Sixty-Four
D-King picked up his shotgun and approached Jerome by the open door. He stood rigid. His eyes carefully scanning the new room. ‘What the fuck?’ he whispered,. ‘Hunter, come and have a look at this.’
Hunter cautiously joined them.
The new room was in much better shape than the one they were in. The ceiling had been painted blue and decorated with what looked like a million fluorescent stars. The walls were even more colorful, displaying a tremendous variety of drawings – dragons, wizards, horses, leprechauns . . . On the far wall a series of wooden shelves held an impressive collection of toys – dolls, cars, action figures with even more toys scattered all over the floor. A large rocking horse sat to the left of the door. Against the west wall a video camera had been placed on a tripod.
Hunter felt his chest knot around his heart. His eyes left the room and rested on D-King’s baffled face.
‘Kids,’ Hunter whispered. The anger in his voice as clear as a loud shout.
D-King’s eyes seemed glued to the room’s decoration. It took him another thirty seconds to face Hunter. ‘Kids?’ D-King’s voice trailed off. ‘Kids?’ This time a powerful cry as he stormed back into the first room. The sadness inside him had been replaced by pure rage.
‘This is fucked up, man,’ Jerome said, shaking his head.
‘You do this to kids? What kind of sick fucks are you?’ D-King demanded standing before the three bound men. His bravado met with silence, his eyes met by no one.
Hunter’s stare rested on the three naked men. He simply didn’t care anymore.
‘Let me tell you something, Detective Hunter.’ D-King’s voice quivered with anger. ‘I grew up on the streets. I’ve dealt with scum my whole life. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt is that out here we have our own way of dealing with things. Most motherfuckers aren’t scared of getting caught. Prison is like holiday camp. It’s their home away from home. In there they’ve got their gangs, their drugs and their bitches. It ain’t much different from outside. But they’d shit a brick if they thought street-law was knocking on their fucking door. Out here we’re the jury, the judge and the executioner. This doesn’t concern you or your law. They’ll pay for what they’ve done to Jenny and you ain’t coming between me and them.’
There was more to it than rage. Hunter knew he’d been right. To D-King Jenny had been a lot more than just one of the girls.
Hunter turned to face the three men tied to the metal chairs. They stared back at him with insolent smiles, like they knew he had to take them in, it was protocol, it was what cops had to do.
Hunter felt tired. He’d had enough. He wasn’t even supposed to be there. This had nothing to do with the Crucifix Killer. This was D-King’s problem.
‘Fuck protocol,’ Hunter whispered. ‘I was never here.’
D-King gave him a quick nod and watched as Hunter holstered his weapon and silently made for the door.
‘Wait!’ the tattooed man shouted. ‘You can’t just walk away. You’re a fucking cop. How about our human rights?’
Hunter didn’t stop. He didn’t even look back as he closed the door behind him.
‘Rights?’ D-King asked with an animated laugh. ‘We’ll give you your rights . . . your last rites.’
‘What do we do about this place . . . and them,’ Jerome tilted his head towards the men in the first room.
‘Torch the place, but we’ll take them with us. We still gotta get the name of their ringleader out of them.’
‘Do you think they’ll talk?’
‘Oh they’ll talk, I promise you. If it’s sodomizing pain they’re into, we’ll give it to them . . . over a ten-day period.’ The evil smile on D-King’s lips made even Jerome shudder.
Back in his car Hunter stared at his shaking hands, struggling with an agonizing and uneasy feeling. He was a detective. He was supposed to uphold the law and he’d just disregarded it. His heart told him he’d done the right thing, but his conscience didn’t agree. D-King’s words still echoed in his ears.
‘That’s it,’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘That’s where I know him from.’
Sixty-Five
With his heart thumping violently against his chest, Hunter made his way back to the RHD as fast as he could. He needed to check some old records.
As he entered his office he was glad it was on a separate floor to all the other detectives. He needed to do this alone, no disturbances. He locked the door behind him and fired up his computer.
‘Be right . . . be right . . .’ he said to himself as he accessed the California Department of Justice databank. Hunter quickly typed in the name he wanted to search for, selected the criteria and hit the ‘search’ button. As the Department of Justice data server went to work, he sat still staring anxiously at the little dot moving back and forth on the screen. The seconds seemed like minutes.
‘C’mon . . .’ he urged the computer to work faster as he paced nervously in front of his desk. Two minutes later the dot stopped moving and the message
‘Shit!’
He tried again. This time going back a few more years. He knew he was right, he knew this had to be it.
The familiar dot started moving on the screen again and Hunter went back to pacing the room. His anxiety at boiling point. He stopped in front of the picture-covered corkboard and stared at all the photographs. He knew it was there, the answer was there.
The searching dot stopped moving and this time the screen filled up with data.
‘Yes . . .’ he said triumphantly, moving back to his desk and quickly scanning the information on the screen. As he found what he was looking for he frowned.
‘You gotta be shitting me!’
Hunter sat in silence thinking about what to do next. ‘The family trees,’ he said. ‘The victims’ family trees.’
On the initial investigation Hunter and Scott had tried everything they could think of to establish a link between the victims. They’d even traced the family trees for some of them. Hunter knew he had it somewhere. He started flipping through the mountain of paper on his desk that constituted the old case files.
‘Here it is,’ he said, as he finally came across the lists. He analyzed them for a few moments. ‘This is it.’ Hunter moved back to his computer and typed in a new name. The result came back almost instantly now that the search criteria had been narrowed down to exactly what he wanted.
Another match . . . and then another.
Hunter massaged his tired eyes. His whole body ached, but his new discovery had injected new life into his veins. He wasn’t able to establish links between all the victims, but he already knew why.
‘How could I’ve missed this before?’ he asked himself, as he knocked on his forehead with his clenched fist. But he knew exactly how. This was an old case, going back several years. A case where he’d been the arresting officer. The obscured victims’ links sometimes spanned three generations according to the family trees. Some of
