Chris Carter - Gallery of the Dead

‘About a block away, and before you ask, there were no CCTV cameras anywhere on that stretch.’

Agent Williams paused and waited for any more questions. None were forthcoming, so he finally carried on with his accounts.

‘The next morning, Miss Rivers’ body was discovered by Detroit PD inside an abandoned wooden shed on the banks of the Detroit River, not that far from the university campus.’ He retrieved four new photographs from his blue file, placing them all on Hunter’s desk. ‘And this was how she was found.’

‘What the hell?’ Garcia said. His surprise was mirrored on Hunter’s and Captain Blake’s faces.

‘Yeah, exactly,’ Agent Williams replied.

‘Shhhhh,’ the man whispered as he stared straight into Timothy Davis’s eyes. His tone of voice was comforting and reassuring. ‘It will be OK, Tim. It will all be OK now. Trust me.’

Timothy blinked once... twice... three times. The movement was slow and lethargic and though his eyes were still open they were fading fast. The images they registered came in blurry and distorted, as if he were looking at the world through a thick sheet of plastic.

His ears weren’t doing much better, either. Though he could still hear the man’s voice, the words he spoke failed to make much sense, not because they were incoherent or spoken too softly, but because Timothy’s brain, now starved of blood, lacked the capacity to understand them.

The man took a step back and grabbed a lungful of soiled air. It had been a very slow-moving and difficult couple of hours, especially because this had been the first ever time that the man had tried anything like this. The procedure had been a lot harder and taken a lot longer than he had anticipated, but it was all paying off with dividends.

The man had to admit that he’d had his doubts. When he’d first come up with the concept for Timothy Davis, he wasn’t sure it would actually work, and because there was absolutely no way he could test the procedure beforehand, doubts had begun creeping up on him, so much so that the man had considered using a completely different method to achieve what he had set out to achieve. A method that would’ve been almost impossible to properly keep under control. But now he was glad that he had stuck with his original plan. In the man’s eyes, what he had just done was a masterpiece — a work of pure art — and he still wasn’t done yet. For his concept to be absolutely perfect, there were still a couple of finishing touches he had to add, but there was no rush. The man knew that he had all the time in the world, so for a moment he allowed himself to indulge in his own self-glorifying ecstasy.

‘Ple... please.’

Not even Timothy knew where the strength to utter that word had come from, and though his plea had been barely louder than a whisper, it had been enough to shatter the man’s invisible vanity mirror and drag him back to the moment.

His stare rested on Timothy’s now pale face. Life was draining from it fast.

‘It really is OK, Tim,’ the man replied. ‘You don’t have to fight it anymore. Just relax and let it happen.’

Timothy tried to look back at the man, but his unfocused eyes were losing direction. Around him, the room, the air, all of it seemed to be getting colder and colder.

‘Do go gentle into that good night, my friend,’ the man insisted, but by then Timothy’s ears were incapable of discerning sounds.

Timothy felt his heart drumming against the inside of his chest as if he had just run a marathon at top speed. Breathing was getting harder and harder. He couldn’t feel his toes anymore. In fact, he couldn’t feel his legs either... or his fingers... or his hands... or even his arms. Timothy’s whole body seemed to have deserted him, while his heart was literally beating the life out of him.

‘Rejoice, Tim,’ the man said. ‘For this is actually our moment of glory. Yours and mine, and do you know why?’ The man smiled proudly. ‘Because when I’m done, you’ll be immortalized.’

A second later, Timothy Davis took his last breath on this earth.

For several silent seconds, Hunter, Garcia and Captain Blake kept their stunned eyes on the two photographs that Special Agent Williams had placed on Hunter’s desk. They now understood why Adrian Kennedy and both FBI agents had acted so surprised when they first laid eyes on Linda Parker’s crime-scene pictures.

The first two photographs on Hunter’s desk were full-body shots of Kristine Rivers, The Surgeon’s first victim. She had been stripped naked and left lying on her back on what looked to be a dirty floor. Her arms were resting naturally by her torso, with her legs extended, her heels practically touching each other, the same position in which Hunter and Garcia had found Linda Parker the night before. But that was where the similarities ended. Unlike Linda Parker’s body, Kristine Rivers’ hadn’t been skinned, neither had her hands and feet been severed from her limbs. In fact, her body looked completely unharmed, which led everyone to focus their attention on the next two photographs — both close-ups of Kristine Rivers’ face — and that was where it all got even more confusing, because this time the killer had taken the victim’s eyes, leaving behind nothing but two terrifying dark holes caked in dry blood and a grotesquely disfigured face.

But that wasn’t all.

Most of her skull, from halfway up her forehead all the way to the back of her neck, had also been completely exposed. Kristine Rivers had been scalped — Old West style.

Hunter repositioned himself to better study the images.

There was no blood whatsoever on the floor surrounding her body, not even by her head, which told everyone that the extraction of her eyes, together with the scalping, hadn’t occurred inside that disused wooden shed.

‘Wait a second,’ Captain Blake interrupted, only then realizing something she had missed. ‘Are you sure we’re talking about the same perpetrator here? The MO in this case looks to be totally different.’

‘My exact thoughts once I laid eyes on your picture board,’ Kennedy replied.

‘Same here,’ Agent Fisher added.

‘Which was no longer than fifteen minutes ago,’ Captain Blake came back, half-surprised, half-annoyed. ‘So you’re telling me that the NCAVC’s “A” team flew all the way down here from DC, put on this huge song-and-dance show about taking over our investigation, without being one hundred percent sure if we were talking about the same perp or not?’

‘Well, not exactly,’ Kennedy replied.

Captain Blake’s annoyance heightened. ‘And what does that mean?’

Kennedy nodded at Agent Williams.

‘You are one hundred percent correct, Captain.’ The agent took over once again, reaching inside his blue file for yet another photograph. ‘The MO here seems completely different and none of us knew that until fifteen minutes ago or thereabouts. We tried patching into the LAPD’s database to have a better look at your investigation files before flying over here, but we couldn’t find anything — no pictures, no crime-scene description... nothing. Hence our total surprise once we finally saw your crime-scene photographs.’

‘The reason why you got nothing,’ Garcia clarified, ‘is that the UVC Unit keeps most of its investigations offline, for that exact reason.’

‘It’s a good strategy,’ Agent Williams admitted, before bringing the subject back to the victims. ‘So, at first look, the only similarities between these two victims is maybe the position in which they were left and the fact that they were both females in their early twenties, which, anybody in this room will agree, isn’t nearly enough to even suggest that they were both victims of the same perpetrator.’