Seven
Everyone had already left by the time Garcia dropped Hunter back to his car. Crime-scene tape still marked the perimeter around the butcher’s shop. A sole uniformed cop guarded the entrance.
Garcia knew Hunter would take his time, looking at every possible detail inside the shop.
‘I’m gonna head back and see what I can do with the crime-scene photos and the Missing Persons database. As you said, our priority is in identifying who she was.’
Hunter nodded and stepped out of the car.
The foul smell seemed to have intensified threefold as Hunter flashed his badge at the officer and entered the shop for the second time that evening.
As the door shut behind him, Hunter was left in pitch-black darkness. He clicked his flashlight on and felt a surge of adrenalin rush through his body. Every step was accompanied by the crunching of glass or the squelching sound of something moist under his feet. He moved on past the old meat display counter and approached the door at the back. As he got closer, Hunter heard the buzzing of flies.
This new room was spacious and linked the front of the store to the small freezer-room at the back. Hunter paused by the door, struggling with the putrid stench. His stomach was begging him to leave, threatening to erupt at any moment and causing him to gag and cough violently a few times. His surgical mask was having little effect.
He slowly allowed the beam of his flashlight to move around the room. Two oversized metal sinks sat against the far wall. To their right was an empty floor-to-ceiling storage module. Rats moved freely on its shelves.
Hunter screwed up his face.
‘There had to be rats,’ he cursed under his breath. He hated rats.
In an instant his mind took him back to when he was eight years old.
On his way back from school, two older kids stopped him and took his Batman lunchbox from him. The lunch-box had been a birthday present from his mother a year earlier, just months before cancer robbed him of her. It was his most prized possession.
After taunting Hunter for a while by throwing the lunch-box back and forth to each other, the two bullies kicked it down an open manhole.
‘Go get it, deaf boy.’
Hunter’s mother’s death was devastating for him and his father, and coping with its aftermath proved particularly difficult. For several weeks, as her disease progressed, Hunter sat alone in his room, listening to her desperate cries, feeling her pain as if it was his own. When she finally passed away, Hunter started experiencing severe loss of hearing. It was his body’s psychosomatic way of shutting off the grief. His temporary deafness made Hunter an even easier target to the bullies. To escape being cast aside even more, he’d learned to lip-read by himself. Within two years, with the same ease that it had gone away, his hearing came back.
‘You better go get it, deaf boy,’ the bigger of the two bullies repeated.
Hunter didn’t even hesitate, hurrying down the metal ladder as if his life depended on it. That was exactly what the bullies wanted him to do. They pushed the lid back over the manhole and walked away, laughing.
Hunter found the lunchbox down at the bottom and made his way back up the ladder, but no matter how hard he tried, he just didn’t have the physical strength to push the lid aside. Instead of panicking, he went back down to the sewage passageways. If he couldn’t get out the same way he went in, he’d simply have to find another way out.
In semi-darkness, clenching his lunchbox tight to his chest, he started down the tunnel. He’d traveled only about fifty yards through filthy, stinking sewage water when he felt something drop from the ceiling onto his back and tug at his shirt. Reflexively, he reached for it, grabbed it and threw it as far away from him as he could. As it hit the water behind him, it squeaked, and Hunter finally saw what it was.
A rat as big as his lunchbox.
Hunter held his breath and slowly turned to face the wall to his right. It was alive with rats of every shape and size.
He started shivering.
Very carefully, he turned around and faced the wall to his left. Even more rats. And he could swear all their eyes were locked on him.
Hunter didn’t think, he simply ran as fast as he could, splashing water high in the air with every step. A hundred and fifty yards ahead he came to a metal ladder that led him to another manhole. Again, the lid would not budge. He returned to the passageway and carried on running. Another two hundred yards, another manhole, and Hunter finally hit a little luck. At the top, the lid was half on, half off. With his skinny body, he had no problem squeezing through the gap.
Hunter still had the Batman lunchbox his mother had given him. And ever since then, rats had made him very uneasy.
Now, Hunter pushed the memory away, bringing his attention back to the butcher’s shop back room. The only other piece of furniture in it was the stainless steel counter where the victim’s naked body had been laid out. It was positioned about six feet from the open freezer-room door on the back wall. Hunter studied the counter from a distance for a long while. There was something odd about it. It was way too high off the ground. When he checked the floor, he found that bricks had been placed under each of its four legs, elevating the counter another foot to foot and a half.
Just like the crime-scene photos showed, the floor was littered with dirty rags, used condoms and discarded syringes. Hunter moved inside, taking short steps, carefully checking the floor before each one. The temperature in the room seemed to be at least five degrees higher than outside, and he felt sweat trickling down the small of his back. As he approached the stainless steel counter, the buzzing noise coming from the flies got louder.
Despite the flies, the nauseating smell and the melting heat, Hunter took his time. He knew the Forensics team had done the best job they could, but crime scenes could offer a lot more than simple physical evidence. And Hunter had a gift when it came to understanding them.
He carefully circled the metal counter for the fifth time. The main question swimming around in his mind was whether the victim had died in that room, or whether the butcher’s shop had been nothing more than a simple dumping ground.
Hunter decided to take the victim’s place.
He hopped onto the metal counter before lying down in the exact position the victim had been found and switching off his flashlight. He kept absolutely still, allowing the sounds, the smell, the heat, and the darkness of the room to envelop him. His shirt was clinging to his body, wet with sweat. From the photographs, he remembered the look in her eyes, the horror expression frozen on her face.
He switched on his flashlight but remained in the same position, his eyes taking in the graffiti that adorned the entire ceiling.
A moment later, something caught his eye. He squinted and sat up. His gaze locked onto the ceiling directly above the metal counter. The realization came in three seconds flat and his eyes widened.
‘Oh Jesus!’