The Crucifix Killer

Sixty-Five

With his heart thumping violently against his chest, Hunter made his way back to the RHD as fast as he could. He needed to check some old records.

As he entered his office he was glad it was on a separate floor to all the other detectives. He needed to do this alone, no disturbances. He locked the door behind him and fired up his computer.

‘Be right… be right…’ he said to himself as he accessed the California Department of Justice databank. Hunter quickly typed in the name he wanted to search for, selected the criteria and hit the ‘search’ button. As the Department of Justice data server went to work, he sat still staring anxiously at the little dot moving back and forth on the screen. The seconds seemed like minutes.

‘C’mon…’ he urged the computer to work faster as he paced nervously in front of his desk. Two minutes later the dot stopped moving and the message No Results Found appeared on the screen.

‘Shit!’

He tried again. This time going back a few more years. He knew he was right, he knew this had to be it.

The familiar dot started moving on the screen again and Hunter went back to pacing the room. His anxiety at boiling point. He stopped in front of the picture-covered corkboard and stared at all the photographs. He knew it was there, the answer was there.

The searching dot stopped moving and this time the screen filled up with data.

‘Yes…’ he said triumphantly, moving back to his desk and quickly scanning the information on the screen. As he found what he was looking for he frowned.

‘You gotta be shitting me!’

Hunter sat in silence thinking about what to do next. ‘The family trees,’ he said. ‘The victims’ family trees.’

On the initial investigation Hunter and Scott had tried everything they could think of to establish a link between the victims. They’d even traced the family trees for some of them. Hunter knew he had it somewhere. He started flipping through the mountain of paper on his desk that constituted the old case files.

‘Here it is,’ he said, as he finally came across the lists. He analyzed them for a few moments. ‘This is it.’ Hunter moved back to his computer and typed in a new name. The result came back almost instantly now that the search criteria had been narrowed down to exactly what he wanted.

Another match… and then another.

Hunter massaged his tired eyes. His whole body ached, but his new discovery had injected new life into his veins. He wasn’t able to establish links between all the victims, but he already knew why.

‘How could I’ve missed this before?’ he asked himself, as he knocked on his forehead with his clenched fist. But he knew exactly how. This was an old case, going back several years. A case where he’d been the arresting officer. The obscured victims’ links sometimes spanned three generations according to the family trees. Some of them not family at all. Without a hint he would’ve never found it. Without D-King he would’ve never thought of it.

Robert started pacing the room once again and stopped in front of Garcia’s desk. A sudden overwhelming sadness brought a tight knot to his throat. His partner was lying in hospital in a semi-coma and there was nothing he could do. He remembered Anna’s sad eyes. How she sat next to her husband’s bed waiting for a sign of life. She loved him more than anything. There’s no love stronger than family love, Hunter thought and then stopped dead. The hair on the back of his neck standing on end.

‘Holy shit!’

He rushed back to his computer and for the next hour he devoured every result page he came across with astounding eagerness and surprise. Slowly, everything was falling into place.

The arrest files… the tattoos, he remembered. A few minutes later, after searching the RHD’s own database, he was staring at the arrest records from the old case.

‘This can’t be…’ he stuttered the words catatonically. A mixture of excitement and fear sucked the heat out of his body. Suddenly, he remembered what he’d seen just a few weeks ago and his stomach knotted. ‘How blind have I been?’ he murmured before turning to his computer for one last search. A name that could bring everything together. It took him less than a minute to find it.

‘I had it right in front of me,’ he whispered, staring blankly at his computer screen. ‘I had the answer right in front of me.’

He needed one final confirmation and it had to come from the San Francisco Police Department. After speaking to Lieutenant Morris from the SFPD over the phone he waited impatiently for Morris to fax him an arrest file. When the file came through half an hour later Hunter stared at it soundless. His mind battling reality. It was an old photograph, but there was no doubt in his mind – he knew who that person was.

Proof. That’s what every investigation comes down to and Hunter had none. There was no way he could link the person on that photograph to any of the Crucifix Killings and he knew it. No matter how sure he was, without proof he had nothing. He checked his watch one more time before reaching for the phone and placing one last call.