Текст книги "I Am Death"

Автор книги: Chris (2) Carter

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Текущая страница: 45 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

Eighty-One

Garcia had gotten home at around a quarter past nine in the evening. He had called Anna from the office to let her know that, once again, he wouldn’t be home in time for dinner. Like always, Anna had told him that it was OK. She said that she wasn’t planning on going to bed early anyway, so she would keep their dinner in the oven and they could heat it up when he got home, and still dine together.

Garcia and Anna had been together since their senior year in high school, and Garcia couldn’t have asked for a more supportive wife. Anna knew how much he loved his job. She’d seen how hard he’d worked for it and how dedicated he was. She understood the commitment and the sacrifices that came with being a detective in a city like Los Angeles, and she fully accepted them. But despite her incredible psychological strength, it was only natural that Anna felt scared sometimes. Scared that one day she’d get that phone call, or that knock on the door in the middle of the night, telling her that her husband wouldn’t be coming home again.

The truth was, after Hunter and Garcia’s last case, the one that had prompted Captain Blake to demand that they both take a two-week break, Garcia had been ready to quit the RHD Special Section.

Garcia was as fearless as fearless got, but his last investigation had brought Anna to within a whisker of death and that had scared him senseless. She meant everything to him, and if he lost her he would lose himself. He’d told his wife about his decision and Anna had been the one who had made him go back.

Tonight, after dining with his wife, Garcia dragged Anna into the shower with him. It reminded him of how they’d made love for the first time. After that, they both collapsed in bed, feeling completely exhausted.

Garcia thought he was dreaming when he heard a clattering sound coming from his right. He turned his face in that direction but kept his eyes closed.

Brrrrrrrrrrrr.

There it was again.

He let out a confused sigh, opening his eyes just enough to see his cellphone vibrating against the surface of his bedside table. It took another two seconds for his tired and sleepy brain to understand what was happening before he finally reached for it.

‘Hello?’ he answered in a drowsy voice, quickly getting to his feet and making his way out of the bedroom so as not to wake Anna.

Too late, she was already turning in bed.

‘Carlos, it’s Robert.’

‘Umm, Robert?’ Garcia asked, sounding a little unsure as to who Robert was. Suddenly, his brain engaged. ‘Robert.’ His voice urgent. ‘What’s going on? Have we got him? Have we got Mat Hade?’

‘No. Forget about that, Carlos. Nothing is what we thought it was. We were wrong.’

‘Wrong? Wrong about what, Robert?’

‘Everything.’

Eighty-Two

Hunter had been driving for almost an hour when he finally spotted the tiny dirt path hidden between bushes to the left of the road he was on. With no signs, no indications of any sort and no illumination whatsoever, even someone who’d been looking for it, like Hunter had, could’ve easily missed it. Like Hunter had. He had driven back and forth along that same stretch of road twice before he at last saw the gap between the bushes.

He stopped and directed his headlights toward it.

‘Is that it?’ he asked himself, leaning forward against the steering wheel. ‘It must be. There’s nothing else out here.’

He left the road and his car disappeared between the bushes as if it’d been swallowed by the night.

The uneven path was full of bumps and holes and that, together with pitch-black darkness, forced Hunter to slow down to a tense crawl. After about three quarters of a mile and two bends, one left, one right, the shrubs and bushes that lined the sides of the dirt road became less dense, giving way to endless fields of nothing at all except dirt, foxtail cactuses and desert marigolds.

Hunter drove on, being as careful as he could to avoid the larger potholes. The smaller ones were inevitable. They practically were the road.

After another half a mile, the road bent left again before going up a small hill. As Hunter drove down the other side, the vegetation changed again. The marigolds were swapped for Joshua trees and desert willows. Dirt and foxtail cactuses were still everywhere. As Hunter drove around a denser concentration of cactuses, he thought he spotted something in the distance. Some sort of massive shadow. He immediately brought his car to a full stop and switched off the head-lights. Reaching for the pair of binoculars he always kept inside his glove compartment, he stepped out of the car.

As luck would have it, it was a cloudy, moonless night. No stars were visible either, which made it all way too dark for him to be able to see anything from where he stood. Looking for higher ground, Hunter climbed up on to the hood of his car, then on to its roof.

Still he saw nothing.

He needed to get closer.

Hunter got back into his Buick and, keeping the head-lights turned off, began moving again, this time even slower than before. He drove for another quarter of a mile before stopping, climbing on to his car and scanning the terrain before him as carefully as he could.

Nothing to his right.

Nothing directly in front of him.

Nothing to his . . . wait. He paused, leaned forward. There it was. Way up ahead and slightly to his left.

Eighty-Three

From that distance, and in almost total darkness, Hunter struggled to understand what he was really looking at. It was some sort of construction. From the size of its shadow, it could be a medium-sized, two-storey house – the only issue was, it didn’t look like a house. The building was square in shape, like a big box, and dusky in color, which on such a dark night, out there in a desert, made it practically invisible. Hunter was surprised that he had managed to spot it, even with a pair of binoculars.

He calculated the distance between the building and where he was standing to be about a quarter of a mile. He got back into his car and reached for his cellphone.

Nothing. Not even half a bar of signal. Moving it about also made no difference. He was slap-bang in the middle of nowhere.

‘Great!’

Hunter decided to leave his car by the side of the dirt road and continue the rest of the way on foot. He’d be a lot quieter, and a lot less visible, that way.

He checked his HK Mark 23 pistol. It had a full clip loaded on to the weapon but Hunter was taking no chances. From the glove compartment, he picked up a flashlight and a second, fully loaded clip.

Despite still being another quarter of a mile away, Hunter moved stealthily, hiding himself as best as he could behind cactuses, trees and willows. He moved about fifteen to twenty yards at a time in a half-crouched position, stopped, got as close to the ground as possible and used his binoculars to check ahead. Everything looked as still as death.

He’d repeated the process five more times before he was able to spot something he hadn’t seen before – a black GMC Yukon parked to the right of the construction.

From his window, Marlon had seen the fake telephone engineer climb into a black GMC Yukon after he’d collected the Wi-Fi camera he had placed high up on the telephone pole.

Hunter breathed in, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and carried on moving forward, getting closer and closer until he was no more than forty yards away from the building. He positioned himself behind a cluster of willows and used his binoculars again. He’d been right. The building looked nothing like a house.

Hunter figured that he’d been approaching it from its side instead of its front. He’d come to that conclusion because he could see no doors on that end of the building. With the Yukon parked around to the right, it seemed only logical that whoever had been driving it had parked by the front door.

Hunter was about to move closer when he noticed something else. On that whole side of the building there was only one window. It was way up high and a little to the left, but what made Hunter pause suddenly was the fact that, despite how far from the ground it was, thick, metal bars had been fitted to the outside of that lone window.

That building wasn’t a house.

It was a prison.

Eighty-Four

Still hiding behind the cluster of willows, Hunter used his binoculars to check the property’s grounds, its roof and all the corners he could see from his shielded location. He found no surveillance of any kind, at least not around that side. Satisfied, he moved closer, reaching the building in front of him in less than twenty seconds. As he did so, he placed his back flat against its west wall before checking left.

Nothing.

Right.

Nothing.

So far, so good.

He then began scooting south, toward where the Yukon was parked. Once he got to the edge of the wall, he crouched down, unholstered his weapon and flash-peeked around the corner.

He saw nothing.

He waited a few more seconds, then peered around again. This time, not so fast.

The Yukon was parked about eleven yards from the building’s entrance – a heavy-looking wooden door. That was it. There was nothing else there.

Great, Hunter thought. Now what, Robert? No way that that door will be unlocked. This is a prison, not a house. Whatever security has been put in place here, it hasn’t been used to keep anyone from getting in. It’s to stop people from getting out.

There was nothing else Hunter could do but get closer and have a better look. And that was exactly what he did. Still with his gun in hand and his back flat against the wall, he rounded the corner and slowly slid his way toward the heavy door. As he got to it, he felt his guts beginning to churn inside him.

There was something definitely evil about this place. Even the air immediately around it felt denser, harder to breathe.

Hunter studied the lock on the door. It looked old, but solid. He took another deep breath and looked around him again.

Nothing but darkness and silence.

He stretched out his left arm, placed his fingers on the door handle, twisted it downwards and gave the door a slow but firm push.

He was wrong.

To his bewildered surprise, the door moved inwards. It was unlocked.

‘What the hell?’ he whispered under his breath.

Hunter held the door in that position for a long moment, his brain quickly trying to figure out what to do next.

He’d come too far to turn back now.

As cautiously as he could, he pushed the door just another inch. Then another. Then another. Then another. Until the gap was wide enough for him to peek inside.

He saw nothing. Whatever this first room was, it seemed to be completely empty.

Hunter held his breath, pushed the door just a couple more inches and furtively slid into the building, slowly closing the door behind him.

The air inside was warm and dusty, heavy with the smell of bleach and disinfectant, very similar to the odor that he and Garcia had picked up inside Mat Hade’s apartment in East Los Angeles.

Hunter stood still for a moment, his back now flat against the inside of the door. His eyes were already used to the moonless night outside so it took them no time at all to acclimatize to the darkness inside, which suited him perfectly. He wanted to avoid using his flashlight as much as possible.

Hunter found himself standing at the entrance to a wide corridor, which had been stripped of all furniture and decorations. The walls were gray and made of cinder blocks, the floor and the ceiling of solid concrete. The entire hallway looked like a square, concrete tunnel – claustrophobic and airless.

It extended about seven yards in front of Hunter, leading to a second door, which lay ajar. A faint light came from somewhere behind it.

With watchful, soundless steps, Hunter quickly moved to it, pausing by the wall to the right of the door. He stood there motionless, waiting, listening.

One minute.

Two minutes.

The silence was deafening.

He finally twisted his body, craned his neck and very carefully peeked through the gap. The light source, which Hunter was unable to identify, was extremely weak, keeping most of the room in shadow. From where he stood, he could only partially see one half of the room without exposing himself, and it looked almost as sterile as the corridor he was in. Toward the back of it, a dark fabric armchair faced a blank wall. To its left, Hunter saw a small, wooden coffee table. On the floor, just in front of the armchair, a rectangular, black and white rug bridged the gap between the armchair and the wall. That was it. Hunter could see nothing else other than dark corners.

With his back still against the wall to the right of the door, he waited another two full minutes.

No sound or movement from inside.

Time to move on.

Hunter took a deep breath and, in a noiseless and well-rehearsed movement, rotated his body into the room, his arms extended in front of him, his gun searching for a target everywhere . . . anywhere.

He found none.

The second half of the room was even emptier than the first.

Hunter’s eyes were still frantically searching the barren space for some sort of target, but he was looking the wrong way. The movement came from the shadow directly behind him.

Fast.

Precise.

Unstoppable.

As Hunter began turning back toward the door he had come in by, he received a blow to the back of the head that was so powerful it propelled him forward and against the wall.

A millisecond later, all thought was swallowed by total darkness.

Eighty-Five

Hunter’s consciousness returned to him slowly and painfully. With every heartbeat, his head throbbed with an intense pain, like a spiked ball was pulsating at the center of his brain. He blinked a couple of times, but his eyelids felt too heavy for him to be able to fully open them, so for now he kept his eyes closed. He took a deep breath and as the warm air inflated his lungs, it seemed to also inflate that damn spike ball in his brain. Agonizing pain exploded inside his head like a furious thunderstorm and brought with it a second, searing and debilitating pain. This one ran the length of his arms, stretching and pulling at both ends as if his arms were about to be violently ripped from their sockets.

Hunter blinked again, but this time he finally found the strength to force open his eyes. Through the pain and the confusion, it took him a moment to understand what he was looking at – his bare feet resting on the floor, limp as if they belonged to a dead man. That was when he realized that he had been tied up in the exact same position they had found Alison Atkins inside that barn-like building. His arms were stretched high above his head. His wrists had been shackled together by a shiny steel chain and then looped around a metal pipe that ran across the ceiling. Two different padlocks kept it all in place. The chain was supporting the whole of his weight and it was biting deeply into his wrists. Thin lines of blood had run down his bare arms and over his shoulders.

Fighting the sickening pain in his head and arms, Hunter lifted his head and looked up. There was no way he was getting out of those shackles by himself.

‘I must admit that you’ve surprised me, Robert.’

The voice came from somewhere in the shadows in front of him. Hunter looked in that direction but saw no one.

‘I never thought you’d get here. I never thought you’d figure it out.’

Despite the voice sounding somewhat different from the one in the two 911 recordings he’d heard, Hunter was still able to recognize it. He’d heard it enough times.

That was why he showed no surprise when the man walked out of the darkness and stopped directly in front of him.

‘Hello, Robert.’

Eighty-Six

Squirm hadn’t slept at all. How could he? Every time he closed his eyes he saw her. Naked. Arms stretched out above her head. Her body dangling from that wooden beam while suspended by the chain shackled to her wrists. He would never forget the way in which she had looked at him.

The terror in her eyes.

The despair in her expression.

The fear that oozed from every pore in her body.

Alison. That was her name. Just like with the previous two women, ‘The Monster’ had made him repeat it until it was engraved on his brain.

‘The Monster’ had dragged Squirm out of his cell, tied him to a chair and made him watch as he slit that poor woman’s abdomen open. A cut so wide Squirm thought the man was about to sever her in half.

Blood cascaded through the cut in large crimson sheets, recoloring her legs before dripping down on to the floor, creating the biggest pool of blood Squirm had ever seen. And the smell that came with it was like nothing he had ever experienced before – sweet and metallic, as if the blood were made out of copper.

But all that blood was nothing compared to what had come next. With a bright smile on his lips, ‘The Monster’ had approached the woman, looked straight into her eyes and slowly shoved his hands deep inside the opening he had made. Seconds later, they came out holding on to her insides.

Squirm had felt bitter bile shoot up from his stomach and travel up his throat, but by now he knew better than to puke in front of ‘The Monster’. Clenching his teeth and squeezing his eyes tight, Squirm managed to swallow it all back down.

But ‘The Monster’ wasn’t done yet. He carefully began pulling and twisting whatever it was that he had ripped from inside her, creating some sort of visceral string and allowing it to drop down into the ever-growing pool of blood on the floor.

It became so long, Squirm could hardly believe it had all come from inside her.

But what had terrified Squirm to the point that he had wet himself was the fact that, through all of that, the woman was still alive. She was still conscious. Despite the devastating pain that she was going through, she also had to watch as ‘The Monster’ exenterated her like an animal, and spread her guts all over the floor like play dough.

‘This, Squirm, takes skill,’ the man had said to him as he plopped another piece of her insides on to the floor. Every time she looked like she was about to pass out, ‘The Monster’ would either slap her face or bring a small flask to her nose so she stayed awake.

Squirm wanted to look away but he’d found it impossible to. It was like he had been hypnotized by the savagery of it all.

Now, back in his cell, Squirm had a new thought and that thought carried with it a sliver of hope. The police might not have been looking for him but they sure as hell would be looking for those women. Unlike his own, their fathers hadn’t paid ‘The Monster’ to get rid of them. Squirm was certain of that. So, if the police were searching for the man who was abducting and killing those women, the police were searching for ‘The Monster’. And if they found him, they would find Squirm.

That thought planted a new seed of hope inside the boy’s heart.

Eighty-Seven

Hunter’s shirt was soaked through with perspiration and he felt beads of sweat dribble down the back of his legs. He looked around the space, trying to understand the room he was in.

Despite the faint light that came from somewhere above his head, the space was dark and shrouded in shadow, just like the room Hunter had found himself in before the killer had gotten the best of him. But this certainly wasn’t the same room. The walls were made out of cinder blocks, the floor of solid concrete. Several metal pipes crisscrossed the ceiling in different directions. Over to Hunter’s left he saw a short flight of stairs leading up to a closed door. Hunter had no doubt now that he was down in the basement of this godforsaken house. If the place could even be called a house.

The man who had stepped from the shadows paused directly in front of Hunter and waited.

Hunter didn’t even look at him. His hands felt stiff and swollen. The chain around his wrists was constricting the blood flow. He tried moving his fingers. He could flex them, but the movement brought with it excruciating pain.

Hunter groaned.

The man smiled.

‘Please tell me, Robert,’ Detective Troy Sanders, the head of the LAPD Missing Persons Unit’s Special Division, said, ‘How did you figure it out?’ His posture was relaxed, his voice calm.

Hunter’s eyes moved to look at him.

Sanders waited.

‘You told us,’ Hunter said. His voice, on the other hand, sounded hoarse and fatigued.

‘Did I?’

‘The notes you sent us. First to Mayor Bailey, then to me. They were full of clues.’

Sanders smiled. ‘They certainly were.’

‘We just didn’t know what any of them meant . . . Until tonight.’

‘So what gave it away, Robert? What made you understand what the clues meant?’

Hunter coughed and it made the spike ball inside his head stab at his brain again.

‘Your last nine-one-one call,’ he finally replied.

That answer seemed to surprise Sanders. ‘Really? How so?’

Hunter licked his cracked lips, trying to get some moisture from his face. ‘Cut me down and I’ll tell you.’

Sanders laughed as he walked around Hunter, disappearing behind him.

‘Well, I can’t do that, Robert. But let me see what I can do.’

All of a sudden, Hunter heard the sound of metal on metal. The chain shackling his wrists lost some of its tautness and his feet were finally able to touch the ground. Just. That allowed him to teeter on his toes and use his legs to support a small percentage of his weight, relieving some of the tension from his arms. It felt like heaven.

‘Better?’ Sanders asked.

Hunter said nothing.

‘So tell me, Robert, how did my last nine-one-one call help you figure it all out?’

Hunter breathed in slowly. ‘The victim’s name,’ he replied. ‘Alison.’

Sanders walked back around to face Hunter.

‘You mentioned it three times,’ Hunter said. ‘You made sure that the operator had that down. Why would you do that? It made no sense, because that would’ve been one of the first things we would’ve found out anyway, especially since you used her cellphone to make the call.’

Sanders remained silent, but the ghost of a smile began to play on his lips.

Hunter tiptoed a little to his left to better support his weight. ‘The fact that you were so insistent that the operator write her name down – something didn’t sound right about that. So I went back to the note you sent me and studied it again.’

Sanders waited.

‘“The clues are in the name,”’ Hunter said. ‘You wrote that.’

Sanders nodded. The ghost of a smile grew.

‘The clues were the names,’ Hunter said. ‘The victim’s names.’

Clap, clap, clap.

Sanders applauded Hunter. ‘Very good, Robert. I’m impressed.’

Hunter licked his lips again. ‘You also wrote that you were –’ he coughed one more time and had to endure the spike ball for several seconds – ‘rewriting history.’

The smile finally appeared.

‘So you searched through history, using the victims’ names as your guideline. All of them.’

Hunter’s silence was a resounding ‘yes’.

‘Let me guess,’ Sanders said. ‘What you found out made your head spin.’

Hunter swallowed and the saliva fought to get through his swollen throat. ‘What I found out made almost every clue in both notes come alive. Suddenly, everything began making sense. The puzzle began to sort itself out.’

‘I’m glad,’ Sanders said. ‘But no matter what you searched for, Robert, I know that whatever result you got wouldn’t have answered every question. A very important piece of that puzzle is still missing.’

‘Yes,’ Hunter admitted.

‘So the picture is still incomplete, Robert. You still have no idea who I really am, do you?’

Hunter and Sanders locked eyes as if in a battle. Hunter blinked first.

‘Your real name is Richard,’ he said. ‘Richard Temple.’

Sanders looked back at Hunter in bewildered surprise. It took him several seconds to overcome the shock of what he’d heard. As he did so, he laughed again, but this time it was a strange laugh that disturbed Hunter. It gurgled up from the depths of his body as if he had chewed it for a long time in his lungs before spitting it out. It was raucous with pain. Emotional pain. When he spoke again, his voice was coated with a macabre tone.

‘You’re wrong, Robert. My name isn’t Richard. My name is . . .’

Sanders paused and moved his neck first left then right in an anxious manner.

‘Squirm.’