by Chris Carter
Hunter was a fast reader. Actually, he was a very fast reader and as soon as he began devouring the chunks and chunks of information he knew he had stumbled upon a complete minefield.
And then the first bomb went off.
He reread the paragraph twice over before he was certain he had it right. And it staggered him.
The second bomb followed almost immediately.
Hunter had to pause and take a deep breath. He could practically hear adrenalin dripping into his veins – and then he found the images. They came at him like an angry heavyweight champion and hidden among them was the knockout punch.
As the final image loaded on to his screen, he felt a sickening shiver kiss the nape of his neck.
‘This can’t be.’
And then that was it.
No more information.
With the same speed with which it had all appeared, it all stopped.
Hunter tried something else. Being a Special LAPD Detective had its perks but the words that came up on his screen made him jerk back.
RESTRICTED ACCESS.
‘What the fuck?’
He tried again.
RESTRICTED ACCESS.
One more time.
RESTRICTED ACCESS.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
He backtracked and reread some of the information he’d gotten from his initial search.
And then it dawned on him.
Just like the killer’s note to Mayor Bailey, the information had mentioned the FBI.
Hunter checked his watch – 11:58 p.m. In Virginia it would be 02:58 a.m. It didn’t matter.
Hunter reached for his phone.
Seventy-Nine
Adrian Kennedy was the head of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and its Behavioral Analysis Unit. He was also a good friend of Hunter’s.
Despite the late hour, Kennedy didn’t even blink when his cellphone rang inside his jacket pocket. As the head of the NCAVC he was used to getting calls at godforsaken hours. Sleep was a luxury that didn’t come as part of his job description.
He reached for the phone and was very surprised to see Hunter’s name on the display screen.
‘Robert?’ he answered it, still sounding a little unsure.
‘Hello, Adrian.’
‘Well, this is a surprise.’ His naturally hoarse voice, made worse by over thirty years of smoking, sounded tired but relaxed. ‘Are you back in LA?’
‘I am.’
Kennedy checked his watch. ‘What time is it there? About midnight?’
‘That’s about right, yes.’
‘So I guess you’re not calling for a chitchat.’ Adrian coughed a laugh. ‘What can I do for you, old friend?’
‘Are you in your office?’
‘Well, I’m sure as hell not home in bed where I should be.’
‘I need to ask you for a favor,’ Hunter said.
Kennedy’s interest grew. If there was one thing he knew about Robert Hunter, it was that he wasn’t a man who asked many people for favors.
‘What do you need?’ Kennedy leaned back in his leather chair.
Without going into too much detail, Hunter told him.
Kennedy sat forward. ‘Are you kidding?’
‘Not even a little bit.’
‘There’s no way, Robert.’ Kennedy’s voice turned morbidly serious. ‘That kind of information is as restricted as it gets. It’s under the same sort of lock and key as our witness protection program.’
‘To someone like me, yes,’ Hunter replied. ‘But not to the head of the NCAVC.’
‘Still, Robert. We have protocols and rules here.’
‘Yeah, I have an egg.’
Kennedy frowned. ‘Excuse me?’
‘I thought that we were just mentioning things that we can easily break.’
‘Oh, that’s cute.’
Hunter said nothing.
‘Listen, Robert, I can’t just go accessing that sort of information without leaving a log trail as long as Route Sixty-Six.’
‘So? Leave a trail.’
‘Easy for you to say.’
‘What difference would that make to you, Adrian? All you’ll be accessing is information and that’s what your job demands, isn’t it? Acquiring it, processing it and understanding it. No one will care.’
‘I will. I’ll still be breaking protocol to access extremely restricted information to then pass it on.’
‘To a fellow law enforcement officer, Adrian. What do you think I’m going to do with it, sell it to the press? And, after all, you owe me.’
Kennedy did owe Hunter. He also knew the LAPD detective well enough to know that he wouldn’t ask for anything unless it was absolutely imperative. He breathed out.
‘This is more than I owe you, old friend.’
Hunter remained quiet.
‘OK. Fuck it,’ Kennedy finally said. ‘Give me about half an hour.’
Eighty
Hunter spent the next twenty-two minutes rereading everything he had found, and for him it only served to underline something he already knew – that reality was much, much more perverted than fiction. The problem was, if he were right in his hunch, reality was just about to get a lot more twisted.
He recalled all the photographs he had found with his initial search less than an hour ago and studied them again, this time a lot more carefully. The last photograph was the one that had triggered an avalanche of thoughts inside Hunter’s head. The one that had made him call Adrian Kennedy.
Despite his best efforts, that was the only photograph of that subject he could find. It had been taken years ago and from a considerable distance. The angle also didn’t help, making the subject blurry and unclear.
Hunter tried using a photo-enhancing application to enlarge it on his screen, but the bigger he made it, the more pixelated it got and the blurrier it became. Still, something about its subject made him very uneasy.
Hunter had become so absorbed by the image that he almost didn’t notice his cellphone rattling against his desktop.
The screen display told him that the caller was unknown.
Had Mat Hade been arrested?
‘Detective Robert Hunter, Robbery Homicide Division,’ he said as he brought the phone to his ear.
‘Robert, it’s Adrian.’
Hunter breathed out. ‘Did you have any luck?’
There was a heavy pause.
‘Adrian?’
‘Yes. I got the files you’re after. I’m emailing them to you right now.’
‘Thanks, Adrian. I’ll owe you for this.’
‘Yes, you will. Robert?’ Adrian called before Hunter could put the phone down.
‘Yes.’
‘Be careful, old friend.’
Hunter disconnected and opened his email application. Seconds later, Kennedy’s email arrived. The subject field was left blank. The body of the email showed only two words – Good luck – but the message came with three separate attachments. Hunter opened the first one and began reading through it. The information it contained was very similar to what he had already found out, only much more detailed.
The second attachment consisted of a single black and white photograph. A photograph of the same subject Hunter had been studying before he’d received Kennedy’s telephone call. As the picture filled Hunter’s screen, he stopped breathing for a moment. It was an old photograph, but not as old as the one Hunter had found. It had been taken inside a controlled environment, not from a considerable distance, and the subject was staring straight at the camera.
Hunter could barely believe his own eyes.
It took him more than a minute to get over the shock of what he was looking at. Once he had, he finally opened the last attachment. The most secretive of all the documents Adrian Kennedy had sent him.
And the most devastating.
As Hunter read through it, he felt as if life had lost its logic.
He got up and began pacing the room, trying to put
his thoughts in order. What to do next?
The clock on the wall showed 12:59 a.m.
There was no way he could wait until the morning.
Reaching for his cellphone, Hunter placed two calls. The second one was to his partner.
Eighty-One
Garcia had gotten home at around a quarter past nine in the evening. He had called Anna from the office to let her know that, once again, he wouldn’t be home in time for dinner. Like always, Anna had told him that it was OK. She said that she wasn’t planning on going to bed early anyway, so she would keep their dinner in the oven and they could heat it up when he got home, and still dine together.
Garcia and Anna had been together since their senior year in high school, and Garcia couldn’t have asked for a more supportive wife. Anna knew how much he loved his job. She’d seen how hard he’d worked for it and how dedicated he was. She understood the commitment and the sacrifices that came with being a detective in a city like Los Angeles, and she fully accepted them. But despite her incredible psychological strength, it was only natural that Anna felt scared sometimes. Scared that one day she’d get that phone call, or that knock on the door in the middle of the night, telling her that her husband wouldn’t be coming home again.
The truth was, after Hunter and Garcia’s last case, the one that had prompted Captain Blake to demand that they both take a two-week break, Garcia had been ready to quit the RHD Special Section.
Garcia was as fearless as fearless got, but his last investigation had brought Anna to within a whisker of death and that had scared him senseless. She meant everything to him, and if he lost her he would lose himself. He’d told his wife about his decision and Anna had been the one who had made him go back.
Tonight, after dining with his wife, Garcia dragged Anna into the shower with him. It reminded him of how they’d made love for the first time. After that, they both collapsed in bed, feeling completely exhausted.
Garcia thought he was dreaming when he heard a clattering sound coming from his right. He turned his face in that direction but kept his eyes closed.
Brrrrrrrrrrrr.
There it was again.
He let out a confused sigh, opening his eyes just enough to see his cellphone vibrating against the surface of his bedside table. It took another two seconds for his tired and sleepy brain to understand what was happening before he finally reached for it.
‘Hello?’ he answered in a drowsy voice, quickly getting to his feet and making his way out of the bedroom so as not to wake Anna.
Too late, she was already turning in bed.
‘Carlos, it’s Robert.’
‘Umm, Robert?’ Garcia asked, sounding a little unsure as to who Robert was. Suddenly, his brain engaged. ‘Robert.’ His voice urgent. ‘What’s going on? Have we got him? Have we got Mat Hade?’
‘No. Forget about that, Carlos. Nothing is what we thought it was. We were wrong.’
‘Wrong? Wrong about what, Robert?’
‘Everything.’
Eighty-Two
Hunter had been driving for almost an hour when he finally spotted the tiny dirt path hidden between bushes to the left of the road he was on. With no signs, no indications of any sort and no illumination whatsoever, even someone who’d been looking for it, like Hunter had, could’ve easily missed it. Like Hunter had. He had driven back and forth along that same stretch of road twice before he at last saw the gap between the bushes.
He stopped and directed his headlights toward it.
‘Is that it?’ he asked himself, leaning forward against the steering wheel. ‘It must be. There’s nothing else out here.’
He left the road and his car disappeared between the bushes as if it’d been swallowed by the night.
The uneven path was full of bumps and holes and that, together with pitch-black darkness, forced Hunter to slow down to a tense crawl. After about three quarters of a mile and two bends, one left, one right, the shrubs and bushes that lined the sides of the dirt road became less dense, giving way to endless fields of nothing at all except dirt, foxtail cactuses and desert marigolds.
Hunter drove on, being as careful as he could to avoid the larger potholes. The smaller ones were inevitable. They practically were the road.
After another half a mile, the road bent left again before going up a small hill. As Hunter drove down the other side, the vegetation changed again. The marigolds were swapped for Joshua trees and desert willows. Dirt and foxtail cactuses were still everywhere. As Hunter drove around a denser concentration of cactuses, he thought he spotted something in the distance. Some sort of massive shadow. He immediately brought his car to a full stop and switched off the head-lights. Reaching for the pair of binoculars he always kept inside his glove compartment, he stepped out of the car.
As luck would have it, it was a cloudy, moonless night. No stars were visible either, which made it all way too dark for him to be able to see anything from where he stood. Looking for higher ground, Hunter climbed up on to the hood of his car, then on to its roof.
Still he saw nothing.
He needed to get closer.
Hunter got back into his Buick and, keeping the head-lights turned off, began moving again, this time even slower than before. He drove for another quarter of a mile before stopping, climbing on to his car and scanning the terrain before him as carefully as he could.
Nothing to his right.
Nothing directly in front of him.
Nothing to his . . . wait. He paused, leaned forward. There it was. Way up ahead and slightly to his left.
Eighty-Three
From that distance, and in almost total darkness, Hunter struggled to understand what he was really looking at. It was some sort of construction. From the size of its shadow, it could be a medium-sized, two-storey house – the only issue was, it didn’t look like a house. The building was square in shape, like a big box, and dusky in color, which on such a dark night, out there in a desert, made it practically invisible. Hunter was surprised that he had managed to spot it, even with a pair of binoculars.
He calculated the distance between the building and where he was standing to be about a quarter of a mile. He got back into his car and reached for his cellphone.
Nothing. Not even half a bar of signal. Moving it about also made no difference. He was slap-bang in the middle of nowhere.
‘Great!’
Hunter decided to leave his car by the side of the dirt road and continue the rest of the way on foot. He’d be a lot quieter, and a lot less visible, that way.
He checked his HK Mark 23 pistol. It had a full clip loaded on to the weapon but Hunter was taking no chances. From the glove compartment, he picked up a flashlight and a second, fully loaded clip.
Despite still being another quarter of a mile away, Hunter moved stealthily, hiding himself as best as he could behind cactuses, trees and willows. He moved about fifteen to twenty yards at a time in a half-crouched position, stopped, got as close to the ground as possible and used his binoculars to check ahead. Everything looked as still as death.
He’d repeated the process five more times before he was able to spot something he hadn’t seen before – a black GMC Yukon parked to the right of the construction.
From his window, Marlon had seen the fake telephone engineer climb into a black GMC Yukon after he’d collected the Wi-Fi camera he had placed high up on the telephone pole.
Hunter breathed in, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and carried on moving forward, getting closer and closer until he was no more than forty yards away from the building. He positioned himself behind a cluster of willows and used his binoculars again. He’d been right. The building looked nothing like a house.
Hunter figured that he’d been approaching it from its side instead of its front. He’d come to that conclusion because he could see no doors on that end of the building. With the Yukon parked around to the right, it seemed only logical that whoever had been driving it had parked by the front door.
&nbs
p; Hunter was about to move closer when he noticed something else. On that whole side of the building there was only one window. It was way up high and a little to the left, but what made Hunter pause suddenly was the fact that, despite how far from the ground it was, thick, metal bars had been fitted to the outside of that lone window.
That building wasn’t a house.
It was a prison.
Eighty-Four
Still hiding behind the cluster of willows, Hunter used his binoculars to check the property’s grounds, its roof and all the corners he could see from his shielded location. He found no surveillance of any kind, at least not around that side. Satisfied, he moved closer, reaching the building in front of him in less than twenty seconds. As he did so, he placed his back flat against its west wall before checking left.
Nothing.
Right.
Nothing.
So far, so good.
He then began scooting south, toward where the Yukon was parked. Once he got to the edge of the wall, he crouched down, unholstered his weapon and flash-peeked around the corner.
He saw nothing.
He waited a few more seconds, then peered around again. This time, not so fast.
The Yukon was parked about eleven yards from the building’s entrance – a heavy-looking wooden door. That was it. There was nothing else there.
Great, Hunter thought. Now what, Robert? No way that that door will be unlocked. This is a prison, not a house. Whatever security has been put in place here, it hasn’t been used to keep anyone from getting in. It’s to stop people from getting out.
There was nothing else Hunter could do but get closer and have a better look. And that was exactly what he did. Still with his gun in hand and his back flat against the wall, he rounded the corner and slowly slid his way toward the heavy door. As he got to it, he felt his guts beginning to churn inside him.
There was something definitely evil about this place. Even the air immediately around it felt denser, harder to breathe.
