As the ice-cold liquid came into contact with her skin, Sharon jolted awake and immediately sucked in a lumpy breath. Her head jerked back in a fright. Her eyelids flickered like butterfly wings for a long moment, while from her lips came indecipherable, frightened sounds.
The man waited patiently, his hands now tucked behind his back.
Sharon finally managed to open her eyes. Her confused and drowsy gaze moved right, then left, ultimately settling on the figure in front of her.
One... two... three seconds went by before Sharon looked properly at the man. There was something in his light-blue eyes, something in the way he looked at her that felt terribly familiar. She had met him somewhere before, Sharon was certain of it, but where?
She forced her memory.
Nothing.
It didn’t matter how tightly she closed her eyes, or how much she begged her brain to remember it, her memory just wasn’t able to make the connection.
Sharon opened her mouth in an effort to speak, or scream — she wasn’t sure herself — but her breathing was still too erratic, catching in her throat. Her diaphragm was unable to overcome her fear.
Not a sound came out.
Her lower jaw trembled, then her entire body, as if all of a sudden an arctic front had just climbed in through her window and clothed her.
The man waited patiently, his hands still tucked behind his back. No movement whatsoever, just a cold stare locked on to her eyes like a predator stalking its prey.
Sharon kept her petrified gaze on his for God knows how long. It was like she had been hypnotized by those deep, penetrating eyes. She trembled again, this time something that came from deep inside her, shaking her core, and that finally made her break eye contact. Her eyes moved right, then left again, but she was too frightened to understand what was happening to her, or where she was.
At last she tried moving, first her legs, then her arms, but as she did so unbearable pain shot up from her feet and legs, and through her arms and shoulders. A pain so intense it made her gag. Her eyes rolled back into her head and she almost passed out again.
Amused, the man waited patiently, his hands still tucked behind his back.
As Sharon regained consciousness, she realized that the reason why she was unable to move was because she’d been tightly tied down to the chair she was sitting in. Cold water was still dripping from the tips of her wet hair on to her chest, stomach and thighs. She drew in a deep breath and steadied herself. Finally, a distant memory began to materialize inside her head. The phone call, the male voice at the other end, the sick joke about him being ‘death’, the door, the window, the fear. As she remembered, her expression changed.
Sharon looked back at the man, pleading. That was when she realized something that her eyes had certainly noticed before but her brain had failed to register — over his clothes and shoes the man was wearing a see-through, hooded, plastic coverall. Only his face was exposed, nothing else. Then Sharon noticed his clothes through the coverall — not your regular everyday attire. He wore some sort of black, shiny jumpsuit, made out of something that hugged his body like a second skin. What came to her mind was — latex.
The man held her stare for another second, then his lips stretched out slowly. Sharon couldn’t tell if that was a smile or not. If it was, it was like none she’d ever seen before. It carried no humor, no sarcasm, no sympathy, no apathy, no feelings of any kind. A completely emotionless facial expression that only served to scare her more.
Sharon drew in another lumpy breath, and despite her fear, she felt her voice come back to her.
She moved her lips, and every word came out through tears.
‘Plea... please. What do you want with me? Wh... why are you here? Please... just let me go. I’ll do anything you want.’
The smile, or whatever it was, disappeared from the man’s lips. He was done waiting. It was time to do what he was there to do. He moved his hands from behind his back, revealing what he was holding.
Sharon’s gaze first focused on his right hand, then on his left.
Panic turned into terror.
In an effort to clear her tears, she squeezed her eyes as tightly shut as she could. When she opened them again, the man had moved two steps closer.
‘Oh, God, no. Please don’t do this.’
‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked. His voice carried no emotion.
All Sharon could do was shake her head.
‘Oh, Sharon, Sharon. You disappoint me. I told you on the phone. Don’t you remember?’
Tears came back to her eyes.
‘I. Am. Death.’ He smiled again. ‘And I have come for you.’
Twenty-seven
When Garcia got to the office at 7:31 a.m., Hunter was seated on his chair with his back toward the door. His hands were behind his head with his fingers interlaced together. His legs were extended in front of him, the heels of his boots resting on the edge of his desk. He was staring at the picture board as if it was the first time he was seeing any of what had been pinned to it. There was an empty coffee mug by his computer keyboard, together with two candy bar wrappers. Garcia glanced at the coffee machine in the corner — empty. From the door, he also noticed the transcribed notes on Hunter’s desk. A couple of them had fallen on to the floor.
‘Did you spend the night in here?’ Garcia asked, stepping inside and closing the door behind him. It wouldn’t have surprised him if Hunter had.
‘No, not really,’ Hunter replied, without diverting his attention from the board. ‘I went home and had a shower.’
‘But no sleep.’ Garcia didn’t phrase it as a question.
Hunter shrugged. ‘In the words of the great American poet, Jon Bon Jovi, I guess “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”.’
Garcia chuckled. ‘Carry on this way and it won’t be long, my friend.’ He moved around to his desk, placed his rucksack on the floor and fired up his computer. ‘So what time did you get here this morning?’
Hunter’s gaze moved to the clock on the wall just above the board.
‘About a quarter past five.’
Garcia didn’t have to ask. He knew the reason why Hunter had gotten to the office so early — the threat the killer had added to the note he’d sent Mayor Bailey: And before the sun rises tomorrow, someone else will see it and feel it too. And trust me, what you’ve seen is nothing compared to what is still to come, unless these so-called experts are able to stop me.
‘Have we got anything?’ Garcia asked, the play completely gone from his tone. ‘Any new nine-one-one calls?’
Hunter finally moved his heels from his desk, sat up straight and swiveled his chair to face his partner.
‘No, nothing yet.’
Both detectives knew that didn’t mean anything.
‘I checked with FedEx about the package that was delivered to Mayor Bailey yesterday,’ Garcia said, loading something up on to his computer screen.
‘And?’
‘The package was dropped off two days ago, just before lunchtime, at a FedEx Express drop box just outside Union Station.’ Garcia tilted his head to one side and followed it with a sigh. ‘Get this, neither of the two CCTV cameras on that corner of the station picked up anything. In fact, they were both concentrating on something else.’
Hunter queried with an eyebrow lift.
‘Yep. He created a diversion,’ Garcia confirmed. ‘Small, homemade smoke bomb hidden inside a trashcan. Nothing major, just a single Ping-Pong ball wrapped in aluminum foil with a short fuse. Good to create enough smoke to get the attention of the cameras, but not enough to create panic. So, for at least a minute, everything else got overlooked.’