The Death Sculptor Read online

  ‘Your father’s illness didn’t take him.’ He waited for Olivia to fully absorb his words before continuing. ‘He was murdered.’

  ‘What? That’s . . . that’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Please, let’s have a seat somewhere,’ Hunter insisted.

  Olivia breathed out as tears returned to her eyes. She finally gave in and followed Hunter into the living area. Hunter didn’t want to put her in the same room as the young nurse.

  Olivia sat in the light-brown armchair next to the window. Hunter took the sofa opposite her.

  ‘Would you like a glass of water?’ he offered.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Hunter waited by the door while an officer fetched them two glasses of water. He handed one to Olivia, who drank it all down in large gulps.

  Hunter took his seat again, and in a steady voice explained that in the early hours of the morning someone had gained access to the house and to Mr. Nicholson’s bedroom.

  Olivia couldn’t stop shaking or crying and, understandably, was questioning everything.

  ‘We don’t know why your father was murdered. We don’t know how the perpetrator entered the house. At the moment we have a truckload of questions and no answers. But we’ll do everything we can to find them.’

  ‘In other words, you don’t have a clue what happened here,’ she fired back angrily.

  Hunter kept silent.

  Olivia stood up and started pacing the room. ‘I don’t understand. Who’d want to kill my father? He had cancer. He was . . . already dying.’ Her eyes filled with tears once again.

  Hunter still said nothing.

  ‘How?’ she asked.

  Hunter looked at her.

  ‘How was he murdered?’

  ‘We’ll need to wait for the coroner’s autopsy examination to positively identify cause of death.’

  Olivia frowned. ‘So how do you know he was murdered? Was he shot? Stabbed? Strangled?’

  ‘No.’

  She looked perplexed. ‘So how do you know?’

  Hunter stood up and approached her. ‘We know.’

  Her eyes moved back to the staircase. ‘I wanna go up to his room.’

  Hunter gently placed a hand on her left shoulder. ‘Please, trust me, Ms. Nicholson. Going into that room won’t settle any of the questions you have. It won’t ease your pain either.’

  ‘Why? I want to know what happened to him. What aren’t you telling me?’

  Hunter hesitated for a moment, but he knew she had the right to know. ‘His body was mutilated.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ both of her hands shot to her mouth.

  ‘I know you and your sister were here last night. You had dinner with your father, right?’

  Olivia was shaking so hard she could barely nod.

  ‘Please,’ Hunter said. ‘Let that be the last memory you have of your father.’

  Olivia exploded into desperate sobs.

  Seven

  Hunter and Garcia got back to their office on the fifth floor of the Police Administration Building in West 1st Street in the middle of the afternoon. The PAB was the new operational headquarters for the LAPD, substituting the nearly 60-year-old Parker Center building.

  After hearing the news, Captain Barbara Blake had also come in on her day off and was waiting for both detectives with a parade of questions.

  ‘Is it true what I heard?’ she asked, closing the door behind her. ‘Someone dismembered the victim?’

  Hunter nodded and Garcia handed her a bunch of photographs.

  Barbara Blake had been the Robbery Homicide Division captain for the past three years. Handpicked by the ex-captain himself, William Bolter, and sanctioned by the mayor of Los Angeles at the time, it didn’t take her long to gain a reputation for being a no-nonsense, iron-fist captain. Blake was an intriguing woman – stylish, attractive, with long black hair and cold dark eyes that could make most people shiver with a simple stare. She wasn’t easily intimidated, took shit from no one, and didn’t mind upsetting high-powered politicians or government officials if it meant getting the job done.

  Captain Blake flipped through the photographs, the look on her face growing more worried with each picture. As she got to the last one, she paused and held her breath.

  ‘What in God’s earth is this?’

  ‘A . . . sculpture of some sort,’ Garcia answered.

  ‘Made of . . . the victim’s body parts?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Silence ruled the room for the next few seconds.

  ‘Is it supposed to mean anything?’ Captain Blake asked.

  ‘Yes, it means something,’ Hunter said. ‘We just don’t know what yet.’

  ‘How can you be so sure it means something?’

  ‘Because if you want someone dead, you walk up to them and shoot them. You don’t risk the time it takes to do something like this unless the whole act has a meaning. And usually, when a perpetrator leaves something that significant behind, it’s because he’s trying to communicate.’

  ‘With us?’

  Hunter shrugged. ‘With somebody. We’ll need to figure out its meaning first before we know.’

  Captain Blake’s attention returned to the picture. ‘So that would mean that this wasn’t random. The killer didn’t just put this thing together in a burst of sadistic inspiration right there and then?’

  Hunter shook his head. ‘Very unlikely. I’d say the killer knew exactly what he would do with Derek Nicholson’s body parts before he killed him. He knew exactly which body parts he needed. And he knew exactly what his horror piece would look like when finished.’

  ‘Great.’ She paused. ‘And what does this mean?’ The captain showed them a picture of the bloody message left on the wall.

  Garcia ran her through the whole story. When he was done, Captain Blake was uncharacteristically lost for words.

  ‘What the hell are we dealing with here, Robert?’ she finally said, handing the pile of photographs back to Garcia.

  ‘I’m not sure, Captain.’ Hunter leaned against his desk. ‘Derek Nicholson was a prosecutor for the State of California for twenty-six years. He put a lot of people behind bars.’

  ‘You think this could be retaliation? Who the hell did he send to prison, Lucifer and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre gang?’

  ‘I don’t know, but that’ll have to be our starting point.’ Hunter looked at Garcia. ‘We need a list of everyone Nicholson has put behind bars – murderers, attempted murderers, rapists, whoever. Let’s prioritize by anyone who has been released, paroled, or made bail in the past . . .’ he thought about it for a moment, ‘fifteen years . . . and also by severity of crime. Anyone he put away for any type of sadistic crime comes first.’

  ‘I’ll get the research team on it,’ Garcia confirmed, ‘but it’s Sunday. We won’t get anything until maybe tomorrow evening.’

  ‘That’s fine. We’ll also need to crosscheck whatever names we get with a list of their immediate family members, relatives, gang members, or whatever; anybody who could be capable of going after Derek Nicholson for revenge on someone else’s behalf. There’s a chance this could’ve been indirect retaliation. Maybe the person Nicholson sent to prison is still there . . . maybe he died in prison, and somebody on the outside is after payback.’

  Garcia nodded.

  Hunter reached for the pile of photographs and spread them out on his desk. His stare settled on the one with the sculpture.

  ‘How did the perpetrator put that thing together?’ the captain asked, joining Hunter by his desk.

  ‘He used wire to hold the pieces in place.’

  ‘Wire?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She bent over and studied the photograph again. A sudden chill ran the length of her body. ‘And how do you suppose we’ll figure out what this thing means? The more I look at it, the more freaky and incomprehensible it seems.’

  ‘The forensics lab will create an exact replica for us. We might bring in one or two art experts and
see if they can make anything of it.’

  In all her years in the force, Captain Blake had seen the most unimaginable things when it came to killers, but nothing like this. ‘Have you ever seen or heard of a crime scene like this one?’ she asked.

  ‘I know of a case where the killer used the victim’s blood as paint to create a canvas,’ Garcia offered, ‘but this is in a league of its own.’

  ‘I’ve never heard or read about anything like this,’ Hunter admitted.

  ‘Could the victim have been random?’ Captain Blake asked, glancing through the notes Garcia had jotted down. ‘I mean, it looks to me that the sadism of the act, and the creation of that grotesque thing, is what was most important to the killer, not the victim himself. The killer could’ve picked Nicholson because he was an easy target.’ She flipped a page on Garcia’s notebook. ‘Derek Nicholson had terminal cancer. He was weak and practically bedbound. Totally defenseless. He couldn’t have screamed for help if the killer had given him a megaphone. And he was alone in the house.’

  ‘The captain has a point,’ Garcia agreed, tilting his head from side to side.

  ‘I don’t buy that,’ Hunter said, moving away from his desk and approaching the open window. ‘Derek Nicholson was an easy target, I agree, but there are plenty of easier targets in a city like Los Angeles – tramps, homeless people, drug addicts, prostitutes . . . If the victim made no difference to the killer, why risk breaking into an LA prosecutor’s home and spend hours doing what he did. Also, he wasn’t that alone in the house. His nurse was in the guesthouse above the garage, remember? And as we know . . .’ he tapped the photograph that showed the message on the wall, ‘. . . she walked in on the killer. Thankfully she didn’t turn on the lights.’ Hunter turned and faced the room. ‘Believe me, Captain, this killer wanted this victim. He wanted Derek Nicholson dead. And he wanted him to suffer before he died.’

  Eight

  Instead of playing volleyball in Venice Beach or catching a Lakers game, Hunter spent the rest of his day carefully studying all the crime-scene photographs, with one question coming up all the time.

  What in the world did that sculpture mean?

  He decided to go back to Derek Nicholson’s house.

  The body, together with the morbid sculpture, had been taken to the coroner’s office. All that was left behind was a sad and lifeless house full of grief, sorrow and fear. Derek Nicholson’s last few hours alive were splattered all over his room, and it all spelled only one thing – terrifying pain.

  Hunter stared at the message the killer left on the wall and felt an empty hole grow inside him. The killer took Derek Nicholson’s life, and in the process devastated three others – both of Nicholson’s daughters’ and the young nurse’s.

  The forensic team had lifted at least four different sets of fingerprints from the house, but analysis would take a day or two. They’d also collected several hair and fiber samples from the room upstairs. Hours of sieving through it, the backyard and trellis on the outside wall of Derek Nicholson’s room gave them nothing. There were no signs of forced entry. No windows had been broken, no latches damaged, no doors or locks tampered with, but then again, Melinda Wallis, the weekend nurse, couldn’t remember if she’d locked the backdoor. Two of the windows downstairs had been left unlocked overnight, and the balcony door that led into Mr. Nicholson’s room was left ajar.

  Hunter had tried talking to Melinda Wallis, but Garcia had been right, she was psychologically shutting down. Her brain was struggling to cope with the shock of discovering Derek Nicholson’s body inside a room bathed in blood, but more than that, her mind was doing its best to shelter her from the knowledge that she had been only a hair away from death.

  Hunter spent all of his time back at the house studying the room upstairs, looking for clues that he might’ve missed earlier on. He didn’t find anything the forensics team hadn’t already found, but the savagery of the scene was more than disturbing. It was like the killer had made a point of splashing blood all over the room.

  The message left on the wall wasn’t part of the original plan, but a last-minute act of cocky defiance. The entire scene seemed like a display window for the killer’s anger and senselessness, and that bothered Hunter.

  Night had already fallen by the time Hunter got back to his apartment. He closed the door behind him and rested his tired body against it. His eyes scanned the dark and lonely living room, and in his mind he debated if staying in tonight was such a good idea.

  Hunter lived alone, no wife, no girlfriends. He’d never been married, and the relationships he had never lasted that long. The pressures that came with his job and the commitment it demanded always seemed too much for most to understand. He didn’t mind being by himself. Living alone didn’t bother him either. But after spending most of the day surrounded by death and walls stained with blood, the loneliness of his small apartment was the last thing he needed.

  Los Angeles nightlife is amongst the liveliest and most exciting in the world, with a spectrum of choice that goes from luxurious and trendy nightclubs, where A-list celebrities hang out, to themed bars and dingy, sleazy underground venues, where the freaks come out to play. Whatever mood you find yourself in, you’re sure to find a place in LA to suit it.

  Hunter made his way to Jay’s Rock Bar, a dive just two blocks away from his home. It was one of his favorite drinking spots, with a great Scotch selection, a jukebox overflowing with rock music, and friendly, full-of-life staff.

  Hunter sat at the bar and ordered a double dose of 12-year-old GlenDronach with two cubes of ice. Single-malt Scotch whisky was his biggest passion, and though he had overdone it a few times he knew how to appreciate its flavor and quality instead of simply getting drunk on it.

  Hunter had a sip of his whisky and allowed its smooth hazelnut, oaky flavor to fully develop in his mouth. The bar was busy enough, and after what he had seen today he was glad to be amongst people laughing and enjoying themselves.

  A group of four women sitting at the table closest to Hunter were discussing the worst pick-up lines they had ever been approached with.

  ‘I was in a bar in Santa Monica one night,’ the short-haired blonde one said, ‘and this bald-headed guy came up to me and said –’ she put on a baritone voice – ‘“Baby, I’m no Fred Flintstone, but I can make your Bedrock!”’

  Two seconds of stunned silence from the group was followed by loud laughter.

  ‘That’s just plain lame,’ the youngest-looking of them said. ‘But I got something that’ll beat that. Last weekend, I was in Sunset Boulevard, and someone came up to me in broad daylight, in the middle of the street and said: “Honey, your name must be Gillette, ’cos you’re the best a man can get.”’

  The group laughed again.

  ‘OK, OK,’ the long-haired brunette said, ‘that one has got to take the medal. I’ve never heard anything so bad in all my life.’

  Hunter agreed and smiled to himself. That had been the first time he’d smiled all day.

  ‘Another one?’ Emilio, the young Puerto Rican bartender asked Hunter, nodding at his empty glass.

  Hunter’s attention moved from the four women to Emilio, and then to his glass. He felt tired, but he knew that if he went back home now he wouldn’t fall asleep. He barely slept anyway. His insomnia made sure of that.

  ‘Sure, why not.’

  Emilio poured him another double dose and dropped one more cube of ice in his glass. Hunter watched it crack as it hit the light brownish liquid. A man sitting at the end of the bar in a battered gray suit coughed a throaty, smoker’s cough and Hunter’s mind went back to Derek Nicholson and the case. Why kill someone who was already dying of lung cancer? Someone who was already condemned to such a painful death? One, maybe two more months at the most, and his cancer would’ve finished him off anyway. But the killer couldn’t . . . wouldn’t allow that to happen. He wanted to be the one delivering the fatal blow. The one looking into Nicholson’s eyes when he died. The one playing God.


  Hunter had a sip of his drink and closed his eyes. He had a bad feeling about this case. A really bad feeling.

  Nine

  In a city like Los Angeles, violent crimes aren’t uncommon. In fact, they are pretty much the norm. It’s not surprising that on average LA coroners are as busy throughout the year as any ER doctor. Work piles up like snow, and everything has to follow a schedule. Even with an urgent request, it was a whole day before Doctor Hove was able to start the autopsy on Derek Nicholson’s body.

  Hunter had managed to get only four hours of sleep. In the morning his eyes felt gritty, and the headache lurking at the base of his skull was typical of a sleep hangover. Experience told him that there was nothing he could do or take to get rid of it. It’d been part of his life for over thirty years now.

  Hunter was getting ready to leave for the PAB when Doctor Hove called saying that she was finally done with Derek Nicholson’s autopsy.

  At 7:30 a.m., he covered the seven miles between his apartment and the LA County Department of Coroner in North Mission Road in seventeen minutes flat. Garcia had arrived just a minute before him and was waiting for Hunter in the parking lot. He was clean shaven and his hair was still wet from his shower, but the bags under his eyes belied the fresh morning look.

  ‘I’ve gotta tell you, I’m not looking forward to this,’ Garcia said, greeting Hunter as he stepped out of his car.

  Hunter looked at him curiously. ‘Have you ever looked forward to anything when you walk into this building?’

  Garcia stared at the old hospital turned morgue. The building was architecturally impressive. Its façade was a stylish combination of red brick and light-gray lintels. The sumptuous steps that led to its main entrance added another touch of elegance to a structure that could easily be mistaken for a traditional European university edifice. A beautiful shell for a building that sheltered so much death.

  ‘Point taken,’ Garcia admitted.

  Doctor Hove met both detectives by the staff entrance door on the right side of the building. Her silky black hair was tied back into a conservative-looking bun. She had no makeup on, and the whites of her eyes showed just enough red to suggest that she hadn’t had a good night of sleep either.