I Am Death (34 page)

The blank stare on Garcia’s face remained.

‘Look at this,’ Hunter said. ‘He wrote: “the clues are
in
the name”.’ He emphasized the word ‘in’ and at the same time tapped it on the
board with his index finger. ‘Not the name. He also uses the word “clues”, not clue, indicating that there’s more than one.’

Garcia looked at the note again. This time, his expression showed concentration.

‘In
it,’ Hunter said again and paused.

Garcia kept his attention on the board, a few dots just starting to connect in his mind. ‘
In
it . . . You mean, like an anagram?’

‘Precisely,’ Hunter said, his voice just a little more excited than a moment ago. ‘But don’t look only at the word “Death”. Look at the whole sentence.
“I am Death” – that’s how he signs every note. That’s what he placed inside Nicole Wilson’s throat. That’s what he left us at Sharon Barnard’s crime
scene.’

Without waiting for Garcia to start trying combinations, Hunter picked up a marker, wrote the sentence ‘I am death’ on an empty space on the board and, as he used a letter from that
phrase, he crossed it off the original sentence. When he was done, he put the marker down.

Garcia had been following everything with the utmost attention. When Hunter stopped, Garcia looked at what he had written, then back at the original sentence, then back to the board.

Without noticing, his jaw had dropped open.

‘No fucking way.’

Alison coughed and spluttered awake with a jolt as freezing water was splashed on to her face. Her natural reaction was to shake her head, but she immediately regretted it. The
pain that the movement awakened inside her skull was so acute she believed her brain was being squeezed by a giant pair of pincers. But the pain she felt inside her head was nothing compared to how
her body agonized as the water dripped down from her face and made contact with the tens of open wounds on her torso, arms and legs. One would be forgiven for believing that the animalistic scream
she let out belonged to some dying beast.

She coughed again, this time trying to open her eyes, but her eyelids felt heavy and sticky and it required an effort of will to force them open. Water trickled into her gasping mouth and she
finally understood why it made everything hurt so much. The water was heavy with a salty, vinegary taste.

A single drop made it past her right eyelid and as it coated her cornea it stung at her eyeball. Immediately, her eyes shot closed once again before she started blinking ferociously, which she
did for almost a full minute.

Pain now came at her from all angles and she grunted as her body began shaking, unable to handle the brutality of it all. She braced herself for another bucket full of vinegary water over her
head but it never came.

Alison finally blinked her eyes open again. The sting was still there but not as incapacitating as before. The blurriness was now very subtle.

The man was standing directly in front of her. Immobile. Staring.

They finally locked eyes. The feeling of familiarity was still there, but no matter how hard she tried, her brain just couldn’t place him.

The man had lowered the chain that held her arms by a few inches. Alison’s feet could now properly touch the ground, but her legs carried no strength. The bulk of her weight was still
being held by her arms and the chain shackled to her wrists – which had now lost their skin. Metal was resting against unprotected raw flesh. Her hands felt like blood-filled balloons and a
tiny prick was all that was needed for them to burst spectacularly.

Because Alison kept slipping in and out of consciousness, she had no way of telling the time. No way of knowing how long she had been held captive.

In silence, the man continued to study Alison. Her naked body had been made even more beautiful by all the small cuts and lacerations he had made. At least that was how he saw it. The blood that
had flowed from them had recolored her skin in beautiful crimson and that vision filled him with an almost uncontrollable excitement, and his body responded accordingly.

They stared at each other for a long while until, surprisingly, the man was the first to break eye contact. He turned and walked over to the workshop table in the corner.

The action caused panic to erupt inside Alison. She had already been whipped and flogged like an eighteenth-century slave, until she had passed out. She had never experienced pain that deep,
that debilitating.

‘Oh, please, no.’ The words stumbled out of her cracked lips, as her eyes were once again filled with tears. ‘No . . . not again.’

Alison had no idea why she was there, why the man had taken her or why he was punishing her in the way he was. Was he connected to her father? He had barely said a word to her. All he did was
either watch her or beat her up.

‘Please, talk to me . . .’ she pleaded. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

Ignoring her, the man picked up something from the workshop table.

Every muscle in Alison’s body tensed up. She wanted to plead again but she couldn’t speak anymore. Her sobs were too intense for that.

The man turned to face her again.

Alison squinted, trying to focus on what he held in his hand, but whatever it was it was too small for her to see.

The man got closer.

Three steps.

Two.

One.

Alison caught a glimpse of something metallic between his fingers.

A knife?

A scalpel?

What?

There was nothing she could do but cry uncont rollably.

She closed her eyes and held her breath, bracing herself. A moment later, she heard the sound of metal scraping against the concrete floor.

Her eyes squeezed tighter.

A few seconds after that, she felt her body swing forward just a little but, surprisingly, it was accompanied by no further pain.

Her first thought was that maybe her body was already so battered that it just hadn’t registered the pain yet.

She waited.

The pain finally came.

And from where else but her arms? So powerful, she felt consciousness slipping away from her again. Her eyes fluttered as she exhaled and, in her mind, her body began a slow descent into a dark
and cold abyss.

But before she hit its bottom, something, or someone, caught her. Right at that moment, her legs turned to jelly and she slumped down on to something hard and uncomfortable. She breathed in a
full mouth of hot, humid air, and that was when she realized that she wasn’t imagining it. She wasn’t falling down into an abyss, she was simply falling down.

The man had grabbed a set of padlock keys and freed her from her shackles. The metal scraping sound she’d heard earlier was a fold-up chair he had dragged and placed under her legs.

As she collapsed into the chair, her arms dropped down to her sides and the sensation that followed was a mixture of total relief together with immeasurable pain. Blood began to freely flow
through them for the first time in who knew how long. The feeling was so intense that her body couldn’t take it. She curved forward and vomited on to the floor.

Surprisingly, that did not upset her captor. When she was done, he grabbed her by her hair and pulled her back up into a sitting position.

Slobs of vomit dripped down from her lips on to her naked torso and legs. She started breathing deeply, her chest rising and falling in a broken rhythm. Her arms now began to feel like they were
on fire. One million pins and needles found their way into her hands and fingers.

Alison’s head slumped forward again, her chin coming into contact with her chest. The man, realizing that she was about to pass out, grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head back.

‘No, no, no. Stay with me, Alison. I need you awake. I need you to feel
everything.’

Her jaw fell open and he spat inside her mouth.

‘Are you listening to me?’

She half coughed, half gagged on his spit. It tasted like sour milk and rotten eggs, but it had the desired effect. It brought Alison back to consciousness.

‘That’s my girl,’ the man said, letting go of her hair and taking a step back.

This time Alison was able to hold her head in place by herself, but something made her doubt that she was one hundred percent conscious. As the man moved toward the workshop table once again,
she caught a glimpse of something that froze her soul. In one of the corners of the basement, hidden in the shadows, she could swear that she saw a little boy. He was staring straight at her. The
terror in his eyes easily matched the fear in hers.

‘I’m not sure why,’ Hunter said. ‘Maybe it was because I was so tired when I reread the note again in the early hours of this morning, but for some
reason my brain mixed up the letters in a strange way and for a split second, I saw it . . . Then it was gone.’

Garcia was still staring at the board.

‘I thought I was imagining things, but I kept on blinking, looking away, then looking back at it again.’ Hunter paused, following his partner’s gaze. ‘And then, as if it
were a dream, the letters just moved around right in front of my eyes.’ He tapped the board one more time. ‘And I saw this.’

From the letters in ‘I Am Death’ Hunter had created three new words: ‘I Mat Hade’.

‘No fucking way,’ Garcia said again, his eyes finally leaving the board. He faced Hunter.

‘I also found it hard to believe, but it’s there.’

‘I know this killer is fucking bold,’ Garcia said. ‘He’s daring and all, but this is ridiculous, Robert.’ He pointed at the board. ‘It’s unprecedented.
He’s not giving us a clue. He’s giving us his name. Why would he do that?’

‘Because he doesn’t know we know,’ Hunter said. ‘He doesn’t know we know about Fresno, about Sacramento, or about his place in East LA. He has no idea that we have
a suspect on the books and that suspect is Mathew Hade – Mat Hade. In fact, when he delivered the note to my door we didn’t have a suspect. We didn’t know who Mat Hade was,
remember? That came later.’

Garcia began making all the connections.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Even if we had figured out then that the clues he was referring to in his note were in the form of an anagram, we didn’t know what to look for – a
word, a couple of words, a phrase, a name, what? We had no way of knowing that what he was giving us was his actual name. With that in mind, how many possible words or combinations of words could
we make from those letters?’

‘Exactly.’

Garcia looked back at the sentence: ‘I Am Death’.

‘And of those,’ Hunter added, ‘how many do you think could form some sort of a name, or a contraction of a name, like “Mat”, or “Ted”, or whatever? And
remember, this is Los Angeles. This place is an international hub. This name we’re talking about doesn’t necessarily need to be an American name.’

‘And even if we did come up with the phrase “I Mat Hade”,’ Garcia said, ‘we would’ve probably discarded it because, in all truth, we would’ve had no
idea that it was an actual name. Family names can come in all shapes and forms . . . and spellings.’

‘Precisely. It would’ve been unrealistic for us to verify every possible anagram. What would we have done, run background checks on every combination that spelled out a name or part
of one? Not likely.’

Garcia chuckled at the cleverness of it all.

‘So he created the anagram because he was never expecting us to find out about him, about Mathew Hade,’ Garcia theorized. ‘Why would we? The odds of us finding out about him
were bordering on zero. He was never arrested. Never charged with anything. He was just a person of interest in three different abduction investigations, two in Fresno and one in Sacramento, but
never here in LA. And all that happened years ago. Not in a million years was he expecting us to find out about any of that.’

‘Probably not,’ Hunter accepted it. ‘All we need is for that phone to ring now.’

As if on cue, Hunter’s cellphone rang loudly, rattling against his desktop.

Garcia’s eyes widened.

‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

Hunter couldn’t remember ever taking a call so quickly. He dashed toward his desk, his feet almost scuffing against the floor, his hand shooting out in the direction of
his cellphone.

‘Detective Hunter, Robbery Homicide Division.’

‘Detective,’ the male voice at the other end of the line said. ‘It’s Brian.’

In his excitement, it took Hunter a second to match the name to the voice, and then both of them to a face.

‘Doctor Brian Snyder, with SID,’ the doctor clarified, picking up on Hunter’s hesitation.

Maybe it had taken Hunter more than just a second.

Garcia looked at Hunter, the question practically written in his eyes.

‘Doctor,’ Hunter said, shaking his head at Garcia. ‘Of course. I’m sorry.’ He paddled back fast. ‘It’s been an eventful morning so far.’

‘Have you found your suspect?’ he asked, his voice shifting from calm to half-excited.

‘No, not yet, but we’re hopeful. Have you got something for us?’

‘I do,’ he confirmed. ‘The results of the handwriting analysis.’

‘OK. Just a sec, Doc. Let me put you on speakerphone.’ Hunter keyed in the necessary command and placed the phone back on his desk.

Garcia stepped closer.

‘All right,’ Doctor Snyder began. ‘Graphologists will need on average thirteen to fifteen different letters out of the twenty-six we have in the English alphabet to achieve a
“one hundred percent” positive match. As I’m sure you’re aware, the annotation inside the book of matches you gave me – Midazolam, 2.5 mg – contains only eight
different letters, and two numbers.’

Garcia glanced at Hunter.

‘So for us to achieve that indisputable positive match, you’d need to find something else with his handwriting on it.’

‘Well,’ Garcia said, before Doctor Snyder was able to continue. ‘For now, that’s pretty much out of the question, Doc. Any sort of partial confirmation?’

‘I was just about to get to that.’

‘Oh sorry,’ Garcia said, lifting his hands and quickly using Hunter’s ‘paddle back’ excuse. ‘Eventful morning.’