Текст книги "The Death Sculptor"

Автор книги: Chris (2) Carter

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Eighty-Five

‘Have you seen this pile of shit?’ Captain Blake blurted as she stormed into Hunter and Garcia’s office, holding a copy of the morning’s edition of the LA Times.

Hunter, Garcia and Alice Beaumont had all read the article. In keeping with the best practices of shocking journalism, the LA Times went on to create its own pseudonym for the killer. It called him, fittingly enough, ‘the Sculptor’.

There were four pictures in total. One showed the building where Nathan Littlewood’s body was found. The other three were portrait photographs of each of the three victims. The article ended by saying that even after three ‘respectable members of the community’ (an attorney for the state of California, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer; a police officer; and a psychologist) had become victims of the most terrifying killer the city of Los Angeles had seen in decades, the LAPD were still chasing their tails like silly dogs. They had no tangible leads.

‘Yes, we’ve seen it, Captain,’ Hunter replied.

‘Silly dogs?’ The captain threw the paper on Hunter’s desk. ‘Goddamnit. Did they hear a fucking word we told them in that press conference yesterday? This makes us look like incompetent clowns. And the worst of it all is that they are right. Three victims in two weeks and we don’t have shit, except shadow puppets.’ The captain turned and faced Alice. ‘And if you are right about the meaning behind the second sculpture, than that’s one more victim off his list. That means he’s only got one more to go.’ Using both hands she tucked her hair behind each ear as she drew a deep breath. ‘Any luck with linking this third victim to the previous two?’

‘No,’ Alice said, sounding a little defeated. ‘I found nothing that linked Nathan Littlewood to any police investigation. He never helped the LAPD with a case. He has never testified in court, nor has he ever been called for jury service. I’m working as fast as I can. Right now I’m trying to find out if he has ever acted as a counselor to any crime victims. I was thinking that maybe he’d helped a victim of a case in which either Nicholson or Nashorn were involved. If so, maybe that case might relate to Ken Sands in some way. But obtaining information on Littlewood’s old clients has proven a little harder than I’d anticipated. But just because we haven’t found it yet, doesn’t mean that Nathan Littlewood wasn’t in some way related to either Ken Sands’s or Alfredo Ortega’s case.’

‘That’s just fantastic,’ the captain shot back. ‘So if this new victim doesn’t tie in with the only theory you guys have managed to come up with so far – Ken Sands’s revenge – then we really have diddly-squat.’ Captain Blake turned to address Hunter. ‘Maybe it’s time that big brain of yours cooked up something new, Robert. I just had my ear chewed off by the Chief of Police and the mayor twenty minutes ago. They’re sick of this “Sculptor” killer terrifying the city and laughing at us. DA Bradley already considers this whole investigation a fiasco, and I won’t repeat what he’s been saying about the detectives running it. This article just did it for everyone. If we don’t come up with something solid in the next twenty-four hours, we’re off the case.’

‘What?’ Garcia practically jumped off his seat.

‘Look. Right now, we’re drowning in sewage. It’s been twelve days since the first murder, and though we’ve all been working nonstop, we have nothing solid. If we don’t come up with something concrete by tomorrow morning, the DA will be asking the FBI to take over. Our job will simply be to assist them.’

‘Assist them?’ Garcia said. ‘By doing what, wiping their asses for them? Making them coffee?’

Hunter had worked with the FBI on a case once before, several years ago, and he had hated the experience. He kept his mouth shut, but there was no way in hell he would babysit the Feds or hand them his investigation on a silver platter.

‘With the story making the news as it did, the Feds contacted the Chief of Police, the mayor, the DA, and myself, offering their assistance. They said, and I quote “Just remember we’re here in case you need us”. And out of that bunch, I’m the only one who thinks we don’t.’

‘That’s just a great big pile of bullshit, Captain.’

‘Find me something concrete or get used to it, because in twenty-four hours we are the ones who’ll be neck deep, shoveling that big pile of bullshit for the Feds.’

Eighty-Six

By late afternoon, the sunny blue sky over Los Angeles had given way to dark and menacing clouds. They’d come to announce that the first downpour of the summer was imminent.

Hunter got to Los Feliz, a hilly neighborhood north of East Hollywood, just as the first roar of thunder cracked the sky. Garcia had gone back to Nathan Littlewood’s office. He wanted to re-interview a few of the people he’d already talked to, and have another look at the crime scene.

Littlewood’s apartment was located on the tenth floor of a fourteen-story building on the corner of Los Feliz Boulevard and Hillhurst Avenue. Hunter had acquired a spare set of keys from his secretary. The building’s entrance lobby was large, well lit, and very clean and welcoming. The porter, a black man of about sixty with a carefully trimmed goatee, was sitting behind a semi-circular reception counter. He raised his eyes from the paperback he was reading, as Hunter entered the building and pressed the elevator button.

‘Visiting someone?’ he asked without getting up.

‘Not today, sir,’ Hunter replied, displaying his badge. ‘Official business.’

The porter lowered his book, intrigued. ‘Has there been a burglary I’m not aware of?’ He started rummaging through a few sheets of paper around the confined space where he was sitting. ‘Has someone just called 911?’

‘No, there’s been no burglary, sir. No one has called 911. Just routine.’ That was all Hunter offered as the elevator doors slid open and he got inside it.

The corridor on the tenth floor was long, wide, well illuminated, and it carried a nice exotic air-freshener smell. The walls were cream with a light-brown skirting board, the carpet beige with triangular patterns. Apartment 1011 was towards the end of the corridor. His secretary had told Hunter that Littlewood had no home-security alarm. He unlocked the door and slowly turned the handle. It opened onto a dark entrance vestibule.

Hunter switched on his flashlight and checked the small space from outside. There was a medium-sized mirror fixed halfway up the wall, just above a narrow, see-through console table with an empty wooden bowl on it. Probably the place where Littlewood deposited his keys once he got in. To the left of the mirror a set of three wooden coat hooks was mounted on the wall. A gray blazer hung from the last hook.

Hunter pushed the door all the way open, stepped inside and flicked the light switch on. The entrance vestibule led into a small kitchen directly ahead, and an average-sized living room on the left.

Hunter quickly checked the pockets on the gray blazer. All he found was a credit card receipt for a Chinese restaurant. It was dated a week ago. According to the address on the receipt, the place was just a block away.

Hunter placed the receipt back into the blazer’s pocket and moved carefully towards the center of the living room, taking everything in. The centerpiece was a large plasma TV on a shiny black module against the south wall. Underneath it, on a shelf, a DVD player and a satellite-receiving box. The space to the right of the DVD player was occupied by a micro-stereo system. The rest of the shiny module was taken up by CDs and DVDs. The module shared the room with a dining table for four, a plush black leather sofa, two matching armchairs, a glass coffee table, a wooden sideboard unit, and a huge bookcase overflowing with books. The room wasn’t messy, but it wasn’t excessively tidy either. There were no feminine touches to anything, or any overly masculine details. Neutral, average, were the words that came to mind. The curtains were drawn, filling the space with dark shadows.

In the living room Hunter saw only one photo frame, half hidden in the corner, behind some CDs on the shiny module. The picture was of Littlewood with his arm around a kid no older than eighteen. The kid was dressed in a graduation gown, and he and Littlewood were sporting great big, proud smiles. Hunter had two similar pictures of him and his father back in his apartment – one after his high-school graduation, the other after his college one.

‘What the hell are you looking for, Robert?’ he whispered to himself.

Eighty-Seven

Lightning lit up the dark sky outside. A monstrous thunderclap followed just a split second later, with a crash that rattled the building. Rain came pelting down, smashing against the windowpanes.

Hunter spent a few more minutes in the living room, going through a few drawers and bookshelves, but found nothing of any interest. The kitchen gave him nothing special, either – mismatched crockery and cutlery, enough for four people at the most, and a half-empty fridge. A small hallway linked the living room to the rest of the apartment. There was one room on the left, halfway down the corridor, and one right at the end of it. The bathroom was on the right, directly opposite the first room.

Hunter moved deeper into the apartment. He decided to start with the main bedroom. It was large and comfortable, with an en suite bathroom. A double bed with a wooden headboard was pushed up against the wall. There was a small working desk, a built-in wardrobe, and a high chest of drawers. Again, no feminine touches and no picture frames – nothing precious, no memories. Hunter took his time going through everything. The wardrobe was well organized – suits and shirts took up half of the space. There were only four pairs of shoes, two of them sneakers. Ties and belts had their own little corner. Hunter checked the pockets of every suit jacket – nothing.

The rain was getting heavier, hammering the windows like evil ghosts trying to get inside. Lightning zigzagged across the sky every couple of minutes.

Hunter carried on checking the room. The chest of drawers held T-shirts, jeans, sweaters, underwear, socks and two bottles of Davidoff Cool Water cologne.

He checked the wastepaper basket on the floor by Littlewood’s desk. There was nothing there but junk mail and a few candy-bar wrappers. The laptop on the desk was password-protected. Hunter wasn’t sure if they’d find anything that could help with their investigation in Littlewood’s hard drive, but right now anything was worth a shot. He would hand the laptop to Brian Doyle at the Information Technology Division. The bathroom was even less adventurous in its décor than the bedroom.

Hunter stopped by the window and spent a moment watching the rain castigate Los Angeles. Another bolt of lightning split the sky, branching out into five different directions. It didn’t look like Hunter was going anywhere for a while.

He left the main bedroom and walked back down the corridor, entering the room opposite the bathroom. It was small but tidy. No doubt it was the guestroom. The main piece of furniture in this room was a single bed with a metal headboard pushed up against a wall. There was a small bedside table to its right. The whole east wall was taken up by a built-in wardrobe. The curtains were also drawn in this room, but they were different from the ones in the living room. These were heavier and thicker. No light or shadows came through them.

Hunter left them as they were and approached the bed, running his hand over the linen. It felt and smelled fresh – recently cleaned. He checked the drawer on the side table. Nothing. Completely empty. Hunter closed the drawer and moved over to the wardrobe, sliding its doors open. Inside, it looked like a mini garage sale. Everything was old – a vacuum cleaner, books, magazines, lamps, a few raggedy coats, an artificial Christmas tree, and a few cardboard boxes.

Wow,’ Hunter said, taking a step back. ‘It doesn’t look like Littlewood threw much away.’

He turned his attention to the cardboard boxes stacked up on the right, pulling the bottom one out. It was relatively heavy. Hunter placed it on the bed and opened its lid. The box was stuffed with vintage vinyl LPs. Out of curiosity, Hunter looked through a few – Early Mötley Crüe, New York Dolls, Styx, Journey, .38 Special, Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Rush . . . Hunter smiled. Littlewood was a metal head when he was young.

He paused and thought of something, quickly flipping through every single LP in the box. Faith No More’s album The Real Thing, which contained the song the killer had left playing inside Nashorn’s boat, wasn’t there.

Hunter returned to the wardrobe and retrieved another box. This one was packed full of photographs – very old ones. He grabbed a handful and started leafing through them. A new smile split his lips. Nathan Littlewood looked desperately young – late-teens maybe, several pounds lighter, with back-combed hair that went just past his shoulders. He looked like a garage-rock-band reject.

Hunter reached deeper into the box and grabbed another bunch of photographs. This time he came up with a group of wedding pictures. Littlewood was wearing an elegant dark suit, and in every photo he looked genuinely happy. The bride was about three inches shorter than he was, with eyes that made you want to stop and just stare at them for a while. She looked stunning in her wedding dress. She too seemed ecstatic.

The next bunch of photographs Hunter came up with weren’t wedding ones, though Littlewood looked just as young. Hunter had flipped through several of them when something grabbed his attention.

‘Wait a second.’ He brought the picture about half a foot from his face and squinted at it, concentrating hard, his memory racing like a computer, searching through all the images he’d seen in the past two weeks. As he finally made the connection, a rush of adrenalin found its way to every corner of his body.

Eighty-Eight

Thunder ruptured the sky one more time, making Alice jump in her seat. She didn’t like rain, and she hated tropical thunderstorms.

‘Jesus Christ.’

She clasped her hands together, brought them up to her mouth and started blowing into her thumbs as if they were a whistle. She always did that when she got scared. Something she’d started doing when she was a little girl.

Alice had spent the whole afternoon in Hunter’s office, frantically querying databases and unlocking backdoors to restricted online systems, searching for some sort of connection between the three victims. She still hadn’t found anything yet. Nor had she had any luck linking Littlewood to Ken Sands. But she’d been doing this type of work for a long time. She knew that just because she hadn’t found a connection yet, didn’t mean it didn’t exist.

Another bolt of lightning snaked through the sky and Alice shut her eyes tight, holding her breath. Lightning didn’t scare her, but she knew that after lightning there was thunder, and thunder petrified her.

The rumble of thunder followed a heartbeat later, and this one sounded reluctant to go, stretching for several seconds. There was nothing Alice could do to avoid the memories. Her eyes filled with tears.

When she was eleven years old, while visiting her grandparents in Oregon, Alice got caught in an enormous thunderstorm.

Her grandparents lived in a farmhouse near Cottage Grove. The entire place was gorgeous, just one huge national-park-like area full of woodlands, lakes and tranquility. Alice loved playing outside. She loved helping her grandpa when he was working with the animals, especially when he was milking the cows, collecting eggs from the henhouse, or feeding the pigs. But what she loved doing more than anything else when she was at her grandparents’ house was playing with Nosey, her grandma’s 3-year-old, black-and-white beagle. Most of her time in Oregon was spent holding, cuddling or running outside with Nosey.

This particular day in June, her parents, together with her grandpa, had driven to town to get a few supplies. Alice stayed at the house with her grandma. While Grandma Gellar was getting things ready for dinner, Alice and Nosey went outside to play. They both loved playing near the bushy trees, as Alice always called the distinct group of elms just down the hill from the house. Though her parents had told her many times never to go play there alone, Alice, being the stubborn little girl she was, never took much notice of their advice.

Alice had no idea how long she’d been running around the trees with Nosey, but it must’ve been a while, because the sky had darkened down to pitch-black with tiny patches of deep blue peeping through. Alice didn’t even notice the strong smell of wet soil that had slowly crept up on them.

The first bolt of lightning that colored the sky froze Alice to the spot. Only then did she notice the dreadful wind that had started blowing, and how cold it had suddenly got. When thunder exploded above her head, shaking the ground, Alice started crying and Nosey went nuts, barking like a crazy dog, and running around in all directions like he’d been blindfolded.

Alice didn’t know what else to do other than cry and curl up under the first tree she saw. She kept calling Nosey to come to her, but he just wasn’t listening. As he rushed from tree to tree, a new bolt of lightning came down like an evil hammer. Its target – the large metal plate on Nosey’s collar. Alice had her eyes wide open, her right arm extended, calling the little dog to come to her, but he didn’t have a chance. The lightning bolt grabbed hold of Nosey and held him for what seemed like an eternity. The little dog was propelled up in the air like a bouncing ping-pong ball. When he hit the ground again, Nosey wasn’t moving anymore. His eyes had gone milky white, and his tongue, hanging lifelessly from his mouth, tar black. Despite the heavy rain, Alice could see smoke lifting from Nosey’s body.

It took almost a year for the nightmares to subside; to this very day, Alice was absolutely petrified of thunderstorms. Even camera flashes made her feel uncomfortable. They reminded her of lightning.

Tropical thunderstorms in Los Angeles don’t usually last more than forty-five minutes to an hour, but this one was approaching an hour and a half, and it was showing no signs of easing.

Alice had a lot of work to do, but there was no way she could sit at the computer right now, her fingers just wouldn’t move. Instead, she decided to try and look through her paperwork. The itemized cellphone bills that the forensics team had found in Nathan Littlewood’s office had arrived a few hours earlier. They were the first thing she saw on her desk.

She had spent about ten minutes identifying Littlewood’s most-dialed numbers, when she noticed something that made her forget the storm outside.

‘Wait just a moment,’ she said to herself and started rummaging through the pile of documents on her desk. When she found the one she was looking for, Alice flipped through the pages, scanning every line.

There it was.

Eighty-Nine

The rain had finally stopped about an hour ago. The clouds had scattered away, but the sky remained dark as night took over.

There were too many photographs inside that cardboard box for Hunter to be able to thoroughly go through all of them while in Nathan Littlewood’s apartment. One photo had already gotten his heart racing with suspicion. He needed to get back to his office, and the box of photographs was going with him.

Before leaving Littlewood’s apartment, Hunter checked the other two cardboard boxes inside the guestroom’s wardrobe; they contained several old bits and pieces of Littlewood’s past, but nothing that Hunter thought relevant.

Garcia was sitting at his desk when Hunter walked back into his office. Alice was nowhere to be seen.

‘Everything OK?’ Hunter asked, noticing the aura of tiredness around his partner.

Garcia puffed his cheeks up with air before slowly letting it out. ‘I got a call from Detective Corbí from South Bureau.’

‘The detective in charge of Tito’s murder investigation?’

‘The one and the same. And guess what? They just had a result come back on a DNA test performed on an eyelash they found in the bathroom. Matches Ken Sands’s DNA.’

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.’