by Chris Carter
Hunter blinked and the woman’s face was substituted by Doctor Winston’s and the video images they’d retrieved from the morgue – his eyes wide in shock as he finally understood what he was holding in his hand, as he finally realized that death had caught up with him, and there was nothing he could do. Hunter closed his eyes. His friend was gone, and he had no clue why.
A distant police siren brought Hunter out of his daze and he shivered with anger. What he saw on the ceiling of the butcher’s shop last night changed everything. The bomb was meant for no one else but the woman who was left there. Doctor Winston, his friend, someone he considered family, had died for no reason – a tragic mistake.
Hunter felt a pain start in his right forearm. Only then did he realize he’d been clutching his fist so tight blood couldn’t find its way to his arm. He swore to himself that whatever happened, he’d make this killer pay for what he’d done.
Eleven
Due to the sensitivity of Hunter’s investigation, the entire operation was moved from the third to the fifth floor of Parker Center, LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division HQ in North Los Angeles Street. The new room was spacious enough for two detectives, but with only a small window on the south wall it felt claustrophobic. When Hunter arrived, Garcia was studying the crime-scene photographs that had been placed on a large magnetic board to the right of Hunter’s desk.
‘We’re a little stuck when it comes to identifying her,’ Garcia said as Hunter fired up his computer. ‘The crime-scene team got several close-up shots of the stitches to her lips, but only one shot that shows her entire face.’ He pointed to the top photograph on the board. ‘And as you can see, it isn’t a great one.’
The photo had been taken at an angle and the left side of the victim’s face was partially obscured. ‘Apart from the video, we’ve got no pictures from the autopsy room,’ Garcia continued. ‘This is all we have to work with. If she was local to where she was found, we can’t really go around asking people and showing them a photograph of someone with her lips stitched shut. It’ll creep the hell out of everybody. And someone would no doubt talk to the media.’ He stepped back from the board.
‘Missing Persons?’ Hunter asked.
‘I got in touch with them last night, but because this is the only photo we have, and the stitches and swelling to her lips are so prominent, the face-recognition software they use won’t work. If they run this picture against their database and she happens to be in there, they’ll never get a match. We needed a better picture.’
‘Sketch artists?’
Garcia nodded, checking his watch. ‘They aren’t in yet, neither are the computer guys. But you know they can perform miracles with airbrushing and retouching, so there’s hope. The problem is, it can take a while.’
‘We don’t have a while,’ Hunter replied.
Garcia scratched his chin. ‘I know, Robert, but without an autopsy report, a DNA profile, or the knowledge of any specific physical marks that could help us identify her, we’re stuck.’
‘We’ve gotta start somewhere, and right now the only place we can start is with the Missing Persons files and those pictures,’ Hunter said, clicking away on his computer. ‘The two of us will have to go through them manually until we get something from the composite drawing team.’
‘The two of us? Manually? Are you serious? Do you know how many people get reported missing in LA every week?’
Hunter nodded. ‘On average eight hundred, but we can narrow the search down using what we already know – Caucasian woman, brunette, hazel eyes, age between twenty-seven and thirty-three. Judging by the length of the counter and the position the body was left, I’d say she was somewhere between five five and five eight. Let’s start the search with women who have been missing for anywhere up to two weeks. If we get nothing, we’ll go back further.’
‘I’ll get right on it.’
‘How about her fingerprints?’
Garcia quickly shook his head. ‘I’ve checked with Forensics. They’ve been running them against the National Automated Fingerprint ID System since last night. So far no matches. She doesn’t seem to be in the system.’
Hunter had a feeling she wouldn’t be.
Garcia poured himself some coffee from the machine on the counter. ‘Any clues from the butcher’s shop?’
Hunter had emailed himself the photo of the ceiling he’d taken with his cell phone last night. When the file downloaded, he hit the print button.
‘Yes, this.’ He showed Garcia the printout.
‘Graffiti?’ Garcia asked after studying the photograph for a moment.
Hunter nodded. ‘I took this picture while lying on the counter in the same position the victim was found.’
Garcia raised an eyebrow. ‘You lay on that?’ He pointed to the photograph of the dirty metal counter on the pictures board, but didn’t wait for a reply. ‘What exactly am I looking at here?’
‘Blended with the graffiti colors, Carlos. Look for the different lettering.’
A moment later Garcia saw it and his whole body tensed. ‘Well, I’ll be dipped in shit.’
Hidden amongst the colors and shapes, a line of small spray-painted black letters seemed out of place. It read: IT’S INSIDE YOU.
Twelve
Before Garcia could ask anything further, Captain Blake entered the room without knocking.
Barbara Blake had taken over the Los Angeles Robbery Homicide Division’s leadership after the retirement of its long-standing captain, William Bolter, two years earlier. Her name had been put forward for captaincy by Bolter himself, upsetting a long list of candidates. She was an intriguing woman – elegant, attractive, with long black hair and mysterious dark eyes that never gave anything away. Despite reservations by some at the division, she had quickly gained a reputation for being a no-nonsense, iron-fist captain. She wasn’t easily intimidated, took shit from no one, and she didn’t mind upsetting high-powered politicians or government officials if it meant sticking to what she believed was right. In just a few months she had earned the trust and respect of every detective under her command.
Captain Blake and Doctor Winston’s friendship went back a long way – over twenty years. The news of his death had hit her like a sucker punch to the gut, and she wanted answers.
As she stepped into the room, she instantly picked up on the tension coming from Garcia. Her eyebrows rose. ‘What happened? Have we got something already?’
Garcia handed her the printout. ‘From the butcher’s shop.’
Just like Garcia, she didn’t see it at first. ‘What the hell am I looking at?’
Garcia pointed at the letters.
The captain’s eyes shot in Hunter’s direction. ‘This was on the wall in the shop?’
‘On the ceiling. Directly above where the victim was left.’
‘But the ceiling is covered in graffiti. Why do you think these words have anything to do with our victim?’
‘Two reasons. One, that’s not graffiti like the rest of the ceiling, that’s a handwritten message. Two, the paint was more vivid than the rest of the graffiti, too fresh.’
The captain’s eyes returned to the printout.
Hunter paused and all of a sudden started searching his desk.
‘What are you looking for?’ the captain asked.
‘The DVD with the video file we got from the morgue yesterday. I want to check something.’ He found it and popped it into his computer’s disk drive.
Garcia and Captain Blake joined Hunter by his desk.
As the video started playing, Hunter fast-forwarded it to the scene where Doctor Winston retrieved the bomb from inside the stitched victim. The player application in Hunter’s computer didn’t have a frame-by-frame function. He had to keep on clicking the play/pause button to slowly advance it to the exact spot he wanted. He watched a small segment a couple of times before turning to face Garcia and the captain.
‘His back is towards the camera, so we have to guess the correct moment,’ Hunte
r said, ‘but look at Doctor Winston’s arm movement right here.’
All eyes were glued to the screen.
Hunter rewound and played the sequence twice over.
‘There’s a small jerk.’ Garcia nodded. ‘As if his hand came unstuck.’
‘Exactly,’ Hunter agreed. ‘Do you have a stopwatch?’
Garcia pulled his sleeve up to reveal his wristwatch. ‘Sure.’
‘Time it. Ready? Go.’ Hunter clicked the play button. Exactly ten seconds later, the screen was filled with static.
‘A ten-second delay trigger mechanism?’ the captain said, looking at Hunter. ‘Like a grenade?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Most grenades’ trigger mechanisms have to be manually activated,’ Garcia said. ‘Who activated that one?’
Hunter rubbed his face. ‘That’s the question that’s been knocking around in my head. Whoever placed the bomb inside the victim couldn’t be sure of the exact moment of extraction. That means that the bomb couldn’t have been on a timer or have been remotely activated.’
Garcia nodded.
‘So what if in this case the trigger was held in place not by a pin like most grenades, but by the confined space where the bomb was placed?’ Hunter suggested. ‘A spring trigger of some sort, held tight by the victim’s own body.’
Garcia and Captain Blake exchanged glances as they considered it for a moment.
‘So extracting the bomb from the victim would’ve released the trigger,’ Garcia said, scratching his forehead. ‘It’s possible – and very creative.’
‘Fantastic,’ the captain said, pinching the bridge of her nose. ‘To the killer this is all just a game.’ She showed Hunter the printout again. ‘He even told us it was inside her.’
Hunter shook his head. ‘The killer wasn’t informing us, Captain.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The killer was informing the victim.’
Thirteen
Captain Blake leaned against the edge of Garcia’s desk and folded her arms. ‘You’ve lost me, Robert.’
‘Have a look at that printout again, Captain,’ Hunter said. ‘The killer wrote “It’s inside you” not “It’s inside her”. He wasn’t communicating with us.’
‘Why would the killer try to communicate with a dead body?’
‘Because she wasn’t dead when he left her.’
The captain ran a finger over her right eyebrow and pulled a face. ‘You lost me even more now.’
Hunter walked up to the pictures board. ‘There were several things that were bothering me about the crime-scene photos. That’s why I wanted to have a look at the butcher’s shop again myself.’ He pointed to one of the pictures. ‘Look at the position the body was found in, the arms in particular. One is hanging down from the side of the counter and the other is resting awkwardly on her chest. The fingers on her right hand are spread apart and half bent, as if she was trying to dig at something. I don’t think the killer left her in this particular position.’
‘The body might’ve been interfered with, Robert,’ the captain countered. ‘It was an anonymous phone call that gave us the body’s location, remember?’
Hunter nodded. ‘Yes, and I listened to the 911 recording. It’s a girl’s voice. Not older than sixteen or seventeen, and she sounded hysterical. The reason why she didn’t wanna give us her name is probably because she was going into that room to shoot up.’
‘OK, so the girl didn’t touch the body,’ the captain said, accepting his theory. ‘But maybe you’re reading too much into this message. Maybe the killer didn’t put a great deal of thought into it. So he wrote you instead of her, no big deal.’
It was Garcia’s turn to disagree. ‘That would suggest that the writing on the ceiling was a spur-of-the-moment thing, Captain.’ He rubbed the lump on his nose. ‘We’re talking about someone who put together his own explosive device and probably engineered the trigger mechanism himself. He then placed it all inside the victim in some way that it wouldn’t be triggered until found and extracted. All of that while she was still alive.’ He shook his head and faced the pictures board. ‘Whatever this killer did, Captain, nothing was on the spur of the moment. He thought it all through. And that’s what makes him so dangerous.’
Fourteen
Captain Blake let out a frustrated breath and started pacing the room. Her high heels clicked against the wooden floor.
‘It doesn’t make any sense. If the victim was still alive when she was left in that butcher’s shop, and the message on the ceiling was meant for her, how come she was dead when we found her? Who killed her, the rats?’ She pulled a photograph from the board and studied it for a moment. ‘Independently of whatever happened to the victim, the fact still remains that someone placed a bomb inside her and stitched her shut. The only way of getting that bomb out was to cut through the stitches and pull it out.’ She paused and allowed her eyes to move from one detective to the other. ‘Don’t tell me you think the killer expected the victim to do that by herself?’
No one replied.
Hunter massaged the back of his neck, and for a moment allowed his fingers to rub the rough scar on his nape.
The captain turned towards him. ‘I know you, Robert. If you think the message was left for the victim instead of us, you must have a theory on this. I’m all ears.’
‘I don’t have a proper theory yet, Captain, just too many ifs.’
‘You’ve gotta have something brewing in that brain of yours,’ the captain pushed. ‘Indulge me, because right now I hate what I’m hearing.’
Hunter took a deep breath. ‘Maybe the bomb’s how the killer wanted her to die.’
Captain Blake’s eyes narrowed. ‘You think the bomb was supposed to blow up inside her, while she was still alive?’
Hunter tilted his head to one side, musing over the possibility.
Captain Blake sat down in Hunter’s chair. ‘You’re going to have to develop on that, Robert. If this killer thought everything through so thoroughly as Garcia has suggested, and if the bomb was supposed to blow up inside the victim as you’re suggesting, why didn’t it? What happened? Did the killer make a mistake? How would the trigger mechanism be activated while the bomb was inside her? And if he didn’t kill her, how the hell did she die?’
‘As I said, too many ifs, Captain,’ Hunter replied calmly. ‘And at the moment I don’t have the answers. With everything that’s happened, we don’t have much to go on. I don’t know if the killer made a mistake or not. I don’t know why the bomb didn’t blow up inside her, or how it was supposed to be activated in the first place. Without the autopsy report we’ll probably never know the real cause of death. What we do know is that it’s nothing apparent. She wasn’t shot, stabbed, or strangled. I also don’t believe she was poisoned.’ He paused. ‘But there’s a possibility she suffocated.’
Captain Blake threw Hunter a perplexed look. ‘How’s that?’
Hunter pointed to an enlarged picture of the victim’s face. ‘Suffocation causes the blood vessels around the eyes and behind the delicate skin on the cheeks to burst. See here.’ He indicated on the photo. ‘This sort of old-person’s-skin look is a consequence of burst blood vessels. There’s a good chance she suffocated. I confirmed it with Doctor Hove. But again, without an autopsy we’ll never be certain.’
‘So you’re saying that you think she might’ve suffocated by herself, after the killer left her there?’
Hunter nodded.
‘On what? The foul smell of the place?’
Hunter shrugged. ‘Her own vomit . . . her tongue . . . Who knows? Maybe the victim had a bad heart. But just imagine if she was still alive when she was left in that butcher’s shop – unconscious, but still alive. She wakes up, naked, frightened, in pain, and with parts of her body stitched shut. That’d certainly be enough to trigger a severe panic attack in most people.’
Captain Blake massaged her closed eyelids, considering Hunter’s suggestion. She knew that a panic attack co
uld easily cause someone to vomit, gag or hyperventilate. With the victim’s mouth sewn tightly shut, she’d have no way of drawing in breath and increasing the flow of oxygen to her lungs. That would’ve made the victim’s panic turn into mindless desperation. If she’d puked, the vomit had nowhere to go. Choking and asphyxiating would’ve been just a breath away. And then . . . certain death.
Fifteen
The results of the chemical tests done on the spray paint used on the ceiling of the butcher’s shop came in by 2:00 p.m. and threw up nothing special. The paint came from a can of Montana Tarblack – probably the most popular brand of spray paint in the USA. Every graffiti artist in the country used it. The handwriting analyses confirmed what Hunter already suspected – the killer had used his non-writing hand to spray the words onto the ceiling. Simple, but effective. Hunter had requested that the whole room be dusted again, and this time they should include the ceiling. Every print found was to be run through the National Automated Fingerprint ID System.
Hunter leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and gently ran the tip of his finger up and down the bridge of his nose. His brain kept trying to make sense of such a senseless act.
If there had been no bomb, if the victim had been found simply stitched shut, Hunter would have a steadier psychological path to follow. The stitches to the mouth on their own would have suggested the possibility of a retaliation kill – a lesson being taught. The victim might have said something she shouldn’t have – about the wrong person, to the wrong person, or both. The act could have been performed as a way to symbolize shutting her up.
The stitches to her mouth and lower body together would have upped the stakes to a possible sexual or love betrayal and revenge. If you can’t keep your mouth and legs shut, I’ll shut them for you. That would’ve clearly placed a deceived husband, boyfriend or lover right at the top of their list of persons of interest. And that possibility was still pretty much alive in Hunter’s mind. But he still had the bomb to deal with. Why place a bomb inside the victim? Experience also told him that the overwhelming majority of what were considered crimes of passion were spur-of-the-moment acts, generated by irrational anger and an almost total loss of control. Very rarely did it come in the form of a planned, calculated and brutal vengeance act.