‘I know . . . I know . . .’ Tanya could do nothing but sob. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘You don’t need to be sorry. What you need to do is answer me. You have five seconds.’

‘No . . . ple- . . . please don’t do that.’

‘Five . . . four . . . three . . .’

Tanya sobbed as her fingers ferociously attacked her touchscreen. ‘I’ll get it. Just give me a moment. I’ll get it.’ Tears blurred her vision. Fear made her hands unsteady.

‘Two . . .’

‘Please . . . Don’t.’

‘One . . .’

In her panic, Tanya dropped her phone. It fell down on to her bed with the screen facing down.

‘Oh no, no, no.’

‘Time’s up.’

SLAM.

As she fumbled for her phone, Tanya heard the same crushing noise as before, only louder. She flipped the phone over just in time to see the gloved hand bring Karen’s head back up again.

Tanya froze.

Karen’s face was utterly unrecognizable. The new head-smash had caused several new shards of glass, big and small, to lodge themselves into her flesh, shredding her face into a horror mask. But what brought Tanya to a hair away from fainting was the new piece of glass that had punctured Karen’s left eye, eviscerating her ocular globe. A viscous substance had begun oozing from it, but the glass piece hadn’t traveled deep enough to reach her brain. Tanya could tell that Karen was still conscious.

‘Her number,’ the demon demanded yet again, but Tanya’s nerves had turned to mush. Her fingers were trembling uncontrollably. Her vision was blurred by a barrage of never-ending tears. Her breathing had become labored and erratic. She tried to speak but her voice got caught somewhere between her throat and her lips.

The countdown began again. Tanya didn’t even hear it get from five to one. All she heard was – ‘time’s up’ – then . . .

SLAM.

SLAM.

SLAM.

Three times in quick succession, each harder than the previous one. The last crunch noise was followed by a faint gasp from Karen.

The gloved hand brought Karen’s head back up, and everything went silent for a while. Her lips had been so severely sliced they were hanging off to one side awkwardly. Her nose had been slashed from the bottom up, rupturing most of its cartilage. Its tip was now held in place only by a thin piece of skin. Her right eye had now also been punctured. Blood seeped out of it in wide sheets. The three head slams had driven the piece of glass that had penetrated Karen’s left eye deeper into her eye socket.

Though Tanya felt faint, she found herself unable to look away, her eyes paralyzed by the grotesque images.

On the screen, Karen convulsed twice. With the second one, her head went completely limp. The gloved hand held it in place for another twenty seconds before finally letting go of her hair.

Her lifeless body slumped forward one final time.

‘I guess this game was exciting after all,’ the demon said. ‘And just look at what you’ve done, Tanya. You’ve killed your friend. Congratulations.’

‘Nooooooo!’ Tanya’s scream came out as an undecipherable shriek.

‘You can now go back to your pathetic life.’

The demon moved from behind the chair and reached for Karen’s smartphone to end the call, but as he grabbed it, the phone panned upwards just enough.

Tanya’s body went rigid.

For a second, she was given a glimpse of the demon’s face, and what she saw made vomit explode from her mouth.

Seven

Garcia’s gaze first moved to the pool of blood under the chair then to the sprinkles on the tabletop. He’d been so taken aback by the ferocity of the victim’s wounds that until then he had failed to notice that except from the ones projecting out of the victim’s face, there were no pieces of glass anywhere else.

‘That’s the exact same conclusion I came to,’ Dr. Slater agreed, as she joined Hunter behind the victim’s chair. ‘The way in which she’d been tied up, with the rope looping around the mid-section of her abdomen, would’ve easily allowed the perpetrator to grab her head and slam her face forward and downward.’ She pretended to grip the victim by the hair on the back of her head and simulated the movement. ‘The slam-down would’ve been fast and hard.’

Garcia walked around the table to the other side, his eyes still searching the floor. ‘So the speculation is that the killer placed some sort of container filled with glass pieces in front of her, maybe on the table, maybe on her lap, grabbed her by the hair and slammed her face into it?’

Sergeant Velasquez, who was still standing by the beaded curtain, grinded his teeth as he readjusted his weight, shifting from one foot to another.

‘As absurd and sadistic as that might sound, Detective,’ Dr. Slater replied, ‘that theory is right at the top of the list at the moment.’

‘Have you found this . . . container?’ Garcia asked.

‘No, not yet,’ the doctor admitted. ‘But I can certainly tell you where the glass came from.’

Eight

Hunter, Garcia and Sergeant Velasquez followed Dr. Slater through the short hallway that led deeper into apartment 305. The corridor offered three new doors – one on the left, one on the right, and one at the far end of it. She guided them into the door on the left.

The apartment’s only bathroom was of a comfortable size and tiled all in white. A beige ceramic bathtub hugged the south wall, with a showerhead directly above it on the right-hand side. A see-through shower curtain, which had been pushed to one side, dropped down from a metal rail. No explanation was needed. As soon as they entered the bathroom they immediately understood what Dr. Slater had meant when she’d said that she knew where the glass had come from. The entire south wall, spanning all the way from the ceiling down to the edge of the bathtub, was a huge wall-to-wall mirror. It had been completely smashed. Most of it was now gone. All that was left were a few shattered pieces still stuck to a couple of corners.

‘The supply was vast and plenty,’ the doctor said. ‘The killer didn’t have to look far.’

From the bathroom door, Hunter and Garcia regarded what was left of the mirror before stepping forward to have a look inside the bathtub. Nothing. It was completely clean. Not even minor splinters of mirrored glass had been left behind. The killer had either been very meticulous while collecting the pieces of broken mirror that had surely fallen into the bathtub, or had very carefully lined it with some sort of protective sheet.

Garcia took a step back and studied the rest of the bathroom. The washbasin was positioned to the right of the door, the toilet to the left. A six-shelf unit, which held a multitude of toiletry items and perfume bottles, sat between the bathtub and the toilet. A digital scale was propped against the unit. A pink bathrobe hung from the single hook behind the door.

‘Any guesses as to the time of death?’ Hunter asked.

‘The first signs of rigor mortis are just beginning to set in,’ Dr. Slater answered. ‘So I’d say more than two and a half hours ago, but less than four.’

Hunter consulted his timepiece – 2:42 a.m. ‘Has her cellphone been found?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Doctor Slater replied. ‘Inside the microwave, nuked to high heaven.’

‘How about a computer, or a laptop?’

‘Her laptop was found on the sofa in the living room. We’ll take it to IT forensics when we’re done here.’

Hunter acknowledged it, but he suspected that IT Forensics wouldn’t really find anything. Why would the killer destroy the victim’s phone, but leave her laptop intact? He walked over to the washbasin and pulled open the cupboard mirror above it. Inside it he found all the usual suspects – toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, Band-Aids, eye drops, and a couple of boxes of strong headache pills. There was also a full bottle of sleeping tablets. The trashcan to the left of the toilet was empty. With the exception of the broken wall mirror, nothing else inside the bathroom seemed to have been touched.