Carter Chris - The Death Sculptor

‘Thanks, Dr. Love, but I do fine the way I am.’

‘I know you do fine. I’ve seen the way women look at you.’ Every time the bartender walked past, her eyes lingered on Hunter for a moment. Hunter and Garcia had both noticed it.

‘Look, don’t get me wrong, I’m really not trying to play matchmaker here. I suck at it, and your personal life is none of my business. All I’m saying is, take Alice out for a friendly drink. Get to know her out of our work environment – which, I might add, is filled with pictures of dead people. Who knows? You guys might just click.’

Hunter swirled his whisky around in his glass. ‘Do you want to hear something funny?’ he said. ‘We knew each other from before.’

‘Who? You and Alice?’

Hunter nodded.

‘What? Really?’

Hunter nodded.

‘From where?’

Hunter told him.

‘Wow, that’s a coincidence. So she was a prodigy kid as well? Boy, do I feel like the dumb one in the box now.’

Hunter smiled and finished his Scotch. Garcia did the same.

‘I don’t want to talk about the case,’ Garcia said, ‘’cos I’m ready to go home here, but do you want to hear something funny? I hate puppets, including shadow ones. I have done since I was a kid.’

‘Really?’

‘I know it’s silly, but I always thought there was something evil about them. Nothing would scare me more than a puppet theater. And my fifth-grade teacher made us stage a puppet play every goddamn month. I either had to manipulate them, or sit with the rest of the class and watch.’ He chuckled uncomfortably. ‘Who knows? Maybe the killer is my teacher and he came back just to haunt me.’

Hunter smiled and stood up, ready to leave. ‘I wish. That would make things much simpler.’

Ninety-Six

Hunter felt so exhausted that no insomnia would’ve been able to keep him awake tonight. Back in his apartment, he had another warm shower and poured himself another shot of Scotch. Against his headache and tired muscles, it worked better than any medicine he could think of.

He kept the living-room lights switched off and headed for the sofa. There was no need for him to see the faded wallpaper, the tired carpet or the mismatched furniture.

Hunter couldn’t even remember when the last time was that he’d turned his TV on. He definitely wasn’t a TV man, but he knew he needed something to keep his mind occupied, no matter how trivial. Something to keep his thoughts from running away from him and back into the case, at least for one night – he really needed to disconnect. Though he loved reading, books tended to excite his brain, while television simply numbed it.

He searched the channels for late-night sports or cartoons, but without cable or satellite TV his choice of channels was somewhat limited. He settled for a rerun of some old World Wrestling Federation show. Entertaining, but not enough to keep sleep from taking over. Slowly, his body and mind gave up the fight and eased into a restless sleep.

It didn’t take long for the nightmares to start. And they came at him in waves – an empty room, bare brick walls, a single, dim light bulb dangling from a wire in the center of the ceiling, weak enough to keep all the corners in a shadow. Everything was so vivid he could smell the room – damp, moldy, stinking of sweat, vomit, and blood. In his dream he was merely a spectator, watching everything unfold before his eyes without being able to intervene.

First he saw Garcia lying unconscious on a dirty metal table while someone slowly dismembered him with a kitchen knife. No matter how much he tried, Hunter could never see the assailant’s face.

In a blink of an eye, the victim on the metal table changed. Garcia was nowhere to be seen. This time, the faceless killer was using his knife on Anna, Garcia’s wife. Her terrified screams reverberated through the room in an endless loop.

Hunter twitched on the sofa.

Another change of scene.

This time the victim was Alice Beaumont, and the dismembering started all over again. The floor of the room was thick with blood. Hunter was helpless, watching these people he knew, people he cared for, being slaughtered in front of his eyes, like a second-rate horror film.

Moments later the killer proceeded to use the body parts like Play-Doh, molding and sculpting them into grotesque, shapeless sculptures. All Hunter could hear were the animated laughs the killer let out every so often, like a kid having the best of times with his new toys.

Hunter’s eyes shot open all of a sudden, as if somebody had shaken him awake. His forehead and neck were drenched in cold sweat. He was still in his living room, the TV was still on, now showing some black and white film. Somehow, while still locked inside his nightmare, Hunter remembered something Garcia had said to him at the bar, and his brain made a crazy connection.

He jumped up and checked his watch – 6:08 a.m. He had been asleep for close to six and a half hours. Despite the horrendous dreams, his headache was gone, and his brain felt fresh and rested, but he needed to get back to his office. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before.

Ninety-Seven

By the time Garcia arrived at the PAB, Hunter had been sitting in front of the pictures board for about an hour and a half. His mind had run through dozens of scenarios, trying desperately to answer the questions his brain ceaselessly asked. He hadn’t managed to answer all of those questions, but one scenario made more sense than all the others, and he wanted to run the idea past everyone.

Captain Blake was the last one to join the group in Hunter’s office. Alice had arrived five minutes earlier.

‘I’ve come up with a theory,’ Hunter said, drawing their attention to the pictures board. He had repositioned several of the photographs in a different order. ‘Please bear with me and hear me out, because it might sound a little crazy at first.’

Captain Blake pulled a face. ‘We’ve got a killer who dismembers his victims and uses their body parts to create sculptures and shadow puppets, Robert. Any theory behind those actions, truth or not, has got to be at least a little crazy. I don’t think any of us is expecting a lot of reason here. What have you got?’

‘OK,’ Hunter began. ‘We all know how much effort we’ve put into trying to understand and identify the meaning behind those sculptures and shadow images. Since we got our third victim four days ago, and consequently, our third sculpture and shadow image, we’ve been trying every combination we could think of to make any sense of this mess. Carlos and I even tried looking at the images as a group, instead of individually.’

Garcia nodded. ‘We thought that maybe the images linked into each other in some way to form something else, maybe a larger image. This whole thing felt like a jigsaw from the beginning. So maybe that was what the killer wanted us to do. Slot the pieces he’d given us into the correct position to complete the puzzle.’

Captain Blake cocked an interested eyebrow.

‘We got nothing, Captain,’ Garcia said, curbing her enthusiasm with a shake of his head. ‘No matter which way we pieced it together, we came up with zilch. Each sculpture casts an individual shadow image, and that’s that. They aren’t linked.’

Hunter agreed. ‘We came to the conclusion that they were independent from each other, not smaller pieces of an incomplete picture.’

‘OK,’ the captain said. ‘So you went back to try and figure out their individual meanings.’

‘Yes,’ Hunter admitted. ‘But with the discovery yesterday that the second victim, Andrew Nashorn, and the third one, Nathan Littlewood, also knew each other – possibly since their late teens – I started pondering new possibilities.’