Chris Carter - Gallery of the Dead

‘I’ll make it up to you when I get back to LA. I promise. I was thinking that maybe I could take you out for dinner somewhere. What do you think?’

Tracy went into a thoughtful silence, one Hunter could hardly blame her for. When he didn’t cancel on her, he would usually cut their date short by having to rush out somewhere after a phone call.

‘When do you get back, do you know?’ she asked.

‘I think we’ll fly back tomorrow morning, or afternoon at the latest. There’s nothing else we can do over here, really.’

Tracy went quiet again, but this time only for an instant. ‘Wait a second, Robert, where are you again?’

Hunter had never told her where he had flown off to.

‘Arizona.’

‘In Tucson?’

Tracy’s tone changed and Hunter couldn’t tell if she was surprised, concerned, or both.

‘That’s correct,’ he replied. ‘How do you know?’

‘I just caught the end of a news report on CNN — an FBI press conference in Tucson, Arizona, about a serial killer they’ve been chasing for some time now.’

‘A little over two months,’ Hunter said.

‘Four victims?’

‘Yes.’

‘So that’s the joint operation you were telling me about.’

‘Yes.’

‘This killer has been active for over two months?’

‘Yes.’

Despite her curiosity, Tracy saw no point in pushing Hunter for answers she knew he would never give her. Instead, she brought the subject back to their date.

‘How about Monday evening?’ she asked.

The sudden change in topic did catch Hunter unprepared.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Our dinner date,’ Tracy explained with a half-laugh. ‘I’m away for the weekend. I’m attending a conference in Sacramento until Sunday evening. I think I told you about it; I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ll be back in LA by Monday morning. If it suits you, we can go for dinner on Monday evening.’

‘Yes, that suits me just fine,’ Hunter replied, a smile now also on his lips. ‘Monday evening sounds great.’

Hunter, Garcia and both FBI agents did fly back to Los Angeles the next morning and the rest of the weekend went by in a blur of checking, cross-checking and re-checking.

By Monday morning, the IT experts in Quantico were still trying to breach Timothy Davis’s laptop and desktop security, with absolutely no advance whatsoever. A separate team of analysts, also back in Quantico, had spent the last few days going over a monumental mountain of emails, texts and social-media messages sent to Linda Parker, but with over a quarter of a million followers all around the world, and having to backtrack everything to an indefinite point in time, the team couldn’t even see the summit of their task, never mind get to it.

Though they were still searching, they’d also had no luck so far with the airlines’ passenger manifests. To be on the safe side, Agent Fisher had put in a new request to include private jet companies.

The first real progress made by anyone came only on Monday morning. The FBI had finally managed to obtain a transcript of the telephone conversation between the killer and Owen Henderson, the freelance reporter the killer had called in Phoenix.

Owen had given Hunter a pretty accurate run-down of the entire phone call. Most of it, just like the reporter had described, had been nothing more than a set of instructions on how to get to Timothy Davis’s house and what to do once he got there, but what had really intrigued Hunter had been the killer’s final words to the reporter.

‘We live in a false world — a plastic world where real, natural beauty is the purest and rarest of art forms. The most valuable of art forms. True beauty cannot be fabricated, copied, or duplicated and for that reason, it’s becoming extinct, but true beauty should live forever. I am making sure of that. I hope that you will be able to understand and appreciate true art.’

Hunter had spent the entire morning dissecting those words, breaking down those sentences, searching for hidden meanings between the lines.

‘Anything?’ Garcia asked. He too had spent the last few hours scrutinizing the transcript.

‘It doesn’t make much sense,’ Hunter said, slumping back on his chair.

‘You think?’ Garcia joked. ‘We’re talking about a killer who mutilates his victims, then uses their bodies to stage some sick scene that only he would consider art. Not to mention the cryptic Latin phrases that he likes to carve into their flesh. In other words — this guy is a freak, Robert, a lunatic lost in some crazy world inside his own head. I’m surprised he can actually string a sentence together. Wanting him to also make sense is maybe asking a little too much, don’t you think?’

‘No, I’m not talking about sense in what he said,’ Hunter replied. ‘I’m talking about sense in relation to what we have. He talks about natural beauty being the purest and rarest of art forms, but there’s nothing natural about what he’s doing. He then tells us that it cannot be fabricated or copied. That it should live forever and that he’s making sure of that, but if he believes that he’s creating art, then in a sense he’s fabricating it.’

Garcia mulled over Hunter’s words. ‘Maybe he means “fabricated” in the sense that it can’t be mass produced. That his art is unique.’

‘So why wouldn’t he use the word “unique”?’

Garcia shrugged. ‘Or who knows? Maybe he only said all that because he knew that we would interrogate the freelance reporter and all of this was devised just to confuse us even more, as if we weren’t lost enough already.’

The second progress also came on Monday, late afternoon. The FBI forensics lab had finally managed to reconstruct and identify the partial shoeprint retrieved from the live fence by Timothy Davis’s house. It had come from a Danner Quarry USA Boot, a company based in Portland, Oregon. Its size had been estimated to be anywhere between 11.5 and 12.5, which suggested something that they already knew — the person they were looking for would most probably be over six-foot-two tall. The problem they had was that the Quarry was Danner’s most popular work boot, selling over 100,000 pairs yearly in the USA.

‘One hundred thousand pairs?’ Captain Blake commented, leaning against the edge of Garcia’s desk. Since officially this investigation was a joint effort between the FBI and the LAPD, she liked to keep herself in the loop just as much as the NCAVC director. ‘Well that’s not really a viable avenue for anyone to pursue, is it? No matter how many agents Adrian Kennedy pulls into this investigation.’

‘I know,’ Garcia agreed. ‘But I wouldn’t be surprised if the FBI gave it a try.’

Despite the ample space and the advanced technology, Hunter and Garcia didn’t really take to their new temporary office inside the Los Angeles FBI Headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard. Every morning, it took them about five minutes each just to clear security at the entrance, and since it was a widely known fact that federal agents and City police officers didn’t really see eye to eye, the level of animosity that came at them from pretty much every angle, regardless of Adrian Kennedy’s orders, was at the best of times infuriating.

Hunter and Garcia still met with Agents Fisher and Williams every day, but with no real necessity for them to be in the Federal Bureau building, they preferred to work from their own office back at the PAB.

‘And that’s pretty much the only progress that has been made?’ Captain Blake asked.

‘Well,’ Garcia replied. ‘That and the fact that the “crime scene as an art piece” theory has solidified considerably.’

‘Yes, but it’s still only a theory.’ She immediately lifted her hand at Hunter. ‘I know. I know. Everything in an investigation is only a theory until the perp gets caught and the theory gets proven.’