Written in Blood

by Chris Carter

  Hunter paused again, his forehead creasing as his eyes narrowed. This time, his concern wasn’t with any of the vocabulary used in the entry. ‘Circumvented’, though not the most common of words, could not really be considered a military term. No, it hadn’t been a word in the text that had caused Hunter to stop and frown; it had been the text itself. The meaning behind it.

  Hunter sat back on his chair, crossed his arms over his chest and stared thoughtfully at his computer screen.

  ‘Everything OK?’ Garcia asked, stretching his neck a little to the left to look past his monitor.

  ‘Umm,’ was Hunter’s reply, which was delivered together with a single nod.

  Garcia was not convinced. ‘I know that face, Robert. What’s up?’

  ‘I’m not really sure.’ Hunter tried again. He used his thumb and forefinger to gently massage his closed eyelids. ‘Maybe I’m just overthinking things – trying too hard to find a way through to this guy, when really there’s nothing here.’

  Hunter knew from experience that trying too hard tended to sabotage the brain. The longer a person tried without success, the more frustrated that person became. Frustration not only shortened the lifespan of the thought process, but it also tricked the brain into distorting images, words and sounds, making you see and hear what wasn’t really there and what hadn’t been said.

  ‘OK,’ Garcia said back. ‘So what do you think you’re over-thinking? Maybe I can help.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Hunter agreed. ‘But let me carry on until the end of the entry. Maybe things clarify themselves.’

  ‘Sure,’ Garcia replied.

  Hunter went back to the words on his screen.

  But it was when the voices moved on to the kill method that a real problem appeared. ‘Dressed in her traditional Geisha outfit,’ the voices had said, ‘she is to be violently open-handed slapped across the face several times, until blood is running down from her nose and lips. No close-fisted punches. Open-handed slaps only. She’s not to be rendered unconscious. With blood on her face, her kimono is to be to be savagely ripped open and the subject raped . . .’ That was when I halted the voices. NO. I will NOT rape anyone. If that were their request, they would have to go away again and come back with something else. I WILL NOT RAPE ANYONE.

  Hunter stopped reading once again.

  ‘This feels wrong,’ he said under his breath. ‘This feels all wrong.’

  Forty-Five

  Despite Hunter keeping his voice to no louder than a whisper, his words traveled the short distance between his desk and Garcia’s with ease, reaching his partner’s ears loud and clear.

  ‘What’s all wrong?’ Garcia asked, his tone full of worry.

  Hunter didn’t reply. Instead, he sat still, his mouth semi-open, his eyes locked onto his computer screen, as he reread the last few lines of text again and again.

  ‘Robert,’ Garcia called, a little louder this time. ‘What feels all wrong? What did you find?’

  Hunter shook his head momentarily, as if trying to shake away a bad dream.

  ‘Whereabouts are you in the text?’ he asked.

  ‘About halfway through the third entry,’ Garcia replied.

  ‘So we’re about even,’ Hunter said, gesturing Garcia to come closer. ‘Have a look at this.’

  Garcia joined Hunter at his desk. ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘Here.’ On his screen, Hunter indicated the last piece of text he had read. ‘This part, right here.’

  Garcia read the section twice, before looking back at Hunter with questioning eyes.

  ‘Nothing strikes you as wrong in this?’ Hunter asked.

  ‘The killer declining to go ahead with rape is surprising,’ Garcia admitted. ‘But I wouldn’t exactly call it wrong.’

  ‘Yes, but here’s the thing,’ Hunter tried to clarify. ‘He didn’t only decline to go ahead with the rape request. He told the voices to go away and come back with something else.’

  Garcia shrugged. ‘In a way, that could be seen as a good thing, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, sure,’ Hunter agreed. ‘But I’m not talking about that, Carlos. I’m not talking about the rape. I’m talking about the killer halting the voices, and not only telling them that he won’t do as he’s being told, but also reversing the tide . . . commanding the voices to go away and come back with a different request. From a psychological point of view, when considering schizophrenia, that just wouldn’t happen.’

  ‘Well,’ Garcia said, quickly angling his head to one side, ‘since my knowledge of schizophrenia is pretty basic, I’m going to have to ask you – why not?’

  ‘Schizophrenia is what causes a person to hear voices in their head,’ Hunter explained. ‘But, as you know, those voices don’t really exist. They are created and manifested by that person’s own subconscious. The problem lies in the fact that in their heads, those voices sound so real and so different from their own that they really believe that someone, or something, is indeed talking to them. With schizophrenia, there are essentially two distinct types of aural delusions.’ Hunter used the fingers on his right hand to count them out. ‘One: voices that come with hallucinations, meaning that the person will actually visualize someone, or something, talking to them. The proverbial imaginary friend. And they will look just as real to them as you do to me right now. In those cases, the schizophrenic will inevitably give the imaginary person, or thing, a name – John, Paul, Jenny, The Dragon, Cthulhu . . . you get the idea, right?’

  Garcia nodded.

  ‘OK,’ Hunter carried on, once again gesturing toward his computer screen. ‘So because in his entries the killer refers to the voices he hears as simply “the voices”, and not by specific names, it led me to believe that our killer fell into the second category of aural delusions – voices alone – no visual hallucinations accompanying them. Those cases tend to be a little more extreme.’

  ‘More extreme?’ Garcia questioned. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if a person is hearing voices that they perceive as real, but seeing absolutely no one whatsoever, more often than not, that person will have a tendency to attribute those voices to powerful non-human entities – God, the Devil, ghosts, saints, a dead relative . . . whatever.’ Hunter lifted both hands in surrender, knowing that he was overstretching his explanation. ‘Anyway, the voices inside someone’s head, in both cases – visual hallucinations or not – are always way too powerful, way too tormenting, way too haunting and certainly way too dominating for a schizophrenic to have any sort of control over them, never mind being able to tell them to go away . . . And that’s why they’re considered schizophrenic.’ Hunter paused to give Garcia a moment. ‘If this killer is able to halt the voices inside his head whenever he wants, then he has just cured himself of schizophrenia. If you can control the voices, you can control the mental illness.’

  Garcia finally saw the logic in Hunter’s reasoning.

  ‘And if this killer is able to halt the voices in his head whenever he wants to,’ Hunter added, ‘why only do it now when he was asked to rape someone? Why didn’t he stop them right at the beginning, when the voices first came to him commanding him to kill? Where’s the sense in that?’

  It was Garcia’s turn to shake his head as if trying to dislodge the memory of a bad dream.

  ‘There’s something else as well,’ Hunter continued, scrolling back on the image on his screen until he got to the desired location. ‘Right here.’

  Garcia’s eyes moved to Hunter’s screen and the section of text that he had indicated.

  Despite the unusual level of detail concerning the subject’s attire, finding a target wouldn’t pose any real problems, except, of course, for the personality issue, which, in all honesty, could be circumvented, as there’s no real way in which the voices could discern her personality.

  ‘“Circumventing the personality issue”?’ Hunter said.

  ‘I think what he means here is that on this occasion the voices could be deceived.’

  ‘Bing
o,’ Hunter agreed, his eyes widening as he nodded. ‘By saying that “there’s no real way in which the voices could discern her personality” he’s alluding to the fact that, somehow, the voices wouldn’t know any better if the victim was an introvert or not, therefore, they could be deceived.’ Hunter paused Garcia with a hand gesture. ‘Now, how do you deceive something that’s a product – a manifestation – of your own thoughts . . . your own subconscious?’

  A new penny dropped.

  ‘You can’t,’ Garcia replied.

  ‘Exactly,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘It’s your own brain. It knows everything you know.’

  Garcia took a step back from Hunter’s desk and pinched his bottom lip with his thumb and forefinger. ‘So what is the conclusion that we can draw from all this? If any.’

  Hunter slumped back on his chair, as if he’d just gone ten rounds with a heavyweight champion.

  ‘I’m not one hundred percent sure,’ he finally replied. ‘But we’re only on entry number three out of sixteen. It’s too early to start concluding anything just yet. But from a purely psychological point of view, this puts a lot of doubt on this killer suffering from schizophrenia.’

  Garcia feared exactly that.

  ‘So how the hell is he hearing voices?’ he asked.

  Hunter breathed out. ‘What if these voices have absolutely nothing to do with a mental illness?’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘What if these are real voices – real people – telling him what to do?’

  Garcia’s head jerked back. ‘What . . .? That’s crazy. How . . .? Who would those people be?’

  Hunter shrugged. ‘I don’t know . . . Look, maybe I’m over-thinking things, because this makes very little sense right now.’ He pointed at his screen. ‘I guess that the best thing to do is to carry on . . .’

  Garcia agreed and went back to his desk.

  Hunter still had no idea of what he was searching for and, if anything, the more he read, the more questions he had.

  If that were their request, they would have to go away again and come back with something else. I WILL NOT RAPE ANYONE. Needless to say that the voices weren’t happy, but that’s not who I am. I’ve never raped anyone. Despite all I’ve seen. Despite all I’ve been through. I’ve never raped anyone – BFOA or otherwise. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to start now.

  Hunter paused again, his eyes moving back a few words on his screen to settle on the acronym the killer had used – BFOA. With a troubled look in his eyes, he searched his memory for anything that could, even remotely, lend some meaning to it.

  Nothing.

  Instinctively, Hunter called up his browser and ran a quick Internet search. Most hits came back for Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithms.

  ‘That’s not it,’ Hunter whispered to himself with a shake of the head.

  One of the links he got on the returned results page was to an acronym finder.

  On that page, he entered the letters ‘BFOA’ into the ‘abbreviation to define’ box and clicked the ‘Find’ button. A blink of an eye later, he had five new definitions listed on a new results page:

  Beller Freibad Open Air (Germany).

  Bull Fights on Acid (band).

  Broward Football Official’s Association (Broward County, Florida).

  Birmingham Football Officials Association (Birmingham, Alabama).

  Boao Forum of Asia (Hainan, China).

  In the context of the diary entry, none of them made any real sense.

  At the top of the acronyms results page, different tabs showed how many results that particular acronym had yielded in relation to specific categories. The results page had defaulted to ‘All Definitions’, showing the five results Hunter had read. The other ‘category tabs’ were:

  Information Technology – zero results.

  Science and Medicine – zero results.

  Organizations, Schools, etc. – four results.

  Slang, Chat and Pop Culture – one result.

  Military and Government – zero results.

  Hunter breathed in.

  ‘What the hell does BFOA stand for, do you know?’ Garcia asked from his desk.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ Hunter replied. ‘So far, nothing I’ve found makes any sense in the entry’s context.’

  ‘I can’t come up with anything either,’ Garcia said.

  Hunter scratched his nose as he read the sentence on his screen one more time. ‘Let’s come back to it in a while. I want to get to the end of this new entry first.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Garcia said.

  I had expected the voices to go away and come back another day. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after, but I was wrong. Despite their disappointment, a brand-new request was voiced by them almost immediately, as if they already had a list of desired subjects in place and they had expected my negative reaction to their original request. The new request was very different not only from the previous one, but from all of them. The level of physical detail, which is usually quite specific, was relatively vague, with most of it left for me to choose, but the major difference between this request and all the previous ones was that the voices didn’t request one subject. They requested two.

  Forty-Six

  Hunter stopped reading again, this time to shrug at thin air. In psychological terms, very little of what he was reading made any real sense. He rubbed his eyes, before picking up the reading from where he’d left off.

  They requested two – Gender: Male and Female. Everything else – hair color, eye color, age, height, etc. was irrelevant. What wasn’t irrelevant was the status of their relationship. The couple had to be married and they had to have been so for over five years. How long over five years was also irrelevant. Kids: also irrelevant. Straight off the bat and since the voices had left it at my discretion, I decided that I would choose a childless couple. In a city like LA, where traditional family values seem to constantly be going head-to-head with having a successful career, with fewer and fewer professional couples choosing to have children, finding such a couple didn’t strike me as being a difficult task. And I was right. All I had to do was visit a few bars and restaurants, and right on the first night of my search, in a restaurant somewhere in Santa Monica, I spotted a young couple sitting at a window table. Neither seemed to be older than thirty years of age. She was tall and slim with shoulder-length auburn hair and magnified brown eyes sitting behind tortoiseshell glasses. I found her to be neither attractive nor ugly, just unremarkable. The man sitting with her was at least three inches taller than his partner, with a thick beard and a slicked-back haircut. They were both casually dressed and the wedding bands on their fingers told me what I needed to know, but what really called my attention to them at first was the fact that, despite them sitting at the same table, they might as well have been by themselves. Their attention, and I mean both of them, was glued to their cellphones. I observed them for almost ten minutes and they didn’t exchange a single word. In fact, they didn’t exchange a single glance. They smiled, all right, but not at each other. They smiled at their screens. I entered the restaurant and took a seat at the bar, so I could continue observing them. When their food arrived, they did put their phones down, but not away. The phones, both of them, were placed on the table, by their plates. As they ate, their eyes danced between their food and their cellphones, and even then, the phones were coming out on top. It was only when they ordered the check that they actually looked at each other and exchanged a few words. The man took care of the bill. She thanked him with a peck on the lips. I followed them outside and into a cocktail lounge around the corner, where they seemed to be meeting a few friends. They stayed for a couple of hours, talking and laughing, but only with their friends, not between themselves. After that, I followed them home – an apartment in Wilshire Montana. A few days later, Doug and Sharon Hogan received a visit from a police officer running a routine survey on home security in their neighborhood. People can be so gullible. Even in a c
ity like LA, they’ll always open the door to a police officer. Date and time: June 10th 2018 –19.30. Location: apartment 39, number 92, 10th Street, Wilshire Montana in Santa Monica. Photo: both of them later that same night.

  Hunter took another quick break to call up the Missing Persons database search application. In the ‘search’ line he entered the names the killer had just mentioned. The result came back in a fraction of a second.

  Doug Hogan, a thirty-one-year-old business analyst, and Sharon Hogan, a twenty-nine-year-old kindergarten teacher, were reported missing on 19 June 2018, by Sharon’s mother, Mrs. Sandra Carson. After not hearing from her daughter for several days, which according to Mrs. Carson was unusual, she tried calling Doug, her son-in-law, but also got no reply. She then tried both of their workplaces, only to be told that neither of them had been to work for an entire week. That was when Mrs. Carson decided to go knocking on their door. With no reply, she first got in touch with the building’s supervisor, who allowed her into her daughter’s apartment. Despite the place showing no signs of a struggle, Mrs. Carson contacted the police, saying that she ‘just knew’ that something wasn’t right. On 19 June she filed an official Missing Persons complaint with the LAPD. Neither Doug nor Sharon were ever found. The investigation was still showing as open. The file contained several photographs – a few individual ones and a couple of the two of them together.

  Hunter closed the Missing Persons database and returned to the diary entry.

  When it came to the delivery method, once again, the voices were very clear – the couple was to be stripped naked and chained together, back-to-back. ‘They are then to be placed inside a large container, one big enough to accommodate both of them without problems. Then the game begins. They are to be told that one of them is going to die, but the trick is – THEY have to choose which one.’ Since I didn’t have any sort of container that could comfortably fit two people, I had to improvise. Thankfully, this is LA; a city where having a swimming pool in your backyard is almost a must, but better yet, a city where wildfires have completely destroyed homes and mansions that most people could only dream of ever owning. Places that were now charred, devastated and abandoned. Places that no one wanted anymore. A forty-minute drive around the fire-affected area in Malibu and I could take my pick. I have no idea of what the house I chose had looked like in the past, as it had been completely destroyed by the latest forest fire. I also had no idea who the house had belonged to, but what difference did any of that make, right? Anyway, among the ruins, covered in charred rubble, I found something perfect for the purpose of the delivery method. Something much better than a swimming pool. I found a Jacuzzi big enough for two, maybe even three people.