The Night Stalker

by Chris Carter

  Garcia searched the street for Hunter. He was certain that while he followed Smith in through the restaurant, Hunter would be trying to cut him off at the top end of the street, but he was nowhere in sight.

  ‘Shit, Robert, where are you?’

  He approached a group of three guys standing just a few yards away. ‘Did any of you see a tall guy come running out of that restaurant just a few seconds ago?’

  They all looked at him, then at the restaurant’s door, then back at him.

  ‘Sure,’ the short stocky one said, and they all nodded at each other at the same time. ‘He went . . . that way.’ One of them pointed left, the other one right, and the stocky guy pointed at his crotch. All three burst out laughing. ‘Get the fuck outta here, cop. We ain’t seen shiiit.’

  Garcia didn’t have time to argue. He took a step back and checked up and down the street once again.

  No Hunter.

  No Smith.

  Garcia had to hand it to him. Smith was smart. He knew no one had gotten a good look at him. He could be wearing a suit or a hooded jacket. As soon as he hit the street in front of the restaurant, instead of carrying on running and sticking out like a sore thumb, he slowed down to a walking pace. Just another guy strolling along a street full of shops. He’d look as suspicious as everyone else.

  Garcia took his cell out of his pocket and called Hunter. ‘Where are you? Did you get him?’ His eyes were still roaming up and down the street.

  ‘No, I’m still at the apartment.’

  ‘What? Why? I thought you’d try to cut him off.’

  ‘I take it you don’t have him either.’

  ‘No. He was clever. He mixed in with the crowd. And I don’t have a clue what sort of clothes he was wearing.’

  ‘I’ll call and put an APB out on him right now.’

  ‘Why are you still at his apartment?’

  A short pause.

  ‘Robert?’

  ‘You’ve gotta come see this room.’

  Thirty-Seven

  Garcia stood motionless by the door to the small square room. The window was now fully open, allowing daylight in. The weak light bulb at the center of the ceiling was also on. A musty smell of old paper and dust lingered in the air, the kind of smell you’d get inside a basement storage room of a bookshop, or a newspaper archive. Hunter was standing next to a large wooden table piled high with magazines, journals, printouts and newspapers. Piles and piles of them were stacked all around the floor, overcrowding the room – Smith was either some sort of collector, or one of those people who was scared of throwing anything away.

  Garcia’s eyes crawled around the room, trying to take everything in. Every inch of every wall was taken by some sort of drawing, article, clipping, sketch or photograph. They came from newspapers, magazines, websites, journals, and many of them had been drawn, written or taken by Smith himself. There were literally hundreds of images and articles. Garcia stepped inside and his eyes moved to the ceiling. The bizarre collage continued there as well. Every available space was covered.

  ‘Jesus . . .’ Something tightened low in Garcia’s gut. He recognized the woman in all the pictures and sketches straight away. There was no mistake. Laura Mitchell. A love heart had been drawn around several of the photographs with a thick red marker pen. Like kids do with pictures of their idols.

  ‘What the fuck is this place?’ Garcia whispered.

  Hunter turned and looked around the room again as if he was seeing it for the first time.

  ‘A sanctuary of some sort? His own private archive? Maybe a research room? Who knows?’ A shrug. ‘This guy seems to have collected everything that was ever published about Laura. Judging by the discoloration of some of the pictures and newspaper articles, some of these are quite old.’ His gaze flickered to the piles of paper everywhere.

  Garcia turned his attention to the magazines and newspaper stacks. ‘Is she in every one of these?’

  ‘I haven’t checked them all. But if I had to have a guess, I’d say yes.’ Hunter pulled a newspaper from the bottom of one of the stacks. It was a copy of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

  Garcia’s left eyebrow lifted a fraction. ‘San Diego?’ He noticed the date. ‘That paper is three years old.’

  Hunter started flipping through the newspaper. ‘The problem is: none of the newspapers, magazines or journals are folded or opened onto a particular page or article. I’ve checked a few already. I assume he kept them because of something on the entertainment section.’ He folded the paper and showed it to Garcia. ‘But as you can see, there are no marks. Nothing is circled, underlined or highlighted.’

  ‘Anything about Laura?’

  Hunter scanned the page.

  Most of the articles were music-related – gig and album reviews. He flipped the paper over and carried on. At the bottom corner of the page he saw a review for an art exhibition and nodded. ‘She was exhibiting in San Diego back then.’

  Garcia craned his neck. There were no pictures. He randomly pulled another newspaper from the bottom of another pile. He came up with a copy of the Sacramento Bee. ‘This one is from a year and a half ago.’ He quickly found the entertainment section and scanned through another exhibition review. ‘He’s been stalking her for years,’ he said, looking around the room one more time. ‘He knew everything there was to know about her. Collected everything there was to collect. Talk about being patient. He waited years for the right moment to make his move. Laura never had a chance.’

  Thirty-Eight

  Hunter and Captain Blake had to pull all the stops to get an overworked and understaffed Forensics division to send two evidence technicians to a non-crime scene so fast. First impressions showed no indications that anyone else other than James had been inside that apartment. There was no hidden cell or prison room. If Smith was their killer, he’d kept Laura Mitchell captive in a secret location somewhere else. And that secret location was probably where he was heading to right now. The difference this time was that he now knew the police were onto him, and that would certainly influence his actions. He’d be edgy, maybe even in a panic. And a killer in a panic was catastrophic. Hunter knew that only too well from harsh experience.

  They needed to catch him fast. Before he left Norwalk. Before he disappeared.

  They didn’t.

  Hunter had immediately arranged for James Smith’s snapshot to be emailed from Parker Center to Norwalk’s LA Sheriff’s Department Station. Available black-and-white units were dispatched to search the streets almost immediately. Officers on foot patrol and inside Norwalk’s Metrolink Station were also sent Smith’s picture via SMS text. Airports, train and bus stations were put on high alert. But six hours after Hunter and Garcia had knocked on Smith’s door, he still hadn’t been sighted.

  Both evidence techs had been going over the apartment for the past three and a half hours. They’d need confirmation from the lab, but their best guess, based on what they’d seen, was that all the fingerprints they’d found so far seemed to have come from only one person – James Smith.

  Key points inside Smith’s bedroom and both bathrooms were sprayed with Luminol but no blood was detected. They also ran a UV light test on all the bed linen and on the fabric sofa and rug in the living room. No evidence of semen stains either.

  Hunter and Garcia kept out of the way, staying in the collage room. There was enough in there to keep a platoon occupied for a week. Initially, Hunter wasn’t worried about sieving through everything. All the information on those pages seemed to pertain to Laura Mitchell, not James Smith. What he was looking for was some sort of personal diary, or journal, or notebook. Anything that could give them a clue to where Smith might have gone or who he was.

  They found nothing. No documents, no passport, no driver’s license. Not even any utility bills.

  ‘Anything that could give us any sort of lead, guys?’ Hunter asked one of the techs some time later.

  ‘Yeah, my guess is you’re looking for a cleaning freak,’ he said,
bending down and sliding his index finger across the top of the skirting board before showing the result to Hunter. ‘Nothing, no dust. My wife is pretty tight on her housecleaning, but even she doesn’t dust the skirting boards every time she cleans. The only place with any dust is that freaky room you guys have been in. There’s a cupboard in the kitchen packed solid with cleaning materials. Enough bleach to fill a Jacuzzi. This guy is either obsessed with cleaning, or he was expecting us.’

  The door to door of the building also produced no information of interest. Most residents said they’d never even seen the person who lived in apartment 418. The ones who did never talked to him. The next-door neighbor, a small, fragile man in his sixties with glasses as thick as bulletproof glass, said Smith always said hi to him whenever they bumped into each other on the corridor. He said Smith was always very polite. That sometimes Smith went out dressed in a suit. No one else in that building ever wore a suit. The old man also said that the walls in the building weren’t very thick. He could often hear Smith cleaning, vacuuming, scrubbing and moving around. He did that a lot.

  The Forensics agents took shoes and underwear from Smith’s wardrobe, and a razor blade, a comb, a toothbrush and a deodorant spray can from his bathroom. They didn’t want to take any chances where a DNA signature was concerned.

  Night had darkened the sky when Hunter received a call from Operations.

  ‘Detective Hunter? It’s Pam from Operations.’

  ‘What have you got for me, Pam?’

  ‘Well, next time you decide to go after someone, please can you pick a person with a more unique name. James is the most common first name in the United States. Smith is the most common last name in the United States. Put them together and we have approximately three and a half million males in the USA called James Smith.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘In the LA area alone there are about five hundred of them. But the interesting thing is: none are registered to the Norwalk address you gave me.’

  Thirty-Nine

  Her eyelids flickered in rapid succession but she failed to open them. Her consciousness was returning to her like waves breaking over a beach. But each time her mind hinted at clearing, an undertow of blackness would pull her back into nothing.

  The only thing she seemed to be certain of at that moment was the smell. Something like mothballs and strong disinfectant all rolled up into one. It felt as if the vile odor had traveled in through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach, burning everything in its way. Her guts felt like writhing snakes trying to climb out of her body.

  Her eyes flickered again, this time for a little longer, and with great effort she managed to force them open. The light around her was dim and weak, but it still burned at her retinas like lightning bolts. Gradually, she began taking in her surroundings. She was lying on her back on some hard and uncomfortable surface, inside a hot and humid place. Old and rusty metal pipes ran across the ceiling in all directions, disappearing as they reached the mold-infested cinder block walls.

  She tried lifting her head, but the movement sent waves of nausea rippling through her stomach.

  Slowly, the numbness that controlled her body started to subside, and as it did, it was substituted by agonizing pain. Her lips felt as if they were being ripped from her face by several pairs of pliers at the same time. Her jaw hurt as if it had been broken. She tried opening her mouth, but the pain that rose from the effort almost sent her back into unconsciousness. Tears started streaming down her face as she urged her brain to work and tell her what to do. She tried moving her arms – surprisingly, no pain. More surprisingly, they weren’t restrained.

  Shivering, she brought her hands to her face and touched her lips with the tips of her fingers. The shivering turned into uncontrollable convulsions of fear as she realized why she couldn’t move them.

  Her mouth had been stitched shut.

  Desperation took over.

  Robotically and without any sense of reality, her trembling fingers tapped the stitches on her lips like a mad pianist. Her wailing and frantic muffled screams echoed throughout the room, but there was no one there to hear them. The thread used on her mouth dug deeper into her skin as she tried to move her lips again. She tasted blood.

  Suddenly, as if a switch had been flicked on inside her head, she became aware of a much more intense and terrifying pain. It was coming from between her legs. It shot through her body with such ferocity it felt like evil had just climbed inside her.

  Instinctively, her hands moved towards the source of the pain, and as they touched her body and the other stitches, she felt her strength leaving her.

  Panic erupted inside her, and her body’s defense mechanism inundated her bloodstream with adrenalin, numbing the pain just enough for her to be able to move. Guided now by pure survival instinct, she forced herself to sit up.

  Sound disappeared, time slowed, and the world turned black and white in front of her eyes. Only then did she realize she was naked and had been lying on some sort of stainless steel table. Strangely, the tabletop seemed higher off the ground than one would expect. At least another foot or so.

  She looked down at her bare feet, and all of a sudden it dawned on her. Her legs were also unrestrained. Frantically her terrified eyes searched the room – large, square with a concrete floor and a metal door directly in front of her. The door didn’t seem to be locked. The walls were lined with empty wooden shelves.

  Without wasting any more time or caring if this was a cruel trap or not, she jumped to the floor. The impact as her feet hit the ground sent a shudder up her spine. A millisecond later, the most unimaginable pain exploded inside her. Her legs lost all their strength and she fell to her knees, shivering. She looked down and all she saw was blood.

  Forty

  It was now three full days after Laura Mitchell’s body had been found and not much had materialized. James Smith, or whoever he really was, had simply vanished. The Forensics agents were right: all the fingerprints found in the apartment did come from a single person. They’d been running them against the National Automated Fingerprints ID System for several hours. So far no matches. It didn’t look like James Smith had ever been in the system.

  The DNA result would still be at least another day or so. Whoever James Smith was, he was smart.

  Choosing the most common American male name automatically hid him under layers upon layers of other people. Even if Hunter asked Operations to narrow the LA’s James Smith list down by filtering on age and approximate height, it’d still be too long. Besides, it was obvious that James Smith wasn’t his real name.

  The apartment in Norwalk had been rented and paid in cash, a year in advance. Hunter talked to the landlord, a Mr. Richards. He was a retired shop owner and lived in Palmdale. He told Hunter that he’d only seen James Smith twice – first when he initially rented the property two years ago, and then again twelve months later when he renewed his lease agreement and paid the next full year in advance, plus extras – more than enough to cover all utility bills. So that was the reason they found no bills in the apartment.

  Mr. Richards told Hunter that in the two years Mr. Smith had been renting his apartment, he’d been a great tenant, the best he’d ever had.

  ‘He never causes any trouble,’ Mr. Richards told Hunter. ‘He’s also never requested anything else, unlike most of my previous tenants. They were always calling and asking me for a new fridge, or stove, or mattress, or electric shower, or whatever. They were always complaining that there was something wrong with the apartment, but not James. He never complained.’

  ‘Did you check any documentation when Mr. Smith rented your apartment?’ Hunter asked. ‘You know, background checks, references or anything like that?’

  Mr. Richards shook his head. ‘There was no need. He paid cash and the full year in advance, which means he could never default on a payment.’

  Hunter was more than aware that Los Angeles was definitely the city for if you’ve got the cash, you get
the goods, no questions asked.

  ‘Did Mr. Smith ever tell you what he did for a living?’

  Another shake of the head from Richards.

  The snapshot Hunter had of James Smith was quickly released to the press. The picture was by no means perfect. His face was at least 30 per cent obscured, but it was the best they had. With a little luck, someone out there would know who he was. A dedicated phone line was created to receive calls. So far they’d got a mountain of dead ends and people claiming to be James Smith himself, challenging the police to come and get them.

  They’d also found the painting Smith had purchased nine months ago along with several DVDs in his apartment. All of them homemade. All of them of Laura Mitchell. Apparently, all of them shot by Smith himself. Hours and hours of footage of Laura at exhibitions, dinner parties, arriving at and leaving her art studio, walking into her gym, browsing in shopping malls, and so on. There were no time-stamps on any of the footage, but judging by her different hairstyles and slight differences in weight, they had been shot over a period of years. They could be seen as surveillance in preparation for an abduction, or plain obsessive stalking. Hunter didn’t want to jump to any conclusions until he had more evidence.

  ‘OK,’ Captain Blake said, putting the ten-page report she was reading down on her desk. ‘What’s confusing me is . . . if this James Smith is our killer, and he’s obviously been collecting intel on Laura Mitchell for a few years, how come he only decided to strike now?’