‘His name is Thomas Hobbs,’ Sergeant Perez continued, reading from the notepad he’d retrieved from his police belt. ‘Twenty-three years of age. Born and raised here in Los Angeles, Pomona Valley. He shares this house with one other person, Sharon Barnard, who, according to Mr. Hobbs, and he had to base this conclusion purely on the jewelry she wore, appears to be the victim. They both work for US Airways.’
‘Wait a second,’ Garcia interrupted. ‘Appears to be the victim?’
Garcia was six-foot two. Perez was five-foot six. The sergeant had to look up to meet the detective’s stare.
‘I guess you’ll understand when you walk in there.’
Garcia shot a worried glance at Hunter.
‘Mr. Hobbs had been away for a day and a half,’ Sergeant Perez explained. ‘This morning he was head steward on a flight from San Francisco back to LA. He wasn’t feeling too well, so after he landed he decided to leave his car at LAX and take a cab home. He found the victim as soon as he opened his front door.’
The sergeant shifted his weight from foot to foot.
‘Unsurprisingly, the sight was way too much for him and he collapsed. That was before he made the nine-one-one call.’ Perez flipped a page on the notepad. ‘As he passed out, he fell forward and into his living room. That explains the blood on his clothes. He’s still in shock so getting any coherent information out of him at the moment is a monstrous task, but you’re welcome to try it if you like. It took me half an hour to get these few details.’ He wiggled the notepad he was holding.
‘Any information on the “possible” victim?’ Hunter asked.
‘Very little,’ Perez replied, consulting his notepad again. ‘Name is Sharon Barnard. Twenty-two years old. Also born and raised here in LA. We did a quick check with US Airways. She finished her last shift — a return flight to Kansas City — yesterday afternoon. She landed at LAX at seventeen twenty-five. We have no indication that she went anywhere else once she left the airport, so we’re assuming that she came straight home. With rush-hour traffic and without stopping anywhere for groceries or anything, she would probably have got home some time between eighteen thirty hours and nineteen hundred hours.’
Hunter and Garcia nodded their understanding.
‘Any signs of a break-in?’ Hunter’s question was directed more at the forensic agent checking the front door.
The agent stopped dusting the doorframe, looked back at the detective and shook his head.
‘Nothing here. The frame isn’t broken or cracked. The lock hasn’t been picked or tampered with. We’ve got a couple of fingerprints from the door handle. Judging by size alone, one of them is definitely female. The bloody hand-prints —’ he indicated the one just above the doorknob, and the one on the outside frame — ‘belong to the guy who found the body.’ He nodded toward the police unit on the drive-way. ‘He used the door and the frame to steady himself as he got up from the floor after fainting.’
‘Have you found a breaching point?’ Hunter asked. ‘Any idea of how the perpetrator got in?’
‘No, nothing yet. Apparently the front door was unlocked when the housemate got home,’ the agent revealed. ‘All the windows are unbroken, and they were all closed and shut from the inside. The back door was also locked.’
‘Here,’ Sergeant Perez said, handing Hunter and Garcia two brand new Tyvek coveralls inside sealed plastic bags.
Both detectives took the bags, ripped them open and started suiting up. When they were done, they pulled the hoods over their heads and each slipped on a pair of latex gloves.
‘I would sincerely suggest that you go for the nose masks too,’ Sergeant Perez commented.
Nose masks in place, they stepped up to the front door. The forensic agent who had been dusting the door handle and frame took a step to his right and pulled the door open.
‘Mind the blood,’ Sergeant Perez said as he turned and walked away.
At last Hunter and Garcia stepped into the living room and immediately paused. Their eyes tried to take everything in, but their brains struggled to comprehend the scene in front of them.
Garcia breathed out, and his words came out as a whisper.
‘What the fuck?’
Thirty-three
The front door of the house opened straight into a small and sparsely decorated living room, with an open-plan kitchen at the back. A square table was positioned about four feet in front of the stove, which centered the cooking counter. The refrigerator was on the far left, just by the door that led into a short hallway and then deeper into the rest of the house. No windows were open, and all the curtains had been drawn shut, but the room was bright with light courtesy of the two high-powered crime-scene lamps that had been mounted on to tripods and placed at opposite corners of the room.
The living room area was covered with a beige, loop pile carpet. A tall, black-wood module occupied most of the west wall. On it were a few decorative items. No TV. A dark-blue fabric sofa with a matching armchair and a black coffee table had been positioned a few feet from the module, toward the center of the room.
Hunter and Garcia breathed out almost at the same time, but neither said a word, their gaze still taking in the entire space, which had been completely bathed in blood — the furniture, the decorative items, the walls, the ceiling, the curtains... everything was covered in splatters of crimson red.
The carpet under their feet had soaked a large amount of blood, but it was now covered by a thick, protective, see-through plastic sheet, which indicated that forensics had already photographed and vacuumed the floor for fibers, hairs, traces and residues. The protective sheet was to avoid any forensic agent, detective, or whoever else entered the crime scene from spreading their bloody footprints, since it was practically impossible to move around the living room without treading on a pool of blood.
Even with the nose masks on, the nauseating smell of human flesh in the early stages of decomposition still filled the room, forcing both detectives to breath mostly through their mouths.
The words I AM DEATH had been written in huge bloody letters across the carpet, just a few feet in front of what was undoubtedly the centerpiece of the sickening canvas that the living room had become. That centerpiece was Sharon Barnard.
She was naked and tied to a metal-framed chair, which was facing the front door. Her ankles had been securely fastened to the chair’s legs by plastic zip ties. Her arms had been pulled behind the chair’s backrest and zip-tied at the wrists. Her whole body was covered in blood. Blood that had come from her face and cascaded down her torso and legs before soaking the carpet beneath her feet. A face that simply wasn’t there anymore.
‘Her face was sanded off.’
The words came from the forensics agent who was by the high-powered lamp at the east end of the room. He was about six-foot one, with an athletic body, high cheekbones and a strong jaw. Unlike Hunter and Garcia, he wore no nose mask. The smell of putrid flesh didn’t seem to bother him.
Garcia turned to face him, but Hunter kept his attention on the victim in front of him.
‘I’m Doctor Brian Snyder,’ the man said, moving toward the detectives. ‘I’m the lead forensic agent assigned to this scene.’
‘Detective Carlos Garcia, LAPD UV Unit. You’re new,’ Garcia added, without any malice. Mike Brindle was the lead forensic agent who attended most UV crime scenes. Hunter and Garcia had worked with him for years.
‘To LA maybe,’ he replied. ‘But I’ve been a forensic agent for over ten years. I just got transferred from Sacramento.’
With an apologetic face, Garcia said, ‘Welcome to Los Angeles. This is Detective Robert Hunter.’