The Death Sculptor

by Chris Carter

  Hunter made a face as if he didn’t understand.

  ‘What was the sculpture? What was created with my father’s . . .’ She couldn’t finish the sentence. Tears were stalking her eyes again.

  ‘Nothing identifiable,’ Hunter replied. ‘It was a shapeless form.’

  ‘Was there a meaning to it?’

  The last thing Hunter wanted to do was to contribute any more to Olivia’s pain, but he saw no way out of it, he had to lie again; he couldn’t compromise the investigation, and he had no proof that what Alice had found was the real meaning behind the shadow puppets. ‘If there is, we haven’t found it yet.’

  Thirty-Eight

  Olivia was studying Hunter’s face. She kept her large green eyes locked on his for five long seconds before deciding that he was telling the truth. She reached for her cup but didn’t bring it to her mouth. Just a nervous reaction to keep her hands from shaking. It didn’t work.

  ‘I haven’t been able to sleep for the past couple of days,’ Olivia said, looking away, finding a neutral spot on the far wall and holding it for a moment. ‘I’d rather stay awake than close my eyes and deal with what my dreams have brought me.’

  Hunter said nothing. He doubted it would be any comfort to Olivia if she knew that he’d been living that exact way for most of his life.

  ‘We knew Dad didn’t have long to live, and as hard as it might’ve been, I thought Allison and I had prepared ourselves for it.’ She shook her head and her bottom lip quivered. ‘It turns out that we weren’t as prepared as we thought. But having to find out details of what really happened this way.’ She pushed the newspaper towards Hunter and said nothing else.

  ‘Once again, I’m sorry,’ Hunter said, not even glancing at the paper. ‘I had to make a decision. And I made it based on my experience in dealing with grieving families of homicide victims.’

  Hunter’s words were delivered in a tender and non-patronizing tone, and Olivia seemed to pick up on it.

  ‘What happened yesterday . . .’ Her gaze quickly moved to the newspaper on the table, and then back to Hunter. ‘Is there really a connection?’

  Olivia’s question simply brought forward something that Hunter had no way of avoiding.

  ‘From what we’ve been able to gather so far, we believe that both crimes were committed by the same person, yes,’ he replied and quickly followed it up. ‘You obviously read the article.’ He nodded at the paper.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does the name Andrew Nashorn ring any bells?’

  ‘No,’ she replied with a subtle headshake.

  ‘You don’t recognize him at all from the newspaper photo?’

  ‘When I read the article this morning, I asked myself that exact same question, Detective.’ Olivia shook her head and looked away again. ‘Neither his name nor his face ring any bells. If my father knew him, I don’t recall him ever mentioning him. And I certainly don’t recall seeing him anywhere.’

  Hunter acknowledged it with a slight tilt of his head.

  Olivia finished her water and pinned Hunter down with a pleading stare. ‘You don’t have much so far, do you, Detective?’ She paused for a fraction of a second. ‘And please don’t lie to me again.’ Her voice almost croaked.

  Hunter waited, debating what to tell her. The anticipation in Olivia’s demeanor was almost electric. ‘At the moment we have bits and pieces that we’re trying to piece together. But we are making progress,’ he assured her. ‘I can’t really reveal much more than that. I’m sorry. I hope you understand.’

  Olivia sat in silence for a long, uncomfortable moment. ‘I know that nothing will ever bring my father back, Detective, but the thought that the monster who took him is still out there . . . still killing . . . and he might never be brought to justice, makes me sick. Please don’t let that happen.’

  Thirty-Nine

  Mid-morning, and no one had any doubts that today would be another spectacular summer’s day. Clear blue skies had paired up with bright biting sunlight, and though it was still early, the heat had built up enough to feel almost oppressive. The A/C in Garcia’s car was back on full blast as he and Hunter made their way to the coroner’s office. Doctor Hove had finished with Andrew Nashorn’s autopsy.

  Hunter sat in silence, his elbow resting against the door handle, his chin on his knuckles. Though he seemed to be observing the cacophony of morning traffic, his thoughts were somewhere else. Olivia’s heavy words were still ringing in his ears. Her anguish was as real to him as it was to her and her sister.

  Just weeks after Hunter received his PhD in Criminal Behavior Analysis and Biopsychology, his father, who worked as a security guard for a downtown branch of the Bank of America, took a bullet to the chest during a robbery gone disastrously wrong. He fought for twelve weeks in a coma. And during that whole time, Hunter never left his side, believing that his companionship, the sound of his voice, or maybe even his touch, could help his father find the strength to fight back. He had been wrong.

  Despite two of the robbers being shot dead at the bank, the three others who made up the rest of the gang escaped. They were never caught.

  The bitter taste of knowing that his father’s killers were never brought to justice had never left Hunter’s mouth. And that knowledge kept the pain alive year after year. He didn’t want the same to happen to Olivia and Allison Nicholson.

  ‘Everything OK?’ Garcia asked, pulling Hunter away from his thoughts.

  It took Hunter a few seconds to drag his eyes from the traffic outside and look at his partner. ‘Yeah, yeah. I was just . . .’

  ‘. . . Away somewhere else?’ Garcia nodded. ‘I know.’ He smiled and let the moment settle. ‘You know, the longer this killer stays at a crime scene, the higher the risk of getting caught, so I’d say he wouldn’t stay a second longer than what was needed.’

  Hunter agreed.

  ‘But those sculptures, those shadow images, they are not the work of a beginner. I’ve never seen anything so intricate. This killer didn’t just chop and twist body parts right there and then hope he got it right first time out. He must’ve practiced, and a lot.’

  ‘I have no doubt he has.’

  ‘Using what? Dummies?’

  ‘Anything, really, Carlos,’ Hunter said. ‘He could create models out of wire, papier mâché, cast, even regular toy dolls with flexible rubber arms and legs. The kind you’d find in any convenience store.’

  ‘So this guy sits at home, playing with dolls before going out and ripping his victims apart. This city is fucked up, you know?’

  ‘This world is fucked up,’ Hunter corrected him.

  ‘Andrew Nashorn’s file finally came through. It’s on the backseat.’ Garcia quickly jerked his head back.

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘Yep, reads like any other detective’s résumé I’ve ever read. Nashorn was born in El Granada, San Mateo County in Northern California, where he lived until he was twelve or thirteen or something like that. His parents moved to Los Angeles then. His father was an accountant, and got offered a better job down here. His mother was a church-going housewife.’

  They came up to a red traffic light. Hunter leaned over and grabbed the file from the backseat.

  ‘Nashorn was a regular school kid,’ Garcia continued. ‘Not the best student, but not the worst either. Though he lived in Maywood, he attended high school in Bell. He never went to college. Worked several odd jobs for a few years after high school before deciding to join the force. It took him a while to make detective.’

  ‘Twelve years,’ Hunter said, reading from the file. ‘Failed the exam four times.’

  ‘He’s a widower. No kids.’

  Hunter nodded. ‘Got married when he was twenty-six,’ he said, reading from the file. ‘His wife died less than three years later.’

  ‘Yeah, I read that. Some odd heart condition they never even knew she had.’

  ‘Cardiomyopathy,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘Heart-muscle disease. He never remarried.’
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br />   ‘From what I gathered he was a good cop,’ Garcia said, shifting his car into gear and turning left into North Mission Road. ‘Put plenty of dirtbags away during his detective years. And then what every cop dreads happened. He got shot on the job, pursuing some lowlife street mugger down in Inglewood.’ Garcia shook his head. ‘Poor guy. In Brazil they’d say he was born with his butt facing the sun covered in chili powder.’

  Carlos Garcia was born in São Paulo, Brazil. The son of a Brazilian federal agent and an American history teacher, he and his mother moved to Los Angeles when Garcia was only ten years old, after his parents’ marriage collapsed. Even though he’d lived in America most of his life, Garcia could speak Portuguese like a true Brazilian, and he still visited the country every few years.

  Hunter looked at his partner and screwed up his face. ‘What? What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘It means he was born unlucky, and in Nashorn’s case, I think it applies.’

  ‘Really? So what do Brazilians say if they think someone was born lucky? “He was born with his butt facing the moon covered in sugar”?’

  ‘Precisely.’ Garcia looked impressed.

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘Nope, that’d be pretty much the exact translation.’

  ‘Interesting analogy,’ was all Hunter could say. The next couple of pages in Nashorn’s file were a brief of the latest investigations Nashorn had been involved with.

  ‘His captain said that he was a man of habits,’ Garcia offered. ‘Always took his vacation at the same exact time of year – first few days of summer. Always two weeks by himself out in the sea, fishing. He used all his savings to buy that boat. According to his captain, that boat was his retirement plan.’

  ‘No girlfriend, no partner.’ Hunter was still reading from the file. ‘Next of kin are an uncle and aunt who still live in El Granada.’

  ‘Yep, his captain is getting in touch with them.’

  Hunter checked the file for Nashorn’s home address – an apartment in East LA. A forensic team had already been dispatched there this morning. Last night, they’d found no cellphone, computer, address book, diary, or anything of that sort in Nashorn’s boat, and according to his captain there was nothing at his desk either. No personal files in his hard drive. They were checking his work emails. Hunter was hoping something would turn up from Nashorn’s apartment search. He closed the file and returned it to the backseat as Garcia pulled into the County Coroner’s parking lot.

  Forty

  Alice Beaumont printed out another document page and placed it on the floor next to the tens of pages that were already there. With Hunter and Garcia out of the office, she had temporarily turned the place into her own private research haven.

  She had a quick stab at finding out what the shadow image created by the second sculpture could mean, but after three quarters of an hour searching the net, she had nothing that even remotely excited her. Unlike the first shadow puppets, she found no mythological meaning that could be attached to the entire image. If she broke the image down, then it was easy to link the distorted head with horns to any devil figure she liked, but that didn’t explain the four smaller shadow figures created by Nashorn’s severed fingers.

  Alice wanted to carry on searching, but she knew that, for now, the investigation’s priority was to work on the lists of perpetrators Derek Nicholson had put away over the years. If she could find some sort of link to any case Andrew Nashorn had worked on, either as a detective or as a Support Division officer, that could give them the starting point they were so desperately looking for.

  Alice sat on the floor with all the printouts surrounding her and started rereading and regrouping them in lots of two, three, four and sometimes five pages.

  She had brought her own laptop in with her this morning. She had a feeling she would be needing a few of the powerful development applications she had in her hard drive. And she was right. Hunter had told her to go back five, maybe ten years in her search for perpetrators who’d been released, had escaped, or were out on parole. That gave her way too many names and files to read through. Couple that with all the new names and files she’d got from Andrew Nashorn’s investigations, and also a list of original victims who personally blamed Nicholson for losing their case, and she’d need at least a week to get through them all. But that was where her expert computer skills came in.

  The first thing Alice did when Hunter and Garcia left was to write a quick application that would read through text files and search for specific names, words, or phrases. The application could also link files together using a variety of criteria. The problem she had was that not all the files were digitized. In fact, about 50 per cent of them were still on paper only. Getting a simple list of names was easy, even going back twenty-six years. But the actual case files only really started being digitized around fifteen years ago. Older cases were being added to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s databank as fast as possible, but the sheer number of them, together with a lack of personnel, made the process laborious and very, very slow. The same applied to the LAPD and Andrew Nashorn’s cases.

  Alice was doing really well with what she had. Her application had already managed to flag and link forty-six documents, but she had yet to start looking into Nashorn’s investigations.

  Forty-One

  Hunter pulled his surgical mask over his nose and mouth and stood to the right of one of the two examination tables inside Special Autopsy Theater One. Garcia was just behind him, arms folded over his chest, shoulders hunched forward as if trying to protect himself from a freezing gust of wind.

  As always, the room felt too cold, despite the hot summer’s day outside; too somber, no matter how bright the surgical and ceiling lights were; and too macabre, with its stainless-steel tables and counters, its clinical atmosphere, its honeycomb of human-body freezers, and its soul-chilling display of laser-sharp cutting instruments.

  ‘There’s no need for the mask, Robert,’ Doctor Hove said, a shadow of a smile playing at the corners of her lips. ‘There’s no risk of contamination and the body doesn’t really smell.’ She paused, considering her words. ‘Maybe just a little bit.’

  Though every cadaver inevitably smells due to its natural breakdown of tissues and the explosive growth of bacteria after death; that odor alone never bothered Hunter. Carefully washed prior to the autopsy examination, the body’s smell was usually all but gone.

  ‘You do realize that your sense of smell is as dead as fried chicken, don’t you, Doc?’ Hunter replied, slipping on a brand new pair of latex gloves.

  ‘My husband tells me that every time I cook.’ The doctor smiled again and directed both detectives’ attention to the two autopsy tables. Nashorn’s dismembered body occupied one of them, and his severed body parts the other. Doctor Hove approached the table containing the body parts.

  ‘The official cause of death was heart failure, induced by severe loss of blood. Just like our first victim.’

  Hunter and Garcia nodded in silence. The doctor continued.

  ‘I compared the lacerations to the ones on the first victim. They are consistent. The killer used the same cutting device.’

  ‘The electric kitchen carving knife?’ Garcia asked.

  The doctor nodded. ‘But this time the killer did it a little differently.’

  ‘How so?’ Hunter asked, moving around to the other side of the table.

  ‘He took the time to try and properly stop the hemorrhage. The feet amputation carries all the signs of a proper Syme’s ankle disarticulation.’

  ‘A what?’ Garcia questioned.

  ‘It’s an ankle amputation procedure named after James Syme,’ Doctor Hove clarified. ‘He was a Clinical Professor of Surgery at the University of Edinburgh in eighteen-something. He developed an ankle-amputation procedure that is still used today. Anyway, the incisions we have here were made clean across the ankle joints. In accordance with the Syme’s ankle-disarticulation guidelines, the arteries were transfixed,
and large veins ligated as much as possible, given that the entire procedure was carried out inside a boat cabin without a surgical team. Usually, smaller blood vessels are electrocoagulated during the procedure, but the killer didn’t bother with that. Either because he didn’t have the equipment, or . . .’

  ‘Because there was no need for it,’ Hunter took over. ‘He knew the victim would die in a matter of hours, maybe minutes. He just didn’t want him to bleed out and die too quickly.’

  ‘I’d have to agree with that,’ the doctor said. ‘The feet were certainly the first to be amputated. The killer used a compression dressing of fluffs, contoured over the stump and wrapped in place with a bias-cut stockinet. Nicely done.’

  ‘You mean professionally done?’ Garcia asked.

  ‘I’d say so, yes. But first, the wounds were covered in cayenne pepper powder.’

  ‘Cayenne pepper?’ Garcia’s brow furrowed. He thought about it for a second. ‘Jesus!’

  Hunter’s memory immediately took him back to the boat and the strange, stinging smell he picked up inside its cabin. He knew he’d smelled it before, but he hadn’t been able to identify it then. ‘The pepper wasn’t used to add to the pain,’ he said, picking up on Garcia’s suspicion, and quickly dismissing it. ‘It was used to stop the bleeding.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Robert is right,’ Doctor Hove noted. ‘Cayenne pepper has been used as a natural remedy for years. More specifically – a blood clotter.’

  Garcia’s focus moved to Nashorn’s severed feet on the metal table. ‘Like coffee powder?’

  ‘Yes, coffee powder can have a very similar effect,’ the doctor confirmed. ‘Both powders react with the body to equalize blood pressure, meaning an extra gushing of pressure will not be concentrated in the wound area as it normally would be. Blood will quickly clot when the pressure is equalized. It’s an old trick, but it works every time. The bandaging has already been sent up to the lab for analysis.’