‘Ambulance should be here in five minutes or less,’ Anna announced, her voice a little shaky.

‘OK, I’m going to need your help,’ the doctor said, addressing Garcia. ‘We need to continue with CPR until the ambulance gets here.’

Garcia nodded.

‘You carry on with the chest compressions, while I’ll give him artificial respiration. Aim for a rate of around a hundred compressions a minute. I’ll count you on. Give me ten now before I start.’

Garcia started pressing down firmly and rhythmically, and with each press his memory spat out a new random image from the Internet victims as they died before his eyes.

‘. . . and ten,’ the doctor said, snapping Garcia out of his horror trance. He pinched the man’s nostrils shut with two fingers to prevent air leakage, took a deep breath and sealed his mouth over the man’s mouth, before breathing into it for about two seconds. His eyes were fixed on the man’s chest, which rose slightly, indicating enough air was being blown in. He repeated the procedure twice.

The man still wasn’t breathing on his own.

‘I need thirty compressions this time,’ the doctor said.

Sirens were heard in the distance.

‘They’re about two and a half minutes away,’ Garcia said, pumping the man’s chest again.

The doctor looked at him curiously.

‘I’m a cop, I can tell.’

When Garcia reached thirty chest compressions, the doctor performed two more artificial respirations.

Still no self-sufficient breathing from the man.

They repeated the process two more times before they heard a loud commotion as the ambulance drove onto the grass and around some trees to reach them.

‘We’ll take it from here,’ a paramedic said, kneeling down by the man’s head.

Garcia let go of the man’s chest. His hands were shaking, and despite being a naturally calm person he was visibly distressed.

‘You did well,’ the doctor said. ‘We did all we could, and everything possible given the circumstances. No one could’ve done any better.’

Garcia kept his gaze on the man as the paramedics took over, strapping a resuscitator mask onto his face.

‘We need to shock him,’ one of the paramedics said. ‘We’re losing him.’

Tears welled up in Anna’s eyes. ‘Oh God.’

Garcia hugged her, while the paramedics brought out a portable defibrillator.

‘Clear,’ a paramedic called out, before delivering a controlled, two-hundred-joule electric shock to the man’s chest.

Nothing.

The paramedic increased the energy to three hundred joules and delivered a new shock.

Still nothing.

Three hundred and sixty joules.

No movement from the man.

Both paramedics looked at each other. There was nothing else they could do. Everyone’s efforts had been in vain.

Anna buried her face into Garcia’s chest and began crying, while Garcia struggled with the enormous guilt that took over him.

Thirty-Seven

‘Everything OK?’ Hunter asked Garcia as soon as he got to his office the next morning, immediately picking up that something was bothering his partner.

Garcia told him about what had happened in the park the day before.

‘I’m sorry Anna had to see that,’ Hunter said.

‘It’s like death has been following me around lately,’ Garcia replied. ‘And there’s nothing I can do to help any of these people.’

‘From what you told me, you did all you could yesterday, Carlos. And you know that we are doing all we can in this investigation.’ Hunter leaned against the edge of his desk. ‘That’s exactly what this killer wants. If we allow frustration to get the better of us, that’s when we start making mistakes and not seeing things.’

Garcia took a deep breath and nodded. ‘Yeah, I know. I’m just still a little rattled about the whole thing yesterday. I thought I could save him, I really did. And I wished Anna hadn’t seen him die.’ He stood up and looked around himself as if searching for something.

‘I’m going to go to the machine downstairs,’ he said, checking how much change he had in his pocket. ‘I need some sort of energy drink. Would you like one?’

Hunter shook his head. ‘I’m OK.’

Garcia nodded back, returned his change to his pocket and exited the office.

Twenty minutes later Hunter and Garcia received two reports. The first was a trace on all calls made to and from Kevin Lee Parker’s cellphone in the past two weeks. There was nothing out of the ordinary there. All the calls made or received had either been to or from his wife, or to or from Emilio. As Emilio had said, it didn’t look like Kevin had much of a social life.

The second report was on possible meanings for SSV, the three letters that had appeared in the top left-hand corner of the screen during the second broadcast. It was divided into five categories: Information Technology (twenty-six entries), Military and Government (twenty-two entries), Science and Medicine (thirty-two entries), Organizations, Schools and Others (twenty-four entries), Business and Finance (eighteen entries).

They spent a long while going over everything.

‘Any of this mean anything to you?’ Garcia finally asked.

Hunter slowly shook his head while reading the entire list of abbreviations for the zillionth time. Not a single one seemed to have any relevance to their case.

‘Symphony Silicon Valley, Society for the Suppression of Vice?’ Garcia frowned as he read the two first entries from the Organizations, Schools and Others category. He flipped the page and looked at the Military and Government entries. ‘Soldier Survivability, Space Shuttle Vehicle? This is totally nuts.’

An observation at the end of the report stated that no meanings had been found for SSV678 or 678SSV. They had tried everything, even entering the numbers as map coordinates. 6,78 had returned a spot southwest of Sri Lanka, in the Laccadive Sea. 67,8 had also hit water, several miles west of Norway in the Norwegian Sea.

Hunter put the report down and rubbed his eyes. So far, nothing was making sense. Just like Michelle Kelly had said, everything came back a dead end. Missing Persons still hadn’t found a match for the woman either.

Hunter’s stare wandered over to the pictures board and settled on the printout of a snapshot taken during the early stages of the broadcast. The woman’s fate hadn’t been decided by then. She was just lying inside that glass coffin, petrified, confused and praying for a miracle. Her face still showed hope. On the printout, BURIED was at 325 and EATEN at 388.

Garcia had finally abandoned the acronyms report and placed it back on his desk when his phone rang.

‘Detective Garcia, Homicide Special,’ he answered.

‘Detective, it’s Emilio Mendoza.’ A short pause. ‘The woman on that picture you gave me . . . I know where I saw her before. I’m looking at her now.’

Thirty-Eight

Michelle Kelly and Harry Mills had gone over every step of their sting operation plan to catch ‘Bobby’, the Internet pedophile, a hundred times. Still, they knew that there were a million chances that something could go wrong. They just prayed that nothing did.

Michelle was also very keen to bring this FBI investigation to an end. The two Internet murders were now beginning to haunt her every moment. The killer’s arrogance more than bothered her. She wanted to move all her efforts onto the LAPD case.

‘Lucy’, the young schoolgirl Michelle had pretended to be over the Internet, was sitting on a bench in Venice Beach facing the skate park when ‘Bobby’ came up behind her.