The Caller

Seventeen

With mid-morning traffic in full flow, it took Hunter and Garcia over forty-five minutes to cover the almost fifteen miles between Tanya Kaitlin’s apartment in West Carson and Karen Ward’s one in Long Beach. They both wanted to have a second, undisturbed look at the crime scene before it was handed over to the CTS Decon team — crime and trauma scene decontamination — the team responsible for cleaning up and disinfecting the aftermath of crime and accident scenes.

With the exception of the victim’s body and several forensics agents walking around in white coveralls, the apartment was exactly how they encountered it in the early hours of the morning. The pool of blood that covered part of the living room floor was still there, but it had by then dried up and clotted, which exacerbated the strong metallic smell that blood acquired once it came into contact with oxygen. With every window shut and locked to avoid the influx of insects that pooled human blood inevitably attracted, and with the temperature outside already getting up to seventy degrees, the eye-watering, rusty-like smell that lingered in the air had intensified considerably and spread into every corner of every room in the apartment.

As they cleared the beaded curtain at the front door, Garcia slipped on the nose mask he had brought with him.

Hunter did the same.

‘I’d say that it’d be easier if we divided the workload, don’t you think?’ Garcia said, bringing up a hand to cover his nose, despite the mask. ‘So how about you take the living room and kitchen, and I’ll take the bedroom, the corridor and the bathroom. Sounds good?’ Without waiting for a reply, Garcia crossed the living room towards the entrance to the hallway on the other side.

Hunter couldn’t blame him. Not surprisingly, the intoxicating smell was much stronger in the living room. In spite of all their experience, neither Hunter nor Garcia had ever gotten used to the smell of blood from a crime scene, or, more precisely, the psychological smell of blood from a crime scene, something that most LAPD homicide detectives understood very well. To them, there was a distinct difference between the smell of blood from a crime scene and the smell of blood from anywhere else, including accidents, hospitals and morgues. They found that at specific crime scenes, especially the ones shrouded by overwhelming violence, the sickly sweet, copper-like smell of blood was always complemented by something else. A scent no one could really explain or agree on, but they could all smell it. They could all sense it. They could all feel it crawling up their skin, as if it were alive and had somehow gotten trapped in the scene. A smell that saturated the walls and soaked the air with its presence.

Some thought of it as the smell left behind by fear.

Some thought of it as the smell left behind by pain.

Some thought of it as the smell left behind by violence.

Hunter thought of it as the smell left behind by evil.

Before he could nod his agreement at his partner, Garcia had already disappeared down the short hallway and into the bathroom. Once he was gone, Hunter turned and faced the dining table and the chair in which Karen Ward’s body had been found. He pulled down his nose mask, letting it hang loosely around his neck, and then stood there, immobile, just staring at the chair. He blanked out every distraction in his mind, and allowed the strong and violating smell of blood, evil, and death to suffocate his senses. A minute later, Tanya Kaitlin’s sequence of accounts began playing in his ears again and, as if a film was being projected before him, his mind began visualizing scenes.

He pictured the killer’s anger as he slammed Karen’s face down into a container full of broken glass, over and over again. He saw the ugly and deformed mask covering the assailant’s face, just like Tanya had described it. He imagined the killer’s satisfaction as Tanya failed to answer his question correctly. He pictured Karen’s desperation. Her fear. Her powerless struggle. But the images Hunter saw in his mind were broken and incomplete. Too many frames were still missing. Something wasn’t right.

He finally snapped out of his daze and walked over to the open-plan kitchen. It was small but well equipped, with a modern microwave and fan oven all rolled up into one, an induction cooker, and a fridge/freezer with an external water and ice dispenser. Hunter pulled its door open and looked inside. It was practically empty, with the exception of a half-full carton of orange juice, and one of milk. A tub of ice cream — chocolate brownie flavor — sat alone at the very back of the large freezer compartment. Hunter shut the door, turned from the fridge, and tried the cupboards on the wall behind him. A few canned goods but no spices or condiments. It didn’t take a detective to figure out that Karen Ward barely, if at all, cooked at home, and something told Hunter that it wasn’t because she didn’t know how, or didn’t like to, but because she wanted to be home as little as possible.

In the living room, Hunter avoided the pool of dried blood and moved over to the sitting area, where a three-seater, dark-brown sofa was flanked by a matching armchair on one side, and by a round acrylic coffee table on the other. The weaved, brown and beige rug in front of the sofa looked new, and so did the TV stand and the dark wood display cabinet that were pushed up against one of the walls.

Hunter walked over to the TV stand and opened the drawer on the left; inside it he found a power extension flex, a couple of paperbacks, and the instruction manuals for the TV, the cable box, and all the kitchen appliances. He tried the drawer on the right — spare light bulbs, a set of screwdrivers, and two plastic folders containing house bills. The display cabinet, to the right of the TV stand, held a few well-arranged and colorful decorative items — pots, bowls, jars, wooden flowers, a square tin box, and a couple of cat figurines. He reached for the tin box and pulled its lid open — empty.

A loud noise, which came from deep inside the apartment, startled Hunter.

‘Carlos, are you all right in there?’ he called out, returning the tin box to the display cabinet.

‘Yep,’ the reply came from the bedroom. ‘All good. Just bumped into the shoe tower in here by accident and half of them came crashing down on me like a shoe rain. Man, do you think she had enough shoes?’

Hunter smiled. He would never be so pretentious to claim he understood the way a woman’s mind worked, but there was one thing he knew for sure, when it came to women’s shoes, in their minds there was no such thing as ‘enough shoes’.

He turned on the balls of his feet and his gaze circumnavigated the crime scene for the nth time. And that was when realization finally hit him.

Earlier that morning, something inside Karen Ward’s room had bothered him. Something other than how unnecessarily crammed the space looked, but he couldn’t really figure out what it was, until now.

Adrenalin shot through his body like a bullet, causing the hair on his arms and on the back of his neck to stand on end. He took two steps forward and paused, looking straight at something.

‘You sick sonofabitch!’