One by One (Роберт Хантер 5 Поодиночке) - Carter Chris (2) - Страница 55

Seventy-Two

Thick leather cuffs had been firmly strapped around the man’s wrists and ankles. Those cuffs were, in turn, attached to the ends of four sturdy-looking metal chains, which were then connected to mechanical rollers. The entire device looked just like an improvised but updated version of the rack, one of the most sadistic medieval torture apparatuses ever created, used to slowly stretch a person’s limbs until they were ripped from the body.

Inside Hunter’s office, they could hear a pin drop.

‘From the silence I hear,’ the caller’s voice came blasting through the phone’s loudspeakers, ‘I assume you are starting to get the picture.’ He laughed a cartoon dog laugh.

Again, no reply from either detective.

‘But that picture isn’t complete yet,’ the caller continued. ‘So let me remedy that for you.’

The camera started to slowly pan upward, toward the ceiling.

All of a sudden Hunter’s office door was pushed open in a hurry and Captain Blake stepped inside. The look on her face was a cocktail of anger, disbelief and dread.

‘Are you watching this . . .’ she began, but Hunter lifted a hand, stopping her, and gesturing toward the speakerphone on his desk.

Too late.

‘Well, well, well,’ the caller said, amused. ‘So who might we have joining us now . . .?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘By the angry tone of her voice, I’m guessing – the Robbery Homicide Division Captain herself. Barbara Blake, is the name correct?’

Captain Blake knew that the killer could’ve easily gotten her name from the LAPD’s official website.

‘Welcome to pickadeath.com, Captain. Glad you can join us today. The more the merrier.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ she said, her words swimming in anger.

Hunter glared at the captain. Rule number one of any negotiations with any sort of perpetrator – one negotiator only, unless the offender has requested otherwise. Any more, and the negotiation could easily be exposed to confusion, which might in turn frustrate and anger the perpetrator, causing the entire process to collapse.

‘Why am I doing this?’ the caller repeated derisively. ‘Are you asking me to do your job for you, Captain Blake?’

Hunter gave her a subtle headshake.

The captain stayed quiet.

The camera carried on panning upward.

Hunter frowned at the screen again, intrigued by something. The first thing he realized was that the location was different from the one used for the broadcast of the two previous victims. There was no brick wall at the back, and the room seemed larger, much larger. Then something else caught his attention – the camera movement. It took him a few seconds to figure out why. He looked at Garcia and mouthed a few words.

Garcia failed to understand them, shook his head and moved closer.

‘It’s a remote-controlled camera.’ Hunter whispered it this time.

‘What?’ Garcia and Captain Blake looked uncertain.

Hunter pressed the ‘mute’ button on his phone. ‘The way the camera is zooming and panning around the place,’ Hunter explained. ‘It’s too slow, too steady. You try doing that by hand, and there’s no way you’ll get such a smooth and constant movement.’

Garcia and Captain Blake looked back at the screen.

‘He’s controlling it remotely,’ Hunter said. ‘He might not even be there.’

‘So?’ Captain Blake shot back. ‘What difference does it make?’

Hunter shrugged.

On the screen the camera’s panning came to a stop, and everyone inside Hunter’s office went rigid. Suspended several feet directly above the victim and the makeshift medieval torture device was a man-made concrete slab. It looked to be around one and a half foot thick, four foot wide and about six and a half foot long. The rock easily weighed over a ton. It was being held in place by very thick chains attached to ten metal hooks that had been built into the top surface of the slab. They couldn’t see what the chains were connected to at the very top.

‘I guess the picture is now complete,’ the caller said with a chuckle. ‘But the beauty of what I’ve created here is . . . I don’t have to crush him all at once. I am able to slowly lower that concrete rock onto the table, gently compressing his body, like a giant vise, until every bone is crushed.’

Hunter knew there would be a twist. The rack was originally a medieval torture device, not an execution one. Its main purpose was to slowly stretch a person’s limbs to obtain a confession or to extract information. The pain it caused was so severe that a confession would usually come very quickly, and the stretching would stop after only a few seconds. But if the rollers weren’t stopped, the body would eventually be dismembered – usually the arms would be ripped from the person’s torso. Death would soon follow from blood loss. But the victim would suffer tremendously before dying. Crushing someone to death with a huge concrete block, when compared to using a torture device like the rack, was relatively painless, and very, very fast. This killer simply wouldn’t allow that to happen.

‘You sonofabitch,’ Captain Blake blasted out, not caring for protocol or rules anymore.

The caller’s response was a laugh full of joy. ‘I guess it’s time we start the show. Enjoy.’

The line went dead.

On the screen both voting buttons were activated, and at the bottom left-hand corner a digital clock started its countdown – 10:00, 9:59, 9:58 . . .

Seventy-Three

Inside the Office of Operations on the first floor of the Police Administration Building, Desiree and Seth were glued to their computer monitors, watching the events unfold on pickadeath.com. They, together with everyone else on their floor, could barely believe their eyes.

‘Sweet Lord and His Creation!’ Desiree said, crossing herself and kissing the tiny golden crucifix on the chain around her neck. ‘He wants people to vote if he should crush that poor man to death or rip his arms and legs from his body like an insect?’

‘Ten thousand votes in ten minutes?’ Seth replied. ‘That’s a lot of votes when you consider that not every vote will go to the same death method.’

‘So you think that if time runs out,’ Desiree came back, ‘and he doesn’t get ten thousand votes, this killer will keep his word and just let this guy go?’

Seth simply shrugged.

Watching the events unfold on their computer monitors wasn’t the only thing Seth and Desiree were doing. They were also the ones in charge of recording and tracking the killer’s call to Hunter’s desk.

The first thing they found out was that the call was coming from a cellphone. Immediately they used an application to query the service provider for the phone’s GPS coordinates.

Nothing.

No GPS.

The caller was either using an old phone or had deactivated the GPS chip.

Instantly Desiree and Seth moved onto cellphone triangulation, a much more cumbersome and laborious process that usually took several minutes and depended on two main factors. One, the phone must stay active during the whole process. If the caller came off the phone and switched it off, the triangulation procedure failed. Two, the phone must stay inside the same triangulation zone. If the caller was mobile and happened to move out of range of any one of the three triangulating towers, the process collapsed and it had to be started again from scratch.

But so far, so good.