The Caller

Five

Karen Ward’s front door opened into a small entrance hall with a couple of large flower prints hanging from its white walls. A warm-red anti-slip rug greeted everyone as they walked through the door. Separation between the hall and the rest of the apartment came via a makeshift chimed beaded-curtain that dropped from the ceiling in uneven strands.

Hunter hadn’t seen one of those since he was a young kid. His grandmother used to have one in her kitchen.

The chimes rang noisily as he pulled the curtain to one side and he and Garcia stepped through into the apartment’s living room. Before following them inside, Sergeant Velasquez crossed himself, murmuring a few Spanish words as he did so.

The living room was relatively spacious and it had been pleasantly decorated with just a few well-chosen pieces of modern furniture, but its main feature was no doubt the large, glass sliding doors behind another beaded-curtain at the far end of the room, leading out into a corner balcony. A compact open-plan kitchen sat against the north wall. Strategically positioned to separate the kitchen from the living room area was a dark pinewood, four-seater dining table. On the other side of the table, by a dark wood display cabinet, there was a full length mirror. Both detectives paused as they entered the room, their attention immediately drawn to the chair at the head of the table and to the horribly mutilated body sitting on it.

Hunter’s eyes narrowed as his brain picked up the pace to try to understand the savagery he was looking at.

The victim had been stripped naked. Her arms had been pinned down to the sides of her body by a thin nylon rope, which tightly looped several times around her torso, just under her breasts, and around the back of the chair. Two separate pieces of rope had been used to securely restrain her ankles to the legs of the chair. She was sitting upright, with her head slightly slumped forward, as if she had fallen asleep, bringing her chin to less than an inch from her chest. But what made Hunter doubt his eyes were the many shards of thick, mirrored glass that had been violently rammed into the woman’s face, disfiguring it into an unrecognizable mess of skin, glass and flesh. Blood had cascaded from her facial wounds in heavy sheets, covering her entire torso and thighs in crimson red before dripping down on to the wooden floor and pooling up under the chair. Part of the tabletop, just by where the victim had been sitting, had also been sprinkled by blood.

From where Hunter and Garcia were standing, what once was her face now looked like a grotesque human pincushion, with numerous glass spikes protruding from it in all different directions.

‘I’m guessing you two are with the UVC Unit.’

Those words came from the forensics agent who had been carefully collecting hairs and fibers from the large rug in the main living room area, just past the dining table.

A couple of silent seconds went by before Hunter and Garcia finally managed to drag their attention away from the body.

‘I’m Dr. Susan Slater,’ the agent said, getting up from her kneeling position. ‘I’m the lead forensics agent assigned to this scene.’

Neither Hunter nor Garcia had ever worked with Dr. Slater before. She was about five-foot seven and looked to be in her early thirties, with a slim body, high cheekbones and a delicate nose. Her head was covered by the hood of her Tyvek jumpsuit, but a thin sliver of blonde hair could still be seen cutting across the top of her forehead. Her makeup was subtle and work-like, but effective enough to keep her attractiveness and femininity even under the unappealing white coverall. Her voice had an odd tone to it — soft and jovial, but at the same time giving the impression of being full of experience and knowledge.

‘Detective Robert Hunter, LAPD UVC Unit. This is Detective Carlos Garcia.’ They both greeted the doctor with a simple head nod before reverting their attention back to the victim.

‘It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?’ Dr. Slater commented. ‘How can anyone do something like that to another human being?’

‘The killer stabbed her in the face with glass shanks?’ Garcia asked, his expression clearly revealing his disbelief in his own words.

‘Might’ve done, Detective,’ Dr. Slater replied. ‘That’s impossible to tell without a proper autopsy examination but, if that’s the case, that’s only part of the story.’

‘So what’s the other part?’ Garcia asked.

She took a couple of steps towards the victim. ‘Let me show you.’

Hunter and Garcia followed her. Sergeant Velasquez stayed by the chimed curtains.

Being careful to avoid the pool of blood on the floor, Dr. Slater squatted down by the side of the chair and beckoned Hunter and Garcia to do the same. Up close, the injuries to Karen Ward’s face were even more disturbing.

Several different-sized shards of mirrored glass had sliced through her skin and muscle tissue, practically tearing her face from its skeleton structure. Slabs of skin and flesh dangled loosely from her cheeks, her forehead, and her chin, where bone had also been exposed.

‘You see,’ Dr. Slater began, ‘if you look only at the large shards of glass...’ She indicated the ones protruding from the victim’s right and left cheek, left eye socket, and the one that had completely traversed the victim’s under-chin soft tissue, pinning her tongue to the lower part of her mouth. ‘The impression that you get is that the perpetrator violently stabbed the victim with improvised glass shanks, leaving each and every one embedded in her face as he did. Some were rammed into her face so hard, they have either fractured bone, or implanted themselves into it.’ She called their attention to two other pieces of glass — one sticking out of the victim’s lower jawbone, the other from her forehead. ‘But that’s not all we have here, Detectives. There’s an even larger number of smaller pieces of glass entrenched in her flesh.’ She indicated a few of them as she spoke. Some were as small as a pea. ‘These pieces are small enough to make it physically impossible for anyone to be able to use them as some sort of stabbing weapon. They are impact residue. Broken pieces from larger ones.’

Hunter tilted his head left then right as he studied the victim’s face. Despite all his experience, he still couldn’t help but cringe at the ferocity of her wounds. Each one would’ve brought with it a whole new dimension of pain. What that young woman must’ve suffered was almost unimaginable.

Dried blood covered most of her body, making it hard to be certain, but the impression Hunter got was that she carried no other wounds or bruises anywhere else. The killer’s rage had been exclusively directed at her face.

After several seconds, Hunter stood up and repositioned himself behind the chair to have a better look at the back of the victim’s head.

‘So what are you saying, doc?’ Garcia asked. ‘That the killer tied her to this chair and then slammed glass sheets into her face?’

‘No,’ Hunter was the one who replied, turning to look at the floor behind the victim’s chair — no glass residue. ‘The inverted motion, Carlos,’ he explained. ‘The killer rammed her face into glass.’