The Night Stalker

Seventy-One

Like a contagious disease, Hunter’s bad luck seemed to spread throughout every aspect of the investigation. The documentaries he and Garcia got from the A & E TV network revealed nothing. Bryan Coleman was right about the Canvas Beauty production: it looked low budget right from the starting credits. Laura Mitchell and Kelly Jensen did appear in it, but for no longer than a few minutes each. They mainly spoke about how living in the West Coast had influenced the way in which they painted.

As Coleman had said, the majority of the piece concentrated on Martina Greene, the daughter of the old A & E TV regional director. The whole thing played more like an advertisement than anything else. Besides Martina, Laura and Kelly, only two other female painters appeared in the documentary — one of them, just like Martina, was naturally blonde. The other one was much older — in her fifties. Hunter checked with both of them, neither had seen nor spoken to Laura or Kelly since. Neither of them recognized James Smith from the picture Hunter showed them either.

Hunter’s team was checking the background of every single person whose name was on the Canvas Beauty documentary credits list. So far, everyone had checked out, but the list was long.

The other three documentaries Hunter and Garcia had obtained from the A & E TV network featured several painters from all over the country — none of them brunette females in their thirties.

Doctor Hove’s lab had confirmed that the dust retrieved from under Kelly Jensen’s nails had come from a mixture of mortar and red clay, consistent with common wall bricks. That meant that she could’ve been kept absolutely anywhere, from a self-built underground bunker to an inside room or an outside garage.

Hunter’s traffic camera gamble didn’t pay off either. The closest road camera to Kelly Jensen’s art studio was a mile away. Her Trans-Am was never spotted on the night she was taken. The South Bureau Traffic Operations’ captain had explained that most of the inner-city cameras were only infraction activated — like going through a red light or breaking the speed limit. They didn’t film twenty-four hours a day. The ones that did were strategically positioned on main roads, avenues and interstates. Their principal function was to alert Traffic Divisions about congestion hotspots and accidents.

Early the morning after Kelly’s disappearance, a camera in Santa Monica picked up her car as it traveled down San Vicente Boulevard going west, in the direction of her apartment building. But the cameras don’t monitor the whole of the boulevard. The vehicle was lost as it approached the final stretch that led to the beachfront.

As Hunter had requested, Forensics had picked up the car from Santa Monica and gone over every inch of its interior and boot. The hairs found matched to Kelly Jensen. The few dark fibers retrieved from the driver’s seat matched the ones found on the wall behind the large canvas in Laura Mitchell’s apartment. They came from the same skullcap. There were no fingerprints.

It was close to midnight, and for the first time since the beginning of spring the sky had clouded over. Menacing rain clouds and strong winds were closing in from the north, bringing with them the unmistakable smell of wet grass and turf. Hunter was sitting in his living room, reading through reports from his research team into Laura, Kelly and Katia’s professional and personal lives. Their backgrounds were totally different from each other. Other than physically having the same overall look and being an artist by profession, the team hadn’t found any other links between the three women.

Laura had come from a success-story family. Her father, Roy Mitchell, started his life slum-poor. Having run away from violent and abusive parents when young, most of the food Roy ate in his early years came from trash cans in the back alleys of hotels and restaurants. He was only fourteen when he started selling discarded secondhand books he bought from hotel staff. By the age of eighteen he’d opened his first bookstore, and from there business prospered. His autobiography — Back Alley Books — topped the US non-fiction book chart for twelve weeks, and spent a further thirty-three in the top twenty-five. He married the young lawyer who helped him set up his book business, Denise, at the age of twenty. Laura was the younger of their two children.

Kelly, on the other hand, had had a pretty unadventurous life. Born into a small, church-going family in Montana, she was destined to become just another Treasure State housewife, tending to her husband, kids and garden. Her arts schoolteacher recognized her talent when it came to painting, and for years kept on telling her that she shouldn’t walk away from her gift.

Katia came from the richest of all three families, but she never took anything for granted. She became a violinist of her own accord, and no matter how much money her family had, talent and dedication can’t be bought. Everything she’d achieved, she did it through her own hard work.

Hunter put the report down and stretched his arms high above his head. From his small bar, he poured another double dose of single malt. He needed something comforting and rich on the palate this time. His eyes rested on the bottle of Balblair 1997 and his mind was made. He dropped a single cube of ice in his glass and heard it crack as the dense, honey-colored liquid hit it. He brought the glass to his nose and breathed in the sweet, vanilla oak vapors for a moment. He took a small sip, allowing the alcohol to reach every corner of his mouth before swallowing it. If heaven had a taste, this would be pretty close to it.

Hunter stared out his window at a city that he had never really understood, and that was getting crazier and crazier by the day. How could anyone understand the madness that went around in this town?

A thin sheet of rain had started falling. Hunter’s gaze dropped to the files and photographs scattered on his coffee table. Laura and Kelly stared back at him with terrified pleading eyes, their ragdoll smiles grotesquely outlined by rough stitches and black thread.

Knock, knock.

Hunter frowned as his eyes first shot towards his front room door and then quickly to his watch. Way too late for visitors. Besides, he couldn’t even remember the last time someone knocked on his door.

Knock, knock, knock. A lot more urgent this time.