Doctor Snyder processed that information in silence before adding, ‘Atkins. Her name was Alison Atkins. She was twenty-eight years old.’ He read the way Garcia looked at him and added, before he could ask the question, ‘The killer used her cellphone to make the nine-one-one call. Once he was done, he put the phone down by the door but never disconnected. He wanted it traced so we could find her.’

Hunter immediately made a mental note to get a copy of the 911 call as soon as they got back to the Police Administration Building.

‘She was a very sweet woman,’ Hunter said. ‘Always smiling. Always very polite. The type who loved life.’

There was a new emotion in Hunter’s voice that Doctor Snyder failed to properly identify. Sadness? Anger? He couldn’t tell.

‘Do you think that she became a victim because you knew her?’ he asked.

Hunter’s focus hadn’t yet diverted from Alison’s face. He gave Doctor Snyder the slightest of shrugs. Right at that moment, he really didn’t know the answer to that question.

The doctor looked again at the victim.

Alison had been stripped naked. Her arms had been shackled together at the wrists by a long metal chain, which in turn had been looped around the thickest of the three wood beams that ran across the ceiling. The loop was kept in place by a small padlock. Alison’s arms were fully extended above her head. Her feet grazed the floor beneath them just enough to stop her body from moving around.

There was so much blood on the floor directly under her body that, at first guess, Hunter would have said that she had bled to death. But what Hunter and Garcia knew had made the police officers outside lose their lunch by the side of the building was the way in which she had bled out.

A horizontal incision, which crossed her body from side to side, had been made across her lower abdominal area. Once the incision had been made, her lower gastrointestinal tract, or small and large intestines, had been removed from her abdominal cavity and left on the floor in front of her. But neither her small nor her large intestine had been completely severed from her body. They were still attached at the highest point – the stomach.

‘The killer disemboweled her?’ Garcia asked disbelievingly, his eyes now moving to the large pool of blood on the floor.

‘That’s exactly what he did,’ Doctor Snyder confirmed.

The killer had cut open the victim’s abdomen, reached inside and gutted her while she was still alive.

As Garcia breathed in, he felt his body shiver.

‘I’ve seen disemboweled bodies before,’ he said, his voice restrained, ‘but I’ve never seen one where the intestines have been completely stretched out this way. How long can it get to?’

Doctor Snyder kept his eyes on Alison Atkins’ eviscerated body for a moment longer before following Garcia’s.

‘Both intestines together will measure about twenty-five feet in length,’ he said, the tone of his voice matching the detective’s.

The killer hadn’t only dragged her small and large intestines out of her abdominal cavity. He had also stretched them to their full extent, twisting and looping them around at points. The visual result was as unbelievable as it was grotesque. As the victim hung in the air with her arms stretched out above her head, the entirety of her lower gastrointestinal tract could be seen exiting her body as if it were an oversized, alien, umbilical cord. It then lay extended, twisted and looped outside her body, splashed on to the floor, lying in an enormous pool of blood.

But what boggled the mind was that all this had been done while she was still alive and, most probably, conscious. Death would’ve come very slowly and in agonizing pain. Neither Hunter nor Garcia needed to ask. They both knew those facts very well.

‘I wanted both of you to see her in situ before we cut her down,’ Doctor Snyder said. ‘As you can tell, this place feels a like a sauna, which will speed up the decomposition process. Rigor mortis had just started to set in when we got here, which means that the killer waited for her to die before making the call. She died no more than three to five hours ago.’

Hunter finally allowed his attention to deviate from Alison. Garcia did the same. As they turned around and faced the large doors behind them, they paused.

There it was.

Written in blood across the inside of both doors was the killer’s signature – I AM DEATH.

‘Do you think he filmed it again?’ Doctor Snyder asked, also facing the morbid script.

‘Probably,’ Garcia replied. ‘Filming it, or taking pictures, or whatever, is his token. His trophy. His sick way of keeping them alive for ever. To him, the recording itself would be just as important as the attack, or the victim, or the violence.’

In silence, all three of them looked around for another full minute before the doctor spoke again.

‘The place is an absolute mess. It’s been abandoned for years. There’s debris here dating back to who knows when. If we decide to look at everything, we might be here for days.’ He paused and made a face.

Hunter had no idea if they’d find anything in there. If they did, it was because the killer wanted them to, but it now made no difference. What the killer didn’t know was that they already knew who he was. They just needed to find him.

Seventy-Seven

Hunter and Garcia spent the rest of the afternoon at the crime scene in the Angeles National Forest. They watched as Alison Atkins was freed from her shackles, placed inside a body bag and loaded into a coroner’s van. Her intestines were carefully collected by one of Doctor Snyder’s forensic agents. Despite all his years of experience, at times he looked like he was about to be sick.

Both detectives were still checking their phones every five minutes or so. Still no sign of Mat Hade. Hunter had also checked with the State of California Department of Motor Vehicles – Mathew Hade had no vehicles registered under his name at present. His last one had been a used 2003 black Ford Escape, which he’d acquired in February 2007 and kept until October 2014. After that, nothing. He also had no outstanding fines.

At 8:30 p.m. Hunter and Garcia received another call from Doctor Snyder. He had the first of the two test results they’d been waiting for – the pen ink analyses. Forensics had first collected a small ink sample from the note the killer had sent Mayor Bailey and chemically compared it to the ink in the BIC Cristal Garcia had found inside Mat Hade’s apartment. The result had been inconclusive. But forensics hadn’t given up. They’d placed the ballpoint pen under a Leica digital microscope and found out that the roller ball at its tip had a couple of faults – scratches. Those scratches, though invisible to the naked eye, would certainly show on any sort of stroke made by the pen. When they’d placed the note under the same microscope, they’d got a perfect match. The killer’s note had been written with that exact same pen.

They had their guy.

They just didn’t have their guy yet.

With this new discovery, a new APB had also been sent out. Orders had been updated from ‘observe and inform the case detectives’ to ‘carefully approach and apprehend’. All they had to do now was sit and wait until Mat Hade was arrested. They just had to hope that this would happen before he claimed another victim.

Garcia went home at around 9:00 p.m., but only after Hunter practically ordered him to.