The Night Stalker (16 page)

‘Shit.’

With his fingers in the slots he shook the window so vigorously the entire frame rattled. He tried again. The panel slid up a couple of inches, enough for him to get his hands under the frame. Much better grip. With one big push, the panel creaked and slid all the way up. Hunter craned forward and looked out. James was rushing down the last rungs of the metal fire escape ladder.

‘Goddamnit.’

Smith didn’t look back. He jumped from the ladder and hit the ground running. He was fast and agile.

Hunter searched the alley for Garcia. He saw Smith zigzag between a few large trash cans and then dive through an open door about twenty yards ahead.

Garcia finally appeared, coming from the alley’s entrance on the right, sprinting like an Olympic champion.

‘The Chinese restaurant’s back door,’ Hunter called from the window. ‘Past those trash cans on the right. He got in through the kitchen.’

Garcia hesitated for a beat, considering if he should run back the way he came in and try to cut James off at the front of the shops. Going back and around would take too long. By the time he got there James would be gone. He carried on forward, sidestepping the trash cans and disappearing through the same door James had done seconds earlier.

Hunter turned around and hurried back out of the room. If he was fast and lucky enough, he could cut Smith off at the top of the street. He’d taken only two steps away from the window when his eyes caught a glimpse of something on the walls.

The light that now poured in through the open window had erased the darkness.

What he saw made him stop dead.

Garcia rushed through the back door of the Chinese restaurant and found himself inside a crowded kitchen. Lunchtime was in full swing. Three chefs were standing by a large ten-burner cooker where several woks were sizzling away. One of the woks seemed to have caught on fire and flames were shooting up from its bowl at least a foot and a half high. Two sous chefs were by a long metal workstation covered with freshly cut vegetables along with three waitresses. One of them had her back flat against the wall next to the double swinging doors that led to the restaurant’s dining room, as if she’d just been pushed out of the way. On the floor directly in front of her was an overturned metal tray. Several bowls of noodles and soup were scattered on the ground. All eight of them were yelling loudly in Mandarin. Garcia didn’t have to understand them to know that they weren’t yelling at each other, or about the spilled food. It was a nervous reaction.

Garcia figured from their reaction that he was about ten to fifteen seconds behind Smith.

All eyes were on Garcia as he came through the alley door. Everyone took a step back. A fraction of a second later they were all yelling and gesticulating at him. Garcia didn’t even miss a step. As he skipped over the dishes on the floor and burst through the swinging doors, he could understand only one word –
asshole.

The shocked expression from the kitchen staff was mirrored on the faces of every customer in the main dining room. Some had turned to look at this new crazy man who’d blasted out of the kitchen, and some were still staring at the restaurant’s front door, where the previous one had just exited.

Garcia ran through the restaurant, expertly avoiding the manager and a waitress on the way.

Outside, the street was full of people coming and going in both directions. Garcia looked left, then right. No one was running. No one looked surprised. There was no commotion. Garcia took two steps forward, lifted himself onto the tips of his toes and looked both ways again. He cursed under his breath as he realized that he didn’t even know what Smith was wearing. Only his eyes had been visible when he opened the door to his apartment. From the exhibition picture, he knew what Smith looked like, but not from the back. Any tall male walking away from him could be Smith.

Garcia searched the street for Hunter. He was certain that while he followed Smith in through the restaurant, Hunter would be trying to cut him off at the top end of the street, but he was nowhere in sight.

‘Shit, Robert, where are you?’

He approached a group of three guys standing just a few yards away. ‘Did any of you see a tall guy come running out of that restaurant just a few seconds ago?’

They all looked at him, then at the restaurant’s door, then back at him.

‘Sure,’ the short stocky one said, and they all nodded at each other at the same time. ‘He went . . . that way.’ One of them pointed left, the other one right, and the stocky guy pointed at his crotch. All three burst out laughing. ‘Get the fuck outta here, cop. We ain’t seen shiiit.’

Garcia didn’t have time to argue. He took a step back and checked up and down the street once again.

No Hunter.

No Smith.

Garcia had to hand it to him. Smith was smart. He knew no one had gotten a good look at him. He could be wearing a suit or a hooded jacket. As soon as he hit the street in front of the restaurant, instead of carrying on running and sticking out like a sore thumb, he slowed down to a walking pace. Just another guy strolling along a street full of shops. He’d look as suspicious as everyone else.

Garcia took his cell out of his pocket and called Hunter. ‘Where are you? Did you get him?’ His eyes were still roaming up and down the street.

‘No, I’m still at the apartment.’

‘What? Why? I thought you’d try to cut him off.’

‘I take it you don’t have him either.’

‘No. He was clever. He mixed in with the crowd. And I don’t have a clue what sort of clothes he was wearing.’

‘I’ll call and put an APB out on him right now.’

‘Why are you still at his apartment?’

A short pause.

‘Robert?’

‘You’ve gotta come see this room.’

Garcia stood motionless by the door to the small square room. The window was now fully open, allowing daylight in. The weak light bulb at the center of the ceiling was also on. A musty smell of old paper and dust lingered in the air, the kind of smell you’d get inside a basement storage room of a bookshop, or a newspaper archive. Hunter was standing next to a large wooden table piled high with magazines, journals, printouts and newspapers. Piles and piles of them were stacked all around the floor, overcrowding the room – Smith was either some sort of collector, or one of those people who was scared of throwing anything away.

Garcia’s eyes crawled around the room, trying to take everything in. Every inch of every wall was taken by some sort of drawing, article, clipping, sketch or photograph. They came from newspapers, magazines, websites, journals, and many of them had been drawn, written or taken by Smith himself. There were literally hundreds of images and articles. Garcia stepped inside and his eyes moved to the ceiling. The bizarre collage continued there as well. Every available space was covered.

‘Jesus . . .’ Something tightened low in Garcia’s gut. He recognized the woman in all the pictures and sketches straight away. There was no mistake. Laura Mitchell. A love heart had been drawn around several of the photographs with a thick red marker pen. Like kids do with pictures of their idols.

‘What the fuck is this place?’ Garcia whispered.

Hunter turned and looked around the room again as if he was seeing it for the first time.

‘A sanctuary of some sort? His own private archive? Maybe a research room? Who knows?’ A shrug. ‘This guy seems to have collected everything that was ever published about Laura. Judging by the discoloration of some of the pictures and newspaper articles, some of these are quite old.’ His gaze flickered to the piles of paper everywhere.

Garcia turned his attention to the magazines and newspaper stacks. ‘Is she in every one of these?’

‘I haven’t checked them all. But if I had to have a guess, I’d say yes.’ Hunter pulled a newspaper from the bottom of one of the stacks. It was a copy of the
San Diego
Union-Tribune.

Garcia’s left eyebrow lifted a fraction. ‘San Diego?’ He noticed the date. ‘That paper is three years old.’

Hunter started flipping through the newspaper. ‘The problem is: none of the newspapers, magazines or journals are folded or opened onto a particular page or article. I’ve checked a few already. I assume he kept them because of something on the entertainment section.’ He folded the paper and showed it to Garcia. ‘But as you can see, there are no marks. Nothing is circled, underlined or highlighted.’

‘Anything about Laura?’

Hunter scanned the page.

Most of the articles were music-related – gig and album reviews. He flipped the paper over and carried on. At the bottom corner of the page he saw a review for an art exhibition and nodded. ‘She was exhibiting in San Diego back then.’

Garcia craned his neck. There were no pictures. He randomly pulled another newspaper from the bottom of another pile. He came up with a copy of the
Sacramento Bee
. ‘This one is from a year and a half ago.’ He quickly found the entertainment section and scanned through another exhibition review. ‘He’s been stalking her for years,’ he said, looking around the room one more time. ‘He knew everything there was to know about her. Collected everything there was to collect. Talk about being patient. He waited years for the right moment to make his move. Laura never had a chance.’

Hunter and Captain Blake had to pull all the stops to get an overworked and understaffed Forensics division to send two evidence technicians to a non-crime scene so fast. First impressions showed no indications that anyone else other than James had been inside that apartment. There was no hidden cell or prison room. If Smith was their killer, he’d kept Laura Mitchell captive in a secret location somewhere else. And that secret location was probably where he was heading to right now. The difference this time was that he now knew the police were onto him, and that would certainly influence his actions. He’d be edgy, maybe even in a panic. And a killer in a panic was catastrophic. Hunter knew that only too well from harsh experience.

They needed to catch him fast. Before he left Norwalk. Before he disappeared.

They didn’t.

Hunter had immediately arranged for James Smith’s snapshot to be emailed from Parker Center to Norwalk’s LA Sheriff’s Department Station. Available black-and-white units were dispatched to search the streets almost immediately. Officers on foot patrol and inside Norwalk’s Metrolink Station were also sent Smith’s picture via SMS text. Airports, train and bus stations were put on high alert. But six hours after Hunter and Garcia had knocked on Smith’s door, he still hadn’t been sighted.

Both evidence techs had been going over the apartment for the past three and a half hours. They’d need confirmation from the lab, but their best guess, based on what they’d seen, was that all the fingerprints they’d found so far seemed to have come from only one person – James Smith.

Key points inside Smith’s bedroom and both bathrooms were sprayed with Luminol but no blood was detected. They also ran a UV light test on all the bed linen and on the fabric sofa and rug in the living room. No evidence of semen stains either.

Hunter and Garcia kept out of the way, staying in the collage room. There was enough in there to keep a platoon occupied for a week. Initially, Hunter wasn’t worried about sieving through everything. All the information on those pages seemed to pertain to Laura Mitchell, not James Smith. What he was looking for was some sort of personal diary, or journal, or notebook. Anything that could give them a clue to where Smith might have gone or who he was.

They found nothing. No documents, no passport, no driver’s license. Not even any utility bills.

‘Anything that could give us any sort of lead, guys?’ Hunter asked one of the techs some time later.

‘Yeah, my guess is you’re looking for a cleaning freak,’ he said, bending down and sliding his index finger across the top of the skirting board before showing the result to Hunter. ‘Nothing, no dust. My wife is pretty tight on her housecleaning, but even she doesn’t dust the skirting boards every time she cleans. The only place with any dust is that freaky room you guys have been in. There’s a cupboard in the kitchen packed solid with cleaning materials. Enough bleach to fill a Jacuzzi. This guy is either obsessed with cleaning, or he was expecting us.’

The door to door of the building also produced no information of interest. Most residents said they’d never even seen the person who lived in apartment 418. The ones who did never talked to him. The next-door neighbor, a small, fragile man in his sixties with glasses as thick as bulletproof glass, said Smith always said hi to him whenever they bumped into each other on the corridor. He said Smith was always very polite. That sometimes Smith went out dressed in a suit. No one else in that building ever wore a suit. The old man also said that the walls in the building weren’t very thick. He could often hear Smith cleaning, vacuuming, scrubbing and moving around. He did that a lot.

The Forensics agents took shoes and underwear from Smith’s wardrobe, and a razor blade, a comb, a toothbrush and a deodorant spray can from his bathroom. They didn’t want to take any chances where a DNA signature was concerned.