‘May I?’ Hunter asked, indicating the evidence bag.
‘Be my guest.’
Hunter picked it up so he and Garcia could study the envelope inside it.
‘I’m guessing you’ve tested it for prints already?’ Garcia asked.
Dr. Slater nodded. ‘None other than mine.’
‘The handwriting?’ Hunter this time.
‘All capitals and nothing special about it. The pen used was a cheap marker pen with a fine tip. No point in trying to trace the ink to any specific brand, as the result would most certainly lead us to the kind of marker pen that is stocked by all major supermarkets.’
Hunter nodded, as he put down the evidence bag. ‘And you mentioned something about a notebook?’
‘Yes,’ Dr. Slater said, pointing toward the back of the lab. ‘And that’s where the plot really thickens. Come, let me show you.’
Hunter and Garcia followed her past a group of forensics agents, all too absorbed in what they were doing to even acknowledge the two detectives. As they reached one of two separate enclosures at the far end of the lab floor, they waited while Dr. Slater entered an eight-digit code into a metal keypad on the door handle.
The enclosure was about twenty-six feet long by twenty wide. Inside it, on three separate worktops, sat five computer screens and six different microscopes – two laser-scanning, two stereo, one inverted and one laser confocal. The temperature inside the new room dropped another degree or two when compared to the rest of the lab. Dr. Slater guided Hunter and Garcia to an empty worktop to the left of the door.
‘This morning,’ she explained, ‘when I checked my mailbox and picked up the envelope, I came this close to opening it right there and then.’ She indicated with her thumb and forefinger. ‘I couldn’t remember ordering anything over the Internet, but I’ve been known to order stuff and completely forget about it, especially if it takes over three days to arrive. Also, sometimes, either the FSD or some other forensics lab around the country will send me unsolicited samples, material, whatever, simply because . . .’ She shrugged. ‘They do stuff like that. Anyway, I was about to rip the envelope open when my brain decided to wake up. No one from the FSD, or any other forensics lab around the country, would hand-deliver an unsolicited package to my door. If they did, it would be because it was something quite urgent and they would ring the bell and deliver it to me, not drop it in my mailbox. With that in mind, I brought it straight here and this morning the package went through three different scanners – regular X-ray, which revealed that the contents were a notebook; explosive detection, which came back negative; and poisonous or hazardous substances, which also came back negative. So, after feeling like a complete idiot for being too paranoid and wasting government resources, I finally opened the package.’ She indicated another evidence bag that was on the worktop directly behind her. Inside it was a leather-bound notebook. ‘And that right there is what I got. Don’t forget to glove up before opening the evidence bag.’
From a dispenser mounted onto the wall by the door, Hunter and Garcia each picked up a pair of blue latex gloves and put them on.
With the notebook still inside the evidence bag, the first thing that both detectives noticed was that the book’s black leather cover was thicker than you would expect on a notebook. There was no design, no inscription, no carvings, no marks of any kind to either the front or the back cover.
The second thing they both noticed was that the journal weighed relatively more than a regular notebook, even though it only seemed to be about one hundred and twenty pages long, maybe a little more. When looked at from a side angle, it was obvious that the pages didn’t sit smoothly between the two covers. Most of them were warped, which indicated that either those pages had gotten wet, or they had something stuck onto them, or both.
Hunter and Garcia repositioned themselves around the workstation before Hunter pulled the notebook out of the see-through plastic bag. He then placed it on the worktop and flipped it open to the first page.
Contrary to what one would expect from a personal diary or a journal, it didn’t open with an owner’s information page. Nothing on the flipside of the front cover either. No name, no address, no cellphone number, no email . . . nothing.
Hunter and Garcia quickly checked the first page.
The entry also differed from that of a regular diary in the sense that there was no date or any other sort of time stamp at the top or anywhere else on the page. There were also no page breaks and no paragraphs, just word after word, forming line after line in a seemingly interminable block of text, but the entry writer had at least made use of punctuation, which, if nothing else, helped to separate his thoughts and make the text less confusing.
The handwriting throughout the whole book was cursive and relatively neat, all in black ink. Any mistakes were dealt with via a single line across the wrong word or phrase – no White-Out, no erasing, no scratching . . . no mess. There was no yellowing of the pages or its edges either, which immediately indicated that the diary couldn’t have been that old. Despite the pages being unlined, Hunter was impressed with how straight the writer had kept the text.
Garcia was just about ready to start flipping through pages in the journal when Hunter placed a hand on his right arm, stopping him. His eyes had moved to the first line on the page and he had started reading it.
Her name was Elizabeth Gibbs, born 22nd October 1994. Not that I care at all about their names, who they were, or any other aspect of their lives. After so many, they become nothing more than meaningless faces lost in darkness. One will morph into another . . . which will morph into another . . . and so on. The cycle never ends. My memory isn’t so good anymore. I forget things. I forget a lot of things, and it’s just getting worse. That’s one of the reasons why I decided to keep this journal. The second is for security. I should’ve started these records a while ago, when I first heard the voices, but that’s water under the bridge and the journal is here now. I did try remembering facts . . . details from past events, but my memory isn’t so good anymore and it won’t be getting any better, only worse. Once again, the voices were very specific about the subject. Female. Minimum height: five-foot seven. Hair: black – long – straight. Eyes: dark. Weight: no heavier than 165 pounds. Ethnicity: white. It took me only a few days to find her. It wasn’t hard. After tailing the subject around town, an opportunity to take her finally showed itself. Date and time: February 3rd 2018 – 19:30. Location: Albertsons’ parking lot, Rosecrans Avenue, La Mirada. Photo: Same night, a few hours after abduction.
Hunter turned the page. There was nothing written on the reverse of it. The writer had decided to use only the front of each diary page. The next one along started with a gap of about three inches – roughly fifteen lines. Two tiny holes right at the top of the page indicated that something had been stapled to it. On the right, closer to the page’s edge there was a smear of what looked like blood. Hunter’s eyes moved to Dr. Slater.
‘There was a photo?’ he asked.
‘There was indeed,’ she replied, as she walked over to a different worktop to pick up yet another evidence bag before handing it to Hunter. Inside it there was an instax-mini Polaroid-style photograph – sixty-two millimeters long by forty-two wide. It showed a woman in her mid-twenties. Her long, straight black hair fell loosely over her shoulders. The look in her dark eyes mirrored the expression on her face – total and utter terror. Tears had come and gone, dragging most of her mascara and eyeliner with them, creating a crisscross of watery black lines all the way down to her chin. The light-red lipstick she had worn that night was smeared over her lips and across her face. The collar and shoulders of the pale-blue blouse she had on were wet with perspiration. The photo had been taken against a cinderblock wall.