Chris Carter - The Caller

Sergeant Velasquez checked the lock. He had to agree that it did look fairly new.

‘Then there’re all the other telltale signs around the apartment that tell me that she was definitely scared of someone.’

‘And which signs are those?’ Velasquez asked.

‘Well, we’ve got a thirty-eight Special Combat pistol in her bedside table, loaded with “extreme prejudice” rounds.’ He drew everyone’s attention back to the bed. ‘We also have a low platform bed, close to the floor, so no one could hide under it. A clothes rack, not a wardrobe, so no one could hide inside it.’ He made his way back to the door. ‘In the bathroom there’s a clear, see-through shower curtain, so no one could hide behind it. She had trouble sleeping but she refused to take her sleeping tablets. There’s a full prescription inside the mirrored cabinet in the bathroom from nine months ago. In the hallway, inside the storage room, there’s a dark-red curtain packed away. I’m guessing the curtain belonged to the sliding balcony doors in the living room. She took those down, replacing them with a somewhat unattractive chimed beaded curtain. Similar to the one at the front door. I don’t think she did it because she liked the way they looked.’

‘The noise,’ Sergeant Velasquez said, picking up on Hunter’s line of thought.

Hunter agreed again. ‘If any uninvited guest gained entry to this apartment, either through the front door or the balcony, she’d get a warning.’

‘The balcony?’ the sergeant questioned. ‘She’s three floors up.’

Hunter nodded. ‘And still, for some reason, she didn’t feel safe. Not even in her own home.’

With nothing more to be done but wait for Dr. Slater’s forensics team to finish what they were there to do, Garcia left the crime scene at around 3:20 a.m. He wanted to try to get at least a couple of hours sleep before sunrise.

Hunter, knowing that sleep would be an impossibility, chose to stay behind and wait until Karen Ward’s body had been cut loose from her restraints and then transported to the Los Angeles County Coroner. They would need the official autopsy examination results to be sure, and that would take a day, maybe two, but with no other visible wounds or bruises to the victim’s body, Hunter was fairly certain that Dr. Slater had been correct in her assessment — death had come as the consequence of severe brain trauma, caused by perforation of the temporal lobe, which was achieved through the left ocular globe cavity. In other words, Karen Ward lost her life after she was violently stabbed through the left eye with a glass shank long enough to reach her brain, but not before her face had been savagely ripped to shreds by mirrored glass.

By the time Hunter left apartment 305 in Long Beach, the first rays of sunlight had begun erasing the night. The rain, which kept on coming and going all throughout the early hours of that Thursday morning, also seemed to have grown tired of its own ordeal, receding completely by daybreak.

Hunter opened the door to his one-bedroom apartment in Huntington Park, southeastern Los Angeles, and stepped inside. The place was small, but clean and comfortable, though any visitor would be forgiven for thinking that most of his furniture had been donated by Goodwill. And they wouldn’t have been far off the mark. The black leatherette sofa, the mismatched armchairs, the bookcase that looked like it was about to buckle under the weight of its overcrowded shelves, and the scratched wooden breakfast table that doubled as a computer desk, all of it had come from different yard sales around the neighborhood.

Hunter closed the door behind him, but stood right where he was, permitting the silence and darkness of his apartment to slowly envelop him for an instant. His eyes circled his living room, resting on shadows, and he tried to imagine what it would be like for a woman who lived alone to feel afraid and unsafe every time she stepped into her own home. What it would feel like to be scared every time she went to bed, or walked into her kitchen. He tried to imagine how quickly anxiety and paranoia would take over her life.

Not long at all, he decided.

In the bathroom, Hunter turned on the shower and stepped under the strong jet of hot water, allowing it to massage the stiff muscles on the back of his neck and shoulders. He closed his eyes and managed to relax for nearly ten seconds before images of the crime scene began playing on the inside of his eyelids like a horror film. He hadn’t even filed in the investigation’s opening report yet, and already a multitude of thoughts were colliding with each other inside his head.

Was Karen Ward being stalked?

So much of what Hunter had seen inside her apartment certainly hinted at it. He had worked on enough cases where the perpetrator had turned out to be a stalker to be able to recognize the behavior pattern of a person who lived in constant fear of someone else. And he knew that the statistics were staggering, scarily so.

Over six million people were stalked every year in the USA. In Los Angeles alone that number transposed to one in every six women and one in every fourteen men. One in every eleven women was stalked more than once and these numbers weren’t taking into consideration Internet and social media stalking, where the issue had already run out of control. The problem in the City of Angels had become so severe that a unit dedicated to deal solely with harassment and/or stalking had been created by the LAPD in 1990 — the Threat Management Unit (TMU). A few celebrity cases had made the news over the years, but they accounted for a negligible percentage of the problem. The truth was that most of us didn’t really consider being watched. Most of us didn’t see ourselves as the object of someone else’s obsession and so we were less careful, less private with our actions, and our attention to the problem was usually low or non-existent. What would also come as a surprise to so many was that female stalkers were a lot more common than people would allow themselves to imagine and they could be just as violent and deadly as their male counterpart — obsession didn’t discern between gender, skin color, social class, religion, or anything else for that matter.

But if Hunter was really right about Karen Ward’s behavior pattern, then the killer’s MO was all wrong.

The brutality of repeatedly slamming someone’s face against a container filled with shards of broken glass exceeded the violence in any stalker case Hunter knew of, but the uncharacteristic excessive use of violence wasn’t all. Apparently, as part of some sordid game, her killer had also used the victim’s cellphone to contact her best friend, forcing her to watch everything over a video-call.

Why? What was the logic in that?

Essentially, stalking was the unwanted or obsessive attention paid by one person to another, usually driven by rejection, jealousy, revenge, envy, insecurity, or simple maniac compulsion. It’s a person-to-person thing, never a group one, Hunter knew that better than most, so why the sadism of the video-call? Why bring someone else into one of the most individual of compulsions? Why publicize the anger, the savagery? It didn’t make any sense. And that was what scared Hunter the most.

After a quick breakfast, Hunter liaised with Garcia and they met up in South Vermont Avenue in West Carson, one of the thirteen neighborhoods that made up the Harbor Region in southern Los Angeles. The address had come from Sergeant Velasquez, and it belonged to the person they wanted to talk to the most: Tanya Kaitlin, Karen Ward’s best friend.

Vermont Avenue is one of the longest-running north/south streets in Los Angeles, with its overall length exceeding twenty-three miles, twenty-two of which travel in an almost perfect straight line. The address they were given took them to the lower tip of South Vermont Avenue, just past West Torrance Boulevard. The building, a tired-looking blue and white rectangular structure in visible need of some care, sat opposite a row of shops.