Hunter took a few seconds to look around the room before his eyes rested on a window on the south wall. ‘How about tire tracks on the outside? There looks to be no other way of getting to this place except for that narrow lane. The killer must’ve driven up here.’

Captain Bolter nodded slightly. ‘You’re right. That lane is the only access to this house and all the police and forensic units have driven up and down it. If we had anything, it’s been covered up. And I’ll be having some asses for this.’

‘Great!’

The room fell silent. They’d all seen it before. A victim that had no chance against a deranged opponent – a blank canvas painted with the striking colors of death – but this seemed different, it felt different.

‘I don’t like this,’ Hunter broke the silence. ‘I don’t like this at all. This isn’t your regular spur of the moment homicide. This was planned and for a fucking long time too. Just imagine the kind of patience and determination it takes to pull something like this off.’ Hunter rubbed at his nose. The stench of death now getting to him.

‘A crime of passion perhaps? Maybe someone just wanted revenge over a broken affair,’ Garcia offered a new opinion.

‘This is no crime of passion,’ Hunter said with a shake of the head. ‘No one that’d been in love with her would be able to do something like this. No matter how hurt he was, unless she was dating Satan himself. Just look at her, this is simply grotesque and that worries me. This ain’t going to end here.’

Hunter’s words sent a new chill into the room. The last thing the city of Los Angeles needed was another psychopath killer on the loose, someone wanting to be the next Jack the Ripper.

‘Hunter’s right, this isn’t a crime of passion. This killer has done this before,’ Captain Bolter said finally, moving away from the window. His statement stopped everyone in their tracks.

‘Do you know something we don’t?’ Garcia asked the question on everyone’s lips.

‘Not for long. There is one more thing I want you to see before I let the forensic boys in here.’

Hunter had been intrigued by that since his arrival. Usually the forensic team checks the scene before the detectives are allowed to walk all over the evidence, but today the captain wanted Hunter in there first. Captain Bolter rarely broke protocol.

‘On the back of her neck, have a look,’ he said tilting his head towards the body.

Hunter and Garcia exchanged a concerned look before approaching the dead woman once again.

‘Give me something to lift her hair up with,’ Hunter called to anyone in the room. Doctor Winston handed him a metal retractable pointer.

As his flashlight illuminated her now exposed neck Hunter’s mind went into a whirlwind of confusion. He stared at it in disbelief – the color drained from his face.

Garcia didn’t have a clear view from where he was standing, but what disturbed him was the look in Hunter’s eyes. Whatever Hunter was staring at, it had scared him soundless.

Despite being thirty-nine years old, Robert Hunter’s youthful-looking face and impressive physique made him look like a man who’d just hit thirty. Always dressed in jeans, T-shirt and a beat-up leather jacket, Hunter was six foot with squared shoulders, high cheekbones and short blondish hair. He possessed a deliberate controlled strength that came across in every movement he made, but it was his eyes that were most striking. An intense pale blue that suggested intelligence and an unflinching resolve.

Hunter grew up as an only child to working-class parents in Compton, an underprivileged neighborhood of South Los Angeles. His mother lost her battle with cancer when he was only seven. His father never remarried and had to take on two jobs to cope with the demands of raising a child on his own.

From a very early age it was obvious to everyone that Hunter was different. He could figure things out faster than most. School bored and frustrated him. He’d finished all of his sixth-grade work in less than two months and just for something to do he’d sped through seventh-, eighth- and even ninth-grade books. Mr Fratelli, the school principal, was amazed by the child prodigy and arranged an appointment at the Mirman School for the Gifted in Mulholland Drive, North West Los Angeles. Doctor Tilby, Mirman’s psychologist, ran him through a battery of tests and Hunter was pronounced ‘off the scale.’ A week later, he’d transferred to Mirman as an eighth-grader. He was only twelve.

By the age of fourteen he’d glided through Mirman’s high-school English, History, Biology and Chemistry curriculum. Four years of high school were condensed into two and at fifteen he’d graduated with honors. With recommendations from all of his teachers, Hunter was accepted as a ‘special circumstances’ student at Stanford University. The top psychology university in America at the time.

In spite of Hunter’s good looks, the combination of being too thin, too young and having a strange dress sense made him unpopular with girls and an easy target for bullies. He didn’t have the body or the aptitude for sports and preferred to spend his free time in the library. He read – chewed up books with incredible speed. He became fascinated with the world of criminology and the thought process of individuals dubbed ‘evil’. Maintaining a 4.0 Grade Point Average during his university years had been a walk in the park, but he soon grew tired of the bullying and of being called ‘tooth-pick boy’. He decided to join a weights gym and started taking martial art classes. To his surprise, he enjoyed the physical pain of the workouts. He became obsessed with it and within a year the effects of such heavy training were clearly visible. His body had bulked up impressively. ‘Tooth-pick boy’ became ‘fit boy’ and it took him a little less than two years to receive his black belt in karate. The bullying stopped and all of a sudden girls couldn’t get enough of him.

By the age of nineteen Hunter had already graduated in Psychology and at twenty-three he received his PhD in Criminal Behavior Analysis and Biopsychology. His thesis paper titled ‘An Advanced Psychological Study in Criminal Conduct’ had been made into a book and it was now mandatory reading at the FBI National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC).

Life was good, but two weeks after receiving his PhD Hunter’s world was turned upside down. For the past three and a half years his father had been working as a security guard for the Bank of America branch in Avalon Boulevard. A robbery gone wrong turned into a Wild West gun-fight and Hunter’s father took a bullet to the chest. He fought for twelve weeks in a coma. Hunter never left his side.

Those twelve weeks sitting in silence, watching his father slip away little by little each day transformed Hunter. He could think of nothing else but revenge. That’s when the insomnia started. When the police told him that they had no suspect, Hunter knew they’d never catch his father’s killer. He felt utterly helpless and the feeling disgusted him. After the burial, he made a decision. He wouldn’t only study the minds of criminals anymore. He’d go after them himself.

After joining the police force, he quickly made a name for himself and moved through the police ranks at lightning speed making detective for the LAPD at the early age of twenty-six. He was soon recruited by the Robbery-Homicide Division, being paired up with a more senior detective – Scott Wilson. They were part of the Homicide Special 1 Division, dealing with serial killers, high-profile and other homicide cases requiring extensive time.

Wilson was thirty-nine at the time. His six-foot-two build was complimented by three hundred pounds of muscle and fat. His most distinctive feature was a shining scar that graced the left side of his shaved head. His menacing look had always played in his favor. No one would mess with a detective that looked like a pissed-off Shrek.