‘And it couldn’t have been a different phone company?’ Garcia asked.

‘No,’ Woods replied. ‘No other supplier services this area.’ He closed his notepad. ‘It seems like you have got yourselves a mysterious telephone engineer.’

‘Marlon said that they were working on the telephone pole in front of property number eight-four-five-six,’ Hunter said, looking north.

‘That’s correct,’ Woods confirmed. ‘And that’s the one, right over there on the corner.’ He pointed at the T-shaped telephone pole directly in front of a white-fronted, single-storey house that sat right where Allenwood Road bent sharply left, about thirty yards north of where they were standing.

Hunter and Garcia walked over to have a better look. Officer Woods followed.

It was a regular-looking telephone pole, brown in color, and made of southern yellow pine. It stood somewhere between thirty-five and forty feet tall. A total of seven telephone cables ran through it – five at the very top, through the horizontal arm of the T, and the remaining two just a few feet beneath the first five, through the long, vertical arm.

Hunter and Garcia spent less than ten seconds looking up at the post before both of them came to the same conclusion.

To reach the first of the cables, an engineer would have to climb about thirty to thirty-five feet. No wonder the AT&T engineers used a basket-crane truck to get up there. On the other hand, a single engineer, even with a long telescopic ladder, would be facing a very tough and somewhat dangerous task.

Hunter walked around the pole, checking it from both sides.

‘Do those cables service this whole street?’ Garcia asked, still looking up at the pole.

‘I’m not sure,’ Woods replied. ‘But I would say so.’ He observed the two detectives for a moment.

‘Do you think it was him?’ Garcia asked his partner.

Hunter paused and looked north, where the road bent left and disappeared behind property 8456.

Garcia waited.

Hunter then looked south, in the direction of the Sloan and Bennett houses. If Marlon was at his bedroom window, Hunter wasn’t able to see him. The angle of the window in relation to the pole’s position, coupled with the way the light reflected off the glass, made it virtually impossible for anyone standing at the pole to see inside.

‘Yes,’ Hunter finally replied. ‘I think it was him.’

Garcia’s gaze moved to the telephone cables. ‘Do you think he bugged the phone lines?’

Hunter looked up at the pole one more time. ‘There’s no reason why he would’ve needed to do that,’ he replied. ‘If that’s what he wanted, then it would’ve been a lot easier, and less risky, to do it via the telephone exchange box.’

‘So if you think that this mysterious telephone engineer was your man,’ Woods said. ‘What was he doing up on the telephone pole?’

Hunter looked north again. Past the pole, the road bent sharply left and disappeared behind the house they were standing in front of, impeding his view. From where he was, he could see no other houses, which meant that no other houses could see him either. He then turned and looked south. From that point, he had a clear and unrestricted view of every house on Allenwood Road, including the Bennetts’.

Hunter finally answered Woods’ question with another question.

‘How difficult do you think it would be for someone to place some sort of camera up there?’

Forty

Night arrives slowly in the summertime, gently gaining ground like a silent soldier. First, lazy shadows find the alleyways, then they start creeping across sidewalks, up walls and through windows, until finally darkness takes hold. By the time Hunter and Garcia got to the coroner’s office, after receiving a phone call from Doctor Hove just half an hour earlier, darkness had stealthily found its way into almost every corner of Los Angeles, with the exception of a sliver of purple sky that still colored the horizon over Santa Monica, but that too was fading fast.

At the crime scene in Venice, besides the several bloody footprints retrieved from the carpet in the living room, forensics had also managed to collect a number of fibers, hairs and traces of dust. Everything had been bagged and taken back to the lab for further examination. Due to how careful they all knew this killer was, hopes weren’t high, but they weren’t dead yet either.

Sharon Barnard’s cabin crew suitcase had been left in the living room by the front door. Inside it they’d found a used change of clothes, a toiletries bag, a makeup bag, and a tablet computer, which was password protected. Her cellphone was found on the kitchen counter, its screen locked by a six-digit combination. Both electronic items had been passed to the LAPD Computer Forensics Unit.

Forensics had also discovered a large number of finger-prints all around the house, but just like the ones found on the front door and handle, an initial, naked-eye analysis by the forensics team expert told them that they probably came from only two sources, one of them almost certainly female. The natural conclusion was that the prints had probably come from Sharon Barnard herself and her housemate, Tom Hobbs. Due to the large number of fingerprints found, confirmation was only expected to come some time in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

Tom Hobbs was still in shock, and waves of anxiety, which were triggered by involuntary memory flashes, came and went throughout the day, throwing him into fits of tears and panic attacks. The LAPD had managed to get in contact with his parents, who came and took him with them back to Pomona Valley, but not before a medic was forced to sedate him. Hunter would try to interview him again tomorrow.

After identifying themselves to the receptionist sitting behind the counter at the LA County Coroner, Hunter and Garcia were told that Doctor Hove was waiting for them inside Autopsy Theater One, the same theater they were in the day before.

In silence, Hunter and Garcia navigated their way through the shiny corridors and double swinging doors until they reached the small anteroom leading to Autopsy Theater One. Hunter hit the buzzer by the electronic keypad to the right of the door. Five seconds later, the doors hissed open.

Despite knowing to expect it, the low temperature inside the autopsy room still made Garcia shiver as he stepped inside. It did every time.

‘Robert. Carlos.’ Doctor Hove greeted both detectives with a nod of her head. She wore a regular light-blue lab gown, with her nose mask hanging loosely around her neck. Her hair was pulled back and tied up in a bundle at the top of her head. She smiled, but there was no way of disguising the drained and exhausted look of someone who’d been working for hours on end under artificial light.

Sharon Barnard’s body was laid out, uncovered, on the stainless-steel examination table at the center of the room. The mess of muscle and flesh that her face had become had now taken on a brownish, dry-meat color. Her right eye, the one that had been spared by the handheld sander, had gone completely milky, and the rest of her skin now looked ghostly white.

Doctor Hove approached the instrument counter on the other side of the examination table. Hunter and Garcia were right behind her. She picked up two copies of the autopsy report and handed one to each detective.

‘Unfortunately,’ the doctor began, her voice sounding as tired as she looked, ‘this post mortem examination hasn’t revealed a great deal.’ She switched on the high-powered halogen lights above the autopsy table.