The room went silent for a moment.
‘OK, let’s get a photograph of this,’ Brindle finally said, addressing Dylan. ‘I also need some lift film. Let’s see how much of a print we can obtain here.’
Hunter stood up and slowly allowed his eyes to move along the panoramic glass wall in front of him.
‘Actually we better dust just about everything here,’ he said. ‘The killer might’ve been hiding and waiting for a while.’ He leaned forward a few inches, his nose almost touching the glass wall, as if searching for a smudge mark. ‘Maybe he leaned against the glass. Maybe he left someth—’
Hunter froze. The word dying in his throat.
‘What?’ Garcia asked, pausing just behind his partner and trying to look over his shoulder, but he had no idea what he was looking at. He thought Hunter had seen something through the window, out back.
Hunter blew another warm breath against the glass, this time a long, purposeful one, moving his head around to deliver the breath against a wider area. The glass misted for just a few seconds.
That was when Garcia finally saw it.
‘You have
LA Times
Pamela Hays sat at her corner desk, undistracted by the noise and oblivious to the chaos of movement around her. She was the
Bruce Kosinski, a larger-than-life man in more than one way, and at that time the city editor at the entertainment desk, was the first to give Pamela a shot at trying her hand at a ‘real’ story. She did well. Very well, in fact. Her research had been second to none, and the story made the front page of the paper. Two years ago, Bruce Kosinski was appointed as chief editor for the
It’s true that Pamela did sleep with Bruce, but she knew that that wasn’t the reason why she was offered the entertainment desk’s editor’s position. The way she saw it, she had more than earned it.
Pamela finished editing another article on her list, rolled her chair back from her desk and stretched her stiff neck.
‘Where the hell is Marco?’ she asked out loud to no one in particular. She got no answer.
Unlike most of the other section editors at the
She checked the clock on the wall.
‘Goddamn it, he’s got less than twenty minutes to get his article to me. If he’s late again, I’m firing his ass. I’ve had it with his crap.’
‘What the hell?’ Pedro, the reporter whose desk was just opposite Pamela’s, said, frowning at his computer screen. ‘Pam, is Christina doing extra work as an actress?’ he asked.
Pamela looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. ‘What the hell are you
‘Come have a look at this,’ Pedro called. There was no play in his voice.
Pamela got up and made her way around to Pedro’s desk.
‘I was just checking a few things on the net,’ Pedro said, ‘when I came across this article.’ He pointed to his screen.
It was a short article named ‘Reality or Hoax?’ The title didn’t catch Pamela’s attention, but the small picture under the headline did – a woman lying inside some sort of glass enclosure with hundreds of very scary black insects swarming around her body. Despite the bad quality of the picture, her face was clearly visible, including the small black mole just below her bottom lip.
Pamela felt her blood almost freeze inside her veins. As she read the article, the color drained from her already naturally pale face.
There was no doubt in her mind. The woman in that picture was Christina Stevenson.
And whatever that was, it was no hoax.
It didn’t.
He forced himself to stop thinking before his brain went into complete meltdown. He got ready and made his way to the twenty-four-hour gym just three blocks from where he lived. A heavy workout always had a way of clearing his head.
Almost two hours later, after a hot shower, he headed out to the PAB.
Garcia had just arrived when Hunter got to his office. Captain Blake followed just seconds later.
‘Brace yourselves,’ she said, allowing the door to close behind her with a
LA Times
The last picture showed her with a still, cold stare, her body all covered in red-raw lumps and black wasps, her lips swollen and bleeding.
The life had been stung out of her.
The headline at the top of the pictures read DEATHNET KILLER BROADCASTS BARBARIC EXECUTION LIVE ONLINE.
Garcia started skimming over the article. It confirmed that the broadcast appeared to have been real, not a hoax. It described what had happened, but not in great detail. There was also no mention of Christina’s body being found.
Hunter leaned back against his desk. He didn’t seem interested in what the paper had to say.
‘I thought the FBI had told you that this video was off the net,’ Captain Blake said. ‘How the
LA Times has enough resources and people on their payroll to be able to track the video down.’