The screen flicked to black for a moment, then it started again.
‘I had to stop filming.’ For some reason, the man sitting beside him had decided to explain. ‘It took me the best part of twenty minutes to wake her up again. But I’ll tell you something, Squirm, she was one tough bitch.’ He let out a croaked, over-enthusiastic laugh that made the boy’s skin crawl.
The new segment started from where the previous one had left off. More blood and tiny chunks of skin began flying up, propelled by the sander’s rotating disk, before cascading back down over everything like rain.
‘Next time, maybe you can watch it live, Squirm, what do you say? Wouldn’t you like to be in that room with us?’
Whatever had begun crawling its way through Squirm’s insides gained momentum. All of a sudden, it rushed up through his throat with incredible speed.
Squirm hadn’t thought it possible, but Sharon’s screams had gotten even louder, assaulting the boy’s ears with the effect of piercing needles. He was still doing his best to hold his eyes open, but there was no stopping the crawling creature from his stomach which had burst into the kid’s mouth in avalanche style.
Squirm’s body jerked forward violently and he projectile-vomited the little that he had in his gut all over the dark-gray linoleum floor. Some of it reached the screen.
‘You ungrateful sonofabitch,’ ‘The Monster’ had barked, jumping up from his seat. He was careful not to step on the mess Squirm had made on the floor.
The boy looked up at the man with total panic in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’ll clean it. I’m sorry.’ He fell to his knees and used his hands to try to collect what he had regurgitated on to the floor.
POW.
The man’s opened hand connected with the side of the kid’s face, just by his left eye, with such force it sent the boy tumbling across the floor. He only stopped when his head smashed against the wall. Squirm’s eyes rolled back into his head a fraction of a second before he collapsed on to the ground like an empty sack of potatoes.
Without caring, ‘The Monster’ grabbed the unconscious boy by the hair, dragged him downstairs and threw him back in his cell.
Thirty-nine
‘What was that about?’ Garcia asked Hunter as both detectives joined Officer Woods by his black and white unit outside.
‘Nothing, really. Just trying to give the kid a tip.’
‘OK,’ Woods said as he finished writing something in his notepad. ‘I’ve just come off the radio with Operations. Before you guys got here, I had asked them to run a quick check on what Marlon had said. That was the info I was waiting for.’
Hunter and Garcia were quietly impressed by Officer Woods’ approach. Most officers would have left all the checking to the detectives.
‘Anything?’ Garcia asked.
‘You tell me,’ Woods began, reading from his notes. ‘There really was a fault with the phone lines reported last month. AT&T sent two engineers to fix it on the twelfth, and yes, they did have a basket-crane truck with them. The fault was fixed that same day. Since then, AT&T has had no other reports, and they have no knowledge of any other faults with the phone lines in this area. They also said that they did not send any other engineers up here for a subsequent check since the fault was fixed. Not on the fourteenth of last month, or at any other time for that matter, and that includes last week.’
‘And it couldn’t have been a different phone company?’ Garcia asked.
‘No,’ Woods replied. ‘No other supplier services this area.’ He closed his notepad. ‘It seems like you have got yourselves a mysterious telephone engineer.’
‘Marlon said that they were working on the telephone pole in front of property number eight-four-five-six,’ Hunter said, looking north.
‘That’s correct,’ Woods confirmed. ‘And that’s the one, right over there on the corner.’ He pointed at the T-shaped telephone pole directly in front of a white-fronted, single-storey house that sat right where Allenwood Road bent sharply left, about thirty yards north of where they were standing.
Hunter and Garcia walked over to have a better look. Officer Woods followed.
It was a regular-looking telephone pole, brown in color, and made of southern yellow pine. It stood somewhere between thirty-five and forty feet tall. A total of seven telephone cables ran through it — five at the very top, through the horizontal arm of the T, and the remaining two just a few feet beneath the first five, through the long, vertical arm.
Hunter and Garcia spent less than ten seconds looking up at the post before both of them came to the same conclusion.
To reach the first of the cables, an engineer would have to climb about thirty to thirty-five feet. No wonder the AT&T engineers used a basket-crane truck to get up there. On the other hand, a single engineer, even with a long telescopic ladder, would be facing a very tough and somewhat dangerous task.
Hunter walked around the pole, checking it from both sides.
‘Do those cables service this whole street?’ Garcia asked, still looking up at the pole.
‘I’m not sure,’ Woods replied. ‘But I would say so.’ He observed the two detectives for a moment.
‘Do you think it was him?’ Garcia asked his partner.
Hunter paused and looked north, where the road bent left and disappeared behind property 8456.
Garcia waited.
Hunter then looked south, in the direction of the Sloan and Bennett houses. If Marlon was at his bedroom window, Hunter wasn’t able to see him. The angle of the window in relation to the pole’s position, coupled with the way the light reflected off the glass, made it virtually impossible for anyone standing at the pole to see inside.
‘Yes,’ Hunter finally replied. ‘I think it was him.’
Garcia’s gaze moved to the telephone cables. ‘Do you think he bugged the phone lines?’
Hunter looked up at the pole one more time. ‘There’s no reason why he would’ve needed to do that,’ he replied. ‘If that’s what he wanted, then it would’ve been a lot easier, and less risky, to do it via the telephone exchange box.’
‘So if you think that this mysterious telephone engineer was your man,’ Woods said. ‘What was he doing up on the telephone pole?’
Hunter looked north again. Past the pole, the road bent sharply left and disappeared behind the house they were standing in front of, impeding his view. From where he was, he could see no other houses, which meant that no other houses could see him either. He then turned and looked south. From that point, he had a clear and unrestricted view of every house on Allenwood Road, including the Bennetts’.
Hunter finally answered Woods’ question with another question.
‘How difficult do you think it would be for someone to place some sort of camera up there?’
Forty
Night arrives slowly in the summertime, gently gaining ground like a silent soldier. First, lazy shadows find the alleyways, then they start creeping across sidewalks, up walls and through windows, until finally darkness takes hold. By the time Hunter and Garcia got to the coroner’s office, after receiving a phone call from Doctor Hove just half an hour earlier, darkness had stealthily found its way into almost every corner of Los Angeles, with the exception of a sliver of purple sky that still colored the horizon over Santa Monica, but that too was fading fast.
At the crime scene in Venice, besides the several bloody footprints retrieved from the carpet in the living room, forensics had also managed to collect a number of fibers, hairs and traces of dust. Everything had been bagged and taken back to the lab for further examination. Due to how careful they all knew this killer was, hopes weren’t high, but they weren’t dead yet either.