Hunter stared back at him. ‘And why is that?’
‘Completely different MO, for starters. OK, he ripped the victim’s tongue out, but compared to the savagery of the amputations in our last two crime scenes, what happened up there looks like a holiday camp. And we’ve got no sculpture and no shadow puppets.’
Hunter placed his elbows on the car’s roof and interlaced his fingers. At that specific moment in time he was inclined to agree with Garcia, but there were still too many loose ends and something was telling him that discarding Ken Sands as a suspect right now was a big mistake. ‘From what we gathered so far, don’t you think that Sands is intelligent enough to change his MO on an unrelated crime?’
‘Unrelated?’ Garcia deactivated the central-locking system and got into his car.
Hunter followed.
Garcia unlocked the engine and switched on the A/C unit. ‘What do you mean, unrelated?’
Hunter leaned against the passenger’s door. ‘OK, for a moment let’s assume that we’ve been right in everything so far, and that Ken Sands really is our killer.’
‘OK.’
‘One of our assumptions is that Sands is going after his victims for revenge, not only for himself, but for his childhood friend as well, Alfredo Ortega, right?’
Garcia nodded. ‘Yep.’
‘OK, so where does Tito fit into his revenge plan?’
Garcia looked pensive for an instant.
‘Remember, Tito said that they never even talked while inside. So there was no bad blood between them from their time in Lancaster.’
Garcia pinched his bottom lip. ‘He doesn’t fit.’
‘No, he doesn’t. If Sands is our man and he came after Tito, it wasn’t because Tito was part of his original plan. It was probably because Tito went asking about him the wrong way, or to the wrong person.’
‘But killers don’t usually change their MO, unless they’re escalating.’ He pointed to the building. ‘That’s exactly the opposite. He’s gone from absurdly grotesque to . . .’ he tried to think of a word, ‘. . . plain nasty, I’d say.’
‘And again, it goes back to the fact that Tito wasn’t part of his original plan. Think about it, Carlos. To our killer, his MO is extremely important – the way he dismembers his victims, the way he carefully puts their body parts back together, constructing a sculpture to cast a different shadow onto the wall each time. To him, all that is mandatory, not a choice, not something he’s doing for fun. It’s as important as the killing act itself, and the choice of victim. It’s part of his revenge. And I have no doubt there’s a direct relation between the sculpture, the shadow, and each specific victim. There’s a reason why he chose a coyote and a raven for Nicholson, and a devil-like image looking down at four other figures for Nashorn.’
‘And Tito wasn’t part of that at all,’ Garcia said.
Hunter agreed in silence.
‘But we’re still not sure what the real meaning behind those shadow images is,’ Garcia went on. ‘And if you’re right, and each image has a direct link to each specific victim, then there’s something that isn’t making any sense in my mind.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘In the first shadow image, the killer paid very close attention to detail, specifically carving the victim’s body parts so as to not leave us a lot of doubt. You said so yourself, the curved, chunky beak on the bird image ruled out a lot of possibilities, leaving us with just a few alternatives. And the same was done to the coyote image. But for the second shadow image, the attention to detail wasn’t nearly so careful. It’s hard to tell properly if we have a human face with horns, a devil, a God, or some sort of animal. The two standing figures, together with the ones on the ground could be people or not. Why would the killer do that? Be so specific with the first shadow image, but not with the second?’
Hunter rubbed his face with both hands. ‘I can only see one reason – relevance.’
Garcia pulled a face and turned both of his palms up. ‘Relevance?’
‘I think the reason why our killer paid so much attention to detail on the first shadow image, is because it mattered. He didn’t want us to make a mistake in identifying what it was. He didn’t want us to think that he gave us a dog and a dove, or a fox and an owl.’
Garcia thought about it for a heartbeat. ‘But it didn’t matter as much on the second one.’
‘Not as much,’ Hunter said. ‘The details of the second image are less important to its meaning. It probably doesn’t matter if the face with horns is human or not. That’s not what the killer wants us to see.’
‘So what does he want us to see?’
‘I don’t know . . . yet.’ Hunter looked out the window at all the police cars parked in front of Tito’s project building. ‘But I do think Ken Sands is smart enough to change his MO just to throw us off his scent.’
Seventy-One
As the day drew to a close, Nathan Littlewood sat at his desk, listening to the recording of his last patient’s session and jotting down some notes. His psychology practice was located in Silver Lake, just east of Hollywood and northwest of downtown LA.
Littlewood was fifty-two years old, five eleven in height, with classic good looks and a trim physique, kept that way by a good diet and three gym sessions a week. He was good at his job, very good in fact. His patients ranged from teenagers to over-sixties, singletons to married and live-in couples, and from everyday people to a few B-list celebrities. Every week tens of patients would pour their hearts and minds out to him.
His last patient of the day had left half an hour ago. Her name was Janet Stark, a 31-year-old actress who was having terrible problems with her live-in boyfriend. They’d been fighting a lot recently about the most mundane of things, and she was sure he was sleeping around behind her back. The problem was, she suspected he was sleeping around with another man.
Janet herself had slept around with plenty of women, and she still did. She wasn’t afraid to admit it, but in her view, female bisexualism was acceptable, male wasn’t.
She’d had six sessions with Littlewood so far. Two a week for the past three weeks, and the flirting had started almost immediately. After the first session, Janet had started dressing more provocatively – shorter skirts, low-cut blouses, mega-cleavage bras, sexy shoes, anything to grab his attention. Today she had turned up in a short summer dress, black, open-toed Christian Louboutin ankle boots, ‘I-desperately-want-you-now’ makeup, and no underwear. As she lay down on the couch, her dress hitched up over her thighs, and she positioned her legs in such a way that absolutely nothing was left to the imagination.
Littlewood loved women, and the sluttier and kinkier they were the better, but he knew better than to have affairs, or even flings, with patients. Things like that never stayed undercover. And in a city like Los Angeles, all that was needed was a flicker of a rumor for the crap to spread like wildfire. In LA, a good rumor had the power to destroy careers. Littlewood was smarter than that. He got his kicks elsewhere, and he paid good money for it.
Littlewood was divorced. He got married in his mid-twenties, but the whole thing lasted less than five years. The problems started pretty much straight after the ceremony. After four and a half years of arguments, discordances and great sexual frustration, their marriage fell into such deep depression that severe psychological damage was caused to both of them. Divorce was the only way out.
They’d had only one son, Harry, who was now studying Law in Las Vegas. After his marriage experience, and the lengthy and arduous divorce process, Littlewood promised himself he would never get married again. Since then, the thought of breaking that promise had not once crossed his mind.