Carter Chris - The Death Sculptor

Hunter carried on reading through the list.

Alice was still tracking his gaze. ‘The next bunch of books are all on psychology – his other degree. Again, a concession from the prison warden to allow Sands to conclude his studies. But one book in particular grabbed my attention. Something that hadn’t even crossed my mind until I saw it.’

Hunter’s eye movement paused halfway down the page. She knew he had recognized it.

Sixty-Six

Standing behind Hunter, Garcia was reading as fast as he could, but nothing stood out. ‘OK, what am I missing?’

Hunter tapped his finger over a title – ‘Principles of Rorschach Interpretation’.

Garcia pulled a face. ‘Pardon my dumbass question, but what’s Rorschach?’

‘Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst,’ Hunter said. ‘He’s best known for developing a psychological projective test – the Rorschach inkblot test.’

They could almost hear Garcia thinking. ‘I’ll be damned. Isn’t that that crazy test when you get shown a white card with just a big ink smudge on it? They ask you to tell them what you think you can see. A little like looking at clouds’ shapes in the sky.’

‘In a nutshell, that’s the test, yes,’ Hunter agreed.

‘And in a not -nutshell way, what is the test?’ Garcia pushed.

Hunter left the list on his desk and leaned back on his chair. ‘The official test consists of ten cards. Each of the blots on them has near-perfect bilateral symmetry. Five inkblots are of black ink, two are of black-and-red ink and three are multicolored. But over the years psychologists have modified the test, creating their own cards with their own inkblots. Some even completely disregard the original bilateral symmetry of the blots.’

‘OK, but what the hell is it for? What does it test?’

Hunter’s head tilted slightly to one side as if not totally convinced. ‘The test is supposed to measure a multitude of personality traits and psychological ills like sense of self-worth, depression, inadequate coping, problem-solving deficits . . .’ He gestured with his hand to indicate that the list went on and on. ‘Basically the test tries to assess an individual’s intellectual functioning and social integration.’

‘From an inkblot?’ Garcia questioned.

Hunter shrugged and nodded once. He completely understood his partner’s skepticism.

‘Yes, but forget what the test is supposed to measure,’ Alice cut in, ‘and think of what we have. The shadows cast by the sculptures could be seen as Sands’s own inkblot type of test.’

Hunter shook his head firmly. ‘The killer is testing us, that’s for sure, but not with inkblots.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘As Garcia said, the inkblots are exactly that, blots, smudges with no real shape. What the killer has given us has perfect shape. A coyote and a raven on the first one, and though we’re still not entirely sure of the meaning of the second image, it certainly isn’t a shapeless blot.’

‘OK, I’ll go with that, but it still comes down to interpretation, doesn’t it? What we think we can see,’ Alice countered. ‘Most people would never have known that, mythologically, a coyote and a raven together mean a betrayer, a liar.’

‘We didn’t know that either,’ Hunter said. ‘Until you looked it up, remember? To a certain extent, most images are open to interpretation. The way someone looks at a piece of art might well be very different from what the artist intended.’

‘That isn’t art, Robert.’ Alice pointed at the replica sculpture.

‘To us it isn’t, but to the killer . . . ?’ He left the sentence hanging in the air for a second. ‘It’s his work, his creation, his art, gruesome or not. And I bet you he saw something completely different from what we are seeing when he put that thing together. Different frame of mind makes you see different things.’

Alice stared at the sculpture. ‘Different frame of mind?’

Hunter stood up and approached the pictures board. ‘Interpretation is directly related to a person’s frame of mind. Looking at the same image, a person could see two completely different things depending on the mood that person is in at the time. And that’s the problem with the Rorschach test.’

‘How can the same person see two different things?’ Alice’s gaze had moved to the shadow photograph pinned to the board. ‘Every time I look at that, I see exactly the same thing – a devil figure looking down at what might possibly be his victims.’

‘Then you’re not keeping your options open,’ Hunter came back. ‘Look, let’s say you have a shapeless image that resembles a face with its mouth wide open. You then show it to someone who, at that moment in time, is feeling happy. That person might interpret that image as someone laughing out loud.’

Garcia immediately caught on. ‘But if that same person were in a darker frame of mind for some reason, that same image could be seen as someone screaming in agony.’

‘Correct. Your mood alters your outlook. And that’s always been the biggest argument against the Rorschach test. Many say that it measures a subject’s frame of mind at that point in time more than anything else. But I agree with you, Alice. Whatever the meanings behind those images are,’ Hunter pointed to the shadow photograph. ‘It has all to do with how we interpret it, and that’s the key to this jigsaw. If we read it wrong, if we don’t figure out exactly what the killer is trying to tell us through those shadows,’ Hunter shook his head, ‘I don’t think we’ll ever catch him.’

Sixty-Seven

She had been jittery all night, needing a hit more than she needed food. Regina Campos didn’t care what kind of drug she took, she just needed to get high on something – anything. She had no money, but that wasn’t too much of a problem. She knew exactly what to do to get her fix. By the age of sixteen, Regina had already learnt that any man would melt like butter if you knew what to do to him in bed.

Regina was only eighteen, and if you asked the few people who knew her, they’d probably describe her as average. She was of average height, with an average body and average looks. In a crowd, no one would give her a second glance. Her hair was neither long nor short, and in high school she’d been an average student, until she dropped out. But she was charming, and she sure knew how to get what she wanted out of people.

Regina had had a string of good-for-nothing lovers and casual encounters. Actually, they were good-for-one-thing lovers – drugs. Her newest good-for-one-thing lover, if she could even call him a lover, was a slob, an ex-convict, who lived in a housing project in Bell Gardens. He was overweight, had the stamina of a 90-year-old man in bed, and got his kicks by wearing women’s panties. Regina couldn’t give a dry spit for how he got turned on. All she knew was that he could get her drugs.

She’d called him late last night, desperate, but he told her over the phone he wouldn’t be in all night. She could come over in the morning if she wanted to.

It had been a long night of waiting for Regina.

She took the stairs up to the third floor like a marathon runner. By now she was so frantic for a hit she was grinding her teeth like a bunny. She didn’t even think twice about the fact that the door to apartment 311 was unlocked, although her lover never left his door unlocked.

She pushed the door open and stepped inside the smelly apartment.

‘Hello, babe,’ she croaked. She’d been smoking so much crack lately it’d started damaging her vocal cords.

There was no response.

She was about to start searching the apartment for him when she saw something that was much more appealing – a silver box sitting on the small dining table. Next to it was a square mirror, and on it Regina could see residues of a white powder. Her little brown eyes lit up like a 4th-of-July sky.