They found nothing. No documents, no passport, no driver’s license. Not even any utility bills.
‘Anything that could give us any sort of lead, guys?’ Hunter asked one of the techs some time later.
‘Yeah, my guess is you’re looking for a cleaning freak,’ he said, bending down and sliding his index finger across the top of the skirting board before showing the result to Hunter. ‘Nothing, no dust. My wife is pretty tight on her housecleaning, but even she doesn’t dust the skirting boards every time she cleans. The only place with any dust is that freaky room you guys have been in. There’s a cupboard in the kitchen packed solid with cleaning materials. Enough bleach to fill a Jacuzzi. This guy is either obsessed with cleaning, or he was expecting us.’
The door to door of the building also produced no information of interest. Most residents said they’d never even seen the person who lived in apartment 418. The ones who did never talked to him. The next-door neighbor, a small, fragile man in his sixties with glasses as thick as bulletproof glass, said Smith always said hi to him whenever they bumped into each other on the corridor. He said Smith was always very polite. That sometimes Smith went out dressed in a suit. No one else in that building ever wore a suit. The old man also said that the walls in the building weren’t very thick. He could often hear Smith cleaning, vacuuming, scrubbing and moving around. He did that a lot.
The Forensics agents took shoes and underwear from Smith’s wardrobe, and a razor blade, a comb, a toothbrush and a deodorant spray can from his bathroom. They didn’t want to take any chances where a DNA signature was concerned.
Night had darkened the sky when Hunter received a call from Operations.
‘Detective Hunter? It’s Pam from Operations.’
‘What have you got for me, Pam?’
‘Well, next time you decide to go after someone, please can you pick a person with a more unique name. James is the most common first name in the United States. Smith is the most common last name in the United States. Put them together and we have approximately three and a half million males in the USA called James Smith.’
‘Great.’
‘In the LA area alone there are about five hundred of them. But the interesting thing is: none are registered to the Norwalk address you gave me.’
Thirty-Nine
Her eyelids flickered in rapid succession but she failed to open them. Her consciousness was returning to her like waves breaking over a beach. But each time her mind hinted at clearing, an undertow of blackness would pull her back into nothing.
The only thing she seemed to be certain of at that moment was the smell. Something like mothballs and strong disinfectant all rolled up into one. It felt as if the vile odor had traveled in through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach, burning everything in its way. Her guts felt like writhing snakes trying to climb out of her body.
Her eyes flickered again, this time for a little longer, and with great effort she managed to force them open. The light around her was dim and weak, but it still burned at her retinas like lightning bolts. Gradually, she began taking in her surroundings. She was lying on her back on some hard and uncomfortable surface, inside a hot and humid place. Old and rusty metal pipes ran across the ceiling in all directions, disappearing as they reached the mold-infested cinder block walls.
She tried lifting her head, but the movement sent waves of nausea rippling through her stomach.
Slowly, the numbness that controlled her body started to subside, and as it did, it was substituted by agonizing pain. Her lips felt as if they were being ripped from her face by several pairs of pliers at the same time. Her jaw hurt as if it had been broken. She tried opening her mouth, but the pain that rose from the effort almost sent her back into unconsciousness. Tears started streaming down her face as she urged her brain to work and tell her what to do. She tried moving her arms – surprisingly, no pain. More surprisingly, they weren’t restrained.
Shivering, she brought her hands to her face and touched her lips with the tips of her fingers. The shivering turned into uncontrollable convulsions of fear as she realized why she couldn’t move them.
Her mouth had been stitched shut.
Desperation took over.
Robotically and without any sense of reality, her trembling fingers tapped the stitches on her lips like a mad pianist. Her wailing and frantic muffled screams echoed throughout the room, but there was no one there to hear them. The thread used on her mouth dug deeper into her skin as she tried to move her lips again. She tasted blood.
Suddenly, as if a switch had been flicked on inside her head, she became aware of a much more intense and terrifying pain. It was coming from between her legs. It shot through her body with such ferocity it felt like evil had just climbed inside her.
Instinctively, her hands moved towards the source of the pain, and as they touched her body and the other stitches, she felt her strength leaving her.
Panic erupted inside her, and her body’s defense mechanism inundated her bloodstream with adrenalin, numbing the pain just enough for her to be able to move. Guided now by pure survival instinct, she forced herself to sit up.
Sound disappeared, time slowed, and the world turned black and white in front of her eyes. Only then did she realize she was naked and had been lying on some sort of stainless steel table. Strangely, the tabletop seemed higher off the ground than one would expect. At least another foot or so.
She looked down at her bare feet, and all of a sudden it dawned on her. Her legs were also unrestrained. Frantically her terrified eyes searched the room – large, square with a concrete floor and a metal door directly in front of her. The door didn’t seem to be locked. The walls were lined with empty wooden shelves.
Without wasting any more time or caring if this was a cruel trap or not, she jumped to the floor. The impact as her feet hit the ground sent a shudder up her spine. A millisecond later, the most unimaginable pain exploded inside her. Her legs lost all their strength and she fell to her knees, shivering. She looked down and all she saw was blood.
Forty
It was now three full days after Laura Mitchell’s body had been found and not much had materialized. James Smith, or whoever he really was, had simply vanished. The Forensics agents were right: all the fingerprints found in the apartment did come from a single person. They’d been running them against the National Automated Fingerprints ID System for several hours. So far no matches. It didn’t look like James Smith had ever been in the system.
The DNA result would still be at least another day or so. Whoever James Smith was, he was smart.
Choosing the most common American male name automatically hid him under layers upon layers of other people. Even if Hunter asked Operations to narrow the LA’s James Smith list down by filtering on age and approximate height, it’d still be too long. Besides, it was obvious that James Smith wasn’t his real name.
The apartment in Norwalk had been rented and paid in cash, a year in advance. Hunter talked to the landlord, a Mr. Richards. He was a retired shop owner and lived in Palmdale. He told Hunter that he’d only seen James Smith twice – first when he initially rented the property two years ago, and then again twelve months later when he renewed his lease agreement and paid the next full year in advance, plus extras – more than enough to cover all utility bills. So that was the reason they found no bills in the apartment.