by Chris Carter
Hunter’s next question made Captain Blake cringe.
‘Would those be wearable, Doc?’
‘Wearable?’
‘Yes. If the killer ended up with something similar to a pair of human-skin trousers and a human-skin hooded and masked sweatshirt, despite the missing patch from the back, could he possibly wear them?’
Dr. Hove hadn’t considered that possibility until then.
‘If he preserved them with the right solutions then yes, Robert, he could.’
Twenty
After their meeting with Captain Blake and the conference call with Dr. Hove, Hunter and Garcia decided to return to Linda Parker’s house. Both of them wanted to have a second look at the crime scene, but this time they would do it undisturbed and by themselves.
‘So,’ Garcia said as he pulled into the driveway. ‘What was this other possibility you were talking about?’
‘Excuse me?’ Hunter looked back at his partner, a little unsure.
‘Back in the office,’ Garcia said, his head tilting slightly to his left. ‘When it was suggested that we are probably dealing with a psychopath who is off the scale when it comes to emotional detachment, you said that there was another possibility, but you never got to tell us what.’
They got out of the car and began making their way toward the house.
‘The most disturbing of them all,’ Hunter said. ‘That this killer isn’t really as heartless and emotionless as he appears to be, but he’s mentally strong enough to be able to consciously break through that threshold whenever he wants to.’
Garcia paused by the house’s front lawn. ‘For what reason?’
Hunter shrugged. ‘Maybe just to prove to us or, even worse, to himself, that he is capable of doing it if he wants to.’
‘Prove it to himself?’
Hunter nodded. ‘Some human minds are funny like that, Carlos. Some people will push themselves to the limits of just about anything, including savagery, for no better reason than to prove to themselves that they can do it. That they have it in them. Like a self-dare.’
Garcia pointed to Linda Parker’s house. ‘Someone could self-dare himself to do that?’
‘Even worse,’ Hunter said. ‘You’ve heard of the Chessboard Killer, right?’
‘Yes, of course. Russian guy. Alexander . . . something?’
‘Pichushkin,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘Yes, that’s him. Do you remember his story?’
Garcia took a moment. ‘From what I remember he was an absolute freak. He gained that nickname because he wanted to kill as many people as there were squares on a chessboard, right? Sixty-four?’
Hunter nodded. ‘He didn’t actually gain the nickname. He gave it to himself. And you’re right – he wanted to kill as many people as there are squares on a chessboard. The problem with him was that, unlike most serial killers in history, Pichushkin wasn’t driven by some crazy monster inside of him that he couldn’t control. He wasn’t fighting an uncontrollable urge that slowly overwhelmed him over time. He simply one day decided that he would be a serial killer, just like you and I decided a long time ago that we wanted to be cops. To him it was a conscious choice, not the consequence of an internal battle.’
‘Like a career choice?’
‘One can put it that way, yes, but it gets stranger still. There was a reason why he wanted to become a serial killer.’
‘Which was?’
‘A very simple one. He wanted to follow in his hero’s footsteps.’
They reached the house’s front door.
‘Hero?’
Hunter nodded. ‘His biggest idol was a murderer. One of Russia’s most infamous and prolific serial killers, actually – Andrei Chikatilo.’
‘The Butcher of Rostov?’ Garcia said.
‘One and the same,’ Hunter agreed. ‘After he got caught, Chikatilo confessed to murdering fifty-six people between 1978 and 1990.’
‘Yes, I remember his story. Very sadistic, pedophile, necrophiliac predator, right? He only raped his victims after mutilating their bodies, including several children.’
‘Yes, that’s him,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘Now here’s the thing about the Chessboard Killer: when the Russian police finally arrested Pichushkin, they asked him why he had done it, why he had killed all those people.’ Hunter paused just to emphasize the lack of logic in what he was about to say. ‘He told them that it had been because he wanted to beat Chikatilo’s record of fifty-six murders. Alexander Pichushkin’s big desire in life was to be remembered as the most prolific serial killer in Russian history. That was the reason he started killing. His victims were whoever was around at the time – men, women, old, young, black, white – it didn’t matter. He was never driven by a compulsion to kill based on the kind of victim or the level of violence. What he was doing was number crunching. That was his motivation.’
All Garcia could do was shake his head at how unbelievable that story was. ‘That’s just a whole lot of crazy inside one small head.’
Hunter used a penknife to break the police seal at Linda Parker’s front door. ‘Indeed. And because all he wanted was to beat the record, Pichushkin simply picked a number. Any number would do, as long as it was higher than fifty-six. A very good chess player, Pichushkin decided on the number sixty-four, because it would also allow him to pick a great nickname for himself. A nickname that would surely get the attention of the press, not only in Russia, but worldwide.’
‘The Chessboard Killer,’ Garcia agreed. ‘It was quite an intriguing name, I must admit.’
‘It certainly worked for him.’
‘So . . . did he?’ Garcia asked.
‘Kill sixty-four people?’
‘Yes, or beat Chikatilo’s record?’
‘Well, that’s where the story gets even more ironic. Pichushkin told the police that he had killed sixty people. Not a whole chessboard, but it would’ve beaten Chikatilo’s record, making him the most prolific serial killer in Russia’s history until then. The problem was, despite what he told the police, the police could only confirm forty-nine murders, which fell a little short of Chikatilo’s mark. The icing on the cake was that that was only revealed in court, not before. So, inside the courtroom, when Pichushkin heard that information for the first time and realized that officially he did not beat the record and he would not be known as “most prolific serial killer in Russian history”, he went absolutely ballistic.’
‘What, really?’
‘I kid you not,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘The trial wasn’t that long ago – 2007. If you search the internet, you’ll find several videos of him, in court, inside a sealed glass defendant cage, going absolutely mental, screaming at everyone, punching the glass, the works. But he wasn’t protesting the guilty verdict. He was protesting the number of murders. He kept on yelling at the judge that he had committed more than fifty-six murders. That the record was his and not Chikatilo’s.’
‘That’s just insane. I will have to check that out.’
‘Alexander Pichushkin is a prime example of the kind of evil a man can do when guided by nothing but sheer determination. His psychopathy wasn’t inherent, it was induced. He didn’t start life as an emotionally detached person, he forced himself to become one just so he could achieve a goal. And if this is the kind of killer we’re dealing with here . . .’ Hunter allowed his thought to go unfinished.
Garcia shook his head once again. ‘Do you know what, Robert? I just don’t think I understand this crazy world anymore.’
Hunter finally unlocked the door and pushed it open. ‘I never did.’
Twenty-One
‘You’re all done, Mr. Davis,’ the petite nurse said as she pulled the needle from Timothy Davis’s right arm. Despite being thirty years old, that was the first time Timothy had given blood. The whole process had been surprisingly painless and stress-free, though he did blink awkwardly a couple of times as he first set eyes on the needle.
‘Oh, please don’t let the size of the needle scare you, Mr. Davis,’ the n
urse had said, offering him one of the most comforting smiles he had ever seen. Her nametag read Rose Atkins.
Timothy Davis had used a home kit to find out his blood type and, before registering online less than three weeks ago, he’d read all about blood donation. The explanation he’d found said that the reason sixteen-to seventeen-gauge needles were used was that they minimized the damage that could sometimes occur to red blood cells as they traveled through the needle. The explanation didn’t make them look any less scary, though.
‘No, ma’am,’ Timothy had replied in a whispering voice. ‘The needle doesn’t scare me none.’
‘Ma’am?’ The nurse’s light-blue eyes had shined with doubt as her smile turned questioning. ‘Please tell me that I don’t really look that old.’
‘Oh, no, ma’am,’ Timothy replied, his tone sincerely apologetic. ‘Please take no offense. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just the way I talk.’
Timothy Davis really just couldn’t help the way he addressed others, for that was how his parents had brought him up.
Despite now living in Arizona, Timothy had been born in the city of Madison, Alabama, to an African American father and an Asian-Indian-American mother. His parents were dirt poor and both of them had had to work two jobs each just to feed and clothe Timothy and his two younger sisters, Iris and Betsy. In school, Timothy had been a way-above-average student, maintaining a 3.8 GPA throughout his high-school years, but for a poor African American kid living in Madison, being above average still wasn’t good enough.
No matter what the press might want people to believe, or what the world might think, race inequality was still alive and well in the USA, especially in Alabama, which ranked at number four in the list of most racist states in America, something that Timothy, his sisters and his parents knew only too well. Timothy had inherited almost all of his father’s physical traits, with the exception of his hazel eyes. His eyes had definitely come from his mother’s side of the family.
‘Always be polite, son,’ his father had told him when Timothy was still a young kid. ‘Always be polite. Don’t matter who you grow up to be, rich or poor, big or small, always treat others with respect, you hear? Black folks, white folks, yellow folks, it don’t matter none, but especially white folks. Don’t give them a reason to hate you even more, son, you hear? Women is always “ma’am”, men is always “sir”. Don’t be weak, son, but don’t be arrogant either. In this life, folks will try to put you down, oh, yes, sir, they will. They’ll try and they’ll try hard too, so you do your best, you hear? Always do your best. And when they tell you that your best ain’t enough, because they will tell you that, you do better, you understand, Tim? You do better, son.’
His father’s words didn’t fall on deaf ears, because Timothy Davis always tried his best at everything he did, and when he became the first ever person in his family to graduate from high school, his father begged him to leave Alabama.
‘Don’t you stay around this godforsaken land, son. You deserve better, you hear? You deserve much better than Alabama and the Deep South. You’re a man now. You’ve paid your dues here and ain’t nobody gonna tell you you owe nobody nothing . . . cause you don’t. Oh, no, sir, you don’t. Your ma ain’t here no more, but she’s watching from up there and she’s as proud of you as I am, son. She wants you to know that it’s time for you to go on to better things, you hear? Go far away from this land. You have a chance that none of us ever had, so you listen to your pa and you listen good. You go and you find a college far away from here. Some place where white folks and black folks don’t hate each other none, or at least not like they do here, son. Some place where the color of your skin won’t stop you from being whoever you want to be.’
Timothy did listen to his father’s words; he only applied to colleges inside what was considered to be the least racist state in the whole of the USA – California. After being accepted by all five universities he had applied to, Timothy chose to join the College of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California in Berkeley. It was there, during his second semester, that he met Ronda, the girl who was to become his wife five years later.
‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ the nurse asked, cleaning away the small blob of blood that had surfaced on Timothy’s arm once she had extracted the needle.
‘No, ma’am. Not bad at all. I thought that it would hurt some, but I was wrong.’
The nurse smiled one more time. She actually found it cute the way he called her ma’am, specially dressed in his strong Alabama accent, but there was a certain sadness about him, a dark gloom inside his eyes that was hard not to notice.
‘Is everything all right, Mr. Davis?’ she asked, as she applied a plaster onto Timothy’s arm before pressure-bandaging it.
‘Oh, yes, ma’am, everything is just fine.’
Timothy Davis had always been a terrible liar and it didn’t take an expert to see through him, but despite her concern, Nurse Atkins didn’t see it as her place to push it any further.
‘You should keep the bandage on for about half an hour,’ she advised. ‘And the plaster for about six, OK?’
‘Yes, ma’am. I’ll do just that.’
‘For the rest of today,’ she continued, as she helped Timothy to his feet. ‘You might feel a little tired, maybe even a little weak, so no heavy lifting or strenuous work of any kind, you hear?’
Timothy nodded. ‘Absolutely, ma’am.’
Nurse Atkins guided him into a short corridor and to the next room along – the ‘snacks deck’, as everyone who worked at the blood bank liked to call it.
‘Please help yourself to as many cookies and as much juice as you like. It will help bring your blood-sugar level back up. Are you vegetarian, by any chance?’
‘Oh, no, ma’am.’
‘OK, so once you get home try to stick to food that’s full of iron like red meat, fish, chicken, or even cereal with dried fruit, preferably raisins. Get some rest, drink plenty of hydrating fluids and by tomorrow you’ll be as good as new.’
‘Thank you so much for all your help, ma’am. I really appreciate it.’
As Nurse Atkins walked away, Timothy Davis felt a comforting kind of warmth spread through his body. A single act of kindness, that was all it took. His blood could now help save a life. Maybe even more than one.
Twenty-Two
Hunter waited until Garcia had stepped into Linda Parker’s living room before closing the door behind them. For a moment neither of them moved, neither of them said a word; they simply stood there, as if for some reason they needed to acclimatize themselves to the inside of the house.
Most people would be surprised at how different an indoor crime scene could look once the circus show created by the police and the forensics team had moved on.
The first very noticeable difference was always the lighting. Gone were all the overly powerful forensics lights, used mostly to help CSI agents identify fibers, residues and sometimes even dust that didn’t seem to belong there. In its place they had the scene’s original lighting, be it natural, as it came in through the windows, or artificial, from all the light fixtures in the house. The significance of that difference was that the crime had occurred under a combination of those two types of lighting, not the blinding brightness of the forensics ones.
The second major factor that would alter the perspective of an indoor crime scene was how much the space seemed to change once everyone was gone. Without the human dynamics of agents and officers moving around the place, every room inevitably appeared a lot more spacious, not to mention how much quieter the entire house became. For a profiler trying to put together a mental picture of what might’ve happened on the night of the crime, those factors alone could sometimes make all the difference.
‘I know I probably say this every time.’ Garcia broke the silence. ‘But this room really does seem a lot bigger than what I remember.’
‘Yes,’ Hunter replied, walking over to the window on the east wall and drawing the curtains s
hut. ‘You do say that every time.’
‘What are you doing?’ Garcia asked.
‘Dr. Hove told us that the victim lost her life sometime between nine in the evening and midnight on Monday, right? There would’ve been no natural light in here. I just want to try to get a better feel for the—’
‘Yeah, sorry, I forgot about the whole sensory thing you do,’ Garcia said, nodding in acceptance before closing the curtains on the other living-room window. He had never met anyone who could visualize a scene in the same way Hunter could.
Both detectives took their time re-examining the living room and the kitchen before moving on to the corridor and finally reaching the main crime scene at the end of the hallway.
Just like the impression they got as they entered the living room a little earlier, without all the agents moving around and their CSI equipment crowding up the place, Linda Parker’s bedroom appeared to be twice as big as they remembered it – and darker, a lot darker. But the lighting and the space weren’t the only difference. The air inside the house felt heavy and stale, almost unbreathable, laden with an odd, indescribable odor that went beyond the metallic smell of blood and the stomach-churning stench of decomposing flesh. Hunter and Garcia made an effort to breathe mostly through their mouths and from the bedroom door they once again allowed their eyes to circle the room.
‘Now that the autopsy report has told us that the victim wasn’t tortured prior to her death,’ Garcia said, ‘that there was no suffering involved, the chaos in this room is starting to look a little less chaotic, don’t you think?’
Still being careful to avoid the pools of dried blood on the floor, Hunter moved deeper into the room. ‘You’re talking about the art-piece theory, right?’
Garcia nodded. ‘As crazy as it sounds, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Everyone’s first impression as they stepped inside this blood-drenched room was that this crime scene was nothing but overly sadistic. Some sick freak who took pleasure in torturing and mutilating his victim for hours before she was finally allowed to die, and from experience alone, you and I would’ve gone with that theory any day of the week and twice on Sundays. But according to what Dr. Hove told us, our killer didn’t get his kicks that way. No torture, Robert. None. No suffering, either. On the contrary, she was dead in less than two minutes. Now look at this crime scene and think about it. If the killer wasn’t a sadistic freak who got a hard-on from torturing his victim and watching her suffer, then why do all this? Why turn the room into a blood fest? Why mutilate her body way beyond recognition? It makes no sense. Even if this guy is a complete nut-job, crazy enough to try to wear her skin like some ill-fitting suit, it still wouldn’t explain these blood smears everywhere.’
