He paused and thought of something, quickly flipping through every single LP in the box. Faith No More’s album The Real Thing, which contained the song the killer had left playing inside Nashorn’s boat, wasn’t there.
Hunter returned to the wardrobe and retrieved another box. This one was packed full of photographs – very old ones. He grabbed a handful and started leafing through them. A new smile split his lips. Nathan Littlewood looked desperately young – late-teens maybe, several pounds lighter, with back-combed hair that went just past his shoulders. He looked like a garage-rock-band reject.
Hunter reached deeper into the box and grabbed another bunch of photographs. This time he came up with a group of wedding pictures. Littlewood was wearing an elegant dark suit, and in every photo he looked genuinely happy. The bride was about three inches shorter than he was, with eyes that made you want to stop and just stare at them for a while. She looked stunning in her wedding dress. She too seemed ecstatic.
The next bunch of photographs Hunter came up with weren’t wedding ones, though Littlewood looked just as young. Hunter had flipped through several of them when something grabbed his attention.
‘Wait a second.’ He brought the picture about half a foot from his face and squinted at it, concentrating hard, his memory racing like a computer, searching through all the images he’d seen in the past two weeks. As he finally made the connection, a rush of adrenalin found its way to every corner of his body.
Eighty-Eight
Thunder ruptured the sky one more time, making Alice jump in her seat. She didn’t like rain, and she hated tropical thunderstorms.
‘Jesus Christ.’
She clasped her hands together, brought them up to her mouth and started blowing into her thumbs as if they were a whistle. She always did that when she got scared. Something she’d started doing when she was a little girl.
Alice had spent the whole afternoon in Hunter’s office, frantically querying databases and unlocking backdoors to restricted online systems, searching for some sort of connection between the three victims. She still hadn’t found anything yet. Nor had she had any luck linking Littlewood to Ken Sands. But she’d been doing this type of work for a long time. She knew that just because she hadn’t found a connection yet, didn’t mean it didn’t exist.
Another bolt of lightning snaked through the sky and Alice shut her eyes tight, holding her breath. Lightning didn’t scare her, but she knew that after lightning there was thunder, and thunder petrified her.
The rumble of thunder followed a heartbeat later, and this one sounded reluctant to go, stretching for several seconds. There was nothing Alice could do to avoid the memories. Her eyes filled with tears.
When she was eleven years old, while visiting her grandparents in Oregon, Alice got caught in an enormous thunderstorm.
Her grandparents lived in a farmhouse near Cottage Grove. The entire place was gorgeous, just one huge national-park-like area full of woodlands, lakes and tranquility. Alice loved playing outside. She loved helping her grandpa when he was working with the animals, especially when he was milking the cows, collecting eggs from the henhouse, or feeding the pigs. But what she loved doing more than anything else when she was at her grandparents’ house was playing with Nosey, her grandma’s 3-year-old, black-and-white beagle. Most of her time in Oregon was spent holding, cuddling or running outside with Nosey.
This particular day in June, her parents, together with her grandpa, had driven to town to get a few supplies. Alice stayed at the house with her grandma. While Grandma Gellar was getting things ready for dinner, Alice and Nosey went outside to play. They both loved playing near the bushy trees, as Alice always called the distinct group of elms just down the hill from the house. Though her parents had told her many times never to go play there alone, Alice, being the stubborn little girl she was, never took much notice of their advice.
Alice had no idea how long she’d been running around the trees with Nosey, but it must’ve been a while, because the sky had darkened down to pitch-black with tiny patches of deep blue peeping through. Alice didn’t even notice the strong smell of wet soil that had slowly crept up on them.
The first bolt of lightning that colored the sky froze Alice to the spot. Only then did she notice the dreadful wind that had started blowing, and how cold it had suddenly got. When thunder exploded above her head, shaking the ground, Alice started crying and Nosey went nuts, barking like a crazy dog, and running around in all directions like he’d been blindfolded.
Alice didn’t know what else to do other than cry and curl up under the first tree she saw. She kept calling Nosey to come to her, but he just wasn’t listening. As he rushed from tree to tree, a new bolt of lightning came down like an evil hammer. Its target – the large metal plate on Nosey’s collar. Alice had her eyes wide open, her right arm extended, calling the little dog to come to her, but he didn’t have a chance. The lightning bolt grabbed hold of Nosey and held him for what seemed like an eternity. The little dog was propelled up in the air like a bouncing ping-pong ball. When he hit the ground again, Nosey wasn’t moving anymore. His eyes had gone milky white, and his tongue, hanging lifelessly from his mouth, tar black. Despite the heavy rain, Alice could see smoke lifting from Nosey’s body.
It took almost a year for the nightmares to subside; to this very day, Alice was absolutely petrified of thunderstorms. Even camera flashes made her feel uncomfortable. They reminded her of lightning.
Tropical thunderstorms in Los Angeles don’t usually last more than forty-five minutes to an hour, but this one was approaching an hour and a half, and it was showing no signs of easing.
Alice had a lot of work to do, but there was no way she could sit at the computer right now, her fingers just wouldn’t move. Instead, she decided to try and look through her paperwork. The itemized cellphone bills that the forensics team had found in Nathan Littlewood’s office had arrived a few hours earlier. They were the first thing she saw on her desk.
She had spent about ten minutes identifying Littlewood’s most-dialed numbers, when she noticed something that made her forget the storm outside.
‘Wait just a moment,’ she said to herself and started rummaging through the pile of documents on her desk. When she found the one she was looking for, Alice flipped through the pages, scanning every line.
There it was.
Eighty-Nine
The rain had finally stopped about an hour ago. The clouds had scattered away, but the sky remained dark as night took over.
There were too many photographs inside that cardboard box for Hunter to be able to thoroughly go through all of them while in Nathan Littlewood’s apartment. One photo had already gotten his heart racing with suspicion. He needed to get back to his office, and the box of photographs was going with him.
Before leaving Littlewood’s apartment, Hunter checked the other two cardboard boxes inside the guestroom’s wardrobe; they contained several old bits and pieces of Littlewood’s past, but nothing that Hunter thought relevant.
Garcia was sitting at his desk when Hunter walked back into his office. Alice was nowhere to be seen.
‘Everything OK?’ Hunter asked, noticing the aura of tiredness around his partner.
Garcia puffed his cheeks up with air before slowly letting it out. ‘I got a call from Detective Corbí from South Bureau.’
‘The detective in charge of Tito’s murder investigation?’