The terror in her eyes.

The despair in her expression.

The fear that oozed from every pore in her body.

Alison. That was her name. Just like with the previous two women, ‘The Monster’ had made him repeat it until it was engraved on his brain.

‘The Monster’ had dragged Squirm out of his cell, tied him to a chair and made him watch as he slit that poor woman’s abdomen open. A cut so wide Squirm thought the man was about to sever her in half.

Blood cascaded through the cut in large crimson sheets, recoloring her legs before dripping down on to the floor, creating the biggest pool of blood Squirm had ever seen. And the smell that came with it was like nothing he had ever experienced before – sweet and metallic, as if the blood were made out of copper.

But all that blood was nothing compared to what had come next. With a bright smile on his lips, ‘The Monster’ had approached the woman, looked straight into her eyes and slowly shoved his hands deep inside the opening he had made. Seconds later, they came out holding on to her insides.

Squirm had felt bitter bile shoot up from his stomach and travel up his throat, but by now he knew better than to puke in front of ‘The Monster’. Clenching his teeth and squeezing his eyes tight, Squirm managed to swallow it all back down.

But ‘The Monster’ wasn’t done yet. He carefully began pulling and twisting whatever it was that he had ripped from inside her, creating some sort of visceral string and allowing it to drop down into the ever-growing pool of blood on the floor.

It became so long, Squirm could hardly believe it had all come from inside her.

But what had terrified Squirm to the point that he had wet himself was the fact that, through all of that, the woman was still alive. She was still conscious. Despite the devastating pain that she was going through, she also had to watch as ‘The Monster’ exenterated her like an animal, and spread her guts all over the floor like play dough.

‘This, Squirm, takes skill,’ the man had said to him as he plopped another piece of her insides on to the floor. Every time she looked like she was about to pass out, ‘The Monster’ would either slap her face or bring a small flask to her nose so she stayed awake.

Squirm wanted to look away but he’d found it impossible to. It was like he had been hypnotized by the savagery of it all.

Now, back in his cell, Squirm had a new thought and that thought carried with it a sliver of hope. The police might not have been looking for him but they sure as hell would be looking for those women. Unlike his own, their fathers hadn’t paid ‘The Monster’ to get rid of them. Squirm was certain of that. So, if the police were searching for the man who was abducting and killing those women, the police were searching for ‘The Monster’. And if they found him, they would find Squirm.

That thought planted a new seed of hope inside the boy’s heart.

Eighty-Seven

Hunter’s shirt was soaked through with perspiration and he felt beads of sweat dribble down the back of his legs. He looked around the space, trying to understand the room he was in.

Despite the faint light that came from somewhere above his head, the space was dark and shrouded in shadow, just like the room Hunter had found himself in before the killer had gotten the best of him. But this certainly wasn’t the same room. The walls were made out of cinder blocks, the floor of solid concrete. Several metal pipes crisscrossed the ceiling in different directions. Over to Hunter’s left he saw a short flight of stairs leading up to a closed door. Hunter had no doubt now that he was down in the basement of this godforsaken house. If the place could even be called a house.

The man who had stepped from the shadows paused directly in front of Hunter and waited.

Hunter didn’t even look at him. His hands felt stiff and swollen. The chain around his wrists was constricting the blood flow. He tried moving his fingers. He could flex them, but the movement brought with it excruciating pain.

Hunter groaned.

The man smiled.

‘Please tell me, Robert,’ Detective Troy Sanders, the head of the LAPD Missing Persons Unit’s Special Division, said, ‘How did you figure it out?’ His posture was relaxed, his voice calm.

Hunter’s eyes moved to look at him.

Sanders waited.

‘You told us,’ Hunter said. His voice, on the other hand, sounded hoarse and fatigued.

‘Did I?’

‘The notes you sent us. First to Mayor Bailey, then to me. They were full of clues.’

Sanders smiled. ‘They certainly were.’

‘We just didn’t know what any of them meant . . . Until tonight.’

‘So what gave it away, Robert? What made you understand what the clues meant?’

Hunter coughed and it made the spike ball inside his head stab at his brain again.

‘Your last nine-one-one call,’ he finally replied.

That answer seemed to surprise Sanders. ‘Really? How so?’

Hunter licked his cracked lips, trying to get some moisture from his face. ‘Cut me down and I’ll tell you.’

Sanders laughed as he walked around Hunter, disappearing behind him.

‘Well, I can’t do that, Robert. But let me see what I can do.’

All of a sudden, Hunter heard the sound of metal on metal. The chain shackling his wrists lost some of its tautness and his feet were finally able to touch the ground. Just. That allowed him to teeter on his toes and use his legs to support a small percentage of his weight, relieving some of the tension from his arms. It felt like heaven.

‘Better?’ Sanders asked.

Hunter said nothing.

‘So tell me, Robert, how did my last nine-one-one call help you figure it all out?’

Hunter breathed in slowly. ‘The victim’s name,’ he replied. ‘Alison.’

Sanders walked back around to face Hunter.

‘You mentioned it three times,’ Hunter said. ‘You made sure that the operator had that down. Why would you do that? It made no sense, because that would’ve been one of the first things we would’ve found out anyway, especially since you used her cellphone to make the call.’

Sanders remained silent, but the ghost of a smile began to play on his lips.

Hunter tiptoed a little to his left to better support his weight. ‘The fact that you were so insistent that the operator write her name down – something didn’t sound right about that. So I went back to the note you sent me and studied it again.’

Sanders waited.

‘“The clues are in the name,”’ Hunter said. ‘You wrote that.’

Sanders nodded. The ghost of a smile grew.

‘The clues were the names,’ Hunter said. ‘The victim’s names.’

Clap, clap, clap.

Sanders applauded Hunter. ‘Very good, Robert. I’m impressed.’

Hunter licked his lips again. ‘You also wrote that you were –’ he coughed one more time and had to endure the spike ball for several seconds – ‘rewriting history.’

The smile finally appeared.

‘So you searched through history, using the victims’ names as your guideline. All of them.’

Hunter’s silence was a resounding ‘yes’.

‘Let me guess,’ Sanders said. ‘What you found out made your head spin.’

Hunter swallowed and the saliva fought to get through his swollen throat. ‘What I found out made almost every clue in both notes come alive. Suddenly, everything began making sense. The puzzle began to sort itself out.’

‘I’m glad,’ Sanders said. ‘But no matter what you searched for, Robert, I know that whatever result you got wouldn’t have answered every question. A very important piece of that puzzle is still missing.’