Gallery of the Dead

Thirty

For several silent seconds, Hunter, Garcia and Captain Blake kept their stunned eyes on the two photographs that Special Agent Williams had placed on Hunter’s desk. They now understood why Adrian Kennedy and both FBI agents had acted so surprised when they first laid eyes on Linda Parker’s crime-scene pictures.

The first two photographs on Hunter’s desk were full-body shots of Kristine Rivers, The Surgeon’s first victim. She had been stripped naked and left lying on her back on what looked to be a dirty floor. Her arms were resting naturally by her torso, with her legs extended, her heels practically touching each other, the same position in which Hunter and Garcia had found Linda Parker the night before. But that was where the similarities ended. Unlike Linda Parker’s body, Kristine Rivers’ hadn’t been skinned, neither had her hands and feet been severed from her limbs. In fact, her body looked completely unharmed, which led everyone to focus their attention on the next two photographs — both close-ups of Kristine Rivers’ face — and that was where it all got even more confusing, because this time the killer had taken the victim’s eyes, leaving behind nothing but two terrifying dark holes caked in dry blood and a grotesquely disfigured face.

But that wasn’t all.

Most of her skull, from halfway up her forehead all the way to the back of her neck, had also been completely exposed. Kristine Rivers had been scalped — Old West style.

Hunter repositioned himself to better study the images.

There was no blood whatsoever on the floor surrounding her body, not even by her head, which told everyone that the extraction of her eyes, together with the scalping, hadn’t occurred inside that disused wooden shed.

‘Wait a second,’ Captain Blake interrupted, only then realizing something she had missed. ‘Are you sure we’re talking about the same perpetrator here? The MO in this case looks to be totally different.’

‘My exact thoughts once I laid eyes on your picture board,’ Kennedy replied.

‘Same here,’ Agent Fisher added.

‘Which was no longer than fifteen minutes ago,’ Captain Blake came back, half-surprised, half-annoyed. ‘So you’re telling me that the NCAVC’s “A” team flew all the way down here from DC, put on this huge song-and-dance show about taking over our investigation, without being one hundred percent sure if we were talking about the same perp or not?’

‘Well, not exactly,’ Kennedy replied.

Captain Blake’s annoyance heightened. ‘And what does that mean?’

Kennedy nodded at Agent Williams.

‘You are one hundred percent correct, Captain.’ The agent took over once again, reaching inside his blue file for yet another photograph. ‘The MO here seems completely different and none of us knew that until fifteen minutes ago or thereabouts. We tried patching into the LAPD’s database to have a better look at your investigation files before flying over here, but we couldn’t find anything — no pictures, no crime-scene description... nothing. Hence our total surprise once we finally saw your crime-scene photographs.’

‘The reason why you got nothing,’ Garcia clarified, ‘is that the UVC Unit keeps most of its investigations offline, for that exact reason.’

‘It’s a good strategy,’ Agent Williams admitted, before bringing the subject back to the victims. ‘So, at first look, the only similarities between these two victims is maybe the position in which they were left and the fact that they were both females in their early twenties, which, anybody in this room will agree, isn’t nearly enough to even suggest that they were both victims of the same perpetrator.’

He finally placed the fifth photo on the desk.

‘But then we’ve got this.’