He left the main bedroom and walked back down the corridor, entering the room opposite the bathroom. It was small but tidy. No doubt it was the guestroom. The main piece of furniture in this room was a single bed with a metal headboard pushed up against a wall. There was a small bedside table to its right. The whole east wall was taken up by a built-in wardrobe. The curtains were also drawn in this room, but they were different from the ones in the living room. These were heavier and thicker. No light or shadows came through them.
Hunter left them as they were and approached the bed, running his hand over the linen. It felt and smelled fresh – recently cleaned. He checked the drawer on the side table. Nothing. Completely empty. Hunter closed the drawer and moved over to the wardrobe, sliding its doors open. Inside, it looked like a mini garage sale. Everything was old – a vacuum cleaner, books, magazines, lamps, a few raggedy coats, an artificial Christmas tree, and a few cardboard boxes.
Wow,’ Hunter said, taking a step back. ‘It doesn’t look like Littlewood threw much away.’
He turned his attention to the cardboard boxes stacked up on the right, pulling the bottom one out. It was relatively heavy. Hunter placed it on the bed and opened its lid. The box was stuffed with vintage vinyl LPs. Out of curiosity, Hunter looked through a few – Early Mötley Crüe, New York Dolls, Styx, Journey, .38 Special, Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Rush . . . Hunter smiled.
He paused and thought of something, quickly flipping through every single LP in the box. Faith No More’s album
Hunter returned to the wardrobe and retrieved another box. This one was packed full of photographs – very old ones. He grabbed a handful and started leafing through them. A new smile split his lips. Nathan Littlewood looked desperately young – late-teens maybe, several pounds lighter, with back-combed hair that went just past his shoulders. He looked like a garage-rock-band reject.
Hunter reached deeper into the box and grabbed another bunch of photographs. This time he came up with a group of wedding pictures. Littlewood was wearing an elegant dark suit, and in every photo he looked genuinely happy. The bride was about three inches shorter than he was, with eyes that made you want to stop and just stare at them for a while. She looked stunning in her wedding dress. She too seemed ecstatic.
The next bunch of photographs Hunter came up with weren’t wedding ones, though Littlewood looked just as young. Hunter had flipped through several of them when something grabbed his attention.
‘Wait a second.’ He brought the picture about half a foot from his face and squinted at it, concentrating hard, his memory racing like a computer, searching through all the images he’d seen in the past two weeks. As he finally made the connection, a rush of adrenalin found its way to every corner of his body.
Eighty-Eight
Thunder ruptured the sky one more time, making Alice jump in her seat. She didn’t like rain, and she hated tropical thunderstorms.
‘Jesus Christ.’
She clasped her hands together, brought them up to her mouth and started blowing into her thumbs as if they were a whistle. She always did that when she got scared. Something she’d started doing when she was a little girl.
Alice had spent the whole afternoon in Hunter’s office, frantically querying databases and unlocking backdoors to restricted online systems, searching for some sort of connection between the three victims. She still hadn’t found anything yet. Nor had she had any luck linking Littlewood to Ken Sands. But she’d been doing this type of work for a long time. She knew that just because she hadn’t found a connection yet, didn’t mean it didn’t exist.
Another bolt of lightning snaked through the sky and Alice shut her eyes tight, holding her breath. Lightning didn’t scare her, but she knew that after lightning there was thunder, and thunder petrified her.
The rumble of thunder followed a heartbeat later, and this one sounded reluctant to go, stretching for several seconds. There was nothing Alice could do to avoid the memories. Her eyes filled with tears.
When she was eleven years old, while visiting her grandparents in Oregon, Alice got caught in an enormous thunderstorm.