Surprisingly, that did not upset her captor. When she was done, he grabbed her by her hair and pulled her back up into a sitting position.
Slobs of vomit dripped down from her lips on to her naked torso and legs. She started breathing deeply, her chest rising and falling in a broken rhythm. Her arms now began to feel like they were on fire. One million pins and needles found their way into her hands and fingers.
Alison’s head slumped forward again, her chin coming into contact with her chest. The man, realizing that she was about to pass out, grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head back.
‘No, no, no. Stay with me, Alison. I need you awake. I need you to feel everything.’
Her jaw fell open and he spat inside her mouth.
‘Are you listening to me?’
She half coughed, half gagged on his spit. It tasted like sour milk and rotten eggs, but it had the desired effect. It brought Alison back to consciousness.
‘That’s my girl,’ the man said, letting go of her hair and taking a step back.
This time Alison was able to hold her head in place by herself, but something made her doubt that she was one hundred percent conscious. As the man moved toward the workshop table once again, she caught a glimpse of something that froze her soul. In one of the corners of the basement, hidden in the shadows, she could swear that she saw a little boy. He was staring straight at her. The terror in his eyes easily matched the fear in hers.
Seventy-two
‘I’m not sure why,’ Hunter said. ‘Maybe it was because I was so tired when I reread the note again in the early hours of this morning, but for some reason my brain mixed up the letters in a strange way and for a split second, I saw it... Then it was gone.’
Garcia was still staring at the board.
‘I thought I was imagining things, but I kept on blinking, looking away, then looking back at it again.’ Hunter paused, following his partner’s gaze. ‘And then, as if it were a dream, the letters just moved around right in front of my eyes.’ He tapped the board one more time. ‘And I saw this.’
From the letters in ‘I Am Death’ Hunter had created three new words: ‘I Mat Hade’.
‘No fucking way,’ Garcia said again, his eyes finally leaving the board. He faced Hunter.
‘I also found it hard to believe, but it’s there.’
‘I know this killer is fucking bold,’ Garcia said. ‘He’s daring and all, but this is ridiculous, Robert.’ He pointed at the board. ‘It’s unprecedented. He’s not giving us a clue. He’s giving us his name. Why would he do that?’
‘Because he doesn’t know we know,’ Hunter said. ‘He doesn’t know we know about Fresno, about Sacramento, or about his place in East LA. He has no idea that we have a suspect on the books and that suspect is Mathew Hade — Mat Hade. In fact, when he delivered the note to my door we didn’t have a suspect. We didn’t know who Mat Hade was, remember? That came later.’
Garcia began making all the connections.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Even if we had figured out then that the clues he was referring to in his note were in the form of an anagram, we didn’t know what to look for — a word, a couple of words, a phrase, a name, what? We had no way of knowing that what he was giving us was his actual name. With that in mind, how many possible words or combinations of words could we make from those letters?’
‘Exactly.’
Garcia looked back at the sentence: ‘I Am Death’.
‘And of those,’ Hunter added, ‘how many do you think could form some sort of a name, or a contraction of a name, like “Mat”, or “Ted”, or whatever? And remember, this is Los Angeles. This place is an international hub. This name we’re talking about doesn’t necessarily need to be an American name.’
‘And even if we did come up with the phrase “I Mat Hade”,’ Garcia said, ‘we would’ve probably discarded it because, in all truth, we would’ve had no idea that it was an actual name. Family names can come in all shapes and forms... and spellings.’
‘Precisely. It would’ve been unrealistic for us to verify every possible anagram. What would we have done, run background checks on every combination that spelled out a name or part of one? Not likely.’
Garcia chuckled at the cleverness of it all.
‘So he created the anagram because he was never expecting us to find out about him, about Mathew Hade,’ Garcia theorized. ‘Why would we? The odds of us finding out about him were bordering on zero. He was never arrested. Never charged with anything. He was just a person of interest in three different abduction investigations, two in Fresno and one in Sacramento, but never here in LA. And all that happened years ago. Not in a million years was he expecting us to find out about any of that.’
‘Probably not,’ Hunter accepted it. ‘All we need is for that phone to ring now.’
As if on cue, Hunter’s cellphone rang loudly, rattling against his desktop.
Garcia’s eyes widened.
‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
Seventy-three
Hunter couldn’t remember ever taking a call so quickly. He dashed toward his desk, his feet almost scuffing against the floor, his hand shooting out in the direction of his cellphone.
‘Detective Hunter, Robbery Homicide Division.’
‘Detective,’ the male voice at the other end of the line said. ‘It’s Brian.’
In his excitement, it took Hunter a second to match the name to the voice, and then both of them to a face.
‘Doctor Brian Snyder, with SID,’ the doctor clarified, picking up on Hunter’s hesitation.
Maybe it had taken Hunter more than just a second.
Garcia looked at Hunter, the question practically written in his eyes.
‘Doctor,’ Hunter said, shaking his head at Garcia. ‘Of course. I’m sorry.’ He paddled back fast. ‘It’s been an eventful morning so far.’
‘Have you found your suspect?’ he asked, his voice shifting from calm to half-excited.
‘No, not yet, but we’re hopeful. Have you got something for us?’
‘I do,’ he confirmed. ‘The results of the handwriting analysis.’
‘OK. Just a sec, Doc. Let me put you on speakerphone.’ Hunter keyed in the necessary command and placed the phone back on his desk.
Garcia stepped closer.
‘All right,’ Doctor Snyder began. ‘Graphologists will need on average thirteen to fifteen different letters out of the twenty-six we have in the English alphabet to achieve a “one hundred percent” positive match. As I’m sure you’re aware, the annotation inside the book of matches you gave me — Midazolam, 2.5 mg — contains only eight different letters, and two numbers.’
Garcia glanced at Hunter.
‘So for us to achieve that indisputable positive match, you’d need to find something else with his handwriting on it.’
‘Well,’ Garcia said, before Doctor Snyder was able to continue. ‘For now, that’s pretty much out of the question, Doc. Any sort of partial confirmation?’
‘I was just about to get to that.’
‘Oh sorry,’ Garcia said, lifting his hands and quickly using Hunter’s ‘paddle back’ excuse. ‘Eventful morning.’
‘Our graphologist said that though legally he cannot one hundred percent confirm it as a match, by analyzing the curvature of some of the letters, together with the way in which the person who wrote them connects them to one another, he would stake his professional reputation on the assumption that whoever jotted down that annotation is the same person who wrote both of the notes. In short, he’s your killer.’