The Death Sculptor (37 page)

Hunter placed the box of photographs on his desk. ‘An eyelash?’

‘That’s right. And I know that kind of blemishes the theory that Ken Sands could be both Tito’s killer and the Sculptor. The Sculptor has given us three messy crime scenes, blood and guts everywhere, but he didn’t leave anything behind he didn’t want to leave behind. Not even a spec of dust. So how come, if Ken Sands really is both, he acted so carelessly in Tito’s apartment?’ Garcia didn’t wait for Hunter to reply. ‘The problem is, he might not have been careless at all. He might have made a genuine mistake.’

Hunter’s interest grew.

‘Eyelashes don’t shed as easily as regular hairs. I checked it,’ Garcia explained. ‘Humans lose between forty and 120 strands of hair a day, while eyelashes will live on average 150 days before falling out. It’s not a contingency most criminals worry about. No matter how careful they are. So unless Tito’s killer was wearing goggles, it was a genuine mistake.’

‘What did you say to Corbí?’

‘Nothing. Still kept him in the dark about the fact that Sands is a person of interest in the Sculptor case. I did ask him to keep me posted about any new developments. But there’s no escaping it now. They’ll be looking for Sands as well.’

Hunter nodded his understanding. ‘Yes, but you remember Tito’s apartment, right? It was filthy. It hadn’t been cleaned in months. So an eyelash may be good enough to place Sands inside the apartment, but without an eyewitness to testify that he was there on the night of the murder, without a confession, no one will ever get a conviction. All Sands has to say is that he visited Tito any time before the night of the murder.’

Garcia knew Hunter was right.

‘Did you get anything from Littlewood’s office building?’

Garcia used both hands to pull his hair back from his forehead. ‘Not a thing.’ He looked at his watch and irritably pinched his nose a couple of times.

Hunter understood Garcia’s frustration well. ‘Where’s Alice?’

‘No idea. She wasn’t here when I got back. What’s that?’ Garcia nodded at the cardboard box Hunter had placed on his desk.

‘Something I got from Littlewood’s apartment. Old photographs.’

Garcia cocked an eyebrow.

Hunter left the box and moved towards the pictures board. His attention this time locked solely on the human-sculpture and severed-limbs photographs. For a moment he studied them as if that was the first time he was seeing any of it.

‘Anything interesting?’

No answer.

‘Robert,’ Garcia called again. ‘Did you find anything in Littlewood’s apartment? Anything in that box?’

Hunter reached for one of the photographs and unpinned it from the board. ‘We need to go down to the captain’s office before she leaves.’

Captain Blake was just finishing a phone call when Hunter and Garcia knocked on her door.

‘Come in,’ she called, after placing a hand over the mouthpiece. As both detectives stepped into her office, she gestured for them to take a seat.

Neither did.

‘Well, I don’t care how you deal with it, Wilks, just deal with it. You’ve got lead on this, so lead, goddammit.’ Captain Blake slammed the phone down and pinched the bridge of her nose while shutting her eyes for just a moment.

Hunter and Garcia waited in silence.

‘OK.’ The captain looked up at them and exhaled a weighted breath. ‘Tell me we’ve got at least a sniff of something new.’

He reached inside his breast pocket and retrieved an old six-by-four-inch photograph, placing it on the captain’s desk.

‘What is this?’ she asked.

‘A sniff of something new,’ Hunter replied with no sarcasm in his voice. ‘I found it in Nathan Littlewood’s apartment.’

Garcia stepped forward, craning his neck.

Captain Blake picked up the photo and stared at it for several seconds. ‘What the hell am I looking at here, Robert?’

‘Could I have a look, Captain?’ Garcia asked, extending his hand.

She handed him the photo and sat back on her swivel chair.

The picture wasn’t of fantastic quality, but it clearly showed a skinny man barely in his twenties, standing outside by a tree, holding a bottle of beer. It was a bright sunny day and he had no shirt on. His hair was dark and curly. He was smiling. The beer bottle in his right hand was angled towards the camera, as if he was toasting something. It didn’t take Garcia long to place him.

‘A very young Nathan Littlewood,’ he said.

Captain Blake look at Hunter, unimpressed. ‘Hardly surprising since you found that picture in his apartment.’

‘Not him,’ Hunter replied. ‘The other person in the picture.’

Captain Blake stole another peek at the photograph in Garcia’s hands, and then looked back at Hunter as if he’d lost his mind. ‘Are we talking about
this
picture? ’Cos if we are, you might need to see an eye doctor, Robert. There’s only one person in it.’

Garcia was already searching the picture’s background for any secondary characters. He knew Hunter well enough to know that he’d seen something that most people would’ve missed. But there was no one. Littlewood was standing by that tree alone. There was nothing in the background but empty space.

‘Look closely,’ Hunter said.

That was when Garcia noticed part of someone’s left arm at the right-hand edge of the picture. Due to its proximity to the camera, it was out-of-focus, but it was easy to tell that the arm was bent at the elbow. Most of the forearm was out of shot.

‘The arm?’ Garcia asked.

Hunter nodded. ‘Stay with it.’ He watched as Garcia concentrated on the picture again. His stare went from confusion, to doubt, to surprise, and then finally it clicked.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Garcia said, his eyes darting towards Hunter.

‘No,
I’ll
be damned,’ the captain said, zapping both detectives with a laser stare. Her voice pitch went up a notch. ‘Do you see me sitting here? What
about
the arm?’

Garcia stood directly in front of her desk and showed her the picture. ‘This isn’t just somebody’s arm.’ He addressed Hunter. ‘That’s why you were checking the photos upstairs again.’

Hunter agreed and placed the picture he took from the pictures board on the captain’s desk. The picture showed a few body parts lying side by side on a stainless steel table. He pointed to one of the two arms in the photograph. Specifically, to a point high up on the triceps.

‘See those?’ he asked.

The captain cocked her head forward and squinted at it. ‘I see them all right; what are they?’

‘Moles,’ Garcia replied, placing the picture he was holding next to the one the captain was looking at. ‘Birthmarks.’ He indicated the same cluster of six small, oddly-shaped dark-red moles on the triceps of the person who had inadvertently got in front of the camera. Despite the arm being out-of-focus, there was no mistaking it. They were exactly the same.

Captain Blake sat still for a while longer, her gaze fixed on the photographs on her desk. She knew that birthmarks were as unique as fingerprints. The odds of two people having the same exact birthmark were about one in sixty-four million. Not even identical twins share them. Two individuals having the exact same six birthmarks, in a small cluster like the one she was looking at, was virtually impossible.

‘So that means that this guy was . . .’ She stabbed her finger over the out-of-focus arm on the photo from Littlewood’s apartment.

‘Andrew Nashorn,’ Garcia said. ‘The killer’s second victim.’

Her eyes glint with a new sparkle. ‘So they knew each other?’

‘It looks that way,’ Hunter said. ‘Or at least they did a long time ago.’

She turned the picture over – nothing. ‘When was this taken?’

‘We can send it to the lab for analysis, but judging by how young Nathan Littlewood looks, and the fact that he got married twenty-seven years ago and in that photo he isn’t wearing a wedding ring, I’d say that picture is probably twenty-seven to thirty years old.’

Garcia agreed.

Captain Blake leaned back on her chair again, clearly running something over in her mind. She looked up, tilting her body to the right and looking past both detectives towards her office door. ‘Where’s the DA girl?’

Garcia shrugged.

‘I haven’t seen her since this morning,’ Hunter said.

‘Well, it looks like she could be right.’ Captain Blake stood up. ‘This killer could have a set agenda. That was her reading of the shadow image cast by the sculpture found at the killer’s second crime scene, wasn’t it? Two victims claimed, two more to go.’ She moved around to the front of her rosewood desk. ‘Well, he’s now claimed his third one. We now know that two of them knew each other. Because of the nature of their jobs, I have no doubt Derek Nicholson and Andrew Nashorn were at least acquainted. Do we have any idea if Nicholson knew the third victim? Was he part of the same group of friends all those years ago?’

Hunter brought his left hand up to his neck to massage it. ‘I just came across this information about an hour ago, Captain. I haven’t had time to do a lot of digging yet. But we’ll obviously be looking into that. I’ve got a box of old photographs upstairs that might still gives us something else. But we now have a whole new angle to look at.’

‘I’d say that’s definitely a sniff of something, Captain,’ Garcia said.

The captain still looked ill at ease, but Garcia was right, they did have something new. She checked her watch and opened the door. ‘Well, get digging then, and let me know the moment you get anything. Right now, I’ve got to go talk to the Chief of Police and the Los Angeles District Attorney.’

Hunter spent most of the night going over every photograph inside that cardboard box. He found more wedding pictures, old holiday snapshots, several photographs of Nathan Littlewood with other friends and family, and a huge collection of photos of Harry, Littlewood’s only son – his birth, his first ever steps, his first day at school, his graduation, his first prom. Basically, every important occasion in his life until he left home. Littlewood was certainly a proud father.

After hours of image searching, Hunter was sure that Andrew Nashorn appeared in none of those photographs. That was all they had – an out-of-focus arm at the edge of an old picture, identifiable only by the small cluster of birthmarks on his triceps.

Hunter had examined every face in every snapshot with a magnifying glass. He was fairly certain that none of them was Derek Nicholson, but ‘fairly certain’ wasn’t certain enough. He would contact both of Nicholson’s daughters, Olivia and Allison, and check if they had any pictures of their father in his early twenties for comparison. Maybe Nicholson was one of those whose appearance drastically changed as they grew older.

Hunter finally managed to fall asleep just before five in the morning. He woke up at 8:22 a.m. The scar on the back of his neck was itching like crazy. He had a long shower, hoping that the warm water he allowed to drum down on his nape for five solid minutes would soothe some of that itch.

It didn’t work.

When Hunter got to his office an hour later, Garcia was sitting at his desk, shoulders hunched over his keyboard, attentively reading something on his computer screen. He looked up as Hunter placed the box of photographs on his desk.

‘Anything?’ Garcia asked expectantly, nodding at the box.

‘Nope, that was it. I’ve been through every photograph, every face. That picture in the park is all we got. If Nathan Littlewood also knew Derek Nicholson, there’s no evidence of it in this box.’

‘Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t. I’ve got four people on this, digging like demented moles, searching for anything that could link Nicholson to Littlewood, going back twenty-five to thirty years.’

Hunter nodded.

Garcia stood up and walked over to the coffee jug in the corner of the room. ‘Just to be one hundred per cent sure, I asked one of the image technicians to compare the birthmarks from the picture you got in Littlewood’s apartment and the ones on the autopsy photographs. There is no doubt. Dimensions, distance, pattern, everything, it’s all exactly the same. That’s Nashorn’s arm.’

Garcia didn’t need to ask, he could see the lack of sleep in his partner’s face: he poured two cups of black coffee and handed one to Hunter.

‘Guess what,’ Alice said as she stepped through the door, a proud smile on her face.

Hunter and Garcia turned at the same time to face her.

‘They knew each other.’

Despite the fresh makeup, the neatly combed hair, and the immaculately ironed skirt and blouse, Alice looked tired. Her eyes were what gave it away. The grit that came from lack of sleep was almost visible in them.

Neither Hunter nor Garcia said a word.

Alice placed her briefcase on her desk. ‘They knew each other,’ she repeated. ‘Andrew Nashorn and Nathan Littlewood knew each other.’

Hunter hadn’t seen Alice since yesterday morning. She hadn’t come back to the office in the afternoon. He knew she hadn’t heard the news from him, and judging by how excited she sounded, and the fact that he and Garcia were her audience, it was obvious that she didn’t know a thing about the photograph he had found in Littlewood’s apartment.

‘We already . . .’ Garcia started saying, but Hunter interrupted him.

‘How do you know this?’

Her proud smile stretched. Alice retrieved two sheets of paper from her briefcase. ‘This is part of Nathan Littlewood’s cellphone bill.’ She handed one of the sheets to Hunter. ‘They were delivered yesterday while both of you were out. This one . . .’ she passed him the second sheet, ‘. . . comes from the cellphone records we obtained from Andrew Nashorn.’

Hunter didn’t have to search the lists. Alice had highlighted the numbers. The same exact phone number appeared three times in Nashorn’s records, and twice in Littlewood’s.

‘That’s the number for an escort girl. Independent, not an agency,’ Alice said. ‘They both used the same escort girl.’

Doubt colored the face of both detectives.

‘Escort?’ Garcia asked.