Текст книги "The Night Stalker"

Автор книги: Chris (2) Carter

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Twenty-Two

The word obsession flashed at the back of Hunter’s mind. Four years was more than enough time for most people to take the hint and move on. Denise told him how possessive and jealous Patrick used to be of Laura, and though during the time they were together he’d never been violent towards her, he did have a problem with his temper.

‘Do you know if anyone other than you had an extra set of keys to Laura’s apartment?’

Denise had another sip of her drink and thought about it for a minute before looking at Roy.

‘Not that we know of,’ he said.

‘Laura never mentioned if she’d given the keys to anyone else?’

A firm shake of the head from Denise. ‘Laura never allowed anyone to go into her apartment or her studio. Her work was very private to her. Even though she was successful, she never did it for the money. She painted for herself. It was a way of expressing what was going on inside her. She didn’t even like exhibiting that much, and that’s what most artists live for. As far as I know, she never took any dates back to her apartment. And she never, never got emotionally involved.’

‘How about any close friends?’

‘I was her closest friend.’ A slight quiver came into her voice.

‘Anyone other than family?’

‘Painters are very lonely people, Detective. They spend most of their time by themselves, working on a piece. She had acquaintances, but no one she could really call a close friend.’

‘She didn’t keep in touch with any of her old school, university or work friends?’

Denise shrugged. ‘Maybe, by phone or the odd drink, but I couldn’t tell you who.’ She paused. ‘The only other person I can think of is Calvin Lange, the curator of the Daniel Rossdale Art Gallery. The person who kick-started her career. He was very fond of her, and she of him. They talked on the phone and met quite frequently.’

Roy nodded his agreement.

Hunter noted Calvin Lange’s name down and his eyes returned to the photo frames on the wooden desk. ‘Being a successful artist consequently means having fans, I suppose.’

Denise nodded proudly. ‘Her work was admired and loved by many.’

‘Did Laura ever mention any . . .’ he searched for the right words, ‘ . . . insistent fans?’

‘You mean . . . like a stalker?’ Her voice faltered for an instant.

Hunter nodded.

Denise finished the rest of her whiskey in one gulp. ‘I never thought of it, but she did mention something a few months ago.’

Hunter put down the picture frame he was holding and took a step in Denise’s direction. ‘What exactly did she tell you?’

Denise’s gaze moved to a neutral point on the white Nepalese rug in the center of the room as her memory struggled to remember. ‘Just that she’d started receiving some emails from someone who said he was in love with her work.’

‘Did she ever show you any of these emails?’

‘No.’

Hunter looked at Roy questioningly, who shook his head.

‘Did she tell you what they said?’

Denise shook her head. ‘Laura played it down, saying that it was just a fan being flattering of her work. But I did get the feeling that something about it had spooked her.’

Hunter wrote again in his notebook.

Denise moved closer, stopping at an arm’s reach from Hunter. She looked into his eyes. ‘How good are you and your team, Detective?’

Hunter frowned as if he hadn’t understood the question.

‘I wanna know if you can catch the sonofabitch who hurt my daughter and took her from me.’ The grief in her voice was gone, substituted by undeniable anger. ‘Don’t tell me you’re gonna do the best you can. The police are always doing the best they can, and their best is rarely good enough. I know you’re gonna do your best, Detective. What I want you to do is look me in the eyes and tell me your best will be good enough. Tell me you’ll catch this sonofabitch. And tell me you will make this sack of shit pay.’

Twenty-Three

Whitney Myers used the little gadget Leonid Kudrov had given her to activate the gates to the underground garage in Katia’s apartment block. As she drove in, she immediately spotted Katia’s torch red V6 convertible Mustang parked in one of the two spaces reserved for her penthouse apartment. Myers took the empty spot next to it, got out and placed her right palm on the Mustang’s hood. Stone cold. Through the window, she checked its interior. All seemed fine. The car alarm light was blinking on the dashboard, indicating that it was active. Myers paused and allowed her eyes to roam the whole of the garage. The place was well lit, but there were many dark spots and corners where someone could hide. She noticed only one security camera, on the ceiling, facing the garage’s entrance door.

Myers retrieved a pair of latex gloves from the box in the back seat of her car and rode the elevator up to the penthouse. There, she used the keys Leonid Kudrov had given her to gain access to Katia’s apartment. No alarm. No signs of forced entry.

She softly closed the door behind her and paused for an instant. The living room was immense and decorated with a lot of style. Myers took her time looking around. Nothing seemed out of place. No signs of a fight or struggle.

She made her way to the spiral stairwell in the corner and moved up to the top floor. On the mezzanine landing, she found Katia’s car keys in a tray on a tall chest of drawers crowded with family photographs.

Myers moved on down the corridor and entered Katia’s bedroom. The walls were painted in pink and white, and there were enough stuffed toys on the perfectly made king-size bed to keep a crèche occupied for weeks. Myers checked the pillows on it. No smell. No one had slept in that bed last night.

Katia’s two suitcases lay on the end of the bed seat. They were both open, but it looked like she hadn’t had time to unpack them. The bedroom’s balcony door was locked from the inside. Again, no signs of forced entry.

Myers moved on to the walk-in closet. Katia’s collection of dresses, shoes and purses took her breath away.

‘Wow.’ She ran her hand down the front of a Giambattista Valli dress. ‘A dream wardrobe,’ she whispered. ‘Katia had taste.’

In the en-suite bathroom, she noticed a hair towel was missing from the rail.

Myers moved out of the bedroom and into the next room along – Katia’s practice den. The room was spacious but simple. A stereo system on a wooden sideboard, a couple of music stands, a mini fridge on the corner and a comfortable armchair pushed up against a wall. Katia’s violin case was on a small coffee table by the door. Her priceless Lorenzo Guadagnini was lying inside it.

Leonid had told her that Katia was obsessed with her Guadagnini violin. If it weren’t by her side, it’d be in her safe behind the large painting of Tchaikovsky on the wall, no exceptions.

Myers found the painting and checked the safe. Locked. Despite her previous confidence that Katia had just skipped town for a few days, she was getting a very bad feeling about this.

Myers returned downstairs and walked into the kitchen. It was as big as most studio apartments in Los Angeles. Black marble worktops and floors, polished steel appliances and enough pots and pans hanging from a center island that could give any small restaurant a run for their money.

The first thing Myers noticed was the missing hair towel from the en-suite bathroom upstairs. It was lying on the floor a few steps away from the fridge. She picked it up and brought it to her nose – a sweet, fruity smell that matched the bottle of designer hair conditioner in Katia’s bathroom.

Myers looked around. There was a bottle of white wine on the breakfast table. No glasses were out. No corkscrew either. But what really caught her attention was the blinking red light on the answerphone at the far end of the worktop. She walked over and looked at the screen.

Sixty messages.

‘I guess Katia is a popular woman.’

Myers pressed play.

‘You have sixty new messages,’ announced the prerecorded woman’s voice. ‘Message one.’

Absolute silence.

Myers frowned.

At the end of it there was a beep, and the machine moved on to the next message.

Silence.

And the next.

Silence.

And the next.

Silence.

‘What the hell?’ Myers took a seat on the barstool next to her. Her eyes settled on the large clock hanging from the wall above the door.

The messages kept on playing, not a whisper in any of them. After maybe the fifteenth or twentieth message, Myers picked up on something that made her skin crawl.

‘No fucking way.’ She pressed the stop button and then rewound the messages back to the very first one. She started from the beginning again. Her eyes returned to the clock above the door, and this time she let them play all the way to the fifty-ninth message. Silence in every single one of them, but the pattern she found told her that that silence had its own chilling meaning.

‘I’ll be goddamned.’

The last message started playing, and suddenly the silence was substituted by a long stretch of static, catching Myers by surprise and making her jump.

‘Jesus . . .’ She brought a hand up to her thumping heart. ‘What the hell was that?’ She rewound it, leaned closer to the machine, and played the message again.

Static noise blasted through the tiny answerphone speaker.

Myers moved even closer.

And what she heard, half-hidden by the static sound, sent a cold shiver down her entire body.

Twenty-Four

From the car, even before leaving the Mitchells’ driveway, Hunter called the Office of Operations and asked them to gather all the information they could on Patrick Barlett, Laura’s ex-fiancé. He’d just become a priority person of interest in the investigation.

Hunter disconnected and speed-dialed Garcia’s number. He gave him the lowdown on everything he’d found out from the Mitchells and they met half an hour later at the entrance to an old warehouse turned apartment block in Lakewood, minutes away from Long Beach.

Hunter looked subdued but Garcia didn’t have to ask. He knew that breaking the news to parents that their daughter had been the victim of a monstrous killer was already hard enough. But to have to tell them that they couldn’t even give her a proper burial because the body had been blown to pieces was really the stuff of nightmares.

They rode the elevator up to the top floor in silence.

Laura Mitchell’s apartment was an astonishing two thousand square feet loft conversion. The living area was simple but stylish with black leather furniture and sumptuous rugs. The kitchen was to the right of the entrance door and the sleeping area to the left – both modern, spacious and decorated with taste. But the bulk of the apartment was taken by her art studio.

Set at the far end and surrounded by large windows, including two skylights, it was filled with canvases of all sizes. The largest one was at least twelve foot by six.

‘Wow, I always loved loft conversions,’ Garcia said looking around. ‘I could fit four of my apartment in here.’ He paused and checked the door. ‘No forced entry. You said that her parents told you that they last heard from her two and a half weeks ago?’

Hunter nodded. ‘Laura and her mother were close. They called or met each other almost every other day. The last time they talked was on the 2nd of this month. A Wednesday. That was just a couple of days after the last night of Laura’s latest exhibition in a gallery in West Hollywood. Her mother tried to contact her again on the 5th, and that’s when alarm bells started ringing.’

‘In between the 2nd and the 5th?’ Garcia said, his eyes narrowing. ‘That’s around two weeks ago.’

Hunter drew a deep breath and his expression hardened. ‘And if she was taken by the killer . . .’ He didn’t complete his thought, allowing the gravity of his suggestion to simply hang in the air.

‘Shit!’ Garcia said in realization. ‘She was killed yesterday. If the same person who killed her also kidnapped her, it means he kept her hostage for two weeks.’

Hunter walked towards the sleeping area.

‘Have Missing Persons been through here?’

‘Yes, Detective Alex Peterson, from the West Bureau was in charge of the investigation,’ Hunter confirmed, opening the drawer on the bedside table – a sleeping eye mask, two cherry-flavored Chapsticks, a small pen flashlight and a packet of Tic Tacs. ‘I’ve already got in touch with him and explained that the case has now escalated to a homicide investigation. He said he didn’t have much, but he’ll send us everything he’s got. He found her laptop on the sofa in the living area. They’ve processed it but got only her fingerprints.’

‘How about the files in the hard drive?’

Hunter tilted his head to one side. ‘It’s password protected. The computer is with the Information Technology Division, but there was no urgent request until I talked to them a few minutes ago, so nothing yet.’

They checked her wardrobe – several dresses, a few of them designer, jeans, T-shirts, blouses, jackets and a substantial collection of shoes and handbags. In the kitchen Hunter checked the fridge, the cupboards, and the trash can. Nothing out of the ordinary. They moved to the living area and Hunter spent a few minutes looking through the photos and the book titles on the shelf unit next to the sofa before making his way into the studio.

Laura Mitchell was a lyrical abstractionist painter, and her work consisted mostly of collections of colors and shapes loosely applied to canvases. The studio floor was littered by a rainbow of paint splashes – almost a work of modern art in itself. Tens of finished paintings were organized against the west wall. Spread around the main working space were three canvas stands, two of them covered by once-white sheets. The third one, occupying a center position, held a thirty-six-by-twenty-four-inch semi-completed painting. Hunter studied it for a few moments before lifting the sheets from the other two stands. Both paintings also appeared unfinished.

Garcia took his time looking through some of the completed canvases resting against the wall.

‘I never understood modern art, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’ Hunter asked.

‘Look at this painting.’ He stepped out of the way so Hunter could take a look. It was another thirty-six-by-twenty-four-inch canvas displaying pastel green and orange colors surrounded by vibrant red and a touch of blue and yellow. To Garcia the colors seemed to have no co-ordination.

‘What about it?’

‘Well, this is named “Lost men in a forest of giant trees”.’

Hunter raised an eyebrow.

‘Exactly. I see no men, there is no forest and nothing on it resembles a tree.’ He shook his head. ‘Go figure.’

Hunter smiled and walked over to the large window on the left of the studio. Locked from the inside. He looked around the studio again before frowning and returning to the bedroom where he rechecked Laura’s wardrobe.

‘Did you find something?’ Garcia asked while he watched Hunter move purposefully into the bathroom.

‘Not yet.’ He searched through the dirty laundry basket.

‘What are you looking for?’

‘Her painting clothes.’

‘What?’

‘In her living room you’ll find three photos of Laura taken while she was working. In all three she’s wearing the same old greenish shirt and track pants, both covered in paint splashes.’ He checked behind the door. ‘And an old pair of tennis shoes. Have you seen them anywhere?’

Instinctively Garcia looked around. ‘No.’ Confusion started to settle in. ‘Why do you need her clothes?’

‘I don’t, I’m just trying to establish that they are missing.’ Hunter returned to the studio and motioned towards the easel holding the uncovered and unfinished painting. ‘It looks like Laura was last working on this canvas. Now check this out.’ He indicated a paint palette thick with crusts of different dried colors. It was casually lying on a wooden unit next to the stand. To its right was a jar containing four different-sized brushes. The water in the jar was muddy with oil paint residue. Resting on the palette, and now sticking to it as if glued, was another brush. Its tip was dry, hard and caked in bright yellow paint. ‘Now look around her studio,’ Hunter continued. ‘She seemed to have been pretty organized. But even if she wasn’t, painters don’t just simply leave the brush they’re working with laying around thick with paint to dry out. It would be just as easy for her to drop it into the cleaning jar.’

Garcia thought for a moment. ‘Something caught her attention while she was working, maybe a sound, a knock on the door . . .’ he said, following Hunter’s line of thought. ‘She put the brush down to go check it out.’

‘And the probable reason why we can’t find her working clothes and shoes is because she was wearing them when she was abducted.’

Hunter paused next to several finished canvases arranged against the back wall. Something about the long one on the far right called his attention. It displayed an astonishing gradient variation moving from yellow at one end to red at the other. He took a few steps back and tilted his head sideways. The canvas was leaning tall against the wall at a sixty-five-degree angle, but it was supposed to be looked at horizontally, not vertically. From a distance, the color combination became almost hypnotic. Laura certainly had talent and an astounding understanding of colors, but that wasn’t what had caught Hunter’s eye.

He approached the painting, crouched down next to it, and studied the floor around the canvas for a moment before looking behind it.

‘Now this is interesting.’

Twenty-Five

Whitney Myers got to her office in Long Beach to find Frank Cohen, her assistant and expert researcher, flipping through computer printouts. He looked up when Myers closed the door behind her.

‘Hey there,’ he said, pushing his glasses up his long and pointy nose. ‘Any luck?’ He knew Myers had spent most of the day going over Katia’s penthouse apartment in West Hollywood.

‘A few clues.’ She dumped her bag on the chair behind her glass-top desk and reached for the jug of freshly brewed coffee that perfumed the entire office. ‘Whoever abducted Katia . . .’ she poured herself a cup and stirred in a teaspoon of brown sugar, ‘. . . did it from inside her apartment.’

Cohen leaned forward.

‘Just as her father said, I found the towel in the kitchen. The smell on it was very faint, but it matched the hair conditioner in her bathroom upstairs. Both of her suitcases were at the end of her bed.’

‘Suitcases?’ Cohen frowned.

Myers walked to the large window that overlooked West Ocean Boulevard. ‘Katia Kudrov had just returned from her tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She had been away for two months,’ she explained. ‘She didn’t even have time to unpack.’

‘Did you find her purse, cell phone?’

Myers shook her head. ‘Only her car keys, as her father had said.’

‘Any signs of forced entry?’

‘None. All locks intact. Doors, windows, balcony.’

‘Struggle?’

‘None, unless you count a towel on the kitchen floor and a bottle of white wine sitting out of the fridge as one.’

Cohen twisted his lips from side to side. ‘Was she in a relationship?’

‘Not with anyone who’d be waiting for her in her apartment if that’s what you’re thinking. Katia had started seeing the Philharmonic’s new conductor, a guy called Phillip Stein. Apparently he was just a fling, though, nothing serious.’

‘Did he feel the same?’

‘Oh, he fell for her. Her father said it’s always just a fling with her. Katia doesn’t do heavy relationships. Music is her real love.’

Cohen pulled a face. ‘Deep.’

‘Katia and this Phillip guy were on the same tour together, and before you ask, there were no signs that he’d been home with her that night. She broke everything off a few days ago, just before their last concert.’

‘I bet he didn’t like that at all.’

‘Not one bit.’

‘So where is he now? Better yet, where was he on the night they got back to LA?’

‘In Munich.’

‘Munich, Germany?’

A quick nod. ‘He was that upset. Never came back with the Philharmonic after their last concert. Flew directly to Germany. That’s where his family is from. He couldn’t have done it. No matter how much motive he had.’

Cohen paused and tapped the top of his pen against his teeth. ‘Aren’t those flashy apartment blocks in West Hollywood packed with security – CCTV cameras and all? If someone took this Katia woman from her apartment, it must’ve been picked up somewhere.’

‘You would’ve thought so, wouldn’t you? You’re right, there’s a camera inside the elevator, two at reception, one on the penthouse landing and one in the underground car park. Conveniently, there was a power surge that blew the fuse box on the night Katia returned from her tour. All the cameras were down for a few hours. We’ve got no footage.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘Nothing. Her father never thought to ask the building’s concierge about cameras. That’s why he never mentioned anything when we met.’

Cohen pulled a face.

‘I know. This thing screams professional kidnapping, doesn’t it?’

‘Has anyone got in touch with the family yet? Ransom request?’

Myers shook her head and returned to her desk. ‘Nothing, and that’s what gets me. Everything so far points to a professional job. Professionals are always after money. Katia and her family are rich enough for the ransom to be in the millions. She’s been gone for over forty-eight hours and nothing, no communication of any sort.’

Cohen tapped the pen against his teeth again. He’d been working with Myers for long enough to know that in a professional kidnapping, communications between the kidnappers and the ransom party were usually established quickly, if possible, before the party had a chance to involve the authorities. If the abductor wasn’t after money, then Cohen knew they weren’t dealing with a kidnapper, they were dealing with a predator.

‘But this gets worse,’ Myers said, sitting back in her chair. ‘Our kidnapper likes to play.’

Cohen stopped with the pen tapping. ‘What do you mean?’

‘There was an answerphone in her kitchen.’

‘Yes, and . . . ?’

Myers allowed the suspense to stretch. ‘The machine was full to capacity. There were sixty new messages.’

Cohen’s left eye twitched. ‘Sixty?’

Myers nodded. ‘I listened to every single one of them.’ She paused and took a sip of her coffee. ‘Not a word, zip, absolute silence, not even heavy breathing.’

‘They were all blank?’

‘It sounded that way. I thought there was something wrong with the phone or the machine, until I got to the last message.’

‘And . . . ?’ Cohen’s eager eyes widened.

‘Have a listen yourself.’ Myers searched her handbag for her digital voice recorder and tossed it over to Cohen.

He quickly placed it in front of him on his desk, readjusted his glasses on his nose and pressed play. Several silent seconds went by. Then a low-pitched white noise oozed out of the tiny speaker. It lasted a few seconds.

‘Static?’

‘That’s what it sounds like at first, doesn’t it?’ Myers replied. ‘But listen again – like you mean it this time.’

Cohen reached for the voice recorder, rewound it, brought it close to his right ear, and listened carefully to it one more time – very attentively this time.

His blood ran cold.

‘What the fuck?’

Covered up by the static-like sound there was something else, something that sounded like a whisper. Cohen listened to it a couple more times. There was no denying it; the undecipherable murmur was definitely there.

‘Is somebody saying something or just trying to catch his breath?’

‘Not a clue.’ Myers shrugged. ‘I did exactly what you just did. Listened to it over and over again. I’m still none the wiser. But I’ll tell you something. If the intention of whoever left that message was to scare Katia, that would’ve done it. It sounds like a poltergeist ready to come through the phone. It freaked the hell out of me.’

‘You think this could be the abductor’s voice?’

‘Either that or someone with a very sick sense of humor.’

‘I’ll get this to Gus at the studio.’ Cohen jiggled the voice recorder in his hand. ‘If we transfer this into his voice analyzing program, we could clean it up and slow it down. I’m sure we’ll decipher whatever it is that he’s saying. If he is saying something, that is.’

‘Great, do it.’

‘Does her father know about this?’ Cohen knew that Myers was in constant contact with Leonid Kudrov, but with nothing of significance to report back, it was fast getting frustrating.

‘Not yet. I’ll wait and see if Gus can make something out of it before giving Mr. Kudrov another call.’ Myers ran her hand through her hair. ‘Now are you ready for the next twist?’

Cohen’s eyes shot in Myers direction. ‘There’s more?’

‘When I was listening to the messages, for no specific reason, I kept looking at the clock in Katia’s kitchen.’

‘OK.’

‘Suddenly, I realized that there was a common factor that linked all of those messages.’

‘What factor?’

‘A time signature.’

‘A what?’

‘I know it sounds crazy, but I went over every message twice. It took me a while.’ She moved to the front of her desk and leaned back against its edge. ‘They’re all twelve seconds long.’

Cohen’s eyes narrowed. ‘Twelve seconds? All sixty of them?’

‘Precisely. Not a second more, not a second less. Even the last message with the noise and the creepy murmur – twelve seconds exactly.’

‘And that’s not a fault with the machine?’

‘Nope.’

‘Did anyone set the message recording time to only twelve seconds?’

Myers looked at Cohen inquisitively. ‘I didn’t even know you could do that.’

‘I’m not sure you can, but I’m just trying to cover all angles.’

‘Even if that’s possible, who’d set a message recording time to only twelve seconds?’

Cohen had to agree. ‘OK,’ he said as his stare returned to the voice recorder. ‘Now that’s officially messed up, and I’m officially intrigued. There’s gotta be a meaning to it. No fucking way the twelve seconds thing is a coincidence.’

‘No fucking way,’ Myers agreed. ‘Now we’re just going to have to find out what it means.’