I Am Death (22 page)

No one said anything because they all thought it was a rhetorical question.

They were wrong.

Chief Bracco pinned Hunter down with a gaze that could’ve curdled milk.

‘I understand that you have a Ph.D. in criminal behavioral psychology, Detective Hunter.’

Hunter’s reply was a subtle nod.

‘And that there’s no one more experienced than the two of you when it comes to cases of this nature.’ His eyes moved to Garcia, then back to Hunter.

‘So please, humor me this once. What type of creep are we after here, other than one with a massive hard-on for killing people?’ He nodded at Captain Blake. ‘Barbara has
already told me that, despite the star positioning of the first body, neither of you believe we’re dealing with a ritualistic killer here. So who are we after?’

Hunter studied the Chief of Police for a beat.

‘It’s too soon to tell, sir,’ he replied. ‘We are still trying to analyze the little data we have so far. As you’ve just mentioned, we’ve been on this case
for less than forty-eight hours.’

‘I understand that, Detective, and as I’ve also said, in that short amount of time this psycho has already given us two bodies. I’d say that that’s plenty to analyze,
wouldn’t you?’ Chief Bracco shook his head. ‘I’m not asking for an official psychological profile here, Detective. I would just like to know your personal opinion of this
guy.’

Hunter stayed quiet, and once again the Chief of Police watched him, this time with an intense, searching gaze, but Hunter’s expression revealed nothing. Chief Bracco checked his
watch.

‘I’m meeting the mayor and the Governor of California in just under an hour. Would any of you like to take a guess as to what the main topic of conversation will be?’

This time it
was
a rhetorical question.

‘So, for my own peace of mind, Detectives, so that I at least half believe the crap that I’ll be selling them in sixty minutes’ time, and subsequently to the LA press at the
conference tomorrow, please give me something.’

‘All I have are hunches and suppositions, sir,’ Hunter finally said. ‘Nothing concrete.’

‘I appreciate that, Detective,’ Chief Bracco said, lifting a hand to stop Hunter before he gave him any more excuses. ‘And a hunch is all I’m asking for. All of us here
know that that’s all criminal profiling is – a hunch, a best guess based on the evidence found so far, nothing more. It’s not an exact science and it never will be. So please,
Detective, hit me with your best hunch. What kind of sick bastard are we after here? Is he delusional? Is he schizophrenic? Does he hear voices in his head? What?’

‘No. He’s not delusional, or schizophrenic, and I don’t believe that he hears voices in his head, sir.’

Hunter felt too tired to launch into a whole psychological explanation to back up his opinion. Instead, he moved on to the facts.

‘What we do know is that he’s methodical, patient and very disciplined. His risks are well calculated. He never rushes because he knows he doesn’t have to. He never leaves
anything behind because his planning is practically flawless. He isn’t the type to panic easily if things don’t go exactly to plan because he knows that he can improvise at the drop of
a dime. He’s comfortable getting into character. He’s comfortable lying, and he does it very well and without hesitation.’

‘And you’re basing all those assumptions on what, exactly?’ Chief Bracco asked, sounding intrigued as opposed to condescending.

‘Everything this killer has done so far has worked out perfectly for him, sir,’ Garcia took over. ‘No mistakes. No glitches. Not a speck of dust left behind that he
didn’t want to leave behind. His timing with his victims has been impeccable. The risk of anyone running into him while he was with any of them was practically non-existent because it was
calculated to the very last detail. None of it, sir, including the fact that he’s so elusive and so thorough, is down to luck.’

The Chief of Police mulled his words for an instant. ‘Wait a second, are you saying that you think the killer knew beforehand that both victims would be alone on the night he
acted?’

Garcia nodded. ‘We’re very sure he did.’

‘How? How did he know?’

‘That we don’t know yet, sir,’ Hunter replied. ‘But that kind of information isn’t very hard to come by if you know where to look. A lot of people will freely offer
it on social media network sites.’

‘Goddamnit.’ Chief Bracco knew Hunter was right. No matter how often he reminded her of the risks, his own daughter was constantly posting similar information about her daily
schedule on her Facebook page.

‘So if you think that he knew his victims would be alone on the nights he acted,’ Chief Bracco said, ‘then you must also believe that he picked them beforehand.’

Hunter nodded. ‘They weren’t picked at random, sir. There’s a reason why he chose them.’ It was Hunter’s turn to lift a hand to stop Chief Bracco before he could
ask his next question. ‘And no, sir, at the moment we don’t know what that reason is, but we are doing all we can to find out.’

‘Any links between the victims?’

‘We don’t know yet, sir.’ Garcia was the one who replied this time. ‘We basically just got back from the crime scene and the coroner’s office, but we already have a
team working on it. If there’s a link between them, I’m sure we’ll find it.’

‘How about the note and the photograph that were sent to Mayor Bailey?’

‘Clean,’ Garcia answered with a headshake. ‘No prints whatsoever. We’re still waiting on ink, paper and handwriting analyses.’

‘How about the package’s point of origin?’

Garcia quickly told him about the smoke bomb diversion at the FedEx drop box.

Chief Bracco ran his thumb and index finger over his mustache a couple of times.

‘So if I got this right,’ he said, facing both detectives, ‘in short you’re saying that the freak we’re after is careful, very patient, well organized, resourceful,
and probably highly intelligent.’

Hunter agreed. ‘You wanted to know who this killer is, sir?’ His gaze paused on Captain Blake before returning to Chief Bracco.

‘This killer is your perfect predator.’

It was coming up to 4:45 a.m. when Hunter finally got back to his one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a dilapidated building in Huntington Park, Southeast LA.

After leaving his office at around 9:00 p.m. the night before, Hunter had decided to drive around the city. He did that often enough. For some reason that not even he could explain, driving
around at night through the streets of Los Angeles somehow calmed him. Helped him think.

As he left his office, he could tell that sleep, if it came at all, would’ve been restless and dotted by nightmares. In the morning, he would feel worse than if he’d stayed up all
night, so he’d decided to stay up all night.

Hunter aimlessly drove around the streets of Central, East and South LA, then The Harbor and South Bay, before crossing the city all the way over to Santa Monica. The clock on his dashboard read
2:22 a.m. when he finally decided to park his car and go for a walk on the beach.

Hunter loved the beach, but unlike most, he preferred it at night.

He liked watching the sea at that time. The undisturbed sound of waves breaking against the sand, together with the quietness of the early hour, reminded him of his parents and of when he was a
little kid.

His father used to work seventy-hour weeks, jumping between two awfully paid jobs. To help out, his mother would take any work that came her way – cleaning, ironing, washing, whatever she
could find. Hunter couldn’t remember a weekend when his father wasn’t working, and even then they struggled to make ends meet. But despite their struggle, Hunter’s parents never
complained. They played the cards they were dealt and, no matter how bad a hand they got, they always did it with a smile on their faces.

Every Sunday, after Hunter’s father got home from work, they used to go down to the beach. Most times they got there once everyone else had already left and the sun had already set. But
Hunter didn’t mind. In fact, he preferred it. It was like the whole beach belonged to him and his parents. After Hunter’s mother passed away, his father never stopped taking him to the
beach on Sundays. Sometimes, Hunter would catch his father wiping away tears as he watched the waves break.

As Hunter finally locked his car and made his way up to his apartment, he never noticed the black GMC Yukon hiding in the shadows around the corner from where he’d parked.

Sitting patiently in the driver’s seat, the man observed Hunter with a black look on his face.

Without switching on any lights, and more out of habit than hunger, Hunter walked into the kitchen, pulled open the fridge door and glanced inside. As always, there
wasn’t much choice – a couple of pieces of fruit, a carton of milk, a can of some cheap energy drink that he was sure one day would punch a hole in his stomach and a half-full pack of
chili-flavored beef jerky. He loved those things, and even though it made them tougher and chewier, he preferred to have them cold.

He stared at the items inside his fridge for a long minute, but reached for none. Despite having had almost no food since that morning, unsurprisingly, Hunter’s appetite was
non-existent.

The images of Nicole Wilson’s beaten body, together with the ones of Sharon Barnard’s totally disfigured face, seemed to have etched themselves on to the inside of his eyelids. Every
time he closed his eyes, there they were – one, raped and tortured to death, the other, just an incomprehensible mess of ripped skin, torn flesh and blood. Both made to suffer the
unimaginable, at the hands of a true monster.

Hunter closed the fridge door, bringing the kitchen and the apartment back to darkness, but didn’t move. Instead, he used his right hand to massage the stiff muscles at the back of his
neck and shoulders. The tips of his fingers came into contact with the jagged, ugly scar on his nape and he paused, feeling the leathery, lumpy skin. A simple reminder of how close to death his job
had taken him, and of how resolute and lethal the mind of an evil murderer can be. As memories began to poke at his brain, he let go of his neck and shook his head, banishing them back to the
darkest corners of his mind. A place he did his best never to visit.

In the bathroom, despite the warm night, Hunter leaned back against the tiled wall and welcomed the powerful, hot shower jet that almost burned his skin. The discomfort caused by the heat was
balanced out by how much it helped his tensed muscles to relax. By the time he shut off the water, his tanned skin had gone a light shade of red and the tips of his fingers looked like old
prunes.

Back in the living room, wrapped in a white towel, Hunter switched on a floor lamp and dimmed its intensity to ‘medium’. That done, he approached his drinks cabinet, which was small
but held an impressive collection of single malt Scotch whisky, which was probably his biggest passion. Though he had overdone it a few times, Hunter sure knew how to appreciate the flavor and
quality of a good single malt, instead of simply getting drunk on it.

His eyes scanned from bottle to bottle. One thing that he knew for certain was that he needed something strong, but at the same time comforting and soothing. He didn’t have to search long.
His decision was made as soon as his eyes grazed over the eighteen-year-old bottle of Auchentoshan.

‘This should do nicely,’ Hunter said, reaching for it.

He poured himself a double dose, added about a fifth of water and dumped himself on the black leatherette sofa, which faced a TV set that hadn’t been turned on in over six months. In fact,
since the Super Bowl game back in February.

He sipped his drink, letting the robust and spicy taste of the Scotch, which had hints of woody almonds, brown sugar and vanilla, engulf his taste buds for a moment.

Mollifying, no doubt about that.

Despite how hard he tried not to think of the case, the images of what he’d seen in the past two days had nowhere else to go. All they did was tumble over themselves inside his mind. One
grotesque scene morphing into another, like a well-edited horror film on a never-ending loop.

Hunter finished his Scotch and decided to have a second one. His palate had gotten used to the single malt’s powerful flavor, so this time he had it neat, no water. Instead of going back
to the sofa, Hunter walked over to the window on the north wall and looked outside. Everything looked still. Even the moon, coyly peeking out in its initial state of waxing crescent, seemed scared
of the evil that now lurked around the City of Angels.

Hunter’s gaze moved to the lights in the distance. From his window he couldn’t see much, but he could still see the tip of the unmistakable conglomerate of high-rise buildings that
formed the central business district of the city, otherwise known as Downtown LA.

Hunter finished his second Scotch and put his glass down on the window ledge.

‘Where are you hiding, you sonofabitch?’ he whispered to himself, his gaze slowly scanning the horizon.

Hunter’s body felt tired, but he could tell that his brain was still wide awake. Going to bed would make no difference. All he would do was toss and turn under the sheets, fighting a
battle he knew he would never win, so instead, he decided to have one more drink. As he turned away from the window and faced the inside of his living room, he paused, frowning.

‘What the hell?’

On the floor, about a foot from his front door, he could see a brown paper envelope. He didn’t really have to search his memory. He knew that it hadn’t been there before. Someone had
slid it under his door.

Hunter’s eyes sought the clock on the wall – 05:47 a.m.

He could think of no reason why any of his neighbors would need to place a letter under his door, much less at this time at night.

Immediately, every muscle in Hunter’s body went into alert mode. He quickly moved over to the chair where he had left his gun holster, unclipped the lock, pulled out his semi-automatic HK
Mark 23 and thumbed the safety off.