Hunter stayed quiet, and once again the Chief of Police watched him, this time with an intense, searching gaze, but Hunter’s expression revealed nothing. Chief Bracco checked his watch.
‘I’m meeting the mayor and the Governor of California in just under an hour. Would any of you like to take a guess as to what the main topic of conversation will be?’
This time it was a rhetorical question.
‘So, for my own peace of mind, Detectives, so that I at least half believe the crap that I’ll be selling them in sixty minutes’ time, and subsequently to the LA press at the conference tomorrow, please give me something.’
‘All I have are hunches and suppositions, sir,’ Hunter finally said. ‘Nothing concrete.’
‘I appreciate that, Detective,’ Chief Bracco said, lifting a hand to stop Hunter before he gave him any more excuses. ‘And a hunch is all I’m asking for. All of us here know that that’s all criminal profiling is — a hunch, a best guess based on the evidence found so far, nothing more. It’s not an exact science and it never will be. So please, Detective, hit me with your best hunch. What kind of sick bastard are we after here? Is he delusional? Is he schizophrenic? Does he hear voices in his head? What?’
‘No. He’s not delusional, or schizophrenic, and I don’t believe that he hears voices in his head, sir.’
Hunter felt too tired to launch into a whole psychological explanation to back up his opinion. Instead, he moved on to the facts.
‘What we do know is that he’s methodical, patient and very disciplined. His risks are well calculated. He never rushes because he knows he doesn’t have to. He never leaves anything behind because his planning is practically flawless. He isn’t the type to panic easily if things don’t go exactly to plan because he knows that he can improvise at the drop of a dime. He’s comfortable getting into character. He’s comfortable lying, and he does it very well and without hesitation.’
‘And you’re basing all those assumptions on what, exactly?’ Chief Bracco asked, sounding intrigued as opposed to condescending.
‘Everything this killer has done so far has worked out perfectly for him, sir,’ Garcia took over. ‘No mistakes. No glitches. Not a speck of dust left behind that he didn’t want to leave behind. His timing with his victims has been impeccable. The risk of anyone running into him while he was with any of them was practically non-existent because it was calculated to the very last detail. None of it, sir, including the fact that he’s so elusive and so thorough, is down to luck.’
The Chief of Police mulled his words for an instant. ‘Wait a second, are you saying that you think the killer knew beforehand that both victims would be alone on the night he acted?’
Garcia nodded. ‘We’re very sure he did.’
‘How? How did he know?’
‘That we don’t know yet, sir,’ Hunter replied. ‘But that kind of information isn’t very hard to come by if you know where to look. A lot of people will freely offer it on social media network sites.’
‘Goddamnit.’ Chief Bracco knew Hunter was right. No matter how often he reminded her of the risks, his own daughter was constantly posting similar information about her daily schedule on her Facebook page.
‘So if you think that he knew his victims would be alone on the nights he acted,’ Chief Bracco said, ‘then you must also believe that he picked them beforehand.’
Hunter nodded. ‘They weren’t picked at random, sir. There’s a reason why he chose them.’ It was Hunter’s turn to lift a hand to stop Chief Bracco before he could ask his next question. ‘And no, sir, at the moment we don’t know what that reason is, but we are doing all we can to find out.’
‘Any links between the victims?’
‘We don’t know yet, sir.’ Garcia was the one who replied this time. ‘We basically just got back from the crime scene and the coroner’s office, but we already have a team working on it. If there’s a link between them, I’m sure we’ll find it.’
‘How about the note and the photograph that were sent to Mayor Bailey?’
‘Clean,’ Garcia answered with a headshake. ‘No prints whatsoever. We’re still waiting on ink, paper and handwriting analyses.’
‘How about the package’s point of origin?’
Garcia quickly told him about the smoke bomb diversion at the FedEx drop box.
Chief Bracco ran his thumb and index finger over his mustache a couple of times.
‘So if I got this right,’ he said, facing both detectives, ‘in short you’re saying that the freak we’re after is careful, very patient, well organized, resourceful, and probably highly intelligent.’
Hunter agreed. ‘You wanted to know who this killer is, sir?’ His gaze paused on Captain Blake before returning to Chief Bracco.
‘This killer is your perfect predator.’
Forty-two
It was coming up to 4:45 a.m. when Hunter finally got back to his one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a dilapidated building in Huntington Park, Southeast LA.
After leaving his office at around 9:00 p.m. the night before, Hunter had decided to drive around the city. He did that often enough. For some reason that not even he could explain, driving around at night through the streets of Los Angeles somehow calmed him. Helped him think.
As he left his office, he could tell that sleep, if it came at all, would’ve been restless and dotted by nightmares. In the morning, he would feel worse than if he’d stayed up all night, so he’d decided to stay up all night.
Hunter aimlessly drove around the streets of Central, East and South LA, then The Harbor and South Bay, before crossing the city all the way over to Santa Monica. The clock on his dashboard read 2:22 a.m. when he finally decided to park his car and go for a walk on the beach.
Hunter loved the beach, but unlike most, he preferred it at night.
He liked watching the sea at that time. The undisturbed sound of waves breaking against the sand, together with the quietness of the early hour, reminded him of his parents and of when he was a little kid.
His father used to work seventy-hour weeks, jumping between two awfully paid jobs. To help out, his mother would take any work that came her way — cleaning, ironing, washing, whatever she could find. Hunter couldn’t remember a weekend when his father wasn’t working, and even then they struggled to make ends meet. But despite their struggle, Hunter’s parents never complained. They played the cards they were dealt and, no matter how bad a hand they got, they always did it with a smile on their faces.
Every Sunday, after Hunter’s father got home from work, they used to go down to the beach. Most times they got there once everyone else had already left and the sun had already set. But Hunter didn’t mind. In fact, he preferred it. It was like the whole beach belonged to him and his parents. After Hunter’s mother passed away, his father never stopped taking him to the beach on Sundays. Sometimes, Hunter would catch his father wiping away tears as he watched the waves break.
As Hunter finally locked his car and made his way up to his apartment, he never noticed the black GMC Yukon hiding in the shadows around the corner from where he’d parked.
Sitting patiently in the driver’s seat, the man observed Hunter with a black look on his face.
Forty-three
Without switching on any lights, and more out of habit than hunger, Hunter walked into the kitchen, pulled open the fridge door and glanced inside. As always, there wasn’t much choice — a couple of pieces of fruit, a carton of milk, a can of some cheap energy drink that he was sure one day would punch a hole in his stomach and a half-full pack of chili-flavored beef jerky. He loved those things, and even though it made them tougher and chewier, he preferred to have them cold.