Twenty-Three

Whitney Myers used the little gadget Leonid Kudrov had given her to activate the gates to the underground garage in Katia’s apartment block. As she drove in, she immediately spotted Katia’s torch red V6 convertible Mustang parked in one of the two spaces reserved for her penthouse apartment. Myers took the empty spot next to it, got out and placed her right palm on the Mustang’s hood. Stone cold. Through the window, she checked its interior. All seemed fine. The car alarm light was blinking on the dashboard, indicating that it was active. Myers paused and allowed her eyes to roam the whole of the garage. The place was well lit, but there were many dark spots and corners where someone could hide. She noticed only one security camera, on the ceiling, facing the garage’s entrance door.

Myers retrieved a pair of latex gloves from the box in the back seat of her car and rode the elevator up to the penthouse. There, she used the keys Leonid Kudrov had given her to gain access to Katia’s apartment. No alarm. No signs of forced entry.

She softly closed the door behind her and paused for an instant. The living room was immense and decorated with a lot of style. Myers took her time looking around. Nothing seemed out of place. No signs of a fight or struggle.

She made her way to the spiral stairwell in the corner and moved up to the top floor. On the mezzanine landing, she found Katia’s car keys in a tray on a tall chest of drawers crowded with family photographs.

Myers moved on down the corridor and entered Katia’s bedroom. The walls were painted in pink and white, and there were enough stuffed toys on the perfectly made king-size bed to keep a crèche occupied for weeks. Myers checked the pillows on it. No smell. No one had slept in that bed last night.

Katia’s two suitcases lay on the end of the bed seat. They were both open, but it looked like she hadn’t had time to unpack them. The bedroom’s balcony door was locked from the inside. Again, no signs of forced entry.

Myers moved on to the walk-in closet. Katia’s collection of dresses, shoes and purses took her breath away.

‘Wow.’ She ran her hand down the front of a Giambattista Valli dress. ‘A dream wardrobe,’ she whispered. ‘Katia had taste.’

In the en-suite bathroom, she noticed a hair towel was missing from the rail.

Myers moved out of the bedroom and into the next room along – Katia’s practice den. The room was spacious but simple. A stereo system on a wooden sideboard, a couple of music stands, a mini fridge on the corner and a comfortable armchair pushed up against a wall. Katia’s violin case was on a small coffee table by the door. Her priceless Lorenzo Guadagnini was lying inside it.

Leonid had told her that Katia was obsessed with her Guadagnini violin. If it weren’t by her side, it’d be in her safe behind the large painting of Tchaikovsky on the wall, no exceptions.

Myers found the painting and checked the safe. Locked. Despite her previous confidence that Katia had just skipped town for a few days, she was getting a very bad feeling about this.

Myers returned downstairs and walked into the kitchen. It was as big as most studio apartments in Los Angeles. Black marble worktops and floors, polished steel appliances and enough pots and pans hanging from a center island that could give any small restaurant a run for their money.

The first thing Myers noticed was the missing hair towel from the en-suite bathroom upstairs. It was lying on the floor a few steps away from the fridge. She picked it up and brought it to her nose – a sweet, fruity smell that matched the bottle of designer hair conditioner in Katia’s bathroom.

Myers looked around. There was a bottle of white wine on the breakfast table. No glasses were out. No corkscrew either. But what really caught her attention was the blinking red light on the answerphone at the far end of the worktop. She walked over and looked at the screen.

Sixty messages.

‘I guess Katia is a popular woman.’

Myers pressed play.

‘You have sixty new messages,’ announced the prerecorded woman’s voice. ‘Message one.’

Absolute silence.

Myers frowned.

At the end of it there was a beep, and the machine moved on to the next message.

Silence.

And the next.

Silence.

And the next.

Silence.

‘What the hell?’ Myers took a seat on the barstool next to her. Her eyes settled on the large clock hanging from the wall above the door.

The messages kept on playing, not a whisper in any of them. After maybe the fifteenth or twentieth message, Myers picked up on something that made her skin crawl.

‘No fucking way.’ She pressed the stop button and then rewound the messages back to the very first one. She started from the beginning again. Her eyes returned to the clock above the door, and this time she let them play all the way to the fifty-ninth message. Silence in every single one of them, but the pattern she found told her that that silence had its own chilling meaning.

‘I’ll be goddamned.’

The last message started playing, and suddenly the silence was substituted by a long stretch of static, catching Myers by surprise and making her jump.

‘Jesus . . .’ She brought a hand up to her thumping heart. ‘What the hell was that?’ She rewound it, leaned closer to the machine, and played the message again.

Static noise blasted through the tiny answerphone speaker.

Myers moved even closer.

And what she heard, half-hidden by the static sound, sent a cold shiver down her entire body.

Twenty-Four

From the car, even before leaving the Mitchells’ driveway, Hunter called the Office of Operations and asked them to gather all the information they could on Patrick Barlett, Laura’s ex-fiancé. He’d just become a priority person of interest in the investigation.

Hunter disconnected and speed-dialed Garcia’s number. He gave him the lowdown on everything he’d found out from the Mitchells and they met half an hour later at the entrance to an old warehouse turned apartment block in Lakewood, minutes away from Long Beach.

Hunter looked subdued but Garcia didn’t have to ask. He knew that breaking the news to parents that their daughter had been the victim of a monstrous killer was already hard enough. But to have to tell them that they couldn’t even give her a proper burial because the body had been blown to pieces was really the stuff of nightmares.

They rode the elevator up to the top floor in silence.

Laura Mitchell’s apartment was an astonishing two thousand square feet loft conversion. The living area was simple but stylish with black leather furniture and sumptuous rugs. The kitchen was to the right of the entrance door and the sleeping area to the left – both modern, spacious and decorated with taste. But the bulk of the apartment was taken by her art studio.

Set at the far end and surrounded by large windows, including two skylights, it was filled with canvases of all sizes. The largest one was at least twelve foot by six.