Inside Hunter’s office, they could hear a pin drop.
‘From the silence I hear,’ the caller’s voice came blasting through the phone’s loudspeakers, ‘I assume you are starting to get the picture.’ He laughed a cartoon dog laugh.
Again, no reply from either detective.
‘But that picture isn’t complete yet,’ the caller continued. ‘So let me remedy that for you.’
The camera started to slowly pan upward, toward the ceiling.
All of a sudden Hunter’s office door was pushed open in a hurry and Captain Blake stepped inside. The look on her face was a cocktail of anger, disbelief and dread.
‘Are you watching this . . .’ she began, but Hunter lifted a hand, stopping her, and gesturing toward the speakerphone on his desk.
Too late.
‘Well, well, well,’ the caller said, amused. ‘So who might we have joining us now . . .?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘By the angry tone of her voice, I’m guessing – the Robbery Homicide Division Captain herself. Barbara Blake, is the name correct?’
Captain Blake knew that the killer could’ve easily gotten her name from the LAPD’s official website.
‘Welcome to
, Captain. Glad you can join us today. The more the merrier.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ she said, her words swimming in anger.
Hunter glared at the captain. Rule number one of any negotiations with any sort of perpetrator –
‘Why am I doing this?’ the caller repeated derisively. ‘Are you asking me to do your job for you, Captain Blake?’
Hunter gave her a subtle headshake.
The captain stayed quiet.
The camera carried on panning upward.
Hunter frowned at the screen again, intrigued by something. The first thing he realized was that the location was different from the one used for the broadcast of the two previous victims. There was no brick wall at the back, and the room seemed larger, much larger. Then something else caught his attention – the camera movement. It took him a few seconds to figure out why. He looked at Garcia and mouthed a few words.
Garcia failed to understand them, shook his head and moved closer.
‘It’s a remote-controlled camera.’ Hunter whispered it this time.
‘What?’ Garcia and Captain Blake looked uncertain.
Hunter pressed the ‘mute’ button on his phone. ‘The way the camera is zooming and panning around the place,’ Hunter explained. ‘It’s too slow, too steady. You try doing that by hand, and there’s no way you’ll get such a smooth and constant movement.’
Garcia and Captain Blake looked back at the screen.
‘He’s controlling it remotely,’ Hunter said. ‘He might not even be there.’
‘So?’ Captain Blake shot back. ‘What difference does it make?’
Hunter shrugged.
On the screen the camera’s panning came to a stop, and everyone inside Hunter’s office went rigid. Suspended several feet directly above the victim and the makeshift medieval torture device was a man-made concrete slab. It looked to be around one and a half foot thick, four foot wide and about six and a half foot long. The rock easily weighed over a ton. It was being held in place by very thick chains attached to ten metal hooks that had been built into the top surface of the slab. They couldn’t see what the chains were connected to at the very top.
‘I guess the picture is now complete,’ the caller said with a chuckle. ‘But the beauty of what I’ve created here is . . . I don’t have to crush him all at once. I am able to slowly lower that concrete rock onto the table, gently compressing his body, like a giant vise, until every bone is crushed.’
Hunter knew there would be a twist. The rack was originally a medieval
slowly
‘You sonofabitch,’ Captain Blake blasted out, not caring for protocol or rules anymore.
The caller’s response was a laugh full of joy. ‘I guess it’s time we start the show. Enjoy.’
The line went dead.
On the screen both voting buttons were activated, and at the bottom left-hand corner a digital clock started its countdown – 10:00, 9:59, 9:58 . . .
pickadeath.com
‘Ten thousand votes in ten minutes?’ Seth replied. ‘That’s a lot of votes when you consider that not every vote will go to the same death method.’
‘So you think that if time runs out,’ Desiree came back, ‘and he doesn’t get ten thousand votes, this killer will keep his word and just let this guy go?’
Seth simply shrugged.
Watching the events unfold on their computer monitors wasn’t the only thing Seth and Desiree were doing. They were also the ones in charge of recording and tracking the killer’s call to Hunter’s desk.
The first thing they found out was that the call was coming from a cellphone. Immediately they used an application to query the service provider for the phone’s GPS coordinates.
Nothing.
No GPS.
The caller was either using an old phone or had deactivated the GPS chip.
Instantly Desiree and Seth moved onto cellphone triangulation, a much more cumbersome and laborious process that usually took several minutes and depended on two main factors. One, the phone must stay active during the whole process. If the caller came off the phone and switched it off, the triangulation procedure failed. Two, the phone must stay inside the same triangulation zone. If the caller was mobile and happened to move out of range of any one of the three triangulating towers, the process collapsed and it had to be started again from scratch.
But so far, so good.
The caller was still on the line, and it didn’t look like he was moving anywhere. If he stayed on the phone for just a little while longer, they would probably have a location. But neither Desiree nor Seth showed a lot of excitement with that prospect. They had both worked on the two previous calls from this same perpetrator to Hunter. They had seen how he had expertly bounced the calls all over Los Angeles, laughing at the LAPD. If there was one thing this perpetrator was not it was ‘stupid’. He knew full well that this call, just like the previous two, would be recorded and traced.
One of the two computers on Seth’s desk beeped once, indicating that the triangulation process had come to an end. Seth and Desiree turned to face the monitor, without paying too much attention to the final coordinates. They were simply waiting for the triangulated location to quickly change, as the caller bounced it onto a different spot, in the same way he had done with the first call.
It didn’t happen.
Ten, twenty, thirty seconds passed and the location stayed the same.
‘You’re joking,’ Seth whispered, leaning over his keyboard. Only then he and Desiree checked the coordinates for the originating phone call.
‘Oh my God.’
Less than sixty seconds had elapsed since the digital clock at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen started counting back from ten minutes.
CRUSH: 1011.
STRETCH: 1089.
‘Not even a minute gone, and over two thousand people have voted?’ Captain Blake finally looked at Hunter.
‘He’s probably placed links on several major social network sites again,’ Hunter replied.
Garcia quickly switched the call to loudspeaker mode. ‘Can you repeat that, Michelle?’
‘I said that he
‘That’s just perfect,’ Captain Blake said. ‘Is there anything the FBI Cybercrime Division can do about this?’
‘We’re already doing all we can,’ Michelle came back. ‘But this guy looks to have anticipated every move we could make. Whichever way we turn, we hit a wall.’
‘Are you and Harry recording this?’ Hunter asked.
‘Harry isn’t here,’ Michelle said. ‘But yes, I’m recording every second of it.’
CLOCK: 7:48, 7:47, 7:46 . . .
CRUSH: 3339.
STRETCH: 3351.
Captain Blake’s cellphone vibrated inside her suit jacket pocket. She reached for it and checked the caller display window – the mayor of Los Angeles. She knew exactly what that meant. She declined the call and returned the phone to her pocket. Right now, she had no time for a pointless argument. She would deal with the mayor in her own time.
Garcia took a step back from his desk and nervously rubbed his face before looking down at the floor and away from the screen. Hunter could almost read his thoughts. After what happened yesterday, Garcia’s subconscious mind couldn’t help but to put forward the worst imaginable scenario for him, swapping the man they could see on their screen for his wife, Anna.
Garcia quickly shook his head, trying to banish the thought. He took a moment or two to try to calm the rapid beating of his heart, waiting for the rate to settle slowly. When it did, his eyes returned to the screen.
Captain Blake was also getting fidgety. The helplessness of watching the voting process without being able to move a finger to stop it was polluting the air inside the room like a sarin gas attack.
‘Over ten thousand hits.’ They all heard Michelle say. ‘It’s going viral.’
CLOCK: 6:11, 6:10, 6:09 . . .
CRUSH: 5566.
STRETCH: 5601.
‘This can’t be happening,’ Captain Blake said.
The phone on Hunter’s desk rang again – internal call. He snapped the receiver off its cradle.
‘Detective Hunter, this is Seth Reid from Operations. You’re not going to believe this, but we’ve got a trace on the caller’s location.’
Seth was wrong: right about now, Hunter would believe anything. He placed the call on speaker mode. ‘You’ve got a fixed location for the originating call?’
‘That’s correct. The caller stayed on the line for long enough, and this time he didn’t bounce the call all over the city.’
Hunter and Garcia frowned. This killer would not make that kind of mistake.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Captain Blake said, reaching for the phone on Garcia’s desk, ready to assemble the whole of the LAPD if necessary. ‘So what
‘This building
‘Yes,’ Seth replied. ‘That’s
Tim was sixteen years old and Spinner seventeen. They were both students at Glendale High, and, just like they did every day after school, they were practicing their moves in the skate ramps in Verdugo Park.
Spinner kick-flipped his board before performing a 180-spin to face his friend. Tim was taking a break and sitting at the edge of the kidney pool they were riding.
‘Damn, dude, you’re on your phone again?’ he called back, shaking his head. ‘You need to skate more and Tweet less. You know what I’m saying? What is it anyway?’
‘You have to come check it out, bro. This is sick – literally.’
Spinner paused and pulled a face at Jenny, another student from Glendale High who was hanging out in the park with them. She also loved skating, but she had a long way to go to get half as good as Tim and Spinner.
Both Spinner and Jenny kicked their boards up and approached Tim.
‘Is it a new move?’ Spinner asked.
‘Nah, dude.’ Tim shook his head. ‘Remember I told you about that crazy website – pickadeath.com?’
‘The one you said was a film stunt?’ Jenny said.
‘Yeah, but you guys saw the paper a couple of days ago, didn’t you?’ Tim replied. ‘It was no stunt, bro. That shit was real. Some crazy fucker killed that woman live on the net.’
‘Maybe the bitch deserved it,’ Spinner commented.
Jenny punched him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t be a dick, Spinner. That’s a horrible thing to say.’
Spinner shrugged. ‘Just saying.’
‘Anyway,’ Tim waved a hand, cutting them short. ‘I just got a Tweet from Mel. The site is back online, bro. Check this shit out.’ Tim showed them his smartphone.
Spinner and Jenny both frowned at the screen at the same time.
‘Damn, is this shit for real?’ Spinner asked, his eyes glistening.
‘Like I said,’ Tim replied. ‘Last time it was very real. So I think – yeah, bro, this shit is happening. Some dude is gonna die.’