One by One

by Chris Carter

  Instinctively Hunter and Garcia took a step back and tilted their heads to one side, as if trying to look under the bed.

  ‘With nothing to hold on to,’ Brindle carried on with his theory, ‘it looks like she clawed at the floor, trying to resist the drag – that was when her fingernails chipped and broke off. Once he got her out from under the bed, she frantically reached out for whatever she could grab.’ Brindle paused and looked at the bed covers again. ‘And that’s how I think the blood got onto them.’

  Everyone’s attention returned to the bed covers.

  ‘You see,’ Brindle explained. ‘An extracted nail will cause the nail bed to bleed as much as a cut to the finger, but a chipped and broken nail will cause bleeding only if it manages to nick the tip, or the sides of the nail bed. And even if it does, there might be no bleeding at all. If there is any, it should be minimal. Just like what we’ve got here.’

  Hunter and Garcia considered it for a moment.

  ‘I also found these stuck to the underside of the bed’s box spring.’ He showed them one last evidence bag. Inside this one, four blond hair strands. ‘Her head most certainly bumped against it while she was being dragged from under the bed.’ He let out a concerned breath. ‘Looking at the state of the room, I’d say she fought as hard as she could, kicking and hitting all the way, until she was completely subdued.’

  Thoughtful silence.

  Garcia spoke first.

  ‘That all makes sense except for hiding under the bed. That implies that she knew someone was coming for her.’ He looked at the glass sliding doors and then back at the bed. ‘Why hide under here when she could’ve escaped from the house through the patio doors?’

  As if on cue, Dylan, the forensics agent who was dusting the glass sliding doors, announced, ‘I’ve got prints here.’

  Everyone turned and faced him.

  ‘The lab will confirm it, but by just looking at them I can tell you that the patterns are all the same. I have no doubt they all come from the same person. Small fingers. Delicate hands. Definitely a woman’s.’

  When it came to fingerprints, Dylan was as good as it got.

  ‘How about the lock?’ Brindle asked.

  ‘The lock isn’t broken,’ Dylan said. ‘We’ll have to remove it and take it for analysis, but this is a standard pin tumbler lock. Not very secure. If the perpetrator entered the house through this door, he could’ve easily bumped it. No sweat.’

  Lock bumping was a lock picking technique for opening pin tumbler locks where a specially crafted bump key was used. A single bump key would work for all locks of the same type. There were several videos over the Internet that could teach anyone how to bump a lock.

  Hunter was still looking at the three evidence bags Brindle had handed him. He agreed with Garcia. Hiding under the bed made no sense under the circumstances.

  ‘Mike, where exactly did you find this watch?’ he asked.

  Brindle showed him.

  Hunter lay down on the floor and looked under the bed, his eyes studying the location where the watch had been found, his mind rushing through possibilities. Still nothing made sense.

  Garcia walked across the other side of the bed and positioned himself just in front of the floral curtains, at the opposite end from where Dylan had dusted the glass door and lock. That distracted Hunter, and for a second his attention refocused on Garcia’s black shoes and socks that he could see from under the bed.

  Hunter’s body tensed. His thought process went from A to Z in just one second. ‘No way,’ he whispered, his gaze locked on his partner’s shoes.

  ‘What?’ Garcia asked.

  Hunter got up. All his attention had now moved to the curtains just behind Garcia.

  ‘Robert, what did you see?’ Garcia asked again.

  ‘Your shoes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw your shoes across the floor from under the bed.’

  Confusion all round.

  ‘OK, and . . .?’

  Hunter lifted a finger, indicating that he needed a moment, before walking in a straight line over to the curtains and slowly pulling them open. He kneeled down and carefully studied the floor for a little while.

  ‘I’ll be damned!’ The words oozed out of his lips.

  ‘What?’ Brindle asked, moving closer. Garcia was just behind him.

  ‘I think we’ve got dust-shift,’ Hunter said and indicated with his index finger. ‘Probably created by a footprint.’

  Brindle kneeled down next to him, his eyes scrutinizing the floor area. ‘Holy shit,’ he said a moment later. ‘I think you might be right.’

  ‘That’s what I think Christina saw,’ Hunter said, looking at Garcia. ‘Her killer’s shoes. I don’t think she was hiding under the bed. I think she probably got under it to retrieve her watch, but while she was under there she saw him. She saw her killer. He was the one who was hiding.’

  The room went silent for a moment.

  ‘OK, let’s get a photograph of this,’ Brindle finally said, addressing Dylan. ‘I also need some lift film. Let’s see how much of a print we can obtain here.’

  Hunter stood up and slowly allowed his eyes to move along the panoramic glass wall in front of him.

  ‘Actually we better dust just about everything here,’ he said. ‘The killer might’ve been hiding and waiting for a while.’ He leaned forward a few inches, his nose almost touching the glass wall, as if searching for a smudge mark. ‘Maybe he leaned against the glass. Maybe he left someth—’

  Hunter froze. The word dying in his throat.

  ‘What?’ Garcia asked, pausing just behind his partner and trying to look over his shoulder, but he had no idea what he was looking at. He thought Hunter had seen something through the window, out back.

  Hunter blew another warm breath against the glass, this time a long, purposeful one, moving his head around to deliver the breath against a wider area. The glass misted for just a few seconds.

  That was when Garcia finally saw it.

  ‘You have got to be joking.’

  Forty-Eight

  The vast open-plan office floor inside the LA Times headquarters building on West 1st Street sounded like a schoolyard at lunch break. The place was bustling with phone chatter, keyboard clacks, loud conversations and the shuffling of hurried feet, as every reporter rushed to meet the day’s deadline.

  Pamela Hays sat at her corner desk, undistracted by the noise and oblivious to the chaos of movement around her. She was the LA Times’ entertainment desk editor, and she too was rushing, reviewing all the articles that would make the final cut of the supplement for tomorrow’s paper.

  Entertainment Pam, as everyone always called her, had been working for the LA Times for only seven years, since she graduated from university at the age of twenty-four. Her first year with the paper had been a struggle. Fresh out of college, and with no experience working for a high-circulation newspaper, she was made to prove her worth by writing an infinite number of second-rate articles on stories she was sure only she and her mother read. Many of them never even made it into print. But Pamela knew she was a good reporter, and an expert researcher. It didn’t take long for others to start realizing that too.

  Bruce Kosinski, a larger-than-life man in more than one way, and at that time the city editor at the entertainment desk, was the first to give Pamela a shot at trying her hand at a ‘real’ story. She did well. Very well, in fact. Her research had been second to none, and the story made the front page of the paper. Two years ago, Bruce Kosinski was appointed as chief editor for the LA Times. His old job was offered to Pamela Hays, who gladly accepted.

  It’s true that Pamela did sleep with Bruce, but she knew that that wasn’t the reason why she was offered the entertainment desk’s editor’s position. The way she saw it, she had more than earned it.

  Pamela finished editing another article on her list, rolled her chair back from her desk and stretched her stiff neck.

  ‘Where the hell is Marco?’ she a
sked out loud to no one in particular. She got no answer.

  Unlike most of the other section editors at the LA Times, Pamela didn’t have an office. She didn’t much care for one either, preferring to sit among her reporters and the hustle and bustle of the main room.

  She checked the clock on the wall.

  ‘Goddamn it, he’s got less than twenty minutes to get his article to me. If he’s late again, I’m firing his ass. I’ve had it with his crap.’

  ‘What the hell?’ Pedro, the reporter whose desk was just opposite Pamela’s, said, frowning at his computer screen. ‘Pam, is Christina doing extra work as an actress?’ he asked.

  Pamela looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. ‘What the hell are you hablando about, muchacho?’ As a joke between the two of them, she had gotten into the habit of speaking Spanglish with Pedro.

  ‘Come have a look at this,’ Pedro called. There was no play in his voice.

  Pamela got up and made her way around to Pedro’s desk.

  ‘I was just checking a few things on the net,’ Pedro said, ‘when I came across this article.’ He pointed to his screen.

  It was a short article named ‘Reality or Hoax?’ The title didn’t catch Pamela’s attention, but the small picture under the headline did – a woman lying inside some sort of glass enclosure with hundreds of very scary black insects swarming around her body. Despite the bad quality of the picture, her face was clearly visible, including the small black mole just below her bottom lip.

  Pamela felt her blood almost freeze inside her veins. As she read the article, the color drained from her already naturally pale face.

  There was no doubt in her mind. The woman in that picture was Christina Stevenson.

  And whatever that was, it was no hoax.

  Forty-Nine

  Hunter woke up at 5:15 a.m. with a headache that could’ve raised the dead. He sat in bed, in the darkness of his bedroom, catatonically staring at the blank wall in front of him, as if he stared long and hard enough it would magically start answering all the questions choking his brain.

  It didn’t.

  He forced himself to stop thinking before his brain went into complete meltdown. He got ready and made his way to the twenty-four-hour gym just three blocks from where he lived. A heavy workout always had a way of clearing his head.

  Almost two hours later, after a hot shower, he headed out to the PAB.

  Garcia had just arrived when Hunter got to his office. Captain Blake followed just seconds later.

  ‘Brace yourselves,’ she said, allowing the door to close behind her with a bang. ‘’Cos the delayed storm is finally here.’

  ‘Storm?’ Garcia frowned.

  ‘The shitstorm,’ she replied, slapping this morning’s copy of the LA Times on his desk. The top half of the front page was taken by a series of six small photographs of Christina Stevenson lying inside the glass coffin. They were arranged sequentially. The first three showed her terrified and confused face at different stages of the voting process – EATEN at 211, then at 745, and finally at 1000. The next two showed her sharing the glass coffin with the tarantula hawks. Her face in both pictures was twisted and contorted in agonizing pain.

  The last picture showed her with a still, cold stare, her body all covered in red-raw lumps and black wasps, her lips swollen and bleeding.

  The life had been stung out of her.

  The headline at the top of the pictures read DEATHNET KILLER BROADCASTS BARBARIC EXECUTION LIVE ONLINE.

  Garcia started skimming over the article. It confirmed that the broadcast appeared to have been real, not a hoax. It described what had happened, but not in great detail. There was also no mention of Christina’s body being found.

  Hunter leaned back against his desk. He didn’t seem interested in what the paper had to say.

  ‘I thought the FBI had told you that this video was off the net,’ Captain Blake said. ‘How the hell did they get this?’

  ‘Not completely off the net,’ Hunter replied. ‘Just out of most people’s reach. But once something goes on the net, then it’s always on the net. Even if most people can’t find it. The LA Times has enough resources and people on their payroll to be able to track the video down.’

  The room was starting to feel stuffy. Captain Blake walked over to the only window in the room and pushed it open.

  ‘So far, that’s the only paper carrying the story,’ she said irritably. ‘But our press office already received a battery of calls – from local, to nationwide and international newspapers. The avalanche of crap is just about to start.’

  Hunter and Garcia knew she was referring to all the jackasses that would no doubt start calling in or sending in anonymous letters with all sorts of bogus tips and information, most of which would have to be checked out because it was protocol. Adding to that, there were always the obligatory phone calls from psychics and tarot card readers with visions, or messages received from beyond the grave that could help break the case. They were all used to it. It happened every time the news of a new high-profile killer broke.

  ‘The mayor was on the phone this morning,’ Captain Blake added. ‘He called me at my home. As soon as I put the phone down, I got a call from the governor of California. Everybody wants to know what the hell is going on, and my home phone seemed to have become this case’s information hot line.’ She grabbed the paper back from Garcia’s desk and hastily threw it into the wastebasket, knocking it over and spilling its contents.

  ‘What did you tell them?’ Hunter asked, calmly returning the wastebasket to its place.

  Captain Blake looked back at Hunter. Her makeup was as impeccable as always, but she was wearing a darker shade of eye shadow than she usually did, and that made the angry look in her eyes appear deadly. Still, Hunter didn’t shy away from it.

  ‘Enough to assure them we’re doing everything we can,’ she replied. ‘But I gave them nothing they didn’t need to know. No one knows the killer contacted you first, and that we were already investigating this case way before it hit the papers. No one knows that this killer has already claimed at least one victim prior to Christina Stevenson. I want to keep all that under wraps. As far as everyone is concerned, we’re starting our investigation into these online murders today.’

  ‘Suits us fine,’ Hunter said.

  ‘I refused the request for a press conference this early in the investigation,’ the captain continued, still annoyed. ‘But we won’t be able to escape it, as you both well know it. There will eventually be a press conference. And guess what?’ She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘The two of you are the ones who will be facing that execution squad.’

  There were few things in life Hunter hated more than press conferences. He breathed out and pinched the bridge of his nose. His headache was still eating away at his brain, despite the grueling workout.

  ‘Did you read the Sunday edition of the LA Times?’ Captain Blake asked. ‘Did you read Christina Stevenson’s story?’

  Both detectives nodded.

  ‘Well, she burst that “celebrity” affair wide open,’ the captain said. ‘I don’t care for tabloids or gossip publications, but since yesterday I’ve had to become intimately acquainted with them. They are all saying that the cheated husband will probably file for divorce.’ She paused, but there was no reaction from Hunter or Garcia. She moved on. ‘Whatever happens, that relationship is now severely dented. The wife’s actions will also probably put an end to her not-very-successful acting career. Though I won’t be surprised if she gets a book deal out of this. My point is, we’ve all seen and worked on cases where people were murdered for a lot less than something like that. Are you looking into this celebrity couple as suspects?’

  ‘We did a preliminary check,’ Garcia said. ‘The husband had been filming in Sacramento since the beginning of the week. He obviously had no idea about the affair, or that the story was coming out. He returned to Los Angeles on Sunday evening. The wife and her lover both have solid alibis for Friday night, the
night Christina Stevenson died. And no, they aren’t each other’s alibis, Captain. We’re looking into other aspects of this, but the big head-scratcher is – how do we link Kevin Lee Parker, our first victim, to Christina’s celebrity affair story? We know for sure that the same person is behind both murders.’

  ‘Well, that’s your job, isn’t it?’ Captain Blake retorted. ‘Finding a connection, if there is any.’

  ‘And as I said, we’re looking into it,’ Garcia replied firmly. ‘The possibility that Ms. Stevenson was murdered because she was a reporter is very real, and we know that. We have a team working on collecting every article she wrote for the Times in the past two years.’

  ‘Get them to work faster,’ the captain said, turning to face the pictures board on the south wall. She immediately noticed two new sets of photographs. The first one had been taken at the car park in Dewey Street, Santa Monica, where Christina Stevenson’s body had been found yesterday morning. When her stare found the pictures of the body itself, the captain held her breath for an instant.

  With the wasps gone, the deformation caused by their stings was absolutely shocking. Christina’s body was an unrecognizable mass. The tarantula hawks had shown no mercy. Even her eyes and tongue had been stung several times.

  ‘Jesus!’ The word unintentionally escaped the captain’s lips. ‘Good thing the paper didn’t get hold of this picture.’

  The second new set of photographs came from Christina’s bedroom.

  Captain Blake scanned the pictures slowly, and Hunter and Garcia saw her body go rigid when she came to the last photo on the set.

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  Fifty

  After Hunter’s discovery inside Christina Stevenson’s bedroom, the forensics team used a fluorescent orange fingerprint powder on the glass wall to enhance what was found. Though fluorescent powders were usually used against multicolored surfaces, they were often used to dust large areas, due to how easy it was to photograph the results under a UV light.