Текст книги "The Night Stalker"
Автор книги: Chris (2) Carter
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 26 страниц)
Thirty-Nine
Her eyelids flickered in rapid succession but she failed to open them. Her consciousness was returning to her like waves breaking over a beach. But each time her mind hinted at clearing, an undertow of blackness would pull her back into nothing.
The only thing she seemed to be certain of at that moment was the smell. Something like mothballs and strong disinfectant all rolled up into one. It felt as if the vile odor had traveled in through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach, burning everything in its way. Her guts felt like writhing snakes trying to climb out of her body.
Her eyes flickered again, this time for a little longer, and with great effort she managed to force them open. The light around her was dim and weak, but it still burned at her retinas like lightning bolts. Gradually, she began taking in her surroundings. She was lying on her back on some hard and uncomfortable surface, inside a hot and humid place. Old and rusty metal pipes ran across the ceiling in all directions, disappearing as they reached the mold-infested cinder block walls.
She tried lifting her head, but the movement sent waves of nausea rippling through her stomach.
Slowly, the numbness that controlled her body started to subside, and as it did, it was substituted by agonizing pain. Her lips felt as if they were being ripped from her face by several pairs of pliers at the same time. Her jaw hurt as if it had been broken. She tried opening her mouth, but the pain that rose from the effort almost sent her back into unconsciousness. Tears started streaming down her face as she urged her brain to work and tell her what to do. She tried moving her arms – surprisingly, no pain. More surprisingly, they weren’t restrained.
Shivering, she brought her hands to her face and touched her lips with the tips of her fingers. The shivering turned into uncontrollable convulsions of fear as she realized why she couldn’t move them.
Her mouth had been stitched shut.
Desperation took over.
Robotically and without any sense of reality, her trembling fingers tapped the stitches on her lips like a mad pianist. Her wailing and frantic muffled screams echoed throughout the room, but there was no one there to hear them. The thread used on her mouth dug deeper into her skin as she tried to move her lips again. She tasted blood.
Suddenly, as if a switch had been flicked on inside her head, she became aware of a much more intense and terrifying pain. It was coming from between her legs. It shot through her body with such ferocity it felt like evil had just climbed inside her.
Instinctively, her hands moved towards the source of the pain, and as they touched her body and the other stitches, she felt her strength leaving her.
Panic erupted inside her, and her body’s defense mechanism inundated her bloodstream with adrenalin, numbing the pain just enough for her to be able to move. Guided now by pure survival instinct, she forced herself to sit up.
Sound disappeared, time slowed, and the world turned black and white in front of her eyes. Only then did she realize she was naked and had been lying on some sort of stainless steel table. Strangely, the tabletop seemed higher off the ground than one would expect. At least another foot or so.
She looked down at her bare feet, and all of a sudden it dawned on her. Her legs were also unrestrained. Frantically her terrified eyes searched the room – large, square with a concrete floor and a metal door directly in front of her. The door didn’t seem to be locked. The walls were lined with empty wooden shelves.
Without wasting any more time or caring if this was a cruel trap or not, she jumped to the floor. The impact as her feet hit the ground sent a shudder up her spine. A millisecond later, the most unimaginable pain exploded inside her. Her legs lost all their strength and she fell to her knees, shivering. She looked down and all she saw was blood.
Forty
It was now three full days after Laura Mitchell’s body had been found and not much had materialized. James Smith, or whoever he really was, had simply vanished. The Forensics agents were right: all the fingerprints found in the apartment did come from a single person. They’d been running them against the National Automated Fingerprints ID System for several hours. So far no matches. It didn’t look like James Smith had ever been in the system.
The DNA result would still be at least another day or so. Whoever James Smith was, he was smart.
Choosing the most common American male name automatically hid him under layers upon layers of other people. Even if Hunter asked Operations to narrow the LA’s James Smith list down by filtering on age and approximate height, it’d still be too long. Besides, it was obvious that James Smith wasn’t his real name.
The apartment in Norwalk had been rented and paid in cash, a year in advance. Hunter talked to the landlord, a Mr. Richards. He was a retired shop owner and lived in Palmdale. He told Hunter that he’d only seen James Smith twice – first when he initially rented the property two years ago, and then again twelve months later when he renewed his lease agreement and paid the next full year in advance, plus extras – more than enough to cover all utility bills. So that was the reason they found no bills in the apartment.
Mr. Richards told Hunter that in the two years Mr. Smith had been renting his apartment, he’d been a great tenant, the best he’d ever had.
‘He never causes any trouble,’ Mr. Richards told Hunter. ‘He’s also never requested anything else, unlike most of my previous tenants. They were always calling and asking me for a new fridge, or stove, or mattress, or electric shower, or whatever. They were always complaining that there was something wrong with the apartment, but not James. He never complained.’
‘Did you check any documentation when Mr. Smith rented your apartment?’ Hunter asked. ‘You know, background checks, references or anything like that?’
Mr. Richards shook his head. ‘There was no need. He paid cash and the full year in advance, which means he could never default on a payment.’
Hunter was more than aware that Los Angeles was definitely the city for if you’ve got the cash, you get the goods, no questions asked.
‘Did Mr. Smith ever tell you what he did for a living?’
Another shake of the head from Richards.
The snapshot Hunter had of James Smith was quickly released to the press. The picture was by no means perfect. His face was at least 30 per cent obscured, but it was the best they had. With a little luck, someone out there would know who he was. A dedicated phone line was created to receive calls. So far they’d got a mountain of dead ends and people claiming to be James Smith himself, challenging the police to come and get them.
They’d also found the painting Smith had purchased nine months ago along with several DVDs in his apartment. All of them homemade. All of them of Laura Mitchell. Apparently, all of them shot by Smith himself. Hours and hours of footage of Laura at exhibitions, dinner parties, arriving at and leaving her art studio, walking into her gym, browsing in shopping malls, and so on. There were no time-stamps on any of the footage, but judging by her different hairstyles and slight differences in weight, they had been shot over a period of years. They could be seen as surveillance in preparation for an abduction, or plain obsessive stalking. Hunter didn’t want to jump to any conclusions until he had more evidence.
‘OK,’ Captain Blake said, putting the ten-page report she was reading down on her desk. ‘What’s confusing me is . . . if this James Smith is our killer, and he’s obviously been collecting intel on Laura Mitchell for a few years, how come he only decided to strike now?’
‘That’s not unusual, Captain,’ Hunter said, walking over to the window in the captain’s office. ‘Very few people have the mental strength to become a killer overnight. The vast majority of serial killers, or people who have shown tendency to becoming one, have fantasized about their actions for months, years, sometimes decades. For most, the fantasy alone is enough to satisfy them. Some will go as far as doing all the preparation, the research, the stalking, the surveillance, collecting intel, maybe even capturing the victim, but bottle out right at the last minute. Maybe it took James all these years to gather the courage to finally act out his fantasy.’
‘And we know our killer doesn’t mind waiting,’ Garcia said.
The phone on Captain Blake’s desk rang. She answered it on the third bell.
‘What?’ she barked.
As she listened her eyes darted towards Hunter.
‘Shit! Seal the entire place and keep everyone else away from that building, do you hear me? And I mean everyone. We’re on our way.’
Forty-One
The abandoned preschool was located in Glassell Park, Northeast Los Angeles. Cracked walls, broken windows, subsiding floors, cobwebs, and crumbling wooden doorframes was all that was left of the once bustling single-story building. Instead of cartoon characters, gang graffiti now decorated the walls both outside and inside. Several police vehicles and a forensic crime-scene van took over the parking lot to the right of the school. The press had parked all over the place. Reporters and photographers, together with an ever growing crowd of onlookers were being held back at the twenty-five-yard perimeter line created by yellow crime-scene tape and numerous officers.
Hunter, Garcia and Captain Blake got out of the car, sidestepped the crowd and quickly stooped under the tape, approaching the two police officers standing by the main building’s entrance. They were both silent.
‘Sorry, sir, but I got orders from high up not to let anyone in there for now,’ the most senior of the two officers said, acknowledging both detectives’ badges.
‘I gave that order,’ Captain Blake replied firmly, displaying her credentials.
Both officers immediately stood to attention.
‘Captain,’ a short, overweight male reporter with thick glasses and a terribly disguised bald patch called from the pack. ‘What’s going on? Who is the victim? Why are you here? Care to give the people of Los Angeles some information?’ His questions ignited an onslaught of frantic shouts from everyone.
All Los Angeles crime beat reporters knew that LAPD captains didn’t usually attend crime scenes, no matter what division or bureau they were from. When they did, there was always a reason. And it was never good news. When the captain of the LAPD Robbery Homicide Division turned up at a crime scene, something was definitely wrong.
Captain Blake ignored the questions and returned her attention to the officer. ‘Were you first response?’
He nodded but avoided her eyes.
‘C’mon, Captain, give us something. Why are you here? What’s going on in there?’ The bald reporter insisted.
Captain Blake still paid no attention. ‘Who else other than Forensics has seen the body?’
‘Only me and my partner, ma’am, Officer Gutierrez.’ He tilted his head in the direction of the building behind him. ‘He’s inside, guarding the entrance to the basement.’
‘No one else?’ she pressed.
‘No one else, ma’am. We got a call from dispatch earlier to come down here and investigate a 911 call – someone claiming to have found a body. We radioed Homicide and Forensics as soon as we walked into that room. We got our orders back almost immediately – not to let anyone else in. Forensics are the only ones we’ve allowed through.’
‘The body is in the basement?’ Hunter asked.
‘Yes, at the end of the corridor turn left and you’ll be in the old kitchen. At the back of it you’ll see a few steps that’ll take you down to a storage room. The body is in there.’ His next words came out no louder than a whisper. ‘What in God’s earth . . . ?’
Minutes later, Hunter, Garcia and Captain Blake found Officer Gutierrez at the back of the old kitchen, guarding the steps to the storage room just like his partner had said. His youthful face couldn’t hide the shock of what he’d seen down in that room.
The cement staircase going down to the basement was worn out, narrow and steep, illuminated by a single light bulb that hung from the water-infiltrated ceiling above the landing at the top. With each step they took, the smell of disinfectant grew stronger. Brilliant forensic light seeped through the rusty metal door at the bottom. As they approached it, Hunter felt his blood rush and warm his skin as if he’d just stepped out into the baking sun. He opened the door, and all he saw was blood.
Forty-Two
Doctor Hove was standing by the far wall talking to her lead Forensics agent, Mike Brindle. They were both wearing white Tyvek coveralls. A stainless steel table occupied the center of the large room. The concrete floor was covered in sticky, coagulated blood. Not splashes and sprinkles, but thick, vampiric pools of it. A few small and delicate bloody handprints traced a short trajectory from the table to the ghostly pale, naked body of a brunette woman lying on her back just a few steps from the door. Her arms had been carefully placed by her side, her legs stretched out.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Captain Blake murmured, bringing a hand to her mouth as she felt her stomach churn.
The woman’s lips had been stitched shut, and though her torso and legs were caked in blood, the black, thorn-like stitches to her lower body were clearly visible.
Doctor Hove approached them in silence and Hunter shot her a questioning look.
The doctor nodded in confirmation. ‘Judging by what we have in this room, I’d say it’s the same killer,’ she said in a hushed voice.
Hunter and Garcia did their best to avoid stepping into the pools of blood and approached the body on the floor. Captain Blake stayed by the door. Hunter crouched down and examined what he could of the woman without touching her. Garcia did the same but his eyes kept returning to her once attractive face, as if something was bothering him. A few seconds later he frowned at Hunter. ‘Jesus, she’s a carbon copy of Laura Mitchell. They could’ve been sisters.’
Hunter nodded. He’d noticed the uncanny resemblance from the door.
Captain Blake pinched the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She knew exactly what that meant.
Hunter turned to Doctor Hove. ‘Is this how you found the body?’
‘No,’ Mike Brindle replied, stepping closer. ‘We photographed everything and then turned her over. Her body was facing down; right cheek against the floor, facing left towards the wall. Her left arm was extended as if she was reaching for something. Her position gave us the impression that she was probably crawling towards the door, but lacked the strength to get there.’
Hunter’s eyes wandered the room again, taking in more of the scene. ‘The handprints?’
‘They’re hers,’ Brindle confirmed. ‘The few bloody sneaker shoeprints you saw on the floor outside and on the steps going up haven’t been confirmed yet. But judging by the runaway smear pattern in some of them, I’d say they belong to the scared teenager who dialed 911 – anonymously, he left no name and no address.’ He paused and his stare returned to the woman on the floor. ‘Rigor mortis started not long ago, but the heat and humidity in this room could have delayed it for up to five hours, maybe a little more.’
‘So she definitely died today?’ the captain asked.
Brindle nodded.
Garcia’s attention went from the body to the large distribution of blood on the floor. ‘She’s got no wounds I can see other than her stitches. Where did all this blood come from?’
Doctor Hove and Mike Brindle exchanged an uneasy glance. ‘I’ll have proper confirmation with the autopsy,’ the doctor replied, ‘but right now, all this indicates some sort of internal hemorrhage.’
Captain Blake’s eyes widened.
‘All this blood . . .’ the doctor shook her head as if she was struggling to find the right words, ‘ . . . dripped out of her through the stitches.’
‘Holy shit.’ Garcia rubbed his face with his right hand.
‘She’s also got tiny abrasions on both of her hands and knees,’ Doctor Hove continued. ‘We think she came off that table and collapsed to the ground. Maybe because she was dizzy or in tremendous pain, but she was still alive. The abrasions were probably caused by the fall and her crawling towards the door. Her prints are on that table, so we concluded that she was left there by the killer, but there isn’t a speck of blood on it. She didn’t start bleeding until she was on the ground.’
‘And then there’s this,’ Brindle said, walking over to where Captain Blake was standing. ‘Excuse me, Captain.’
She frowned and took a step to her right.
Brindle pointed to the wall directly behind where the captain was standing. Only then did they see the set of small spray-painted black letters – IT’S INSIDE YOU.
Forty-Three
Captain Blake’s lips parted in disbelief. They were exactly the same words Hunter had found spray-painted on the ceiling in the butcher’s shop where Laura Mitchell’s body had been found. Her stare refocused onto the body on the floor for a moment before moving back to Doctor Hove.
‘OK, I thought what we had here was just suspicion and conjecture. I was obviously wrong. But if you knew this was the same killer, given that he placed a bomb inside his first victim that took the lives of two other people inside one of your autopsy rooms . . .’ she pointed to the letters on the wall, ‘ . . . and again he’s telling us he did the same here, what the hell are we doing in this room? Where’s the bomb squad? And why did you risk turning the body over?’
‘Because whatever it was the killer placed inside her this time,’ Hunter replied, gently rubbing between his eyebrows, ‘it’s already gone off inside her.’
‘Judging by where she bled from,’ the doctor added, ‘that’s exactly what we think. As we said, it all points to an internal hemorrhage, but not one we’ve ever seen before.’
‘What do you mean?’ Captain Blake asked.
‘Internal hemorrhages usually occur from traumatic injuries, blood vessel rupture or certain specific diseases, carcinoma being one of them. But the blood accumulates inside the body, hence the term internal. And the amount is just a fraction of what you see here. This woman bled as if she had been mutilated. Whatever it was that caused it, it was inside her.’
No one said anything for a moment.
‘There was nothing else in this room other than what you can see,’ Brindle took over. ‘The body, those old shelves on the walls and that stainless steel table.’ He gestured towards it. ‘There are no chains, no ropes or any sort of restraints anywhere. A closer look at the victim’s wrists and ankles shows no abrasions or marks. She wasn’t tied down. She also couldn’t have been locked in here because there’s no lock on that door.’ He shook his head as he considered it. ‘The truth is: we can’t find anything that suggests why she wasn’t allowed to just walk out of here. So far there are no indications that anyone else was in here with her when she died. It looks like the killer simply dumped her on that table and left. And as we said, she wasn’t bleeding then. But the killer somehow knew she would never get out of this room alive.’
Hunter had already noticed that the table in the room had been raised higher off the ground than normal. ‘Does this look strange to anyone?’ He pointed to the wooden blocks under each of the four table legs.
Everyone frowned.
‘The first victim, Laura Mitchell,’ he continued, ‘was left on a stainless steel counter inside a butcher’s shop in East LA. That counter had also been raised higher off the ground by bricks. First I thought that maybe the old butcher there had been some sort of a giant, but no, I checked. He was five foot eight.’
‘So you think the killer did this deliberately?’ the captain asked. ‘Why?’
‘I’m not sure yet.’
They all paused as they heard heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. A couple of seconds later a crime lab agent also dressed in white Tyvek coveralls pulled the door open. He brought with him a large, black plastic flight case.
‘It’s OK, Tom,’ Brindle said, reaching for the case. ‘I know how to set it up.’
The agent left the case with Brindle and exited the room.
‘This is why we had to turn her body over,’ Doctor Hove explained as Brindle undid the locks to the case and started unpacking its contents. ‘That’s a portable tactical X-ray unit. It’s mainly used for the investigation of small– to medium-sized objects like parcels, boxes and luggage. The picture it produces is not of the same quality as you’d get from a proper hospital X-ray machine, but it’ll serve our purposes here. We’re pretty confident that whatever was placed inside her has, as Robert said, gone off, and that’s what killed her. But we all know what this killer is capable of.’ She looked at Captain Blake. ‘I don’t wanna move her before I have an idea of what we’re dealing with.’
They all watched as Brindle set up the equipment. ‘Since we don’t have a tripod,’ he said, ‘can somebody hold the camera over her?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Garcia said, returning to the body and once again carefully avoiding the pools of blood. He took the small digital camera from Brindle.
‘Just keep it directed at her stomach. Two to three feet away will do,’ Brindle explained before approaching the laptop he’d set up on top of the black plastic flight case. ‘That’s all there is to it. The camera connects wirelessly to the computer and produces an X-ray image. You can press the on button now, Carlos.’
He did, and all eyes reverted to the laptop screen as the image materialized.
Brindle and Doctor Hove’s eyes widened in amazement and confusion, and they both craned their necks a little closer.
Hunter squinted, trying to understand what he was looking at.
Captain Blake’s jaw dropped and her mouth went instantly dry, but she was the only one who managed to ask the question in everyone’s mind.
‘In the name of God, what . . . the hell . . . is that . . . inside her . . . ?’