I Am Death

Forty

Night arrives slowly in the summertime, gently gaining ground like a silent soldier. First, lazy shadows find the alleyways, then they start creeping across sidewalks, up walls and through windows, until finally darkness takes hold. By the time Hunter and Garcia got to the coroner’s office, after receiving a phone call from Doctor Hove just half an hour earlier, darkness had stealthily found its way into almost every corner of Los Angeles, with the exception of a sliver of purple sky that still colored the horizon over Santa Monica, but that too was fading fast.

At the crime scene in Venice, besides the several bloody footprints retrieved from the carpet in the living room, forensics had also managed to collect a number of fibers, hairs and traces of dust. Everything had been bagged and taken back to the lab for further examination. Due to how careful they all knew this killer was, hopes weren’t high, but they weren’t dead yet either.

Sharon Barnard’s cabin crew suitcase had been left in the living room by the front door. Inside it they’d found a used change of clothes, a toiletries bag, a makeup bag, and a tablet computer, which was password protected. Her cellphone was found on the kitchen counter, its screen locked by a six-digit combination. Both electronic items had been passed to the LAPD Computer Forensics Unit.

Forensics had also discovered a large number of finger-prints all around the house, but just like the ones found on the front door and handle, an initial, naked-eye analysis by the forensics team expert told them that they probably came from only two sources, one of them almost certainly female. The natural conclusion was that the prints had probably come from Sharon Barnard herself and her housemate, Tom Hobbs. Due to the large number of fingerprints found, confirmation was only expected to come some time in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

Tom Hobbs was still in shock, and waves of anxiety, which were triggered by involuntary memory flashes, came and went throughout the day, throwing him into fits of tears and panic attacks. The LAPD had managed to get in contact with his parents, who came and took him with them back to Pomona Valley, but not before a medic was forced to sedate him. Hunter would try to interview him again tomorrow.

After identifying themselves to the receptionist sitting behind the counter at the LA County Coroner, Hunter and Garcia were told that Doctor Hove was waiting for them inside Autopsy Theater One, the same theater they were in the day before.

In silence, Hunter and Garcia navigated their way through the shiny corridors and double swinging doors until they reached the small anteroom leading to Autopsy Theater One. Hunter hit the buzzer by the electronic keypad to the right of the door. Five seconds later, the doors hissed open.

Despite knowing to expect it, the low temperature inside the autopsy room still made Garcia shiver as he stepped inside. It did every time.

‘Robert. Carlos.’ Doctor Hove greeted both detectives with a nod of her head. She wore a regular light-blue lab gown, with her nose mask hanging loosely around her neck. Her hair was pulled back and tied up in a bundle at the top of her head. She smiled, but there was no way of disguising the drained and exhausted look of someone who’d been working for hours on end under artificial light.

Sharon Barnard’s body was laid out, uncovered, on the stainless-steel examination table at the center of the room. The mess of muscle and flesh that her face had become had now taken on a brownish, dry-meat color. Her right eye, the one that had been spared by the handheld sander, had gone completely milky, and the rest of her skin now looked ghostly white.

Doctor Hove approached the instrument counter on the other side of the examination table. Hunter and Garcia were right behind her. She picked up two copies of the autopsy report and handed one to each detective.

‘Unfortunately,’ the doctor began, her voice sounding as tired as she looked, ‘this post mortem examination hasn’t revealed a great deal.’ She switched on the high-powered halogen lights above the autopsy table.

Hunter and Garcia blinked a couple of times while their eyes got used to the enhanced brightness.

‘As you can plainly see —’ she directed their attention to Sharon Barnard’s torso, arms and legs — ‘unlike the first victim, this one shows no signs of having been physically tortured prior to the total disfiguration of her face. No whipping marks or cuts of any kind. None to her back either.’ She turned and indicated the chart on the wall behind her, which itemized the weight of the deceased’s brain, heart, liver, kidneys and spleen. ‘All of her internal organs, including her brain, were in as good a condition as could be expected for a healthy twenty-two-year-old female.’

Hunter and Garcia flipped to the second page on the report. Just as the lead forensics agent at the crime scene, Doctor Brian Snyder, had guessed, the cause of death had been heart failure induced by acute loss of blood.

‘Again, unlike the first victim,’ Doctor Hove continued, ‘this one showed no indication of having been sexually assaulted.’

That discovery surprised Garcia a lot more than it did Hunter. In truth, Hunter was half expecting it. When he had examined Sharon Barnard’s body in situ that morning, he had seen no bruises or abrasions of any sort to her inner thighs, nor around her groin region.

‘Also,’ the doctor added, ‘this time there was no message. Nothing was left in her throat or anywhere else in her body.’

Garcia nodded as he explained, ‘The message was left on the carpet inside the victim’s house. Written in her own blood.’

Doctor Hove’s face was colored by intrigue. ‘What was the message?’

‘Same three words as before, Doc. I Am Death. That’s it. Nothing more. Written all in capital letters.’

The doctor’s gaze returned to Sharon Barnard, and to what should’ve been her face. ‘I will admit that, bar being shot in the face by a close-quarters shotgun, the trauma to her facial muscles and nerves was as severe as I’ve ever seen.’

‘The difference is,’ Hunter said in a somber voice, moving around to the other side of the table, ‘when you’re shot in the face by a close-quarters shotgun, chances are you’ll die instantly. No pain.’ He shook his head. ‘The killer didn’t want that to happen here.’

Everyone went quiet for a moment.

Garcia, whose gaze had returned to Sharon Barnard’s body on the examination table, let out a heartfelt breath.

‘I don’t get this. I don’t get any of this. How can a killer completely switch his MO this way? I’ve never heard of a case like this.’

‘That’s exactly the same thought that has been with me since I started the post mortem,’ Doctor Hove said. ‘If I hadn’t been told, I would’ve never guessed, or found out through the examination, that this victim belonged to the same killer who had tortured and murdered the victim from yesterday morning’s autopsy.’

‘Exactly,’ Garcia agreed, bowing his head in the doctor’s direction before looking at Hunter. ‘We’ve dealt with killers who like to experiment before, Robert. Killers whose MOs slightly change from one murder to the other, but this is nothing like that. Here, the break away from the previous MO is too severe. Like the Doc said, this could’ve been a completely different killer. If not for the fact that he likes to authenticate his work by signing it, we would’ve never known both murders were related. We wouldn’t even be in this autopsy room.’

Out of frustration, Garcia stated what Hunter and Doctor Hove already knew.

‘His first victim was abducted and tortured for arguably five-and-a-half days before she was murdered. Her body was covered in whipping marks and lacerations — one hundred and twenty in total. We all know that, when used, abduction and prolonged torture accounts for a large portion of the killer’s MO. That just simply didn’t happen here.’ He nodded at the body on the table. ‘The second victim was never abducted. She was subdued and murdered inside her own home in a matter of hours, not days. Also, the first victim’s cause of death could easily be considered a non-violent method. He kept her upside down long enough to induce oedema of the brain. Painful? Yes. Violent? Not quite. Now just look at this.’ Once again, Garcia pointed to Sharon Barnard’s body. ‘He scraped her whole face off with an electric sander and left her to die. Painful? Hell, yes. Violent? Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’

Garcia took a step back from the autopsy table and folded his arms in front of his chest. The coldness of the room was starting to get to him.

‘And my last point,’ he continued, ‘which baffles me more than all the others, is the fact that victim one was raped repeatedly.’ He shrugged as he spoke. ‘People who are dominated by sexual compulsion to commit ever-increasingly savage and brutal crimes will never find enough satisfaction in their acts to the point that it will make them spontaneously stop. We all know this. They simply can’t stop themselves. Nevertheless, we just found out that victim two wasn’t even touched.’ Garcia paused for breath. ‘Looking at both crimes, the only similarities we have, other than the “I AM DEATH” bullshit, is that both victims were female and in their early twenties. That’s it. Nothing else matches. Not even the level of violence.’

Hunter tucked his hands deep inside his pockets. ‘I know all this, Carlos, and you’re right on every point. Sociopaths who are guided by powerful MOs such as sexual gratification, extreme sadism, and victim abduction followed by torture and death rarely detour from those MOs. And even when they do, it’s usually an escalation, or a slight variation, not a total detachment like we have here. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with a plausible theory to explain any of this since I first laid eyes on her this morning.’

Garcia looked at Hunter questioningly.

‘The only thing I could come up with was that this killer is lacking that uncontrollable urge.’

Garcia greeted Hunter’s statement first with silence, then by looking back at Sharon Barnard’s disfigured face.

‘The uncontrollable urge,’ Hunter repeated. ‘That compulsive desire inside of them that so many can’t even explain themselves and are completely helpless against. Like you said a minute ago — they simply can’t stop themselves. I don’t think that that’s what drove this guy to abduct, rape, torture and kill Nicole Wilson, or to invade Sharon Barnard’s home and mutilate her the way he did. That’s not why he’s doing what he’s doing.’

A thoughtful silence descended on the room one more time.

‘So why is he?’ Doctor Hove asked eventually.

Hunter shook his head. ‘I’m not sure what’s driving him yet. But this guy is not out of control, Doc. He’s not losing an internal battle against his urges. On the contrary, he’s completely in control of everything he does. He abducts, he rapes, he tortures, he kills, not to satisfy some overpowering desire inside of him.’

Hunter faced the body.

‘He does it because he wants to. He’s showing us that he can be any sort of killer he wants, morph from one type to another in no time at all. Because he’s not driven by compulsion. He’s a killer by choice.’