‘This is the most recent picture we have of him,’ Hunter explained. He knew Sands had created that look deliberately. A lot of inmates serving medium to long sentences had a similar appearance. It was a common trick to stop the system from having an accurate, recent picture of them. The long hair and the bushy beard would be gone within an hour of their release. ‘I’m sure he won’t have so much hair around his face anymore.’ Hunter showed her one more picture – Sands’s arrest mugshot. ‘This is what he looked like ten years ago.’
Amy took the picture from Hunter’s hands. She kept her eyes on them for a long instant.
Hunter went quiet, allowing her to study it for as long as she needed to.
‘It could’ve been him,’ Amy finally said.
Hunter felt a tingle of electricity run through him.
‘But of course, I can’t be sure. The man who visited Mr. Nicholson that day didn’t have no beard or long hair. He was dressed in a suit and all.’
‘I understand.’
Amy’s stare never left the printout in her hands. ‘But it could’ve been him.’
Fifty
The blood had coagulated and dried onto the floor and walls, and as the red blood cells died and started to decompose, the odd, metallic smell had faded, giving way to a much stronger odor – something like rotten meat mixed with sour milk. Many who’d been to a brutal crime scene would argue that that was exactly what a violent death smelled like.
Hunter paused by the door to Nashorn’s boat cabin once again. Revisiting crime scenes, alone, in the dead of night, had become almost an obsession with him. It gave him a chance to look around uninterrupted, to take his time, to try, if only for a split second, to adopt the same frame of mind as the killer. But how could anyone make sense of the senseless?
Hunter had read and reread the forensic team’s crime-scene report. The many shoeprints he’d seen around the cabin’s floor the day before were very inconsistent and couldn’t be matched to a specific shoe size. There was so much blood covering the floor that, as soon as the killer moved his foot, more blood seeped back to obscure its outline. That made the forensics analysis a lot more difficult. Mike Brindle, the forensics agent who led the team that attended the scene, told Hunter earlier in the day that he’d found something odd about the shoeprints. The distribution of weight from each step seemed to be unequal. That suggested that the killer either walked with an asymmetric abnormality – as if he had a limp, or had deliberately worn wrong-sized shoes. It was a trick that Hunter had encountered before. Forensics couldn’t identify a sole pattern, either, which suggested that the killer had covered his shoes with a thick plastic cover, or something on those lines. That would also explain the lack of bloody footprints outside the cabin.
Brindle had assured Hunter that his team had left the cabin in the exact same state in which they’d found it. The objects that had been removed for forensic examination had been listed in the document Hunter had with him. Everything else was left in its place.
Hunter zipped up his Tyvek coverall and stepped into the cabin. He wasn’t worried about contaminating the scene; he just didn’t want his shoes and clothes to get smeared with blood, or drenched in that sickening smell. He knew that when that smell found its way into any fabric, no amount of washing or dry cleaning would get rid of it. It was a psychological thing. The brain would associate the clothes with the smell, even after the smell was long gone.
He paused in the center of the room and slowly allowed his eyes to roam the space around him.
The cabin door showed no signs of forced entry, though picking the two locks on it wouldn’t pose a great obstacle to anyone with experience.
Hunter went over most of the same movements he and Garcia had gone through the day before, making sure he hadn’t missed anything. He walked over to the small fridge and pulled its door open. It had been well stocked – several bottles of water, cheese, cold meats and plenty of beer. He rechecked the trashcan – a candy-bar wrapper and an empty bag of beef jerky. No beer cans. No glasses out in the small kitchen either. If Nashorn had invited anyone on board just before sailing off for two weeks, it probably hadn’t been to shoot the breeze.
Garcia had suggested earlier that maybe the killer had approached Nashorn outside the boat first with some sort of weapon, forcing him to open the door before striking him across the face. Given both crime scenes, and Doctor Hove’s conclusion that the killer’s weapon of choice had been an electric kitchen carving knife, Hunter found that theory very unlikely. This killer didn’t like firearms.