by Chris Carter
Garcia squatted down next to him.
Nicole’s body had been left with her extended right arm pointing west, in a straight line with the lone leafy tree. Her right leg pointed southwest. Consequently, her left arm and leg pointed east and southeast respectively. Her head pointed north.
Hunter’s eyes flicked from the picture to the tree and the surrounding vegetation several times.
Garcia ran his palm against the grass around him. Despite it being untreated, it wasn’t very high – about two to three inches long, maybe four in some places. It felt dry, which was understandable because Los Angeles had seen nothing but cloudless skies and a beating sun for the past two weeks. Not a drop of rain.
‘There’s no give on the ground whatsoever,’ Garcia said, his fingers still moving back and forth on the grass. ‘That’s why forensics got no footprints anywhere.’
Across the road at LAX, another airplane approached and touched down.
Garcia stood up, his eyes searching the vicinity once again. Something didn’t sit right with him.
‘Why would the killer dump her body right on this spot?’ he asked.
He was facing west, looking at the leafy tree. There were dense clusters of trees north, south and further west, past the lonely tree. Pershing Drive and the airport were east, directly behind him.
‘I was just asking myself that same question,’ Hunter said.
‘The killer clearly wasn’t attempting to hide the body,’ Garcia added. ‘Just look around. There are thicker clusters of trees just about everywhere on this field. He could’ve hidden the body behind any of them. Why place it here, in the most exposed spot there is? Plus, this guy was arrogant enough to write us a note just to tell us his chosen name – DEATH. And I say “us” because he knew the note would be found during the autopsy examination. Not to mention the whole role-playing abduction game that he played with the victim. This guy’s got an ego, Robert, and it’s a big one. He’s confident, seemingly intelligent and knowledgeable. He knows it, and he wants us to know it as well. If such a person wanted to hide a body, he wouldn’t dump in a city field. He would’ve simply made it disappear. No traces. No witnesses. Nothing. He dumped the body here because he wanted it found.’
Hunter agreed with a nod. ‘But something still isn’t right,’ he said.
Garcia looked around again.
‘One thing we know,’ Hunter continued, ‘is that perpetrators who place their victims’ bodies into specific positions or shapes, with the intention of them being found that way, are very particular about everything, every detail. Most of them to the point of OCD.’ Hunter indicated the photograph of the body in situ. ‘The position of the hands, feet, head, the hair, the clothes and the makeup, if any, the surroundings . . . it all has to perfectly match the picture in the perpetrator’s head.’
Above them another aircraft approached for landing. Hunter waited for the sound to die down before moving on.
‘This guy put a lot of time and effort into what he did – the abduction, the torturing, the kill method, the positioning as he disposed of the body, the note in her throat . . . everything was done with tremendous attention to detail. There’s no way he would want us to miss any of it. He wants us to know how good he thinks he is.’
‘I agree,’ Garcia said. ‘And that’s why this is bothering me. He would’ve wanted the body found, and fast, before the elements started to eat at it, before something or someone disturbed its placement. For that, this whole site is wrong. It’s too secluded, too far back from the road . . . wait a second.’ Garcia lifted a hand as he looked at Hunter.
‘Who found the body?’ Hunter asked. ‘Who called it in?’
‘I was about to ask you the same question,’ Garcia said, already searching through the file he had with him, looking for the 911-occurrence sheet. ‘Who would’ve come across a body way out here?’ A few more page flips. ‘OK, here it is.’ Garcia pulled a sheet out of the folder. As he read it, his forehead creased with doubt. ‘Anonymous call, made by a male cyclist at 12:39 a.m.’
The green field they were in sure as hell wasn’t a city park. It looked more like a small forest than anything else, squashed between an airport and a water treatment plant. People didn’t walk their dogs there. They didn’t go for runs, or cycle about in a place like that, especially not at night.
‘A cyclist riding past here at around half past midnight spotted the body?’ Garcia repeated, pointing to Pershing Drive. ‘From that road? That’s what, about thirty to forty yards away? In pitch-black darkness?’ He chuckled at the idea. ‘I don’t think so.’
Fifteen
Taking extra care not to damage her recently manicured pale-pink fingernails, Grace Hamilton opened the FedEx package. Inside, she found a standard, brown paper legal-size envelope addressed to the Mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Bailey. Across the front, in large red letters, were the words URGENT – PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL.
She reached for the FedEx wrapper and checked the sender’s name on the back. Tyler Jordan.
Grace frowned at it. It wasn’t a name she recognized. The address was local, somewhere in Victoria Park, Central LA. Despite having a fantastic memory for names and addresses, she couldn’t remember seeing it before either. The space for the sender’s contact number had been left blank – typical.
She pulled her chair closer to her computer desk and called up the application that allowed her to go into Mayor Bailey’s contacts book. After typing in her password, she entered the family name ‘Jordan’ and clicked ‘Search’. She got three matches, none of them were Tyler. None of them from Los Angeles. She tried ‘Tyler Jordan’ as a double-barreled name, first with a hyphen, then without.
Nothing.
Grace didn’t find that strange at all. It wasn’t unusual for members of the public to mark their mail ‘urgent’, or ‘for your eyes only’, or ‘private and confidential’, in the hope that it would reach the mayor’s desk unopened. But that rarely happened.
Mayor Bailey received hundreds of letters from members of the public every month, but it was Grace’s job to make sure that he didn’t waste his valuable time reading the sort of rubbish that got sent in on a daily basis.
Whoever Tyler Jordan was, it didn’t look like he, or she for that matter as Tyler could be male or female, was known to Mayor Bailey. That fact alone already placed the envelope in the ‘not so urgent’ stack, but elections were just around the corner and Grace couldn’t afford to ignore something potentially important.
She called up an Internet map application and entered the address on the back of the envelope. What she got was a boarded-up grocery store on an empty concrete lot.
Strange, she thought, but that only served to heighten her curiosity.
Grace knew that, before reaching her desk, every single postal item had already been thoroughly scanned by security for harmful chemicals and explosives, so it wasn’t like she was taking a health risk. But x-ray machines and other security devices couldn’t read any internal text, or make out any included images.
In the two and a half years she’d been working for Mayor Bailey, she’d seen obscene drawings, threatening letters, hate mail, pornographic pictures of people offering themselves to him (female and male), conspiracy theory plots . . . the list was almost endless.
Anything deemed remotely threatening was passed on to the Secret Service. Anything viewed as indecent or obnoxious went straight into the shredder by her desk.
Grace stared at the envelope in her hands for a short while, then at the ‘not so urgent’ mail pile on her desk. She pursed her lips.
‘Oh, what the hell,’ she said seconds later as she slid open the envelope. One more crazy letter or silly picture wouldn’t really make a difference to her. If there was one thing that Grace Hamilton was not it was prudish.
What she got was a second envelope. This one was crispy white, similar to the ones sent with wedding invitations. On the front of it someone had typed the words – DO NOT IGNORE THIS.
Now Grace was really intrigued.
She checked the back of the new envelope. No sender’s name or address. Not that she really expected to find any.
She bit the right side of her bottom lip, considering.
A couple of seconds later, her decision was made. She reached for the sword-shaped letter opener on her desk, tore open the top of the envelope and tilted it so its contents could slide out.
The first item to drop on to Grace’s desk was a white piece of paper that had been folded in half. Something had clearly been written inside. She could make out the outlines of the letters.
The second item was a Polaroid photograph.
It slid on to her desk face down.
Grace paused, amused by the irony of it all. One more decision to make – what to look at first, the picture or the folded piece of paper?
In her head, she eeny meeny miny moed between the two items.
The picture won.
She reached for it and turned it over.
Her heart skipped a beat.
‘Oh, sweet Jesus!’
Sixteen
Garcia’s gaze stayed on the 911-occurrence sheet for just a moment longer before finding Hunter’s face.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘We need to listen to this call.’
Hunter nodded, looking at Garcia’s Honda Civic. They could access it through the onboard police computer. They quickly made their way back to the car.
After navigating through a couple of screens, Garcia finally found the emergency-line log record.
‘Here it is,’ he said as he double-clicked the icon for the sound file.
DISPATCHER (female voice): ‘Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?’
MALE VOICE: ‘Umm, I think I just came across a dead body. She looks dead.’
The voice sounded a little rushed, but not exactly nervous.
DISPATCHER: ‘You said you came across a female body?’
Keyboard clanks.
MALE VOICE: ‘That’s right. I was just riding my bicycle, then suddenly, there she was on the grass.’
DISPATCHER: ‘And she isn’t moving at all?’ MALE VOICE: ‘I’m telling you, she looks dead.’ DISPATCHER: ‘Is she a friend of yours? Do you know her name?’
MALE VOICE: ‘No, I’ve never seen her before.’
DISPATCHER: ‘OK, sir, can you tell me your location?’
MALE VOICE: ‘Yeah, I was cycling north on Pershing Drive, just by the airport – LAX, past the Hyperion water treatment plant.’
There was a pause as the dispatcher waited for the caller to carry on, but he said nothing else.
DISPATCHER: ‘OK, sir, that’s great, but can you be a little bit more specific? Pershing Drive is quite a long road.’
MALE VOICE: ‘Once you pass the treatment plant, heading north, there’s a large field full of trees on the left. She’s just on the grass by a tree that’s a little detached from all the other trees. I’d say maybe about . . . maybe three hundred yards past the plant.’
DISPATCHER: ‘Have you tried talking to her, or waking her up? Maybe she was just tired, or had a little too much to drink and fell asleep by the tree. Can you see any liquor bottles by her side? Any trace of vomit on her clothes or on the ground by where she’s lying?’
MALE VOICE: ‘No, I haven’t touched her, and you’re not listening to me.’
The voice got a fraction more anxious. He pronounced the next three words very slowly.
MALE VOICE: ‘She looks dead.’
DISPATCHER: ‘Yes, sir, I am listening to you. I just need to establish the correct service to dispatch. Can you see any blood around her, or on her person?’
MALE VOICE: ‘No, I can see no blood.’
DISPATCHER: ‘OK, and are you sure she isn’t breathing? Can you check for a pulse?’
MALE VOICE: ‘No, I’m not touching no dead body. Look, you need to send the police up here. Fast.’
DISPATCHER: ‘They’re already on their way, sir, and they’ll be with you very shortly. Can I please have your—’
The caller disconnected.
Hunter and Garcia gave each other a measured stare.
‘I want to listen to this again,’ Garcia finally said, double-clicking the sound file one more time. Another airplane took off and Garcia increased the volume a touch.
Hunter checked his watch, sat back and closed his eyes, but his attention wasn’t on the dialogue anymore.
When the file had finished playing, Garcia breathed out.
‘This is all wrong,’ he said.
Hunter checked his watch again.
‘At night,’ Garcia continued, ‘not even Superman could have spotted the body from this distance. There’s no way a cyclist saw her all the way over there from here.’
‘Especially when that call wasn’t even made from here,’ Hunter said.
Garcia’s forehead creased. ‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s something missing from the recording, Carlos.’
Garcia’s stare became more purposeful and he instinctively looked at the onboard computer screen and the sound file icon again.
A Boeing 767 began its run up the runway and Garcia realized what he had missed.
‘There are no background airplane noises,’ he said.
They were next to LAX, the third busiest airport in the USA with an aircraft either taking off or landing every forty to sixty seconds, day and night. The roar of jet engines was practically constant. Even with the windows shut, they could still hear it. Hunter had timed it – the call had lasted one minute and forty-two seconds. Even during the night, when air traffic was reduced, they should’ve heard at least two planes either landing or taking off.
‘There are no airplane noises,’ Hunter confirmed.
‘Sonofabitch,’ Garcia said, switching off his car stereo.
‘Like you’ve said, this guy is very confident.’ Hunter tilted his head to one side. ‘And he wants to play.’
‘The killer made the call. We need to get a copy of this recording to audio forensics.’
Hunter agreed.
Garcia regarded him for a couple of seconds. ‘But we’re not going to get anything from it, are we?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Hunter replied. ‘If we do, it will only be because the killer wants us to.’
Seventeen
After leaving the green wooded area by LAX, Hunter and Garcia drove to Nicole Wilson’s abduction site – Audrey Bennett’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Hunter had no intention of bothering Ms. Bennett for another interview. He knew that there was nothing else she would be able to tell him that she hadn’t already told Missing Persons, and Hunter had thoroughly read the interview transcript twice over. What he really wanted was to have a look at the outside of her property and its grounds. He wanted to understand how easy it had been for the killer to gain access to it, break into the house and take Nicole from inside without being noticed. And as Hunter had expected, it’d been particularly easy.
One didn’t actually drive up to the Hollywood Hills as much as crawl up. The roads were steep and twisty with so many abrupt changes and so few signs that even residents who’d been living there for years found it easy to get lost. The beauty of it, some said, was that it was exactly that sort of confusion that made Upper Laurel Canyon and Hollywood Hills so desirable to the people who lived there. Who’d need a gated community when few could find their way around anyway?
Audrey Bennett’s house was located just off an elbow bend on Allenwood Road and, like all the other houses on that side of Upper Laurel Canyon, there was no gate, wall, or even a decorative fence protecting any part of her property. No surveillance cameras either. Any visitor, known or unknown, could very easily walk on to the grounds of the house and, if so desired, all the way around to its backyard without being restricted by even the flimsiest of doors.
After asking Ms. Bennett’s permission, Hunter and Garcia took their time studying the house, grounds and backyard before taking to the road. As they started walk
ing, they saw two little girls dressed in pink ballet outfits come running out the door of one of the neighboring houses. A short and plump woman followed. The three of them jumped into a blue SUV that was parked on their driveway. As they drove off, both girls waved at Hunter and Garcia from the back seat.
Slowly, both detectives walked from Allenwood Road all the way down to Laurel Pass Avenue. On their way back up to the Bennetts’ house, they also walked the length of Carmar Drive, which branched out to the left of the main road. Twice they passed a group of kids on skateboards, none older than thirteen years old, who were making the most out of the steep hills and tight bends.
‘Who needs to go to a gym?’ Garcia said, wiping his brow with the palm of his hand. With the sun high in the sky, the temperature at that time of the day had hit 82˚F. ‘Just go up and down these roads once a day and you’ll be as fit as an athlete. Just look at this.’ He pointed at his face. ‘I’m sweating like a pig.’
Hunter paused and watched the kids skate for a few moments. As they reached the bottom of the long hilly road, collected their skateboards and began the long walk back up to the top, a new thought entered his mind. He quickly returned to Garcia’s car, picked up the files that Missing Persons had sent over to the RHD and started flipping back through them.
‘Something wrong?’ Garcia asked.
‘I’m looking for the report on the door-to-door Missing Persons conducted around the area at the beginning of their investigation.’
Reflexively, Garcia’s eyes scanned the house across the street from them, then the one next to it, before going back to Hunter.
‘Why?’
‘They drew a blank, didn’t they?’ Hunter asked. ‘No one remembered seeing anything out of the ordinary on the night Nicole was abducted. No vehicles that didn’t belong. No conspicuous characters lingering around. Nothing.’
