The Death Sculptor rh-4

by Carter Chris

  Brian Doyle, the head of the LAPD Information Technology Division, had gotten back to Hunter towards the end of the afternoon with what he’d managed to extract from the computer they found in Nashorn’s apartment. Hunter and Garcia spent an hour pouring over all the emails retrieved, and what had been compiled from the computer’s Internet history. It became obvious that Nashorn was a frequent user of several escort agencies, many of them specializing in fetish, bondage and sadomasochism services. There was also a string of porn websites, and though many of them could be considered hard edge – none were illegal.

  The emails gave them nothing suspicious, no threats or anything that could be construed as one. Nor had they made any progress identifying the second person who had talked to Derek Nicholson in his house when he fell ill. What Nicholson’s nurse had told Hunter, about Nicholson clearing his conscience and telling someone the truth about something, was still rolling around in Hunter’s mind.

  Hunter and Garcia spent the rest of the day researching on the Internet, looking for anything that even remotely resembled the new shadow image cast by the sculpture made of Nashorn’s body parts. They found nothing that looked like the entire image. The figure of the distorted head with horns could easily be matched to a representation of most devils or demons. And that applied to religions, belief systems and cultures across the globe. But there were also mythological horned gods, like the Greek god Pan, or even Apollo and Zeus, whose early representations were as a horned man.

  Devil or God, Hunter thought. Take your pick.

  Without having a point of reference, it was like looking for a blond hair on a sandy beach.

  The second part of the image proved even more elusive. Two figures standing and two lying down, practically on top of each other. Hunter and Garcia found nothing, and Hunter had to start considering the possibility that Alice could be right. Maybe the image had no hidden meaning at all. Nothing religious. Nothing mythological. No parallel connotation. Maybe the meaning was as simple as she had suggested – an evil killer looking down at his victims. Two down, two to go. And that meant he would kill again.

  Forty-Nine

  It was past dinnertime when Hunter returned to Lennox and parked in front of Amy Dawson’s house. Once again, with a polite smile, Derek Nicholson’s weekdays nurse showed him into her house, but this time guided him into the kitchen.

  The air was sprinkled with the pleasant smell of cooked tomatoes, basil, onions, chilies and spices.

  ‘My husband is watching the game in the living room,’ Amy explained. ‘He’s a big Lakers fan, and when he gets excited, he can be quite loud. You don’t mind if we talk in here, do you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Hunter assured her. ‘I’ll be as brief as I can.’

  Amy was wearing a light, floral dress and rubber flip-flops. Her cornrows had been undone, and her hair was now pulled back into a bushy ponytail. She offered Hunter a seat on one of the chairs around the foldout Formica table.

  ‘If you had come a little earlier, you could’ve had dinner with us.’

  Hunter smiled. ‘That’s very kind of you to say, thank you. But it was probably a good thing. Get me near a nice, homemade pasta dish, and I could eat my bodyweight . . . maybe more.’

  Amy paused and skeptically stared at Hunter. ‘How do you know I cooked pasta tonight?’

  ‘Umm . . . just a guess judging by the mouthwatering smell in your kitchen.’ He shrugged. ‘Homemade spicy tomato sauce?’

  Amy couldn’t hide her surprise. ‘That’s right. My mother’s own recipe. We all like it with plenty of heat.’

  ‘Me too.’ Hunter nodded before having a seat. He waited until Amy sat across the table from him. ‘I just wanted to go back to that second person you said had visited Mr. Nicholson in his home after he was taken ill.’

  ‘I haven’t remembered anything else,’ she said, looking sincerely sorry.

  ‘That’s OK. What I really wanted was for you to have a look at a photograph, and tell me if there’s any chance the person in it is the same person who visited Mr. Nicholson that day.’

  ‘OK.’ She leaned forward, placing her elbows on the table.

  Screamer, the family dog, started barking just outside the kitchen door. Amy pulled an annoyed face. ‘Excuse me for just a second, Detective.’ She stood up and opened the door, but didn’t allow the dog inside. ‘Delroy,’ she called out. ‘Could you take Screamer and maybe put him outside? I can’t deal with him now.’

  ‘I’m watching the game,’ a strong baritone voice replied.

  ‘Can you ask Leticia to take him upstairs then?’

  ‘Leticia,’ Delroy called in an even louder voice. ‘Come get your dog before I strangle it.’

  Amy closed the door, shaking her head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again as she returned to her seat. ‘Sometimes that dog drives me crazy. And so does my husband.’

  Hunter smiled. ‘That’s OK.’ He placed an A4-sized photograph of Andrew Nashorn in front of Amy. ‘This is the person I was talking about.’

  She picked it up and studied it hard for a long moment.

  ‘I’m sorry, Detective, that’s not him. The man looked younger and leaner, I’m sure.’ She returned the photograph to the table.

  Hunter nodded, but left the picture where it was. ‘How about this person?’ He produced a second photograph. This time the mugshot of Ken Sands. He had contacted the California State Prison in Lancaster and managed to get a more recent picture of Sands, taken on the day he was released. His hair was long and messy, and he had allowed a bushy, scraggy beard to grow. None of his facial features were very visible.

  ‘This is the most recent picture we have of him,’ Hunter explained. He knew Sands had created that look deliberately. A lot of inmates serving medium to long sentences had a similar appearance. It was a common trick to stop the system from having an accurate, recent picture of them. The long hair and the bushy beard would be gone within an hour of their release. ‘I’m sure he won’t have so much hair around his face anymore.’ Hunter showed her one more picture – Sands’s arrest mugshot. ‘This is what he looked like ten years ago.’

  Amy took the picture from Hunter’s hands. She kept her eyes on them for a long instant.

  Hunter went quiet, allowing her to study it for as long as she needed to.

  ‘It could’ve been him,’ Amy finally said.

  Hunter felt a tingle of electricity run through him.

  ‘But of course, I can’t be sure. The man who visited Mr. Nicholson that day didn’t have no beard or long hair. He was dressed in a suit and all.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Amy’s stare never left the printout in her hands. ‘But it could’ve been him.’

  Fifty

  The blood had coagulated and dried onto the floor and walls, and as the red blood cells died and started to decompose, the odd, metallic smell had faded, giving way to a much stronger odor – something like rotten meat mixed with sour milk. Many who’d been to a brutal crime scene would argue that that was exactly what a violent death smelled like.

  Hunter paused by the door to Nashorn’s boat cabin once again. Revisiting crime scenes, alone, in the dead of night, had become almost an obsession with him. It gave him a chance to look around uninterrupted, to take his time, to try, if only for a split second, to adopt the same frame of mind as the killer. But how could anyone make sense of the senseless?

  Hunter had read and reread the forensic team’s crime-scene report. The many shoeprints he’d seen around the cabin’s floor the day before were very inconsistent and couldn’t be matched to a specific shoe size. There was so much blood covering the floor that, as soon as the killer moved his foot, more blood seeped back to obscure its outline. That made the forensics analysis a lot more difficult. Mike Brindle, the forensics agent who led the team that attended the scene, told Hunter earlier in the day that he’d found something odd about the shoeprints. The distribution of weight from each step seemed to be unequal. That suggested that t
he killer either walked with an asymmetric abnormality – as if he had a limp, or had deliberately worn wrong-sized shoes. It was a trick that Hunter had encountered before. Forensics couldn’t identify a sole pattern, either, which suggested that the killer had covered his shoes with a thick plastic cover, or something on those lines. That would also explain the lack of bloody footprints outside the cabin.

  Brindle had assured Hunter that his team had left the cabin in the exact same state in which they’d found it. The objects that had been removed for forensic examination had been listed in the document Hunter had with him. Everything else was left in its place.

  Hunter zipped up his Tyvek coverall and stepped into the cabin. He wasn’t worried about contaminating the scene; he just didn’t want his shoes and clothes to get smeared with blood, or drenched in that sickening smell. He knew that when that smell found its way into any fabric, no amount of washing or dry cleaning would get rid of it. It was a psychological thing. The brain would associate the clothes with the smell, even after the smell was long gone.

  He paused in the center of the room and slowly allowed his eyes to roam the space around him.

  Was the killer already on board when Nashorn got to his boat?

  The cabin door showed no signs of forced entry, though picking the two locks on it wouldn’t pose a great obstacle to anyone with experience.

  Hunter went over most of the same movements he and Garcia had gone through the day before, making sure he hadn’t missed anything. He walked over to the small fridge and pulled its door open. It had been well stocked – several bottles of water, cheese, cold meats and plenty of beer. He rechecked the trashcan – a candy-bar wrapper and an empty bag of beef jerky. No beer cans. No glasses out in the small kitchen either. If Nashorn had invited anyone on board just before sailing off for two weeks, it probably hadn’t been to shoot the breeze.

  So what then?

  Garcia had suggested earlier that maybe the killer had approached Nashorn outside the boat first with some sort of weapon, forcing him to open the door before striking him across the face. Given both crime scenes, and Doctor Hove’s conclusion that the killer’s weapon of choice had been an electric kitchen carving knife, Hunter found that theory very unlikely. This killer didn’t like firearms.

  He crossed the room to the far wall, where the largest concentration of blood splatter was located. The chair in which Nashorn’s body was found had been taken away by forensics, but its spot was marked by masking tape. Hunter paused at the center of it and looked around. There was nowhere to hide. Anyone attempting to conceal himself would’ve been spotted straight away, unless he was a midget. From the door, Nashorn would’ve been able to see the whole of the cabin, with the exception of the bathroom’s interior, but only if its door was closed. If the killer had hidden in there, then he would have had two options: wait until Nashorn pulled the bathroom door open and club him across the face with whichever weapon had been used; or pull the door open himself and storm towards Nashorn once he’d entered the cabin.

  Hunter immediately saw two problems with that theory. As in any small boat cabin, the bathroom wasn’t very spacious. Doctor Hove was certain that Nashorn had been knocked out with a single, powerful blow to the face, and the blow had come from right to left in a swinging motion. That was impossible to achieve if standing inside the bathroom. There simply wasn’t enough space. If the killer had stormed out of the bathroom towards Nashorn, no matter where inside the cabin Nashorn had been, in such a cramped environment, it would’ve taken the killer at least two to three seconds to get to his victim. That was enough time for Nashorn to notice the attack and assume the most basic of defensive positions – hands up to protect the face. Even though his arms had been severed from his body, there were no defensive wounds to his hands or arms.

  Hunter’s gaze circled the room again and paused on the small door to the inboard engine compartment. Like most things at that end of the cabin, it was covered in dried blood. With the forensics team in a hurry to start processing the scene last night, Hunter had not had a chance to properly check the engine pit. He crouched down next to it and lifted the door open. The compartment was small, not much bigger than a regular cupboard. The engine itself occupied most of the space. Blood had leaked in through the top of the door and dripped onto the engine and the oil-stained floor of the pit. Hunter was about to close the door when he saw something that caught his attention. A pattern of blood across the center part of the engine. Not dripped blood that had seeped through the door, but splattered blood. Hunter had seen that type of splatter many times – wound-spray, usually caused by a rotating motion, like when an assailant hits a victim across the face. The force of the blow would cause the victim’s neck to rotate, and blood from the inflicted wound would fly out in a thin arc.

  He reached for the forensics-report folder and quickly flipped through the evidence photographs. As he found what he was looking for, his brain went into overdrive, calculating all the possibilities. He reached down, stuck his head into the pit, and fiddled with the underside of the engine, as if feeling for something. When he pulled his hand out, it was covered in a thin sheet of slimy liquid.

  Hunter felt his blood warm inside his veins. ‘Smart motherfucker.’

  Fifty-One

  By 9:00 a.m., the heat reflected off the dusty roads already felt like an oven door had been opened. Hunter sat at one of the outside tables at the Grub café, in Seward Street. The large white umbrella that shot out from the center of the table provided a very welcome shade. The trimmed green hedges peppered in purple flowers that covered the crisscrossed wooden fence surrounding the café gave the place a country feel, despite it being just east of West Hollywood.

  Detective Seb Stokes, Andrew Nashorn’s old partner, was the one who’d suggested they meet there. He arrived a couple of minutes after Hunter, paused by the door to the outside yard, and surveyed the busy tables. He was a bear of a man. His battered trousers stretched tight around an expanding waistline, and his jacket looked like it could rip if Stokes shrugged or sneezed too hard. His hair was thin, light brown and combed to one side to disguise an undisguisable bald patch. He had the worn look of someone who’d spent too much time in the same job, and had grown to hate it.

  Despite never meeting him before, Hunter recognized him straight away and lifted a hand, grabbing his attention. Stokes walked over.

  ‘I guess I look too much like a cop, don’t I?’ His voice matched his image, full-bodied, but tired.

  ‘I guess we all do,’ Hunter said, standing up to shake his hand.

  Stokes looked Hunter up and down, taking his figure and attire in. The black jeans, the cowboy boots, the shirt with its sleeves rolled up around muscular forearms, the broad shoulders and strong chest, the face with its square jaw.

  ‘Really?’ Stokes said with a sarcastic grin. ‘You look more like the all-American dream gymnast than any cop I’ve ever seen.’ He shook Hunter’s hand. ‘Seb Stokes. Everyone calls me Seb.’

  ‘Robert Hunter. Call me Robert.’

  They both sat down.

  ‘OK, let’s order.’ Stokes signaled a waitress over without even looking at the menu and ordered the breakfast special. Hunter asked for a cup of black coffee.

  Stokes sat back and undid the buttons on his suit jacket. ‘So you’re the lead on Andy’s murder?’ He shook his head and looked into the distance before fixing Hunter with his tired eyes. ‘Is it true what I’ve heard? He was cut up into pieces? I mean . . . dismembered? Decapitated?’

  Hunter nodded. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And his body parts were left on a table, in some sort of crazy sculpture?’

  Hunter nodded again.

  ‘Do you think it was a gang hit?’

  ‘Nothing points that way.’

  ‘What? A single perp?’

  ‘From what we have, yes.’

  Stokes used the palm of his left hand to wipe the sweat from his glistening forehead and Hunter saw his jaw almost lock in ang
er.

  ‘That’s fucked up. Fucking coward, piece of shit. That’s no way for an officer to die. I would kill for five minutes in a room alone with the mother-humper who did that to Andy. Let’s see who would dismember who then.’

  Hunter kept his gaze locked on Stokes, watching him feed off his emotions.

  ‘You know you have the entire goddam LAPD behind you on this one, right? Whatever you need, from whatever division, just ask. Fucking cop-killer. He’s gonna get what’s coming to him.’

  Hunter said nothing.

  ‘It wasn’t a random attack, right? It was personal? I mean, did it look like a payback job?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘For what? Andy hadn’t been in the field for . . .’ Stokes shook his head and narrowed his eyes.

  ‘Eight years.’ Hunter filled in the blank.

  ‘That’s right, eight years. He was with the Operations Support division . . .’ He paused, suddenly realizing the implications. ‘Wait up. You think it was payback for a case that goes back more than eight years, back to when he was on the field?’

  ‘You used to be his partner, right?’

  ‘Well, not exactly partner. We worked several cases together, yes, but when we were with the South Bureau, most of the investigations we were assigned to didn’t require more than one senior detective. We did a lot of low-level robberies, muggings, domestic violence, thefts, that kinda shit. Andy and I worked together in a few homicides, mostly gang related. Anything more high profile got sent to you folks down at the RHD.’

  The waitress came back with their coffees. Stokes’s had so much whipped cream on top it looked like a snow-covered Christmas tree. Hunter waited as Stokes emptied three sugar sachets into his mug.

  ‘You think this scumbag is someone Andy and I put away?’

  ‘At the moment we’re looking at every possibility.’