I Am Death

Seventy-seven

Hunter and Garcia spent the rest of the afternoon at the crime scene in the Angeles National Forest. They watched as Alison Atkins was freed from her shackles, placed inside a body bag and loaded into a coroner’s van. Her intestines were carefully collected by one of Doctor Snyder’s forensic agents. Despite all his years of experience, at times he looked like he was about to be sick.

Both detectives were still checking their phones every five minutes or so. Still no sign of Mat Hade. Hunter had also checked with the State of California Department of Motor Vehicles — Mathew Hade had no vehicles registered under his name at present. His last one had been a used 2003 black Ford Escape, which he’d acquired in February 2007 and kept until October 2014. After that, nothing. He also had no outstanding fines.

At 8:30 p.m. Hunter and Garcia received another call from Doctor Snyder. He had the first of the two test results they’d been waiting for — the pen ink analyses. Forensics had first collected a small ink sample from the note the killer had sent Mayor Bailey and chemically compared it to the ink in the BIC Cristal Garcia had found inside Mat Hade’s apartment. The result had been inconclusive. But forensics hadn’t given up. They’d placed the ballpoint pen under a Leica digital microscope and found out that the roller ball at its tip had a couple of faults — scratches. Those scratches, though invisible to the naked eye, would certainly show on any sort of stroke made by the pen. When they’d placed the note under the same microscope, they’d got a perfect match. The killer’s note had been written with that exact same pen.

They had their guy.

They just didn’t have their guy yet.

With this new discovery, a new APB had also been sent out. Orders had been updated from ‘observe and inform the case detectives’ to ‘carefully approach and apprehend’. All they had to do now was sit and wait until Mat Hade was arrested. They just had to hope that this would happen before he claimed another victim.

Garcia went home at around 9:00 p.m., but only after Hunter practically ordered him to.

‘Get the hell out of here, Carlos,’ he said, pointing at the door. ‘Because if you don’t, Anna won’t be angry with you, she’ll be angry with me. And I’d rather face the wrath of a serial killer any day than that of a pissed-off woman, especially Anna.’

‘That is a very wise decision, my friend,’ Garcia said as he powered down his computer. ‘Because when she gets angry, she could make the devil look like Casper the friendly ghost.’ He paused as he reached the office door. ‘How about you, Robert? You’re not going to spend the night in here again, are you? There’s nothing else we can do but wait. He’ll get picked up soon enough. We have the whole of the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department looking for him. He can’t hide for ever.’

‘Yeah, I know. I’ll be leaving soon. I just need to check on a few more things first and I’ll be right behind you. Ten, fifteen minutes max.’

‘Do you need any help?’

‘No, man, I’ll be fine. Send Anna my love, will you?’

Over an hour later and Hunter was still at his desk.

He swiveled his chair around to look at the picture board again. They had already added several new items to it — the two photographs they had of Mathew Hade and a number of new crime-scene shots from that afternoon. Operations was still gathering a full dossier on Alison Atkins.

Hunter breathed out as he stared at the crime-scene shots. He hadn’t exactly known Alison, but he had seen her go about her job, full of life, smiling at every customer, and that had inevitably altered the way in which seeing her hanging from that wood beam had affected him — first total sadness, then absolute rage.

‘Where the fuck are you, you piece of shit?’ Hunter said between clenched teeth, moving his attention to Mat Hade’s photographs.

He checked his cellphone again. Still nothing.

He pushed his chair away from his desk, leaned back and rubbed his face with both hands. He felt tired, hungry and drained. Garcia was right. There was nothing else they could do. Maybe it was time to go home, but as that thought entered his mind he remembered something he’d forgotten about — the 911 call. The killer had been the one who had called it in, using Alison Atkins’ phone.

Hunter needed to listen to that recording.

He quickly pulled his chair back to his desk and began typing commands and navigating through folders and locations. It took him just over a minute to find it. He cranked up the volume on his computer speakers and double-clicked on the sound file.

As he listened to the recording and to how calm and collected the killer sounded, Hunter could feel his heartrate doubling because he knew that Mat Hade had just eviscerated Alison Atkins prior to making that call. As he’d spoken to the 911 operator he had probably been standing in a pool of her blood, treading over her gutted intestines and staring at her lifeless face.

How could anyone be that cold, that senseless?

Once the recording had played, Hunter rewound it and played it again. Then again. Then again. That was when something struck him as odd.

‘Wait a second,’ Hunter whispered to himself as he played the call one more time.

‘Why?’ he said out loud, mulling over something specific the killer had said to the operator. ‘Why would he do this? It makes no sense.’

Hunter got up, approached the picture board and reread the note the killer had pushed under his door.

Something began moving the gears inside his head.

He stepped back and stared at the whole board for a minute. Then his eyes began moving from victim to victim to victim. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

He read the note one more time. The gears in his head were now moving at full speed.

‘That is one dumb idea, Robert,’ he said, shaking his head to try to ban a new thought.

It didn’t work.

He looked at the wall clock — 10:48 p.m. ‘Fuck!’ he said as he sat back at his computer. ‘Here goes nothing.’ He began searching.