by Chris Carter
‘How about a computer, or a laptop?’
‘Her laptop was found on the sofa in the living room. We’ll take it to IT forensics when we’re done here.’
Hunter acknowledged it, but he suspected that IT Forensics wouldn’t really find anything. Why would the killer destroy the victim’s phone, but leave her laptop intact? He walked over to the washbasin and pulled open the cupboard mirror above it. Inside it he found all the usual suspects – toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, Band-Aids, eye drops, and a couple of boxes of strong headache pills. There was also a full bottle of sleeping tablets. The trashcan to the left of the toilet was empty. With the exception of the broken wall mirror, nothing else inside the bathroom seemed to have been touched.
Hunter stepped back into the corridor and tried the door on the right-hand side. Just a small storage room where the victim kept several miscellaneous items, together with various house-cleaning products. He closed the door and moved on to the one at the far end of the hall – Karen Ward’s bedroom.
The room was spacious enough, with a low queen bed, a black fabric armchair, a four-drawer dresser, and an eight-shelf wooden shoe rack. Instead of a wardrobe, Karen Ward had preferred to have her clothes hanging from an extra-wide chrome clothes rack. Despite one of the room’s two west-facing windows being partially covered by the clothes rack, the room would still get enough sunlight during the day.
As Hunter’s eyes carefully circled the room, something began bothering him. He walked over to the bed, which had been positioned against the east wall, stopped and turned to face the clothes rack all the way across the room from it.
This doesn’t feel right, he thought.
The clothes rack was flanked on one side by the armchair and on the other by the dresser. The shoe rack was to the right of the door, against the north wall, every inch of space on it taken. There was only one bedside table, on the near side of the bed. On it Hunter found a reading lamp, a digital alarm clock, and a dog-eared paperback. He pulled open the bedside table’s only drawer and paused.
‘Carlos, come have a look at this.’
Garcia walked over to where his partner was standing.
From inside the drawer, Hunter retrieved a thirty-eight caliber, Colt 1911, Special Combat pistol.
‘Whoa,’ Garcia said, lifting both hands in surprise. ‘That’s one hell of a gun to have by your bed.’
‘She’s got a permit for it,’ Hunter announced, indicating the official document inside the open drawer. On the pistol, he thumbed the catch to release the magazine. If the gun had surprised them, its ammunition took it a step further. The clip was full to capacity with nine thirty-eight Special, Flex Tip bullets.
Hunter and Garcia exchanged a concerned look.
The Flex Tip bullet was a patented design by Hornady Ammunition, and it was part of its Critical Defense range. Both detectives were very familiar with it. It was an extremely destructive round; upon entering soft tissue, its flexible tip would swell up, distributing equal pressure across the entire circumference of the bullet cavity. The result was total bullet expansion and maximum damage. Flex Tip bullets weren’t the type of round used for target practice.
Hunter slotted the magazine back into the pistol and returned it to the drawer. Other than the gun permit, there was nothing else inside it.
‘You mentioned that the victim’s handbag was found on the sofa in the living room,’ Hunter said, addressing Sergeant Velasquez.
‘Yes, that’s correct.’
‘Anything interesting inside it?’
‘No.’
Hunter scratched the underside of his chin and took a slow stroll around the room, his eyes roaming everywhere. He paused momentarily as he reached the space between the clothes rack and the dresser before returning to the side of the bed. His attention went back to the bedside table.
‘This feels all wrong.’
‘What does?’ Garcia asked. ‘The gun?’
‘That too,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘But I’m talking about this room.’
With an unsure look, Garcia looked around the space.
Hunter saw Dr. Slater and Sergeant Velasquez do the same.
‘What do you mean, Robert?’ Garcia queried.
‘If this was your room,’ Hunter said, ‘and these were your things, would you arrange it this way?’
Garcia took a moment, allowing his gaze to pause over each furniture item for a few seconds. ‘Well, I . . . probably wouldn’t need the shoe rack, or the dresser with all the makeup paraphernalia.’
‘No, that’s not what I mean, Carlos. I’m talking about the position of the bed, the clothes rack . . . everything you see in here. If this was your room and this was your furniture, would you arrange it like this?’
Once again, Garcia regarded the room and its contents, this time paying more attention to their positioning. ‘Well, it does feel a little too crammed in here.’
‘Exactly,’ Hunter agreed.
‘But it’s not because of lack of space,’ Dr. Slater cut in, her gaze moving from floor to ceiling then from wall to wall. ‘This is a large enough room. The problem here really is the furniture placement. If you just move a few things around, the room would feel much bigger.’
‘OK,’ Hunter went with it. ‘So what would you change? What would you move around?’
Everyone looked like they were thinking about it for a short moment.
‘I’d probably swop the bed with the clothes rack for starters.’ Garcia was the first to reply.
Dr. Slater nodded. ‘For sure. Just look at this. The bed’s footboard is just a few feet from the door, practically blocking your path as you enter the room. Take your attention away from it for just a second, and you’d bang your leg against it every time. There’s also no real need to block half of that window,’ she added, gesturing towards it. ‘If you just swop the bed and the clothes rack around, the room wouldn’t only feel a lot more spacious, it would also become much brighter during the day.’
‘Maybe it’s an energy thing,’ Sergeant Velasquez proposed from the door. ‘You know . . . like that feng something.’
‘Feng shui,’ Garcia said.
‘That’s it. Maybe she was going for that kind of feel.’
Hunter shook his head. ‘No. The principle of feng shui is that energy should flow unrestricted and uninterrupted. In this case, the energy from the door would cut across the bed and the energy from the window would be blocked by the clothes rack. There’s nothing feng shui about this room.’
Dr. Slater and Sergeant Velasquez looked at Hunter curiously.
‘I read a lot,’ Hunter explained with a shrug. ‘Could you do me a favor?’ he addressed Sergeant Velasquez, taking a step closer to the bed. ‘Could you stay right outside the door and close it for me, please? Just for a second. I want to have a look at something.’
The sergeant frowned at the request, but complied.
Hunter’s eyes moved from the door, to the bed, and then the windows.
‘It’s OK, Sergeant,’ he called out after a couple of seconds. ‘You can open the door again.’
‘Pardon my curiosity,’ Velasquez said as he re-entered the room. ‘But what does how the victim arranged the furniture in her bedroom have to do with her murder?’
‘Maybe nothing,’ Hunter conceded, getting down on his knees to check under the bed. He found nothing. ‘But there’re too many things in this apartment that just don’t feel right, like this entire room, and I don’t think that that’s just a coincidence. There must be a specific reason why.’
‘OK, and what do you think that reason would be?’ Velasquez asked.
Hunter got back on to his feet. ‘I think it was because she was scared.’
The sergeant hesitated for a moment. ‘Scared? Scared of what?’
‘Not of what?’ Hunter replied. ‘Of who.’ He indicated as he clarified. ‘By placing the bed right here, she could sleep facing the door. That’s why she slept on the left side of the bed, and we know that beca
use of the bedside table. If she left the hallway lights on, which I’m sure she did every night, she’d be able to see shadows under the door – footsteps of anyone approaching her room. Just like I saw yours while you were standing outside.’
Instinctively Velasquez looked down at his shoes.
‘There’s also a reasonably new sliding lock on the inside of the bedroom door,’ Hunter continued. ‘I bet it wasn’t there four months ago when she moved in. She put it there herself, and the scratch marks on both, the lock and catch, suggest that she used it regularly.’
Sergeant Velasquez checked the lock. He had to agree that it did look fairly new.
‘Then there’re all the other telltale signs around the apartment that tell me that she was definitely scared of someone.’
‘And which signs are those?’ Velasquez asked.
‘Well, we’ve got a thirty-eight Special Combat pistol in her bedside table, loaded with “extreme prejudice” rounds.’ He drew everyone’s attention back to the bed. ‘We also have a low platform bed, close to the floor, so no one could hide under it. A clothes rack, not a wardrobe, so no one could hide inside it.’ He made his way back to the door. ‘In the bathroom there’s a clear, see-through shower curtain, so no one could hide behind it. She had trouble sleeping but she refused to take her sleeping tablets. There’s a full prescription inside the mirrored cabinet in the bathroom from nine months ago. In the hallway, inside the storage room, there’s a dark-red curtain packed away. I’m guessing the curtain belonged to the sliding balcony doors in the living room. She took those down, replacing them with a somewhat unattractive chimed beaded curtain. Similar to the one at the front door. I don’t think she did it because she liked the way they looked.’
‘The noise,’ Sergeant Velasquez said, picking up on Hunter’s line of thought.
Hunter agreed again. ‘If any uninvited guest gained entry to this apartment, either through the front door or the balcony, she’d get a warning.’
‘The balcony?’ the sergeant questioned. ‘She’s three floors up.’
Hunter nodded. ‘And still, for some reason, she didn’t feel safe. Not even in her own home.’
Nine
With nothing more to be done but wait for Dr. Slater’s forensics team to finish what they were there to do, Garcia left the crime scene at around 3:20 a.m. He wanted to try to get at least a couple of hours sleep before sunrise.
Hunter, knowing that sleep would be an impossibility, chose to stay behind and wait until Karen Ward’s body had been cut loose from her restraints and then transported to the Los Angeles County Coroner. They would need the official autopsy examination results to be sure, and that would take a day, maybe two, but with no other visible wounds or bruises to the victim’s body, Hunter was fairly certain that Dr. Slater had been correct in her assessment – death had come as the consequence of severe brain trauma, caused by perforation of the temporal lobe, which was achieved through the left ocular globe cavity. In other words, Karen Ward lost her life after she was violently stabbed through the left eye with a glass shank long enough to reach her brain, but not before her face had been savagely ripped to shreds by mirrored glass.
By the time Hunter left apartment 305 in Long Beach, the first rays of sunlight had begun erasing the night. The rain, which kept on coming and going all throughout the early hours of that Thursday morning, also seemed to have grown tired of its own ordeal, receding completely by daybreak.
Hunter opened the door to his one-bedroom apartment in Huntington Park, southeastern Los Angeles, and stepped inside. The place was small, but clean and comfortable, though any visitor would be forgiven for thinking that most of his furniture had been donated by Goodwill. And they wouldn’t have been far off the mark. The black leatherette sofa, the mismatched armchairs, the bookcase that looked like it was about to buckle under the weight of its overcrowded shelves, and the scratched wooden breakfast table that doubled as a computer desk, all of it had come from different yard sales around the neighborhood.
Hunter closed the door behind him, but stood right where he was, permitting the silence and darkness of his apartment to slowly envelop him for an instant. His eyes circled his living room, resting on shadows, and he tried to imagine what it would be like for a woman who lived alone to feel afraid and unsafe every time she stepped into her own home. What it would feel like to be scared every time she went to bed, or walked into her kitchen. He tried to imagine how quickly anxiety and paranoia would take over her life.
Not long at all, he decided.
In the bathroom, Hunter turned on the shower and stepped under the strong jet of hot water, allowing it to massage the stiff muscles on the back of his neck and shoulders. He closed his eyes and managed to relax for nearly ten seconds before images of the crime scene began playing on the inside of his eyelids like a horror film. He hadn’t even filed in the investigation’s opening report yet, and already a multitude of thoughts were colliding with each other inside his head.
Was Karen Ward being stalked?
So much of what Hunter had seen inside her apartment certainly hinted at it. He had worked on enough cases where the perpetrator had turned out to be a stalker to be able to recognize the behavior pattern of a person who lived in constant fear of someone else. And he knew that the statistics were staggering, scarily so.
Over six million people were stalked every year in the USA. In Los Angeles alone that number transposed to one in every six women and one in every fourteen men. One in every eleven women was stalked more than once and these numbers weren’t taking into consideration Internet and social media stalking, where the issue had already run out of control. The problem in the City of Angels had become so severe that a unit dedicated to deal solely with harassment and/or stalking had been created by the LAPD in 1990 – the Threat Management Unit (TMU). A few celebrity cases had made the news over the years, but they accounted for a negligible percentage of the problem. The truth was that most of us didn’t really consider being watched. Most of us didn’t see ourselves as the object of someone else’s obsession and so we were less careful, less private with our actions, and our attention to the problem was usually low or non-existent. What would also come as a surprise to so many was that female stalkers were a lot more common than people would allow themselves to imagine and they could be just as violent and deadly as their male counterpart – obsession didn’t discern between gender, skin color, social class, religion, or anything else for that matter.
But if Hunter was really right about Karen Ward’s behavior pattern, then the killer’s MO was all wrong.
The brutality of repeatedly slamming someone’s face against a container filled with shards of broken glass exceeded the violence in any stalker case Hunter knew of, but the uncharacteristic excessive use of violence wasn’t all. Apparently, as part of some sordid game, her killer had also used the victim’s cellphone to contact her best friend, forcing her to watch everything over a video-call.
Why? What was the logic in that?
Essentially, stalking was the unwanted or obsessive attention paid by one person to another, usually driven by rejection, jealousy, revenge, envy, insecurity, or simple maniac compulsion. It’s a person-to-person thing, never a group one, Hunter knew that better than most, so why the sadism of the video-call? Why bring someone else into one of the most individual of compulsions? Why publicize the anger, the savagery? It didn’t make any sense. And that was what scared Hunter the most.
Ten
After a quick breakfast, Hunter liaised with Garcia and they met up in South Vermont Avenue in West Carson, one of the thirteen neighborhoods that made up the Harbor Region in southern Los Angeles. The address had come from Sergeant Velasquez, and it belonged to the person they wanted to talk to the most: Tanya Kaitlin, Karen Ward’s best friend.
Vermont Avenue is one of the longest-running north/south streets in Los Angeles, with its overall length exceeding twenty-three miles, twenty-two of which travel in an almost perfect straight
line. The address they were given took them to the lower tip of South Vermont Avenue, just past West Torrance Boulevard. The building, a tired-looking blue and white rectangular structure in visible need of some care, sat opposite a row of shops.
‘Have you been waiting long?’ Hunter asked as he stepped out of his car.
Garcia, who was leaning against the driver’s door of his Honda Civic, consulted his watch – 8:16 a.m.
‘Not even a couple of minutes.’ His words were followed by a half-curbed yawn.
‘Did you manage to get any sleep at all?’
‘Very little.’ Garcia’s reply came with an awkward head-tilt. ‘I decided to sleep in the living room so I wouldn’t wake Anna up for the second time in the same night. Bad move. My couch just wasn’t made for sleeping. At least, not for someone who is six-foot two.’
Hunter could perfectly relate.
‘By six o’clock I had enough of the tossing and turning, so I thought that I might as well get some work done.’ Garcia’s eyes dropped to the blue file in his right hand. ‘How about you? What time did you get out of there?’
‘About an hour or so after you, once the body was taken to the coroner’s, just before dawn.’
‘So asking if you got any sleep would be a silly question, right?’
Hunter looked back at his partner.
‘Yep,’ Garcia agreed with himself. ‘Silly question.’
‘So what’s in the folder?’
‘Victim’s basic profile.’ Garcia shrugged. ‘Well, some of it, at least. Operations is still working on it. This is all the info they managed to gather on her in such short notice.’
‘OK, so what have we got?’ Hunter asked, as they crossed the road in the direction of the blue and white apartment building.
Garcia flipped open the folder. ‘Karen Ward, twenty-four years old, born March seventeenth in the city of Campbell, Santa Clara County, where her parents still live. No criminal record. No substantial debts. Clean driver’s license. She came to Los Angeles four years ago to study esthetics and makeup at the Academy of Beauty LA.’