‘Do you know who she is?’ Hunter asked again.
‘She ain’t none of my girls if that’s what you’re asking,’ he replied after a brief pause.
‘Could she have been on the game?’
‘Not looking like that.’ Instantly D-King’s hands came up in surrender. ‘Sorry, bad joke. Anybody could be on the game these days. She looks to have been attractive enough. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before though.’ He tried to read Hunter’s expressionless face and failed. ‘The problem is that nowadays a lot of girls are trying to go it alone, creating websites and all, doing their own thang, you know what I’m saying? It’s hard to be sure. But if she was a top working girl in the Hollywood area, I’d know.’
The other four women who were playing by the edge of the pool decided to join Lisa, who was now sitting on a floating chair sipping a colorful drink.
D-King’s eyes moved down to the picture again. ‘This is too fucking nasty, man. And knowing the kind of shit you get involved with, I’m sure whoever did this did it while she was still alive, right?’
‘Could this have been done by a gang?’ Hunter asked. ‘Or a pimp?’
D-King’s face clouded over. Helping the police was never part of his agenda. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he replied coldly.
‘C’mon, D-King, look at her.’ Hunter tapped the photograph on the table, but kept a steady voice. He was aware all three musclemen around the yard had their eyes on him. ‘Her mouth wasn’t the only part of her body that was stitched shut. Whoever did this did a real nasty job on her. And you were right. It was done while she was still alive.’
D-King shifted in his seat. Violence against women had a way of lighting a fuse inside him. His mother had been beaten to death by his own drunken father while he was locked in the closet. He was ten. D-King never forgot her screams and pleas for mercy. He had never forgotten the sound of her bones breaking as his father repeatedly hit her, over and over again. He heard those sounds almost every night in his dreams.
D-King sat back and looked at his fingernails, flicking the end of each one with his thumb. ‘You mean could this be some sort of trademark retaliation?’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows? Possibly. If she belonged to a homeboy and she either stole from him or decided to fuck around, I wouldn’t be surprised. Some people don’t look kindly at being fucked with. Examples have to be made, do you feel me? This could even be considered mild by some standards.’ He paused and looked at the picture again. ‘But if this is payback for her being somebody’s woman and getting dirty somewhere else, you can expect to get another body – the motherfucker she was doing it with. This kind of revenge comes in twos, Detective.’ He pushed the photo back towards Hunter. ‘What does this have to do with homemade explosive devices?’
‘More than it looks.’
D-King chuckled. ‘You never give anything away, do you?’ He had a sip of the dark green colored drink in front of him. ‘Actually, if last time we saw each other is anything to go by, I don’t really fucking wanna know what this is all about.’ He regarded Hunter like a poker player about to bet his whole stash before tapping the picture with his index finger. ‘But this is fucking offensive, man, and I owe you one anyway. Let me look into it and I’ll get back to you.’
Seventeen
Garcia turned on the fan and stood in front of it for a minute before going back to his desk. He couldn’t even imagine how hot that room would be during summer.
He’d been going over the crime-scene pictures in his computer, enhancing and scrutinizing them, looking for anything they could use to point them in the right direction as to the victim’s identity. So far, nothing. No tattoos or surgery scars. The moles and freckles he could see on her arms, stomach, neck and cleavage were too common and not prominent enough to really be classed as identifying marks. As far as he could tell, she was a natural brunette and her breasts were her own.
Her arms showed no signs of needle marks and her frame wasn’t skinny and wasted. If she was a junkie, she certainly didn’t look like one. Despite the small patches on her cheeks that carried that old-person’s-skin look Hunter had mentioned, the victim couldn’t have been any older than thirty-three, at a stretch. If the old saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul was true, then her soul was scared beyond belief when she died.
Garcia leaned forward, placed his elbows on his desk and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He reached for his coffee cup, but it had long gone cold. Before he could pour himself a new one, a clicking sound announcing the arrival of a new email came from his computer. The Missing Persons files he’d requested. They’d promised to send them over in forty-five minutes. That had been two hours ago.
Garcia read the email and let out a high-pitched whistle. Fifty-two brunette Caucasian women with hazel eyes, aged between twenty-seven and thirty-three, and somewhere between five five and five eight in height had been reported missing in the past two weeks. He unzipped the attachment containing all the files and started printing them out, first the photographs, then their personal information sheets.
He poured himself a new cup of coffee and gathered all the printouts into one pile. The photos would have been brought into the Missing Persons Unit by the person who reported them as missing. Even though Missing Persons would have asked for a recent picture, Garcia knew that some of those photographs could be over a year old, sometimes more. He’d have to allow for subtle changes in appearance such as hair length and style, and fullness of the face due to weight loss or gain.
The main problem Garcia faced was that he had only the close-up photo of the victim, the one from the crime scene, to compare them to. The swelling on the victim’s lips together with the thick black threaded stitches forcing them tightly together deformed the bottom half of her face. Matching any of the photographs sent from Missing Persons to that one would be a long and laborious task.
An hour later Garcia had reduced the possible matches from fifty-two to twelve, but his eyes were getting tired, and the more he looked at the pictures, the fewer distinguishing features he saw.
He spread the twelve printouts out on his desk, creating three lines of four with their respective information sheets next to them. The photos were all of reasonable quality. There were six face portraits, passport-style; three where the subject had been cropped from a group picture; one showed a wet-haired brunette sitting on a jet ski; another smiling brunette was by the pool; and the last picture showed a woman at a dinner table holding a glass of champagne.
Garcia was about to start the whole process again when Hunter walked through the door and saw him hunched over his desk, staring intensely at the group of neatly arranged photographs.
‘Are those from Missing Persons?’ Hunter asked.
Garcia nodded.
‘Anything?’
‘Well, I started with fifty-two possibilities and have been comparing them to our crime-scene photos for over an hour now. The swelling on our victim’s face makes things a lot harder. I’m now down to these,’ he nodded at the twelve photos on his desk, ‘but my eyes are starting to play tricks on me. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to look for any more.’
Hunter stood in front of Garcia’s desk and allowed his eyes to jump from photo to photo, spending several seconds on each one. A moment later his gaze settled on the facial close-up of the unidentified victim. He moved them all nearer together, making a new photo group before reaching for a blank sheet of paper.