The Night Stalker

Hunter shook his head. ‘I’m OK, Chief, thanks. I grabbed one as I was leaving the airport.’

Chief Suarez laughed. ‘Yeah, and I bet it tasted like cat piss.’

Hunter conceded. ‘Probably just a step above it.’

‘No, no. You’ve gotta try this.’ He grabbed a mug from a tray on top of the metal filing cabinet by the window and poured Hunter a cup. ‘No one makes coffee like my Louise. She’s got a gift. Like a family secret. How do you take it?’

Hunter had to admit that even from that distance, the coffee smelled incredible. ‘Black is great.’

‘I like you already. That’s how coffee is meant to be drunk.’ The chief handed Hunter the cup.

‘You were telling me about Ted Jenkins,’ he said before having a sip. ‘Wow.’ His eyes widened.

Chief Suarez smiled. ‘Good, isn’t it? I’ll ask Louise to make you a flask before you leave.’

Hunter nodded his thanks.

‘OK. Ted Jenkins. He’s the editor for the Healdsburg Tribune. Back then he was just a reporter. I had a drink with him last night after I got off the phone with you. He certainly remembers what happened. A terrible case where a cheated husband lost his head and killed his wife, his kid, the wife’s lover and then blew his own head off with a shotgun. Huge for a place like Healdsburg, but for an LA cop. .?’ Chief Suarez leaned forward, placed both hands on his desk and interlaced his fingers. ‘One of the reasons I made chief of police is because I’m a very curious man, Detective. And your phone call yesterday got my curiosity steaming.’ He paused and took a sip of his coffee. ‘I looked you up. Had a quick chat with your captain this morning too.’

Hunter said nothing.

The chief reached for his reading glasses and his eyes moved to a notepad on his desk. ‘Los Angeles Police Department — Homicide Special Section. Your specialty — ultra-violent crimes. Now that’s something us folks over here only see in movies.’ His eyes returned to Hunter over his spectacles. ‘Your captain told me you’re the best there is. And that got my old brain thinking. Everyone knows Los Angeles is a crazy town, Detective. Gangs, drugs, drive-by shoot-outs, serial killers, mass murderers, killing sprees, and worse. Why would a murder case that happened twenty years ago in a small town like Healdsburg interest the Homicide Special Section in LA?’

Hunter sipped his coffee.

‘So late last night I went down to our archives room to look for the case files. Turns out that anything older than ten years was stuck under piles and piles of junk inside unmarked cardboard boxes at the back of a smelly and cobweb-filled room. It took me and an officer nearly five hours to find them.’ He tapped a very old-looking paper folder next to his desktop PC.

Hunter moved to the edge of his seat.

‘Imagine my surprise when I saw the pictures and read the reports of what had really happened.’ He handed the file to Hunter.

Hunter flipped it open and the first photograph he saw made his heart skip a beat.

Ninety

The woman was in her late twenties, early thirties. It was hard to tell from the photo because her face was swollen and battered, but even so, Hunter could see she’d been pretty, very pretty.

A large bruise covered the left side of her forehead, eye and cheekbone. Her shoulder-length black hair was wet and sticking to her face. Her large hazel eyes, that Hunter was sure had once dazzled many men, were wide open. Her terrifying fear was frozen in them like a snapshot. Just like Laura, Kelly and Jessica, her lips had been stitched tightly shut with thick black thread, but the stitches were neat and tidy, unlike those on the victims in Los Angeles. Blood had seeped through the needle punctures and run down to her chin and neck. She was alive when he stitched her up. A brownish substance had also accumulated between her lips and at the corners of her mouth — vomit. She had been sick and the discharge had had nowhere to go.

The second picture was a close-up of the words that had been written the wall — HE’S INSIDE YOU. Ray Harper had used blood to write them. The third picture showed the next set of stitches on her body. Her groin and inner thighs were also smeared with blood that had seeped through the puncture wounds. She’d been tied to the bed by her wrists and ankles in a spread-eagled position. But the bed had been tipped on its end and pushed up against a wall, placing the victim in a standing position and facing the inside of the room.

Hunter moved to the next picture — a male body lying on the floor directly in front of the bed and the female victim. His entire head and most of his neck were missing. A double-barreled shotgun was lying partly over his torso and partly in an enormous pool of blood. Both of his hands were resting on the gun’s stock. From the destruction to his head, Hunter knew he’d discharged both rounds simultaneously, and that the barrel ends had been placed under his chin.

Hunter skipped the rest of the photos and skimmed over the report and the autopsy files. He finally found what he was looking for as he got to the last page inside the folder — the crime-scene log sheet. Eight different people had had direct access to the Harper crime scene that day — the county coroner, a county forensic investigator, the county sheriff together with two of his deputies, Chief Cooper and two other Healdsburg police officers.

‘Are Officer Perez or Officer Kimble still with the police department?’ he asked Chief Suarez.

The chief scratched a thin scar under his chin. ‘Officer Perez retired four years ago. He lives just down the road from me. His son is with the fire department. Officer Kimble passed away a few years back. Pancreatic cancer won that battle.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Hunter’s attention returned to the log sheet. ‘Do you know any of these deputies from the County Sheriff’s Office, Peter Edmunds or Joseph Hale?’

The chief nodded. ‘Sure, but they aren’t deputies any more. Peter Edmunds is Captain of Field Services and Operations and Joseph Hale is Assistant Sheriff of the Law Enforcement Division. They both live in Santa Rosa. They’re great guys.’

Hunter rubbed his eyes for an instant. The county coroner, the county forensic investigator, the county sheriff, and Healdsburg old chief of police, Chief Cooper, would all be over sixty-five years of age today. It wasn’t impossible but there was very little chance any of them would’ve become a serial killer in their old age. That meant that everyone who had attended the crime scene was accounted for, unless someone hadn’t been logged in. But if that was the case, Hunter had no way of finding out who else had seen the scene. Instinctively he flipped through the files and the pictures again and suddenly frowned. Something caught his eye. He returned to the photographs, this time studying every picture attentively. When he reached the last one, he flicked back to the files and scanned them again, all the way to the last page.

‘Are these all the case files or is there another folder somewhere in your archives room?’ he asked.

‘That’s it. Nothing else.’

‘Are you sure?’

Chief Suarez arched his eyebrows. ‘Yes I’m sure. I told you, it took us five hours to find those files. We’ve been through every single one of the old boxes, and believe me, there were quite a few of them. Why?’

Hunter closed the folder on his lap.

‘Because there’s something missing.’

Ninety-One

The drive to Chief Cooper’s house took Hunter less than fifteen minutes.

He stepped out of the car, and as he closed the door behind him, a woman came out onto the house’s porch. She was in her mid-sixties, slender but not skinny. She wore a simple blue dress and a pocketed apron. She had a long angular face framed by straight gray hair falling to her shoulders.