‘Yep, his captain is getting in touch with them.’
Hunter checked the file for Nashorn’s home address – an apartment in East LA. A forensic team had already been dispatched there this morning. Last night, they’d found no cellphone, computer, address book, diary, or anything of that sort in Nashorn’s boat, and according to his captain there was nothing at his desk either. No personal files in his hard drive. They were checking his work emails. Hunter was hoping something would turn up from Nashorn’s apartment search. He closed the file and returned it to the backseat as Garcia pulled into the County Coroner’s parking lot.
Forty
Alice Beaumont printed out another document page and placed it on the floor next to the tens of pages that were already there. With Hunter and Garcia out of the office, she had temporarily turned the place into her own private research haven.
She had a quick stab at finding out what the shadow image created by the second sculpture could mean, but after three quarters of an hour searching the net, she had nothing that even remotely excited her. Unlike the first shadow puppets, she found no mythological meaning that could be attached to the entire image. If she broke the image down, then it was easy to link the distorted head with horns to any devil figure she liked, but that didn’t explain the four smaller shadow figures created by Nashorn’s severed fingers.
Alice wanted to carry on searching, but she knew that, for now, the investigation’s priority was to work on the lists of perpetrators Derek Nicholson had put away over the years. If she could find some sort of link to any case Andrew Nashorn had worked on, either as a detective or as a Support Division officer, that could give them the starting point they were so desperately looking for.
Alice sat on the floor with all the printouts surrounding her and started rereading and regrouping them in lots of two, three, four and sometimes five pages.
She had brought her own laptop in with her this morning. She had a feeling she would be needing a few of the powerful development applications she had in her hard drive. And she was right. Hunter had told her to go back five, maybe ten years in her search for perpetrators who’d been released, had escaped, or were out on parole. That gave her way too many names and files to read through. Couple that with all the new names and files she’d got from Andrew Nashorn’s investigations, and also a list of original victims who personally blamed Nicholson for losing their case, and she’d need at least a week to get through them all. But that was where her expert computer skills came in.
The first thing Alice did when Hunter and Garcia left was to write a quick application that would read through text files and search for specific names, words, or phrases. The application could also link files together using a variety of criteria. The problem she had was that not all the files were digitized. In fact, about 50 per cent of them were still on paper only. Getting a simple list of names was easy, even going back twenty-six years. But the actual case files only really started being digitized around fifteen years ago. Older cases were being added to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s databank as fast as possible, but the sheer number of them, together with a lack of personnel, made the process laborious and very, very slow. The same applied to the LAPD and Andrew Nashorn’s cases.
Alice was doing really well with what she had. Her application had already managed to flag and link forty-six documents, but she had yet to start looking into Nashorn’s investigations.
Forty-One
Hunter pulled his surgical mask over his nose and mouth and stood to the right of one of the two examination tables inside Special Autopsy Theater One. Garcia was just behind him, arms folded over his chest, shoulders hunched forward as if trying to protect himself from a freezing gust of wind.
As always, the room felt too cold, despite the hot summer’s day outside; too somber, no matter how bright the surgical and ceiling lights were; and too macabre, with its stainless-steel tables and counters, its clinical atmosphere, its honeycomb of human-body freezers, and its soul-chilling display of laser-sharp cutting instruments.
‘There’s no need for the mask, Robert,’ Doctor Hove said, a shadow of a smile playing at the corners of her lips. ‘There’s no risk of contamination and the body doesn’t really smell.’ She paused, considering her words. ‘Maybe just a little bit.’
Though every cadaver inevitably smells due to its natural breakdown of tissues and the explosive growth of bacteria after death; that odor alone never bothered Hunter. Carefully washed prior to the autopsy examination, the body’s smell was usually all but gone.
‘You do realize that your sense of smell is as dead as fried chicken, don’t you, Doc?’ Hunter replied, slipping on a brand new pair of latex gloves.
‘My husband tells me that every time I cook.’ The doctor smiled again and directed both detectives’ attention to the two autopsy tables. Nashorn’s dismembered body occupied one of them, and his severed body parts the other. Doctor Hove approached the table containing the body parts.
‘The official cause of death was heart failure, induced by severe loss of blood. Just like our first victim.’
Hunter and Garcia nodded in silence. The doctor continued.
‘I compared the lacerations to the ones on the first victim. They are consistent. The killer used the same cutting device.’
‘The electric kitchen carving knife?’ Garcia asked.
The doctor nodded. ‘But this time the killer did it a little differently.’
‘How so?’ Hunter asked, moving around to the other side of the table.
‘He took the time to try and properly stop the hemorrhage. The feet amputation carries all the signs of a proper Syme’s ankle disarticulation.’
‘A what?’ Garcia questioned.
‘It’s an ankle amputation procedure named after James Syme,’ Doctor Hove clarified. ‘He was a Clinical Professor of Surgery at the University of Edinburgh in eighteen-something. He developed an ankle-amputation procedure that is still used today. Anyway, the incisions we have here were made clean across the ankle joints. In accordance with the Syme’s ankle-disarticulation guidelines, the arteries were transfixed, and large veins ligated as much as possible, given that the entire procedure was carried out inside a boat cabin without a surgical team. Usually, smaller blood vessels are electrocoagulated during the procedure, but the killer didn’t bother with that. Either because he didn’t have the equipment, or . . .’
‘Because there was no need for it,’ Hunter took over. ‘He knew the victim would die in a matter of hours, maybe minutes. He just didn’t want him to bleed out and die too quickly.’
‘I’d have to agree with that,’ the doctor said. ‘The feet were certainly the first to be amputated. The killer used a compression dressing of fluffs, contoured over the stump and wrapped in place with a bias-cut stockinet. Nicely done.’
‘You mean professionally done?’ Garcia asked.
‘I’d say so, yes. But first, the wounds were covered in cayenne pepper powder.’
‘Cayenne pepper?’ Garcia’s brow furrowed. He thought about it for a second. ‘Jesus!’
Hunter’s memory immediately took him back to the boat and the strange, stinging smell he picked up inside its cabin. He knew he’d smelled it before, but he hadn’t been able to identify it then. ‘The pepper wasn’t used to add
