Garcia did the same.
‘I don’t want to talk about the case,’ Garcia said, ‘’cos I’m ready to go home here, but do you want to hear something funny? I hate puppets, including shadow ones. I have done since I was a kid.’
‘Really?’
‘I know it’s silly, but I always thought there was something evil about them. Nothing would scare me more than a puppet theater. And my fifth-grade teacher made us stage a puppet play every goddamn month. I either had to manipulate them, or sit with the rest of the class and watch.’ He chuckled uncomfortably. ‘Who knows? Maybe the killer is my teacher and he came back just to haunt me.’
Hunter smiled and stood up, ready to leave. ‘I wish. That would make things much simpler.’
Ninety-Six
Hunter felt so exhausted that no insomnia would’ve been able to keep him awake tonight. Back in his apartment, he had another warm shower and poured himself another shot of Scotch. Against his headache and tired muscles, it worked better than any medicine he could think of.
He kept the living-room lights switched off and headed for the sofa. There was no need for him to see the faded wallpaper, the tired carpet or the mismatched furniture.
Hunter couldn’t even remember when the last time was that he’d turned his TV on. He definitely wasn’t a TV man, but he knew he needed something to keep his mind occupied, no matter how trivial. Something to keep his thoughts from running away from him and back into the case, at least for one night – he really needed to disconnect. Though he loved reading, books tended to excite his brain, while television simply numbed it.
He searched the channels for late-night sports or cartoons, but without cable or satellite TV his choice of channels was somewhat limited. He settled for a rerun of some old World Wrestling Federation show. Entertaining, but not enough to keep sleep from taking over. Slowly, his body and mind gave up the fight and eased into a restless sleep.
It didn’t take long for the nightmares to start. And they came at him in waves – an empty room, bare brick walls, a single, dim light bulb dangling from a wire in the center of the ceiling, weak enough to keep all the corners in a shadow. Everything was so vivid he could smell the room – damp, moldy, stinking of sweat, vomit, and blood. In his dream he was merely a spectator, watching everything unfold before his eyes without being able to intervene.
First he saw Garcia lying unconscious on a dirty metal table while someone slowly dismembered him with a kitchen knife. No matter how much he tried, Hunter could never see the assailant’s face.
In a blink of an eye, the victim on the metal table changed. Garcia was nowhere to be seen. This time, the faceless killer was using his knife on Anna, Garcia’s wife. Her terrified screams reverberated through the room in an endless loop.
Hunter twitched on the sofa.
Another change of scene.
This time the victim was Alice Beaumont, and the dismembering started all over again. The floor of the room was thick with blood. Hunter was helpless, watching these people he knew, people he cared for, being slaughtered in front of his eyes, like a second-rate horror film.
Moments later the killer proceeded to use the body parts like Play-Doh, molding and sculpting them into grotesque, shapeless sculptures. All Hunter could hear were the animated laughs the killer let out every so often, like a kid having the best of times with his new toys.
Hunter’s eyes shot open all of a sudden, as if somebody had shaken him awake. His forehead and neck were drenched in cold sweat. He was still in his living room, the TV was still on, now showing some black and white film. Somehow, while still locked inside his nightmare, Hunter remembered something Garcia had said to him at the bar, and his brain made a crazy connection.
He jumped up and checked his watch – 6:08 a.m. He had been asleep for close to six and a half hours. Despite the horrendous dreams, his headache was gone, and his brain felt fresh and rested, but he needed to get back to his office. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before.
Ninety-Seven
By the time Garcia arrived at the PAB, Hunter had been sitting in front of the pictures board for about an hour and a half. His mind had run through dozens of scenarios, trying desperately to answer the questions his brain ceaselessly asked. He hadn’t managed to answer all of those questions, but one scenario made more sense than all the others, and he wanted to run the idea past everyone.
Captain Blake was the last one to join the group in Hunter’s office. Alice had arrived five minutes earlier.
‘I’ve come up with a theory,’ Hunter said, drawing their attention to the pictures board. He had repositioned several of the photographs in a different order. ‘Please bear with me and hear me out, because it might sound a little crazy at first.’
Captain Blake pulled a face. ‘We’ve got a killer who dismembers his victims and uses their body parts to create sculptures and shadow puppets, Robert. Any theory behind those actions, truth or not, has got to be at least
a little crazy. I don’t think any of us is expecting a lot of reason here. What have you got?’
‘OK,’ Hunter began. ‘We all know how much effort we’ve put into trying to understand and identify the meaning behind those sculptures and shadow images. Since we got our third victim four days ago, and consequently, our third sculpture and shadow image, we’ve been trying every combination we could think of to make any sense of this mess. Carlos and I even tried looking at the images as a group, instead of individually.’
Garcia nodded. ‘We thought that maybe the images linked into each other in some way to form something else, maybe a larger image. This whole thing felt like a jigsaw from the beginning. So maybe that was what the killer wanted us to do. Slot the pieces he’d given us into the correct position to complete the puzzle.’
Captain Blake cocked an interested eyebrow.
‘We got nothing, Captain,’ Garcia said, curbing her enthusiasm with a shake of his head. ‘No matter which way we pieced it together, we came up with zilch. Each sculpture casts an individual shadow image, and that’s that. They aren’t linked.’
Hunter agreed. ‘We came to the conclusion that they were independent from each other, not smaller pieces of an incomplete picture.’
‘OK,’ the captain said. ‘So you went back to try and figure out their individual meanings.’
‘Yes,’ Hunter admitted. ‘But with the discovery yesterday that the second victim, Andrew Nashorn, and the third one, Nathan Littlewood, also knew each other – possibly since their late teens – I started pondering new possibilities.’
‘Such as?’ the Captain queried.
‘Carlos said something yesterday that didn’t click until sometime in the middle of the night, but I should’ve thought of it before.’
Captain Blake and Alice’s attention moved to Garcia, who in turn looked back at Hunter.
‘What did I say?’
‘That you never liked puppets. And you told me about your fifth-grade teacher.’
Captain Blake tightened her stare.
Garcia shrugged as if it were nothing. ‘Puppets used to freak me out. They still do, in a way.’
‘What about your fifth-grade teacher?’ Alice asked.
‘He came up with a theater class, and made us stage a puppet play every month.’ Garcia scratched his left cheek nervously. ‘Boy, I hated that class. I hated that teacher. I hated that whole year.’
‘And that’s an angle I never considered before,’ Hunter said.
‘What angle are you talking about, Robert?’ Captain Blake said. ‘Because I don’t think any of us see it either.’
‘A theater, Captain. A puppet theater.’ Hunter positioned himself next to the replica of the sculpture from the first crime scene, Derek Nicholson’s house. ‘Puppets are used in theaters for one reason only.’
Just a fraction of confusion lifted from everyone’s faces.
‘To stage a play?’ Alice said.
‘To tell a story,’ Garcia commented a second later.
Hunter smiled. ‘Exactly.’
Ninety-Eight
Captain Blake’s eyes quickly browsed Garcia and Alice’s faces; neither of them seemed to be on the same page as Hunter yet either.
Hunter didn’t wait to be asked. ‘I think we’ve been going down the right track all along, we were just knocking on the wrong door. There is a bigger picture here.’ He pointed at the board. ‘But it isn’t one single image. And the shadow puppets were the clue.’ Hunter cleared his throat before proceeding. ‘I think the killer is staging a play. Just like a puppeteer. He’s telling us a story, giving us a scene at a time.’
Stunned silence.
Simultaneously, everyone’s uncertain eyes left Hunter and moved back to the pictures on the board. Alice started chewing her bottom lip. Hunter had noticed she did that when she was concentrating on something. He could tell that they were trying very hard to stay with him.
‘Let me show you what I mean, starting with the first image we got.’ He turned off the lights, switched his flashlight on, and aimed its beam onto the replica sculpture. The dog and bird-like shadow images appeared on the wall behind it once again.
‘We identified this first image as being that of a coyote and a raven. I have no doubt Alice found the correct interpretation for those two animals in combination – it means a liar, a deceiver, someone who betrays. I also think we are correct in linking that interpretation directly to the first victim. In the killer’s mind, Derek Nicholson was a liar.’
‘Yeah, we’ve all agreed on that,’ Captain Blake said.
Hunter turned the lights back on and pointed to the shadow photograph they had obtained from the sculpture left at the second crime scene, Andrew Nashorn’s boat. The image showed a large, horned, devil-like face looking down at what looked like two people in a standing position, and two lying on the ground, one on top of the other. ‘Now, with this second image, I think there are things we got right, and things we got wrong.’ He nodded at Alice. ‘I think Alice was right again when she said that the killer probably had an agenda. He’s after specific victims. He isn’t picking them at random out of the general public. At the time he created this sculpture, he’d killed two people, Nicholson and Nashorn. We thought they were represented by these two figures lying on the ground.’ He indicated them in the image. ‘And it looked like there were two more names on his list, represented by the two standing figures.’
Captain Blake moved closer to the board. ‘And you think that’s wrong?’
‘Partially. I don’t think that these two on the ground represent the two victims who had been killed at that point, as was suggested. But maybe these two standing up indicate that, at the time of the second murder, there were still two more names on the killer’s hit list.’
Garcia curled his lips over his teeth, considering. ‘So what do you think the two on the ground represent?’
‘A fight.’
Silence ruled again for the next few seconds. Everyone frowned and squinted at the picture, trying to process it under Hunter’s new light.
‘OK, let me walk you through what I think this whole image means,’ Hunter said, grabbing everyone’s attention again. ‘Imagine a group of four friends, and for now let’s say that those four are Nicholson, Nashorn, Littlewood and a fourth person who we haven’t identified yet. This group of friends go out on a drinking night, or a party night, or something. They get too drunk, they get too rowdy as guys sometimes do, maybe even too high, and they end up in an argument with someone, either an outsider, or someone who was originally part of their group. The argument escalates and turns into a punch-up. Even if it had started as a joke . . .’ Hunter indicated the two images piled up on the ground once again, ‘. . . it didn’t end as one.’
Garcia was pinching his chin, following Hunter’s every word, slowly stepping into his partner’s line of thought. Suddenly the dots connected.
‘And they killed him,’ he said.
The shadow image that he’d looked at countless times before now took on a whole new meaning in front of his eyes. ‘The fight got completely out of hand,’ Garcia continued. ‘The rest of the group was standing around, watching, or maybe they all took turns punching and kicking. It takes one wrong kick to the temple, a stumble and a head hit against a curbstone, or a wall, or something, and the punch-up ends . . . badly.’
Hunter nodded. ‘It probably happened unintentionally, but I think somebody was killed. That’s the theory.’
Looking at the picture, listening to Hunter’s interpretation, it was like the image had morphed before Captain Blake’s eyes.
‘But then we’re either missing someone, or we got the numbers wrong,’ Alice joined in.
‘What do you mean?’ the captain asked.
‘When we first looked at this shadow image, we knew the killer had already murdered two people, and we believed he was after two more, represented by the two standing up figures. If this image represents two people fighting on the floor with the
rest watching, and as Robert is suggesting, one of them accidentally dies, then we’re left with three remaining figures. The one that comes out of the fight, and the two standing up.’ She lifted three fingers. ‘We have three victims now – Nicholson, Nashorn and Littlewood. And that would mean the killer has got them all. His list is complete.’
‘You’re forgetting him.’ Hunter pointed to the largest figure in the image. The distorted head with what looked like horns, looking down at the probable fight scene. ‘You thought this figure represented the killer, remember? Like a devil. I don’t think it does. I think that with every murder, the killer uses the sculpture and the shadow image it casts to represent that specific victim. This was left in Andrew Nashorn’s boat for a reason. I think the Devil-like figure represents Nashorn.’
‘So why the horns?’ Captain Blake asked.
‘Maybe to indicate that he was the leader, or the instigator. In every group of guys like that, Captain, there’s always one who is the head. The one whom everyone follows. Maybe Nashorn was the one who started the fight. Or maybe he was the one who, instead of stopping it, urged the participants to carry on punching.’
Uneasiness took over the room.
Hunter gave everyone time to consider his theory.
‘Maybe the person isn’t dead,’ Alice said. ‘Maybe you’re right, maybe there was a fight, but instead of dying the victim was physically, or even mentally impaired. Maybe after all these years, that victim is back, and he wants revenge.’
Hunter shook his head. ‘No, the victim died.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because the killer tells us.’
Ninety-Nine
Hunter drew their attention to the last two shadow-image photographs on the board. The ones cast by the two-part sculpture left in Nathan Littlewood’s office.