by Chris Carter
‘He’s preaching, being condescending even, reminding us of who we are, what our job is, what the public expect of us, and what happens when we fail or make a mistake.’ There was a short pause. ‘There’s also a blatant accusation, saying that we see only what we choose to see. And this line –’ he pointed to it on the note – ‘ ‘‘And the problem with that is that when they play at being blind men, people suffer . . . people get tortured . . . and people die.” Though very aggressive,’ Garcia continued, ‘it doesn’t sound like a threat. It sounds like a statement.’
‘You’re exactly right,’ Hunter agreed. ‘There’s no other way of interpreting those two paragraphs, Carlos. They’re clear and concise. No ambiguity, no sarcasm, no play on words, no double meanings, and nothing hidden between the lines.’
Garcia’s attention didn’t deviate from the note.
‘Now, have a look at the third paragraph and tell me what you think. Again, forget double meanings and all. Just read it like a letter.’
So now I have a question. If any of these so-called experts stood face to face with someone like me, if they looked straight into my eyes, would they see the truth inside me? Would they see what I have become, or would they falter?
Garcia thought about it for a moment. ‘It’s . . . a challenge,’ he said. ‘He’s defying us to go find him. To pick him out of a crowd. To identify him. That’s the invitation to the game. As you’ve said before, he wants to play.’
‘Right again,’ Hunter said. ‘But there’s something else. Something not actually hidden. You just need to read it carefully.’
Garcia frowned and reread the paragraph a couple more times. ‘OK,’ he said, standing up straight and shrugging. ‘I’m missing it, then. What else? What am I not seeing?’
‘He’s not only challenging us to pick him out of a crowd, Carlos. He’s questioning if we’d be able to see what he has become. That’s a very powerful statement.’ Hunter had another sip of his coffee. ‘Think of what that word actually means.’
‘He’s telling us that he wasn’t always like this,’ Garcia said, looking at Hunter, his voice a touch more excited then a moment ago. ‘He wasn’t always a monster, a killer. He’s not your textbook sociopath because he wasn’t born that way. He, for the lack of a better word, became that way.’
Hunter nodded slowly.
‘Something changed him.’
Twenty-Nine
The man woke up as the first rays of the morning sun seeped through the dirty curtains covering the window on the east wall of his small bedroom. Out on the streets, garbage trucks were already noisily moving around and, far off in the distance, a couple of sirens wailed like coyotes barking at the moon.
He’d finished with Sharon Barnard in the early hours of the morning, but he’d felt too tired to drive all the way back to his place, a two-storey house somewhere northeast of Los Angeles. He’d found the property many years ago, hidden away in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but empty terrain. He had paid cash for it and used false documentation, which meant that the house could never be traced back to him. Because the building had been so run down, he’d got it for an absolute bargain. After years of repairs and heavy modifications, which he did himself, he ended up with just the perfect place. No matter how much noise anyone made from inside his house, no one would ever hear it. No one would ever come for them.
The one-bedroom apartment he was in at the moment was just a crash pad somewhere in East Los Angeles. He had paid a year’s rent in advance, all in cash. He really only used it from time to time, when circumstances demanded. Just like this morning.
As soon as the man opened his eyes, he swung his feet off the single bed, sat up straight and rubbed his face vigorously with both hands. He didn’t have a watch, and there was no clock anywhere in the room, but it didn’t matter. He knew exactly what time it was.
He reached for the medicine bottle that was on the bedside table, poured two capsules into his hand and flung them into his mouth. He didn’t need any water to wash them down. He simply filled his mouth with saliva, threw his head back with a jerk, and down they went. He walked naked to the window, his feet padding across the worn-out and scratched wooden floorboards. Outside, city life was slowly trickling on to the streets.
The man crossed over to the bathroom and paused before the small mirror on the wall just above the washbasin. He could barely recognize the stranger staring back at him now. So much had changed over the years. He would never be the same again. He knew that full well but it didn’t matter. Not to him. Not anymore.
In his reflection he saw the proud glint of accomplishment deep inside his eyes, and that caused him to smile, something he didn’t do too often.
He brushed his teeth and then stood under a warm shower, washing meticulously from his head down, before using a brand new razor blade to shave off every strand of hair from his body, including his head, a ritual he repeated every morning. When he was done, he dried himself and returned to his bedroom.
From the wardrobe he retrieved the only two items that hung there – a dark suit and long-sleeved white shirt. The tie rack on the back of the wardrobe door held a single black and white striped tie. There was a solitary drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. It contained one pair of white boxers, a pair of black socks and a large plastic laundry bag. He slipped on the boxers and got dressed, then took the bed sheet, the pillowcase and the cover sheet and stuffed them into the laundry bag, together with the clothes he’d been wearing the night before.
He walked into the living room, grabbed a red pen and a loose sheet of paper from the bottom drawer of an old two-drawer cabinet, and took a seat at the wooden table that faced the window.
The man barely had to think about what he wanted to write. He’d gone through it in his head a thousand times, until he had it worded perfectly, just the way it needed to be.
Once he was done, he carefully folded the note in half and slipped it into a brown paper envelope. This time, the note wasn’t addressed to the mayor, or any other politician. He didn’t need to use the same trick again because this time he knew exactly who to address it to – Detective Robert Hunter, LAPD Robbery Homicide Division.
‘OK, Detective,’ he said in an angry voice. ‘Let’s see how good you really are.’
Thirty
Despite leaving San Francisco International Airport fifteen minutes late, US Airways flight 667 landed at Los Angeles International Airport exactly on time, at 08:55 a.m.
Tom Hobbs had been the lead flight attendant on the fully booked, one hour and twenty-five minute flight, and he had struggled through every second of it. By the time the flight touched down, Tom’s brain was turning to mush.
He staggered through the airport, pulling his inflight case behind him. He felt tired, hungover and nauseated, but the worst was now behind him. Or so he thought.
Tom slipped on his sunglasses and stepped out of the building into another scorching hot summer’s day. Outside he paused for an instant, trying to decide what to do. He had driven to the airport yesterday morning. His car was parked at the Central Terminal Area parking lot, building 2A, but he was in no state to drive. He felt shivery, his headache was now so intense it could wake the dead, and he hadn’t eaten anything yet; courtesy of the cocktail of drugs he had consumed overnight. Finally, deciding to listen to reason, Tom chose to leave his car where it was and take a cab home.
The almost ten-mile trip from Los Angeles LAX to the house he shared with Sharon in Venice took the cab driver just under half an hour. Twice Tom almost asked the driver to pull up by the side of the road. The stop and start motion, due to traffic lights and road congestion, brought him to the verge of being sick, but somehow he managed to hold it all in.
‘You OK back there?’ the cab driver asked, checking Tom through the rearview mirror. He was sloshing on the backseat with his head propped against the window, his eyes closed.
Tom’s reply was barely audible.
‘Buddy, you all right?
Do you need me to stop? You don’t look so good.’ The driver asked again, this time reducing his speed.
Tom forced his eyes open. ‘No, it’s OK. I’ll be all right.’ His voice sounded hoarse and fatigued. ‘I just need to get home and get some sleep.’
‘Rough night?’ The driver followed the question with a dubious smile.
Tom saw it, and didn’t like it.
‘No, just bad food. I’ll be OK once I get home and get some sleep.’
The driver didn’t make any more small talk, but stepped on it and kept checking on Tom via the rearview mirror every couple of minutes. The faster he got to Tom’s address, the better. The last thing he wanted was to have to clean up puke from his back seat.
Tom stepped out of the cab and squinted at how bright the day seemed, even through his dark glasses. The glaring light made him feel sick again. He took an enormous deep breath, hoping that that would be enough to keep his nausea at bay.
‘I’ve gotta stop partying like this,’ he said to himself as he started toward the house. But that certainly wasn’t the first, and probably wouldn’t be the last time he’d recited those exact same words. The flesh was weak, he had admitted to that many times.
As he paused before his front door, his stomach roared so loudly he thought that maybe his large intestine was now devouring the small one. But despite how hungry he felt, Tom would think about food later. All he wanted right now was to collapse in bed and sleep until tomorrow morning.
He reached for his key and slid it into the door lock. His stomach roared again, this time louder and for longer, making him curl over a little with pain. OK, maybe he would have to eat a candy bar or something before heading for bed, just to try to calm the storm brewing inside his belly.
Tom tried rotating the key, but it didn’t move.
‘Hum!’
He tried a couple more times.
Nothing.
‘What the hell?’ He twisted the doorknob. The door was unlocked. Tom found that very strange. They never forgot to lock the door, not even when they were in the house. Venice wasn’t the most secure neighborhood in LA.
‘Sharon,’ he called, pushing open the door.
The first thing that hit him was the smell, an odd combination of putrid and bittersweet that seemed to rip its way though his nostrils before lodging itself at the back of his throat, choking him and making him gag. He felt a drop of bile come up through his esophagus and spill into his mouth. For some reason, instead of spitting it out, he swallowed it back down.
Tom squeezed his eyes tight behind his shades. The smell had also made his eyes water. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes.
‘What the fuck? Sharon?’ he called again. Had she left a whole chicken outside the fridge in this heat?
He coughed a couple of times before finally looking up and into his living room. His eyes were still half blurred, so it took them a few seconds to refocus.
For a moment Tom hesitated, his tired and confused brain struggling to make sense of the grotesque images his visual nerves were sending in. Reality had just morphed into the sickest nightmare he’d ever had.
‘What?’
His whispered voice caught in his throat as a rush of adrenalin took over his body. It fired bullets of uncontrollable fear down his spine and into his heart. Bitter bile shot back up from his stomach but this time it wasn’t only a drop, and this time it would’ve been impossible for Tom to swallow it all back down.
Sick exploded out of his mouth before he collapsed on to the floor and into the pool of blood his living room had become.
Thirty-One
‘Something changed him?’ Captain Blake asked with a frown. She was sitting behind her desk, nursing a fresh cup of coffee. ‘How so, Robert?’ Her hair was loose, tucked behind her ears, and she wore a black pencil skirt with a tight-fitting plum cotton blouse. She had asked Hunter and Garcia to come to her office as soon as she arrived at the PAB.
‘I’m not really sure how, Captain,’ Hunter replied. ‘But what I’m very certain of is that he chose the words he used on his note very carefully, doing his best to avoid doubt. He ends his third paragraph by writing: “Would they see what I have become, or would they falter?” He could very easily have written “see what I am?” Or “who I am?” Or “the monster in me?” Or something along those lines.’
‘But he didn’t,’ she said, leaning back in her chair.
‘No, he didn’t. I’m sure that he picked the word “become” for a specific reason.’
‘And you think that is because he wants us to understand he wasn’t always a psychopath. That something in the course of his life changed him. And whatever it was that happened to him, it made him decide to start killing people.’
Hunter nodded.
‘Like what, for example?’
Hunter shrugged. ‘He doesn’t allude to anything in his note, so right now that’s impossible to tell. Every individual reacts differently to different situations, Captain, you know that. Everybody’s got a different breaking point. For some people, it takes a lot for that switch to flick inside their heads, if it ever does. For others, not so much. Even a physical disease can potentially turn someone into a murderer.’
‘Wait a second,’ the captain said. ‘Physical disease?’
Garcia also looked at Hunter sceptically.
‘Yes,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘History is littered with different cases. In America, Charles Whitman is probably the most famous example.’
Captain Blake paused for a moment, searching her memory. The name finally came back to her. ‘Charles Whitman? Wasn’t he the Texas Bell Tower sniper?’
‘That’s right,’ Garcia said, now remembering it as well.
Charles Whitman was a former US Marine who became one of the most famous mass murderers in US history. On 1 August 1966, he started his killing spree by murdering his wife and then his mother. Once they were dead, he drove up to the University of Texas in Austin, where he was studying for a degree in engineering, and, armed with numerous firearms and several hundred rounds of ammunition, got up on to the highest point on campus, the main building’s clock tower. From there, he indiscriminately shot random passersby for almost two hours until he was finally shot dead by Austin police officer Houston McCoy. In those two horrible hours, Charles Whitman managed to kill fourteen people and injure thirty-two.
Understandably so, the press quickly branded Whitman a monster – but that was until the police discovered the note Whitman had left behind. A suicide note, or what essentially became a suicide note because Whitman was certain that he would die that day.
The note shocked everyone. In it, Whitman confessed that he himself found his behavior completely inexplicable. He began his note by stating that he adored his wife and mother, and that he had no idea why he was doing what he was doing. He went on to explain that in the past few months he had simply been consumed by excruciating headaches, like nothing he had ever experienced before, and those headaches brought with them overwhelming feelings of rage and destructive impulses which he found harder and harder to resist.
Because he was certain that he would be killed that day, Whitman ended his note by begging the authorities for his brain to be autopsied for signs of physical disease. The authorities complied, and it was discovered that Charles Whitman had a brain tumor that seemed to be just a few months old. The tumor was located in the hypothalamus, and it was pressing on to his amygdala. The coroner confirmed that Whitman’s terrible headaches were certainly caused by the tumor. In the USA, Whitman’s case opened a whole new door to the way psychologists and psychiatrists approached the mental state of a supposedly sociopathic murderer.
‘So you’re saying that our killer could have a brain tumor now?’ Captain Blake asked in a semi-sarcastic tone.
‘He could,’ Hunter admitted. ‘But that’s not what I’m saying, Captain. I’m just trying to reinforce the fact that, with the little we have, it’s impossible to do anything else other than speculate at
this time, and that will lead us nowhere. We all know this.’
‘And you don’t think that you’re reading too much into every word this nut case has written?’ the captain shot back. ‘You don’t think that he could’ve sent us that note just to fuck with us? As Carlos has suggested – to throw us down the wrong path? We all know that it has happened plenty of times before. After all, the note promised that we’d have another victim before sunrise today.’ The captain turned toward the large panoramic window and pointed at the sky. ‘Well, the sun has certainly risen, and we’ve got nothing yet. He could be bluffing for all we know, Robert. That note could be nothing but a gimmick.’
‘That’s not what the note says, Captain,’ Hunter came back.
Captain Blake glared at him. ‘Is it not?’
‘No. The note says that before the sun rises tomorrow, which is today, someone else will see it and feel it too. He’s talking about the monster that he has become. He’s telling us that before the sun came up today, someone else would have suffered and died by his hands. The note says nothing about the victim being delivered to us. If he decides to do the same thing he did with Nicole Wilson and call it in via the switchboard, that call could come in this afternoon, tomorrow, next week, or any time after that. We’re dancing to his tune here, Captain, and he can change the beat any time he likes.’
Mulling those words, Captain Blake reached for her cup of coffee and had a sip.
‘And no,’ Hunter added, ‘I don’t believe that he sent the mayor that note with the intention of fucking with us. The Polaroid and the victim’s mutilated body are proof that he’s more than serious.’
Captain Blake was about to say something else when the phone on her desk rang.
‘Give me a sec,’ she said as she took the call.
No words were needed. The look in her eyes as she stared back at her detectives told them all they needed to know.
The killer wasn’t bluffing.
