‘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
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.