The room went silent for a moment.
‘OK, let’s get a photograph of this,’ Brindle finally said, addressing Dylan. ‘I also need some lift film. Let’s see how much of a print we can obtain here.’
Hunter stood up and slowly allowed his eyes to move along the panoramic glass wall in front of him.
‘Actually we better dust just about everything here,’ he said. ‘The killer might’ve been hiding and waiting for a while.’ He leaned forward a few inches, his nose almost touching the glass wall, as if searching for a smudge mark. ‘Maybe he leaned against the glass. Maybe he left someth—’
Hunter froze. The word dying in his throat.
‘What?’ Garcia asked, pausing just behind his partner and trying to look over his shoulder, but he had no idea what he was looking at. He thought Hunter had seen something through the window, out back.
Hunter blew another warm breath against the glass, this time a long, purposeful one, moving his head around to deliver the breath against a wider area. The glass misted for just a few seconds.
That was when Garcia finally saw it.
‘You have
LA Times
Pamela Hays sat at her corner desk, undistracted by the noise and oblivious to the chaos of movement around her. She was the
Bruce Kosinski, a larger-than-life man in more than one way, and at that time the city editor at the entertainment desk, was the first to give Pamela a shot at trying her hand at a ‘real’ story. She did well. Very well, in fact. Her research had been second to none, and the story made the front page of the paper. Two years ago, Bruce Kosinski was appointed as chief editor for the
It’s true that Pamela did sleep with Bruce, but she knew that that wasn’t the reason why she was offered the entertainment desk’s editor’s position. The way she saw it, she had more than earned it.
Pamela finished editing another article on her list, rolled her chair back from her desk and stretched her stiff neck.
‘Where the hell is Marco?’ she asked out loud to no one in particular. She got no answer.
Unlike most of the other section editors at the
She checked the clock on the wall.
‘Goddamn it, he’s got less than twenty minutes to get his article to me. If he’s late again, I’m firing his ass. I’ve had it with his crap.’
‘What the hell?’ Pedro, the reporter whose desk was just opposite Pamela’s, said, frowning at his computer screen. ‘Pam, is Christina doing extra work as an actress?’ he asked.
Pamela looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. ‘What the hell are you
‘Come have a look at this,’ Pedro called. There was no play in his voice.
Pamela got up and made her way around to Pedro’s desk.
‘I was just checking a few things on the net,’ Pedro said, ‘when I came across this article.’ He pointed to his screen.
It was a short article named ‘Reality or Hoax?’ The title didn’t catch Pamela’s attention, but the small picture under the headline did – a woman lying inside some sort of glass enclosure with hundreds of very scary black insects swarming around her body. Despite the bad quality of the picture, her face was clearly visible, including the small black mole just below her bottom lip.
Pamela felt her blood almost freeze inside her veins. As she read the article, the color drained from her already naturally pale face.
There was no doubt in her mind. The woman in that picture was Christina Stevenson.
And whatever that was, it was no hoax.
It didn’t.
He forced himself to stop thinking before his brain went into complete meltdown. He got ready and made his way to the twenty-four-hour gym just three blocks from where he lived. A heavy workout always had a way of clearing his head.
Almost two hours later, after a hot shower, he headed out to the PAB.
Garcia had just arrived when Hunter got to his office. Captain Blake followed just seconds later.
‘Brace yourselves,’ she said, allowing the door to close behind her with a
LA Times
The last picture showed her with a still, cold stare, her body all covered in red-raw lumps and black wasps, her lips swollen and bleeding.
The life had been stung out of her.
The headline at the top of the pictures read DEATHNET KILLER BROADCASTS BARBARIC EXECUTION LIVE ONLINE.
Garcia started skimming over the article. It confirmed that the broadcast appeared to have been real, not a hoax. It described what had happened, but not in great detail. There was also no mention of Christina’s body being found.
Hunter leaned back against his desk. He didn’t seem interested in what the paper had to say.
‘I thought the FBI had told you that this video was off the net,’ Captain Blake said. ‘How the
LA Times has enough resources and people on their payroll to be able to track the video down.’
The room was starting to feel stuffy. Captain Blake walked over to the only window in the room and pushed it open.
‘So far, that’s the only paper carrying the story,’ she said irritably. ‘But our press office already received a battery of calls – from local, to nationwide and international newspapers. The avalanche of crap is just about to start.’
Hunter and Garcia knew she was referring to all the jackasses that would no doubt start calling in or sending in anonymous letters with all sorts of bogus tips and information, most of which would have to be checked out because it was protocol. Adding to that, there were always the obligatory phone calls from psychics and tarot card readers with visions, or messages received from beyond the grave that could help break the case. They were all used to it. It happened every time the news of a new high-profile killer broke.
‘The mayor was on the phone this morning,’ Captain Blake added. ‘He called me at my home. As soon as I put the phone down, I got a call from the governor of California. Everybody wants to know what the hell is going on, and my home phone seemed to have become this case’s information hot line.’ She grabbed the paper back from Garcia’s desk and hastily threw it into the wastebasket, knocking it over and spilling its contents.
‘What did you tell them?’ Hunter asked, calmly returning the wastebasket to its place.
Captain Blake looked back at Hunter. Her makeup was as impeccable as always, but she was wearing a darker shade of eye shadow than she usually did, and that made the angry look in her eyes appear deadly. Still, Hunter didn’t shy away from it.
‘Enough to assure them we’re doing everything we can,’ she replied. ‘But I gave them nothing they didn’t need to know. No one knows the killer contacted you first, and that we were already investigating this case way before it hit the papers. No one knows that this killer has already claimed at least one victim prior to Christina Stevenson. I want to keep all that under wraps. As far as everyone is concerned, we’re starting our investigation into these online murders today.’
‘Suits us fine,’ Hunter said.
‘I refused the request for a press conference this early in the investigation,’ the captain continued, still annoyed. ‘But we won’t be able to escape it, as you both well know it. There will eventually be a press conference. And guess what?’ She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘The two of you are the ones who will be facing that execution squad.’
There were few things in life Hunter hated more than press conferences. He breathed out and pinched the bridge of his nose. His headache was still eating away at his brain, despite the grueling workout.
‘Did you read the Sunday edition of the
‘We did a preliminary check,’ Garcia said. ‘The husband had been filming in Sacramento since the beginning of the week. He obviously had no idea about the affair, or that the story was coming out. He returned to Los Angeles on Sunday evening. The wife and her lover both have solid alibis for Friday night, the night Christina Stevenson died. And no, they aren’t each other’s alibis, Captain. We’re looking into other aspects of this, but the big head-scratcher is – how do we link Kevin Lee Parker, our first victim, to Christina’s celebrity affair story? We know for sure that the same person is behind both murders.’
‘Well, that’s your job, isn’t it?’ Captain Blake retorted. ‘Finding a connection, if there is any.’
‘And as I said, we’re looking into it,’ Garcia replied firmly. ‘The possibility that Ms. Stevenson was murdered because she was a reporter is very real, and we know that. We have a team working on collecting every article she wrote for the
‘Get them to work faster,’ the captain said, turning to face the pictures board on the south wall. She immediately noticed two new sets of photographs. The first one had been taken at the car park in Dewey Street, Santa Monica, where Christina Stevenson’s body had been found yesterday morning. When her stare found the pictures of the body itself, the captain held her breath for an instant.
With the wasps gone, the deformation caused by their stings was absolutely shocking. Christina’s body was an unrecognizable mass. The tarantula hawks had shown no mercy. Even her eyes and tongue had been stung several times.
‘Jesus!’ The word unintentionally escaped the captain’s lips. ‘Good thing the paper didn’t get hold of this picture.’
The second new set of photographs came from Christina’s bedroom.
Captain Blake scanned the pictures slowly, and Hunter and Garcia saw her body go rigid when she came to the last photo on the set.
‘What the hell is that?’
‘The killer left us that,’ Hunter said.
‘What?’ Captain Blake stepped closer to have a better look.
‘He left that on the glass wall behind the curtains,’ Hunter clarified. ‘We think he hid there while waiting for his victim to come home.’
‘How did he do this?’
‘The same way kids do. He misted the glass with a warm breath, and then wrote on it.’
Forensics had used a handheld steamer to properly steam the desired section on the glass. The fluorescent orange powder attached itself to the water particles created by the steam that surrounded whatever the killer had drawn onto the glass, making the whole thing look like a large, fluorescent orange stencil.
At the center of it the killer had written three words: THE DEVIL INSIDE.
‘What the hell does this mean?’ the captain asked, spinning around to face her detectives. ‘Inside what . . . or who . . .? His head . . .? Her . . .? That glass coffin . . .?’
‘We don’t know what it means yet, Captain,’ Hunter said.
‘That’s why I got here early,’ Garcia joined in. ‘The only reference I could find was to a horror film released in January 2012. It’s called
Garcia nodded, while reading out of his computer screen. ‘It’s a documentary-style horror film about a woman who becomes involved in a series of exorcisms, while trying to figure out what happened to her mother.’
A moment of stunned silence.
Up went the second eyebrow. ‘Did you just say exorcisms?’
Garcia breathed out, sharing the captain’s frustration. ‘That’s right. According to the movie blurb, her mother had murdered three people while possessed by a demon. The daughter wants to find out if that’s true or not.’