Chris Carter - The Night Stalker

The way Chief Cooper looked at Hunter made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

‘His files aren’t missing. They aren’t there because his body was never found.’

‘What?’ Hunter cleared the rain from his eyebrows and stared back at Chief Cooper. ‘Never found? So how did you know he was murdered?’

The chief let out a deep sigh. His glasses were so heavy with rain Hunter could barely see his eyes. ‘The truth is that we didn’t know. But that was what the evidence told us.’

‘What evidence?’

Chief Cooper finally pulled the nylon hood of his raincoat over his head and retreated a few steps back to the shelter of a large tree. Hunter followed him.

‘The Harpers tragedy happened on a Sunday,’ the chief explained. ‘Every Sunday, without fail, for the six years previous to that day, Ray took his son fishing. Sometimes to Lake Sonoma, sometimes to Rio Nido, and sometimes to Russian River. They’re all within driving distance. I went with them several times. Ray was a great fisherman, and his boy was starting to get pretty good at it too.

‘Tito, the neighbor who called in “shots fired”, saw Ray and his kid packing the truck a couple of hours before he heard the shot. The owner of the gas station a few blocks away from their house also confirmed seeing the kid in the passenger’s seat of Ray’s truck while Ray went into the store to buy some ice cream. Andrew never came back to the house with his father. When Forensics checked the truck, they found the kid’s shirt and shoes. There was blood on the shirt, on the shoes, on the car’s dashboard, and on the inside of the passenger’s door. The kid’s blood. The lab confirmed it.’

‘Wasn’t there an investigation into the boy’s disappearance?’

‘Yes, there was. But we found nothing other than what I just told you. We don’t know where he took his son, Detective – Sonoma Lake, Rio Nido or Russian River. There are also acres and acres of forest surrounding Healdsburg and the rivers. He could’ve killed his son and buried or left him to the wolves somewhere in the forest. He could’ve weighted the kid’s body down and dumped him in the lake or the river. Finding the body without knowing where he went that day was a pretty impossible task. Though we did try, we never found it.’

The chief took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose where the pads had left two sunken red marks.

‘Ray was a good man, but he suffered from depression,’ he continued. ‘I think he found out about Emily’s affair a few days earlier because there was thought put into what he did. It wasn’t your typical loss of control murder, though it might’ve looked that way from all the mess and blood. We figured Ray found out that Emily saw her lover when she thought it was safe to do so. So he got his kid out of the house and killed him first, disposing of the body somewhere. He then went over to Nathan Gardner’s apartment, disfigured him and left him there, bleeding to death, but not before stitching his mouth shut. After that, Ray returned to his house to confront his wife, and to complete his crazy killing plan.’

Chief Cooper paused and looked straight into Hunter’s eyes.

‘And I have no doubt that in Ray’s plan, no one was coming out alive. No one .’

Garcia stood across the room from the unmade bed, staring at the mess of clothes and objects on the floor.

Mark Stratton, Jessica Black’s boyfriend, had cut short his band’s pre-tour and come back to LA in the early hours of the morning. Garcia accompanied him to the morgue so he could positively identify her body.

No matter how physically or mentally strong anyone is, seeing a loved one lying naked on a cold metal morgue’s body-tray will cut through their defenses. Despite all the stitches having been removed, Jessica’s face seemed to have frozen with an expression of terror and pain. Mark didn’t have to ask if she’d suffered.

His legs gave away within seconds of him being in the room, but Garcia managed to grab him before he hit the floor.

Hunter had told Mark over the phone that there was a possibility that Jessica had been abducted from inside their own apartment. He explained that it was very important that the police and a forensic team had a look at it as soon as possible. It was also very important that he didn’t disturb anything. It didn’t quite work that way.

Since Mark had come off the phone to Hunter late yesterday, he hadn’t stopped shaking. He had incessantly called his home number and Jessica’s cell phone, leaving message after message. He just couldn’t think straight. Emotions took over and he had lost it, destroying his hotel room in anger and frustration.

Without knowing what had happened, the rest of his band had to kick his door in and hold him down. It took the tour manager a couple of hours to get things organized, including a flight back to LA. By then Mark was tramp-drunk, and at the airport he wasn’t allowed to board the plane.

‘Aviation rules,’ explained the young woman at the airline counter. ‘He’s way too inebriated to fly. I’m sorry.’

That had been the last daily flight back to Los Angeles. In the end, they had to hire a private plane to take him back.

After a cab dropped him by his private condo, Mark, still half-drunk, stumbled rather than walked through his front door. At that moment all hope of things not being disturbed inside his apartment was lost. He didn’t stop calling Jessica’s name for hours, walking from room to room, turning lights on and off as if she would suddenly magically appear. He opened her wardrobe and rummaged through her clothes. He emptied drawers and cupboards. He lay down on their bed, hugged her pillow and cried until he had no more tears left.

Mark was now sitting quietly in his kitchen, his eyes bloodshot and sore.

Garcia picked up a photo frame from the bedroom floor – Jessica and Mark holidaying somewhere sunny. They looked happy and in love.

He returned the frame to the dresser, turned to face the unmade bed once again and considered what to do. They couldn’t cordon off Mark and Jessica’s apartment because it wasn’t an official crime scene. The chances of him getting a Forensics team dispatched to the apartment before confirming Jessica had been abducted from there were less than slim. The chances of that Forensics team finding any sort of clue in a scene that had been compromised and completely messed with were virtually none.

Garcia walked out of the room, down the long corridor and into the living room. On the stylish glass table that sat between the sofa and the wall-mounted TV set, he found several music magazines. The top one had Jessica on its cover. Out of pure curiosity he flipped it open and looked for the article. It was a two-page interview through which she talked about being a successful musician and her life in general, but one subheader caught his attention – On Love. Garcia allowed his eyes to skim through the section, but just a few lines in he paused. A chill ran down his spine as if he’d been suddenly hit by an arctic wind. He read the lines again just to be sure.

‘No fucking way.’ He grabbed the magazine and rushed back to his office.

Hunter left Chief Cooper’s house by Lake Sonoma just before lunchtime, but he wasn’t ready to fly back to LA just yet. His mind was batting thoughts back and forth and he needed to organize them before moving on. He remembered driving past the city library on the way to the chief’s house. He decided to start there.

The building was a single-story structure that couldn’t even be compared to some of LA’s high-school libraries. Hunter parked in the adjacent lot, pulled the collar of his jacket tight against his neck and dashed to the entrance. The rain that had started earlier was still coming down.