The Night Stalker

‘Nothing so far.’

‘How far back are we searching?’

‘Twenty-five years.’

‘Really? That long ago?’

Hunter leaned against his desk. ‘We might as well cover all angles.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What if we’re right about the love theory, but the person the victims remind our killer of isn’t an ex-wife, or girlfriend, or even someone he’s been infatuated with all his life. What if it’s someone else? Someone he also loved. Someone he’d never hurt no matter what?’

Garcia thought about it for a brief moment. ‘His mother?’

Hunter nodded. ‘It’s a possibility. Either his mother or a guardian — like an aunt, an older sister or cousin or something.’ Hunter paused and reached for a folder on his desk. ‘Have you ever heard of Katia Kudrov?’

Garcia frowned and shook his head at the same time. ‘Who’s she?’

Hunter pulled a portrait out of an envelope.

Garcia’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Holy shit. She’s almost the spitting image of Laura and Kelly. Who the hell is she?’

Hunter took his time telling Garcia everything that had happened since he met Whitney Myers.

‘This is a copy of Whitney’s investigation file. She’s covered every angle. She even has her own forensic specialist.’

‘And. .?’ Garcia started flipping through the pages.

‘Nothing substantial. The fingerprints found belonged to Katia herself, her father or the person she was seeing at the time.’

Garcia’s eyebrows arched.

‘He’s not a suspect. He wasn’t even in the country at the time of the abduction. It’s all there, have a look through later.’

‘So her father never filed a Missing Persons report?’

Hunter shook his head. ‘Not officially. That’s why she wasn’t in any of the lists MP sent us. Last night was the first I ever heard of her.’

‘Do you think our killer has her?’

‘I’m not sure. Sometimes I think my mind is chasing ghosts.’

‘What kinda ghosts?’

Hunter shrugged and started picking at the scab that had formed on the cut above his eyebrow.

‘I think there are several similarities in the way Katia, Laura and Kelly were abducted. But then again, there are only so many ways a person can be abducted. That’s why I’m worried about wasting time and chasing a connection that might not even be there. As Whitney said, officially Katia Kudrov isn’t even a Missing Persons case, she was never reported.’ He picked at the scab too hard and a tiny blob of blood started to form. Hunter wiped it away with the heel of his hand. ‘Our research team is already looking into the background of Laura and Kelly, searching for any more connections other than looks and profession. I’ve asked them to include Katia in that search.’

Hunter’s cell phone rang and he fumbled for it in his jacket pocket. ‘Detective Hunter.’

‘Detective, it’s Garry Cameron from ITD.’

‘Garry. . tell me you got something.’ His eyes darted towards Garcia expectantly.

‘Sorry, Detective, no facial image whatsoever,’ Garry sounded defeated. ‘I went through every single frame of the footage you gave me, enhancing them every way I could. The guy never gets himself into a revealing angle.’ A quick pause. ‘In a couple of frames there’s a flash of skin but that’s all. All I can tell you other that what you’ve already seen is that he’s Caucasian. I’m really sorry, Detective.’

Hunter disconnected and closed his eyes. He needed some sort of break in this investigation. Four people were dead. James Smith was still missing after that bizarre phone call, and if Katia Kudrov had been taken by the same person who took Laura and Kelly, she was running out of time fast.

Seventy-One

Like a contagious disease, Hunter’s bad luck seemed to spread throughout every aspect of the investigation. The documentaries he and Garcia got from the A & E TV network revealed nothing. Bryan Coleman was right about the Canvas Beauty production: it looked low budget right from the starting credits. Laura Mitchell and Kelly Jensen did appear in it, but for no longer than a few minutes each. They mainly spoke about how living in the West Coast had influenced the way in which they painted.

As Coleman had said, the majority of the piece concentrated on Martina Greene, the daughter of the old A & E TV regional director. The whole thing played more like an advertisement than anything else. Besides Martina, Laura and Kelly, only two other female painters appeared in the documentary — one of them, just like Martina, was naturally blonde. The other one was much older — in her fifties. Hunter checked with both of them, neither had seen nor spoken to Laura or Kelly since. Neither of them recognized James Smith from the picture Hunter showed them either.

Hunter’s team was checking the background of every single person whose name was on the Canvas Beauty documentary credits list. So far, everyone had checked out, but the list was long.

The other three documentaries Hunter and Garcia had obtained from the A & E TV network featured several painters from all over the country — none of them brunette females in their thirties.

Doctor Hove’s lab had confirmed that the dust retrieved from under Kelly Jensen’s nails had come from a mixture of mortar and red clay, consistent with common wall bricks. That meant that she could’ve been kept absolutely anywhere, from a self-built underground bunker to an inside room or an outside garage.

Hunter’s traffic camera gamble didn’t pay off either. The closest road camera to Kelly Jensen’s art studio was a mile away. Her Trans-Am was never spotted on the night she was taken. The South Bureau Traffic Operations’ captain had explained that most of the inner-city cameras were only infraction activated — like going through a red light or breaking the speed limit. They didn’t film twenty-four hours a day. The ones that did were strategically positioned on main roads, avenues and interstates. Their principal function was to alert Traffic Divisions about congestion hotspots and accidents.

Early the morning after Kelly’s disappearance, a camera in Santa Monica picked up her car as it traveled down San Vicente Boulevard going west, in the direction of her apartment building. But the cameras don’t monitor the whole of the boulevard. The vehicle was lost as it approached the final stretch that led to the beachfront.

As Hunter had requested, Forensics had picked up the car from Santa Monica and gone over every inch of its interior and boot. The hairs found matched to Kelly Jensen. The few dark fibers retrieved from the driver’s seat matched the ones found on the wall behind the large canvas in Laura Mitchell’s apartment. They came from the same skullcap. There were no fingerprints.

It was close to midnight, and for the first time since the beginning of spring the sky had clouded over. Menacing rain clouds and strong winds were closing in from the north, bringing with them the unmistakable smell of wet grass and turf. Hunter was sitting in his living room, reading through reports from his research team into Laura, Kelly and Katia’s professional and personal lives. Their backgrounds were totally different from each other. Other than physically having the same overall look and being an artist by profession, the team hadn’t found any other links between the three women.

Laura had come from a success-story family. Her father, Roy Mitchell, started his life slum-poor. Having run away from violent and abusive parents when young, most of the food Roy ate in his early years came from trash cans in the back alleys of hotels and restaurants. He was only fourteen when he started selling discarded secondhand books he bought from hotel staff. By the age of eighteen he’d opened his first bookstore, and from there business prospered. His autobiography — Back Alley Books — topped the US non- fiction book chart for twelve weeks, and spent a further thirty-three in the top twenty-five. He married the young