Both detectives shook their heads.
‘The images are too perfect for it to have been a fluke or a coincidence,’ Hunter said.
‘So now you have to figure out what this dog and this bird mean?’
‘Exactly,’ Garcia said. ‘The killer is playing charades with us, doc. Giving us a riddle within a riddle. Something that could mean absolutely nothing. He could be laughing at us right now. Making us go around in circles trying to figure out if there really is a meaning behind Scooby-Doo and Tweety Bird. Meanwhile, he’s off on his dismembering rampage.’
‘Wait.’ Doctor Hove lifted a hand. ‘The images look like cartoons?’
‘No they don’t,’ Garcia clarified. ‘I apologize for my crap sense of humor.’
The doctor looked at Hunter and pointed at the sculpture. ‘So if you’re right, that thing should give us another shadow puppet.’
‘Probably.’
If there were a device inside that boat cabin that could measure tension, its gauge would have gone through the roof.
‘OK, let’s check it out right now, then,’ the doctor said, her curiosity so intense it was almost visible. She clicked her flashlight back on before walking over to the light switch and flicking it off.
Hunter and Garcia also turned their Maglites back on. They spent the next few minutes going around the sickening sculpture, illuminating it from all sides and checking the shadows it projected against the wall.
They got nothing – no animals, no objects, no words.
That was when Hunter’s gaze went back to Nashorn’s head on the coffee table. Something about the way it had been positioned caught his attention. It was looking directly at the sculpture, but from a low, diagonal angle, looking up at it.
‘Let me try something.’ Hunter turned his Maglite back on and repositioned himself, directing his flashlight beam back at the sculpture but from the exact same angle as Nashorn’s stare.
‘Maybe the killer is showing us how to look at it.’
‘By positioning the victim’s head?’ the doctor asked, looking a little dubious.
‘Who knows? I wouldn’t put anything past this monster.’
They all paused and contemplated the strange shadows that were now cast onto the wall behind the sculpture.
Doctor Hove’s entire body tingled as if it’d been electrified, turning her skin into gooseflesh.
‘I’ll be damned.’
Twenty-Nine
There must’ve been at least a dozen police vehicles parked around the lot behind the New World Cinema building in Marina Harbor. The curious crowd that had gathered was now substantial, and the number of news vans and reporters had doubled in the last hour.
‘Excuse me,’ a young woman in her mid-twenties asked the mechanic, who was standing towards the back of the crowd, leisurely observing the police and media circus unfold. ‘Do you know what happened here?’ She spoke with a Midwestern accent. Maybe Missouri or Wisconsin. ‘Has a boat been stolen?’
The mechanic chuckled at the woman’s naivety and turned to face her.
‘I don’t think you’d get this many cops and TV vans around here just for a stolen boat. Not even in Los Angeles.’
The woman’s eyes widened a fraction. ‘Someone was murdered?’ Her voice lifted with excitement.
The mechanic held the suspense for a moment and then nodded. ‘Yeah. Inside that last boat right at the end of the dock.’
The woman went on tiptoe in an effort to catch a glimpse of the boat. She saw nothing other than the backs of the heads of fellow curious onlookers. ‘Have they brought the body out yet?’ she asked, moving from side to side, still trying to see something.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Have you been here long?’
The mechanic nodded. ‘I guess you could say that.’
‘Gee, I wonder what happened.’
The mechanic had read somewhere once that most people were fascinated with death. The more vicious and gruesome, the more they wanted to know about it and the more they wanted to see. Some scientists attributed it to a violent primal instinct – dormant in some, but very active in many. Some psychologists believed it was related to the obsession humans have with trying to understand death and what happens afterwards.
‘I heard he was decapitated,’ the mechanic said, testing the woman’s morbid curiosity.
‘No way.’ She got more agitated, going up on the tips of her toes and craning her neck like a meerkat as she tried to see beyond the crowd.
‘That’s what I heard,’ the mechanic continued. ‘And that the whole boat was washed with blood. Pretty sick, apparently.’
‘Mother of God,’ the woman said, bringing a hand to her mouth.
‘Yeah, welcome to LA.’
She looked disgusted for a couple of seconds, until her eyes caught a glimpse of a police officer just ahead of them. She then bounced on her toes with enthusiasm like a kid who’d just been told she’d be going to Disneyworld for the first time. ‘Oh, there’s a cop, let’s go ask him.’
‘No, I’m OK. My work here is done. I’ve got to go anyway.’
‘I can’t believe you’re not curious.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything that cop can tell me that I don’t already know.’
The woman frowned at the words but seemed too excited to give them much thought. ‘Well, I’ll ask him anyway. I wanna know.’
The mechanic nodded and stepped back into the crowd.
The woman pushed through and approached the officer.
Neither she, the officer, nor anyone else in the crowd noticed the tiny bloodstains on the mechanic’s trouser hems.
Thirty
It was close to 1 a.m. when Hunter finally got back to his apartment. He desperately wanted a shower. There was so much blood inside that boat cabin that, despite his protective-wear, he felt as if his skin, even his soul, had been stained by it.
He closed his eyes, leaned head first against the white tiles, and allowed the strong, hot shower jet to massage the tense muscles of his neck and shoulders. He slowly ran a hand through his hair. The tips of his fingers grazed the deep, ugly scar on his nape and he paused, feeling the rough, lumpy skin. A reminder of how determined and deadly an evil mind could be. Not that Hunter needed any reminding. Though it happened a few years ago, his encounter with the monster the press called the Crucifix Killer was as fresh in his mind as any memories of a minute ago. The painful scar on his nape forever telling him how close he and Garcia had come to death.
The problem was, no matter what he did, no matter how fast or hard the police worked, they just couldn’t catch them quick enough. As soon as they tracked down one manic killer and sent him to prison, two, three, four more were already roaming the streets. The balance was tipped the wrong way. Ironic how the City of Angels seemed to attract more evil than any other city in the USA.
Hunter had no idea how long he stood there, but by the time he’d pushed the memory aside and turned off the water, his tanned skin had gone a dark shade of pink, and his fingertips looked like prunes.
He dried his body, wrapped himself in a clean white towel and returned to his living room. His drinks cabinet was small, but held an impressive connoisseur’s collection of single-malt Scotch whisky. He needed something strong but soothing and comforting. He didn’t search for long, making his choice as soon as his eyes rested on the bottle of Balvenie 15-year-old single barrel.
Hunter poured himself a generous dose, added a tiny drop of water, and dumped himself in the black leatherette sofa. He tried his best not to think about the case, but the images of everything he had seen in the past few days had nowhere else to go. They kept on spinning around and tumbling over themselves inside his head. They’d just found out about the images behind the first sculpture, but before they’d even had a chance to try and figure out the real meaning of those images, the killer had given them a second victim, a second sculpture and a second set of images that, at first look, made even less sense than the original one. He had no idea where to start.