The Death Sculptor (29 page)

‘As I told you over the phone, the reason why I called you is that we found this in the victim’s living room,’ Corbí said, making a slight head movement towards the apartment, and handing Hunter a business card. ‘It’s one of yours, right?’

Hunter nodded.

Corbí reached inside his breast pocket for his notebook. ‘Thomas Lynch, better known as Tito. He was out on parole from Lancaster. Been out for eleven months. According to his record,’ Corbí faced Garcia, ‘you were the arresting officer seven years ago, and the one who got a confession out of him.’ He paused and reassessed his words. ‘Or should I say, you convinced him to cut a deal. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say that since he was released he became some sort of informer for you guys.’

‘Not really,’ Garcia said.

Corbí looked at him with a penetrating stare. ‘Friend?’

‘Not really.’

Corbí nodded, taking off his glasses, breathing on both lenses and using the tip of his blue tie to polish them. ‘Care to shed some light on how he came by one of your business cards? A very-crisp-and-new business card.’

The last sentence was delivered with a slight lilt in his tone.

Garcia held Corbí’s gaze. ‘We contacted him recently, looking for some information – but he wasn’t an informer,’ he added, before Corbí had a chance to retort. ‘He was just someone who showed up in a list of names.’

Ricky Corbí was experienced enough to know that Garcia wasn’t being stubborn. He was simply giving him all the information he was prepared to give at that time. Pursuing it further was pointless. He gave Garcia a barely noticeable nod.

‘Could you tell us when you saw him last?’ Ellison asked.

‘Yesterday afternoon,’ Hunter said.

Corbí and Ellison exchanged a quick look.

‘According to the ME, your boy was murdered sometime last night,’ Corbí took over again, returning his glasses to his face. ‘Or most probably in the very early hours of the morning. They are just getting ready to take the body away, if you guys would like to have a look first . . .’

Hunter and Garcia nodded.

‘I have no idea who he pissed off last night,’ Corbí added, handing the detectives a pair of latex gloves each, together with shoe covers. ‘But whoever it was, he did a job on this Tito character. We have a real work of art in there.’

Corbí and Ellison stepped into apartment 311, followed by Hunter and Garcia. Together with the four forensic agents, the already-crowded living room became a sardine can.

‘What’s in the box?’ Hunter asked, nodding at the silver box on the dining table.

‘Now, nothing,’ Corbí said. ‘But it did contain drugs – cocaine, to be more precise. A very fine cut. Probably very high-quality stuff. The lab will confirm it. Initial signs indicate that whoever whacked him took the drugs.’

‘You think this was a drugs hit?’ Garcia asked.

‘Who knows at this stage?’ Ellison replied.

‘Who called it in?’

‘Some terrified girl. Didn’t leave a name. She sounded very young.’

‘When was this? When was the call made?’

‘This morning. We checked the recording. The girl said that she came to visit a friend. Most probably she came here to score some drugs. From the door-to-door so far, no one knows who this young
friend
could be.’ Ellison’s eyebrows arched. ‘Actually, people barely knew the tenant in this apartment. No one is talking. And in a project like this, I’d be more surprised if they ever did. But forensics has already retrieved several sets of prints. Who knows, we might get lucky.’

Hunter’s eyes swept the room in a matter of seconds; no blood anywhere. The living room looked a mess, but no different than it had the day before, when they’d paid Tito a visit. No visible disturbance. The chain lock and the inside doorframe were also intact. Nothing indicated a forced entry.

‘Are you guys through in there?’ Corbí asked the lead forensic agent, indicating the tiny corridor that led to the bathroom and bedroom.

‘Yeah, we’ve got everything. You’re clear.’

They crossed the living room.

‘There’s no way all of us will fit in there,’ Corbí said as they got to the bathroom door. ‘I thought there couldn’t be a smaller bathroom than the one in my house. I was wrong. You guys go ahead. We’ve seen it.’ Corbí and Ellison stepped back, allowing Hunter and Garcia to take lead.

Hunter slowly pushed the door open.

‘Oh crap.’ The words dribbled out of Garcia’s lips.

Hunter said nothing, his gaze taking everything in.

The floor, the walls and the sink in the tiny bathroom were splattered with blood. Arterial spray from a knife being swung across someone’s throat or body. Tito was naked, sitting on the floor inside the blood-soaked shower cubicle. His back was against the tiled wall, his legs stretched out in front of him, his arms loosely slumped by his side. His head was tilted back, as if he was looking at something on the ceiling. The problem was, he had no eyes. They both had been pressed back into his skull until they sunk in. One of them seemed to have busted in its socket. What looked like blood tears had run down the corners of the sockets, past his ears, and down the side of his shaved head. His mouth was opened, and half filled with thick, clotted blood. His tongue had been ripped from his mouth.

‘We found the tongue at the bottom of the toilet,’ Corbí offered from the door.

Tito’s throat had been slit the whole length of his neck, and blood had cascaded down his torso and onto his lap and legs.

‘According to the forensics guys,’ Ellison said. ‘There are no visible traumas to the body, which means he wasn’t beat up. He was simply brought to the bathroom and slaughtered like cattle. No blood was found anywhere else in the house.’

‘Drugged?’ Garcia asked.

‘We’ll need to wait for the autopsy for confirmation. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he was as high as my captain’s ego when this happened. There’s coke residue on the small square mirror on the table in the living room.’

‘The bedroom is a damn mess,’ Corbí took over. ‘And it stinks of dirty clothes, unwashed body parts and pot. But judging by the rest of the apartment, I don’t think that was a disturbance. I think he lived like a pig out of choice. We also found marijuana in the bedroom, a kilo of it, together with a few crack-cocaine pipes. If whoever did this was after something, that something was probably inside that silver box in the living room, drug or not.’ He waited for Hunter and Garcia to exit the bathroom. ‘I’m not gonna ask you what kind of information you requested out of this Tito character. That’s your business, and I know better than to butt in into another cop’s investigation, but is there anything you can tell us about the victim that might facilitate
our
investigation?’

Hunter knew he couldn’t give Corbí and his partner Ken Sands’s name. Corbí would start searching for him, asking around. The heat on the streets to find Sands would increase, and so would the chances of him hearing about it and disappearing. Hunter couldn’t risk that. He had to lie.

‘Unfortunately there’s nothing I can give you,’ he said.

Corbí studied Hunter’s face and demeanor and saw nothing that belied his answer. If that was a poker face, it was the best poker face Corbí had ever seen. A moment later his gaze reverted back to Ellison, who shrugged.

‘OK,’ Corbí said, adjusting his tie. ‘I guess there’s nothing else I can show you here.’

Outside the sun was baking people and cars alike. Garcia reached for his sunglasses in his shirt pocket, and ran his hand around the back of his neck. It came back soaking wet. Standing by the driver’s door, he looked at Hunter over the roof of his Honda Civic.

‘Well, if Sands was the one who got to Tito, then it doesn’t look like he’s our killer, does it?’

Hunter stared back at him. ‘And why is that?’

‘Completely different MO, for starters. OK, he ripped the victim’s tongue out, but compared to the savagery of the amputations in our last two crime scenes, what happened up there looks like a holiday camp. And we’ve got no sculpture and no shadow puppets.’

Hunter placed his elbows on the car’s roof and interlaced his fingers. At that specific moment in time he was inclined to agree with Garcia, but there were still too many loose ends and something was telling him that discarding Ken Sands as a suspect right now was a big mistake. ‘From what we gathered so far, don’t you think that Sands is intelligent enough to change his MO on an unrelated crime?’

‘Unrelated?’ Garcia deactivated the central-locking system and got into his car.

Hunter followed.

Garcia unlocked the engine and switched on the A/C unit. ‘What do you mean, unrelated?’

Hunter leaned against the passenger’s door. ‘OK, for a moment let’s assume that we’ve been right in everything so far, and that Ken Sands really
is
our killer.’

‘OK.’

‘One of our assumptions is that Sands is going after his victims for revenge, not only for himself, but for his childhood friend as well, Alfredo Ortega, right?’

Garcia nodded. ‘Yep.’

‘OK, so where does Tito fit into his revenge plan?’

Garcia looked pensive for an instant.

‘Remember, Tito said that they never even talked while inside. So there was no bad blood between them from their time in Lancaster.’

Garcia pinched his bottom lip. ‘He doesn’t fit.’

‘No, he doesn’t. If Sands is our man and he came after Tito, it wasn’t because Tito was part of his original plan. It was probably because Tito went asking about him the wrong way, or to the wrong person.’

‘But killers don’t usually change their MO, unless they’re escalating.’ He pointed to the building. ‘That’s exactly the opposite. He’s gone from absurdly grotesque to . . .’ he tried to think of a word, ‘. . . plain nasty, I’d say.’

‘And again, it goes back to the fact that Tito wasn’t part of his original plan. Think about it, Carlos. To our killer, his MO is
extremely
important – the way he dismembers his victims, the way he carefully puts their body parts back together, constructing a sculpture to cast a different shadow onto the wall each time. To him, all that is mandatory, not a choice, not something he’s doing for fun. It’s as important as the killing act itself, and the choice of victim. It’s part of his revenge. And I have no doubt there’s a direct relation between the sculpture, the shadow, and each specific victim. There’s a reason why he chose a coyote and a raven for Nicholson, and a devil-like image looking down at four other figures for Nashorn.’

‘And Tito wasn’t part of that at all,’ Garcia said.

Hunter agreed in silence.

‘But we’re still not sure what the real meaning behind those shadow images is,’ Garcia went on. ‘And if you’re right, and each image has a direct link to each specific victim, then there’s something that isn’t making any sense in my mind.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘In the first shadow image, the killer paid very close attention to detail, specifically carving the victim’s body parts so as to not leave us a lot of doubt. You said so yourself, the curved, chunky beak on the bird image ruled out a lot of possibilities, leaving us with just a few alternatives. And the same was done to the coyote image. But for the second shadow image, the attention to detail wasn’t nearly so careful. It’s hard to tell properly if we have a human face with horns, a devil, a God, or some sort of animal. The two standing figures, together with the ones on the ground could be people or not. Why would the killer do that? Be so specific with the first shadow image, but not with the second?’

Hunter rubbed his face with both hands. ‘I can only see one reason – relevance.’

Garcia pulled a face and turned both of his palms up. ‘Relevance?’

‘I think the reason why our killer paid so much attention to detail on the first shadow image, is because it
mattered
. He didn’t want us to make a mistake in identifying what it was. He didn’t want us to think that he gave us a dog and a dove, or a fox and an owl.’

Garcia thought about it for a heartbeat. ‘But it didn’t matter as much on the second one.’

‘Not as much,’ Hunter said. ‘The details of the second image are less important to its meaning. It probably doesn’t matter if the face with horns is human or not. That’s not what the killer wants us to see.’

‘So what
does
he want us to see?’

‘I don’t know . . . yet.’ Hunter looked out the window at all the police cars parked in front of Tito’s project building. ‘But I do think Ken Sands is smart enough to change his MO just to throw us off his scent.’

As the day drew to a close, Nathan Littlewood sat at his desk, listening to the recording of his last patient’s session and jotting down some notes. His psychology practice was located in Silver Lake, just east of Hollywood and northwest of downtown LA.

Littlewood was fifty-two years old, five eleven in height, with classic good looks and a trim physique, kept that way by a good diet and three gym sessions a week. He was good at his job, very good in fact. His patients ranged from teenagers to over-sixties, singletons to married and live-in couples, and from everyday people to a few B-list celebrities. Every week tens of patients would pour their hearts and minds out to him.

His last patient of the day had left half an hour ago. Her name was Janet Stark, a 31-year-old actress who was having terrible problems with her live-in boyfriend. They’d been fighting a lot recently about the most mundane of things, and she was sure he was sleeping around behind her back. The problem was, she suspected he was sleeping around with another man.

Janet herself had slept around with plenty of women, and she still did. She wasn’t afraid to admit it, but in her view, female bisexualism was acceptable, male wasn’t.

She’d had six sessions with Littlewood so far. Two a week for the past three weeks, and the flirting had started almost immediately. After the first session, Janet had started dressing more provocatively – shorter skirts, low-cut blouses, mega-cleavage bras, sexy shoes, anything to grab his attention. Today she had turned up in a short summer dress, black, open-toed Christian Louboutin ankle boots, ‘I-desperately-want-you-now’ makeup, and no underwear. As she lay down on the couch, her dress hitched up over her thighs, and she positioned her legs in such a way that absolutely nothing was left to the imagination.