The Death Sculptor

Forty

Alice Beaumont printed out another document page and placed it on the floor next to the tens of pages that were already there. With Hunter and Garcia out of the office, she had temporarily turned the place into her own private research haven.

She had a quick stab at finding out what the shadow image created by the second sculpture could mean, but after three quarters of an hour searching the net, she had nothing that even remotely excited her. Unlike the first shadow puppets, she found no mythological meaning that could be attached to the entire image. If she broke the image down, then it was easy to link the distorted head with horns to any devil figure she liked, but that didn’t explain the four smaller shadow figures created by Nashorn’s severed fingers.

Alice wanted to carry on searching, but she knew that, for now, the investigation’s priority was to work on the lists of perpetrators Derek Nicholson had put away over the years. If she could find some sort of link to any case Andrew Nashorn had worked on, either as a detective or as a Support Division officer, that could give them the starting point they were so desperately looking for.

Alice sat on the floor with all the printouts surrounding her and started rereading and regrouping them in lots of two, three, four and sometimes five pages.

She had brought her own laptop in with her this morning. She had a feeling she would be needing a few of the powerful development applications she had in her hard drive. And she was right. Hunter had told her to go back five, maybe ten years in her search for perpetrators who’d been released, had escaped, or were out on parole. That gave her way too many names and files to read through. Couple that with all the new names and files she’d got from Andrew Nashorn’s investigations, and also a list of original victims who personally blamed Nicholson for losing their case, and she’d need at least a week to get through them all. But that was where her expert computer skills came in.

The first thing Alice did when Hunter and Garcia left was to write a quick application that would read through text files and search for specific names, words, or phrases. The application could also link files together using a variety of criteria. The problem she had was that not all the files were digitized. In fact, about 50 per cent of them were still on paper only. Getting a simple list of names was easy, even going back twenty-six years. But the actual case files only really started being digitized around fifteen years ago. Older cases were being added to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s databank as fast as possible, but the sheer number of them, together with a lack of personnel, made the process laborious and very, very slow. The same applied to the LAPD and Andrew Nashorn’s cases.

Alice was doing really well with what she had. Her application had already managed to flag and link forty-six documents, but she had yet to start looking into Nashorn’s investigations.