The Executioner (41 page)

The silence that followed indicated that everyone understood Hunter’s position.

His cell phone rang. The caller display showed Mollie’s number.
Spooky
.

‘Hello, Mollie.’ Hunter moved towards the window. Even through the phone he could feel something wasn’t right. Her breathing was labored, as if she’d been running. ‘What’s wrong?’

Mollie took a deep breath, and Hunter realized she was also crying.

‘Mollie, talk to me. What’s wrong?’

Garcia and Hopkins tensed.

Another deep breath. Hunter heard a car horn. ‘Mollie, are you at the hotel?’

‘No.’ Her voice trembled.

‘Where are you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘I left.’

‘You left the hotel?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know. Some time ago.’ Her words dragged, stalled by her tears and the lump in her throat.

‘Calm down, Mollie. Talk to me. What happened? Why did you leave the hotel?’

‘I saw it . . .’ Her tone was becoming hysterical.

‘Take a deep breath, Mollie. What did you see?’ Hunter stood up and reached for his coat.

Silence.

‘Mollie, stay with me. What did you see?’

‘I saw the victim . . .’

‘The victim?’

‘The killer’s next victim. He’s going after the next victim tonight.’

Adrenalin pumped through Hunter’s blood. ‘OK, try to calm down for a sec, Mollie. How do you know it’s the next victim? It could’ve been an earlier one.’

‘Earlier?’

Hunter hesitated for a moment. ‘The visions you had before. The two people you saw. They weren’t the only victims. There were others before them, and there’s been another one since.’

‘No, no. It’s not them. It’s the next victim. I know it,’ she said in a panic-stricken tone.

Hunter was already at the door. ‘How can you be so sure, Mollie?’

‘Because it’s me.’ Her voice faltered. ‘He’s coming after me.’

‘Wherever it is that you’re going I’m coming with,’ Garcia said, reaching for his jacket as Hunter ran past him and out into the corridor. ‘What’s going on, Robert?’

Hunter didn’t answer. He didn’t stop or turn around. Garcia only managed to catch up with him when they reached the parking lot.

‘You’re driving,’ Hunter said, pressing the speed dial button on his cell phone. He got the prerecorded message straight away.

‘Where am I going?’ Garcia asked as he turned on the engine.

‘Drive as if you were going to my place. The hotel where Mollie is staying is just three blocks from me.’

‘What happened?’

Hunter recounted the conversation he’d had with Mollie.

‘Holy shit!’ Garcia’s eyes widened. ‘When did she have the vision?’

‘I don’t know. I told you word for word what she said.’

‘And the connection simply went dead?’

A quick nod. ‘As if somebody had snapped the phone shut. I just tried calling her back – voice mail.’ Hunter closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose and forced himself to think clearly. Mollie hadn’t been exact when she told him that she’d left the hotel. That could’ve been ten minutes or five hours ago. She could still be in the hotel vicinity, or miles away by now. But where would she go?

Hunter remembered Mollie mentioning a friend she used to work with called Susan, but that was done in passing and he had no address for her.

‘Did she have any money?’ Garcia asked, eager to help.

Hunter opened his eyes and looked at his partner. ‘Not enough for a ticket anywhere,’ he replied, already knowing what Garcia was thinking. He tried her cell phone again – prerecorded message.

They arrived at the Travel Inn in East Florence Avenue in less than twelve minutes. It was a typical two-story, U-shaped travelers’ hotel found all across America. No need to go through reception to get to the rooms. Both detectives rushed up to number 219 on the second floor. They knocked on the door, tapped on the window and called her name. Mollie wasn’t in.

The overweight receptionist at the front desk confirmed that the key to room 219 was in its cubbyhole. That particular Travel Inn hadn’t yet upgraded to the now-conventional key cards, still using the old-fashioned key and massive key-ring combination. Guests at the hotel weren’t requested to leave the key at reception when they were going out. The receptionist hadn’t seen Mollie. The key had been dropped into the express-return box and she had no idea what time that happened.

Hunter flashed his badge, grabbed the key and returned to Mollie’s room. The few things she had with her when he took her there two nights ago were gone, and so was her rucksack. Hunter checked the room and the bed while Garcia took care of the bathroom.

‘Robert, you better come take a look at this.’

Hunter entered the bathroom and froze as his eyes rested on a few drops of blood in the sink. They looked around but there was no sign of a struggle. Nothing seemed disturbed. Hunter examined the blood.

‘What’re you thinking?’ Garcia asked.

‘Nosebleed. Mollie told me she gets them sometimes, mainly after visions.’

‘What do you wanna do?’

Hunter dialed a number on his cell phone. The person at the other end answered it on the second ring.

‘Trevor, it’s Hunter, Robert Hunter. I need you to do me a favor.’

Trevor Tollino was the most senior officer with the Special Operations Bureau of the LAPD, and a close friend.

‘What do you need, Robert?’ he murmured down the phone. Trevor used to be a field cop, but during a gunfire exchange with a drug gang in south LA he was hit in the neck. The bullet damaged his vocal cords, and after two operations he was left with a soft whispering voice. Hunter was the one who risked his life to pull a bleeding Trevor back to cover.

‘I need you to track down the location of a cell phone. It’s equipped with the latest GPS chip.’

‘Even with GPS, cell phones can be tricky to trace, Robert. If the phone’s on, it should take a few minutes. If the phone’s been turned off, then we’ve got a problem.’

‘Can you give it a try?’ Hunter said, giving Trevor Mollie’s number and all the information he’d copied down when he purchased the phone. ‘Call me back as soon as you have something.’

There was a pause. ‘Is this an official request, Robert?’

‘It’s a life-or-death request.’

Another short pause. ‘No problem. Leave it with me. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.’

Hunter paced the room and checked the window a couple of times. From the room he could see a small section of the street below and nothing else.

His phone rang, making Garcia jump on his seat.

‘Trevor, talk to me?’

‘I’ve got nothing, Robert. I can’t triangulate on it. The phone has either run out of battery or it’s been switched off. What I do have is the general location of its last call.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘The call was made to your phone.’

‘And the location?’

‘Firestone Boulevard in Downey.’

‘What? Downey is about seven miles from here. Can you give me a more specific location?’

‘Sorry, Robert. The call didn’t last long enough for me to properly close in on it. The best I could do was to narrow its location down to a general area. The phone was last active somewhere around the junction of Firestone and Lakewood.’ A brief pause. ‘After that it simply vanished.’

Hunter took a moment to rearrange his thoughts. There were four possibilities swimming around in his head. One – Mollie had been too spooked by her new vision and was now wandering the streets of LA with no real objective. Two – she’d decided to leave Los Angeles; after all, she’d thought about it before. Three – she’d looked up a friend, possibly the Susan woman she’d mentioned in passing. And four – she’d been abducted.

Mollie didn’t have enough cash for an air ticket, and there was no rail or bus station anywhere around Downey. If she was thinking about leaving LA, she had gone to the wrong part of town. Downey was also too far for her to have aimlessly walked there in a panic. There had to be a reason why her call to Hunter had come from a place seven and a half miles away from where the hotel was.

‘Robert,’ Garcia called again. ‘Are you OK? What do you think we should do?’

‘We’ve gotta go to Downey. According to Trevor, that’s where she was when we got disconnected.’ He instinctively checked his watch. ‘That was no more than twenty minutes ago. She wasn’t indoors. I heard traffic noise through the phone, and Trevor said the call was made from Firestone Boulevard. She might still be there somewhere.’

‘OK, let’s go.’

Firestone and Lakewood are two large and very busy boulevards in Downey, southeast Los Angeles. Garcia made the journey in less than twenty minutes.

‘Shit!’ he whispered as they got to the junction.

They were looking at Stonewood Center mall – a massive shopping complex of over a hundred and seventy stores. But that wasn’t all. Moving west from the junction, up Firestone Boulevard, was a carnival of smaller malls and stores – a shopper’s paradise.

There was a long line of cars at the entrance to Stonewood Center’s parking lot. Garcia slowed down, as if he was about to join the back of it. The streets were heaving with people carrying bags, packets and different-size boxes. Two days of shopping left until Christmas Day – every shop was open late, and the malls looked like an ant house at mealtime. They didn’t know what Mollie was wearing and they had no picture of her. Even if they did, who’d they ask? With the number of people Christmas shopping at this hour, they were looking at the proverbial needle in a haystack situation.

Hunter massaged the rough, ugly scar on his nape. Their best shot of finding Mollie at the moment was if she switched her phone back on. He’d asked Trevor to keep trying to pick up a track signal on it. If it came back into the grid, they’d know. But why had it been switched off?

Impulse was telling Hunter to search the crowds, but reason told him it would be a waste of time. There was nothing they could do from there. Hunter told Garcia not to join the line of cars.

‘We’ve gotta go back to the RHD and coordinate from there.’

As Garcia swerved his car away from the parking lot line and rejoined traffic, Hunter closed his eyes. Mollie’s last words still echoed in his ears.

‘
He’s coming after me tonight
.’

Captain Blake was standing in front of the new picture board, studying the four suspects’ photographs left on it, when Hunter and Garcia arrived back at the RHD. Hopkins had already brought her up to speed with the latest developments.

‘There’s one thing I forgot to tell you about me when we first met,’ Captain Blake said calmly, closing the door once Hunter and Garcia reached their desks. ‘I’m not the kind of person who swears easily.’ She lifted both hands in an ‘I admit’ gesture. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Miss Goody Two Shoes. Sometimes you need to swear to properly express yourself. In my case that happens only when I’m really pissed off.’

‘Are we in any danger of you getting to the point anytime soon, captain?’

‘Shut the fuck up and listen, Robert. Does this look like a fucking two-way conversation to you?’ Her calm tone had vanished. ‘Do you two have shit for brains, or are you both just plain imbeciles? I’m getting goddamn tired of repeating myself to you. What did I fucking tell you two? I told you I wanted to be informed the second you located the psychic girl. Do you wanna know what I just found out?’ Her heels clicked as she paced the room. ‘I just found out that you not only knew where the girl was, but you transferred her into a hotel, and now you fucking lost her. Shit, Robert.’ The captain slammed her closed fist on his desk with an emphatic thump. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?’

Hunter kept his voice even. ‘Because I know what would’ve happened, captain. You would’ve brought her here, stuck her in an interrogation room and bombarded her with questions she wouldn’t have been able to answer. Not because she wanted to hide anything, but because she simply doesn’t know the answers. I’ve asked her everything that could be asked. She doesn’t know why she sees the things she sees, and she can’t control it.’ Hunter breathed in sharply. ‘If she made it into your report, I’m sure Chief Collins or Mayor Edwards would’ve requested she’d be interviewed by a psychologist, who’d certainly be looking to discredit her rather than understand.’

‘You’re a goddamn psychologist,’ the captain shot back angrily. ‘You could’ve done the interview yourself.’

‘Do you think the mayor would’ve allowed me to conduct the interview?’

‘I told you I’d deal with the mayor. He’s my problem, not yours. I always stand behind my detectives, but you don’t seem to wanna trust me. I would’ve listened to you first, Robert.’