The action caused panic to erupt inside Alison. She had already been whipped and flogged like an eighteenth-century slave, until she had passed out. She had never experienced pain that deep, that debilitating.

‘Oh, please, no.’ The words stumbled out of her cracked lips, as her eyes were once again filled with tears. ‘No . . . not again.’

Alison had no idea why she was there, why the man had taken her or why he was punishing her in the way he was. Was he connected to her father? He had barely said a word to her. All he did was either watch her or beat her up.

‘Please, talk to me . . .’ she pleaded. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

Ignoring her, the man picked up something from the workshop table.

Every muscle in Alison’s body tensed up. She wanted to plead again but she couldn’t speak anymore. Her sobs were too intense for that.

The man turned to face her again.

Alison squinted, trying to focus on what he held in his hand, but whatever it was it was too small for her to see.

The man got closer.

Three steps.

Two.

One.

Alison caught a glimpse of something metallic between his fingers.

A knife?

A scalpel?

What?

There was nothing she could do but cry uncont rollably.

She closed her eyes and held her breath, bracing herself. A moment later, she heard the sound of metal scraping against the concrete floor.

Her eyes squeezed tighter.

A few seconds after that, she felt her body swing forward just a little but, surprisingly, it was accompanied by no further pain.

Her first thought was that maybe her body was already so battered that it just hadn’t registered the pain yet.

She waited.

The pain finally came.

And from where else but her arms? So powerful, she felt consciousness slipping away from her again. Her eyes fluttered as she exhaled and, in her mind, her body began a slow descent into a dark and cold abyss.

But before she hit its bottom, something, or someone, caught her. Right at that moment, her legs turned to jelly and she slumped down on to something hard and uncomfortable. She breathed in a full mouth of hot, humid air, and that was when she realized that she wasn’t imagining it. She wasn’t falling down into an abyss, she was simply falling down.

The man had grabbed a set of padlock keys and freed her from her shackles. The metal scraping sound she’d heard earlier was a fold-up chair he had dragged and placed under her legs.

As she collapsed into the chair, her arms dropped down to her sides and the sensation that followed was a mixture of total relief together with immeasurable pain. Blood began to freely flow through them for the first time in who knew how long. The feeling was so intense that her body couldn’t take it. She curved forward and vomited on to the floor.

Surprisingly, that did not upset her captor. When she was done, he grabbed her by her hair and pulled her back up into a sitting position.

Slobs of vomit dripped down from her lips on to her naked torso and legs. She started breathing deeply, her chest rising and falling in a broken rhythm. Her arms now began to feel like they were on fire. One million pins and needles found their way into her hands and fingers.

Alison’s head slumped forward again, her chin coming into contact with her chest. The man, realizing that she was about to pass out, grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head back.

‘No, no, no. Stay with me, Alison. I need you awake. I need you to feel everything.’

Her jaw fell open and he spat inside her mouth.

‘Are you listening to me?’

She half coughed, half gagged on his spit. It tasted like sour milk and rotten eggs, but it had the desired effect. It brought Alison back to consciousness.

‘That’s my girl,’ the man said, letting go of her hair and taking a step back.

This time Alison was able to hold her head in place by herself, but something made her doubt that she was one hundred percent conscious. As the man moved toward the workshop table once again, she caught a glimpse of something that froze her soul. In one of the corners of the basement, hidden in the shadows, she could swear that she saw a little boy. He was staring straight at her. The terror in his eyes easily matched the fear in hers.

Seventy-Two

‘I’m not sure why,’ Hunter said. ‘Maybe it was because I was so tired when I reread the note again in the early hours of this morning, but for some reason my brain mixed up the letters in a strange way and for a split second, I saw it . . . Then it was gone.’

Garcia was still staring at the board.

‘I thought I was imagining things, but I kept on blinking, looking away, then looking back at it again.’ Hunter paused, following his partner’s gaze. ‘And then, as if it were a dream, the letters just moved around right in front of my eyes.’ He tapped the board one more time. ‘And I saw this.’

From the letters in ‘I Am Death’ Hunter had created three new words: ‘I Mat Hade’.

‘No fucking way,’ Garcia said again, his eyes finally leaving the board. He faced Hunter.

‘I also found it hard to believe, but it’s there.’

‘I know this killer is fucking bold,’ Garcia said. ‘He’s daring and all, but this is ridiculous, Robert.’ He pointed at the board. ‘It’s unprecedented. He’s not giving us a clue. He’s giving us his name. Why would he do that?’

‘Because he doesn’t know we know,’ Hunter said. ‘He doesn’t know we know about Fresno, about Sacramento, or about his place in East LA. He has no idea that we have a suspect on the books and that suspect is Mathew Hade – Mat Hade. In fact, when he delivered the note to my door we didn’t have a suspect. We didn’t know who Mat Hade was, remember? That came later.’

Garcia began making all the connections.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Even if we had figured out then that the clues he was referring to in his note were in the form of an anagram, we didn’t know what to look for – a word, a couple of words, a phrase, a name, what? We had no way of knowing that what he was giving us was his actual name. With that in mind, how many possible words or combinations of words could we make from those letters?’

‘Exactly.’

Garcia looked back at the sentence: ‘I Am Death’.

‘And of those,’ Hunter added, ‘how many do you think could form some sort of a name, or a contraction of a name, like “Mat”, or “Ted”, or whatever? And remember, this is Los Angeles. This place is an international hub. This name we’re talking about doesn’t necessarily need to be an American name.’

‘And even if we did come up with the phrase “I Mat Hade”,’ Garcia said, ‘we would’ve probably discarded it because, in all truth, we would’ve had no idea that it was an actual name. Family names can come in all shapes and forms . . . and spellings.’

‘Precisely. It would’ve been unrealistic for us to verify every possible anagram. What would we have done, run background checks on every combination that spelled out a name or part of one? Not likely.’

Garcia chuckled at the cleverness of it all.

‘So he created the anagram because he was never expecting us to find out about him, about Mathew Hade,’ Garcia theorized. ‘Why would we? The odds of us finding out about him were bordering on zero. He was never arrested. Never charged with anything. He was just a person of interest in three different abduction investigations, two in Fresno and one in Sacramento, but never here in LA. And all that happened years ago. Not in a million years was he expecting us to find out about any of that.’