Chris Carter - Gallery of the Dead

‘Would you like some company? Do you want to come over?’

Hunter hesitated.

‘I’m still wide awake,’ she added. ‘Will be for hours. I can tell.’

As coincidence had it, Tracy Adams also suffered from insomnia, albeit not as severely as Hunter.

‘And I’ve got a late start tomorrow. My first class is only at eleven.’

The truth was, Hunter would have loved her company, but he thought about it for an instant, more than enough time for his logical side to take over.

‘Is it OK if I take a rain check on that one? Tonight I won’t be good company to anybody.’

Hunter meant every word, but that was only part of the reason. Something had been really bothering him since he had entered Linda Parker’s bedroom a few hours back, and before the night was over he wanted to run a couple of searches against a few different databases.

‘Of course,’ Tracy replied after a silent moment. ‘If you change your mind, you know where to find me, right?’

‘I do. I’ll call you, OK?’

As soon as they disconnected, images of the crime scene began tumbling over each other inside Hunter’s head — avalanche style. He looked up at the sky again. The stars were now all gone. Darkness, it seemed, had come to Los Angeles in more ways than one.

Dr. Carolyn Hove, the Los Angeles Chief Medical Examiner, was an early riser. She’d been so for as long as anyone could remember, including herself. Back when she was a schoolkid, even during summer breaks, and to her parents’ dismay and annoyance, young Carolyn would be up and ready for action by the crack of dawn. One of her earliest memories of her late father was of him telling her that if she looked up the definition of ‘morning person’ in a dictionary, she would probably find a picture of herself.

That morning, like every morning throughout the year, Dr. Hove arrived at the County Department of Medical Examiner — Coroner in North Mission Road at least an hour before any other pathologist in her team. That first quiet hour by herself was her favorite part of the working day.

At the reception counter, inside the lobby of the architecturally stunning old hospital-turned-morgue, Frank, the night watcher, who was built like a tank, greeted her with a warm smile.

‘Good morning, Doctor,’ he said in his natural baritone voice.

Dr. Hove smiled back at him. Despite being in her late forties, she still looked like a woman in her early thirties, tall and slim, with piercing green eyes, full lips, prominent cheekbones and a delicate nose. That morning, her long chestnut hair had been tied back into a tidy ponytail.

Frank pushed a large cup of coffee across the counter in her direction.

‘Brewed less than a minute ago,’ he said.

Every morning, as soon as Frank saw Dr. Hove driving into the parking lot through one of the many surveillance monitors, he would make a brand-new pot of strong Colombian coffee. Her favorite. By the time she’d parked and walked through the main entrance doors, he’d always have a fresh, steaming cup waiting for her.

‘I have no idea what my mornings would be like without you, Frank,’ the doctor said as she took the cup. Her voice had the sort of velvety and calm tone usually associated with experience and knowledge, and Dr. Hove possessed plenty of both. ‘Did you watch the game last night?’ she asked, already knowing the answer. Just like her, Frank was a huge Lakers fan and, if time and work allowed, would never miss a game.

‘But of course,’ he replied. ‘Did you?’

The doctor made a face at him. ‘Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?’

Frank’s smile brightened. ‘What a game, wasn’t it? And we’re now one step closer to the playoffs.’

‘Oh, we’ll get there,’ Dr. Hove said with conviction. ‘The way we’ve been playing, there’s no doubt about it. I’ll see you tomorrow, Frank. Have a good morning and a good sleep.’

‘Have no doubt of that, Doc.’

Dr. Hove approached the double metal doors just past the reception counter and waited for Frank to buzz her in. Once she got to her office, she fired up her computer, sat back on her chair and sipped her coffee. It tasted absolutely perfect.

As her computer finally came to life, the event and autopsy rota was the first application to automatically load onto her screen.

She studied it for a short moment.

Several autopsies from the previous day had taken longer than the examining pathologist had anticipated, which was nothing new. Due to the incredible workload of the Los Angeles County morgue, such delays happened a lot more often than Dr. Hove wanted. The main problem was, those autopsies would have to be reentered into today’s schedule, pushing back the ones that had originally been planned for the day. It was a vicious cycle and at the moment, the backlog added up to roughly a week and a half.

Dr. Hove had another sip of her coffee and went to work. As the Chief Medical Examiner, it was her job to reschedule the autopsies each and every morning, reassigning examination rooms and pathologists if necessary. She had to push back five post-mortems originally scheduled for the end of the day, but after twenty minutes she had it all sorted out. Unfortunately that was only half of the battle.

Dr. Hove’s stare moved to the pile of folders that had been left inside the ‘entry’ tray on her desk. Those files belonged to the bodies that had arrived overnight. They would have to be entered into the system and added to the autopsy schedule.

‘Never a dull night in the City of Angels,’ she whispered to herself, reaching for the files.

Unknown to Dr. Hove, in the early hours of the morning, there had been two retaliation drive-by shoot-outs in Westmont. Nine males had lost their lives, and four of them were under the age of eighteen. Add five other adult bodies to that tally — three male and two female — who had all died under mysterious circumstances, and Dr. Hove was looking at fourteen new arrivals; but again, that didn’t really bother her. What did bring a worried frown to her forehead was the annotation that had been made to the cover sheet of one of the two female body files.

New entries marked as ‘urgent’ were a common trade in her line of work. Understandably, every LAPD or county sheriff homicide detective saw practically every single one of their cases as urgent, and since the results from a post-mortem examination could very easily change the entire course of an investigation, they would all like to have them back as fast as humanly possible. Dr. Hove and every pathologist in her team were more than used to handling cases tagged as urgent. But the file she had in her hand wasn’t marked as urgent. It was marked as a Level Zero autopsy.

In Los Angeles, every postmortem examination where, even after death, the victim could still pose some sort of risk of contamination — radiation, poisoning, contagious diseases, etc., were tagged as ‘dangerous’ or ‘hazardous’. Those examinations were conducted exclusively inside Autopsy Theater Zero, which was the only autopsy theater located in a sealed-off area down in the basement of the main building of the Medical Examiner complex. Those autopsies were known as Level Zero and they could only be performed by a specialist team, or the Chief Medical Examiner herself.

‘Interesting,’ Dr. Hove said, flipping open the file.

She was instantly surprised.

Usually, requests for a Level Zero autopsy only came to her if the investigation was either being handled by the FBI, or had the involvement of the CDC–Center for Disease Control and Prevention — but that wasn’t the case. This investigation belonged to the LAPD. More precisely, to the Ultra Violent Crimes Unit. The name of the lead detective assigned to the case was Robert Hunter.