Hunter had another sip of his strong black coffee and checked his watch – 4:51 a.m. He’d managed only four hours of sleep, but for him that was as close to sleeping bliss as he could ever get.
Hunter’s battle with insomnia had started very early in his life, triggered by the death of his mother when he was only seven. The nightmares were so devastating that as a self-defense mechanism his brain did all it could to keep him awake at night. Instead of falling asleep, Hunter read ferociously. Books became his refuge, his castle. A safe place where the ghastly nightmares couldn’t breach the gates.
Hunter had always been different. Even as a child he could solve puzzles and work out problems faster than most adults. It was like his brain was able to fast-track just about anything. In school, his teachers had no doubt he wasn’t like most students. At the age of twelve, after being put through a series of exams and tests suggested by Doctor Tilby, Hunter’s school psychologist, he was accepted into the Mirman School for the Gifted as an eighth-grader, two years ahead of the usual age of fourteen.
Mirman’s special curriculum didn’t slow Hunter down. Before the age of fifteen, he had glided through their entire program, condensing four years of high school into two. With recommendations from all his teachers, and a special mention from Mirman’s principal, he was accepted as a ‘special circumstances’ student at Stanford University. Hunter decided to study psychology. By then his insomnia and nightmares were relatively under control.
In college, his grades were just as impressive, and Hunter received his PhD in Criminal Behavior Analysis and Biopsychology just before his twenty-third birthday. The head of the psychology department at Stanford University, Doctor Timothy Healy, made it clear that if Hunter ever showed interest in a teaching position, there would always be a place on his staff for him. Hunter respectfully declined, but said that he would keep it in mind. Doctor Healy was also the one who forwarded Hunter’s PhD thesis paper entitled An Advanced Psychological Study in Criminal Conduct to the head of the FBI National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. To this day, Hunter’s paper was still mandatory reading at the NCAVC and at its Behavioral Analysis Unit.
Two weeks after receiving his PhD, Hunter’s world was rocked for the second time. His father, who at the time was working as a security guard for a branch of the Bank of America in downtown Los Angeles, was gunned down during a robbery that had escalated into a Wild West shoot-out. Hunter’s nightmares and insomnia came back with a vengeance, and they had never left him since.
Hunter finished his coffee and placed the cup down on the window ledge.
It didn’t matter how tightly he closed his eyes or ground his fists against them, he couldn’t shut down the images that had been eating away at him since yesterday afternoon. It was like he’d memorized every second of the footage, and someone had turned on the endless loop switch inside his head. Questions were being lobbed at him from every corner of his mind, and so far he hadn’t come up with a single answer. Some of them bothered him more than others.
‘Why the torture?’ he whispered to himself now. He understood very well that it took a certain type of individual to be able to torture another human being before killing him or her. It might sound simple but, when the time comes, very few were ever able to go through with it. One needed a level of detachment from regular human emotions that few can achieve. The ones who can are referred to by psychologists and psychiatrists as psychopaths.
Psychopaths show no empathy, or remorse, or love, or any other emotion associated with caring for someone else. Sometimes their lack of feelings can be so severe that they will display none toward even themselves.
The second fact that was digging around in Hunter’s mind like a bulldozer was the choice game. Why did the killer go through the tremendous trouble of creating a torture chamber capable of two horrific deaths – either by fire or water? And why call him on the phone, or anyone else for that matter, and ask them to make that choice?
It wasn’t uncommon for a murderer, even a psychopath, to doubt his decision to kill someone right at the last minute, but that didn’t seem to have been an issue with this killer. He had no doubt the victim would die; he just couldn’t make up his mind on which was worse – burned to death or drowned. Two opposites of sorts. Two of the most feared ways a person could die. But the more Hunter thought about it, the more stupid he felt. He was sure he had been tricked.
He knew that there was no way the caller had that amount of sodium hydroxide sitting around for no reason at all. It had all been part of the game. He had said so himself. He was expecting Hunter to pick water instead of fire, for all the exact reasons he had mentioned over the phone – it was a kinder, less sadistic and faster way of ending the victim’s suffering. But water would’ve also preserved the state of the body, and in case they came across it anytime soon, a forensics team would have a much better chance of finding a clue, if one was to be found. Fire, on the other hand, would’ve simply destroyed everything.
Hunter ground his teeth in anger and tried in vain to fight the guilt that was nibbling away at his brain. There was no doubt in his mind that the caller had played him. And Hunter hated himself for not foreseeing it.
The ringtone from Hunter’s cellphone dragged him away from his thoughts. He blinked a couple of times as if waking up from a bad dream and looked around the dark room. The cellphone was on the old and scratched wooden dining table that doubled up as a desk. It rattled against the table-top one more time before Hunter got to it. The call display window told him it was Garcia. Reflexively Hunter checked his watch before answering it – 5:04 a.m. Whatever it was, Hunter knew it wouldn’t be good news.
‘Carlos, what’s up?’
‘We’ve got the body.’
Eleven
At five forty-three in the morning the back alley in Mission Hills, San Fernando Valley, would’ve still been cloaked in darkness, if not for the flashing blue lights of three squad cars and a pedestal-mounted power light from the forensics team.
Hunter parked his old Buick LeSabre by the single lamppost at the entrance to the alleyway. He stepped out of the car and stretched his six-foot frame against the morning wind. Garcia’s metallic-blue Honda Civic was parked across the road. Hunter took a moment to look around before entering the back alley. The lamppost’s old bulb was yellow and weak. At night, if you weren’t looking for it, it would’ve been very easy to miss the alleyway. It was located behind a quiet road of small shops, away from the main streets.
Hunter zipped up his leather jacket and slowly started down the alleyway. He flashed his badge at the young officer standing by the yellow crime-scene tape before ducking under it. He saw light fixtures above some of the shops’ back doors, but none was on. There were a few plastic and paper bags scattered around, a few empty beer and soda cans, but other than that the back street was tidier than most he’d seen in downtown LA. The second half of the alleyway was lined with big metal dumpsters, four in total. Garcia, two forensics agents and three uniformed officers were gathered just past the third dumpster. At the end of the alleyway a bedraggled, dirt-strewn black man of indistinct age, whose wiry hair seemed to explode from his head in all directions, was sitting on a concrete step. He seemed to be mumbling something to himself. Another police officer was standing a few feet to his right, one hand cupped over his nose, as if protecting himself from a violating smell. There were no CCTV cameras anywhere.