by Chris Carter
Jessica crossed her legs under her and checked her watch – 1:18 a.m. She’d fallen asleep in an awkward position and the left side of her neck had gone stiff. She sat there for a while longer, nursing the pain and dreading the loneliness of her bed. But spending the night in the living room would probably make her miss him even more. She had one last sip of her wine and blew out the scented candle before heading to bed.
Jessica wasn’t the best of sleepers, and sometimes she would toss and turn for a long while before finally falling into a light sleep. Tonight though, with the help of the wine, she started dozing almost immediately.
Click, click.
She blinked a few times before opening her eyes. Had she really heard something or was that her mind playing tricks on her? The bedroom curtains weren’t drawn, and the full moon just outside her window was enough to keep total darkness out. Jessica allowed her eyes to roam the room slowly – nothing. She lay still, listening attentively but the sound didn’t repeat itself. A minute later she started drifting back into sleep.
Click, click.
Her eyes shot open this time. There was no doubt in her mind. She’d heard something. And it was coming from inside her apartment. Jessica sat up in bed and brushed her fingers against the touch lamp on her bedside table. Her eyes narrowed slightly. Had she left a tap on somewhere? But if that was it, why wasn’t the sound constant?
Click, click.
She held her breath and her pulse surged in her neck. There it was again. It was coming from just outside her bedroom door. It sounded like a shoe heel lightly clicking against the corridor’s wooden floor.
‘Mark?’ she called and instantly felt silly for doing so. He wouldn’t be back for several weeks.
Jessica hesitated for an instant, debating what to do. But what else could she do? Stay in bed worrying for the whole night? It was probably nothing but she had to go check it out. Slowly, she slid out of bed. She was wearing nothing but a tiny pair of shorts and the thinnest of sleeveless shirts.
She stepped outside her room and switched on the hallway lights. Nothing. She waited a moment. No sound. She grabbed Mark’s old baseball bat from the storage closet before proceeding cautiously down the corridor. An uncomfortable shiver ran through her as her bare feet touched the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. All the faucets were securely off. There were no drips. She walked back and checked the living room, the kitchen, Mark’s games room and her practice den. The entire apartment was absolutely still, except for the tick-tock that came from the clock in the kitchen. She rechecked the windows – all closed – doors – all locked.
Jessica shook her head and chuckled as her eyes focused on the baseball bat in her hands.
‘Yeah, I’m a real home-run hitter, me.’ She paused. ‘But just in case, I’m keeping you by the bed.’
Back in her room, Jessica looked around one more time before resting the baseball bat against her bedside table and getting back into bed. She switched off the lamp and snuggled under the covers once again. As her eyes closed, every hair on her body stood on end. Some hidden instinct inside her exploded into life. Some sort of danger sensor. And the only thing she could sense was that she wasn’t alone in that room. Someone else was there with her. That’s when she heard it. Not a clicking sound coming from outside, but a hoarse whispering voice coming from the only place she didn’t check.
‘You forgot to look under your bed.’
Fifty-Eight
Hunter had spent the rest of the night on the computer discovering who Whitney Myers really was.
In the morning, after a strong cup of black coffee, he made his way back to Culver City and Kelly Jensen’s studio. The blinking red light he’d seen last night from her window was a wireless CCTV camera, hidden away in an alcove in the wall. The camera was pointing straight at the small parking lot. There were no computers in Kelly’s studio, so the camera couldn’t have belonged to her.
At 6:00 a.m. only one of the shops that shared the car parking lot with Kelly’s studio was open – Mr. Wang’s convenience store. Hunter’s luck was in; the wireless camera belonged to the elderly bird-like Chinese man.
Mr. Wang’s wrinkled face and observant eyes only hinted at how much he’d lived, what he’d seen and the tremendous knowledge he’d accumulated over so many years.
He told Hunter that he’d asked his son, Fang Li, to install the camera at the back after his old Ford pickup truck was broken into one too many times.
Hunter asked him how far back he kept the recordings.
‘Year,’ Mr. Wang replied with a wide smile that seemed to never fade.
Hunter’s face lit up in surprise. ‘You have recordings going back a year?’
‘Yes. Every minute.’ His voice was like a whisper, but the words came out quickly, as if he was about to run out of time for what he wanted to say. His pronunciation was perfect, indicating that he’d been in America for many years, but the sentences were staccato. ‘Fang Li too smart. Good with computers. He make program that box files. Twelve months – files delete automatic. Don’t need do nothing.’
Hunter bobbed his head. ‘Clever. Can I have a look at them?’
Mr. Wang’s eyes narrowed to such a thin line, Hunter thought he’d closed them. ‘You wanna see in store’s computer?’
A quick nod. ‘Yes. I’d like to see the footage from a few weeks ago.’
Mr. Wang bowed and his smile spread even wider. ‘OK, no problem, but me no good. Need talk to Fang Li. He not here. I call.’ Mr. Wang reached for the phone behind the counter. He spoke Mandarin. The conversation didn’t last longer than a few seconds. ‘Fang Li coming,’ he said, putting the phone down. ‘Be here very fast. Not live far.’ He consulted his watch. ‘Not go to work yet. Too early.’
Hunter asked Mr. Wang about Kelly Jensen. He said that she came into the shop almost every day when she was around, but sometimes she’d disappear for weeks. He liked Kelly very much. He said she was very polite, always happy and very beautiful.
‘In my country, whole village be asking her to marry.’
Hunter smiled and looked around the shop while he waited. He bought a cup of microwavable coffee and a packet of teriyaki-flavored beef jerky. A few minutes later Fang Li arrived. He was in his late twenties, with longish black hair that shined like in a shampoo commercial. His features were striking, a replica of what his father must have looked like when he was younger, but much taller and well built. He quickly spoke to his father before turning and offering his hand to Hunter.
‘I’m Fang Li, but everybody calls me Li.’
Hunter introduced himself and told him the purpose of his visit.
‘OK, come with me and I’ll show you.’ Li guided Hunter through a back door that led into a large, well-organized storage room. The entire place carried a sweet and pleasant smell, a combination of exotic spices, condiments, soaps, fruit and unburned incense. At the far end of it, up a set of wooden stairs was the shop’s office. Hundreds of Chinese calendars hung from the walls – Hunter had never seen so many. It was like they used them as wallpaper. Apart from the calendars there were several old, metal filing cabinets, a wooden shelf rack, a water cooler and a large desk with a computer monitor on it. Chinese characters danced across the screen.
Li chuckled as he read them.
‘What does that mean?’ Hunter asked.
‘Be yourself. There’s no one better suited for the job.’
Hunter smiled. ‘Very true.’
‘My father likes this kinda thing. Proverbs and all, you know. But he prefers to create his own, so I programed a little screen saver for him. It reads from a list of his own wise sayings.’
‘So is that what you do? Computer programing?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Your father said that you could store as much as a whole year’s worth of footage.’
‘That’s right. My father’s pretty much obsessed with organization.’ He pointed out the window at the storage room. ‘Nothing’s ever out of place
with him.’
Hunter nodded.
‘He’s also big on security. We’ve got five cameras filming twenty-four hours a day. One picking up the front door, one facing the parking lot out back, and three inside the shop. There’s no way we could archive that much data without having a ridiculous amount of hard drive space or compressing the hell out of the footage. So I created a small program that automatically compresses the files that are over three days old and then archives them into external high-capacity hard drives.’ Li rolled his chair back and pointed at four small black boxes under the desk. ‘At the end of twelve months, those files auto-delete to create more space.’ He paused and faced Hunter. ‘So what do you need, Detective?’
Hunter wrote something down on a piece of paper and placed it on the desk in front of Li. ‘I need a copy of all the footage you have between those dates.’
Li looked at the paper. ‘An entire week’s worth? From all five cameras?’
‘Maybe, but let’s start with the footage from the one in the parking lot.’
Li coughed. ‘That’s one hundred and sixty-eight hours of footage. Even compressed that’ll take . . .’ his eyes narrowed and his lips moved without a sound for a second, ‘. . . around thirty DVDs. Maybe a few more. When do you need them for?’
‘Yesterday.’
Li’s face paled. He checked his watch. ‘Even if I had a professional multi-DVD copier, which I don’t, it’d still take most of the day.’
Hunter thought about it for a beat. ‘Wait a second. You said that older files are stored in those external hard drives, right?’ He pointed at the black boxes. ‘Will the files from those dates be in one of them?’
Li quickly picked up on what Hunter was suggesting and his lips spread into a smile. ‘They will be, yes. Very good idea. You could take the whole hard drive. There’s nothing in them but archived CCTV footage. Nothing that my father would need, anyway. You can link the drive to any computer, easy. It will save you tons of time, but you’ll still have to uncompress the files on your side.’
‘We can do that.’
Li nodded. ‘Let me show you how to find them.’
Fifty-Nine
Hunter made it back to Parker Center in less than half an hour and went straight into the Information Technology Division. Brian Doyle was at his desk, speed-reading through a pile of papers. He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday. His eyes were bloodshot and his face unshaven. An empty pizza box was by the edge of the desk and the coffee percolator in the corner was practically empty.
‘Have you been here all night?’ Hunter asked.
Doyle looked up but said nothing. His stare went straight through Hunter.
‘Are you OK?’
Doyle’s eyes finally focused. ‘Umm? Yeah, sorry, I’m fine.’ He placed the sheet he was reading on the desk. ‘Just understaffed and overworked. Everyone always needs everything ASAP. I’ve got cases piling up everywhere. And this afternoon there’s this huge sting operation going on.’ He leaned back in his chair and studied Hunter for a second. ‘What the hell happened to your face?’ He pointed at the cut above his eyebrow.
Hunter shook his head. ‘Walked into a door.’
‘Of course you did. Just hope the door isn’t gonna sue the department.’
‘She won’t.’
‘She? A woman did that to you?’
‘Long story.’
‘I bet.’ He cleared a space at the edge of his desk and leaned against it. ‘OK, Robert, for you to be here, it’s gotta be something urgent.’
Hunter nodded. ‘But I only need about three minutes of your time, Jack. Then I’m out of here.’
‘Is this about the psycho who killed Doctor Winston with that bomb?’
An almost imperceptible nod. Hunter felt his chest tighten around his heart as he remembered he’d never see his old friend again.
‘He was a good man. I met him a couple of times.’ Doyle checked his watch. ‘What do you need?’
Hunter handed him the high-capacity hard drive and waited while Doyle hooked it up to his PC. Unsurprisingly, all the directories in the hard drive were perfectly organized – first by camera location and then by date.
‘Can these files be uncompressed in bulk?’ Hunter asked.
‘Not simultaneously. They’re massive. It’d be too processor intensive and it’d crash any machine, but . . .’ Doyle lifted his index finger, ‘you could line them up inside an application. As soon as one file finishes uncompressing, it’ll automatically move to the next one in the list. That way you don’t even have to be there. Just leave it working and come back when it’s all done.’
‘That’ll work for me.’
Doyle smiled. ‘Please tell me you don’t need all of these files. There’re hundreds of them. This will take days.’
‘No.’ Hunter shook his head. ‘Just a handful of them – to start with.’
‘OK, in that case I’ll tell you the easiest thing to do. Because this is an external drive, I can link it up to an empty laptop instead of clogging up the machine in your office. That way you can work on your machine if you need to and just leave the laptop on the side, as it does its thing. Give me five minutes and I’ll have it all set up for you.’
Sixty
The phone on Hunter’s desk rang almost the second he entered his office. It was Doctor Hove.
‘Robert, I’m about to send you some lab results on Jensen. I got my team to fast-track whatever they could.’
‘Thanks, Doc. What do we have?’ He gestured for Garcia, who’d just come in, to grab his phone and listen in.
‘OK, as we expected, the victim was sedated. We found traces of a drug called Estazolam in her blood. It’s a sleeping agent.’
‘Usually prescribed for short-term treatment of insomnia, right?’ Hunter confirmed.
Doctor Hove had forgotten that Hunter knew more about insomnia than most doctors.
‘That’s right. Now, given its relatively high concentration, we figured that’s what the killer used to sedate her on the day she died. Before dumping her in that basement. He didn’t overdo it, though. He used just enough to knock her out for a couple of hours or so.’
Hunter leaned back in his chair.
‘But the interesting thing is: we also found faint traces of another drug. Something called Mexitil. It’s an anti-arrhythmic drug.’
‘Anti- what?’ Garcia blurted.
‘A common drug used to treat a heart condition called ventricular arrhythmia.’
Hunter started leafing through sheets of paper on his desk.
‘If you’re looking for her medical records, Robert, don’t bother,’ the doctor said, recognizing the sound of pages turning. ‘Her heart was as strong as a racing horse’s. She didn’t have the condition.’
Hunter stopped and thought for a split second. ‘What are the side effects of this Mexitil, Doc?’
‘Very good, Robert. Mexitil is pharmacologically similar to Lidocaine, which as you know is a local anesthetic. Its major side effect is light drowsiness and confusion. But if taken by someone who doesn’t suffer from ventricular arrhythmia, that light drowsiness can become moderate to severe. And you don’t even need high doses of the drug to cause it. But that’s about all it does. It won’t knock you out. It won’t even make you doze off.’
Hunter considered it. It made sense. That was probably why neither of the victims had any restraint marks. If the killer kept them in a constant state of confusion and drowsiness, he didn’t need to immobilize them.
‘Would there be any other reason why the killer chose to use Mexitil?’ Hunter asked. ‘If he just wanted them high, he could’ve used a number of drugs.’
‘It’s an easy drug to obtain on the Internet.’
‘So are most drugs nowadays, Doc,’ Garcia countered.
‘True.’ There was a short pause. ‘There’s always the chance that he’s familiar with the drug. He might suffer from the condition himself.’
Hunter was already clicking away on
his computer, searching the Internet for more information about the drug. ‘Could you check your database, Doc? Go back five . . . no, ten years. Look for any case where Mexitil was found in a murder victim’s blood?’
‘No problem.’ This time the sound of pages turning came from Doctor Hove’s side. ‘I’ve also got a result on the dark copper-colored dust retrieved from under the victim’s fingernails. It’s brick dust.’
Hunter’s eyebrows arched.
‘We might be able to identify exactly what kind of brick it is. I’ll let you know if we can.’ The doctor coughed to clear her throat. ‘At first I thought that maybe she tried to claw her way out of wherever she was kept. Somewhere with a brick wall. But as you well know, if that had been the case, she’d certainly have cracked and broken nails . . . maybe even missing ones. None were even chipped. They were filed down into claws, remember? Maybe the killer has a bizarre fetish for pointy fingernails.’
Hunter’s eyes quickly moved from his computer to the pictures board. ‘Nothing else was found under her nails?’
‘Yes, bits of her own skin,’ the doctor confirmed. ‘She scraped at her mouth, her groin and the stitches before dying.’
‘Only her skin?’
‘That’s right.’
Hunter nodded to himself. ‘OK, Doc. Call me if anything else comes up.’ He put the phone down and stared at his own fingernails for a moment. ‘A weapon,’ he whispered.
‘A what?’ Garcia asked, rolling his chair away from his desk.
‘A weapon. That’s why her fingernails were so claw-like.’ Hunter stood up and approached the pictures board. ‘Look at the crime-scene pictures of our first victim.’ He pointed to the ones of Laura Mitchell’s hands. There was nothing strange about her fingernails.
‘No filing,’ Garcia agreed.
‘Having pointy fingernails didn’t come from the killer, as the doctor suggested. Kelly used a brick wall to sharpen them herself. I think she wanted to attack her captor. In an empty cell, it was the only weapon she could think of.’