The Death Sculptor (18 page)

‘Precisely.’ Garcia looked impressed.

‘You’re kidding?’

‘Nope, that’d be pretty much the exact translation.’

‘Interesting analogy,’ was all Hunter could say. The next couple of pages in Nashorn’s file were a brief of the latest investigations Nashorn had been involved with.

‘His captain said that he was a man of habits,’ Garcia offered. ‘Always took his vacation at the same exact time of year – first few days of summer. Always two weeks by himself out in the sea, fishing. He used all his savings to buy that boat. According to his captain, that boat
was
his retirement plan.’

‘No girlfriend, no partner.’ Hunter was still reading from the file. ‘Next of kin are an uncle and aunt who still live in El Granada.’

‘Yep, his captain is getting in touch with them.’

Hunter checked the file for Nashorn’s home address – an apartment in East LA. A forensic team had already been dispatched there this morning. Last night, they’d found no cellphone, computer, address book, diary, or anything of that sort in Nashorn’s boat, and according to his captain there was nothing at his desk either. No personal files in his hard drive. They were checking his work emails. Hunter was hoping something would turn up from Nashorn’s apartment search. He closed the file and returned it to the backseat as Garcia pulled into the County Coroner’s parking lot.

Alice Beaumont printed out another document page and placed it on the floor next to the tens of pages that were already there. With Hunter and Garcia out of the office, she had temporarily turned the place into her own private research haven.

She had a quick stab at finding out what the shadow image created by the second sculpture could mean, but after three quarters of an hour searching the net, she had nothing that even remotely excited her. Unlike the first shadow puppets, she found no mythological meaning that could be attached to the entire image. If she broke the image down, then it was easy to link the distorted head with horns to any devil figure she liked, but that didn’t explain the four smaller shadow figures created by Nashorn’s severed fingers.

Alice wanted to carry on searching, but she knew that, for now, the investigation’s priority was to work on the lists of perpetrators Derek Nicholson had put away over the years. If she could find some sort of link to any case Andrew Nashorn had worked on, either as a detective or as a Support Division officer, that could give them the starting point they were so desperately looking for.

Alice sat on the floor with all the printouts surrounding her and started rereading and regrouping them in lots of two, three, four and sometimes five pages.

She had brought her own laptop in with her this morning. She had a feeling she would be needing a few of the powerful development applications she had in her hard drive. And she was right. Hunter had told her to go back five, maybe ten years in her search for perpetrators who’d been released, had escaped, or were out on parole. That gave her way too many names and files to read through. Couple that with all the new names and files she’d got from Andrew Nashorn’s investigations, and also a list of original victims who personally blamed Nicholson for losing their case, and she’d need at least a week to get through them all. But that was where her expert computer skills came in.

The first thing Alice did when Hunter and Garcia left was to write a quick application that would read through text files and search for specific names, words, or phrases. The application could also link files together using a variety of criteria. The problem she had was that not all the files were digitized. In fact, about 50 per cent of them were still on paper only. Getting a simple list of names was easy, even going back twenty-six years. But the actual case files only really started being digitized around fifteen years ago. Older cases were being added to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s databank as fast as possible, but the sheer number of them, together with a lack of personnel, made the process laborious and very, very slow. The same applied to the LAPD and Andrew Nashorn’s cases.

Alice was doing really well with what she had. Her application had already managed to flag and link forty-six documents, but she had yet to start looking into Nashorn’s investigations.

Hunter pulled his surgical mask over his nose and mouth and stood to the right of one of the two examination tables inside Special Autopsy Theater One. Garcia was just behind him, arms folded over his chest, shoulders hunched forward as if trying to protect himself from a freezing gust of wind.

As always, the room felt too cold, despite the hot summer’s day outside; too somber, no matter how bright the surgical and ceiling lights were; and too macabre, with its stainless-steel tables and counters, its clinical atmosphere, its honeycomb of human-body freezers, and its soul-chilling display of laser-sharp cutting instruments.

‘There’s no need for the mask, Robert,’ Doctor Hove said, a shadow of a smile playing at the corners of her lips. ‘There’s no risk of contamination and the body doesn’t really smell.’ She paused, considering her words. ‘Maybe just a little bit.’

Though every cadaver inevitably smells due to its natural breakdown of tissues and the explosive growth of bacteria after death; that odor alone never bothered Hunter. Carefully washed prior to the autopsy examination, the body’s smell was usually all but gone.

‘You do realize that your sense of smell is as dead as fried chicken, don’t you, Doc?’ Hunter replied, slipping on a brand new pair of latex gloves.

‘My husband tells me that every time I cook.’ The doctor smiled again and directed both detectives’ attention to the two autopsy tables. Nashorn’s dismembered body occupied one of them, and his severed body parts the other. Doctor Hove approached the table containing the body parts.

‘The official cause of death was heart failure, induced by severe loss of blood. Just like our first victim.’

Hunter and Garcia nodded in silence. The doctor continued.

‘I compared the lacerations to the ones on the first victim. They are consistent. The killer used the same cutting device.’

‘The electric kitchen carving knife?’ Garcia asked.

The doctor nodded. ‘But this time the killer did it a little differently.’

‘How so?’ Hunter asked, moving around to the other side of the table.

‘He took the time to try and properly stop the hemorrhage. The feet amputation carries all the signs of a proper Syme’s ankle disarticulation.’

‘A what?’ Garcia questioned.

‘It’s an ankle amputation procedure named after James Syme,’ Doctor Hove clarified. ‘He was a Clinical Professor of Surgery at the University of Edinburgh in eighteen-something. He developed an ankle-amputation procedure that is still used today. Anyway, the incisions we have here were made clean across the ankle joints. In accordance with the Syme’s ankle-disarticulation guidelines, the arteries were transfixed, and large veins ligated as much as possible, given that the entire procedure was carried out inside a boat cabin without a surgical team. Usually, smaller blood vessels are electrocoagulated during the procedure, but the killer didn’t bother with that. Either because he didn’t have the equipment, or . . .’

‘Because there was no need for it,’ Hunter took over. ‘He knew the victim would die in a matter of hours, maybe minutes. He just didn’t want him to bleed out and die too quickly.’

‘I’d have to agree with that,’ the doctor said. ‘The feet were certainly the first to be amputated. The killer used a compression dressing of fluffs, contoured over the stump and wrapped in place with a bias-cut stockinet. Nicely done.’

‘You mean professionally done?’ Garcia asked.

‘I’d say so, yes. But first, the wounds were covered in cayenne pepper powder.’

‘Cayenne pepper?’ Garcia’s brow furrowed. He thought about it for a second. ‘Jesus!’

Hunter’s memory immediately took him back to the boat and the strange, stinging smell he picked up inside its cabin. He knew he’d smelled it before, but he hadn’t been able to identify it then. ‘The pepper wasn’t used to add to the pain,’ he said, picking up on Garcia’s suspicion, and quickly dismissing it. ‘It was used to stop the bleeding.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Robert is right,’ Doctor Hove noted. ‘Cayenne pepper has been used as a natural remedy for years. More specifically – a blood clotter.’

Garcia’s focus moved to Nashorn’s severed feet on the metal table. ‘Like coffee powder?’

‘Yes, coffee powder can have a very similar effect,’ the doctor confirmed. ‘Both powders react with the body to equalize blood pressure, meaning an extra gushing of pressure will not be concentrated in the wound area as it normally would be. Blood will quickly clot when the pressure is equalized. It’s an old trick, but it works every time. The bandaging has already been sent up to the lab for analysis.’

‘Did the killer use the same level of care for the subsequent amputations?’ Garcia asked.

Doctor Hove tilted her head to one side and twisted her mouth. ‘Kind of. Arteries and large veins in the arms were also ligated, using a thick thread, but as you’ll remember, there was no dressing of the wounds. And unlike the feet amputations, cayenne pepper was never used to try and contain the hemorrhage. But what was done would certainly prevent the victim from bleeding out too quickly.’

‘We obviously have no toxicology results yet, right?’ Hunter said.

‘Not yet,’ the doctor confirmed. ‘In a day or two. My guess is that we’ll get the same result for the heart-rate regulating drugs the killer used on his first victim.’

Hunter had the same feeling, but he noticed something else in Doctor Hove’s demeanor. Something seemed to be troubling her. ‘Is there something else?’ he chanced.

Doctor Hove took a deep breath and tucked her hands inside the large pockets on her long white overcoat. ‘You know I’ve been a pathologist for many years, Robert. And when you are a pathologist in a city like LA, you get to see pretty much the worst human beings have to offer, almost on a day-to-day basis. But I’ll tell you now, if there’s such a thing as pure evil, or a real demon walking amongst us, then this killer is it. And it wouldn’t surprise me if, when you catch this guy, you find he’s got devil horns on his head.’

Those words stopped Hunter and Garcia dead in their tracks, the image of the shadow figure cast by the sculpture found in the boat cabin coming back to them like a recurring nightmare.

‘Wait.’ Garcia lifted his hand before exchanging a quick, unsettling glance with Hunter. ‘Why do you say that, Doc?’

The doctor turned around. ‘Let me show you why.’

Alice finished reading through another file and checked her watch. She’d been at it for three and a half hours and she still hadn’t found a path she thought was worth pursuing further. She’d already read through thirty-eight of the forty-six initial documents her application had flagged.

She shook her head disapprovingly as she studied the two untouched case-file boxes on her desk. She had no doubt that this time she’d bitten off a lot more than she could chew. She needed a team of readers, and maybe one or two other programmers, to get through those documents by the end of today. Maybe she should go back to searching for a meaning to the shadow image cast by the new sculpture. Maybe she’d have better luck there.

Alice poured herself a fresh cup of coffee and leaned back against the wall. Her eyes rested on the pictures board for a moment, and the brutality of it all made her shiver. How could anyone be this evil? This disturbed? And still be clever enough to come up with the sculptures and the shadow images? Still be clever enough to walk into someone’s house or boat, spend hours torturing them, rip them to pieces, and then walk out without being noticed? Without leaving any clues behind, except the ones he wanted the police to find?

Alice forced herself to look away, trying to shut the images out of her mind. Her attention returned to the documents on the floor. The cover pages carried the case number and the accused or convict’s name. She stared at them for a while, her brain throwing thoughts around, rummaging through possibilities. She’d already scanned through several cases where Andrew Nashorn had been the lead detective, and a handful where he’d been involved in the investigation, either in a detective capacity, or as a support officer. Almost all of them concerned gang members, muggers, thieves and petty criminals. Individuals who, in her opinion, didn’t have what it took to be this killer. She doubted very much she’d find a relation there. But she hadn’t even started on the list of victims who might’ve personally blamed Derek Nicholson and the State of California for losing their case.

She sipped her coffee too quickly, burning the roof of her mouth. Suddenly she paused as her brain spat out a new idea, instigated by the very lack of relation between the lists of names she had.

Back at her computer, Alice called up the code screen for the application she’d written earlier. All she needed were a few alterations here and there and she’d have a new search-and-compare tool. It took her thirty minutes to make all the necessary modifications. She used her security-clearance password to allow her new application to gain access to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s database. Hunter had also provided her with a password that allowed her to connect to the LAPD and the national criminal database.

While the program searched away, Alice went back to the files. The application had to connect to, and search, two different databases in two different locations – she was expecting it to take a while. The first results, using her initial search criteria, came back after thirty-five minutes. Thirty-four distinct names. Alice called up their individual case-summary pages and printed them out. She read through them, jotting down notes in the margins as she went along. As she started reading the summary page for search result number twenty-four, she felt a chill envelop her body. She put the page down and quickly shuffled through the remaining pages, looking for the match her application had indicated.