He quickly placed it in front of him on his desk, readjusted his glasses on his nose and pressed play. Several silent seconds went by. Then a low-pitched white noise oozed out of the tiny speaker. It lasted a few seconds.
‘Static?’
‘That’s what it sounds like at first, doesn’t it?’ Myers replied. ‘But listen again — like you mean it this time.’
Cohen reached for the voice recorder, rewound it, brought it close to his right ear, and listened carefully to it one more time — very attentively this time.
His blood ran cold.
‘What the fuck?’
Covered up by the static-like sound there was something else, something that sounded like a whisper. Cohen listened to it a couple more times. There was no denying it; the undecipherable murmur was definitely there.
‘Is somebody saying something or just trying to catch his breath?’
‘Not a clue.’ Myers shrugged. ‘I did exactly what you just did. Listened to it over and over again. I’m still none the wiser. But I’ll tell you something. If the intention of whoever left that message was to scare Katia, that would’ve done it. It sounds like a poltergeist ready to come through the phone. It freaked the hell out of me.’
‘You think this could be the abductor’s voice?’
‘Either that or someone with a very sick sense of humor.’
‘I’ll get this to Gus at the studio.’ Cohen jiggled the voice recorder in his hand. ‘If we transfer this into his voice analyzing program, we could clean it up and slow it down. I’m sure we’ll decipher whatever it is that he’s saying. If he
‘Great, do it.’
‘Does her father know about this?’ Cohen knew that Myers was in constant contact with Leonid Kudrov, but with nothing of significance to report back, it was fast getting frustrating.
‘Not yet. I’ll wait and see if Gus can make something out of it before giving Mr. Kudrov another call.’ Myers ran her hand through her hair. ‘Now are you ready for the next twist?’
Cohen’s eyes shot in Myers direction. ‘There’s more?’
‘When I was listening to the messages, for no specific reason, I kept looking at the clock in Katia’s kitchen.’
‘OK.’
‘Suddenly, I realized that there was a common factor that linked all of those messages.’
‘What factor?’
‘A time signature.’
‘A what?’
‘I know it sounds crazy, but I went over every message twice. It took me a while.’ She moved to the front of her desk and leaned back against its edge. ‘They’re all twelve seconds long.’
Cohen’s eyes narrowed. ‘Twelve seconds? All sixty of them?’
‘Precisely. Not a second more, not a second less. Even the last message with the noise and the creepy murmur — twelve seconds exactly.’
‘And that’s not a fault with the machine?’
‘Nope.’
‘Did anyone set the message recording time to only twelve seconds?’
Myers looked at Cohen inquisitively. ‘I didn’t even know you could do that.’
‘I’m not sure you can, but I’m just trying to cover all angles.’
‘Even if that’s possible, who’d set a message recording time to only twelve seconds?’
Cohen had to agree. ‘OK,’ he said as his stare returned to the voice recorder. ‘Now that’s officially messed up, and I’m officially intrigued. There’s gotta be a meaning to it. No fucking way the twelve seconds thing is a coincidence.’
‘No fucking way,’ Myers agreed. ‘Now we’re just going to have to find out what it means.’
Twenty-Six
‘What?’ Garcia asked, facing Hunter and moving towards the canvas. ‘What have you found?’
‘We need to get the Forensics guys in here, now.’ He paused and looked up at his partner. ‘Someone was hiding behind this canvas.’
Garcia crouched down next to Hunter.
‘Look at this.’ Hunter pointed to the floor just behind the canvas base. ‘Can you see the dust marks?’
Garcia squinted as he moved his face so close to the floor it looked like he was about to kiss it. Moments later he saw it.
Since it had been placed there, regular house dust had settled on the floor around the canvas edge. Garcia saw a long, dragging dust mark.
‘The canvas was moved forward,’ he finally admitted.
‘Enough for a person to get behind it,’ Hunter noted.
Garcia bit his bottom lip. ‘Laura could’ve moved it forward herself.’
‘She could’ve, but check this out.’ Hunter pointed to a spot further behind the canvas, closer to the wall.
Garcia squinted again. ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’
Hunter reached for his pen flashlight. ‘Look again.’ He handed it to Garcia.
Garcia directed the light beam to the spot Hunter had indicated. This time it didn’t take him long to see it.
‘I’ll be damned.’
Just a few inches from the wall, he identified the faint outline of foot imprints left in the dust. Clear indications that someone had been standing there.
‘Look at it one more time,’ Hunter said. ‘See anything that strikes you as odd?’
Garcia returned his attention to the imprints. ‘Nope, but you obviously have, Robert. What am I missing?’
‘The amount of variation on the imprints.’
Garcia looked for a third time. ‘There’s barely any.’
‘Exactly. Isn’t that strange?’
It finally clicked. When standing in a confined space for even a small amount of time, it was natural for anyone to fidget and shift his or her weight from foot to foot, to try to move into a more comfortable position every time the old one becomes uncomfortable. That shifting should, in theory, leave behind several different onionskin imprints. There were none. And that could only mean two things — either the killer didn’t wait long, or — and the thing that really bothered Hunter — the killer was preternaturally patient and disciplined.
Hunter’s cell phone rang in his pocket.
‘Detective Hunter.’
‘Detective, it’s Pam from Operations,’ said the voice at the end of the line. ‘I’ve emailed you all the information we managed to get on Patrick Barlett. At the moment he’s out of town.’
‘Out of town?’
‘He’s been away at a conference in Dallas since Tuesday evening. He’s flying back tomorrow — mid- afternoon. Everything checked out.’
‘OK, thanks, Pam.’
Hunter disconnected and returned his attention to the space behind the large canvas and the faint foot imprints. A strong and fast perpetrator could have covered the distance between there and where Laura would have been standing in a flash, too fast for her to react. But Hunter didn’t believe her attacker had surprised her in that way. If he had, there would have been some sort of a struggle, and there were no such signs anywhere. If someone had crept up behind her and sedated her in some way, Laura would have no doubt dropped her paint palette and
