Olivia, Derek Nicholson’s oldest daughter, had finally moved from behind the metal chair. She was dressed all in black, wearing a jumpsuit made of some impermeable material zipped up to her neck. She pulled the jumpsuit’s hood back from her head, and Hunter saw she was wearing a black, silicone swimmer’s cap. Her shoes looked a couple of sizes too big for her feet. Hunter remembered what the lead forensics agent had said about the shoeprints found at the second crime-scene, Nashorn’s boat – that the distribution of weight from each step seemed to be unequal. That suggested that the killer either walked with a limp, or had deliberately worn the wrong-sized shoes. She was still holding the electric knife in her hand.
‘You really had me convinced,’ Hunter said, remembering the first day he saw her in her father’s house. ‘The way you acted . . . the tears . . . the uncontrollable shivering . . . the despair in your voice . . . I bought it all.’
Olivia didn’t even flinch. ‘So, how did you do it?’ she asked again.
Hunter swallowed. He would gain every second he could. ‘A friend of your mother’s,’ he said, and saw those words hit Olivia like a whip.
She paused, anger and sadness slushing around inside her eyes. She took a moment to compose herself. ‘Which friend?’
‘Someone she knew. I don’t have a real name. She called herself Jude.’
‘What did she tell you?’
Hunter coughed. ‘Nothing much.’
Olivia waited but Hunter said nothing else. ‘You better carry on talking or I will start cutting.’
‘She came to talk to us about the victims. Your victims.’
‘What about them?’
‘She was beat up by them, as a group. Just like your mother.’
Hunter saw rage recolor Olivia’s face. Her burning eyes focused on Scott, who was listening attentively, but still looked frightened and in tremendous pain.
‘We did figure out the shadow images,’ Hunter quickly added, trying to force her attention back to him. ‘But we read them wrong . . . partially wrong.’
It worked. Olivia turned and faced Hunter again.
‘It took us a little while, but we figured out the meaning behind the coyote and the raven. You were telling us that your father was a liar.’
‘He wasn’t my father,’ she spat out in disgust.
‘OK,’ Hunter said. ‘I’m sorry. You were telling us that Derek Nicholson was a betrayer, a liar,’ he corrected himself.
‘He was.’ Her voice quivered with anger. ‘I was three years old when my mother died. I was lied to for twenty-eight years. Tricked like a little dog to believe a lie.’
‘I’m so sorry for that,’ Hunter said and paused for a moment. His strained neck was starting to hurt. ‘But it took us forever to figure out that what you were doing was telling us a story, scene by scene, like in a puppet theater.’
Scott looked confused.
Olivia said nothing.
‘But we read your second sculpture and its shadow image wrong,’ Hunter continued. ‘We went through tens of interpretations, and in the end I was convinced that you were showing us a fight scene. A group of guys who used to hang out together, get drunk and high together. One day they got into a fight, things got out of hand and someone died. We also concluded that you were telling us that Andrew Nashorn was the group leader.’
‘He was a scumbag,’ Olivia said.
‘But it wasn’t a fight scene you were showing us, was it?’ Hunter said. ‘You weren’t showing us two people fighting on the floor, with the rest of the group watching. You were showing us a rape scene, with the rest of the group watching.’
‘They didn’t watch. They took turns.’ There was a glow burning in her eyes, like a storm building.
‘She was a street hooker.’ Scott had finally found enough strength to say something. ‘Andy picked her up on a dark corner on Sunset Strip. She was looking for it. That was what she did. She fucked people for a living. How was that rape?’
Olivia turned so fast she almost became a blur, and slammed her closed fist into Scott’s jaw, rupturing his lower lip and sending a spray of blood across the room.
‘You don’t get to speak until I tell you to, you sack of shit.’
Hunter twitched on the floor.
‘And you better not move until I tell you to.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
The moment was tensing up.
‘I’m listening,’ Olivia said. ‘How did you figure out it was a rape scene?’