by Chris Carter
Captain Blake was about to ask something else when Hunter stopped her with a hand gesture.
‘Captain,’ he said, his voice urgent but non-aggressive. ‘We can go over all this and whatever else you like once we get back to the PAB, but right now we need to figure out what to do about the diary. Yes, we have found out why this killer wants his diary back so badly, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’ll still call me at five o’clock today with instructions on how to deliver the book back to him.’
‘The tracker is still a good idea,’ Keller said, bringing everyone’s eyes to him. ‘I’m sorry.’ His hands signaled surrender. ‘I know I’m not part of the investigation, but if I may say so . . . if we can fit a tracker into his diary, which I think I can, I do believe that you stand a great chance of getting this guy . . . whoever he is. Nothing really changes from the original plan, except that instead of placing a tracker inside the front cover, I’ll do it to the back one.’
No one in that room really needed any convincing.
‘I’m fine with that,’ Captain Blake said.
‘I agree,’ Hunter joined in. ‘We have no reason to change our plan, unless—’
‘Unless we find something else hidden in the back cover,’ Garcia said, anticipating what Hunter was about to say.
‘Let’s go find out, shall we?’ Keller said, gesturing toward the door.
Fifty-Nine
All four of them rushed back to Electronics Lab number two. In there, Keller carefully set the internal leather sheet of the front cover back to its original place, without reapplying any glue. He would do that later. Right then, his main concern was to have a look at the back cover. He removed the cling film sheet that was covering the diary and flipped the book to the last page, exposing the inside of the back cover and an identical leather sheet to the one he’d just dealt with. He switched the steam gun back on and, while he waited for it to heat up, he covered the body of the diary with another sheet of protective cling film.
‘This could take about twenty minutes,’ he announced to the group. ‘Maybe more.’
‘Anything we can do to help?’ Hunter asked.
‘Unfortunately no, not really.’
‘Well, I’m staying,’ Garcia said, rounding the workbench to the other side. ‘This back-and-forth fuss between here and the PAB is tedious, and though I do want to go through all the entries in the diary, the rush to find why this killer wanted his diary back so badly is over.’
Hunter agreed with a nod.
‘Is there a coffee machine somewhere around here?’ Captain Blake asked.
‘Yes, sure,’ Keller replied, as he once again swapped his glasses for the watchmaker’s magnifying ones. ‘Go to the end of the corridor and turn right. You’ll see it.’
‘I’ll help,’ Garcia said, as Captain Blake got to the door. ‘You want anything?’ he asked Hunter, who shook his head. ‘Vince?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
As Garcia and Captain Blake left the room, the steam gun beeped behind Keller. He reached for it, grabbed the scalpel and started with the top right-hand corner of the leather sheet – the outside corner.
‘Do you think they bought it?’ Keller asked Hunter. ‘I mean, the story about the water damage and reinstalling software?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hunter replied. ‘But I could think of nothing else.’
‘It was a good response,’ Keller agreed. ‘But my concern is . . . and once again, I’m sorry for butting into something that I probably shouldn’t, but what if they, whoever the “voices” are, try to contact Miles Sitrom, whoever he is, just for confirmation?’
‘It’s a risk,’ Hunter admitted it. ‘But I don’t think they would.’
‘How come?’
‘I’m willing to bet that that chat room is the only way they can contact each other,’ Hunter explained. ‘Because it’s in the interest of both parties to remain completely anonymous.’
‘That’s true,’ Keller agreed.
‘Once we logged in,’ Hunter continued. ‘The voices did say that they weren’t expecting to hear from our killer yet, probably because they understand that their request, whatever that was, will take the killer a few days to acquire.’
‘What kind of request?’
Hunter breathed out. ‘Victims that match a specific profile.’
Keller paused and looked at Hunter through over-magnified eyes.
‘The real killer himself is busy not only searching for this new subject, but he also has the lost diary problem to deal with, so I’m pretty sure that he won’t be contacting the voices for a few days.’
‘And if this tracker trick works,’ Keller said. ‘You won’t need a few days.’
‘That’s the hope,’ Hunter agreed.
Garcia and Captain Blake came back into the lab. By then, Keller had managed to melt just about an inch and a half of glue.
‘So how’s it going?’ Captain Blake asked.
‘I don’t think that we’re going to find any secret hidden in the back cover,’ Keller replied, without looking up.
‘Why is that?’ Garcia asked, approaching the workbench.
‘The glue on the front cover,’ Keller confirmed. ‘It dissolved a lot faster than this one, which did get me wondering earlier. What it tells me is that the glue on the front cover was tampered with before, as we now know it has, but the sheet on the back cover is showing a lot more resistance, indicating that it’s still factory standard. It hasn’t been messed with.’
‘That’s a good thing, right?’ Captain Blake asked.
‘Presumably. Let’s wait and see.’
It took Keller twenty-nine minutes to finally dissolve the glue that held the leather sheet to the back cover. When he at last flipped the sheet over, everyone breathed out a sigh of relief. Just like Keller had predicted, there was nothing on the back cover.
In silence, Keller studied the cover for a full minute.
Everyone waited.
‘I don’t think we’re going to have a problem,’ Keller finally announced. ‘I just need to carve a sliver off the cover and I’m very confident that I can insert an activated twenty-four-hour tracker in here seamlessly. You’d be able to run your hand over the inside of the back cover and you wouldn’t notice a thing.’
‘How long do you need?’ Captain Blake asked.
‘About half an hour to create the tracker,’ Keller replied. ‘Then maybe another half an hour to re-glue both cover sheets back in place, but . . .’ He lifted a finger, halting everyone. ‘For this tracker to be paper-thin, it needs to not have an activation button, or a battery that needs to hold power for more than twenty-four hours.’ Keller nodded at Hunter and Garcia.
‘Yes, sure,’ Garcia agreed.
‘Also,’ Keller continued. ‘Due to how thin this tracker will be, it will have limited strength. If whoever you’re tracking takes the Metro, or enters a building and goes underground more than one sublevel, the signal will be interrupted.’
‘Understood,’ Hunter said.
‘So,’ Keller carried on. ‘If there’s no other urgent need for the diary right now and this killer will only give you instructions on how to hand it back to him at five o’clock this afternoon, may I suggest that we wait until maybe three or four before activating the tracker.’ He checked his watch. It was coming up to 1:00 p.m. ‘If we activate it in an hour’s time, when I’m done creating the tracker, we’ll be throwing a few precious hours away.’
‘Good point,’ Captain Blake agreed.
‘I can re-glue the sheet to the front cover now to gain time,’ Keller said. ‘As well as start on the tracker, but maybe I should wait until four this afternoon to activate it, put it in place and seal the cover.’
‘It’s your call, Robert,’ Captain Blake said. ‘You’re the one who’s going to have to take his call and deal with this piece of shit’s instructions.’
‘Are you sure that if you activate the tracker around four this afternoon, you’ll have enough time
to seal it in place seamlessly?’ Hunter asked Keller.
‘I’m positive.’
‘All right. Do what you need to do.’
Sixty
Once they all got back to the Police Administration Building, Captain Blake returned to her office and Hunter and Garcia went back to their desks and the diary entries.
Though there seemed to be no more need to search for the reason why this killer wanted his diary back so badly, Hunter continued to read everything in the diary slowly and very carefully, still trying to read between the lines. Maybe they now knew why the diary was so important to him, but the text entries could still reveal valuable information concerning the killer’s identity, a location, or maybe even who ‘the voices’ were.
The seconds ticked away, and the more they read, the more shocked they became. All those murders – the barbarism, the sadism, the grotesqueness of everything . . . all of it – wasn’t down to a psychopathic maniac on a serial murder rampage. This was barbarism, unimaginable pain, sadism and grotesqueness on demand. These victims were being murdered simply because some people wanted to see it happen . . . because they wanted their sick fantasies to become a reality.
‘Do you know what?’ Garcia said from his desk, interrupting Hunter’s angry thoughts. ‘I don’t even know who I’d like to get my hands on the most right now. I don’t know if it’s this sack-of-shit mercenary killer or if it’s the waste-of-space, spineless assholes who request and pay for these murders to happen. So these weird fucks have these sick fantasies in their heads, but they don’t even have the guts to live them themselves. They pay someone else to do their dirty work for them and then sit at home in front of a computer screen, watching the result and probably playing with themselves.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ Hunter agreed. ‘Maybe that’s why they do it, or maybe they’re just being smart and covering their tracks. They are not taking any risks here. If anybody is going to get caught, it will be the killer himself, not them. They’re ghosts in cyberspace, Carlos. Unidentifiable. Probably not even the killer knows who they are.’
Garcia breathed out anger.
‘Or maybe their fetish,’ Hunter continued, ‘ . . . their fantasy, really is to just watch, not to take part. Believe it or not, that is a thing.’
‘Still,’ Garcia said, with an irritated shake of the head. ‘They are just as guilty as the killer.’
‘There’s no doubt about that,’ Hunter agreed.
Garcia slumped back into his seat, his posture defeated. ‘This world has lost its head. It has lost its sense . . . its dignity.’ He shook his head dismissively. ‘This isn’t a videogame, you know? This is real life . . . real people.’
Hunter stayed quiet, but he couldn’t disagree with his partner. The only difference was, he had come to the conclusion that humanity had lost its sense a long time ago.
After a short break, both detectives went back to the diary. To Hunter, it seemed that with each new entry he read the level of violence and sadism went up a step. This killer’s victims had been subjected to some of the most horrific torture methods and deaths imaginable. There were mutilations, decapitations, ancient torture techniques and instruments – which the killer had to craft out of wood and metal himself – dismemberments, burned alive, eaten by hungry rats, and more. Just like with the first two entries, most of the new ones ended with specific longitude and latitude coordinates to where the victim’s remains had been buried. With two of them, their remains had been dropped into the ocean and would no doubt be lost forever. A third victim, a twenty-two-year-old student from UCLA, had her remains cremated and the ashes flushed down a toilet. Hunter and Garcia would have to inform her parents of that.
‘I feel sick,’ Garcia said, as he finished reading another entry. ‘I literally feel sick to my stomach.’ He stood up and placed a hand against the top of his chest while wincing. ‘Which entry are you on?’
‘Just finished number ten,’ he replied. ‘Six more to go. You?’
‘One less than you. Did you find anything?’ Garcia asked, knowing that Hunter had been doing his ‘reading between the lines’ thing. ‘Any hint of a clue that could point us in any direction?’
Hunter’s shake of the head was slow and considered. ‘Nothing. If the people behind the voices in that chat room covered their tracks by being totally anonymous, the killer has covered his tracks by being extremely careful with what he wrote.’
‘This thing with the tracker in the diary,’ Garcia said, now massaging his chest. ‘It’s got to work. We need to stop this guy.’
Hunter nodded in silence, because he feared the same thing. If their plan with the tracker in the diary didn’t work, Hunter was sure that they would never hear from this killer again. He and the voices would certainly dissolve the Dark Web chat room they saw earlier and simply create another one with a different web address – problem solved. The killer could also change cities – go to another metropolis like Chicago, New York, Dallas, wherever, because the city in which he operated had no bearing on the final result of what he did. He could find victims anywhere.
‘I need to go get something with sugar in it,’ Garcia said, still struggling with the sick feeling crawling up his throat. ‘A Dr. Pepper or something. Would you like anything?’
‘I’m OK,’ Hunter replied. ‘Thank you.’
As if on cue, just as Garcia stepped out of the office, Hunter’s cellphone rang inside his jacket pocket.
‘Detective Hunter,’ he said, bringing the phone to his ear. ‘UVC Unit.’
‘Hey there,’ a young female voice said. ‘How’s it going?’
It took Hunter’s brain a couple of seconds for it to finally match the voice to a face. As he did, worry came over him like a shroud.
‘Angela?’ he asked, his voice full of apprehension.
‘Yes, who did you think it was?’ Angela’s voice, on the other hand, sounded bored. ‘I just wanted to check what time you’ll be dropping by with the tablet you promised me?’
‘Hold on a second. How are you calling me?’ Hunter asked. ‘Whose phone are you using?
‘Well . . . mine, of course.’
‘How are you using your phone when you gave me your SIM card?’ On reflex, Hunter’s hand shot into his right jacket pocket. It found nothing.
‘Well . . . I did hand it to you . . . but I took it back.’
‘What? When?’ His fingers were still rummaging his pocket for the SIM card.
‘When we were sitting outside in the backyard. I was smoking a cigarette, remember?’
Hunter could barely believe what he was hearing.
‘Why would you do that? Didn’t you hear or understand why I asked you for your SIM card? This killer could be tracking you right now. You need to end this call, and you need to do it now.’ Hunter paused for a second. He knew he should’ve taken the phone instead of the SIM card. He cursed himself under his breath.
‘Yes, of course I understood why you did it, but c’mon, we talked about this. This guy isn’t 007. Tracking a stranger’s phone isn’t that simple. Plus, I’m being guarded by “the best of the best” – your words, not mine – and I don’t think this guy has a death wish or the desire to rot in prison. He’s not going to simply turn up at an LAPD safehouse just like that, is he? Anyway, take a chill pill; I haven’t been on the phone for long. I just needed a couple of songs to help me start the day. I need my motivational music or I don’t even get out of bed.’
‘Music?’ Hunter jumped to his feet. ‘Angela, when did you put your SIM card back into your phone?’
‘Earlier this morning. Once I woke up. And it was to listen to just two songs. Not even ten minutes of streaming.’
‘Jesus Christ, Angela.’
‘All right. All right. I’ll take the SIM card out again. Just don’t forget the tablet, will you?’
Right then, just before Angela disconnected, a distant sound came through on Hunter’s earpiece that sent horror tumbling down his spine. It sounded like a doorbel
l.
‘What was that?’ Hunter asked, worry coating every word – but it was too late. The next thing he heard was the sound of the line going dead.
Sixty-One
Garcia pulled open the door to the UVC Unit office just a fraction of a second before Angela had disconnected from her call to Hunter. As he entered the room, he brought his can of Dr. Pepper to his lips and had another long sip.
‘No don’t hang up . . .’ Hunter almost shouted down his phone. ‘Angela . . .? Angela . . .?’ He looked at the display screen again. The call had ended.
‘You were calling Angela?’ Garcia asked, chuckling as he got to his desk. ‘She’s still giving you attitude, huh? That girl needs to learn some manners.’
Garcia’s words hit a wall on Hunter. He was way too busy going into his recent calls list and pressing the call-back button. He brought the phone back to his ear and waited.
‘The person you have called is temporarily unavailable,’ a recorded voice said, indicating that Angela had turned off her phone.
Hunter quickly searched his contacts for the phone numbers of the two SIS agents. He called Martin first. The phone rang once . . . twice . . . five times before Martin’s voice mail picked it up. Hunter left an urgent ‘call me back’ message and disconnected. Then he dialed Jordan’s number and got exactly the same result.
‘You have got to be kidding me,’ he said, before once again leaving an urgent ‘call me back’ message.
‘What the hell is going on, Robert?’ Garcia asked.
Hunter quickly explained the conversation he’d just had with Angela.
‘Are you sure that what you heard was a doorbell?’ Garcia asked.
‘That’s what it sounded like.’
‘But it could’ve been something else?’ Garcia pushed.
‘Yes,’ Hunter replied. ‘It could’ve, but then why isn’t anyone answering their phones?’
Garcia had no answer.
