One by One

by Chris Carter

  Sophie had been coached for this job for weeks, even going through an intensive self-defense course with an FBI instructor. In her right jacket pocket she was also carrying a mini canister of pepper-spray, just in case.

  The FBI had spotted Bobby the second he started walking down East Market Street in the direction of the skate park. He was wearing a dark blue hooded jacket with the hood up, blue jeans, white Nike sneakers and a red backpack. Funny – she dressed older, he dressed younger.

  Every movement Bobby made was being filmed by a camera set up at a strategic point at the top of one of the skate ramps. Every word he uttered was being recorded by the wire Lucy was wearing under her top. At the beach an undercover agent and his dog were pretending to play with a ball, while watching Bobby from a safe distance.

  The surprise on Lucy’s face was all pretend. Michelle had run her through the scenario dozens of times.

  ‘Remember, you believe he’s twenty-one. When you see him for the first time, be shocked. Be hurt that he has lied to you. Be angry that he has abused your trust.’

  ‘Wow,’ Bobby said with a big smile, taking down his hood. ‘You’re even prettier in person. Look at you, you look amazing.’

  ‘What a scumbag,’ Harry said from his observation point at the top of East Market Street.

  Lucy’s eyes moistened. ‘Is this a joke?’

  ‘No, it’s me, Bobby.’

  Bobby was in his mid-thirties, with short fair hair, a squared jaw, masculine lips, a strong nose and inviting light blue eyes. He wasn’t exactly a bad-looking man. He probably had no problems getting female attention. The problem was that he preferred young girls.

  Bobby sat down.

  Lucy recoiled a few inches.

  ‘The bird is in the nest,’ Harry said into his microphone. ‘We can take him down.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Michelle replied. She was standing just a few yards from Lucy and Bobby, pretending to listen to her iPod while watching the skate kids do their stuff. ‘Let them talk for a minute.’

  ‘You’re not twenty-one,’ Lucy said in a trembling voice.

  ‘Oh, please don’t be upset,’ Bobby said, giving her his best sad-puppy face. ‘Give me a chance to explain, Lucy. It’s still me, the Bobby you know. The Bobby you’ve been chatting to for four months. The Bobby you said you were falling in love with. I just . . . didn’t know how to tell you in the chat room.’

  A tear rolled down Lucy’s cheek.

  ‘Damn, she’s good,’ Harry whispered to himself.

  ‘Forget the age thing,’ Bobby said in a tender voice. ‘That shouldn’t be important. Remember how we connected? How we chatted? How we got to know and understand each other so well? Nothing has changed. I’m the same person inside. C’mon, Lucy, don’t you believe that when two people connect as strongly as the way we did, when they find their soul mate, nothing else matters? I know you’re mature enough to know that.’

  No reply.

  ‘I think you’re an incredible and beautiful person,’ Bobby continued. ‘I’m in love with you, Lucy. I don’t get why age has to change that.’

  ‘Are you getting this crock of shit?’ Harry said into his microphone.

  ‘Yep, every word,’ Michelle replied. ‘He’s one sick slimeball.’

  Lucy said nothing. She just sat there, looking hurt.

  ‘Could we go for a walk and talk some more?’ Bobby said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to seeing you so much.’

  ‘OK, that’s it,’ Michelle said, checking her watch. ‘I’m ending this shit right now.’

  Out of the six young girls the FBI knew Bobby had had sex with, only one had agreed to cooperate. She was twelve. But one was all they needed. All she had to do was pick him out from a lineup, and they had him. Michelle also knew that once they had Bobby in custody, and one of the victims had cooperated, the others would also come forth and point their fingers.

  Michelle pulled her earbuds out of her ears, strolled up to where Lucy and Bobby were sitting and simply stood in front of Bobby for a moment, sizing him up.

  Bobby looked at her and frowned. ‘Can I help you?’

  Michelle smiled. ‘Can you help me? No.’ She asked and answered, gesticulating at the same time. ‘Can I help you? No. Can you help yourself? No. Are you a sick scumbag who deserves to rot in prison? Positively yes.’ She pulled out her credentials. ‘FBI, you sack o’ shit. We need to talk to you about some of your online chat-room activity.’

  For a second everyone remained still, then, in a flash, Bobby came alive. He jumped up and slammed the top of his head into Michelle’s chin. The brutal impact sent her head flying back as if she had been shot. Her jaw slammed against her skull with such force that her vision instantly blurred. Blood flew up in the air from the fresh cut on her lip. She stumbled backward awkwardly, her body half limp, her legs too jellified to keep her up. She hit the ground like a puppet on severed strings.

  Bobby jumped over the bench and made a run for it in the direction of Oceanfront Walk.

  Thirty-Nine

  ‘What?’ Garcia said into his phone. Emilio’s words had caught him completely by surprise. ‘Wait a second, Emilio. Let me put you on speakerphone.’ Garcia clicked a button and returned the receiver to its cradle. ‘Go ahead, say that again.’

  Hunter looked at Garcia.

  ‘The woman in that picture you gave me on Saturday when you came by the shop. I now know where I saw her before. I’m actually looking at her right now.’

  It was Hunter’s turn to look baffled. ‘What? Emilio, this is Detective Hunter. What do you mean, you are looking at her right now? Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at home. And what I mean is, I’m looking at another picture of her right now.’

  ‘Another picture?’ Garcia asked.

  ‘That’s right. A picture in yesterday’s newspaper.’

  Garcia frowned. ‘The press caught up with the video?’ he asked Hunter.

  ‘Not that I’m aware of. Captain Blake would’ve been going apeshit if the press was onto this.’

  ‘You saw her in yesterday’s paper?’ Garcia returned his attention to the phone. ‘Which one?’

  ‘The LA Times,’ Emilio answered.

  Instinctively Hunter and Garcia’s gaze shot to the only window in their office. The LA Times headquarters was literally across the road from the Police Administration Building. It was the first edifice they saw when they looked out of their window.

  ‘But she isn’t part of the news,’ Emilio said. ‘The story isn’t about her.’

  A moment of confused looks.

  ‘She’s the reporter.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s why she looked so familiar to me. My girlfriend loves to read the entertainment supplement of the LA Times on Sundays, mainly the celebrity gossip part. She’s into that kind of stuff, you know? Sometimes I flip through it myself. Anyway, that woman writes a column in the entertainment supplement. There’s always a small picture of her at the top of whatever article she wrote that week. And that’s why she looked so familiar. I’d seen her picture before several times.’

  Garcia was writing something down on a notepad.

  ‘I didn’t look at the paper yesterday. I was working,’ Emilio explained. ‘I’m off today. I was just having a quick look through yesterday’s paper before I threw it away, and there she was.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ Hunter asked.

  ‘Christina, Christina Stevenson.’

  Hunter typed her name into an Internet search engine. Within a few seconds he had her picture on his screen. Emilio was right. There was no doubt Christina Stevenson was their second victim, unless she had an identical twin or a clone working for the LA Times.

  ‘Great job, Emilio,’ Garcia said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’ He disconnected.

  Hunter was scanning through the information on one of the pages he had on his screen.

  ‘What have you got?’ Garcia asked.

  ‘Not much. Christina Stevenson, twenty-nine years
old. She’d been with the LA Times for six years. The last two of those she spent with the entertainment desk, which is called by many the gossip pit. That’s all the personal information I have here.’

  ‘She was a gossip reporter?’ Garcia asked.

  ‘It looks that way.’

  ‘Damn, no one makes more enemies than they do, not even us.’

  Garcia was right. In a city like LA, where to so many being in the public eye was as important as breathing air, gossip reporters could make or break anyone’s career. They could destroy a person’s relationship, break their family homes, expose dirty secrets, do almost anything they liked. And the worst of all was that it didn’t even have to be true. In LA the smallest of rumors could completely change someone’s life, for better or worse. Gossip reporters were known for having false friends, and real enemies.

  Hunter hesitated for a second, pondering a few things over.

  Garcia knew exactly what Hunter was debating in his head. If they started asking questions inside the headquarters of the LA Times, there was no hiding this story anymore. A story that, so far, no newspaper or TV news channel had picked up on. It was like taking raw meat to a pack of hungry wolves, even if the raw meat was one of their own. No information would be forthcoming, because reporters love to obtain it, but they hate giving it away.

  ‘So what do you want to do?’ Garcia asked. ‘Start asking questions at the Times?’

  ‘We’ll have to. If the victim was a reporter there, there’s no escaping it, but not just yet.’ Hunter reached for the phone on his desk and called the research team. He asked them to find out everything they could on Christina Stevenson, but more important he needed her home address ASAP. They could start there.

  A minute later his phone rang.

  ‘Do we have an address already?’ Hunter said into the phone.

  ‘Um . . . Detective Robert Hunter?’ a male voice asked.

  Hunter paused. ‘Yes. This is Detective Robert Hunter. Who is this?’

  ‘This is Detective Martin Sanchez with the Santa Monica Police Department.’

  ‘How can I help you, Detective Sanchez?’

  ‘Well, earlier this morning one of our patrol cars, answering a 911 call, found a female body at a private parking lot near Marine Park in Santa Monica.’ Sanchez paused to clear his throat. ‘Somebody left a note with the body. Your name is on it.’

  Forty

  It took several seconds for the blurriness to dissipate from Michelle’s vision, and even then bright spots of light seemed to be exploding everywhere. Her entire head hurt as if it was being gradually squeezed in a vise. She could feel her bottom lip pulsating from the blood pressure so ferociously she thought it would blow up like an air balloon.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Sophie asked. She was kneeling next to Michelle, holding her head in her hands. Everything had happened so fast she’d had no time to react.

  Michelle looked at her with dopey eyes. No recognition. Her brain still wasn’t registering much.

  ‘Michelle, are you OK?’ Harry’s voice came through her earbuds dangling from her neck. Harry was already running down East Market Street in the direction of the skate park. All bets were off.

  ‘Michelle?’ Sophie called again.

  Suddenly, just like being woken up by a bucket of cold water to the face, her brain re-engaged. Her eyes refocused on Sophie’s face, and everything came back to her in a flash. Her hand shot to her lip and she winced as her fingertips touched it. She pulled her hand away and looked at it.

  Blood.

  Confusion was immediately replaced by anger.

  ‘Oh no, he didn’t,’ she said to herself, quickly returning her earbuds to her ears.

  ‘Bird is trying to fly,’ she heard Harry say.

  ‘Like hell he is,’ Michelle replied.

  ‘Michelle, are you all right?’ Harry asked, sounding a little relieved and out of breath at the same time.

  ‘I’ll live,’ she replied in an angry voice.

  ‘That was one hell of a headbutt.’

  ‘Stop worrying about me, goddammit,’ she blurted into her microphone. ‘Somebody pin Bobby’s bitch-ass down.’

  ‘We’re already on it.’

  As soon as Bobby had headbutted Michelle and run for it, the undercover agent at the beach had kneeled down by his German shepherd and pointed at Bobby, running away in the distance. ‘Take him down, boy. Take him down.’

  The dog had taken off like a rocket.

  Bobby was fast, but not fast enough. The dog was able to get to him in just a couple of seconds.

  The takedown command instructed the dog to simply use its body weight to drop a fleeing subject to the ground. A fully developed German shepherd with running momentum produced an impact force equivalent to being hit by a motorbike at 25mph.

  Bobby was catapulted forward and onto the ground, hitting the deck hard.

  Fifteen minutes later Bobby was sitting in the backseat of a tinted, unmarked SUV, parked in a back alley around Venice Beach. His hands were cuffed behind his back. An FBI agent was sitting to his left. Michelle Kelly and Harry Mills were sitting directly in front of him.

  Bobby kept his head low. His eyes on his knees.

  ‘You sucker-punch sonofabitch,’ Michelle said, touching her swollen lip again.

  Bobby didn’t look up.

  ‘But it’s all good,’ Michelle carried on. ‘Because guess what? We’ve got your sorry ass. And you’re not going anywhere for a very long time.’

  Bobby said nothing.

  Michelle picked up Bobby’s backpack, unzipped it and dumped all its contents on the floor between them. There wasn’t much: several different chocolate bars, various packs of gum, three bottles of soda, a small, squared gift box with a red ribbon, a map of the area and a key on a keychain. No wallet. No driver’s license. No identification of any kind. Bobby had already been searched. He had nothing on him.

  ‘So what do we have here?’ Michelle said, rummaging through everything.

  Bobby’s eyes followed her hands. ‘Don’t you need a warrant for that? That’s private proper . . . urgh.’

  The agent’s elbow connected with Bobby’s ribcage.

  ‘If I were you,’ the agent said. ‘I’d limit myself to answering the questions you’re asked, or else this thing can get very ugly, very quickly . . . For you, that is.’

  Michelle picked up the chocolate bars, together with the packs of gum and the bottles of soda, and passed them over to Harry. ‘Let’s get these to the lab ASAP,’ she said, before looking back at Bobby. ‘I’m willing to bet your freedom that at least some of those are drugged.’

  No answer. Bobby’s eyes went back to his knees.

  Michelle smiled. ‘And what is this?’ She reached for the gift box. The tag on it said To Lucy, with love. She undid the ribbon and pulled the lid open.

  Harry’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re kidding me.’

  Michelle stared at the gift inside with angry eyes. ‘Red lacy underwear?’ she finally said. ‘You thought Lucy was thirteen years old, and you bought her lacy panties?’ She looked at Harry. ‘Somebody give me a gun and I’ll shoot this barf-bag in the face, right now.’

  Bobby shifted nervously in his seat.

  ‘You know, it doesn’t really matter that you don’t want to talk right now, or give us your real name, or anything. Because we’ve got this.’ Michelle held up the key and keychain that was inside Bobby’s backpack. The key ring simply said 103. ‘We now know that you got yourself a shitty hotel room somewhere not very far from here. It might take us a few hours, but we’ll find the hotel, and whatever else you left behind in that room. I bet we’ll find a wallet and an identity.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Actually, I bet we’ll find a laptop or a smartphone.’ Michelle leaned forward, her face just inches away from Bobby’s. She could smell his cheap cologne. His minty breath. She smiled at him. ‘You can’t even begin to imagine what we can extract out of a laptop or a smartphone’s hard drive. You see, Bobby, all those mont
hs in the chat rooms, and you had no idea you were chatting to me. I’m your Lucy.’ Michelle allowed the weight of those words to crash down on Bobby for a moment. ‘This is checkmate, buddy. Whichever way you play it, the game is over.’

  Forty-One

  The address they were given revealed a small, squared, two-story office building in Dewey Street, just behind Marine Park in Santa Monica. It took Hunter and Garcia forty-seven minutes to make the journey from the PAB. The outside of the old building was littered with For Sale and For Lease signs.

  Hunter wondered who in their sane mind would want to buy or rent any office space in a building that looked to have been so terribly neglected in the past few years – tired and discolored bricks, ill-fitted windows and dark rainwater marks coming down from the roof like some sort of muddy icing on a cake.

  The parking lot was hidden behind the property, away from the main street. Weeds were sprouting up through a web of cracks. Of the eight car spaces, only one was taken – a red Ford Fusion. Several wooden crates were pushed up against the wall, just a few yards from the car. The entrance to the parking lot had been sealed off by the Santa Monica Police Department with yellow crime-scene tape. A crowd had formed outside the perimeter, and though nothing could be seen from where they were standing, no one looked prepared to move an inch. Some were actually drinking coffee out of a thermos while they waited.

  Hunter and Garcia parked in front of the building, next to the three police cars and the forensics van, before slowly weaving their way through the crowd.

  As they reached the crime-scene tape and Hunter quickly chatted to the two officers guarding the entrance to the lot, a tall, lean and spare man dressed in a black hooded sweatshirt and dark blue jeans caught Garcia’s eyes. He was standing at the back of the crowd, hands tucked deep into his pockets. But contrary to everyone else’s tense and apprehensive body language, his was calm and relaxed. He looked up and his eyes met Garcia’s for a brief moment, before darting away.