Devil or God, Hunter thought. Take your pick.

Without having a point of reference, it was like looking for a blond hair on a sandy beach.

The second part of the image proved even more elusive. Two figures standing and two lying down, practically on top of each other. Hunter and Garcia found nothing, and Hunter had to start considering the possibility that Alice could be right. Maybe the image had no hidden meaning at all. Nothing religious. Nothing mythological. No parallel connotation. Maybe the meaning was as simple as she had suggested – an evil killer looking down at his victims. Two down, two to go. And that meant he would kill again.

Forty-Nine

It was past dinnertime when Hunter returned to Lennox and parked in front of Amy Dawson’s house. Once again, with a polite smile, Derek Nicholson’s weekdays nurse showed him into her house, but this time guided him into the kitchen.

The air was sprinkled with the pleasant smell of cooked tomatoes, basil, onions, chilies and spices.

‘My husband is watching the game in the living room,’ Amy explained. ‘He’s a big Lakers fan, and when he gets excited, he can be quite loud. You don’t mind if we talk in here, do you?’

‘Of course not,’ Hunter assured her. ‘I’ll be as brief as I can.’

Amy was wearing a light, floral dress and rubber flip-flops. Her cornrows had been undone, and her hair was now pulled back into a bushy ponytail. She offered Hunter a seat on one of the chairs around the foldout Formica table.

‘If you had come a little earlier, you could’ve had dinner with us.’

Hunter smiled. ‘That’s very kind of you to say, thank you. But it was probably a good thing. Get me near a nice, homemade pasta dish, and I could eat my bodyweight . . . maybe more.’

Amy paused and skeptically stared at Hunter. ‘How do you know I cooked pasta tonight?’

‘Umm . . . just a guess judging by the mouthwatering smell in your kitchen.’ He shrugged. ‘Homemade spicy tomato sauce?’

Amy couldn’t hide her surprise. ‘That’s right. My mother’s own recipe. We all like it with plenty of heat.’

‘Me too.’ Hunter nodded before having a seat. He waited until Amy sat across the table from him. ‘I just wanted to go back to that second person you said had visited Mr. Nicholson in his home after he was taken ill.’

‘I haven’t remembered anything else,’ she said, looking sincerely sorry.

‘That’s OK. What I really wanted was for you to have a look at a photograph, and tell me if there’s any chance the person in it is the same person who visited Mr. Nicholson that day.’

‘OK.’ She leaned forward, placing her elbows on the table.

Screamer, the family dog, started barking just outside the kitchen door. Amy pulled an annoyed face. ‘Excuse me for just a second, Detective.’ She stood up and opened the door, but didn’t allow the dog inside. ‘Delroy,’ she called out. ‘Could you take Screamer and maybe put him outside? I can’t deal with him now.’

‘I’m watching the game,’ a strong baritone voice replied.

‘Can you ask Leticia to take him upstairs then?’

‘Leticia,’ Delroy called in an even louder voice. ‘Come get your dog before I strangle it.’

Amy closed the door, shaking her head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again as she returned to her seat. ‘Sometimes that dog drives me crazy. And so does my husband.’

Hunter smiled. ‘That’s OK.’ He placed an A4-sized photograph of Andrew Nashorn in front of Amy. ‘This is the person I was talking about.’

She picked it up and studied it hard for a long moment.

‘I’m sorry, Detective, that’s not him. The man looked younger and leaner, I’m sure.’ She returned the photograph to the table.

Hunter nodded, but left the picture where it was. ‘How about this person?’ He produced a second photograph. This time the mugshot of Ken Sands. He had contacted the California State Prison in Lancaster and managed to get a more recent picture of Sands, taken on the day he was released. His hair was long and messy, and he had allowed a bushy, scraggy beard to grow. None of his facial features were very visible.

‘This is the most recent picture we have of him,’ Hunter explained. He knew Sands had created that look deliberately. A lot of inmates serving medium to long sentences had a similar appearance. It was a common trick to stop the system from having an accurate, recent picture of them. The long hair and the bushy beard would be gone within an hour of their release. ‘I’m sure he won’t have so much hair around his face anymore.’ Hunter showed her one more picture – Sands’s arrest mugshot. ‘This is what he looked like ten years ago.’

Amy took the picture from Hunter’s hands. She kept her eyes on them for a long instant.

Hunter went quiet, allowing her to study it for as long as she needed to.

‘It could’ve been him,’ Amy finally said.

Hunter felt a tingle of electricity run through him.

‘But of course, I can’t be sure. The man who visited Mr. Nicholson that day didn’t have no beard or long hair. He was dressed in a suit and all.’

‘I understand.’

Amy’s stare never left the printout in her hands. ‘But it could’ve been him.’

Fifty

The blood had coagulated and dried onto the floor and walls, and as the red blood cells died and started to decompose, the odd, metallic smell had faded, giving way to a much stronger odor – something like rotten meat mixed with sour milk. Many who’d been to a brutal crime scene would argue that that was exactly what a violent death smelled like.

Hunter paused by the door to Nashorn’s boat cabin once again. Revisiting crime scenes, alone, in the dead of night, had become almost an obsession with him. It gave him a chance to look around uninterrupted, to take his time, to try, if only for a split second, to adopt the same frame of mind as the killer. But how could anyone make sense of the senseless?

Hunter had read and reread the forensic team’s crime-scene report. The many shoeprints he’d seen around the cabin’s floor the day before were very inconsistent and couldn’t be matched to a specific shoe size. There was so much blood covering the floor that, as soon as the killer moved his foot, more blood seeped back to obscure its outline. That made the forensics analysis a lot more difficult. Mike Brindle, the forensics agent who led the team that attended the scene, told Hunter earlier in the day that he’d found something odd about the shoeprints. The distribution of weight from each step seemed to be unequal. That suggested that the killer either walked with an asymmetric abnormality – as if he had a limp, or had deliberately worn wrong-sized shoes. It was a trick that Hunter had encountered before. Forensics couldn’t identify a sole pattern, either, which suggested that the killer had covered his shoes with a thick plastic cover, or something on those lines. That would also explain the lack of bloody footprints outside the cabin.

Brindle had assured Hunter that his team had left the cabin in the exact same state in which they’d found it. The objects that had been removed for forensic examination had been listed in the document Hunter had with him. Everything else was left in its place.

Hunter zipped up his Tyvek coverall and stepped into the cabin. He wasn’t worried about contaminating the scene; he just didn’t want his shoes and clothes to get smeared with blood, or drenched in that sickening smell. He knew that when that smell found its way into any fabric, no amount of washing or dry cleaning would get rid of it. It was a psychological thing. The brain would associate the clothes with the smell, even after the smell was long gone.