Li nodded. ‘Let me show you how to find them.’
Fifty-Nine
Hunter made it back to Parker Center in less than half an hour and went straight into the Information Technology Division. Brian Doyle was at his desk, speed-reading through a pile of papers. He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday. His eyes were bloodshot and his face unshaven. An empty pizza box was by the edge of the desk and the coffee percolator in the corner was practically empty.
‘Have you been here all night?’ Hunter asked.
Doyle looked up but said nothing. His stare went straight through Hunter.
‘Are you OK?’
Doyle’s eyes finally focused. ‘Umm? Yeah, sorry, I’m fine.’ He placed the sheet he was reading on the desk. ‘Just understaffed and overworked. Everyone always needs everything ASAP. I’ve got cases piling up everywhere. And this afternoon there’s this huge sting operation going on.’ He leaned back in his chair and studied Hunter for a second. ‘What the hell happened to your face?’ He pointed at the cut above his eyebrow.
Hunter shook his head. ‘Walked into a door.’
‘Of course you did. Just hope the door isn’t gonna sue the department.’
‘She won’t.’
‘
‘Long story.’
‘I bet.’ He cleared a space at the edge of his desk and leaned against it. ‘OK, Robert, for you to be here, it’s gotta be something urgent.’
Hunter nodded. ‘But I only need about three minutes of your time, Jack. Then I’m out of here.’
‘Is this about the psycho who killed Doctor Winston with that bomb?’
An almost imperceptible nod. Hunter felt his chest tighten around his heart as he remembered he’d never see his old friend again.
‘He was a good man. I met him a couple of times.’ Doyle checked his watch. ‘What do you need?’
Hunter handed him the high-capacity hard drive and waited while Doyle hooked it up to his PC. Unsurprisingly, all the directories in the hard drive were perfectly organized — first by camera location and then by date.
‘Can these files be uncompressed in bulk?’ Hunter asked.
‘Not simultaneously. They’re massive. It’d be too processor intensive and it’d crash any machine, but. .’ Doyle lifted his index finger, ‘you could line them up inside an application. As soon as one file finishes uncompressing, it’ll automatically move to the next one in the list. That way you don’t even have to be there. Just leave it working and come back when it’s all done.’
‘That’ll work for me.’
Doyle smiled. ‘Please tell me you don’t need all of these files. There’re hundreds of them. This will take days.’
‘No.’ Hunter shook his head. ‘Just a handful of them — to start with.’
‘OK, in that case I’ll tell you the easiest thing to do. Because this is an external drive, I can link it up to an empty laptop instead of clogging up the machine in your office. That way you can work on your machine if you need to and just leave the laptop on the side, as it does its thing. Give me five minutes and I’ll have it all set up for you.’
Sixty
The phone on Hunter’s desk rang almost the second he entered his office. It was Doctor Hove.
‘Robert, I’m about to send you some lab results on Jensen. I got my team to fast-track whatever they could.’
‘Thanks, Doc. What do we have?’ He gestured for Garcia, who’d just come in, to grab his phone and listen in.
‘OK, as we expected, the victim was sedated. We found traces of a drug called Estazolam in her blood. It’s a sleeping agent.’
‘Usually prescribed for short-term treatment of insomnia, right?’ Hunter confirmed.
Doctor Hove had forgotten that Hunter knew more about insomnia than most doctors.
‘That’s right. Now, given its relatively high concentration, we figured that’s what the killer used to sedate her on the day she died. Before dumping her in that basement. He didn’t overdo it, though. He used just enough to knock her out for a couple of hours or so.’
Hunter leaned back in his chair.
‘But the interesting thing is: we also found faint traces of another drug. Something called Mexitil. It’s an anti-arrhythmic drug.’
‘Anti-what?’ Garcia blurted.
‘A common drug used to treat a heart condition called ventricular arrhythmia.’
Hunter started leafing through sheets of paper on his desk.
‘If you’re looking for her medical records, Robert, don’t bother,’ the doctor said, recognizing the sound of pages turning. ‘Her heart was as strong as a racing horse’s. She didn’t have the condition.’
Hunter stopped and thought for a split second. ‘What are the side effects of this Mexitil, Doc?’
‘Very good, Robert. Mexitil is pharmacologically similar to Lidocaine, which as you know is a local anesthetic. Its major side effect is light drowsiness and confusion. But if taken by someone who doesn’t suffer from ventricular arrhythmia, that light drowsiness can become moderate to severe. And you don’t even need high doses of the drug to cause it. But that’s about all it does. It won’t knock you out. It won’t even make you doze off.’
Hunter considered it. It made sense. That was probably why neither of the victims had any restraint marks. If the killer kept them in a constant state of confusion and drowsiness, he didn’t need to immobilize them.
‘Would there be any other reason why the killer chose to use Mexitil?’ Hunter asked. ‘If he just wanted them high, he could’ve used a number of drugs.’
‘It’s an easy drug to obtain on the Internet.’
‘So are most drugs nowadays, Doc,’ Garcia countered.
‘True.’ There was a short pause. ‘There’s always the chance that he’s familiar with the drug. He might suffer from the condition himself.’
Hunter was already clicking away on his computer, searching the Internet for more information about the drug. ‘Could you check your database, Doc? Go back five. . no, ten years. Look for any case where Mexitil was found in a murder victim’s blood?’
‘No problem.’ This time the sound of pages turning came from Doctor Hove’s side. ‘I’ve also got a result on the dark copper-colored dust retrieved from under the victim’s fingernails. It’s brick dust.’
Hunter’s eyebrows arched.
‘We might be able to identify exactly what kind of brick it is. I’ll let you know if we can.’ The doctor coughed to clear her throat. ‘At first I thought that maybe she tried to claw her way out of wherever she was kept. Somewhere with a brick wall. But as you well know, if that had been the case, she’d certainly have cracked and broken nails. . maybe even missing ones. None were even chipped. They were filed down into claws, remember? Maybe the killer has a bizarre fetish for pointy fingernails.’
Hunter’s eyes quickly moved from his computer to the pictures board. ‘Nothing else was found under her nails?’
‘Yes, bits of her own skin,’ the doctor confirmed. ‘She scraped at her mouth, her groin and the stitches before
