Текст книги "The Night Stalker"

Автор книги: Chris (2) Carter

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Five

Hunter understood what was going through Doctor Hove’s mind. In the immediate aftermath of the blast, her self-preservation instinct had kicked in and she had felt relief. She’d had a lucky escape. But now reason and guilt were settling in and her mind was punishing her in the worst possible way. If my meeting hadn’t run late, Sean Hannay would still be alive.

‘None of this is your fault, Doc,’ Hunter tried to reassure her, but he knew that words would have little effect. Before accepting anything, they all needed to understand what had happened in that room.

Hunter took a step up to the autopsy room door as his mind tried to process the scene in front of him. Right now, nothing was making sense. Suddenly, something caught his eye and he squinted for a second before turning to face Doctor Hove.

‘Are autopsies ever videotaped?’ he asked, pointing to something on the floor that resembled a camera tripod leg.

Doctor Hove shook her head. ‘Very rarely, and the request has to be approved either by me or . . .’ her eyes moved from Hunter to the inside of the room, ‘. . . the chief medical examiner.’

‘Doctor Winston himself.’

A single, hesitant nod from Doctor Hove.

‘Do you think he might’ve chosen to record this autopsy?’

Doctor Hove considered it for a moment and her face flared with hope. ‘There’s a chance. If he considered the case intriguing enough.’

‘Well, even if he did,’ Garcia cut in, ‘how would that help us? The camera was certainly blown to shit like most of the room. Just look at it.’

‘Not necessarily,’ the doctor said slowly.

All eyes went back to her.

‘Do you know something we don’t?’ Hunter asked.

‘Autopsy room four is sometimes used as a lecture room,’ the doctor explained. ‘It’s the only examination suite we have equipped with a video camera connection hub. It links directly to our mainframe computer. That means that the images are simultaneously stored into our mainframe hard drive. To videotape a lecture or an examination, all a doctor has to do is set up a digital camera, hook it to the hub and they’re good to go.’

‘Can we find out if Doctor Winston did that?’

‘Follow me.’

Doctor Hove moved purposefully back to the same stairway they’d come down and went up to the ground floor. They passed the reception area before continuing through a set of metal double doors and into a long and empty hallway. Three-quarters of the way down, they turned right. A single wooden door with a small frosted glass window stood at the end of the corridor. Doctor Hove’s office. She unlocked it, pushed the door open, and led them inside.

Doctor Hove went straight to her desk and logged onto her computer. Both detectives gathered behind her.

‘Only mine and Doctor Winston’s login has administrator’s rights access to the video directory on the mainframe computer. Let’s see if we got anything.’

It took Doctor Hove only a few clicks to get to the video directory where all recordings were stored. Inside the main folder there were three subdirectories – New, Lectures and Autopsies. The doctor expanded the directory named new to find only one .mpg file. The timestamp on it indicated that it had been created an hour ago.

‘Bingo. Jonathan did record the autopsy.’ Doctor Hove paused and anxiously looked at Hunter. He noticed that she had fractionally pulled her hand away from the mouse.

‘It’s OK, Doc; you don’t have to watch this. We can take it from here.’

Doctor Hove hesitated for a second. ‘Yes I do.’ She double-clicked the file. The screen flickered and the computer launched its default video player application. Hunter and Garcia moved closer.

The pictures weren’t of great quality, but clearly showed a white female body on an autopsy table. The image had been filmed from above and at an angle, and was partially zoomed in so that the table occupied most of the screen. On the right, two other people in white lab coats could be seen from mid-torso down.

‘Can you zoom out?’ Garcia asked.

‘The image was recorded this way,’ Hunter replied, shaking his head. ‘We’re not controlling a camera here. This is just playback.’

On the screen, one of the two people to the right of the table moved towards the body’s head and bent down to examine it. Doctor Winston’s face suddenly appeared in the shot.

‘There’s no sound?’ Garcia asked as he watched Doctor Winston’s lips move in silence. ‘How come there’s no sound?’

‘The microphones on the cameras we use to video examinations aren’t of great quality,’ the doctor explained. ‘We usually don’t even turn them on.’

‘I thought pathologists had a habit of dictating every step of their examinations.’

‘And we do,’ she confirmed. ‘Onto our own personal recording devices. We take them into the examination rooms with us. Whatever Jonathan was using, is now mangled up with everything else in that room.’

‘Great.’

‘Eyes – hazel, skin is well cared for, earlobes look like they’ve never been pierced . . .’ Hunter said before the video showed Doctor Winston turning away from the camera. ‘Damn! I can’t see his mouth any more.’

‘You can lip-read?’ The question came from Doctor Hove, but her surprised look was mirrored on Garcia’s face.

Hunter didn’t reply. He kept his attention on the screen.

‘Where in the world did you learn to do that?’ Garcia asked.

‘Books,’ Hunter lied. Right now, the last thing he wanted to do was talk about his past.

They watched in silence for the next few seconds.

‘Jonathan is performing a regular external examination of the body,’ Doctor Hove confirmed. ‘All the victim’s physical characteristics are listed, including first impressions of their wounds, if any. He’d also be looking for any physical marks that could help identify the victim – she was brought in as a Jane Doe.’

On the screen, Doctor Winston paused and an intrigued look passed across his face. They all watched as his assistant handed him a small flashlight. Bending over, he focused the light directly on the stitches applied to the victim’s lower body, moving the light up and down and from side to side. He seemed baffled by something.

‘What is he doing?’ Garcia instinctively tipped his head to one side, trying to get a better view.

The video played on and they all watched as Doctor Winston used a metallic pointer to probe through the stitches and into the victim’s body. The doctor’s lips moved and they all looked at Hunter.

‘It’s something metallic,’ Hunter translated, ‘but I still can’t say for certain what it could be. Pass me the stitch-cutting scissors and the forceps, will you?’

‘There was something inside her?’ Doctor Hove frowned.

On the screen, Doctor Winston turned away from the camera again and proceeded to use a pair of scissors to slice through the stitches. Hunter noticed there were five in total. The doctor inserted his right hand into the victim.

Moments later, Doctor Winston managed to retrieve an object. When he turned, only its edge flashed past the camera.

‘What was that?’ Garcia asked. ‘What was left inside the victim? Did anyone see?’

‘Not sure,’ Hunter replied. ‘Let’s wait, he might turn and face the camera again.’

But he never did.

Within seconds there was a blast and the whole image was substituted by static. The words – Room 4. Signal fail – flashed across the center of the screen.

Six

Absolute silence filled the room for several seconds. Doctor Hove was the first to speak.

‘A bomb? Someone put a bomb inside a murder victim? What the hell . . . ?’

There was no reply. Hunter took over at the computer and was already clicking away, rewinding the images. He pressed play again, and the video resumed from just a couple of moments before Doctor Winston pulled his hand from inside the victim’s body, gripping the unidentified metallic object. All eyes reverted back to the screen.

‘I can’t make it out exactly,’ Garcia said. ‘It moves past the camera too fast. Can you slow it down?’

‘It doesn’t matter what it looks like,’ Doctor Hove said almost catatonically. ‘It was a bomb. Who the hell puts a bomb inside a victim, and why?’ She took a step back and massaged her temples. ‘Terrorist?’

Hunter shook his head. ‘The location of the attack alone defeats the very essence of terrorism. Terrorists want to cause as much damage as possible with as much loss of life as possible. I hate to state the obvious, Doc, but this is a morgue, not a shopping mall. And the blast wasn’t even powerful enough to destroy a whole medium-sized room.’

‘Besides,’ Garcia said, with no sarcasm in his voice, ‘most bodies in here are already dead.’

‘So why would someone place a bomb inside a dead body? It doesn’t make any sense.’

Hunter held the doctor’s gaze. ‘I can’t tell you the answer to that question right now.’ He paused for a moment. ‘We need to stay focused here. I’m assuming that no one else has seen this footage?’

Doctor Hove nodded.

‘We need to keep it this way for now,’ Hunter said. ‘If news gets out that a killer has placed a bomb inside a victim, the press will turn this into a carnival. We’ll spend more time giving pointless interviews and answering stupid questions than investigating anything. And we can’t afford to lose any more time. Despite our emotions on this, what we have here is someone who is crazy enough to kill a young woman, place an explosive device inside her body and stitch it shut. Consequently, he also took the life of two other innocent people.’

New tears started to form in Doctor Hove’s eyes. But she had worked with Hunter in many cases over the years and there was no one in law enforcement she trusted more than him. She nodded slowly and for the first time Hunter saw anger in her face.

‘Just promise me you’ll catch this sonofabitch.’

Before leaving the coroners building, Hunter and Garcia stopped by the Forensics lab and picked up all the available information the team had collected so far. Most of the lab test results would take at least a couple of days. Since Hunter had never got a chance to see the body as it was found at the crime scene, the reports, notes and photographs were all he had to go on at the moment.

He already knew that the body had been found eight hours ago in the back room of the disused butcher’s shop in East LA. An anonymous phone call had tipped off the police. Hunter would get a copy of the recording later.

On their way back to East LA, Hunter slowly flipped through all the information in the forensic file. The crime-scene pictures showed that the victim had been left naked, lying on her back on a dirty metal counter. Her legs were together and stretched out but not tied. One of her arms was hanging off the side of the counter, the other rested on her chest. Her eyes were left open, and Hunter had seen the expression in them many times before – pure fear.

One of the pictures showed a close-up of her mouth. Her lips had been stitched shut with thick black, thorn-like thread. Blood had seeped through the needle punctures and ran down her chin and neck, indicating that she was still alive when it was done. Another close-up showed that the same thing had been done to her lower body. Her groin and inner thighs were also smeared with blood that had seeped through the puncture wounds. There was some swelling around the stitches – another indication that she had died hours after being violated by needle and thread. By the time she died, the wounds had already started to go septic. But that wouldn’t have caused her death.

Hunter checked the location photographs. The butcher’s shop was a dirty mess. Its floor was covered in crack pipes, old syringes, used condoms, and rat droppings. The walls were plastered with graffiti. Forensics had found so many different fingerprints it looked like a party had taken place in that back room. The truth was: right now only an autopsy examination could shed light onto the case.

Seven

Everyone had already left by the time Garcia dropped Hunter back to his car. Crime-scene tape still marked the perimeter around the butcher’s shop. A sole uniformed cop guarded the entrance.

Garcia knew Hunter would take his time, looking at every possible detail inside the shop.

‘I’m gonna head back and see what I can do with the crime-scene photos and the Missing Persons database. As you said, our priority is in identifying who she was.’

Hunter nodded and stepped out of the car.

The foul smell seemed to have intensified threefold as Hunter flashed his badge at the officer and entered the shop for the second time that evening.

As the door shut behind him, Hunter was left in pitch-black darkness. He clicked his flashlight on and felt a surge of adrenalin rush through his body. Every step was accompanied by the crunching of glass or the squelching sound of something moist under his feet. He moved on past the old meat display counter and approached the door at the back. As he got closer, Hunter heard the buzzing of flies.

This new room was spacious and linked the front of the store to the small freezer-room at the back. Hunter paused by the door, struggling with the putrid stench. His stomach was begging him to leave, threatening to erupt at any moment and causing him to gag and cough violently a few times. His surgical mask was having little effect.

He slowly allowed the beam of his flashlight to move around the room. Two oversized metal sinks sat against the far wall. To their right was an empty floor-to-ceiling storage module. Rats moved freely on its shelves.

Hunter screwed up his face.

‘There had to be rats,’ he cursed under his breath. He hated rats.

In an instant his mind took him back to when he was eight years old.

On his way back from school, two older kids stopped him and took his Batman lunchbox from him. The lunch-box had been a birthday present from his mother a year earlier, just months before cancer robbed him of her. It was his most prized possession.

After taunting Hunter for a while by throwing the lunch-box back and forth to each other, the two bullies kicked it down an open manhole.

‘Go get it, deaf boy.’

Hunter’s mother’s death was devastating for him and his father, and coping with its aftermath proved particularly difficult. For several weeks, as her disease progressed, Hunter sat alone in his room, listening to her desperate cries, feeling her pain as if it was his own. When she finally passed away, Hunter started experiencing severe loss of hearing. It was his body’s psychosomatic way of shutting off the grief. His temporary deafness made Hunter an even easier target to the bullies. To escape being cast aside even more, he’d learned to lip-read by himself. Within two years, with the same ease that it had gone away, his hearing came back.

‘You better go get it, deaf boy,’ the bigger of the two bullies repeated.

Hunter didn’t even hesitate, hurrying down the metal ladder as if his life depended on it. That was exactly what the bullies wanted him to do. They pushed the lid back over the manhole and walked away, laughing.

Hunter found the lunchbox down at the bottom and made his way back up the ladder, but no matter how hard he tried, he just didn’t have the physical strength to push the lid aside. Instead of panicking, he went back down to the sewage passageways. If he couldn’t get out the same way he went in, he’d simply have to find another way out.

In semi-darkness, clenching his lunchbox tight to his chest, he started down the tunnel. He’d traveled only about fifty yards through filthy, stinking sewage water when he felt something drop from the ceiling onto his back and tug at his shirt. Reflexively, he reached for it, grabbed it and threw it as far away from him as he could. As it hit the water behind him, it squeaked, and Hunter finally saw what it was.

A rat as big as his lunchbox.

Hunter held his breath and slowly turned to face the wall to his right. It was alive with rats of every shape and size.

He started shivering.

Very carefully, he turned around and faced the wall to his left. Even more rats. And he could swear all their eyes were locked on him.

Hunter didn’t think, he simply ran as fast as he could, splashing water high in the air with every step. A hundred and fifty yards ahead he came to a metal ladder that led him to another manhole. Again, the lid would not budge. He returned to the passageway and carried on running. Another two hundred yards, another manhole, and Hunter finally hit a little luck. At the top, the lid was half on, half off. With his skinny body, he had no problem squeezing through the gap.

Hunter still had the Batman lunchbox his mother had given him. And ever since then, rats had made him very uneasy.

Now, Hunter pushed the memory away, bringing his attention back to the butcher’s shop back room. The only other piece of furniture in it was the stainless steel counter where the victim’s naked body had been laid out. It was positioned about six feet from the open freezer-room door on the back wall. Hunter studied the counter from a distance for a long while. There was something odd about it. It was way too high off the ground. When he checked the floor, he found that bricks had been placed under each of its four legs, elevating the counter another foot to foot and a half.

Just like the crime-scene photos showed, the floor was littered with dirty rags, used condoms and discarded syringes. Hunter moved inside, taking short steps, carefully checking the floor before each one. The temperature in the room seemed to be at least five degrees higher than outside, and he felt sweat trickling down the small of his back. As he approached the stainless steel counter, the buzzing noise coming from the flies got louder.

Despite the flies, the nauseating smell and the melting heat, Hunter took his time. He knew the Forensics team had done the best job they could, but crime scenes could offer a lot more than simple physical evidence. And Hunter had a gift when it came to understanding them.

He carefully circled the metal counter for the fifth time. The main question swimming around in his mind was whether the victim had died in that room, or whether the butcher’s shop had been nothing more than a simple dumping ground.

Hunter decided to take the victim’s place.

He hopped onto the metal counter before lying down in the exact position the victim had been found and switching off his flashlight. He kept absolutely still, allowing the sounds, the smell, the heat, and the darkness of the room to envelop him. His shirt was clinging to his body, wet with sweat. From the photographs, he remembered the look in her eyes, the horror expression frozen on her face.

He switched on his flashlight but remained in the same position, his eyes taking in the graffiti that adorned the entire ceiling.

A moment later, something caught his eye. He squinted and sat up. His gaze locked onto the ceiling directly above the metal counter. The realization came in three seconds flat and his eyes widened.

‘Oh Jesus!’

Eight

Katia Kudrov stepped out of her bathtub and wrapped a fluffy white towel around her shoulder-length black hair. Scented candles illuminated her luxurious bathroom in the penthouse of an exclusive apartment block in West Hollywood. The candles helped her relax. And tonight she wanted nothing more than to unwind.

Katia had just finished her first American tour as the principal violinist concertmistress with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Sixty-five concerts in as many cities in seventy days. The tour had been a tremendous success, but the grueling schedule had left her exhausted. She was looking forward to a well-deserved break.

Music found its way into Katia’s life at a very early age, when she was only four. She remembered vividly sitting on her grandfather’s lap while he tried to rock her to sleep to the sound of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major. Instead of falling asleep, she fell in love with the sounds she heard. The next day, her grandfather gave Katia her first violin. But Katia wasn’t a natural, far from it. For years her parents endured the agonizing and ear-piercing noises of her long practice sessions. But she was dedicated, determined and hard-working, and eventually she began playing music that could make the angels smile. After a long spell in Europe, she had come back to LA thirteen months ago after being offered the concertmistress seat with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Katia stepped out of the bathroom, paused in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom, and studied her reflection. Her features were nearly perfect – large brown eyes, a small nose, high cheekbones and full lips that framed a faultless smile. At thirty, she still had the body of a high-school cheerleader. She checked her profile, sucking her stomach in for several seconds before deciding that she’d gained a small potbelly. Probably from all the junk food she ate at the many cocktail parties she’d had to attend during the tour. Katia shook her head in disapproval.

‘Back on the diet and in the gym from tomorrow,’ she whispered to herself, reaching for her pink bathrobe.

The cordless phone on her bedside table rang and she looked at it dubiously. Not many people had her home number.

‘Hello,’ she finally answered after the fifth ring, and could swear she heard a second click on the line, as if someone had picked up the extension in her study, living room or kitchen.

‘How’s my favorite superstar?’

Katia smiled. ‘Hi Dad.’

‘Hi there, baby. So how was the tour?’

‘Fantastic, but extremely exhausting.’

‘I bet. I read the reviews. Everyone loves you.’

Katia smiled. ‘I’m so looking forward to two weeks of no rehearsals, no concerts, and certainly no parties.’ She made her way out of her bedroom and onto the mezzanine that overlooked her spacious living room.

‘But you have some time for your old man, right?’

‘I always have time for you when I’m not touring, Dad. You’re the one who’s always so busy, remember?’ she challenged.

He chuckled. ‘OK, OK, don’t rub it in. I’ll tell you what. I can tell you’re tired by your voice, how about you have an early night and we catch up over lunch tomorrow?’

Katia hesitated. ‘What are we talking about here, Dad? One of your quick “I gotta go, let’s grab a sandwich” deals, or a proper sit-down, three-course, no-cells-allowed lunch?’

Leonid Kudrov was one of the most famous film producers in the USA. His lunch engagements usually never lasted more than thirty minutes, which Katia knew well.

There was a small pause and this time Katia was sure she heard a click on the line. ‘Dad, are you still there?’

‘I’m here, baby. And I’ll take option number two, please.’

‘I mean it, Dad. If we’re having a proper lunch, there’ll be no phone calls, and you’re not rushing away after half an hour.’

‘No cells, I promise. I’ll clear my afternoon schedule. And you can pick the restaurant.’

Katia’s smile was more animated this time. ‘OK. How about we meet at Mastro’s Steak House in Beverly Hills at one o’clock?’

‘Great choice,’ her father agreed. ‘I’ll make the reservation.’

‘And you won’t be late, will you, Dad?’

‘Of course not, honey. You’re my superstar, remember? Look, I gotta go. An important call just came in.’

Katia shook her head. ‘What a surprise.’

‘Have a good sleep, darling. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘See you tomorrow, Dad.’ She rang off and placed the receiver in her bathrobe pocket.

Taking the stairs down to the living room, Katia made her way into the kitchen. She felt like having a glass of wine, something to relax her even more. She selected a bottle of Sancerre from the fridge. As she fumbled inside one of the worktop drawers for the corkscrew, the phone in her pocket rang again.

‘Hello?’

‘How’s my favorite superstar?’

Katia frowned.