Hunter nodded. ‘They weren’t picked at random, sir. There’s a reason why he chose them.’ It was Hunter’s turn to lift a hand to stop Chief Bracco before he could ask his next question. ‘And no, sir, at the moment we don’t know what that reason is, but we are doing all we can to find out.’

‘Any links between the victims?’

‘We don’t know yet, sir.’ Garcia was the one who replied this time. ‘We basically just got back from the crime scene and the coroner’s office, but we already have a team working on it. If there’s a link between them, I’m sure we’ll find it.’

‘How about the note and the photograph that were sent to Mayor Bailey?’

‘Clean,’ Garcia answered with a headshake. ‘No prints whatsoever. We’re still waiting on ink, paper and handwriting analyses.’

‘How about the package’s point of origin?’

Garcia quickly told him about the smoke bomb diversion at the FedEx drop box.

Chief Bracco ran his thumb and index finger over his mustache a couple of times.

‘So if I got this right,’ he said, facing both detectives, ‘in short you’re saying that the freak we’re after is careful, very patient, well organized, resourceful, and probably highly intelligent.’

Hunter agreed. ‘You wanted to know who this killer is, sir?’ His gaze paused on Captain Blake before returning to Chief Bracco.

‘This killer is your perfect predator.’

Forty-Two

It was coming up to 4:45 a.m. when Hunter finally got back to his one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a dilapidated building in Huntington Park, Southeast LA.

After leaving his office at around 9:00 p.m. the night before, Hunter had decided to drive around the city. He did that often enough. For some reason that not even he could explain, driving around at night through the streets of Los Angeles somehow calmed him. Helped him think.

As he left his office, he could tell that sleep, if it came at all, would’ve been restless and dotted by nightmares. In the morning, he would feel worse than if he’d stayed up all night, so he’d decided to stay up all night.

Hunter aimlessly drove around the streets of Central, East and South LA, then The Harbor and South Bay, before crossing the city all the way over to Santa Monica. The clock on his dashboard read 2:22 a.m. when he finally decided to park his car and go for a walk on the beach.

Hunter loved the beach, but unlike most, he preferred it at night.

He liked watching the sea at that time. The undisturbed sound of waves breaking against the sand, together with the quietness of the early hour, reminded him of his parents and of when he was a little kid.

His father used to work seventy-hour weeks, jumping between two awfully paid jobs. To help out, his mother would take any work that came her way – cleaning, ironing, washing, whatever she could find. Hunter couldn’t remember a weekend when his father wasn’t working, and even then they struggled to make ends meet. But despite their struggle, Hunter’s parents never complained. They played the cards they were dealt and, no matter how bad a hand they got, they always did it with a smile on their faces.

Every Sunday, after Hunter’s father got home from work, they used to go down to the beach. Most times they got there once everyone else had already left and the sun had already set. But Hunter didn’t mind. In fact, he preferred it. It was like the whole beach belonged to him and his parents. After Hunter’s mother passed away, his father never stopped taking him to the beach on Sundays. Sometimes, Hunter would catch his father wiping away tears as he watched the waves break.

As Hunter finally locked his car and made his way up to his apartment, he never noticed the black GMC Yukon hiding in the shadows around the corner from where he’d parked.

Sitting patiently in the driver’s seat, the man observed Hunter with a black look on his face.

Forty-Three

Without switching on any lights, and more out of habit than hunger, Hunter walked into the kitchen, pulled open the fridge door and glanced inside. As always, there wasn’t much choice – a couple of pieces of fruit, a carton of milk, a can of some cheap energy drink that he was sure one day would punch a hole in his stomach and a half-full pack of chili-flavored beef jerky. He loved those things, and even though it made them tougher and chewier, he preferred to have them cold.

He stared at the items inside his fridge for a long minute, but reached for none. Despite having had almost no food since that morning, unsurprisingly, Hunter’s appetite was non-existent.

The images of Nicole Wilson’s beaten body, together with the ones of Sharon Barnard’s totally disfigured face, seemed to have etched themselves on to the inside of his eyelids. Every time he closed his eyes, there they were – one, raped and tortured to death, the other, just an incomprehensible mess of ripped skin, torn flesh and blood. Both made to suffer the unimaginable, at the hands of a true monster.

Hunter closed the fridge door, bringing the kitchen and the apartment back to darkness, but didn’t move. Instead, he used his right hand to massage the stiff muscles at the back of his neck and shoulders. The tips of his fingers came into contact with the jagged, ugly scar on his nape and he paused, feeling the leathery, lumpy skin. A simple reminder of how close to death his job had taken him, and of how resolute and lethal the mind of an evil murderer can be. As memories began to poke at his brain, he let go of his neck and shook his head, banishing them back to the darkest corners of his mind. A place he did his best never to visit.

In the bathroom, despite the warm night, Hunter leaned back against the tiled wall and welcomed the powerful, hot shower jet that almost burned his skin. The discomfort caused by the heat was balanced out by how much it helped his tensed muscles to relax. By the time he shut off the water, his tanned skin had gone a light shade of red and the tips of his fingers looked like old prunes.

Back in the living room, wrapped in a white towel, Hunter switched on a floor lamp and dimmed its intensity to ‘medium’. That done, he approached his drinks cabinet, which was small but held an impressive collection of single malt Scotch whisky, which was probably his biggest passion. Though he had overdone it a few times, Hunter sure knew how to appreciate the flavor and quality of a good single malt, instead of simply getting drunk on it.

His eyes scanned from bottle to bottle. One thing that he knew for certain was that he needed something strong, but at the same time comforting and soothing. He didn’t have to search long. His decision was made as soon as his eyes grazed over the eighteen-year-old bottle of Auchentoshan.

‘This should do nicely,’ Hunter said, reaching for it.

He poured himself a double dose, added about a fifth of water and dumped himself on the black leatherette sofa, which faced a TV set that hadn’t been turned on in over six months. In fact, since the Super Bowl game back in February.

He sipped his drink, letting the robust and spicy taste of the Scotch, which had hints of woody almonds, brown sugar and vanilla, engulf his taste buds for a moment.