The Night Stalker

Forty-Three

Captain Blake’s lips parted in disbelief. They were exactly the same words Hunter had found spray-painted on the ceiling in the butcher’s shop where Laura Mitchell’s body had been found. Her stare refocused onto the body on the floor for a moment before moving back to Doctor Hove.

‘OK, I thought what we had here was just suspicion and conjecture. I was obviously wrong. But if you knew this was the same killer, given that he placed a bomb inside his first victim that took the lives of two other people inside one of your autopsy rooms. .’ she pointed to the letters on the wall, ‘. . and again he’s telling us he did the same here, what the hell are we doing in this room? Where’s the bomb squad? And why did you risk turning the body over?’

‘Because whatever it was the killer placed inside her this time,’ Hunter replied, gently rubbing between his eyebrows, ‘it’s already gone off inside her.’

‘Judging by where she bled from,’ the doctor added, ‘that’s exactly what we think. As we said, it all points to an internal hemorrhage, but not one we’ve ever seen before.’

‘What do you mean?’ Captain Blake asked.

‘Internal hemorrhages usually occur from traumatic injuries, blood vessel rupture or certain specific diseases, carcinoma being one of them. But the blood accumulates inside the body, hence the term internal. And the amount is just a fraction of what you see here. This woman bled as if she had been mutilated. Whatever it was that caused it, it was inside her.’

No one said anything for a moment.

‘There was nothing else in this room other than what you can see,’ Brindle took over. ‘The body, those old shelves on the walls and that stainless steel table.’ He gestured towards it. ‘There are no chains, no ropes or any sort of restraints anywhere. A closer look at the victim’s wrists and ankles shows no abrasions or marks. She wasn’t tied down. She also couldn’t have been locked in here because there’s no lock on that door.’ He shook his head as he considered it. ‘The truth is: we can’t find anything that suggests why she wasn’t allowed to just walk out of here. So far there are no indications that anyone else was in here with her when she died. It looks like the killer simply dumped her on that table and left. And as we said, she wasn’t bleeding then. But the killer somehow knew she would never get out of this room alive.’

Hunter had already noticed that the table in the room had been raised higher off the ground than normal. ‘Does this look strange to anyone?’ He pointed to the wooden blocks under each of the four table legs.

Everyone frowned.

‘The first victim, Laura Mitchell,’ he continued, ‘was left on a stainless steel counter inside a butcher’s shop in East LA. That counter had also been raised higher off the ground by bricks. First I thought that maybe the old butcher there had been some sort of a giant, but no, I checked. He was five foot eight.’

‘So you think the killer did this deliberately?’ the captain asked. ‘Why?’

‘I’m not sure yet.’

They all paused as they heard heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. A couple of seconds later a crime lab agent also dressed in white Tyvek coveralls pulled the door open. He brought with him a large, black plastic flight case.

‘It’s OK, Tom,’ Brindle said, reaching for the case. ‘I know how to set it up.’

The agent left the case with Brindle and exited the room.

‘This is why we had to turn her body over,’ Doctor Hove explained as Brindle undid the locks to the case and started unpacking its contents. ‘That’s a portable tactical X-ray unit. It’s mainly used for the investigation of small-to medium-sized objects like parcels, boxes and luggage. The picture it produces is not of the same quality as you’d get from a proper hospital X-ray machine, but it’ll serve our purposes here. We’re pretty confident that whatever was placed inside her has, as Robert said, gone off, and that’s what killed her. But we all know what this killer is capable of.’ She looked at Captain Blake. ‘I don’t wanna move her before I have an idea of what we’re dealing with.’

They all watched as Brindle set up the equipment. ‘Since we don’t have a tripod,’ he said, ‘can somebody hold the camera over her?’

‘I’ll do it,’ Garcia said, returning to the body and once again carefully avoiding the pools of blood. He took the small digital camera from Brindle.

‘Just keep it directed at her stomach. Two to three feet away will do,’ Brindle explained before approaching the laptop he’d set up on top of the black plastic flight case. ‘That’s all there is to it. The camera connects wirelessly to the computer and produces an X-ray image. You can press the on button now, Carlos.’

He did, and all eyes reverted to the laptop screen as the image materialized.

Brindle and Doctor Hove’s eyes widened in amazement and confusion, and they both craned their necks a little closer.

Hunter squinted, trying to understand what he was looking at.

Captain Blake’s jaw dropped and her mouth went instantly dry, but she was the only one who managed to ask the question in everyone’s mind.

‘In the name of God, what. . the hell. . is that. . inside her. .?’