Текст книги "One by One (Роберт Хантер 5 Поодиночке)"

Автор книги: Chris (2) Carter

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Garcia was looking around the kitchen when his smart-phone beeped.

‘We’ve got a file on Ms. Stevenson,’ he announced, checking his email application.

Hunter was studying the three pictures on the sideboard. One was of Christina sitting on a beach somewhere. In the second one, a kind-faced woman with vivid blue eyes and full lips was smiling. Christina had definitely inherited her mother’s eyes, strong nose, high cheekbones and the small mole under her bottom lip. The woman on the picture had an almost identical one. The last picture showed Christina in a black and gray cocktail dress, holding a glass of champagne and talking to an elegantly dressed group of people.

‘What do we have?’ Hunter asked, turning to face Garcia.

‘OK, I’ll skip what we already know,’ Garcia said. ‘Christina Stevenson was born right here in LA. She grew up in Northridge, where she lived with her mother, Andrea. No brothers or sisters. Her father is unknown, and according to this, Christina never had a legal stepfather. Her mother never married. She went to Granada Hills High School, and it looks like she was a good enough student – good grades, never in trouble. She was part of the cheerleaders’ team from her sophomore to her senior year.’ Garcia scrolled down on his phone application. ‘Her mother died of a brain aneurysm seven years ago, on the exact same day Christina received her degree in journalism from UCLA.’

Reflexively Hunter’s gaze returned to the portrait of the smiling woman on the sideboard.

‘It looks like her mother’s death knocked the life out of her,’ Garcia moved on. ‘Because we’ve got nothing for a whole year here. After that, she managed to land an intern’s job with the LA Timesand has been with the paper ever since.’

‘Was she always with the entertainment desk?’ Hunter asked.

‘Nope. She spent four years jumping from desk to desk – city, international, politics, economy, current affairs, crime, even sports. She only settled into her own when she joined the entertainment desk two years ago. Never married. No kids. There’s no mention of any boyfriends here either. No records of drug use. They’re still checking her financial records, but the mortgage on this house is almost paid off. She earned a very decent salary from the paper.’ Garcia scrolled down a little more. ‘She had a big story published yesterday, in the Sunday edition of the LA Times.Probably the story Emilio was talking about.’

‘What was the story?’

More scrolling followed by a surprised look from Garcia.

‘Listen to this. It was a scoop on a Hollywood celebrity who’d been fooling around with her kid’s teacher while her husband, who is also a celebrity, was away, recording the latest episodes for the TV series he stars in. The story made the front cover of the entertainment supplement, with a sizable “call” on the paper’s front page.’ Garcia put his smartphone away. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s the kind of story that can get you a whole bunch of new enemies. The kind that can break up marriages and destroy lives.’

‘Who was the celebrity?’ Hunter asked.

Before Garcia could answer, Mike Brindle poked his head through the living-room door. ‘Robert, Carlos, you better come have a look at this.’

Forty-Five

The atmosphere inside the FBI Cybercrime Division was one of triumph. Smiles and congratulations were going around the room like a carousel. Even the FBI director in charge of the Los Angeles field office had called Michelle Kelly to express his satisfaction. He had two small daughters of his own and he couldn’t even begin to imagine what he would do if either of them ever fell victim to an Internet pedophile.

Sitting at her computer, Michelle brought up Bobby’s case file. On its front page she right-clicked on the empty square in the top right-hand corner that said ‘‘photo file’’, and selected ‘add’ from the pop-up menu. Harry Mills had already transferred a series of mugshots taken after Bobby’s arrest into the FBI’s mainframe computer. Michelle selected one, and clicked ‘add’.

She then placed the cursor over the ‘Name’ field and typed in Bobby’s real name – Gregory Burke.

Bobby was no longer a faceless, nameless threat to young kids anymore.

Michelle moved the cursor over to the Investigation Statusfield, deleted the word ‘open’, and as she typed in ‘closed – subject arrested’, she felt enormous satisfaction run through her. But she knew that that feeling wouldn’t last long.

Unfortunately there were way too many ‘Bobbys’ out there, stalking social network sites, chat rooms, games websites or wherever kids would gather to socialize in cyberspace. Michelle and the FBI CCD were doing the best they could, but the simple truth was that they were hugely outnumbered, and the ratio grew the wrong way year after year. She knew that putting Bobby away was only a small victory in a war they’d been losing since the early days of the Internet, but even so it was days like today that made the fight worthwhile.

‘You OK?’ Harry asked, coming up behind her.

‘I’m great.’ She clicked the ‘save’ button.

‘How’s the lip?’

Michelle brought her fingertips to her swollen bottom lip. ‘It hurts a little, but I’ll live. A small price to pay for sending one more scumbag to prison.’

‘And I hope he rots in there.’

Michelle chuckled, more out of relief than amusement. ‘With what we have on him, I’m sure he will.’

It had taken the FBI less than two hours to discover the small hotel Bobby had booked for the day. It was only three blocks away from Venice Beach, where he was arrested. Inside the room they had found personal documents, credit cards, money, sex paraphernalia, pills, alcohol and a small, medicine-sized bottle containing some clear liquid. The bottle was already with the FBI forensics lab, and everyone had their money on the liquid testing positive for some sort of homemade date-rape drug, like gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. But the real finding came from a small black case by the bed. Inside it they’d found Bobby’s personal laptop computer with hundreds of images and video clips, together with a digital video camera.

To Michelle’s delight, Bobby hadn’t had a chance to transfer the contents of the camera’s memory card to his laptop – an unedited, twelve-minute video clip filmed only two days ago. The clip clearly showed Bobby with a girl who looked no older than eleven.

‘So,’ Harry said. ‘You’re coming out to celebrate, right? We’re all going to Baja for a few drinks, and maybe some food.’

Baja was a Mexican grill-restaurant and bar just two blocks away from the FBI building.

Michelle glanced at her watch. ‘Sure, but why don’t you guys go ahead and I’ll meet you there in about forty minutes or so. I just want to have another look at that crazy footage we recorded on Friday. You know, that woman inside that glass coffin . . . that whole voting thing.’

Harry gave her a feeble smile. He knew they had thrown everything they had at that transmission while the stream was live, but they’d gotten nowhere. Every path had led to a dead end. The FBI CCD was rarely blocked out of an Internet transmission so professionally, and their “failure” to find a way in had pissed Michelle off in a way Harry had only seen once before. She simply didn’t know how to accept defeat.

‘What are you hoping to find, Michelle?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing.’ She avoided eye contact. ‘Maybe the killer is thatmuch cleverer than we are.’

‘It’s not a competition, you know?’

‘Yes, it is, Harry.’ She finally looked at him with something burning in her eyes. ‘Because if he’s better than we are . . . if he wins and we lose, people die . . . in a very grotesque way.’

Harry lifted both hands in a surrender gesture, but he knew Michelle wasn’t angry with him. ‘Would you like some help?’

Michelle smiled. ‘I’ll be OK. You know me. Go celebrate with everyone, and I’ll be down in a little while. And don’t get too drunk before I get there.’

‘Oh, I can’t promise you that.’ He started moving toward the door.

‘Harry,’ she called. ‘Order me a Caipirinha, will you? Extra lime.’

‘You bet.’

‘I won’t be long.’

Harry turned away from Michelle and smiled at himself. ‘Yeah, I bet you won’t,’ he muttered.

Forty-Six

After everyone had left, Michelle dimmed the lights around her desk, poured herself a large cup of coffee and started going over the footage they had recorded from the Internet three days ago. She had never forgotten those images, but watching that woman locked inside that glass coffin again, while a nest of tarantula hawks slowly stung the life out of her, made every hair on Michelle’s neck stand on end. Her swollen bottom lip started throbbing again, as her heartbeat accelerated. For an instant, right at the end of the footage, when one of the large black wasps exited through the woman’s nasal cavity, Michelle had to fight the urge to be sick, a sensation, she remembered, not that much different from the day four FBI agents blasted through her door in the early hours of the morning to arrest her.

From a very early age, Michelle had always been great with computers, something that not even she could explain. It was like her brain was wired differently, patched up to make even the most complicated lines of machine code read like a nursery rhyme.

Michelle Kelly was born in Doyle, northern California. Her father passed away when she was only fourteen years old. A smoker since his early teens and with a weak immune system, he had contracted pneumonia while he struggled to get over a very bad cold. Her mother, a timid and submissive woman, who had always dreaded being alone, remarried a year later.

Michelle’s stepfather was a violent drunk, who very soon transformed her low-self-esteem mother into a drug-taking, alcohol-drinking zombie. Despite trying hard, Michelle was powerless to stop her mother from becoming a wreck.

Late one night, six months after her stepfather moved in, he carefully pushed open the door to Michelle’s bedroom and stepped inside. Her mother was passed out in the living room, after consuming three-quarters of a bottle of vodka.

Michelle jerked awake as her stepfather threw his large, sweaty and naked body on top of her, her heart racing in her chest, her breath rasping in her throat, confusion and terror lighting her eyes. He cupped his meaty hand over her mouth, pushed her head hard into the pillow and whispered in her ear,‘Shhhh, don’t fight it, babe. You gonna like this. I promise you. I’m gonna school you on what a real man feels like. And very soon you’ll be begging me for more.’

He had managed to partially rip her clothes off, and as he prepared to enter her he relaxed his grip over her lips. Michelle opened her mouth wide, but instead of screaming, she bit down hard with all the strength she had in her. Her young teeth cut through flesh and bone as if she was biting into a slab of butter, severing his pinky finger clean off. She spat it back into his face while he screamed in agony, blood cascading down his hand and arm. Before running out of the house and into the night, she grabbed a baseball bat and swung it right between his opened legs so hard and with such precision that it made him vomit. She never went back.

Three days later, after hitching four different rides, Michelle arrived in Los Angeles. She lived on the streets for several days, eating out of trashcans, sleeping under cardboard boxes and using the shower and facilities at Santa Monica Beach.

It was at that same beach that she met Trixxy and her boyfriend, two heavily tattooed surfers who told her that she could crash at their house if she wanted to. ‘A lot of people do,’ they explained.

It was true. Their house was always full of people coming and going.

Michelle soon found out that Trixxy and her boyfriend weren’t only surf lovers. They were part of one of the first generations of Internet hackers. Back then the Internet was still taking its initial baby steps into the commercial world. Everything was new, and security was flawed.

It didn’t take Trixxy and her boyfriend long to find out that Michelle was a natural with computers. No, ‘natural’ wasn’t really the right word. Michelle was an absolute genius. She was able, in minutes, to work out and write the correct code procedures to overcome problems that would take Trixxy and her boyfriend hours to do, if not days. In no time she was hacking into all sorts of web servers and online databases – universities, hospitals, public and private organizations, financial institutions, federal agencies, international enterprises . . . Nothing was off limits. The more secure they were supposed to be, the bigger the challenge, and the better Michelle became. She even broke into the FBI and the NSA databanks twice in the same week.

Like every hacker in cyberspace, Michelle gave herself an alias – Thrasos, the Greek mythological spirit of boldness. Very becoming, she thought.

In cyberspace the possibilities were endless, and Michelle was just starting to have fun. That was when she found out that her mother had passed away after ingesting half a box of sleeping pills and washing them down with a bottle of bourbon.

Michelle cried for three whole days, a combination of sadness and anger. She soon learned that only a few months before, her stepfather had convinced her mother to make a will, leaving the house that they lived in, which had been bought by her real father, and everything of any value she still had to him. With that, Michelle’s anger mutated. Her stepfather had transformed her mother into a drunken junkie, and then stolen everything she had. When Michelle checked, she found out that he had already put the house up for sale. That was when the angry monster inside her started screaming – REVENGE.

Within a week her stepfather’s life had taken a turn for the very worst. Through the Internet, Michelle started wrecking his life. All the money in his bank account went mysteriously missing, seemingly due to some internal computer error that no one could track down. She ran up absurd gambling debts in his name, maxed out his credit cards, suspended his driver’s license, and modified his internal revenue tax declaration in such a way that it would be only a matter of time before the IRS came asking questions. She left him broke, unemployed, homeless and alone.

Three months later he stepped in front of a train.

Michelle never lost a second of sleep over what she did.

It was an ex-boyfriend, after being arrested for possession of drugs with intent to distribute, who, in exchange for a deal, tipped the cops about Michelle. The cops, in turn, escalated the tip to the FBI Cybercrime Division, who’d already been looking for Thrasos for some time. With the information the ex-boyfriend had given them, it took the FBI less than a week to set up a monitoring operation. The arrest came a few days later. Four agents blasted through her front door, just as Michelle had broken into the WSCC database – the interconnected power grid that distributes electric energy to the entire west coast of the United States. She had just restructured their rates system, giving everyone, from Montana down to New Mexico and across to California, electric energy at dirt-cheap prices.

By then, cybercrime and cyber terrorism had already become a major threat to America and its way of life. The government of the United States understood that someone with the kind of expertise Michelle Kelly possessed had the potential to become a tremendous asset and an ally in their new fight, rather than an enemy. With that in mind, the FBI offered her a deal – carry on hacking, but on this side of the law, or a very, very long stint in prison.

Michelle took the deal.

She soon realized that she didn’t really miss her old life. She wasn’t a hacker because she liked to break the law, or for monetary gain. She was a hacker because she enjoyed the challenge and the thrill, and she was brilliant at it. The deal she was offered took none of that away; it just made it all legal.

Not surprisingly, the FBI played its cards perfectly. Knowing that the reason why Michelle had run away from home had been her abusive stepfather, they acclimatized her to her new role by making sure that every case she dealt with throughout her first year with the Bureau involved a cyber-sex crime – more precisely, pedophilia. Michelle’s anger and disgust toward such offenders were so intense, she buried herself in work, making every case a personal issue.

She was so good at what she did that within four years she was heading the Los Angeles FBI Cybercrime Division.

Michelle shook the memory out of her head now before turning her attention back to the footage of the woman locked inside the glass coffin again. She watched the recording one more time from the beginning, her eyes searching for any sort of missed detail, but once again she failed to pick up anything.

‘What the hell are you looking for, Michelle? There’s nothing here,’ she said to herself, while rubbing the palm of her hand against her forehead.

She took a bathroom break, refilled her coffee cup and returned to her desk. She wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

Her next step was to slow the footage down 2.5 times, and, with the help of a ‘color and contrast’ application, to enhance the images using a color saturation method. The over-saturation tended to heighten small details, things people wouldn’t pick up on otherwise.

Michelle sat forward on her chair, placed her elbows on her desk, rested her chin on her knuckles and started from the top again.

The reduced speed made watching the footage almost mind numbing. The color and contrast saturation tired the eyes faster, straining the ocular globes. Michelle found herself taking short breaks every three to four minutes. To relax her eyes, she would refocus them on something at the opposite end of the room for a moment, while massaging her temples, but she could already feel a headache gaining momentum right behind her eyeballs.

‘Maybe I should’ve accepted Harry’s help,’ she murmured to herself. ‘Or better yet, maybe I should’ve just gone with them, because right about now I sure as hell could do with a drink.’

She had another sip of her coffee before letting the footage play again, and checked the time counter in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. She had just over a minute to go.

As her eyes returned to the screen, Michelle swore she saw something flash past.

Not a tarantula hawk.

‘What the hell?’

She paused the recording, rewound the images back just a couple of seconds and hit ‘play’.

Zoom.

She saw it go past again.

Adrenaline rushed through her body.

Once more Michelle rewound the images, but this time she zoomed in on a specific section of the screen and shut down the color and contrast saturation program. Instead of allowing the footage to play, she manually advanced it frame by frame.

And there it was.

Forty-Seven

Hunter and Garcia followed Brindle down the short corridor that led deeper into the house and back into Christina Stevenson’s bedroom.

‘We ran a UV test against the bed sheets, the bed covers and the pillowcases,’ Brindle announced, guiding both detectives toward the bed. ‘No traces of semen anywhere, but there are tiny bloodstains, mainly on this corner of the bed covers. The lab will tell us if the blood belongs to the victim or not.’ He indicated the location before turning the UV light back on. ‘Have a look.’

One simple and quick way to detect bloodstains on dark or red surfaces was to use an ultraviolet light. It provides enough contrast between the background and the stain to allow the stain to be visualized.

As soon as the UV light came on, four small, smeared bloodstains became clearly noticeable on the dark blue bed cover. But they were minimal, and totally inconclusive. A small razor nick from shaving her legs in the shower could’ve produced them.

Brindle knew that too, but he wasn’t finished yet. He turned off the UV light and handed Hunter and Garcia a small clear plastic evidence bag. Inside it was a woman’s diamond Tag Heuer watch.

‘I found that under the bed, near the wall.’

Still neither detective looked impressed. The room was an absolute mess. Objects of all shapes and sizes had been knocked over and kicked across the floor in all directions. The watch could have been on the dresser to start with, but ended up under the bed.

‘That’s not all,’ Brindle said, noticing the skepticism on both detectives’ faces. He showed them a second clear plastic evidence bag. It contained three tiny items. ‘I also found these under the bed. Here, use this.’ He handed them an illuminated magnifying glass.

Hunter and Garcia studied the items in the bag for several seconds.

‘Fingernail chips,’ Hunter said.

‘Torn fingernail chips,’ Brindle clarified. ‘They were stuck to the floorboard grooves.’ He paused, giving Hunter and Garcia a chance to digest what he was saying. ‘It looks like the victim was hiding under the bed. The perpetrator found her, and I’d say he pulled her out by the legs. The dislodged dust from under the bed created a smeared pattern, which is consistent with something heavy . . . like a person, being dragged from under it.’

Instinctively Hunter and Garcia took a step back and tilted their heads to one side, as if trying to look under the bed.

‘With nothing to hold on to,’ Brindle carried on with his theory, ‘it looks like she clawed at the floor, trying to resist the drag – that was when her fingernails chipped and broke off. Once he got her out from under the bed, she frantically reached out for whatever she could grab.’ Brindle paused and looked at the bed covers again. ‘And that’s how I think the blood got onto them.’

Everyone’s attention returned to the bed covers.

‘You see,’ Brindle explained. ‘An extracted nail will cause the nail bed to bleed as much as a cut to the finger, but a chipped and broken nail will cause bleeding only if it manages to nick the tip, or the sides of the nail bed. And even if it does, there might be no bleeding at all. If there is any, it should be minimal. Just like what we’ve got here.’

Hunter and Garcia considered it for a moment.

‘I also found these stuck to the underside of the bed’s box spring.’ He showed them one last evidence bag. Inside this one, four blond hair strands. ‘Her head most certainly bumped against it while she was being dragged from under the bed.’ He let out a concerned breath. ‘Looking at the state of the room, I’d say she fought as hard as she could, kicking and hitting all the way, until she was completely subdued.’

Thoughtful silence.

Garcia spoke first.

‘That all makes sense except for hiding under the bed. That implies that she knew someone was coming for her.’ He looked at the glass sliding doors and then back at the bed. ‘Why hide under here when she could’ve escaped from the house through the patio doors?’

As if on cue, Dylan, the forensics agent who was dusting the glass sliding doors, announced, ‘I’ve got prints here.’

Everyone turned and faced him.

‘The lab will confirm it, but by just looking at them I can tell you that the patterns are all the same. I have no doubt they all come from the same person. Small fingers. Delicate hands. Definitely a woman’s.’

When it came to fingerprints, Dylan was as good as it got.

‘How about the lock?’ Brindle asked.

‘The lock isn’t broken,’ Dylan said. ‘We’ll have to remove it and take it for analysis, but this is a standard pin tumbler lock. Not very secure. If the perpetrator entered the house through this door, he could’ve easily bumped it. No sweat.’

Lock bumping was a lock picking technique for opening pin tumbler locks where a specially crafted bump key was used. A single bump key would work for all locks of the same type. There were several videos over the Internet that could teach anyone how to bump a lock.

Hunter was still looking at the three evidence bags Brindle had handed him. He agreed with Garcia. Hiding under the bed made no sense under the circumstances.

‘Mike, where exactly did you find this watch?’ he asked.

Brindle showed him.

Hunter lay down on the floor and looked under the bed, his eyes studying the location where the watch had been found, his mind rushing through possibilities. Still nothing made sense.

Garcia walked across the other side of the bed and positioned himself just in front of the floral curtains, at the opposite end from where Dylan had dusted the glass door and lock. That distracted Hunter, and for a second his attention refocused on Garcia’s black shoes and socks that he could see from under the bed.

Hunter’s body tensed. His thought process went from A to Z in just one second. ‘No way,’ he whispered, his gaze locked on his partner’s shoes.

‘What?’ Garcia asked.

Hunter got up. All his attention had now moved to the curtains just behind Garcia.

‘Robert, what did you see?’ Garcia asked again.

‘Your shoes.’

‘What?’

‘I saw your shoes across the floor from under the bed.’

Confusion all round.

‘OK, and . . .?’

Hunter lifted a finger, indicating that he needed a moment, before walking in a straight line over to the curtains and slowly pulling them open. He kneeled down and carefully studied the floor for a little while.

‘I’ll be damned!’ The words oozed out of his lips.

‘What?’ Brindle asked, moving closer. Garcia was just behind him.

‘I think we’ve got dust-shift,’ Hunter said and indicated with his index finger. ‘Probably created by a footprint.’

Brindle kneeled down next to him, his eyes scrutinizing the floor area. ‘Holy shit,’ he said a moment later. ‘I think you might be right.’

‘That’s what I think Christina saw,’ Hunter said, looking at Garcia. ‘Her killer’s shoes. I don’t think she was hiding under the bed. I think she probably got under it to retrieve her watch, but while she was under there she saw him. She saw her killer. Hewas the one who was hiding.’

The room went silent for a moment.

‘OK, let’s get a photograph of this,’ Brindle finally said, addressing Dylan. ‘I also need some lift film. Let’s see how much of a print we can obtain here.’

Hunter stood up and slowly allowed his eyes to move along the panoramic glass wall in front of him.

‘Actually we better dust just about everything here,’ he said. ‘The killer might’ve been hiding and waiting for a while.’ He leaned forward a few inches, his nose almost touching the glass wall, as if searching for a smudge mark. ‘Maybe he leaned against the glass. Maybe he left someth—’

Hunter froze. The word dying in his throat.

‘What?’ Garcia asked, pausing just behind his partner and trying to look over his shoulder, but he had no idea what he was looking at. He thought Hunter had seen something through the window, out back.

Hunter blew another warm breath against the glass, this time a long, purposeful one, moving his head around to deliver the breath against a wider area. The glass misted for just a few seconds.

That was when Garcia finally saw it.

‘You have gotto be joking.’

Forty-Eight

The vast open-plan office floor inside the LA Timesheadquarters building on West 1st Street sounded like a schoolyard at lunch break. The place was bustling with phone chatter, keyboard clacks, loud conversations and the shuffling of hurried feet, as every reporter rushed to meet the day’s deadline.

Pamela Hays sat at her corner desk, undistracted by the noise and oblivious to the chaos of movement around her. She was the LA Times’entertainment desk editor, and she too was rushing, reviewing all the articles that would make the final cut of the supplement for tomorrow’s paper.

Entertainment Pam, as everyone always called her, had been working for the LA Timesfor only seven years, since she graduated from university at the age of twenty-four. Her first year with the paper had been a struggle. Fresh out of college, and with no experience working for a high-circulation newspaper, she was made to prove her worth by writing an infinite number of second-rate articles on stories she was sure only she and her mother read. Many of them never even made it into print. But Pamela knew she was a good reporter, and an expert researcher. It didn’t take long for others to start realizing that too.

Bruce Kosinski, a larger-than-life man in more than one way, and at that time the city editor at the entertainment desk, was the first to give Pamela a shot at trying her hand at a ‘real’ story. She did well. Very well, in fact. Her research had been second to none, and the story made the front page of the paper. Two years ago, Bruce Kosinski was appointed as chief editor for the LA Times.His old job was offered to Pamela Hays, who gladly accepted.

It’s true that Pamela did sleep with Bruce, but she knew that that wasn’t the reason why she was offered the entertainment desk’s editor’s position. The way she saw it, she had more than earned it.

Pamela finished editing another article on her list, rolled her chair back from her desk and stretched her stiff neck.

‘Where the hell is Marco?’ she asked out loud to no one in particular. She got no answer.

Unlike most of the other section editors at the LA Times, Pamela didn’t have an office. She didn’t much care for one either, preferring to sit among her reporters and the hustle and bustle of the main room.

She checked the clock on the wall.

‘Goddamn it, he’s got less than twenty minutes to get his article to me. If he’s late again, I’m firing his ass. I’ve had it with his crap.’

‘What the hell?’ Pedro, the reporter whose desk was just opposite Pamela’s, said, frowning at his computer screen. ‘Pam, is Christina doing extra work as an actress?’ he asked.

Pamela looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. ‘What the hell are you hablandoabout, muchacho?’ As a joke between the two of them, she had gotten into the habit of speaking Spanglish with Pedro.

‘Come have a look at this,’ Pedro called. There was no play in his voice.

Pamela got up and made her way around to Pedro’s desk.

‘I was just checking a few things on the net,’ Pedro said, ‘when I came across this article.’ He pointed to his screen.

It was a short article named ‘Reality or Hoax?’ The title didn’t catch Pamela’s attention, but the small picture under the headline did – a woman lying inside some sort of glass enclosure with hundreds of very scary black insects swarming around her body. Despite the bad quality of the picture, her face was clearly visible, including the small black mole just below her bottom lip.