The Caller

Twenty-Three

It took another whole day for Karen Ward’s autopsy results to finally come through on Saturday morning. The details of the brutality with which she was murdered were just as shocking on paper as they were visually.

In total, there were twenty-nine severe lacerations to her face. Three of those had breached through to the inside of her mouth. In consequence, her tongue had been almost completely severed. Her killer had used so much force in the head-slammings that chunks of glass had embedded themselves into six out of Karen’s fourteen facial bones, including her nose, cheeks, forehead and chin. The force of the impacts also caused both of her cheekbones to fracture, together with her nose and jaw. Death had indeed come as the result of extensive brain trauma, where the hypothalamus and the optic tract were ruptured by a five-inch long shard of mirrored glass that had been introduced via the victim’s left ocular globe cavity.

Toxicology came back negative on all counts. The killer had not sedated Karen, not even as he subdued her prior to her murder, which meant that Karen Ward was one hundred percent lucid throughout her entire ordeal.

CSI had also come back with several test results. Only one set of fingerprints had been found inside the victim’s apartment, and they belonged to the victim herself. The prints that were found on the outside of Karen Ward’s front door also gave them very little to go on. One of the sets belonged to Karen herself, the other three got no matches against AFIT — Advanced Fingerprint Identification Technology — which meant that whoever they belonged to had no previous records, but the result that had really surprised everybody had been the fingerprint test that the CSI fingerprint expert had run against the fire escape door by Karen Ward’s apartment. He hadn’t found a single print, as if the door had been completely wiped clean that same night.

Forensics was still analyzing fibers, hairs and specks of dust that had been collected at the crime scene. So far, nothing had flagged up as unusual. The container the killer had used to hold the glass pieces he had obtained from the bathroom mirror was never found, nor were the remaining shards of glass. The speculation was that maybe the killer had kept them as trophies.

IT Forensics had also managed to breach the password security on the laptop found in Karen Ward’s living room. Hunter and Garcia’s team were already searching through text files, images, email messages, and everything else they could find, but just like Hunter had expected, they still hadn’t come across anything they thought could be of any interest to the investigation.

‘Any luck?’ Garcia asked as Hunter finally got back to the office. He had spent the entire morning in Santa Monica, where he had visited Burke Williams, the beauty spa Karen Ward was working at when she started receiving the notes Tanya Kaitlin had told them about.

‘Not sure yet,’ Hunter replied, taking off his jacket and placing it on the back of his chair.

Garcia made a face at Hunter while waiting for his partner to clarify.

‘I managed to get a list of all the clients who were attended to by Karen Ward during her short time at Burke Williams.’

‘All right. How many?’

‘Sixty-two names.’

‘Wow.’

‘It’s not as bad as it sounds,’ Hunter explained. ‘From his body frame, Tanya Kaitlin was very sure that the killer was male, remember?’

‘OK,’ Garcia conceded. ‘So how many out of the sixty-two are male?’

‘Five.’

‘That’s a pretty good reduction.’

‘Operations is already working on their profiles,’ Hunter said. ‘So let’s wait and see what they can come up with and we’ll take it from there.’

‘How about the stalker notes Karen received? Did you ask the people at the spa about them?’

‘I did, and no one had a clue what I was talking about.’

‘What?’ Garcia found that positively odd. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It seems like Karen didn’t tell anyone at Burke Williams about the notes she was getting or about being stalked,’ Hunter clarified. ‘I spoke not only with the spa manager, but with everyone else who worked there, including the receptionist. They all echoed Tanya’s words — Karen was a great cosmetologist and the sweetest person you could ever meet, but none of them knew anything about any notes. She never told a soul.’

‘So what reason did she give them for leaving?’ Garcia leaned forward, placing both elbows on his desktop. ‘She must’ve told them something.’

‘She did. She told them that she was going back to Campbell due to family problems. That was all.’ Hunter had a seat behind his desk. ‘She’d been there for less than four months, so no one felt that they were close enough to her to ask for any more details.’

‘Well,’ Garcia said. ‘LA is such a mega-metropolis that moving neighborhoods could be just like moving cities. People could easily get away with a white lie like that.’

‘After Burke Williams,’ Hunter continued. ‘I took a drive down to Long Beach to talk to the people at True Beauty.’

‘Let me guess,’ Garcia said. ‘Exactly the same thing. Karen never told anyone about the notes she was receiving or about being stalked.’

Hunter nodded as he woke up his computer. ‘Lastly, I dropped by DuBunne spa in South Torrance.’

‘DuBunne? Isn’t that where Tanya Kaitlin works?’

‘That’s right. I wanted to have a quick chat with that Cynthia woman Tanya mentioned.’

‘The one who she had the conversation about remembering phone numbers with?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And?’

‘She’s a nineteen-year-old girl,’ Hunter explained. ‘Fresh out of beauty school. She’s doing her apprenticeship at DuBunne. Still lives with her parents in Gardena.’ He shook his head. ‘Whatever conversation she had with Tanya about not remembering phone numbers by heart anymore was inoffensive. I did ask her if she remembered having that conversation with anyone else. She didn’t. I don’t think this killer acquired that information through her.’

‘Talking about Tanya,’ Garcia said. ‘Any word from her? Has she recalled any other conversations about not remembering phone numbers and all?’

‘No, nothing. My hope was that she would’ve remembered something when I asked her the question for the first time yesterday. That would’ve caught her brain by surprise. Now that she’s had time to think about it, she probably won’t.’

‘OK, I don’t follow,’ Garcia said. ‘Surely the more you think about something, the more you search your memory, the more chances you have of your brain remembering something, no?’

‘In most cases, yes.’

‘But not in hers? Why?’

‘Because the guilt that she has placed on herself would’ve triggered a toxic defense mechanism response that would’ve pushed her brain into selective post-traumatic amnesia.’

Garcia kept his eyes on Hunter for a couple of silent seconds. ‘OK,’ he finally said. ‘So just for a moment, let’s pretend that I don’t have a Ph.D. in psychology like you do, Robert, and tell me all that again.’

Hunter smiled before clarifying. ‘Tanya feels guilty for Karen’s death because she believes that she should’ve known her number. She thinks it’s her fault her best friend is dead. Because of that, as a defense mechanism to lessen her pain, there’s a chance that her brain will choose to let go of any memory that it somehow associates with that guilt. The more she thinks about it, the more her brain will push the memories away because remembering will make her feel even more guilty.’

‘OK, now I get it and that’s not good.’

‘I’m still keeping my fingers crossed, though,’ Hunter added. ‘Everyone reacts differently to traumas, so you never know. I’ll give her another call later tonight.’

Garcia reached for his notepad. ‘By the way, I got off the phone with forensics just minutes before you got here.’

‘Anything new?’

‘They just finished analyzing the collage note we found inside Karen’s bedroom,’ Garcia said, sitting back on his chair. ‘As we were expecting, they drew a blank. It’s completely clear from fingerprints or DNA.’ He looked up from his notes. ‘Who goes through the trouble of cutting out letter by letter from a magazine to hide his handwriting, only to forget to wear gloves while piecing the note together, right?’

Hunter said nothing because, as crazy as it might sound, he’d seen it happen before. Most killers out there had a below-average IQ and were categorized as ‘disorganized murderers’. Movies and books sometimes portrayed some of them as cunning masterminds, but in reality, most of them would struggle with a fourth-grade math exam. They were labeled ‘disorganized’ because they didn’t really set out to kill their victims. They usually did it out of an uncontrollable violent impulse, which could have been initially triggered by a number of factors — shame, insecurity, anger, jealousy, low self-esteem, under the influence of mind-altering substances — the list was long and very personal. The problem was, the reverse of the coin, the killers who were categorized as ‘organized murderers’, tended to be highly intelligent, organized, and very, very disciplined.

‘The piece of paper used as a backdrop for the note,’ Garcia continued, ‘came out of a common white-paper pad, nothing special about it either. Easily found in any supermarket or stationery store.’

‘How about the shoes?’ Hunter asked.

Garcia shook his head. ‘They’ve been cleaned... bleached, actually. Forensics found absolutely nothing inside them. No skin cells whatsoever. Not even from Karen herself.’

That didn’t surprise Hunter. ‘How about the mask, any luck with it?’

The sketch Tanya Kaitlin had worked on with the police artist had already been sent to every costume and party shop in the greater Los Angeles area.

Garcia breathed out. ‘So far, no matches. Apparently no one has ever seen anything like it. No score over the Internet either. This mask wasn’t bought from a shop, Robert. He created it himself.’

Hunter had no doubt that that had been the case, but they still had to try.

‘But it’s not all bad,’ Garcia announced. ‘We’ve got one positive result. One you were one hundred percent right about.’

‘And what is that?’

‘The nine-one-one calls.’

On his screen, Garcia clicked and scrolled a couple of times until he found what he was looking for.

‘In the past three months there were four bogus, high-priority, nine-one-one calls made, concerning the general area of Karen Ward’s home address. Two of the addresses given by the caller were to the same apartment block, the other two to neighboring ones.’

‘Any luck when it comes to CCTV camera locations?’ Hunter asked.

Garcia laughed. ‘You would hope so, wouldn’t you? You called it right, Robert — this guy is anything but dumb. He stayed away from payphones, choosing to use four different pre-paid cellphones — no chance of a trace.’

‘Do we have the audio files for the calls?’

Garcia sat back on his chair and gave Hunter a quirky smile. ‘We do now. I just got the email.’