curly. He was smiling. The beer bottle in his right hand was angled towards the camera, as if he was toasting something. It didn’t take Garcia long to place him.
‘A very young Nathan Littlewood,’ he said.
Captain Blake look at Hunter, unimpressed. ‘Hardly surprising since you found that picture in his apartment.’
‘Not him,’ Hunter replied. ‘The other person in the picture.’
Captain Blake stole another peek at the photograph in Garcia’s hands, and then looked back at Hunter as if he’d lost his mind. ‘Are we talking about
Garcia was already searching the picture’s background for any secondary characters. He knew Hunter well enough to know that he’d seen something that most people would’ve missed. But there was no one. Littlewood was standing by that tree alone. There was nothing in the background but empty space.
‘Look closely,’ Hunter said.
That was when Garcia noticed part of someone’s left arm at the right-hand edge of the picture. Due to its proximity to the camera, it was out-of-focus, but it was easy to tell that the arm was bent at the elbow. Most of the forearm was out of shot.
‘The arm?’ Garcia asked.
Hunter nodded. ‘Stay with it.’ He watched as Garcia concentrated on the picture again. His stare went from confusion, to doubt, to surprise, and then finally it clicked.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Garcia said, his eyes darting towards Hunter.
‘No,
Garcia stood directly in front of her desk and showed her the picture. ‘This isn’t just somebody’s arm.’ He addressed Hunter. ‘That’s why you were checking the photos upstairs again.’
Hunter agreed and placed the picture he took from the pictures board on the captain’s desk. The picture showed a few body parts lying side by side on a stainless steel table. He pointed to one of the two arms in the photograph. Specifically, to a point high up on the triceps.
‘See those?’ he asked.
The captain cocked her head forward and squinted at it. ‘I see them all right; what are they?’
‘Moles,’ Garcia replied, placing the picture he was holding next to the one the captain was looking at. ‘Birthmarks.’ He indicated the same cluster of six small, oddly-shaped dark-red moles on the triceps of the person who had inadvertently got in front of the camera. Despite the arm being out-of-focus, there was no mistaking it. They were exactly the same.
Ninety-One
Captain Blake sat still for a while longer, her gaze fixed on the photographs on her desk. She knew that birthmarks were as unique as fingerprints. The odds of two people having the same exact birthmark were about one in sixty-four million. Not even identical twins share them. Two individuals having the exact same six birthmarks, in a small cluster like the one she was looking at, was virtually impossible.
‘So that means that this guy was . . .’ She stabbed her finger over the out-of-focus arm on the photo from Littlewood’s apartment.
‘Andrew Nashorn,’ Garcia said. ‘The killer’s second victim.’
Her eyes glint with a new sparkle. ‘So they knew each other?’
‘It looks that way,’ Hunter said. ‘Or at least they did a long time ago.’
She turned the picture over – nothing. ‘When was this taken?’
‘We can send it to the lab for analysis, but judging by how young Nathan Littlewood looks, and the fact that he got married twenty-seven years ago and in that photo he isn’t wearing a wedding ring, I’d say that picture is probably twenty-seven to thirty years old.’
Garcia agreed.
Captain Blake leaned back on her chair again, clearly running something over in her mind. She looked up, tilting her body to the right and looking past both detectives towards her office door. ‘Where’s the DA girl?’
Garcia shrugged.
‘I haven’t seen her since this morning,’ Hunter said.
‘Well, it looks like she could be right.’ Captain Blake stood up. ‘This killer could have a set agenda. That was her reading of the shadow image cast by the sculpture found at the killer’s second crime scene, wasn’t it? Two victims claimed, two more to go.’ She moved around to the front of her rosewood desk. ‘Well, he’s now claimed his third one. We now know that two of them knew each other. Because of the nature of their jobs, I have no doubt Derek Nicholson and Andrew Nashorn were at least acquainted. Do we have any idea if Nicholson knew the third victim? Was he part of the same group of friends all those years ago?’
Hunter brought his left hand up to his neck to massage it. ‘I just came across this information about an hour ago, Captain. I haven’t had time to do a lot of digging yet. But we’ll obviously be looking into that. I’ve got a box of old photographs upstairs that might still gives us something else. But we now have a whole new angle to look at.’
‘I’d say that’s definitely a sniff of something, Captain,’ Garcia said.
The captain still looked ill at ease, but Garcia was right, they did have something new. She checked her watch and opened the door. ‘Well, get digging then, and let me know the moment you get anything. Right now, I’ve got to go talk to the Chief of Police and the Los Angeles District Attorney.’
Ninety-Two
Hunter spent most of the night going over every photograph inside that cardboard box. He found more wedding pictures, old holiday snapshots, several photographs of Nathan Littlewood with other friends and family, and a huge collection of photos of Harry, Littlewood’s only son – his birth, his first ever steps, his first day at school, his graduation, his first prom. Basically, every important occasion in his life until he left home. Littlewood was certainly a proud father.
After hours of image searching, Hunter was sure that Andrew Nashorn appeared in none of those photographs. That was all they had – an out-of-focus arm at the edge of an old picture, identifiable only by the small cluster of birthmarks on his triceps.
Hunter had examined every face in every snapshot with a magnifying glass. He was fairly certain that none of them was Derek Nicholson, but ‘fairly certain’ wasn’t certain enough. He would contact both of Nicholson’s daughters, Olivia and Allison, and check if they had any pictures of their father in his early twenties for comparison. Maybe Nicholson was one of those whose appearance drastically changed as they grew older.
Hunter finally managed to fall asleep just before five in the morning. He woke up at 8:22 a.m. The scar on the back of his neck was itching like crazy. He had a long shower, hoping that the warm water he allowed to drum down on his nape for five solid minutes would soothe some of that itch.
It didn’t work.
When Hunter got to his office an hour later, Garcia was sitting at his desk, shoulders hunched over his keyboard, attentively reading something on his computer screen. He looked up as Hunter placed the box of
