I Am Death

Twenty-five

As he finally placed his pen down on his desk, Hunter noticed that his hands were shaking. Beads of cold sweat had also formed on his forehead.

He stood up, and as he did his knees clicked noisily. He’d been sitting down for way too long. He stretched his long frame and the stiff muscles in his back and legs responded with what felt like a thousand painful pinches. Hunter forced the stretch even more, this time bringing his neck into it. It clicked just as noisily as his knees.

Damn, he thought, grinding his teeth. Carlos is right. Maybe I am getting too old for this crap.

Hunter had just spent the last three hours transcribing and re-transcribing every word from the note the killer had sent Mayor Bailey that morning. He’d made twenty-five copies of it, trying to match the killer’s handwriting as best as he could.

And he’d done a great job.

The exercise was simple. Hunter wasn’t trying to memorize the note word for word, though, after recopying it so many times, that was exactly what had happened. But no, what he was really trying to do was to get some sort of insight, however small, into the killer’s mind, into the killer’s way of thinking. He was trying to think like the killer did, to feel what the killer felt when he wrote those words. He was looking for hidden meanings and word tricks. Trying to read between the lines.

After three laborious hours, Hunter had come up with very little. To him, it felt as if the killer knew that the note would be scrutinized to its very last detail. Every word, every letter, analyzed and reanalyzed — physically and psychologically — and the killer had locked every door; he had left no openings, no pathways into his psyche.

Hunter knew that carrying on any longer would bring him no better results.

He poured himself another large cup of black coffee, returned to his chair and half swiveled it around to face the old-fashioned picture board by the east wall. Despite how young their investigation was — less than twenty-four hours old — the board was already plastered with information and photographs.

Forensics had come back with the results of the test that had been run on the blood used to write the note that had been left lodged inside the victim’s throat — I AM DEATH. As Hunter and Garcia were expecting, the killer had used Nicole Wilson’s blood to write it, but according to the forensics report, it didn’t seem as though he had used a brush to do it. Instead, he had used his own fingers, dipping them in his victim’s blood before carefully inscribing each letter. Not surprisingly, forensics had found no fingerprints, partial or otherwise. The killer, no doubt, had been wearing gloves.

The second note, the one that Hunter had spent the last three hours transcribing, had been sent over to the forensics lab, together with the Polaroid photograph of the victim in captivity, immediately after he and Garcia had left Captain Blake’s office earlier that afternoon.

Hunter was no graphologist, but he didn’t need a forensics report to tell him that the notes had been written by the same person. Despite the killer using his fingers to inscribe the first note, and a red pen to write the second, his handwriting was impressively steady.

The killer had written both notes in cursive handwriting, and his calligraphy was firm but gracious. Despite the paper having no guiding lines, all the letters stood in perfect symmetry to one another, and they flowed in beautifully measured strokes and shapes. This told Hunter that the person they were looking for was meticulous, organized, paid particular attention to detail, and prided himself in everything he did, including how he murdered his victims.