The Death Sculptor

Forty-Eight

After the morning’s development, the rest of the day began to drag. Nothing else materialized. Not surprisingly, the address Alice had on file for Ken Sands was out of date, and since he had left prison only six months ago, he hadn’t filed for any documents that could help track him down – no driver’s license, no passport, no national-welfare registration, nothing. His social-security record still showed the old address.

Hunter had a team trying to track down a bank account, a gas or electricity bill, anything that could point them in the right direction. They were also looking into Sands’s old friends. People he hung out with before going to prison, people he met in prison who were now on the outside; anyone, really. But obtaining information from old friends or prison mates was a lot harder than it sounded, and Hunter knew it. In Los Angeles street law, ratting someone out, especially to the cops, was a crime punishable by death. Even his enemies wouldn’t talk easy.

Hunter had also requested all the prison-visitation records for Sands and Ortega, but because of California privacy laws it could be a day or two before they got a judge to sanction the request, and another few before they got the files.

Gina Valdez, Ken Sands’s girlfriend, whom he had beaten almost to death, had disappeared. Getting your name changed in America wasn’t a very complicated process. And in the Internet age, changing your whole identity was getting easier and easier. No one knew if Gina had changed her name, or created a new identity. No one knew if she was still in LA, in California, or even in the country anymore. But one thing was for sure: she didn’t want to be found.

As an LAPD detective, Andrew Nashorn had sometimes worked with a partner, Detective Seb Stokes. Stokes wasn’t involved in Ken Sands’s arrest, but Hunter gave him a call anyway. They arranged to meet first thing tomorrow morning.

Brian Doyle, the head of the LAPD Information Technology Division, had gotten back to Hunter towards the end of the afternoon with what he’d managed to extract from the computer they found in Nashorn’s apartment. Hunter and Garcia spent an hour pouring over all the emails retrieved, and what had been compiled from the computer’s Internet history. It became obvious that Nashorn was a frequent user of several escort agencies, many of them specializing in fetish, bondage and sadomasochism services. There was also a string of porn websites, and though many of them could be considered hard edge – none were illegal.

The emails gave them nothing suspicious, no threats or anything that could be construed as one. Nor had they made any progress identifying the second person who had talked to Derek Nicholson in his house when he fell ill. What Nicholson’s nurse had told Hunter, about Nicholson clearing his conscience and telling someone the truth about something, was still rolling around in Hunter’s mind.

Hunter and Garcia spent the rest of the day researching on the Internet, looking for anything that even remotely resembled the new shadow image cast by the sculpture made of Nashorn’s body parts. They found nothing that looked like the entire image. The figure of the distorted head with horns could easily be matched to a representation of most devils or demons. And that applied to religions, belief systems and cultures across the globe. But there were also mythological horned gods, like the Greek god Pan, or even Apollo and Zeus, whose early representations were as a horned man.

Devil or God, Hunter thought. Take your pick.

Without having a point of reference, it was like looking for a blond hair on a sandy beach.

The second part of the image proved even more elusive. Two figures standing and two lying down, practically on top of each other. Hunter and Garcia found nothing, and Hunter had to start considering the possibility that Alice could be right. Maybe the image had no hidden meaning at all. Nothing religious. Nothing mythological. No parallel connotation. Maybe the meaning was as simple as she had suggested – an evil killer looking down at his victims. Two down, two to go. And that meant he would kill again.