One by One (Роберт Хантер 5 Поодиночке) - Carter Chris (2) (читать книги бесплатно полные версии txt) 📗
Instead of driving home at the end of the day and spend another night struggling with his thoughts and fighting insomnia, Hunter decided to revisit Christina Stevenson’s house. He knew for sure that Christina had been abducted from inside her bedroom, and abduction locations, just like crime scenes, always had more to offer than simple physical evidence. Hunter had a gift when it came to understanding them, and maybe, being there alone, away from any distractions, would help him see something he’d missed.
He spent almost two hours in her house, most of it inside her bedroom. He tried to imagine what had happened that night, and role-played along with the images that came to him.
He positioned himself behind the flowery curtain in Christina’s bedroom, exactly where he figured the killer had hid. Hunter knew that the killer hadn’t attacked Christina immediately as she entered the room; her clothes scattered around the floor, together with the champagne flute and bottle, told him that. She was drinking alone. Judging by how expensive a bottle of Dom Ruinart was, Christina must’ve been celebrating something special. Probably her article making the front cover of the entertainment supplement that Sunday.
The killer took his time watching her, either waiting for the perfect moment to strike or enjoying the show as she undressed. Either way, the moment came when she squeezed herself under her bed to retrieve her watch, Hunter guessed. He had a feeling that while Christina was under the bed, she had spotted the killer’s shoes as he hid behind the curtain. Then everything happened in a flash. Within a minute she had been dragged out from under the bed and subdued. The killer most certainly had a syringe with the appropriate dosage of phenoperidine ready. Christina had fought as hard as she could, kicking and screaming. Signs of her struggle were all over the room, but her attacker was strong, and the drug stronger.
Despite reliving the entire scene in his mind, and meticulously moving about the house, Hunter picked up no new clues, nothing that answered any of the many questions screaming at him from inside his head.
After leaving Christina’s place, he sat in his car for a long while, wondering what to do next, wondering if they would be able to move even an inch closer to this killer before he killed again. And Hunter was certain he would kill again.
He checked his watch and decided that he still wasn’t ready to go home yet. Instead, he drove around the city aimlessly, looking for nothing, heading nowhere. In West Hollywood the bright neon lights and the busy streets made him feel a little more alive. It was always good to see people smiling, laughing and enjoying life.
From there he drove east for a while, past Echo Lake and the concrete bulk that was the Dodgers’ stadium, before heading south through central Los Angeles. All of a sudden, Hunter had an urge to go to the beach, see the ocean, maybe walk barefoot on the sand. He loved the sea breeze at night. It reminded him of his parents and of when he was a little kid. A happier time, perhaps. He turned west and headed toward Santa Monica Beach, deciding to avoid the freeways. For once, he wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere.
He passed the turn for the 4th Street Bridge and carried on down South Mission Road. Those streets were as familiar to him as the inside of his apartment, and he took no notice of any street signs, specially the large one overhead.
Then it happened, similar to a wayward domino that has suddenly lost its balance, tumbling against all the other pieces and triggering a great linked chain reaction. First, his subconscious registered it. Then, about a second later, as his subconscious mind communicated with his conscious one, a warning bell sounded inside Hunter’s head. It took just another millisecond for his brain to send a signal down to the muscles in his body via his nervous system. Adrenaline rushed through him like a tidal wave, and Hunter finally slammed on the brakes, hard. His old Buick LeSabre swerved left before coming to an abrupt stop in the middle of the road. He was lucky that there wasn’t another vehicle right behind him.
Hunter shot out of the car like a bullet. His breath catching on his throat as his eyes focused on the large green road sign he’d just driven under. His mind was working at a thousand miles per hour, searching for memories, trying to slot them into place. As he started recalling, his mind segmented the memory into pictures, and he felt a shiver gradually climb up his spine.
‘It can’t be this,’ he said to no one, but his words had little meaning, because the more he remembered, the more certain he was.
All the clues the killer had thrown at them had been real.
Ninety-Five
Hunter drove straight back to his office in the PAB and immediately fired up his computer. The first thing he noticed after it booted up was that he had received an email from Pamela Hays, Christina Stevenson’s editor at the LA Times entertainment desk. Attached was a zip file – Christina’s crime articles he had requested earlier.
‘Great!’ Hunter whispered before setting those aside for the time being, knowing that he would soon be coming back to them.
His priority at that moment was to find an old incident file. He couldn’t remember the victim’s name, or the exact date, but he was certain of the year – that would be good enough. He called up the internal search engine for the LAPD Incidents Database, entered the year he could remember, the incident type and the officer’s name. The single result came back in about 0.23 seconds.
‘Bingo!’ Hunter smiled.
He clicked on the link and read through the incident report. Adrenaline and excitement pumped through his veins.
Hunter went back to Pamela Hays’ email and uncompressed the attached archive. There were two hundred and fifty-nine files in total, but just like the first articles archive he had received a few days ago, these also weren’t searchable text files. They were scanned images of the newspaper pages with the published articles. No file titles, just published dates, but this time Hunter didn’t have to read them all. He now knew the exact date he was looking for. The incident file gave him that. He quickly found the specific article and double clicked the image.
It wasn’t a very long piece, only around five hundred words or so. The article also contained four photographs. Three of them were of poor quality; the fourth was a good-quality portrait, and absolutely shocking. The article had featured on the second page of the LA Times crime supplement on a Thursday morning, almost two and a half years ago.
The title of the article alone made Hunter pause for breath, forcing him to reread it a couple of times. Things were starting to make a dreadful kind of sense.
A side note at the end of the article revealed how the newspaper had acquired the three poor-quality photographs that accompanied the piece, and Hunter choked for the second time.
‘No way,’ he said out loud in the quiet of the room. The room echoed around him. Hunter felt almost dizzy at how quickly the pieces were now slotting into place.
He made a printout of the scanned image and placed it on his desk, taking another moment to think about what to search for next. Then he remembered the camcorder the killer had left inside the trashcan out in City Hall Park, and just like that his mind made the connection.
‘Sonofabitch.’
He brought up his web browser and took a moment to think about what words to type into the search engine. He quickly decided on a four-word sentence. The result came back almost instantly – about 6 million results in 0.36 seconds.
