The Night Stalker

Thirty-Eight

Hunter and Captain Blake had to pull all the stops to get an overworked and understaffed Forensics division to send two evidence technicians to a non-crime scene so fast. First impressions showed no indications that anyone else other than James had been inside that apartment. There was no hidden cell or prison room. If Smith was their killer, he’d kept Laura Mitchell captive in a secret location somewhere else. And that secret location was probably where he was heading to right now. The difference this time was that he now knew the police were onto him, and that would certainly influence his actions. He’d be edgy, maybe even in a panic. And a killer in a panic was catastrophic. Hunter knew that only too well from harsh experience.

They needed to catch him fast. Before he left Norwalk. Before he disappeared.

They didn’t.

Hunter had immediately arranged for James Smith’s snapshot to be emailed from Parker Center to Norwalk’s LA Sheriff’s Department Station. Available black-and-white units were dispatched to search the streets almost immediately. Officers on foot patrol and inside Norwalk’s Metrolink Station were also sent Smith’s picture via SMS text. Airports, train and bus stations were put on high alert. But six hours after Hunter and Garcia had knocked on Smith’s door, he still hadn’t been sighted.

Both evidence techs had been going over the apartment for the past three and a half hours. They’d need confirmation from the lab, but their best guess, based on what they’d seen, was that all the fingerprints they’d found so far seemed to have come from only one person — James Smith.

Key points inside Smith’s bedroom and both bathrooms were sprayed with Luminol but no blood was detected. They also ran a UV light test on all the bed linen and on the fabric sofa and rug in the living room. No evidence of semen stains either.

Hunter and Garcia kept out of the way, staying in the collage room. There was enough in there to keep a platoon occupied for a week. Initially, Hunter wasn’t worried about sieving through everything. All the information on those pages seemed to pertain to Laura Mitchell, not James Smith. What he was looking for was some sort of personal diary, or journal, or notebook. Anything that could give them a clue to where Smith might have gone or who he was.

They found nothing. No documents, no passport, no driver’s license. Not even any utility bills.

‘Anything that could give us any sort of lead, guys?’ Hunter asked one of the techs some time later.

‘Yeah, my guess is you’re looking for a cleaning freak,’ he said, bending down and sliding his index finger across the top of the skirting board before showing the result to Hunter. ‘Nothing, no dust. My wife is pretty tight on her housecleaning, but even she doesn’t dust the skirting boards every time she cleans. The only place with any dust is that freaky room you guys have been in. There’s a cupboard in the kitchen packed solid with cleaning materials. Enough bleach to fill a Jacuzzi. This guy is either obsessed with cleaning, or he was expecting us.’

The door to door of the building also produced no information of interest. Most residents said they’d never even seen the person who lived in apartment 418. The ones who did never talked to him. The next-door neighbor, a small, fragile man in his sixties with glasses as thick as bulletproof glass, said Smith always said hi to him whenever they bumped into each other on the corridor. He said Smith was always very polite. That sometimes Smith went out dressed in a suit. No one else in that building ever wore a suit. The old man also said that the walls in the building weren’t very thick. He could often hear Smith cleaning, vacuuming, scrubbing and moving around. He did that a lot.

The Forensics agents took shoes and underwear from Smith’s wardrobe, and a razor blade, a comb, a toothbrush and a deodorant spray can from his bathroom. They didn’t want to take any chances where a DNA signature was concerned.

Night had darkened the sky when Hunter received a call from Operations.

‘Detective Hunter? It’s Pam from Operations.’

‘What have you got for me, Pam?’

‘Well, next time you decide to go after someone, please can you pick a person with a more unique name. James is the most common first name in the United States. Smith is the most common last name in the United States. Put them together and we have approximately three and a half million males in the USA called James Smith.’

‘Great.’

‘In the LA area alone there are about five hundred of them. But the interesting thing is: none are registered to the Norwalk address you gave me.’