Written in Blood Read online

  Garcia, who had been copied in on the email, did the same.

  Hunter poured two cups of coffee for himself and his partner before opening the first image, titled ‘page 1’. All images had been exported in high resolution, which made them very easy to read.

  Despite having already read the first couple of pages back at the FSD lab, Hunter started from the beginning again. The rest of the entry described how the killer had put together the box in which Elizabeth Gibbs had been buried. After that, it explained how easy it had been to drug her with common crushed sleeping pills before placing her inside the makeshift box and sealing it shut.

  The entry mentioned nothing about the small camera they had found inside the box, but it went on to describe how hard she had fought once she’d been buried alive, clawing at the lid, punching it, kicking it, even biting it at times before finally losing all her hope and strength.

  According to the entry, it had taken Elizabeth Gibbs almost twenty-four hours to run out of oxygen and finally suffocate. Her last couple of hours were spent crying and praying, instead of fighting. The entry ended with a surprise, though.

  Just like with all previous subjects, this one also cried and begged for her life when I came for her. They all ask the same questions – Why? Why me? Why are you doing this to me? What have I ever done to you? It’s intriguing to observe a subject as they realize that they ARE going to die and that there’s absolutely nothing that they can do to stop it. Some will offer me their bodies. Tell me that I can do whatever I want to them, as long as I set them free afterwards. Some will tell me that they can pleasure me in ways I didn’t even know possible. Some will try to appeal to my humane side and tell me stories. Stories about their lives and how much they have already suffered in life. Some will tell me about their families . . . their parents . . . their brothers and sisters . . . their partners . . . even their pets. This subject was no different. She told me about her childhood and how she was systematically raped by her father-in-law for three years when she was just a kid. She told me how much he’d hurt her – physically and psychologically. She told me that her father-in-law tore her inside and because of that she would never be able to have children of her own. She told me how much that knowledge broke her . . . how close she had come to ending her life more than once, and that the only reason why she had never succeeded had been because of her best friend, who had become her boyfriend, and was now her fiancé. She told me that they were set to get married in eight months’ time. I’ve heard all different types of stories from all different types of subjects and I don’t blame them. People will try whatever they can to save their lives. That’s human nature. For some reason, this subject’s story stayed with me. Maybe it was the look in her eyes . . . maybe it was the deep pain in her voice, or maybe it was because she reminded me of someone I knew a long time ago. I don’t know, but I decided that I would give her a gift. I decided that in eight months’ time – on the day that she was supposed to get married – I would dress her in a wedding dress.

  Hunter stopped reading and looked up from his computer screen. As if on cue, so did Garcia.

  ‘Did you get to the part about the wedding dress?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Hunter replied.

  ‘Is that his idea of being merciful?’ Garcia continued. ‘To dress her in a wedding dress on the day that she was supposed to get married?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . maybe.’

  ‘Well, he calls it a gift. Can you believe that crap?’ He quoted. ‘“But I decided that I would give her a gift”. This guy is clearly deranged, don’t you think? He went back to dig her up, eight months after he’d buried her, to dress her up in a wedding dress . . . but for what? Just so he can feel good about himself? Did he do it to lessen his guilt?’

  Hunter didn’t reply.

  Garcia still wasn’t finished.

  ‘Can you imagine the patience?’ he carried on. ‘The perseverance? The body wouldn’t be in perfect condition. That much we know. Decay would already have started to some degree, but still, he extracted her, soft body and all, probably undressed her from her old clothes.’ He paused and lifted a hand. ‘I’m guessing that he buried her with clothes originally. Then dressed her up again in a wedding dress.’ Garcia shook his head as he considered the scenario. ‘And he probably also cleaned the inside of the coffin as well. There was no mess, remember?’

  Hunter nodded.

  ‘If those aren’t the actions of a deranged mind, then I don’t know what is.’

  ‘The best we can do is to carry on reading,’ Hunter said.

  ‘Sure,’ Garcia agreed. ‘But I need a bathroom break first.’ He got up and left the office.

  Hunter moved on to the images titled ‘page 7’ and ‘page 8’ – the second journal entry. The next ‘subject’.

  The Polaroid photo that corresponded to the entry was the same photo that Dr. Slater had sent them earlier that morning – the boy with longish blond hair and pale blue eyes that had reminded Angela of her brother.

  Hunter sipped his coffee and went back to the text. Once again, the entry contained no drawings or sketches, no page breaks, no paragraphs . . . just word after word, forming line after line in a solid block of text.

  The voices are back. I heard them late last night. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to hear them so soon. It’s only been twenty-two days since the last subject, but it seems to me that the voices are getting hungrier . . . greedier . . . and the sadism and humiliation are definitely back. Once again, the voices came to me with a very specific request – this time Male. Age: No older than eighteen and no younger than fifteen. Minimum height: five-foot six. Hair: natural blond (not dyed – very important), no specific length. Eyes: blue, any shade, but blue and only blue – not green, not brown . . . ‘BLUE’. Weight: not important. Ethnicity: white. I first believed that finding the target would’ve been a simple task, after all this is Los Angeles, the city where blondes seem to grow on trees, but as it turns out, and I should’ve known this from experience, most people aren’t really what they appear to be. Apparently, in this city, one in every five blonde women and one in every three blond men isn’t a natural blonde. Roaming the streets for an easy target, one that wouldn’t really be missed by anyone, was a pointless effort. It appears that there are no homeless white boys with blond hair and blue eyes anywhere in this city. The age bracket also made things a little harder – fifteen to eighteen years old – high school age. It took me a few days to select three possible targets. It took me twelve days (four consecutive days observing each of them) to pick the winner – Cory Snyder – a sixteen-year-old boy from Lakewood, Southeast LA. It took another four days of constant staking out before the perfect opportunity to take him finally presented itself. Date and time: March 25th 2018 – around 01:45. Location: Centralia Street, Lakewood. The subject was making his way back home from a party he had attended. The subject being highly intoxicated and high on weed made the abduction relatively easy. Photo: Late next day, after the subject had sobered up.

  Garcia came back to the office and took a seat at his desk. As he did, Hunter paused to have a look at the Polaroid once again, and his heart was filled with intense sadness. The psychological effect of humanizing a victim (putting a name to a face, identifying where the victim came from, and so on) was indeed a powerful one.

  Hunter minimized the image on his screen and called up the Missing Persons database. The result came back in under five seconds.

  Cory Snyder was born on 10 July 2001 in Los Angeles. Like the diary entry indicated, he was a resident of Lakewood, a very diverse neighborhood in Southeast LA. Cory was an only child and lived with his mother, Ms. Linda Flynn, who had reported him missing on 25 March 2018, after he failed to return home from a party at a friend’s house less than a mile away from his home. Cory’s parents were divorced, had been so since Cory was five years old. His father, Mr. Martin Snyder, lived in Palo Alto, California. Cory’s address, according to the Missing Persons report, was 5941
Elsa Street, CA 90712. Cory Snyder was still listed as missing. The investigation was still marked as open.

  Hunter quickly called up a map application on his computer and checked the boy’s address. Elsa Street was a short residential street just off of Centralia Street, the street mentioned in the diary as the location for the abduction. It seemed like Cory Snyder was just minutes away from home when he was taken.

  Hunter went back to the Missing Persons report and checked the name of the assigned detective – Winston Bradley. He knew Detective Bradley. The UVC Unit had been called in to take over a couple of his Missing Persons investigations after they’d been escalated to homicide.

  Hunter went back to the image and continued reading.

  Like I’ve said, sadism and humiliation are definitely back on the menu, because the instructions from the voices were simple – ‘Flagellation. The boy is to be stripped naked and tied up – his arms are to be stretched out above his head, with his wrists shackled together. He is to receive 25 lashes to his back and 25 lashes to his front every single day until death. The lashes are to be applied with a leather bullwhip. I want to see how long . . . how many days a pretty white boy can survive. The boy is to be hydrated and fed once a day, no more. He’s not to pass from hunger or dehydration. He must perish from the lashes. The wounds are not to be attended to. Any bleeding is not to be stopped.’ The instructions were followed exactly as the voices requested – 50 lashes every day – 25 to his back and 25 to his front. At night the subject was given food and water. My accuracy with the bullwhip wasn’t great to start with. It did get better the more I used it, but despite aiming solely for the front and back of the torso, several of the lashes were wrongly delivered to the back and front of the legs, the groin region, the neck and the face. It didn’t take long for it to become a very bloody and messy affair. The tip of a bullwhip can slice through human skin and muscle tissue with tremendous ease. Despite my initial inaccuracy, every single lash I administered violently ruptured the subject’s flesh, creating the sort of deep lacerations that would bring terror into the heart of any medic. With every lash, blood gashed out of the fresh wound like a camel’s spit, misting the air with a dark crimson cloud. Also, due to my inaccuracy, after the first few lashes, many of the subsequent whip blows hit directly over an existing wound, either cutting across it or deepening the lesion almost to the bone. At times, entire chunks of flesh flew up before dropping to the ground. Understandably, throughout his ordeal, the subject passed out innumerable times, during which I would stop and wait for him to naturally regain consciousness before continuing from where I had left off. In answer to the voices’ question – and to my surprise – the subject lasted a total of 241 lashes. The subject perished on the fifth day.

  Twenty-Six

  ‘Jesus!’ Garcia gasped from his desk, as if he and Hunter were reading in synchronicity. ‘Have you read the second entry yet? The second victim?’

  ‘I’m just getting to the end of it now,’ Hunter replied, lifting his hand at his partner to signal that he was almost there. That was when he realized that the hairs on his arms were standing on end and his heart was beating faster than minutes earlier.

  I saw no point in placing the subject inside a casket. Decomposition works much faster when the body is in direct contact with soil. Let the earth take what was left of him. 34°11'48.1"N 118°17'38.3"W.

  Hunter minimized the page image and quickly brought back his map application. After entering the longitude and latitude coordinates into the search box, the map on his screen navigated to Burbank, an incorporated city twelve miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles; more specifically, it zoomed in on another isolated cluster of trees by Skyline Mountain Way, not that far from Deer Canyon.

  As Hunter studied the map, the rush of adrenaline that inundated his veins made his hands shake.

  Garcia pushed his chair away from his desk and got to his feet. ‘He whipped the boy until he died?’ His tone was half disbelief, half anger. ‘What the actual fuck?’ He began pacing in front of his desk. ‘And all because a voice in his head told him to?’ He shook his head in total disgust. ‘This is sick . . . and completely fucking nuts.’

  Hunter also pushed his chair away from his desk, but stayed seated, the expression on his face thoughtful and solemn at the same time.

  Garcia checked his watch – 5:51 p.m.

  ‘So what do you want to do?’ he asked, quickly studying the map application that he too had opened on his computer screen. ‘Do you want to take a trip to Burbank and engage in another digging expedition?’

  In December, the average sunset time in LA was around 4:45 p.m.

  ‘If we start now,’ Hunter said, with a shake of the head, ‘we won’t be done before ten, maybe even midnight.’

  Garcia breathed out in relief. He wasn’t too keen on spending another evening shoveling soil.

  ‘This is also now an official investigation,’ Hunter added.

  Garcia smiled. ‘Which means that we can put in a request for a professional digging operation to start first thing in the morning. We don’t need to do any of it ourselves.’

  Hunter agreed with a simple head gesture. ‘I will put in a request for a new digging crew for tomorrow morning, first thing.’

  After a couple of phone calls, Hunter pulled himself back to his desk and once again maximized the page images.

  Garcia noticed the way that Hunter was pinching his bottom lip, something that he did when deep in thought.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Garcia asked.

  ‘This is just . . . odd,’ Hunter replied, his stare glued to his computer screen.

  ‘Odd is a massive understatement, Robert,’ Garcia disagreed. ‘This guy is well and truly fucked up.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the perpetrator,’ Hunter said. ‘I’m talking about the voices he hears.’

  ‘What?’ Garcia queried. ‘Why? What about them?’

  ‘Contrary to what a lot of people might believe,’ Hunter began, ‘schizophrenics aren’t usually violent. Only a very small number of people struggling with such illness may become violent, and eight out of ten times, that violence is directed toward themselves, not others. The cases where someone who suffers from schizophrenia will turn violent against someone else, driven by voices inside their heads, are very few and far between.’

  ‘Yes,’ Garcia interrupted Hunter. ‘But they do exist and this is clearly one of those cases.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not arguing that,’ Hunter agreed. ‘What I’m getting at is that the voices that people with schizophrenia hear don’t normally come from a total disconnect to their lives. They usually have firm roots in real-life events experienced by that person, especially when the voices are commanding the subject to be violent toward others.’

  Garcia’s eyes squinted just a little, as he scratched his chin. ‘Could you simplify that some? I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to say.’

  ‘The orders from the voices,’ Hunter tried to clarify. ‘The tremendous specificity of it – age, height, hair color, eye color, ethnicity . . . everything, not to mention the orders regarding the punishment – specific number of lashes to the front and the back of the victim and so on.’ Hunter paused and looked at his partner. ‘Now let me put this to you – pretend that we know nothing about this killer . . . that we don’t have his diary . . . If we turned up at a crime scene and this was what we found – a white boy of seventeen years of age, blond hair, blue eyes. Stripped naked – tied up with his arms above his head, who had been whipped to death . . . What would be the first thing to come to your mind?’

  Garcia stopped his pacing and locked eyes with Hunter.

  ‘Straight off the bat,’ Hunter insisted. ‘What would be your first intuition about the scene?’

  Garcia squared his shoulders. ‘That the perpetrator had a huge beef with the victim and wanted to punish him. That would justify the torture . . . the flagellation.’

  ‘Right,’ Hunter accepted it. ‘So now let’s mov
e this up a step. Let’s say that we just found the perpetrator’s diary and we now know that there’s no personal connection whatsoever between the killer and the victim. So the initial huge-beef theory is out.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘But we still have the same victim and the same torturous crime scene – the flagellation of a young man.’ Hunter sat back on his chair. ‘So, now that we know there was no personal connection between the victim and the killer, what new conclusions would spring to mind?’

  Garcia leaned against the edge of his desk, considering Hunter’s question. ‘That the perpetrator’s beef wasn’t specific to an individual,’ he finally replied. ‘But generic . . . to a certain group or type of individuals.’

  Hunter pointed his right index finger at Garcia, indicating that he had hit the nail on the head. ‘Exactly. That group or type of individual being . . . young, white, blond-haired and blue-eyed, right?’

  Garcia nodded.

  ‘Which sounds like . . .?’

  ‘A very racist grudge,’ Garcia said, starting to jump on board with Hunter.

  ‘Right again,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘And this will take us back to what I was saying earlier – that the voices that people who suffer from schizophrenia hear don’t normally come from a total disconnect to their lives. They usually have firm roots in real-life events experienced by that person, especially when the voices are commanding the subject to be violent toward others.’

  ‘So what you’re suggesting here is,’ Garcia concluded, ‘that sometime in this killer’s life, presumably when he was young, he was either abused, or hurt, or humiliated, or whatever, by a young, white, blond-haired, blue-eyed boy of around seventeen years of age, and that that trauma manifested itself in the form of schizophrenic voices inside his head. Voices that are now commanding him not only to find someone who resembles the kid who traumatized him, but to also torture, mutilate and kill the boy.’