Carter Chris - The Death Sculptor

That was when he felt something like he’d never felt before. A sixth-sense warning that came from deep inside him, almost freezing his blood in his veins and making every hair on his body stand on end.

Instinctively his eyes shot up, searching for the rearview mirror.

Looking back at him, from the darkness of his backseat, was the most evil-looking pair of eyes he’d ever seen.

Seventy-Two

Hunter sat alone in total darkness facing the pictures board in his office. It was late and everyone had gone home. In his hand he held a flashlight, which he kept flicking on and off at uneven intervals, in an attempt to trick his brain.

As light enters the eye and hits the retina, the eye’s photographic plate, the image that is formed is inverted, but is interpreted the right way up by the brain. If you allow that image to be projected onto the retina for just a split second before cutting off the light source, the brain then has to interpret only what it can remember, drawing from what modern medicine calls the ‘immediate’ or ‘f ash’ memory.

If the image is a shape well known to the brain, like a chair, the minor details the brain failed to register due to the short light exposure, are automatically compensated by the long-term memory – the brain thinks ‘it looked like a chair’, so the brain pulls a chair image from its memory bank. But if the shape is unknown to the brain, then it has nothing to fall back on. It then compensates by working harder in trying to identify details from the original image. That was what Hunter was trying to do, force his brain to see something it hadn’t seen before.

So far, it hadn’t worked.

‘Is this your idea of disco lights?’

Hunter turned in the direction of the voice and switched on his flashlight. Alice was standing by the door, holding her briefcase.

‘I didn’t know you were still here,’ he said.

‘What, you think you’re the only workaholic in this place?’ She smiled.

Hunter shifted in his seat.

‘Do you mind if I switch on the lights?’

‘Go ahead.’ He flicked off his flashlight.

Alice hit the light switch before nodding at the board. ‘Got anything new?’ She knew what he was trying to do.

Hunter rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger while shaking his head. ‘Nothing.’

Alice placed her briefcase on the floor and leaned against the doorframe. ‘Are you hungry?’

Hunter hadn’t thought about it the whole day, and as he did his stomach rumbled. ‘Starving.’

‘Do you like Italian?’

Seventy-Three

Campanile was a rustically elegant restaurant on South La Brea Avenue, reminiscent of a little Mediterranean village, complete with a bell tower, a fountain-accented courtyard, and a tiny bakery.

‘I didn’t know you liked this place,’ Hunter said as he and Alice took a table in the courtyard.

‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me.’ She looked at him with a faint smile on her lips, but not wanting Hunter to dwell on her words, she quickly followed them up. ‘I used to come here a lot. I love Italian food, and the chef here is fantastic. Probably the best around this part of town.’

Hunter couldn’t disagree. ‘So you don’t come here a lot anymore?’

‘Not as much. I still love Italian food, but I’m not getting any younger, and I really have to watch what I eat. Shifting any excess weight isn’t as easy as it used to be.’

Hunter unfolded the cloth napkin and placed it on his lap. ‘I don’t think there’s any shifting to be done.’

Alice paused and looked back at him in a peculiar way. ‘Was that you paying me a compliment?’

‘Yes, and at the same time telling you the truth.’ Alice pushed her hair back behind her ears and swept it around over her left shoulder. A self-conscious and slightly flirtatious move.

It went totally unnoticed.

‘Shall we order?’ Hunter asked.

‘Why not.’ The reply came in a less than enthusiastic tone.

They both ordered spaghetti. Hunter had his with primavera sauce, and Alice had hers with the chef’s special spicy meatballs and sundried tomatoes. They shared a bottle of red wine and tried as best as they could to keep the conversation away from the investigation.

‘How come you’ve never married, Robert?’ The question came at the end of the meal, as the waiter poured them both the rest of the wine. ‘As I said, in school most of the girls I knew had a thing for you. I’m sure you had plenty of opportunities.’

Hunter studied Alice while he had a sip of his wine. She had real interest burning in her eyes, almost like a reporter digging for a new scoop. ‘There are certain things that just don’t go together. What I do and married life are two of them.’

Alice pursed her lips together and twisted them to one side. ‘That’s a lame excuse, if I’ve ever heard one. Many cops are married.’

‘True, but a large number of them eventually get divorced due to the pressures that come with being a cop.’

‘But at least they tried, without hiding behind a pretty bad excuse. What happened to the old saying better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all ?

Hunter shrugged. ‘I never heard that expression.’

‘Bullshit.’

A ghost of a smile betrayed him.

‘How about Carlos?’ Alice said. ‘He is married. Are you saying that his wife will eventually leave him because of his job?’

‘Some people are very lucky, or at least lucky enough to find that one person in life they’re meant to be with. Carlos and Anna are one such example. I don’t think you’ll ever find a better-suited couple. No matter how hard you look.’

‘And you never met that person? The one you’re supposed to be with for the rest of your life?’

In a flash Hunter’s memory was inundated by images of one face . . . the sound of one name. He felt his heart warm in his chest, but as the memories progressed at hyper speed, it grew ice cold.

‘No.’ Hunter didn’t shy away from her stare. But he was sure that something in his eyes gave him away.

Alice did see it. First something tender, then something hard and arctic, something very painful, and in spite of her curiosity, she knew she had no right to ask any more questions.

‘I’m sorry.’ She broke eye contact and changed the subject before the silence became too awkward. ‘So you got nothing new from the second shadow image?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Tell me something, do you think we got the first one right? I mean, the interpretation of it – that the killer was telling us that, to him, Derek Nicholson was a betrayer, a liar.’ She lifted a hand to stop Hunter from answering too quickly. ‘I know that we’ll never know for sure until we catch the killer. But does it ring right to you?’

Hunter could already see where she was leading. ‘Yes.’

‘But still, you have doubts about our interpretation of the second shadow image.’

‘Yes.’

Alice sipped her wine slowly. ‘You, Carlos and I have spent countless hours studying that human sculpture and the shadow image it casts, trying to make some sense of its meaning. I don’t think there’s anything else there, other than what we’ve been seeing from the start. Even the captain agrees. Why do you think we’re wrong this time? Why can’t the killer be using the image to tell us that he’s going after two more victims?’

The waiter came over to clear their table. Hunter waited until he moved away, balancing all the dishes up his arms.

‘In my view, that interpretation is too much of a leap from the first one. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.’

Alice’s eyes widened. ‘Sense? What in this case makes sense, Robert? We have a maniac out on an ego trip, chopping people up and creating human-flesh sculptures so he can give us crazy clues to a jigsaw puzzle. Where the hell is the sense in all that?’