‘Did you really think that the food was poisoned, Squirm? What the fuck? Why? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. If I wanted to kill you, why would I poison the food? That’s no fun.’ The play left the man’s voice, replaced by a dead serious tone. ‘The fun comes from getting your hands dirty, Squirm. From feeling the warmth of blood against your skin. From punishing them. You in sync with their breathing as they’re dying, and you taking every breath with them. Until the very last one. Until they breathe no more.’ ‘The Monster’ laughed again. ‘You should’ve seen your face. Shocked and happy at the same time.’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry, Squirm. The only way you’ll get rid of me is if I get rid of you. Besides that, your worthless little life belongs to me.’

Squirm felt like he had fallen down the rabbit hole. That he had somehow transcended worlds.

‘No, you’re not hallucinating,’ the man replied.

Without noticing it, Squirm had asked the question out loud.

‘I know that you’re wondering what the hell is happening here. Why am I giving you my food without having touched it? Why haven’t I thrown it on the floor for you to eat it? Why am I being so . . .’ ‘The Monster’ searched the air for the word. ‘Nice.’ The man turned his palms toward him, folded his fingers in and checked his nails. ‘And trust me, this is the nicest I’ll ever be.’ He looked at the boy again. ‘You want to know why, don’t you?’

No reply. No movement.

‘Don’t you, Squirm?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘OK then.’ He tapped the tabletop twice with his right hand. ‘Sit down. Eat your food. And I’ll tell you.’

Fifty-Seven

The file that Detective Sanders handed Hunter opened with a black and white portrait photograph of a man who looked to be in his mid to late thirties. He was an interesting-looking man. His head was clean-shaven, his face round and unremarkable, with a small nose and thin lips, but his light-blue eyes carried an intensity in them that was almost hypnotic. They seemed to be full of intelligence and pain at the same time.

The first thought that came into Hunter’s mind as he studied the photograph was that whoever this man was, with the exception of his eyes he had the sort of simple, featureless face that would take to disguising like a cat to free food. The sort of face that would easily blend into a crowd and then disappear.

‘Detectives,’ Sanders finally said. ‘Meet Mathew Hade.’

‘OK, and who is he?’ Garcia asked.

‘Well, following Detective Hunter’s guidelines, I initialized a search against the national Missing Persons database for a list of cases where an abduction was perpetrated under similar circumstances to Nicole Wilson’s; for example, from inside a house, or where the abduction scene was relatively clean, and so on. I restricted the search to LA only, going back a maximum of twenty years.’ Sanders shook his head. ‘That gave me no results really worth looking into. I sent Robert an email telling him that the search hit a blank and he asked me to try it again, this time expanding the search to the whole of California. That gave me four different cases.’

Garcia finally moved his gaze from Hade’s picture back to Detective Sanders.

‘The scenes in those cases were nowhere near as clean as Ms. Wilson’s one,’ Sanders explained. ‘But they were interesting enough. The problem was, two out of the four perpetrators were dead, and the other two are serving life sentences with no possibility of parole. I emailed the results to Robert and he asked me to run one last search.’

‘In reality I was ready to give up,’ Hunter took over. ‘This was just a long shot, anyway. I was just throwing things up in the air, hoping for a sniff of a result.’

‘But the new search made sense,’ Sanders said, paused, then corrected himself. ‘Actually, it wasn’t a new search, it was the same search, but Robert figured out what we were doing wrong – we were searching only through closed MP investigations.’

If an investigation was tagged as ‘concluded’ by Missing Persons, it meant that the perpetrator/s had either been apprehended or shot dead. Of the ones apprehended, only a very small number, the least dangerous ones, the ones least likely to reoffend, would’ve made parole. The rest would still be inside. The very few who’d manage to break out of prison were again either shot dead or re-apprehended within days. If the search was only factoring investigations that had been concluded by Missing Persons, it was no wonder they were getting poor results.

‘So I take it that Mr. Mathew Hade over here is the result of that search,’ Garcia said, nodding at the photograph. ‘Or, at least, one of the results.’

‘He is indeed,’ Sanders confirmed it. ‘The case follows,’ he said, indicating the file.

As Hunter turned the page, Sanders began relating it.

‘In February two thousand and nine, while house-sitting for a friend, a twenty-one-year-old college student named Tracy Dillard went missing in Fresno. The friend had gone back to Arizona on her college break to visit her parents for a couple of weeks. Ms. Dillard was asked to housesit mainly so her friend’s cats would be properly fed in her absence. Until this day, Ms. Dillard has never been found.

‘Despite no signs of forced entry, the investigators concluded that she had actually been abducted from inside the house. There were no signs of a struggle either. Forensics found no fingerprints, but they did find a few fabric fibers that seemed to belong to some sort of coat. Unfortunately, the fibers were matched to a very common brand of workman’s jacket. At the time, you could pick one up at Wal-Mart for under fifty bucks. They also found a couple of male boot prints in the house’s backyard.’

Hunter and Garcia, who’d been following Sanders’ accounts on paper, flipped over the page.

‘The investigation led Fresno PD’s Missing Persons Unit to interview a number of “persons of interest”,’ Sanders continued. ‘Mathew Hade was one of them.’

‘How come?’ Garcia asked.

‘He was a sort of a jack-of-all-trades. A handyman. Extremely clever and adaptable. His IQ was up in the 130s. He was good at just about anything – plumbing, electronics, mechanics, carpentry, roofing, bricklaying, gardening, decorating . . . you name it. If it needed fixing, he could probably do it. He could also build you stuff, if that was the requirement, and apparently he did it all very well.’ There was a short pause. ‘He was also a trained locksmith.’

Sanders’ last few words got Hunter and Garcia’s attention.

‘On the week of Ms. Dillard’s disappearance, Mathew Hade had been doing some roofing work on the same road where she was housesitting, two houses away, actually. That same week, he was also seen out on the street, talking to Ms. Dillard on one or two occasions. He completed all the roofing work a day before she went missing. The boot prints found in the garden matched Hade’s shoe size, but the sole pattern didn’t match any of the shoes the police found in his house.’

‘What shoe size was he?’

‘Eleven,’ Sanders replied and made a face. ‘Yeah, I know, the most common male shoe size in the US.’

‘How about the jacket fibers?’ Garcia asked.

‘Mr. Hade told the police that he did have one of those exact jackets, but it was old and torn, so he had thrown it away a few days prior to his interview.’

‘Convenient,’ Garcia commented.

‘Was he ever arrested?’ Hunter asked.

‘No. Despite suspicions, police didn’t have enough to justify an arrest.’ Sanders regarded both detectives for a quick second. ‘I know what you’re thinking – so this Mathew Hade was a person of interest in a missing persons investigation in Fresno, so what, right?’