‘Family,’ Garcia said.

‘There’s no love stronger than family love,’ Hunter agreed. ‘But a further check revealed that the only family he had left was his sister… his adopted sister.’

‘Adopted?’

Another nod. ‘Brenda was adopted at the late age of nine. Not because she was an orphan, but because she’d been taken away from her overly abusive biological family by the Department of Health and Human Services. John’s family took her in and gave her the love she never had. She felt protected, she felt secure with them. They became the family she’d never really had. Their deaths triggered something in her subconscious memory. Maybe a scared feeling of being without a family again. Maybe the memories of all the abuse she’d received when she was young. Maybe the fear of being taken away and returned to her original family.’

Garcia looked confused.

‘In traumatic situations like the one she’d been through,’ Hunter explained. ‘Losing her entire family in such quick succession, it’s not uncommon for the brain to make no distinction of age. It simply retrieves the memories from the subconscious. All the fear and anger she felt as a child would’ve come back with the same intensity if not stronger, making her feel like a little lonely girl once again. That might’ve awakened some sort of rage, some sort of hidden evil inside her. She blamed everyone involved in her brother’s case for taking her family from her. Especially the jury, Scott and I. She couldn’t allow it to go unpunished.’

‘When did you know it was Isabella?’

‘When I found out about John Spencer. With his sister being the only living relative, all that was left for me to do was to find out who she was. A new search revealed that she’d been committed shortly after her father’s death.’

‘Committed?’

‘In San Francisco, that’s where she lived. After her father died, rage took over her and she apparently lost her mind… went crazy, destroyed her apartment and almost killed her boyfriend. They lived together at the time.’

‘So she was arrested,’ Garcia stated more than asked.

‘At first, yes, and then taken to the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital where she stayed for a couple of years. I called the San Francisco Police Department and they sent me a fax of the arresting report. She looked very different in the picture. Different color and length of hair, in fact she looked older, as though what she’d been through had knocked the life out of her. But there was no doubt. I knew who she was then.’

Hunter walked over to the window and had a look outside. The day looked perfect, not a cloud in the sky. ‘And then I remembered her CD collection and whatever doubt I still had just disappeared.’

‘CD collection?’

‘The first night I had dinner with Isabella at her place, for some reason I checked her CD collection.’

Garcia made a face that silently asked ‘How did that help?’

‘Her entire collection was comprised of Jazz CDs, with the exception of a handful of rock albums, all of them autographed, not by the band, not by the musicians, but by the producer – John Spencer. What I didn’t know at the time was that John never signed his name as John Spencer, that’s not how he was known in the music industry. He signed his autographs Specter J. His rock pseudonym or something, I found that out on the internet. That’s why when I read the autograph inscriptions that night it never occurred to me. The inscriptions said something like, “From Big B with eternal love.” I just assumed that was one of these weird names artists give themselves nowadays, you know like Puffy, or LL Cool J. Specter J and Big B didn’t ring any bells then.’

‘Big Brother?’ Garcia half asked, half concluded.

Hunter nodded. ‘John Spencer was a year older than Brenda.’

‘So her time in psychiatric care gave her all the time in the world to hatch her plan.’

‘A couple of years,’ Hunter confirmed.

‘And that explains the time difference between John Spencer’s case and the first Crucifix killing.’

Another nod from Hunter. ‘And yesterday I found out about her military past.’

‘Military?’

‘Well, sort of. She was a surgeon, a very talented one according to what I found. At the beginning of her career she spent two years in Bosnia and Herzegovina with US forces and the medical team helping landmine victims.’

‘You’re kidding?’ Garcia’s eyebrows rose in surprise and then in realization. ‘The explosives?’

‘That’s where she would’ve gained knowledge of them. It’s part of their training, understanding about mines, explosives, detonating mechanisms, velocity and power of explosion… things like that. She would’ve had every manual available to her then.’

‘So it would’ve been just a case of knowing where to look, who to talk to and she would’ve easily obtained the raw materials she needed.’

‘Precisely.’

A short silence followed. ‘The sketch she gave us?’ Garcia asked, already guessing the answer.

‘To throw us off course. That night, without realizing, I’d drawn a doodle of the double-crucifix. An unconscious reflex as my mind had been totally absorbed by the case. Isabe…’ Hunter paused and thought better of what he was about to say. ‘Brenda,’ he corrected himself, ‘was a very clever woman and with some very quick thinking she saw the perfect opportunity to send us on a wild-goose chase, so she came up with that fictitious story about meeting someone in a bar. Someone with the double-crucifix tattooed on his wrists. She then only needed to give us a bogus description and the investigation would take a wrong turn.’

‘We wasted a couple of weeks running after that bogus description.’

‘And we would’ve wasted more,’ Hunter agreed. ‘We had no reason to doubt her. We assumed we were on to a good thing.’

‘And how did you know she would come after you that night?’

‘Three things. One, there were no more jurors left to take revenge upon.’

‘But she’d only taken nine victims; there are twelve jurors in total.’

‘The other three were already dead from natural causes. She couldn’t hurt them anymore. Scott, my partner, the other arresting detective, was also dead.’ Hunter stopped for a moment remembering what Brenda had told him four days ago. After a deep breath he continued. ‘I was the only one left.’

‘Not a great position to be in,’ Garcia joked.

Hunter agreed. ‘Two, it was John’s birthday. For her, the ultimate revenge day. The ultimate present to her brother and her family.’

A long pause followed.

‘And three? You said there were three things,’ Garcia questioned.

‘Me carrying your cross.’

‘Huh? I don’t follow,’ Garcia said, shifting himself on the bed, trying to get into a better position.

‘The biggest analogy of someone’s last day on earth.’

Garcia thought about it for a few seconds. ‘To carry a cross on your back. Jesus’s last day on earth,’ Garcia said, realizing Hunter’s point.

Hunter nodded again. ‘I knew I only had a few hours to think of something. I knew she’d be coming after me.’

Hunter turned to face the window again and his stare seemed distant and alienated. He gently touched the back of his neck and felt the scar which hadn’t fully healed yet.

‘If you had a strong suspicion it was Isabella, why did you go through all that? Why did you risk your life allowing her to get to you? Why not just arrest her?’ Garcia asked, shifting his body once again.

‘I had no proof, only suspicions. Just a crazy theory about revenge. As you know we had nothing on the killer, no DNA or fingerprints, nothing that could link her to any of the victims or crime scenes. If we took her in, she would’ve walked, and I’m sure we would’ve lost her forever. My only hope was to allow her to come to me.’

‘So you set a trap. A dangerous trap.’

Another nod. ‘I could think of nothing else, I was running out of time.’