‘Did you find anything?
‘Not a thing,’ Garcia replied. ‘But I’m sure that we weren’t nearly thorough enough. It’s pitch-black up here and all we had were these headlamps.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Dr. Slater assured them. ‘If this monster has left anything behind, we’ll find it.’
The forensics photographer moved past them and began photographing the body inside the coffin.
‘This is going to be slow and boring work,’ Dr. Slater said to Hunter and Garcia. ‘We’ll be here for hours. You guys should go home. I’m sure it’s way past the end of your shift. If we uncover anything else, I’ll let you know straight away.’
‘I’ll stay for a little while,’ Hunter said, before turning to face his partner. ‘But you go home, Carlos. Say hi to Anna for me. I’ll see you at headquarters tomorrow.’
Garcia was about to leave when the photographer snapped another picture and something inside the coffin caught his eye. Something that seemed to be attached to the right corner by the body’s head. Something that her fanned hair had been hiding.
‘Detectives,’ he called, putting down his camera. ‘Maybe you want to come and have a look at this.’
Hunter, Garcia and Dr. Slater moved closer, crouching down by the grave. Kenneth Morgan joined them a second later.
‘Right there.’ The photographer carefully moved some of the hair out of the way and indicated a small, black, rectangular box, about the size of an eight-pin Lego brick.
‘Let me have a look,’ Morgan said, grabbing a brand-new pair of latex gloves. He moved closer still and reached for it, but the tiny black box didn’t budge. ‘It’s not coming out,’ he announced. ‘I think it’s glued to the wood.’
‘What the hell is it?’ Dr. Slater asked.
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Morgan replied, angling his body over the coffin to try to get a better look at it. That was when he noticed the tiny, round lens on its face. He paused and looked back at Dr. Slater, his eyes full of surprise.
‘I think this is a camera, Doc. A streaming camera. Whoever did this didn’t just bury this poor woman alive. He watched her die.’
Eight
Tuesday, December 8th
Barbara Blake, the captain of LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division, had spent the best part of her morning in yet another budget meeting. Once the meeting was over, she dropped a file on her desk and went straight into Hunter and Garcia’s office.
‘OK,’ she said, as she closed the door behind her. Her long dark hair was tied back into a slick ponytail, revealing shiny silver earrings dangling from tiny lobes. She wore a dark blue pencil skirt suit. Her jacket was undone, showing a silk white blouse underneath. ‘What’s this file that was on my desk this morning? A “murder diary”? A shallow grave up in Deukmejian? A woman who was buried alive? What the hell?’ Both of her palms faced up.
Hunter ran the captain through the whole story.
‘So where is this diary now?’ she asked when Hunter was done.
‘With the FSD DNA lab,’ Garcia replied. ‘But we should be getting photographs of every page sometime today.’
‘And who’s the woman . . . the victim, do we know?’
‘We still need to wait for DNA confirmation to be one hundred percent sure,’ Hunter replied, indicating the photos that were taken by the forensics photographer that were already pinned to the photo board.
The captain’s stare moved to it for a brief second, while Hunter reached for a notepad on his desk.
‘But I will be very surprised if the DNA test doesn’t confirm the information in the diary,’ he said.
‘The diary describes her abduction?’ Captain Blake asked.
‘Not the method,’ Garcia replied. ‘Just the location.’
‘Whom did the case belong to in Missing Persons?’ the captain asked.
‘Detective Henrique Gomez,’ Hunter replied.
‘I know Gomez.’ The captain nodded. ‘Have you spoken to him yet?’
‘We did, this morning,’ Garcia confirmed. ‘But given the amount of cases Missing Persons have to deal with on a daily basis, and taking into account that Miss Gibbs’s disappearance happened over two years ago, it’s no surprise that Detective Gomez barely remembers the case. All the info we got came from the case file he handed us and, from what we gathered, the case died a death within weeks.’
Captain Blake’s eyebrows arched.
‘Missing Persons interviewed everyone they could,’ Hunter explained. ‘The boyfriend, the family, friends, work colleagues, gym members, Albertsons employees who were working on the night that she went missing . . . everyone they could think of, and they got absolutely nothing. Every path led to a dead end. Her car didn’t give them anything either. Officially the case was still open until now. Miss Gibbs was still listed as “missing” according to the MP database, but because every avenue they pursued led them to a complete standstill, unofficially, Missing Persons had classed Miss Gibbs as a “runaway”.’
‘Well, not anymore,’ Captain Blake said. ‘There was no CCTV on the parking lot?’ She sounded surprised.
‘None around the spot where she parked that night,’ Hunter revealed. ‘The place in question, on Rosecrans Avenue, is a huge open complex where you’ll find restaurants, bars, banks, supermarkets, drugstores . . . there’s even a six-screen cinema. The parking lot alone, which doesn’t change a parking fee, covers an area equivalent to one city block, with eleven entry and exit points. It’s accessible via three different main roads – Rosecrans Avenue on its north side, La Mirada Boulevard on its west side and Adelfa Drive on the east.’
‘Our guy,’ Garcia jumped in again, ‘the person who took Miss Gibbs, is no amateur. According to his entry in the notebook, he tailed his target for four days before an opportunity to take her presented itself. That alone shows patience and determination, not to mention knowhow.’
The captain’s stare returned to the photo board. She had read about the wedding dress in the file Hunter had left on her desk that morning, but seeing it, even if only in a photograph, made it completely real.
‘And he buried her in a wedding dress?’ she asked, her frown revealing how incredulous that sounded to her.
‘Reburied,’ Hunter corrected his captain, and proceeded to explain their conclusion.
‘Jesus! Why?’
‘At this point, only the killer knows,’ Hunter said. ‘But maybe the voices told him to.’
Captain Blake’s head jerked back slightly and she almost smiled at Hunter. ‘Voices?’
‘In his entry,’ Hunter explained. ‘The little that we read, the perp mentions “voices”. He says that he should’ve started the journal a while ago, when he first heard them. He then states that the voices had asked for a very specific type of subject, or victim – certain type of hair, height, eye-colour . . . everything. We haven’t read more than just about a page and a half of the journal, but from that entry alone, it seems that he does what he does because voices tell him to. Maybe that’s why he went back to her grave, dug her up, dressed her in a wedding dress and buried her again.’