The Death Sculptor

Forty-Seven

‘Sands grew up with Ortega in Paramount,’ Alice read out of a new document. ‘They were best friends. Neither had any brothers or sisters, and that brought them even closer together. They both came from poor families. Sands’s father drank a lot, so life in his house wasn’t exactly perfect. Sands hated being home. He hated his father and the beatings he used to get from him. He spent most of his time out on the streets and with Ortega. Soon they started getting involved with drugs, gangs, fights – you know the drill.’

The phone on Captain Blake’s desk rang and she reached for it. ‘Not now.’ She slammed the phone back down. ‘Carry on.’

Alice coughed to clear her throat. ‘Sands and Ortega went to Paramount High School. Ortega was a below- average student, but Sands, despite being disruptive, had better grades than most would expect. Getting accepted into college wouldn’t have been a problem if he had wanted, and had the means. But their street life was already escalating into a criminal one, and when they were seventeen they both got busted for auto theft and possession of marijuana. That cost them a year in juvie hall.

‘Their quick spell inside rattled Ortega. He decided he didn’t really want to carry on with that life. He met Pam soon after he was released. They got married a couple of years later. Though he was still a drug user, he got a job at the warehouse, as I said, and everything indicated that he was leaving the street life behind.’

‘But not Sands,’ Hunter deduced.

A quick headshake. ‘Not Sands. He carried on as a petty criminal for a while after he was released, but in juvie he made quite a few contacts. Before you knew it, he was dealing drugs in a major way.’

‘How did you come by all this information so fast?’ Garcia asked.

‘The DA’s office keeps extensive files on everyone we prosecute,’ Alice replied, nodding at Bradley and flipping a page on her report. ‘One night, Sands got back home drunk and high, had another row with his girlfriend, Gina Valdez, and things got out of hand. He lost his head, grabbed a baseball bat, and put Gina in hospital with a beating that left her a breath away from death. She had a few broken bones, a fractured skull, and she lost the sight in her left eye.’

‘What a pleasant guy,’ Garcia said, leaning against the window.

‘You said your application was looking for links between family and relatives,’ Hunter cut in. ‘How did you manage to link Sands to Ortega?’

‘With his wife murdered, Ortega listed Ken Sands as his next of kin after he got the death penalty,’ Alice clarified. ‘As I said, they were like brothers when young. You suggested that we searched for family members, gang members, anyone on the outside who could seek revenge on someone else’s behalf. Well, Ken Sands certainly fits that category.’

‘No arguments there,’ Garcia said.

‘But here’s where it gets good,’ Alice added. ‘Andrew Nashorn was the detective who arrested Sands.’

It felt as if static electricity had been let loose in the room for a moment.

‘Sands’s girlfriend, Gina, was petrified of him, and rightly so. He’d beaten her up before, many times, it transpired. Nashorn was the one who managed to convince her to press charges when she was well enough. Sands was charged with aggravated battery to a live-in partner with the use of a deadly weapon.

‘Which is a felony according to California Penal Code 245,’ DA Bradley added.

Alice nodded. ‘Add to that the fact that when he was apprehended he was high and carrying over a kilo of heroin, and you get a nine-and-a-half-years prison sentence. He went to the California State Prison in Lancaster.’

‘How long ago was that?’ the captain asked.

‘Ten years. And apparently, after his sentence was read out, and before being taken away by the court officers, Sands had time to look back at Nashorn, who was sitting just behind the state prosecutor, and utter the words – “I’ll be coming for you”.’ Alice placed the report on Captain Blake’s desk. ‘He was released six months ago.’

Time seemed to halt for several seconds.

‘Do we have an address for him?’ Hunter asked.

‘Just his old home address. Sands wasn’t paroled, he served his sentence – clean release, no need to report to a parole officer, or a judge, or anything. No restrictions either. He can even leave the country if he wants to.’

‘OK,’ Captain Blake said, looking back at the printout on her desk. ‘Let’s find him ASAP and have a little chat with him.’ She motioned for Alice to hand over her folder and the report.

‘Until we find him,’ DA Bradley said, ‘let’s keep this as quiet as possible. I don’t want any of this leaking to the press, or anyone.’ He looked at Hunter and Garcia as if they’d publicize the new finding as soon as they left the room. ‘And I mean anyone. We’ve got a prosecutor and a cop murdered. Every police officer, every law-enforcement agency in Los Angeles, is itching to get their hands on any suspect we may have. This gets out, and we’re going to have a fucking manhunt on a scale none of us has ever seen before. So not a goddamn word to anyone. Am I clear?’

Neither Hunter nor Garcia replied. They just stared at the DA.

‘Am I clear, detectives?’

‘Crystal,’ Hunter answered.

Forty-Eight

After the morning’s development, the rest of the day began to drag. Nothing else materialized. Not surprisingly, the address Alice had on file for Ken Sands was out of date, and since he had left prison only six months ago, he hadn’t filed for any documents that could help track him down – no driver’s license, no passport, no national-welfare registration, nothing. His social-security record still showed the old address.

Hunter had a team trying to track down a bank account, a gas or electricity bill, anything that could point them in the right direction. They were also looking into Sands’s old friends. People he hung out with before going to prison, people he met in prison who were now on the outside; anyone, really. But obtaining information from old friends or prison mates was a lot harder than it sounded, and Hunter knew it. In Los Angeles street law, ratting someone out, especially to the cops, was a crime punishable by death. Even his enemies wouldn’t talk easy.

Hunter had also requested all the prison-visitation records for Sands and Ortega, but because of California privacy laws it could be a day or two before they got a judge to sanction the request, and another few before they got the files.

Gina Valdez, Ken Sands’s girlfriend, whom he had beaten almost to death, had disappeared. Getting your name changed in America wasn’t a very complicated process. And in the Internet age, changing your whole identity was getting easier and easier. No one knew if Gina had changed her name, or created a new identity. No one knew if she was still in LA, in California, or even in the country anymore. But one thing was for sure: she didn’t want to be found.

As an LAPD detective, Andrew Nashorn had sometimes worked with a partner, Detective Seb Stokes. Stokes wasn’t involved in Ken Sands’s arrest, but Hunter gave him a call anyway. They arranged to meet first thing tomorrow morning.

Brian Doyle, the head of the LAPD Information Technology Division, had gotten back to Hunter towards the end of the afternoon with what he’d managed to extract from the computer they found in Nashorn’s apartment. Hunter and Garcia spent an hour pouring over all the emails retrieved, and what had been compiled from the computer’s Internet history. It became obvious that Nashorn was a frequent user of several escort agencies, many of them specializing in fetish, bondage and sadomasochism services. There was also a string of porn websites, and though many of them could be considered hard edge – none were illegal.

The emails gave them nothing suspicious, no threats or anything that could be construed as one. Nor had