The Night Stalker

by Chris Carter

  It was just past 7:00 a.m. when Doctor Hove called Hunter’s cell.

  During the short trip from Hunter’s apartment to the morgue, he heard a report of shots fired in Boyle Heights and another of an armed robbery in progress in Silver Lake through the police radio. He drove past three light-flashing, siren-wailing police cars and two ambulances. The day had barely started. How could such an incredible city be so saturated with insanity?

  The main coroners building at the LACDC was an intriguing piece of architecture with hints of Renaissance styling. Terracotta bricks and light gray lintels gave it an Oxford college look. Its business hours were the same as any city office – Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Except under special request, no autopsies were ever carried out in the evenings or weekends. This was certainly one of those.

  Hunter had called Garcia from the car and he wasn’t surprised to find him already waiting in the empty parking lot.

  ‘You got here quick,’ Hunter said, stepping out of his old Buick.

  ‘I got no sleep. I was waiting for this call.’

  Hunter looked at him suspiciously. ‘How about Anna?’

  Garcia bobbed his head to one side. ‘She got no sleep either. She insisted on staying up with me. She said that at least we could spend a few hours together since we haven’t had much time for each other lately. But you know how perceptive she is. She’s already picked up that the case we’re working on isn’t just a regular one. She never says anything, but you can see the worry in her face.’

  Hunter nodded understandingly. He was very fond of Anna. She was the unseen strength behind his partner. Most cops’ wives would never understand or stick by their husbands like Anna did. Divorce numbers amongst the police in Los Angeles were around 70 per cent. But Hunter could never see that happening to Anna and Garcia. They were made for each other.

  On the other hand, Hunter himself had never been married. The few relationships he’d had over the years had never really worked out. They’d always start well. But the pressures and commitments imposed by his job had a way of taking their toll on most love stories.

  Hunter paused and turned as he heard the sound of another car entering the lot.

  Captain Blake parked her silver metallic Dodge Challenger next to Garcia’s Honda Civic.

  ‘I wanna see this for myself,’ she explained as she closed the door and pressed a button on her key. The car’s headlights flicked twice followed by a muffled click. ‘I want to get a better idea of who the hell we’re dealing with here. What kind of freak has claimed the lives of four people in my city so far.’

  A silent and haggard-looking Doctor Hove let them into the building. With most of its lights turned off, and without the hustle and bustle of people, orderlies, and pathologists moving around, the place looked and felt like a horror movie mausoleum. The cold, antiseptic odor that was all too familiar to them seemed stronger this early in the morning. The underlying smell of death and decomposition followed their every step, scratching the inside of their nostrils. Garcia fought the shiver that threatened to run up his spine as they walked past the empty reception area and turned into a desolate hallway. No matter how many times he and Hunter had walked those corridors, he’d never get used to the empty feeling that took over him every time.

  ‘There’s no point in explaining it until you see it for yourselves,’ Doctor Hove said, punching the code into the metal keypad by the door to the special autopsy room. ‘And if you thought the bomb left inside the first victim was crazy, wait until you see this.’

  Forty-Six

  The room was large and bright, lit by two rows of florescent lights that ran the length of the ceiling. Two steel tables dominated the main floor space, one fixed, one wheeled.

  They stepped through the door and were immediately hit by a blast of cold air and an immense feeling of sadness that seemed to chill their bones. The brunette woman’s body was lying uncovered on the fixed table. The stitches to her mouth and body had been removed, now substituted by new ones that outlined the Y incision. In a strange way she looked peaceful. The immeasurable suffering that was etched on her face just a few hours ago seemed to have vanished, as if she was grateful to someone for removing those terrible stitches from her body.

  They all put on latex gloves and approached the table in silence. Doctor Hove buttoned up her white lab coat and moved around to the other side of the body.

  Hunter stared at the woman’s face for a long time. There was little doubt in his mind.

  ‘I think her name is Kelly Jensen,’ he said quietly, retrieving a black-and-white printout from the folder he’d brought with him and handing it to the doctor.

  Captain Blake and Garcia craned their necks across the table. Doctor Hove had a good look at it before holding it close to the woman’s face. Without the stitches to her lips, and washed of all that blood, the resemblance was undeniable.

  The doctor nodded in agreement. ‘On looks alone I’d say you’re right, Robert.’

  ‘Her file says that when she was a teenager she tripped and fell through a glass window in school,’ Hunter continued, reading from a file sheet. ‘Two large shards pierced the back of her left shoulder leaving a V-shaped scar. Her right elbow was also cut and she should have a semicircular scar just below the joint.’

  Doctor Hove lifted her right arm and they all bent over to take a look at her elbow. An old and faint semicircular scar marked the skin a couple of centimeters below the joint. Very quickly they all repositioned themselves around the head of the table. The doctor didn’t have to lift her upper body far, just a few inches was all that was needed. On the back of her left shoulder, scar tissue marked by the evidence of old stitches formed a sideways V-shape.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much doubt now, is everyone agreed?’ Doctor Hove lowered the victim body back down.

  ‘Who is she?’ the captain asked.

  ‘The information I have at the moment isn’t much, just what was passed to Missing Persons. Thirty years old from Great Falls in Montana. She was reported missing twenty-one days ago.’ Hunter paused to clear his throat. ‘Now here comes the punch. The person who reported her as missing was her agent.’

  ‘Agent?’ Garcia asked.

  Hunter nodded. ‘Kelly Jensen was a painter.’

  Forty-Seven

  Everyone held their breaths. Captain Blake was the first to slash the silence.

  ‘How old was the first victim?’

  ‘Laura Mitchell was thirty,’ Garcia replied.

  ‘And when did she go missing?’

  Garcia looked at Hunter.

  ‘She was reported missing fifteen days ago,’ he replied.

  Captain Blake closed her eyes for an instant. ‘Fantastic,’ she said, ‘so we’re dealing with some psycho killer who’s after pretty, brunette, 30-year-old painters, and has a hard-on for stitching their bodies shut?’

  Hunter didn’t reply.

  ‘Are there any more brunette 30-year-old painters who are missing?’

  ‘I searched all the way back to ten weeks, Captain, Laura Mitchell and Kelly Jensen were the only two.’

  The captain’s gaze returned to the body on the table. ‘Well, that’s something I guess.’ She turned to face Hunter and Garcia. ‘We’ll talk about this back at PC. What do we have here, Doc?’ she asked Doctor Hove.

  The doctor stepped a little closer to the autopsy table.

  ‘Well, just like the first victim, the stitches the killer applied to his second one were amateurish, to say the least.’ The doctor pointed to Kelly Jensen’s mouth. ‘Actually, they were more like knots than anything else. Ten in total, five to each body part.’

  ‘Same as the first one,’ Hunter confirmed.

  Doctor Hove nodded.

  ‘So you’re saying we shouldn’t be looking for anyone with medical knowledge?’ the captain asked.

  ‘If he has any, he didn’t show it here. The thread used is also very thick. What in medical suture we call a number six or seven. Th
read sizes are identified by the United States Pharmacopeia,’ she explained. ‘Seven is the thickest. In comparison, a size four thread is roughly the diameter of a tennis racquet string. The thread used here will be going to the lab for proper analysis today, but there’s no doubt he used some sort of nylon.’ Doctor Hove turned and retrieved a folder from behind her. ‘Her organs were healthy, but dehydrated. They also showed symptoms of mild malnutrition.’

  The captain shifted on her feet. ‘The killer starved her?’

  ‘Possibly, but not for long. The symptoms are consistent with one, maybe two days of starvation at the most. She was deprived of food and water either on the day or the day before she died.’ She lifted her right hand in a wait gesture. ‘Before any of you raise this point, the stitches to her mouth were brand new, probably inflicted just hours before she died. That wasn’t the reason why she’d had no food or water.’

  ‘Any guesses?’ Captain Blake asked as her eyebrows arched.

  Doctor Hove tucked her dark hair behind her ears. ‘There could be any number of reasons. Some sort of ritual on the killer’s part, the victim herself refusing to eat as an act of defiance or because she felt sick, or angry, or anything . . .’ She shrugged almost imperceptibly.

  ‘Did you find any sort of marks at all on her body, Doc?’ Hunter took over.

  The doctor’s face morphed as if Hunter had asked the million-dollar question.

  ‘Now here is where it starts to get interesting.’ She took a step to her right and allowed her eyes to refocus on Kelly Jensen’s ghostly white face. ‘I couldn’t find a single scratch on her.’

  Captain Blake looked puzzled. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Doctor Hove confirmed. ‘As we said earlier, her wrists and ankles are totally free from marks and abrasions. We know she wasn’t restrained to that table in the kitchen basement of the preschool. But I can’t find anything that suggests she was restrained at all during the time she was held captive either.’ The doctor paused. ‘My examination of the inside of her mouth and the skin around it also showed no evidence that she was gagged.’

  ‘Which means the killer wasn’t concerned with the victim making any sort of noise,’ Garcia noted.

  Doctor Hove nodded. ‘She was either drugged up to her eyeballs, or locked inside a very secure and soundproofed room, or both. Toxicology results will take a few days.’

  ‘Needle marks?’ Hunter asked.

  ‘Not even a little nick. Except for the tiny scrapes to her palms and knees, which I’m pretty sure she got when she fell to the floor, she doesn’t have a scratch on her. Take away the stitches, and there’s not a shred of evidence the killer ever touched her.’

  Everyone went silent for a moment.

  Hunter thought back to how long he’d spent going over every inch of the crime-scene pictures of Laura Mitchell. Just like Kelly Jensen, she didn’t have a scrape on her.

  Hunter’s attention shifted to Kelly’s hands and his brow furrowed. Every one of her nails had been filed, witch-style. As pointy and as sharp as possible.

  ‘Did you find anything under her nails, Doc? Why are they so . . . claw-like?’

  ‘Good spot, Robert,’ the doctor agreed. ‘And the answer is – I’m not sure why. But I did find something under them, yes – some sort of dark copper-colored dust. It could be clay or brick dust, maybe even dry dirt. Again, we’ll need to wait for the lab results to be sure.’

  Hunter bent down and examined Jensen’s hands more closely.

  ‘I’ll put an urgent tag with anything related to this case that gets sent to the lab,’ the doctor reassured them. ‘Hopefully we’ll start getting results in a day or two. But unfortunately, due to the severity of her internal injuries and the amount of blood that was discharged, we won’t be able to establish with any certainty if she was raped or not. If there was any trace of it, it’s been washed away by her own blood.’

  The entire room seemed to tense with those words.

  Doctor Hove walked over to the metal counter and retrieved something from a plastic tray. ‘Now this is the cause of it all, and it’s as grotesque as it’s ingenious,’ she said, returning to the autopsy table. The strange metallic object she was holding was about eight inches long, a quarter-inch wide and two inches deep. At first glance it looked like several long and narrow slices of metal stacked up on top of each other like a deck of cards.

  There were curious looks all round.

  ‘This is what the killer placed inside her,’ the doctor said, her voice a touch sadder than before.

  The curious looks turned into confused frowns.

  ‘What?’ Captain Blake spoke first. ‘I don’t know what that is, Doc, but it sure as hell isn’t what we saw through that X-ray machine of yours.’

  ‘Not in this state, no,’ the doctor agreed.

  ‘And what in God’s creation does that mean?’

  Doctor Hove moved back to the other side of the autopsy table, putting some distance between herself and the other three.

  ‘What this is, is a weapon like I’ve never seen before. Here we have a stack of twelve quarter-inch-wide razor blades held together by a very strong and potent spring mechanism. These blades are laser sharp. And when I say laser sharp, I mean a Samurai sword cuts like a baseball bat when compared to these.’

  Hunter rubbed his eyes and shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Garcia said, shaking his head. ‘As the captain said, that isn’t what we saw. So what did you mean when you said not in this state, Doc?’

  ‘You obviously remember what we saw inside her body when we used the X-ray machine, right?’ Doctor Hove clarified. ‘Big, triangular shape with a rounded base? Something like a large protractor?’ She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘OK, how do you suppose the killer managed to get that inside her? You’ll have to agree that its rounded base was way too wide for it to be simply inserted into her body.’

  Hunter let out a deep, heavy breath, his eyes back on the object in the doctor’s hands. ‘Some sort of spreading knife.’

  Captain Blake’s attention swung to Hunter. ‘Some sort of what?’

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ the doctor confirmed, showing everyone the long and thin metal object again. ‘In this closed format, the killer would’ve had no problems inserting this thing into her before sewing her shut.’

  The shiver Garcia had fought off as he entered the building returned, and this time he was powerless against it.

  ‘Once inside,’ the doctor continued, ‘this happened.’ She held the object by one of its tips using only her thumb and index finger. With her other hand’s forefinger she clicked an almost invisible button at the top of it.

  WHACK.

  Forty-Eight

  Caught completely by surprise, everyone jumped back.

  ‘Shit!’ Captain Blake let out in a high-pitched voice, bringing a hand to her mouth.

  ‘Holy crap, what the fuck?’ Garcia’s hands shot up towards his face in a protective reflex.

  In a fraction of a second, with a loud metallic thwack, the blades on the object in Doctor Hove’s hands had snapped open exactly like a Chinese hand fan. Every shocked eye in the room was on it, and though their mouths were half-open, not a word was uttered. Doctor Hove carefully placed the object down on Kelly’s stomach, its narrower tip just touching her pubic bone.

  ‘This is about the position this thing was found inside her,’ she finally said, her voice quieter, her tone darker than before. ‘As you can see, the area it covers is almost the entire width of her abdomen.’

  Captain Blake let go of the breath she had been holding for the past minute.

  ‘As I said,’ the doctor moved on, ‘these blades are laser sharp on both edges. The springs that were used to smack them open are small but very powerful. Able to generate several pounds of pressure. Probably the equivalent to someone hatching down with a meat cleaver. This thing sliced through everything in its path.’

  She indicated a large female body organ diagram
on the wall behind her.

  ‘Her urethra, bladder, cervix, uterus, ovary, vaginal cavity, everything in her reproductive system was mutilated instantly. The blades also managed to rip through muscle, her appendix and part of her large intestine. Her pelvic bone was chipped. There was no way she could’ve survived this. The internal hemorrhage she suffered was . . . unthinkable, but death wouldn’t have been instantaneous. The pain she went through is something that even Satan would’ve had trouble imagining.’

  Hunter ran a hand over his mouth. ‘How long?’

  ‘How long did she suffer for?’ The doctor shrugged. ‘Depends on how strong she was. A matter of minutes, probably. But to her I’m sure it felt like days.’

  All eyes returned to the object the doctor had placed on Kelly’s stomach.

  ‘So how does this thing work again?’ Captain Blake asked.

  ‘Simple,’ the doctor said, picking it up. ‘The blades are way too sharp for anyone to touch them, so moving them back to their starting position could pose a problem, but there’s a retracting mechanism built into it.’ She indicated a round screw just a couple of centimeters from the object’s base – the side that held one of the ends of the blades together. Using a screwdriver she retrieved from a glass-fronted cabinet, Doctor Hove began to turn it slowly. As she did, the blades started retracting behind each other, closing the fan-like knife. Less than a minute later they were all stacked up like a deck of cards just like before.

  ‘The trigger is this button,’ the doctor indicated it with her finger, ‘very similar to the ones you see in click pens.’

  They all moved closer to have a better look.

  ‘So if this thing went off inside her, who clicked it on?’ the captain asked.

  ‘Well, I said the trigger is very similar to a clicking pen mechanism, but not identical. The difference is that this one is much more sensitive. I also said this was an ingenious piece of work. Check this out.’ She stepped back, holding the strange knife just as she had moments earlier. This time, instead of clicking the trigger with her finger, she simply jerked it down about four inches, as if shaking a cocktail shaker, but only once.