She reached for the FedEx wrapper and checked the sender’s name on the back. Tyler Jordan.
Grace frowned at it. It wasn’t a name she recognized. The address was local, somewhere in Victoria Park, Central LA. Despite having a fantastic memory for names and addresses, she couldn’t remember seeing it before either. The space for the sender’s contact number had been left blank — typical.
She pulled her chair closer to her computer desk and called up the application that allowed her to go into Mayor Bailey’s contacts book. After typing in her password, she entered the family name ‘Jordan’ and clicked ‘Search’. She got three matches, none of them were Tyler. None of them from Los Angeles. She tried ‘Tyler Jordan’ as a double-barreled name, first with a hyphen, then without.
Nothing.
Grace didn’t find that strange at all. It wasn’t unusual for members of the public to mark their mail ‘urgent’, or ‘for your eyes only’, or ‘private and confidential’, in the hope that it would reach the mayor’s desk unopened. But that rarely happened.
Mayor Bailey received hundreds of letters from members of the public every month, but it was Grace’s job to make sure that he didn’t waste his valuable time reading the sort of rubbish that got sent in on a daily basis.
Whoever Tyler Jordan was, it didn’t look like he, or she for that matter as Tyler could be male or female, was known to Mayor Bailey. That fact alone already placed the envelope in the ‘not so urgent’ stack, but elections were just around the corner and Grace couldn’t afford to ignore something potentially important.
She called up an Internet map application and entered the address on the back of the envelope. What she got was a boarded-up grocery store on an empty concrete lot.
Strange, she thought, but that only served to heighten her curiosity.
Grace knew that, before reaching her desk, every single postal item had already been thoroughly scanned by security for harmful chemicals and explosives, so it wasn’t like she was taking a health risk. But x-ray machines and other security devices couldn’t read any internal text, or make out any included images.
In the two and a half years she’d been working for Mayor Bailey, she’d seen obscene drawings, threatening letters, hate mail, pornographic pictures of people offering themselves to him (female and male), conspiracy theory plots... the list was almost endless.
Anything deemed remotely threatening was passed on to the Secret Service. Anything viewed as indecent or obnoxious went straight into the shredder by her desk.
Grace stared at the envelope in her hands for a short while, then at the ‘not so urgent’ mail pile on her desk. She pursed her lips.
‘Oh, what the hell,’ she said seconds later as she slid open the envelope. One more crazy letter or silly picture wouldn’t really make a difference to her. If there was one thing that Grace Hamilton was not it was prudish.
What she got was a second envelope. This one was crispy white, similar to the ones sent with wedding invitations. On the front of it someone had typed the words — DO NOT IGNORE THIS.
Now Grace was really intrigued.
She checked the back of the new envelope. No sender’s name or address. Not that she really expected to find any.
She bit the right side of her bottom lip, considering.
A couple of seconds later, her decision was made. She reached for the sword-shaped letter opener on her desk, tore open the top of the envelope and tilted it so its contents could slide out.
The first item to drop on to Grace’s desk was a white piece of paper that had been folded in half. Something had clearly been written inside. She could make out the outlines of the letters.
The second item was a Polaroid photograph.
It slid on to her desk face down.
Grace paused, amused by the irony of it all. One more decision to make — what to look at first, the picture or the folded piece of paper?
In her head, she eeny meeny miny moed between the two items.
The picture won.
She reached for it and turned it over.
Her heart skipped a beat.
‘Oh, sweet Jesus!’
Sixteen
Garcia’s gaze stayed on the 911-occurrence sheet for just a moment longer before finding Hunter’s face.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘We need to listen to this call.’
Hunter nodded, looking at Garcia’s Honda Civic. They could access it through the onboard police computer. They quickly made their way back to the car.
After navigating through a couple of screens, Garcia finally found the emergency-line log record.
‘Here it is,’ he said as he double-clicked the icon for the sound file.
DISPATCHER (female voice): ‘Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?’
MALE VOICE: ‘Umm, I think I just came across a dead body. She looks dead.’
The voice sounded a little rushed, but not exactly nervous.
DISPATCHER: ‘You said you came across a female body?’
Keyboard clanks.
MALE VOICE: ‘That’s right. I was just riding my bicycle, then suddenly, there she was on the grass.’
DISPATCHER: ‘And she isn’t moving at all?’ MALE VOICE: ‘I’m telling you, she looks dead.’ DISPATCHER: ‘Is she a friend of yours? Do you know her name?’
MALE VOICE: ‘No, I’ve never seen her before.’
DISPATCHER: ‘OK, sir, can you tell me your location?’
MALE VOICE: ‘Yeah, I was cycling north on Pershing Drive, just by the airport — LAX, past the Hyperion water treatment plant.’
There was a pause as the dispatcher waited for the caller to carry on, but he said nothing else.
DISPATCHER: ‘OK, sir, that’s great, but can you be a little bit more specific? Pershing Drive is quite a long road.’
MALE VOICE: ‘Once you pass the treatment plant, heading north, there’s a large field full of trees on the left. She’s just on the grass by a tree that’s a little detached from all the other trees. I’d say maybe about... maybe three hundred yards past the plant.’
DISPATCHER: ‘Have you tried talking to her, or waking her up? Maybe she was just tired, or had a little too much to drink and fell asleep by the tree. Can you see any liquor bottles by her side? Any trace of vomit on her clothes or on the ground by where she’s lying?’
MALE VOICE: ‘No, I haven’t touched her, and you’re not listening to me.’
The voice got a fraction more anxious. He pronounced the next three words very slowly.
MALE VOICE: ‘She looks dead.’
DISPATCHER: ‘Yes, sir, I am listening to you. I just need to establish the correct service to dispatch. Can you see any blood around her, or on her person?’
MALE VOICE: ‘No, I can see no blood.’
DISPATCHER: ‘OK, and are you sure she isn’t breathing? Can you check for a pulse?’
MALE VOICE: ‘No, I’m not touching no dead body. Look, you need to send the police up here. Fast.’
DISPATCHER: ‘They’re already on their way, sir, and they’ll be with you very shortly. Can I please have your—’
The caller disconnected.
Hunter and Garcia gave each other a measured stare.
‘I want to listen to this again,’ Garcia finally said, double-clicking the sound file one more time. Another airplane took off and Garcia increased the volume a touch.
Hunter checked his watch, sat back and closed his eyes, but his attention wasn’t on the dialogue anymore.
When the file had finished playing, Garcia breathed out.
‘This is all wrong,’ he said.
Hunter checked his watch again.
‘At night,’ Garcia continued, ‘not even Superman could have spotted the body from this distance. There’s no way a cyclist saw her all the way over there from here.’
‘Especially when that call wasn’t even made from here,’ Hunter said.
Garcia’s forehead creased. ‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s something missing from the recording, Carlos.’
Garcia’s stare became more purposeful and he instinctively looked at the onboard computer screen and the sound file icon again.
A Boeing 767 began its run up the runway and Garcia realized what he had missed.
‘There are no background airplane noises,’ he said.
They were next to LAX, the third busiest airport in the USA with an aircraft either taking off or landing every forty to sixty seconds, day and night. The roar of jet engines was practically constant. Even with the windows shut, they could still hear it. Hunter had timed it — the call had lasted one minute and forty-two seconds. Even during the night, when air traffic was reduced, they should’ve heard at least two planes either landing or taking off.
‘There are no airplane noises,’ Hunter confirmed.
‘Sonofabitch,’ Garcia said, switching off his car stereo.
‘Like you’ve said, this guy is very confident.’ Hunter tilted his head to one side. ‘And he wants to play.’
‘The killer made the call. We need to get a copy of this recording to audio forensics.’
Hunter agreed.
Garcia regarded him for a couple of seconds. ‘But we’re not going to get anything from it, are we?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Hunter replied. ‘If we do, it will only be because the killer wants us to.’