Garcia’s eyes crawled around the room, trying to take everything in. Every inch of every wall was taken by some sort of drawing, article, clipping, sketch or photograph. They came from newspapers, magazines, websites, journals, and many of them had been drawn, written or taken by Smith himself. There were literally hundreds of images and articles. Garcia stepped inside and his eyes moved to the ceiling. The bizarre collage continued there as well. Every available space was covered.

‘Jesus . . .’ Something tightened low in Garcia’s gut. He recognized the woman in all the pictures and sketches straight away. There was no mistake. Laura Mitchell. A love heart had been drawn around several of the photographs with a thick red marker pen. Like kids do with pictures of their idols.

‘What the fuck is this place?’ Garcia whispered.

Hunter turned and looked around the room again as if he was seeing it for the first time.

‘A sanctuary of some sort? His own private archive? Maybe a research room? Who knows?’ A shrug. ‘This guy seems to have collected everything that was ever published about Laura. Judging by the discoloration of some of the pictures and newspaper articles, some of these are quite old.’ His gaze flickered to the piles of paper everywhere.

Garcia turned his attention to the magazines and newspaper stacks. ‘Is she in every one of these?’

‘I haven’t checked them all. But if I had to have a guess, I’d say yes.’ Hunter pulled a newspaper from the bottom of one of the stacks. It was a copy of the San DiegoUnion-Tribune.

Garcia’s left eyebrow lifted a fraction. ‘San Diego?’ He noticed the date. ‘That paper is three years old.’

Hunter started flipping through the newspaper. ‘The problem is: none of the newspapers, magazines or journals are folded or opened onto a particular page or article. I’ve checked a few already. I assume he kept them because of something on the entertainment section.’ He folded the paper and showed it to Garcia. ‘But as you can see, there are no marks. Nothing is circled, underlined or highlighted.’

‘Anything about Laura?’

Hunter scanned the page.

Most of the articles were music-related – gig and album reviews. He flipped the paper over and carried on. At the bottom corner of the page he saw a review for an art exhibition and nodded. ‘She was exhibiting in San Diego back then.’

Garcia craned his neck. There were no pictures. He randomly pulled another newspaper from the bottom of another pile. He came up with a copy of the Sacramento Bee. ‘This one is from a year and a half ago.’ He quickly found the entertainment section and scanned through another exhibition review. ‘He’s been stalking her for years,’ he said, looking around the room one more time. ‘He knew everything there was to know about her. Collected everything there was to collect. Talk about being patient. He waited years for the right moment to make his move. Laura never had a chance.’

Thirty-Eight

Hunter and Captain Blake had to pull all the stops to get an overworked and understaffed Forensics division to send two evidence technicians to a non-crime scene so fast. First impressions showed no indications that anyone else other than James had been inside that apartment. There was no hidden cell or prison room. If Smith was their killer, he’d kept Laura Mitchell captive in a secret location somewhere else. And that secret location was probably where he was heading to right now. The difference this time was that he now knew the police were onto him, and that would certainly influence his actions. He’d be edgy, maybe even in a panic. And a killer in a panic was catastrophic. Hunter knew that only too well from harsh experience.

They needed to catch him fast. Before he left Norwalk. Before he disappeared.

They didn’t.

Hunter had immediately arranged for James Smith’s snapshot to be emailed from Parker Center to Norwalk’s LA Sheriff’s Department Station. Available black-and-white units were dispatched to search the streets almost immediately. Officers on foot patrol and inside Norwalk’s Metrolink Station were also sent Smith’s picture via SMS text. Airports, train and bus stations were put on high alert. But six hours after Hunter and Garcia had knocked on Smith’s door, he still hadn’t been sighted.

Both evidence techs had been going over the apartment for the past three and a half hours. They’d need confirmation from the lab, but their best guess, based on what they’d seen, was that all the fingerprints they’d found so far seemed to have come from only one person – James Smith.

Key points inside Smith’s bedroom and both bathrooms were sprayed with Luminol but no blood was detected. They also ran a UV light test on all the bed linen and on the fabric sofa and rug in the living room. No evidence of semen stains either.

Hunter and Garcia kept out of the way, staying in the collage room. There was enough in there to keep a platoon occupied for a week. Initially, Hunter wasn’t worried about sieving through everything. All the information on those pages seemed to pertain to Laura Mitchell, not James Smith. What he was looking for was some sort of personal diary, or journal, or notebook. Anything that could give them a clue to where Smith might have gone or who he was.

They found nothing. No documents, no passport, no driver’s license. Not even any utility bills.

‘Anything that could give us any sort of lead, guys?’ Hunter asked one of the techs some time later.

‘Yeah, my guess is you’re looking for a cleaning freak,’ he said, bending down and sliding his index finger across the top of the skirting board before showing the result to Hunter. ‘Nothing, no dust. My wife is pretty tight on her housecleaning, but even she doesn’t dust the skirting boards every time she cleans. The only place with any dust is that freaky room you guys have been in. There’s a cupboard in the kitchen packed solid with cleaning materials. Enough bleach to fill a Jacuzzi. This guy is either obsessed with cleaning, or he was expecting us.’

The door to door of the building also produced no information of interest. Most residents said they’d never even seen the person who lived in apartment 418. The ones who did never talked to him. The next-door neighbor, a small, fragile man in his sixties with glasses as thick as bulletproof glass, said Smith always said hi to him whenever they bumped into each other on the corridor. He said Smith was always very polite. That sometimes Smith went out dressed in a suit. No one else in that building ever wore a suit. The old man also said that the walls in the building weren’t very thick. He could often hear Smith cleaning, vacuuming, scrubbing and moving around. He did that a lot.

The Forensics agents took shoes and underwear from Smith’s wardrobe, and a razor blade, a comb, a toothbrush and a deodorant spray can from his bathroom. They didn’t want to take any chances where a DNA signature was concerned.

Night had darkened the sky when Hunter received a call from Operations.

‘Detective Hunter? It’s Pam from Operations.’

‘What have you got for me, Pam?’

‘Well, next time you decide to go after someone, please can you pick a person with a more unique name. James is the most common first name in the United States. Smith is the most common last name in the United States. Put them together and we have approximately three and a half million males in the USA called James Smith.’