The Caller

Nineteen

Fall in the City of Angels was a very elusive thing. There was no sting to the air, no characteristic cold bite at night, no typical shiver early in the mornings; on the contrary, autumn could bring with it some of the warmest days and nights, easily matching the temperatures reached at the height of summer, and today certainly was one of those days.

Hunter had all four of his windows rolled down on his way to the Police Administration Building on West First Street, downtown Los Angeles, but in stop-start traffic he could barely reach enough speed to produce any sort of breeze. The still and stale air inside the cabin, combined with over 70 percent air humidity, made his car feel like a sauna and a steam room at the same time. As he and Garcia finally stepped into their office on the fifth floor of the PAB, the first thing Hunter did was blast the AC unit to full power. Garcia stifled a smile. He could see the long and thin wet mark running all the way down the back of Hunter’s shirt.

‘In this heat,’ Garcia said, as he fired up his computer, ‘having a car with no aircon is a bitch, isn’t it?’

Hunter looked back at him sideways. ‘Don’t you start.’

‘I’m not starting anything, but you do understand that your car doesn’t even belong to this century, right? You really need to take that thing to a scrap yard, my friend.’

‘Why? It’s a great car?’

‘That’s not a car, Robert. That’s a rusty twenty-year-old bathtub with wheels. I know you like to call it a classic, but...’

‘No,’ Hunter interrupted him. ‘I just call it a car. It does its job, which is to get me from A to B, and it’s very reliable. What else could I ask for?’

‘Aircon,’ Garcia said, throwing more salt into the wound. ‘You could ask for aircon.’

Without anyone knocking, the door to their office was pushed open and Captain Barbara Blake stepped inside.

Captain Blake had taken over the LAPD Robbery Homicide Division’s leadership a few years back, after the retirement of one of its longest-standing and most decorated captains, William Bolter. She had been hand-picked by Bolter himself, which angered a long list of candidates, but angering people was something that simply came with the captain’s job, and Barbara Blake had absolutely no problems with it.

She was indeed an intriguing woman — strong and resilient, but at the same time attractive and elegant, with long black hair and suspenseful dark eyes that never gave anything away. Despite being greeted by some hostility when she took over, she had quickly gained a reputation for being a tough-as-nails, no-nonsense captain. She wasn’t easily intimidated, took no crap from anyone — including her superiors in the police department — and had no reservations about upsetting high-powered politicians or government officials if it meant sticking to what she believed was right. Within a few months of her stepping into her new shoes, the initial hostility began to dissipate, and slowly but surely she earned the trust and respect of every single detective under her command.

‘OK,’ Captain Blake said, closing the door behind her. ‘What’s the story on this case that came in overnight? The report I read from Long Beach PD is as loose as a clown’s pocket, but it mentions something about the killer making a video-call to the victim’s best friend? What the hell is all that about?’

‘As crazy as it sounds, Captain,’ Garcia replied, stirring a single cube of brown sugar into the cup of coffee he’d just poured, ‘that’s exactly what happened. We just got back from talking to Tanya Kaitlin. That’s the victim’s friend who the perp called.’

The captain leaned back against the door. ‘OK, I’m listening.’ Her inquiring eyes moved from Garcia to Hunter.

They quickly summarized what Tanya Kaitlin had told them about the call she’d received from the killer.

‘Wait a second,’ the captain said, lifting a hand to interrupt them when they told her about the killer’s MO. ‘The killer called her to play a game?’

‘That’s right,’ Hunter replied. ‘Two questions, get them right and your friend lives. Get them wrong and...’ On his computer screen, he double-clicked the photo file he’d received from the forensics team. ‘Come see for yourself.’

As Captain Blake positioned herself behind his chair, Hunter began clicking through the photographs.

‘Jesus!’ she exclaimed, unable to disguise her shock, but at the same time transfixed by the brutal images. The eighth picture in the sequence was a close-up of the injury to Karen Ward’s left eye. The one believed to have been the fatal one, with a long shard of mirrored glass protruding out of her eye socket. This time, Captain Blake looked away in disgust.

‘OK,’ she said, stepping back and away from Hunter’s desk. ‘I don’t need to see any more. What the hell is wrong with this world?’ She shook her head, trying to blink away the images. ‘That goes way beyond sadistic. Way beyond psychopathic.’

Hunter understood the captain’s frustration well. He knew that, unlike what most people might think, killing wasn’t such a hard a task to achieve. Every human was capable of doing it.

In the USA, a great number of homicides happened as a consequence of an error of misjudgment. All it really took was a moment of insanity. A second of someone losing his or her temper and it was done — a quick squeeze of the trigger, a push, a direct knock to the temple, a swing of a bat to the head, a sharp instrument to the right part of the body — there were hundreds of different ways to end a life in just a second. What took a specific type of individual — cold, calculated, sadistic, devoid of emotions — was preceding the murder with torture. Being able to deliberately inflict tremendous physical pain on another human being and getting a kick from it was something that not many on this earth were able to do.

‘It gets worse,’ Hunter said. ‘He forced her to look.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Captain Blake replied. ‘You just told me.’

‘No.’ Garcia this time. ‘Not her best friend, Captain. The victim.’

A look of confusion came over Captain Blake.

‘The killer forced Karen Ward to look at her reflection after each head slam. He forced her to watch her own disfiguration.’

‘What?’

‘In our first visit to the crime scene,’ Hunter said, taking over, ‘something in Karen Ward’s living room bothered me, but I couldn’t really pinpoint it. I should’ve realized what it was when I checked her bedroom for the first time, but there was so much wrong with it that it escaped me, pure and simple.’

‘And what was it?’ Captain Blake asked.

‘The mirror.’

‘What mirror?’

Hunter pulled his chair closer to his desk and clicked his mouse a few times until he found what he was looking for.

‘These are the crime scene pictures of Karen Ward’s living room.’ Once again he pointed at his computer screen.

Captain Blake returned to Hunter’s side.

‘See this?’ He indicated the full length mirror positioned between the dining table and the sitting area. ‘What’s a dressing mirror doing in the living room?’

The captain shrugged. ‘That’s not that uncommon, Robert. Maybe she lacked space in her bedroom. Plus, a lot of women like to have one last quick look at their outfit just before walking out the door.’

Hunter nodded, acknowledging the captain’s point. ‘The problem is: the space is there, Captain.’ A few more clicks. ‘This is a picture of her bedroom. See the space between the clothes rack and the dresser? I checked the floor. There were four small rubber marks, which exactly matched the rubber feet on the dressing mirror. It was moved, Captain.’

‘Tanya Kaitlin also told us that the killer kept on telling her to look,’ Garcia offered, ‘and she couldn’t understand why, because she was looking, and she kept on telling him so.’

‘That’s because the killer wasn’t really telling her to look,’ Hunter again. ‘He was telling Karen.’

Captain Blake pressed her lips tightly together. One of her ‘worried’ telltale signs.

‘He wanted to torture her in every possible way,’ Hunter said. ‘Physically and psychologically.’

No one said anything for a long while.

‘How about this mask the killer was wearing?’ Captain Blake finally broke the silence. ‘Was the witness able to give you some sort of description of it?’

‘She was,’ Garcia replied. ‘We’re getting a sketch artist to her by this afternoon. If the killer hasn’t created this mask himself, there’s a slim chance that we might be able to identify the supplier.’

Captain Blake nodded to herself. ‘And how did the killer get access to the building? To her apartment? Does anyone know?’

‘Security at the victim’s building was pretty basic and easily breachable,’ Garcia told her. ‘Just a dated intercom entry system with a door buzzer, nothing more. An earth magnet against the door’s weak locking mechanism and, boom, you’re in.’

‘How about her apartment?’

Garcia sipped his coffee. ‘There were no signs of a struggle... no signs of a break-in, so the speculation is that the victim could’ve buzzed the killer in herself, either because she knew him, or because he came up with a believable enough story when he rang her apartment. Either way, she would’ve opened her front door for him herself.’

‘There’s also the possibility that he was waiting for her inside when she got home,’ Hunter added.

Captain Blake’s forehead creased. ‘How would he have gotten in?’

‘That we’re not sure yet, but we know that he’s done it before.’

The captain’s interest visibly grew. ‘What? He’s been inside her apartment before? How do you know?’

Hunter leaned back on his chair. ‘When we first attended the scene,’ he explained. ‘We found several tell signs that hinted that Karen Ward lived in fear. Our suspicions were confirmed earlier this morning by her best friend.’ Hunter proceeded to tell Captain Blake what Tanya Kaitlin had told them about the stalker-type notes Karen Ward had received.

‘And she told you that one of these notes was left on the victim’s bed?’ Captain Blake asked.

‘That’s correct,’ Garcia confirmed, taking over again. ‘But it doesn’t end there. After we left Ms. Kaitlin’s apartment, we decided to drive back to the crime scene to have another look.’

‘And...?’

‘And while checking her bedroom, I bumped into the victim’s shoe rack by accident. Half of her shoe collection rained down on me and, let me tell you, Captain, there were enough shoes there to open up a shop.’

‘There’s no such thing as enough shoes,’ the captain shot back. ‘But go on.’

‘Well, after the shoe rain stopped, I found this. It had slipped out from inside one of them.’

Garcia pointed to a see-through evidence bag that was sitting on his desk. Inside it was a white, eight-by-five-inch sheet of paper. Captain Blake hadn’t noticed the evidence bag until then. She stepped closer to have a better look and her eyes instantly widened. The scrap of paper was actually a collage of letters and words that had been cut out from a magazine to form a note.

A stalker’s note.