It was then that Hunter realized why the image of Holden’s eyes had come back to him so vividly back in his office – Hunter had never seen Nicholas Holden’s face in full. They had only met a few times, all of them at crime scenes. With a nose mask always covering the bottom half of his face and the hood of his Tyvek coverall always pulled tight over his head, all Hunter had ever seen of Holden’s face were his eyes.

By the time Holden realized what had happened, it was too late . . . for him at least.

With one giant step, Hunter was already over him. All it took was one well-placed hit to Holden’s left temple.

Lights out.

Ninety-Two

Twelve hours later

Police Administration Building

Hunter and Garcia were both at their desks, filling in paperwork, when Captain Blake stepped into their office.

‘OK,’ she said in a half surprised, half confused tone. ‘How did this happen? Somebody please explain it to me.’

Both detectives paused and looked back at her.

‘Yesterday when I left my office,’ the captain began. ‘We had two victims and nothing else. No clues, no links between victims, no suspects, nothing. Our press office was getting ready to release a short, but expertly bullshit-filled statement.’

Garcia curbed a smile.

‘Don’t you start,’ the captain said, pointing a finger at him.

‘I didn’t say anything.’ Garcia surrendered with his hands up.

‘That was yesterday,’ Captain Blake continued. ‘I get in here today and I find out that not only did we have a brand new victim overnight, but the whole case has been wrapped up. Done and dusted. The “video-call killer” is sitting in a goddamn cell downstairs. And, as I understand it, he was one of the forensic agents who had been working the scenes?’ Her eyebrows lifted as the palms of her hands flipped upwards. ‘How did we move from “nothing” to “done” in just a few hours? What the hell happened overnight?’

Garcia pointed at Hunter. ‘Robert happened, Captain. What else? I was still wrapping things up at the crime scene.’ The look he gave Hunter could silence a small crowd. ‘He didn’t even give me a courtesy call to let me know what was going on. And I’m his partner.’

‘I didn’t really know what was going on.’ Hunter’s gaze moved first to Garcia then to Captain Blake. He then proceeded to tell her how the events of last night had unfolded. He showed her the screenshot Erica Barnes had captured on her cellphone and the upside-down heart-shaped blood clot in the killer’s left eye. He told her how he was certain he had seen that same blood clot before, but he just couldn’t remember where, or in whose eyes, until he knocked a file from his desk on to the floor. As he picked up the scattered pieces of paper, his eyes settled on a fingerprint sheet.

Fingerprints . . . fingerprints . . . fingerprints.

That was when his brain finally engaged. Nicholas Holden was a forensic fingerprint expert.

Hunter told Captain Blake about pulling Holden’s file, finding out about the accident, then pulling the report from the LAPD Collision Investigation Unit.

‘So the blood clot in his left eye had been a consequence of the accident,’ Captain Blake said. ‘That’s why you didn’t see it in his file picture.’

‘That’s right,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘Scar tissue left from the trauma and hemorrhage in his eye. The photo in his file was taken a few years before that.’

‘So how long had he been a forensic agent for?’

‘Seven years. The accident happened three and a half years into his career. He spent about five months in hospital and almost a year in counseling therapy, before he asked to be allowed back into work.’

‘Seven years? And you’ve never met him before?’ The captain’s stare bounced between both detectives.

‘Just a couple of times, Captain,’ Garcia jumped in. ‘Always at crime scenes, always with his nose mask on and the hood of his Tyvek pulled over his head.’

‘How come only a couple of times?’

‘He used to be a lab technician,’ Hunter explained. ‘And a very good one at that, apparently. He was also very clever, because he played his cards just right. He spent a year and seven months gathering information on his victims. During that time, he stayed as a lab technician. When he finally decided that he was ready to put his plan into action, he requested to be transferred to the crime-scene field team. That was five months ago.’

‘Convenient,’ the captain commented.

Hunter then explained that when he read the conclusion reached by the Collision Investigation Unit – that the accident that had claimed Holden’s entire family had been caused because the driver of the other vehicle was using her cellphone to take a selfie – something clicked inside Hunter’s brain and he remembered the driving selfies he had seen in Tanya Kaitlin and John Jenkinson’s social media pages. He remembered them because he had seen them that same day.

He showed Captain Blake both pictures.

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ she said, things finally starting to connect for her.

‘That’s not all,’ Hunter said. ‘We got a third victim last night, remember?’ He loaded one last picture to his computer screen: another driving selfie – Erica Barnes and her sister, Dr. Gwen Barnes.

For a moment, Captain Blake was lost for words. Just like Hunter and Garcia, she didn’t subscribe to the ‘coincidence’ fan club.

‘So if you knew Nicholas Holden was your man,’ she said at last, ‘why didn’t you get a SWAT team to storm his place? Why didn’t you call Garcia? Why the hell did you go down there by yourself?’

Garcia looked at Hunter with the same crowd-silencing look from before. ‘Yes, why didn’t you call your partner?’

‘Because my whole theory was based on a memory, Captain. No matter how certain I believed I was, I had no real proof that Holden was the “video-call” killer. For that I needed confirmation that he really did have that same heart-shaped blood clot in his left eye, because that was the only real piece of evidence we had that could identify the killer.’

‘Ha,’ Garcia laughed. ‘Now tell her about your plan on how to get that confirmation.’

Captain Blake looked at Hunter questioningly.

‘I didn’t really have a plan,’ Hunter began. ‘I didn’t really know what to do, but I knew that I had come across all of this new mind-boggling information in the space of an hour. Information that had potentially given us the killer’s identity, and I didn’t want to sit on it until the morning to get confirmation.’

‘So he grabbed a fingerprint sheet from a case.’ Garcia took over. ‘Any case, it didn’t matter, and drove to Holden’s house.’

Captain Blake began to understand Garcia’s amusement. ‘Oh, please don’t tell me that your plan was to knock on his door with the excuse of asking him for his expert opinion on something . . . at around two in the morning.’

Garcia’s smile brightened. ‘Got it in one, Captain. That was his plan. Foolproof, don’t you think?’

The captain laughed.

‘OK, I agree, it was a crap plan,’ Hunter said. ‘But it somehow worked out in the end.’

He then told Captain Blake about everything that had happened from the time he got into Holden’s house, until the time he called it in.

‘Twelve people on the board?’ the captain asked, the amusement gone from her voice, her eyes full of shock.

‘The daunting thing is,’ Hunter said. ‘That was supposed to be just the beginning. He wasn’t going to stop after those twelve.’

Shock morphed into bewilderment. ‘What?’

‘Nicholas Holden’s mind is . . . broken,’ Hunter said. ‘The anger, the pain, the guilt, the never-ending heartache . . . it had all become way too much for him to take. It was destroying him from inside. The only way his mind could cope was by finding some sort of escape valve. A release from everything – the pain, the guilt, the anger. In his own words: something that could give his life a new purpose – a new meaning.’