The Night Stalker

Seventeen

Garcia turned on the fan and stood in front of it for a minute before going back to his desk. He couldn’t even imagine how hot that room would be during summer.

He’d been going over the crime-scene pictures in his computer, enhancing and scrutinizing them, looking for anything they could use to point them in the right direction as to the victim’s identity. So far, nothing. No tattoos or surgery scars. The moles and freckles he could see on her arms, stomach, neck and cleavage were too common and not prominent enough to really be classed as identifying marks. As far as he could tell, she was a natural brunette and her breasts were her own.

Her arms showed no signs of needle marks and her frame wasn’t skinny and wasted. If she was a junkie, she certainly didn’t look like one. Despite the small patches on her cheeks that carried that old-person’s-skin look Hunter had mentioned, the victim couldn’t have been any older than thirty-three, at a stretch. If the old saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul was true, then her soul was scared beyond belief when she died.

Garcia leaned forward, placed his elbows on his desk and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He reached for his coffee cup, but it had long gone cold. Before he could pour himself a new one, a clicking sound announcing the arrival of a new email came from his computer. The Missing Persons files he’d requested. They’d promised to send them over in forty-five minutes. That had been two hours ago.

Garcia read the email and let out a high-pitched whistle. Fifty-two brunette Caucasian women with hazel eyes, aged between twenty-seven and thirty-three, and somewhere between five five and five eight in height had been reported missing in the past two weeks. He unzipped the attachment containing all the files and started printing them out, first the photographs, then their personal information sheets.

He poured himself a new cup of coffee and gathered all the printouts into one pile. The photos would have been brought into the Missing Persons Unit by the person who reported them as missing. Even though Missing Persons would have asked for a recent picture, Garcia knew that some of those photographs could be over a year old, sometimes more. He’d have to allow for subtle changes in appearance such as hair length and style, and fullness of the face due to weight loss or gain.

The main problem Garcia faced was that he had only the close-up photo of the victim, the one from the crime scene, to compare them to. The swelling on the victim’s lips together with the thick black threaded stitches forcing them tightly together deformed the bottom half of her face. Matching any of the photographs sent from Missing Persons to that one would be a long and laborious task.

An hour later Garcia had reduced the possible matches from fifty-two to twelve, but his eyes were getting tired, and the more he looked at the pictures, the fewer distinguishing features he saw.

He spread the twelve printouts out on his desk, creating three lines of four with their respective information sheets next to them. The photos were all of reasonable quality. There were six face portraits, passport-style; three where the subject had been cropped from a group picture; one showed a wet-haired brunette sitting on a jet ski; another smiling brunette was by the pool; and the last picture showed a woman at a dinner table holding a glass of champagne.

Garcia was about to start the whole process again when Hunter walked through the door and saw him hunched over his desk, staring intensely at the group of neatly arranged photographs.

‘Are those from Missing Persons?’ Hunter asked.

Garcia nodded.

‘Anything?’

‘Well, I started with fifty-two possibilities and have been comparing them to our crime-scene photos for over an hour now. The swelling on our victim’s face makes things a lot harder. I’m now down to these,’ he nodded at the twelve photos on his desk, ‘but my eyes are starting to play tricks on me. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to look for any more.’

Hunter stood in front of Garcia’s desk and allowed his eyes to jump from photo to photo, spending several seconds on each one. A moment later his gaze settled on the facial close-up of the unidentified victim. He moved them all nearer together, making a new photo group before reaching for a blank sheet of paper.

‘Every face can be looked at in several ways,’ Hunter said, placing the sheet of paper over the first photo at the top of the group, covering two-thirds of it. ‘That’s how composite sketches are created. Individual characteristics added together one by one.’

Garcia moved closer.

‘The shape of the head and ears, the shape of the eyebrows, eyes and nose, the mouth, the jaw line, the chin. .’ As he mentioned each facial feature, Hunter used the paper sheet to cover all the other ones. ‘We can very crudely use the same principle here.’

A few minutes later they had discarded another eight photographs.

‘I’d say our victim could be any of these four,’ Hunter said finally. ‘They share all the same physical features — oval face, small nose, almond-shaped eyes, arched eyebrows, prominent cheekbones. . the same as our victim.’

Garcia agreed with a nod.

Hunter checked the personal fact sheets Garcia had stapled to the back of each picture. They’d all been reported missing over a week ago. Their home and work addresses were scattered all over town. At first glance there seemed to be no other similarities between the four women other than their looks.

Hunter glanced at his watch. ‘We’ve gotta check them all out today.’

Garcia reached for his jacket. ‘I’m ready.’

Hunter handed him two of the photographs. ‘You take those and I’ll take these two.’

Garcia nodded.

‘Call me if you get lucky.’