Two minutes later he and Garcia were downstairs talking to the senior sergeant in charge of searching City Hall Park and the streets immediately surrounding the PAB.
‘So far, we’ve got trash,’ the sergeant announced, clearly annoyed with the ‘garbage hunt’ task he was given. He’d been on front-desk duty all day and had no idea what had happened less than fifty minutes ago. ‘Wrappers, all kinds of it,’ he continued, his tone a step away from being sarcastic. ‘Burgers, sandwiches, candy bars, Twinkies – you name it, we’ve got it. We also have truckloads of cans, bottles and paper coffee cups.’
Hunter was listening to the sergeant, but his eyes were roaming around the park, the streets and all the buildings surrounding it. He was positive the killer would still be nearby. This killer took too much pride in what he did to simply walk away without savoring the result to such an audacious trick, like making the call from just outside the Police Administration Building, and maybe, leaving something behind for the LAPD to find. Psychopath or not, it would appeal to his sense of satisfaction. It follows the same principle as when a person surprises someone else with a present that he/she spent a long time creating, or choosing. The real satisfaction comes from observing that someone’s reaction as he/she unwraps the gift.
The sergeant pulled a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and dabbed it over his sweaty forehead. ‘We’re bagging every little piece of trash into evidence bags, and you know why?’ He was in no mood to wait for an answer. ‘Because no one told us what the hell we’re supposed to be looking for out here, and if that one thing so happens to be a bubble gum wrapper and we miss it, it’s
The radio clipped to the belt around the sergeant’s thick waistline crackled loudly before a thin voice came through.
Both detectives knew that 10-1 was police ten-code for ‘poor reception’.
More radio crackles.
The sergeant moved around to the other side of Hunter and Garcia.
Reflexively the sergeant looked back at both detectives to check if they’d heard the message.
They had.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ the sergeant replied. ‘What have you got?’
Hunter, Garcia and the sergeant turned and looked in that general direction. They’d been standing by the Frank Putman water feature, right at the center of the park, not that far from the northeast corner. They could see a young officer standing by a trashcan waving at them. They quickly walked over.
The officer was in his early twenties and looked to be fresh out of the police academy. He had bright blue eyes, red, acne-riddled cheeks and a pencil-tip nose. He was wearing a pair of latex gloves and holding a compact, black camcorder in his hands. He greeted everyone with a single head nod.
‘I found this in there, Sergeant.’ He pointed to the trash-can to his left. ‘It was inside a regular brown-paper sandwich bag.’ He handed the camera to his sergeant, who barely looked at it before passing it over to Hunter.
‘This is your show,’ he said, looking very uninterested.
Hunter gloved up and took the camera. The letters and numbers on one side of it read Sony Handycam CX250 HD. The camera was one of those with a flip-out screen on the side.
‘I’m not really sure what we’re looking for out here, sir,’ the officer explained. ‘But that’s a brand-new digital camera, worth at least a few hundred bucks. It’s got no business being in the trash.’
‘Where’s the sandwich bag the camera was in?’ Hunter asked the officer, who promptly produced a clear plastic evidence bag.
‘All bagged up and ready to go, sir,’ he said. ‘I figured somebody would want this separate from the rest of the garbage.’
Garcia acknowledged the officer’s good work before quickly checking the sandwich bag.
Nothing. No marks, no stains, nothing written anywhere.
He and Hunter returned their attention to the camcorder.
‘Did you try turning this on?’ Hunter asked the officer.
He shook his head. ‘Not my place, sir. I found it and called it in straightaway.’
Hunter nodded his agreement. For an instant he considered if he should take the camera straight to forensics, but the reality of the matter was that there was no clear evidence that that camcorder had indeed been left behind by the killer.
Hunter flipped open the viewer screen and froze. He didn’t need to turn the camera on to know. Staring back at him was all the confirmation he needed.
He had considered using a thick blood-red marker pen to write Detective Robert Hunter – LAPD on the sandwich bag he’d left inside the trashcan at the northeast corner of the park less than an hour ago. By doing so, he would make sure that if anyone else came across the bag, like a garbage collector (homeless trashcan scavengers tended to stay away from the park due to its proximity to the Police Administration Building), chances were they’d drop it in at the PAB. But in the end the man had decided against it. He’d read a lot about Detective Robert Hunter in the past few months. Hunter was supposed to be ‘a class above’, according to some of the articles he’d read. Well, how good could he really be, if he wasn’t even able to figure out that there was bound to be a hidden reason behind the fact that the LAPD was
But the man had to admit that he was a little bit surprised because things had happened fast. Faster than what he had foreseen. Very shortly after the Internet voting had ended, a team of five uniformed officers exited the PAB and purposefully crossed the road in the direction of the park. One of them, an officer with red acned cheeks and a thin-tip nose, had almost bumped into him. The team was being coordinated by an overweight senior officer, probably a sergeant, now too old and too fat for any kind of more physically demanding job, the man concluded. The four young officers under his command had clearly been instructed to search the park, not to stop and interview people.
The man’s lips stretched into a skewed, wry smile.
The man was sure that the order to solely search the park, instead of wasting time interviewing passersby, had come from Detective Hunter’s office. Which meant that he had very quickly made a connection between the triangulated location of the incoming call and the possibility of a clue or a teaser being left behind.
‘Not bad, Detective Hunter,’ the man said under his breath. ‘Not bad at all.’
His smile widened a fraction as he saw Detective Hunter himself, followed by Detective Garcia, exit the PAB and make their way toward the park. The look on their faces told its own story, and it spoke of frustration, defeat, unrelenting concern and maybe even fear. It was the same look the man had had etched on his face for many years. But not anymore.
The man’s left leg started hurting again, and as he began rubbing his knee with the palm of his hand he saw the young officer who was searching the northeast corner of the park wave at both detectives and the sergeant.
The man’s smile grew wider still, and he felt a wave of excitement surge inside him.
The officer had found it.
As the number 70 bus to El Monte pulled in at the bus stop, the man saw Detective Hunter flip open the camcorder’s view screen. The look on his face made the man want to throw his head back and laugh loudly, but instead he quietly turned around, boarded the bus and took a seat toward the back.
It was almost time to finish this whole thing off.
They saw the same thing Hunter and Garcia did. They just didn’t understand it.
‘Sonofabitch,’ Garcia murmured, his breath catching in his throat.
Hunter said nothing, but his eyes left the camcorder and quickly returned to searching the park. That was the event this killer wouldn’t want to miss. What he had waited around for – the moment they came across his little gift. Hunter was sure this killer would want to be looking straight at them so he was able to see the surprise on their faces. To the killer, it would be the perfect punch line.
But with the rush hour picking up momentum, the streets and the park had gotten busier. People were cutting across it in a multitude of directions, all in a hurry to get somewhere fast. Hunter’s eyes moved as quickly as they could. He understood that this killer needed only a second, maybe two, to completely savor the moment and laugh at their frustration. After that, satisfied, he would just fade back into anonymity.
There was no need for the killer to allow his gaze to linger on their group for longer than a brief instant and risk being spotted.
Maybe if Hunter had looked west first, he would’ve noticed the man standing at the bus stop by the northwest corner of the park, staring straight at them. The smirk on his face was insolent, arrogant . . . proud, even. But Hunter had instinctively looked up from the camcorder in his hands and forward. He was facing east. By the time his gaze reached the bus stop, the man had his back to them, waiting patiently at the end of the line, ready to board the bus –
‘Stretch?’ The sergeant wrinkled his nose. ‘Does that mean anything to you guys?’
Garcia nodded in silence and felt something tighten deep down in his gut, as his subconscious mind started spitting out random images of the broadcast.
Hunter’s forefinger hovered over the ‘on’ button, for a moment unsure and hesitant if he was ready for whatever new surprise the killer had in store for them, but the doubt vanished fast.
He pressed the switch.
Nothing happened.
He tried again.
Still nothing.
‘Battery seems to be dead,’ the pencil-tip-nosed officer offered matter-of-factly.
Despite holding no real hopes for any sort of clue to come from it, Hunter asked the sergeant to get the sandwich bag the camcorder was found in to forensics ASAP. He and Garcia rushed back to the Police Administration Building and went straight down to the LAPD Computer Crimes Unit.
‘And he left this inside a trashcan out in the park?’ Baxter asked, looking down at the compact camcorder Hunter had placed on his desk. The word STRETCH stared back at him from the flip-out view screen.
‘That’s right,’ Garcia confirmed. ‘It looks like he was controlling everything remotely.’
Baxter thought about that for a second.
‘How difficult would that really be to accomplish?’ Garcia asked.
‘For an average person? Quite a bit. For someone with his knowledge of computer programming and electronics, not hard at all. All he had to do was develop an application that monitored the voting process and link it to a second program that controlled the mechanics of both death methods. As soon as one of them reached a specified number, in this case ten thousand, it would activate the machinery for that specific death method. It’s the same engineering behind any regular timer, but instead of a specific time he used a count. The way the camera zoomed in and out during the broadcast could’ve easily be controlled from anywhere with a simple smartphone application.’
Someone’s personal cellphone rang a few desks away, grabbing everyone’s attention. The ringtone was the original theme tune to
Baxter finally retrieved a pair of latex gloves from his top drawer, slipped them on and cautiously picked the camera up from his desk.
‘It looks like the battery is dead,’ Garcia explained. ‘Do you have a power supply that will fit it?’
Baxter nodded. ‘I do.’ But instead of looking for it, he turned the camera upside down and flipped open a very small hinged lid on the underside of it. He paused and chewed on his bottom lip for a second. ‘But a power supply will make no difference here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This is a CX250 Handycam,’ Baxter explained, pointing to the model number specified on the side of the camera. ‘It’s a fairly well-known camera, and the reason why it’s smaller than some of the more expensive models is because it has no hard drive. It uses something called a memory stick duo. What that means is that this camera has no storage facility built into it. Everything it records gets saved into a removable memory stick, which goes in here.’ He indicated the now opened hinged lid. The compartment was empty. ‘In this model,’ he added, ‘even after unclipping the lid you would have to press down on the memory stick so it clicks in before popping up.’ He made an ‘eject up’ movement with his index finger. ‘It’s a double safety mechanism, which means that the memory stick didn’t fall out by mistake: it was removed.’
That caused both detectives to pause momentarily.
‘I can get a power supply and plug it in if you want. It will turn the camera on, but that’s all it will do. There will be no images in it for you to see, if that was what you were expecting.’