‘But as I said,’ Hunter massaged the back of his neck, ‘at the moment this is all just a crazy theory in my head. I have no proof of anything yet.’
‘Crazy or not, all the pieces seem to slot into place,’ Captain Blake said, returning her attention to the images on the board. ‘And that would also explain why our killer is dismembering his victims. It’s payback time – an eye for an eye – blood in, blood out.’
She paused for a brief moment while she worked things out in her head. It’d been sixteen days since the first murder, and as things stood, she was inclined to claw at any reasonable possibility. She also hated working with the FBI.
‘OK, it’s plausible, and it makes more sense than anything else we’ve got so far. Let’s go with it. Let’s get a team digging into our three victims’ past. If that group of friends really existed, I want to know who that fourth person was. If you need to get in touch with the FBI to dig deeper, do it. I don’t like them any more than you do, but they have resources that we don’t, and they can get access to things a lot faster than we can. Tell the team already digging into Derek Nicholson’s life to dig harder. We need to find out who visited him by his deathbed. Talk to his nurses again. And let’s get one last team looking into any cases where the victim was found chopped to pieces inside a box, a container, a matchbox, anything. I know there’s a possibility that the body was never found in the first place, but if it was found, and if you are right,’ she addressed Hunter, ‘we identify that victim, we identity our Sculptor killer.’
One Hundred
The next twenty-four hours went by in a blur. Everyone was working as fast and as hard as they could, but so far very little progress had been made.
With her experience in navigating databases, Alice had volunteered to run the searches for bodies found chopped to pieces inside any sort of container, but she hit a wall almost immediately. Her expertise was in the digital world. If any records were stored anywhere online, she would no doubt get to them. But when you’re searching for something that dates back years before the use of digital databases, it all becomes a lottery. If some underpaid clerk had, at some point, been given the mind-numbing task of transposing that information from paper to digital, then Alice knew she would find it. But if that information was still packed away inside a dark archive room somewhere, that was exactly where it would stay. Realistically, due to budgeting and a lack of staff, most government organizations would never manage to completely digitize their backlog of paper files.
Hunter and Garcia went back to Amy Dawson’s house – Derek Nicholson’s weekday nurse. She had seen the newspapers front pages and the photographs of all three victims. She couldn’t understand why a serial killer would go after Mr. Nicholson.
Hunter revisited the subject of Derek Nicholson wanting to make peace with God and tell someone the truth about something, but Amy told him that that had been all he’d said. He’d never mentioned anything else or any names. She had no idea what truth he had referred to, and she remembered nothing new about the second person who’d visited Mr. Nicholson that day.
Speaking to Melinda Wallis, Nicholson’s weekend nurse and the person who had found his body that morning, was a much more delicate affair. Since the murder, she had moved back into her parents’ house in La Habra Heights, a rural canyon community located on the border of Orange and Los Angeles Counties. Even with Hunter’s experience, interviewing her proved almost impossible. The trauma caused by what she had seen in that room, and the knowledge that she’d been a breath away from a ruthless killer, and the bloody message he had left on the wall specifically for her, had spread its roots deep into her conscious and subconscious mind. Even with years of psychotherapy, which her family couldn’t afford, she would never be the same person again. Sadly, Melinda had become another victim of the Sculptor.
One Hundred and One
Before returning to the PAB, Hunter and Garcia had one more stop – Allison Nicholson’s apartment in Pico-Robertson, just south of Beverly Hills.
Derek Nicholson’s youngest daughter lived in a luxurious two-bedroom apartment in the much sought-after Hillcrest development, adjacent to the famous Hillcrest Country Club. Hunter had contacted both of Nicholson’s daughters by phone earlier in the day. They’d arranged to meet at 7:15 p.m. at Allison’s apartment.