I Am Death

Seventy-two

‘I’m not sure why,’ Hunter said. ‘Maybe it was because I was so tired when I reread the note again in the early hours of this morning, but for some reason my brain mixed up the letters in a strange way and for a split second, I saw it... Then it was gone.’

Garcia was still staring at the board.

‘I thought I was imagining things, but I kept on blinking, looking away, then looking back at it again.’ Hunter paused, following his partner’s gaze. ‘And then, as if it were a dream, the letters just moved around right in front of my eyes.’ He tapped the board one more time. ‘And I saw this.’

From the letters in ‘I Am Death’ Hunter had created three new words: ‘I Mat Hade’.

‘No fucking way,’ Garcia said again, his eyes finally leaving the board. He faced Hunter.

‘I also found it hard to believe, but it’s there.’

‘I know this killer is fucking bold,’ Garcia said. ‘He’s daring and all, but this is ridiculous, Robert.’ He pointed at the board. ‘It’s unprecedented. He’s not giving us a clue. He’s giving us his name. Why would he do that?’

‘Because he doesn’t know we know,’ Hunter said. ‘He doesn’t know we know about Fresno, about Sacramento, or about his place in East LA. He has no idea that we have a suspect on the books and that suspect is Mathew Hade — Mat Hade. In fact, when he delivered the note to my door we didn’t have a suspect. We didn’t know who Mat Hade was, remember? That came later.’

Garcia began making all the connections.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Even if we had figured out then that the clues he was referring to in his note were in the form of an anagram, we didn’t know what to look for — a word, a couple of words, a phrase, a name, what? We had no way of knowing that what he was giving us was his actual name. With that in mind, how many possible words or combinations of words could we make from those letters?’

‘Exactly.’

Garcia looked back at the sentence: ‘I Am Death’.

‘And of those,’ Hunter added, ‘how many do you think could form some sort of a name, or a contraction of a name, like “Mat”, or “Ted”, or whatever? And remember, this is Los Angeles. This place is an international hub. This name we’re talking about doesn’t necessarily need to be an American name.’

‘And even if we did come up with the phrase “I Mat Hade”,’ Garcia said, ‘we would’ve probably discarded it because, in all truth, we would’ve had no idea that it was an actual name. Family names can come in all shapes and forms... and spellings.’

‘Precisely. It would’ve been unrealistic for us to verify every possible anagram. What would we have done, run background checks on every combination that spelled out a name or part of one? Not likely.’

Garcia chuckled at the cleverness of it all.

‘So he created the anagram because he was never expecting us to find out about him, about Mathew Hade,’ Garcia theorized. ‘Why would we? The odds of us finding out about him were bordering on zero. He was never arrested. Never charged with anything. He was just a person of interest in three different abduction investigations, two in Fresno and one in Sacramento, but never here in LA. And all that happened years ago. Not in a million years was he expecting us to find out about any of that.’

‘Probably not,’ Hunter accepted it. ‘All we need is for that phone to ring now.’

As if on cue, Hunter’s cellphone rang loudly, rattling against his desktop.

Garcia’s eyes widened.

‘You’ve got to be kidding.’