‘As Garcia said, the inkblots are exactly that, blots, smudges with no real shape. What the killer has given us has perfect shape. A coyote and a raven on the first one, and though we’re still not entirely sure of the meaning of the second image, it certainly isn’t a shapeless blot.’
‘OK, I’ll go with that, but it still comes down to interpretation, doesn’t it? What we think we can see,’ Alice countered. ‘Most people would never have known that, mythologically, a coyote and a raven together mean a betrayer, a liar.’
‘We didn’t know that either,’ Hunter said. ‘Until you looked it up, remember? To a certain extent, most images are open to interpretation. The way someone looks at a piece of art might well be very different from what the artist intended.’
‘That isn’t art, Robert.’ Alice pointed at the replica sculpture.
‘To us it isn’t, but to the killer . . . ?’ He left the sentence hanging in the air for a second. ‘It’s his work, his creation, his art, gruesome or not. And I bet you he saw something completely different from what we are seeing when he put that thing together. Different frame of mind makes you see different things.’
Alice stared at the sculpture. ‘Different frame of mind?’
Hunter stood up and approached the pictures board. ‘Interpretation is directly related to a person’s frame of mind. Looking at the same image, a person could see two completely different things depending on the mood that person is in at the time. And that’s the problem with the Rorschach test.’
‘How can the same person see two different things?’ Alice’s gaze had moved to the shadow photograph pinned to the board. ‘Every time I look at that, I see exactly the same thing – a devil figure looking down at what might possibly be his victims.’
‘Then you’re not keeping your options open,’ Hunter came back. ‘Look, let’s say you have a shapeless image that resembles a face with its mouth wide open. You then show it to someone who, at that moment in time, is feeling happy. That person might interpret that image as someone laughing out loud.’
Garcia immediately caught on. ‘But if that same person were in a darker frame of mind for some reason, that same image could be seen as someone screaming in agony.’
‘Correct. Your mood alters your outlook. And that’s always been the biggest argument against the Rorschach test. Many say that it measures a subject’s frame of mind at that point in time more than anything else. But I agree with you, Alice. Whatever the meanings behind those images are,’ Hunter pointed to the shadow photograph. ‘It has all to do with how
Sixty-Seven
She had been jittery all night, needing a hit more than she needed food. Regina Campos didn’t care what kind of drug she took, she just needed to get high on something – anything. She had no money, but that wasn’t too much of a problem. She knew exactly what to do to get her fix. By the age of sixteen, Regina had already learnt that any man would melt like butter if you knew what to do to him in bed.
Regina was only eighteen, and if you asked the few people who knew her, they’d probably describe her as average. She was of average height, with an average body and average looks. In a crowd, no one would give her a second glance. Her hair was neither long nor short, and in high school she’d been an average student, until she dropped out. But she was charming, and she sure knew how to get what she wanted out of people.
Regina had had a string of good-for-nothing lovers and casual encounters. Actually, they were good-for-one-thing lovers – drugs. Her newest good-for-one-thing lover, if she could even call him a lover, was a slob, an ex-convict, who lived in a housing project in Bell Gardens. He was overweight, had the stamina of a 90-year-old man in bed, and got his kicks by wearing women’s panties. Regina couldn’t give a dry spit for how he got turned on. All she knew was that he could get her drugs.
She’d called him late last night, desperate, but he told her over the phone he wouldn’t be in all night. She could come over in the morning if she wanted to.
It had been a long night of waiting for Regina.
She took the stairs up to the third floor like a marathon runner. By now she was so frantic for a hit she was grinding her teeth like a bunny. She didn’t even think twice about the fact that the door to apartment 311 was unlocked, although her lover never left his door unlocked.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside the smelly apartment.
‘Hello, babe,’ she croaked. She’d been smoking so much crack lately it’d started damaging her vocal cords.
There was no response.