The Night Stalker (17 page)

Night had darkened the sky when Hunter received a call from Operations.

‘Detective Hunter? It’s Pam from Operations.’

‘What have you got for me, Pam?’

‘Well, next time you decide to go after someone, please can you pick a person with a more unique name. James is the most common first name in the United States. Smith is the most common last name in the United States. Put them together and we have approximately three and a half million males in the USA called James Smith.’

‘Great.’

‘In the LA area alone there are about five hundred of them. But the interesting thing is: none are registered to the Norwalk address you gave me.’

Her eyelids flickered in rapid succession but she failed to open them. Her consciousness was returning to her like waves breaking over a beach. But each time her mind hinted at clearing, an undertow of blackness would pull her back into nothing.

The only thing she seemed to be certain of at that moment was the smell. Something like mothballs and strong disinfectant all rolled up into one. It felt as if the vile odor had traveled in through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach, burning everything in its way. Her guts felt like writhing snakes trying to climb out of her body.

Her eyes flickered again, this time for a little longer, and with great effort she managed to force them open. The light around her was dim and weak, but it still burned at her retinas like lightning bolts. Gradually, she began taking in her surroundings. She was lying on her back on some hard and uncomfortable surface, inside a hot and humid place. Old and rusty metal pipes ran across the ceiling in all directions, disappearing as they reached the mold-infested cinder block walls.

She tried lifting her head, but the movement sent waves of nausea rippling through her stomach.

Slowly, the numbness that controlled her body started to subside, and as it did, it was substituted by agonizing pain. Her lips felt as if they were being ripped from her face by several pairs of pliers at the same time. Her jaw hurt as if it had been broken. She tried opening her mouth, but the pain that rose from the effort almost sent her back into unconsciousness. Tears started streaming down her face as she urged her brain to work and tell her what to do. She tried moving her arms – surprisingly, no pain. More surprisingly, they weren’t restrained.

Shivering, she brought her hands to her face and touched her lips with the tips of her fingers. The shivering turned into uncontrollable convulsions of fear as she realized why she couldn’t move them.

Her mouth had been stitched shut.

Desperation took over.

Robotically and without any sense of reality, her trembling fingers tapped the stitches on her lips like a mad pianist. Her wailing and frantic muffled screams echoed throughout the room, but there was no one there to hear them. The thread used on her mouth dug deeper into her skin as she tried to move her lips again. She tasted blood.

Suddenly, as if a switch had been flicked on inside her head, she became aware of a much more intense and terrifying pain. It was coming from between her legs. It shot through her body with such ferocity it felt like evil had just climbed inside her.

Instinctively, her hands moved towards the source of the pain, and as they touched her body and the other stitches, she felt her strength leaving her.

Panic erupted inside her, and her body’s defense mechanism inundated her bloodstream with adrenalin, numbing the pain just enough for her to be able to move. Guided now by pure survival instinct, she forced herself to sit up.

Sound disappeared, time slowed, and the world turned black and white in front of her eyes. Only then did she realize she was naked and had been lying on some sort of stainless steel table. Strangely, the tabletop seemed higher off the ground than one would expect. At least another foot or so.

She looked down at her bare feet, and all of a sudden it dawned on her. Her legs were also unrestrained. Frantically her terrified eyes searched the room – large, square with a concrete floor and a metal door directly in front of her. The door didn’t seem to be locked. The walls were lined with empty wooden shelves.

Without wasting any more time or caring if this was a cruel trap or not, she jumped to the floor. The impact as her feet hit the ground sent a shudder up her spine. A millisecond later, the most unimaginable pain exploded inside her. Her legs lost all their strength and she fell to her knees, shivering. She looked down and all she saw was blood.

It was now three full days after Laura Mitchell’s body had been found and not much had materialized. James Smith, or whoever he really was, had simply vanished. The Forensics agents were right: all the fingerprints found in the apartment did come from a single person. They’d been running them against the National Automated Fingerprints ID System for several hours. So far no matches. It didn’t look like James Smith had ever been in the system.

The DNA result would still be at least another day or so. Whoever James Smith was, he was smart.

Choosing the most common American male name automatically hid him under layers upon layers of other people. Even if Hunter asked Operations to narrow the LA’s James Smith list down by filtering on age and approximate height, it’d still be too long. Besides, it was obvious that James Smith wasn’t his real name.

The apartment in Norwalk had been rented and paid in cash, a year in advance. Hunter talked to the landlord, a Mr. Richards. He was a retired shop owner and lived in Palmdale. He told Hunter that he’d only seen James Smith twice – first when he initially rented the property two years ago, and then again twelve months later when he renewed his lease agreement and paid the next full year in advance, plus extras – more than enough to cover all utility bills. So that was the reason they found no bills in the apartment.

Mr. Richards told Hunter that in the two years Mr. Smith had been renting his apartment, he’d been a great tenant, the best he’d ever had.

‘He never causes any trouble,’ Mr. Richards told Hunter. ‘He’s also never requested anything else, unlike most of my previous tenants. They were always calling and asking me for a new fridge, or stove, or mattress, or electric shower, or whatever. They were always complaining that there was something wrong with the apartment, but not James. He never complained.’

‘Did you check any documentation when Mr. Smith rented your apartment?’ Hunter asked. ‘You know, background checks, references or anything like that?’

Mr. Richards shook his head. ‘There was no need. He paid cash and the full year in advance, which means he could never default on a payment.’

Hunter was more than aware that Los Angeles was definitely the city for if you’ve got the cash, you get the goods, no questions asked.

‘Did Mr. Smith ever tell you what he did for a living?’

Another shake of the head from Richards.

The snapshot Hunter had of James Smith was quickly released to the press. The picture was by no means perfect. His face was at least 30 per cent obscured, but it was the best they had. With a little luck, someone out there would know who he was. A dedicated phone line was created to receive calls. So far they’d got a mountain of dead ends and people claiming to be James Smith himself, challenging the police to come and get them.

They’d also found the painting Smith had purchased nine months ago along with several DVDs in his apartment. All of them homemade. All of them of Laura Mitchell. Apparently, all of them shot by Smith himself. Hours and hours of footage of Laura at exhibitions, dinner parties, arriving at and leaving her art studio, walking into her gym, browsing in shopping malls, and so on. There were no time-stamps on any of the footage, but judging by her different hairstyles and slight differences in weight, they had been shot over a period of years. They could be seen as surveillance in preparation for an abduction, or plain obsessive stalking. Hunter didn’t want to jump to any conclusions until he had more evidence.

‘OK,’ Captain Blake said, putting the ten-page report she was reading down on her desk. ‘What’s confusing me is . . . if this James Smith is our killer, and he’s obviously been collecting intel on Laura Mitchell for a few years, how come he only decided to strike now?’

‘That’s not unusual, Captain,’ Hunter said, walking over to the window in the captain’s office. ‘Very few people have the mental strength to become a killer overnight. The vast majority of serial killers, or people who have shown tendency to becoming one, have fantasized about their actions for months, years, sometimes decades. For most, the fantasy alone is enough to satisfy them. Some will go as far as doing all the preparation, the research, the stalking, the surveillance, collecting intel, maybe even capturing the victim, but bottle out right at the last minute. Maybe it took James all these years to gather the courage to finally act out his fantasy.’

‘And we know our killer doesn’t mind waiting,’ Garcia said.

The phone on Captain Blake’s desk rang. She answered it on the third bell.

‘What?’ she barked.

As she listened her eyes darted towards Hunter.

‘Shit! Seal the entire place and keep everyone else away from that building, do you hear me? And I mean
everyone
. We’re on our way.’

The abandoned preschool was located in Glassell Park, Northeast Los Angeles. Cracked walls, broken windows, subsiding floors, cobwebs, and crumbling wooden doorframes was all that was left of the once bustling single-story building. Instead of cartoon characters, gang graffiti now decorated the walls both outside and inside. Several police vehicles and a forensic crime-scene van took over the parking lot to the right of the school. The press had parked all over the place. Reporters and photographers, together with an ever growing crowd of onlookers were being held back at the twenty-five-yard perimeter line created by yellow crime-scene tape and numerous officers.

Hunter, Garcia and Captain Blake got out of the car, sidestepped the crowd and quickly stooped under the tape, approaching the two police officers standing by the main building’s entrance. They were both silent.

‘Sorry, sir, but I got orders from high up not to let anyone in there for now,’ the most senior of the two officers said, acknowledging both detectives’ badges.

‘I gave that order,’ Captain Blake replied firmly, displaying her credentials.

Both officers immediately stood to attention.

‘Captain,’ a short, overweight male reporter with thick glasses and a terribly disguised bald patch called from the pack. ‘What’s going on? Who is the victim? Why are you here? Care to give the people of Los Angeles some information?’ His questions ignited an onslaught of frantic shouts from everyone.

All Los Angeles crime beat reporters knew that LAPD captains didn’t usually attend crime scenes, no matter what division or bureau they were from. When they did, there was always a reason. And it was never good news. When the captain of the LAPD Robbery Homicide Division turned up at a crime scene, something was definitely wrong.

Captain Blake ignored the questions and returned her attention to the officer. ‘Were you first response?’

He nodded but avoided her eyes.

‘C’mon, Captain, give us something. Why are you here? What’s going on in there?’ The bald reporter insisted.

Captain Blake still paid no attention. ‘Who else other than Forensics has seen the body?’

‘Only me and my partner, ma’am, Officer Gutierrez.’ He tilted his head in the direction of the building behind him. ‘He’s inside, guarding the entrance to the basement.’

‘No one else?’ she pressed.

‘No one else, ma’am. We got a call from dispatch earlier to come down here and investigate a 911 call – someone claiming to have found a body. We radioed Homicide and Forensics as soon as we walked into that room. We got our orders back almost immediately – not to let anyone else in. Forensics are the only ones we’ve allowed through.’

‘The body is in the basement?’ Hunter asked.

‘Yes, at the end of the corridor turn left and you’ll be in the old kitchen. At the back of it you’ll see a few steps that’ll take you down to a storage room. The body is in there.’ His next words came out no louder than a whisper. ‘What in God’s earth . . . ?’

Minutes later, Hunter, Garcia and Captain Blake found Officer Gutierrez at the back of the old kitchen, guarding the steps to the storage room just like his partner had said. His youthful face couldn’t hide the shock of what he’d seen down in that room.

The cement staircase going down to the basement was worn out, narrow and steep, illuminated by a single light bulb that hung from the water-infiltrated ceiling above the landing at the top. With each step they took, the smell of disinfectant grew stronger. Brilliant forensic light seeped through the rusty metal door at the bottom. As they approached it, Hunter felt his blood rush and warm his skin as if he’d just stepped out into the baking sun. He opened the door, and all he saw was blood.

Doctor Hove was standing by the far wall talking to her lead Forensics agent, Mike Brindle. They were both wearing white Tyvek coveralls. A stainless steel table occupied the center of the large room. The concrete floor was covered in sticky, coagulated blood. Not splashes and sprinkles, but thick, vampiric pools of it. A few small and delicate bloody handprints traced a short trajectory from the table to the ghostly pale, naked body of a brunette woman lying on her back just a few steps from the door. Her arms had been carefully placed by her side, her legs stretched out.