The bathroom was empty.
They had cleared the whole second floor of the house in less than twenty-two seconds.
‘We’re all clear up here, Captain,’ Davis called down. ‘The psycho ain’t upstairs.’
One Hundred and Four
Team Gamma had followed team Alpha into the house, crossed the living room, and as team Alpha turned left into the dining room once they reached the corridor downstairs, team Gamma veered right. The door that led down into the basement was locked with a military-grade padlock.
‘We need to blast the basement door open,’ agent Turkowski said into his mike, alerting the other teams that a loud blast was coming.
‘I’m on it,’ agent Lopez, the second half of Gamma team, replied, readying the breaching shotgun he had strapped to his back.
Turkowski took a step back and held fast. ‘Do it.’
BOOM.
The loud blast sent shock waves throughout the house.
The padlock disintegrated.
Turkowski kicked the door open, and they were immediately slapped across the face by a breath of musty, stale-smelling air. It had a fetid and sickly quality to it, aged and filthy, charred by the daily Californian heat. Despite the obnoxious odor, neither agent even blinked.
Wide wooden steps led down to the pitch-black basement.
‘Lights, lights,’ Turkowski called without lowering his MP5, his laser sight searching for a target at the bottom of the stairs, but finding nothing.
‘I’ve got it,’ Lopez replied, reaching for the thin light-switch cord that hung from the ceiling.
The light was terribly weak.
Crude brick walls ran against both sides of the staircase, creating an oppressing and claustrophobic down-running corridor.
‘I’ve got a real bad feeling about this,’ Turkowski said, as he and Lopez quickly took the stairs down in cover formation.
The steps were sturdy, but almost every one of them creaked under the strain of their weight. They cleared the last step and entered the dimly lit, wide-open basement room, their breathing labored, their laser sights doing a crazy crisscross dance everywhere, looking for the slightest sign of a threat, before finally homing in on the west end of the hall.
‘Holy shit!’ Lopez breathed out before radioing in. ‘Basement is clear. Psycho ain’t down here either.’ He paused for a gulp of putrid air. ‘But I guess you’re going to want to see this, Captain. And so will the homicide detectives.’
One Hundred and Five
Graham Fisher waited patiently for the red light to turn green before turning right onto East 4th Street in Boyle Heights. The traffic was as slow as it’d always been at that time in the morning, trickling through like water through a funnel. A few seconds later he hung a left onto South St Louis Street, and as he did so he tensed. About seventy-five yards ahead, just at the bottom of the hilly street he lived on, he could see a cluster of seven vehicles hastily parked; two of them were LAPD black and white cruisers. Gathered in a tight group by the first vehicle was a crowd of law-enforcement agents.
Graham immediately reduced his speed, but not in a panicky way, and signaled a left turn onto the next street along. He calmly parked by the first house on the right before reaching inside his glove compartment for his sunglasses. Pushing his baseball cap low over his forehead, he exited his car and leisurely walked up to the top of the road, where a white van was parked. Using the van for cover, he peeked at the cluster of vehicles and at the tightly gathered crowd of agents at the bottom of his street.
The first person he recognized was Detective Robert Hunter. The second was Detective Carlos Garcia. Together with them Graham saw an eight-men-strong SWAT team, two females, four other intimidating-looking males and four uniformed police officers. Twenty people in total. They all looked to be heavily armed. They were clearly getting ready for a surprise assault, and Graham had no doubt which house they’d be storming into in the next few seconds.
Graham knew that this day was coming. In fact, he was expecting it. He just wasn’t expecting it so soon, at least not before he was done.
With his eyes still fixed on the group, Graham’s mind started going over his plan once again. It was still perfect, he decided. The only difference was that he now needed to speed things up, move things forward a little, and improvise, at least a little bit. But that would be no problem. He knew exactly what to do.
As he returned to his car, Graham broke into a slightly manic giggle, a high-pitched sound that joined nervousness and joy all at once.
‘Let’s see how prepared you are for what’s coming to you, Detective Hunter,’ he said to himself, trembling with excitement, before jumping back into his car and driving away.
One Hundred and Six
Hunter, Garcia, Captain Blake and Michelle Kelly all wrinkled their noses at the sickening smell that hit them as they started down the wooden steps that took them to Graham Fisher’s basement. None of them could explain the strange feeling they got as they entered the house. As if they were all stepping into a house of horrors, where pain, fear and suffering were as much a part of it as its walls.
As they reached the basement floor, they all stopped dead. It was a large and damp room, surrounded by bare brick walls. There was a single glowing yellowish light bulb encased in a wire screen at the center of the ceiling. Its weak light struggled to illuminate the room, while at the same time casting shadows just about everywhere. The floor was made of concrete, and it was covered in stains, some new, some old and some larger than others.
Pushed up against the east wall was a long wooden worktable. On it, electronic components such as circuit boards, decoder modules, capacitors, potentiometers, microprocessors and oscilloscopes. A few blueprints had been matter-of-factly pushed to one end of the worktable. On the northeast corner of the room they found a large handmade tools cabinet, housing an impressive collection of tools, including several special glass-cutting drills and saws. But not every space or hook was taken. Some of the tools seemed to be missing.
The southeast corner of the room was taken by a smaller worktable with a vise at one end and a multipurpose table saw at the other. Placed next to the table was a large, faded green, chest fridge. But what made the hairs on the back of everyone’s neck stand on end was what was at the opposite end of the room, against the west wall – something that all four of them had stared at and tried to analyze for hours on end on their computer screens.
Mounted near the left corner was the glass enclosure the killer had used to soak Kevin Lee Parker into his deadly alkaline bath. The heavy metal chair he’d been tied to was still there, right at the center of the enclosure, bolted to the crude concrete floor. A large gas canister had been placed on either side of the glass cage. They were connected to the two metal pipes sprinkled with holes on the inside of the enclosure via two thick, fire-resistant tubes.
‘Fire or water,’
the killer had said.
‘Burned alive or drowned.’
The images came back to Hunter in a hurricane of memories.
The metal pipes could either fill the enclosure with water or fire. The house’s water system was connected to them at the top.
Hunter knew he had been tricked into choosing water that day; nevertheless, Graham Fisher had been prepared to burn his victim alive in case he had misjudged Hunter.
Next to the gas canisters were two fifteen-liter barrels of industrial-grade NaOH – sodium hydroxide. They were also connected to the metal pipes via thick, chemical-resistant tubes.
By the other corner of the west wall, mounted onto a surgical-looking metal table, was the glass coffin the killer had used for Christina Stevenson. As Garcia’s eyes settled on it, he shivered and took two steps back, feeling an awkward panic start to gain momentum at the bottom of his stomach. Inside the glass coffin were hundreds of dead tarantula hawks.
Hunter sensed his partner’s hesitation and gave him a subtle headshake before whispering, ‘They’re all dead.’
Still, the sight of it was enough for Garcia’s memory to send him back to the day he was stung by four tarantula hawks. The day he almost died.
He took a series of steady deep breaths, fought the shiver that threatened to run down his spine and felt his heartbeat slowly return to normal. But he wasn’t the only one feeling uneasy down in that basement.
Two people had been sadistically tortured and murdered in that dark and damp room. The instruments used for all their suffering were still there, stained with their blood, filled with their pain. To everyone, it felt as if the victims’ terrified screams and pleas were still echoing around those brick walls. Graham Fisher had created a true torture chamber in his basement.
Just a few feet away from the glass coffin were an old wheelchair and two hospital-standard IV stands. Still hanging from one of their hooks, an old and empty plastic methyl B12 nutrient IV bag. No doubt one of the many different nutrient cocktails Graham had to intravenously feed his wife during her last few months alive.
‘The rack isn’t here,’ Captain Blake said. ‘That grotesque thing he used to dismember his third victim. It’s not here.’
‘He used a different location,’ Hunter said. ‘This place doesn’t have the physical structure for it.’ His eyes instinctively circled the room.
‘It’s certainly big enough,’ the SWAT captain offered.
‘Yes,’ Hunter agreed. ‘But the killer had a large and heavy slab of concrete hanging high above his victim, suspended by thick metal chains. He even said that he could control it. He said that he could slowly lower the rock onto his victim’s body, adjusting the amount of pressure he was able to deliver, like a vise. He would’ve needed some very strong and probably large piece of machinery to do that.’
‘Some sort of electronically controlled crane or something,’ Garcia confirmed. ‘No way he would’ve been able to get something like that down here.’
‘So where, then?’ Captain Blake asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ Hunter said. ‘We need to check land and property registries to see if Graham Fisher owns any other properties or pieces of land. The problem is, even if he doesn’t, he could be renting a large garage or a small warehouse or any other type of building big enough for what he had in mind. If he is, I’m sure he would’ve paid cash for a short-term lease. Finding him that way can take a long time.’
Captain Blake didn’t look impressed.
‘But it’s now just a matter of time, Captain,’ Hunter added. ‘The house is lived in. There are freshly washed dishes on the dish rack in the kitchen, and the sponge is still a little damp. He wasn’t expecting us here today, so chances are he hasn’t taken all the necessary precautions. We now have a whole house to search here, including an office with a computer upstairs. There’s got to be something that will give us a clue to where he might be. Meanwhile we need a citywide APB for Graham and his car, a black Chevrolet Silverado. We need to get his picture to the press and the media ASAP. We need his face
everywhere.
Let’s close the circle on him. We also need a team of officers to knock on every door on this street and see if anyone knows anything.’
Captain Blake lifted both hands in the air in a surrender gesture. ‘You’ve got a green light on whatever you need.’ Her gaze moved from the glass coffin to the glass cage and then back to Hunter. ‘Just bring this psycho in.’
She walked back toward the staircase again. The basement was starting to give her the creeps. She needed to get out of there.
Michelle had also moved, but not in the direction of the staircase. She was now at the worktable by the east wall, looking through all the electronic components and blueprints she found. The blueprints were detailed schematics of how both torture devices in that basement had been put together, and how they’d work. The blueprints for the rack used to torture and murder the third victim weren’t there, but she found something else.
Something that made her blood run cold.
One Hundred and Seven
‘Shit!’ Michelle whispered, but down in the basement her whisper reverberated off the walls like a handclap. Everyone turned to face her.
‘What have you got?’ Hunter asked.
Captain Blake paused just before taking the first step up the stairs.
‘Surveillance photographs of the victims,’ Michelle replied, showing everyone the first of several photographs from the pile she had discovered. ‘Kevin Lee Parker, the first victim,’ she said.
The photo showed Kevin coming out of the videogames store he worked at. The killer had used a red marker pen to draw a circle around his face. Michelle put the photo down and reached for another one before announcing, ‘Christina Stevenson, the second victim.’
This one showed Christina as she stepped out of her house. A red circle had been also drawn around her face.
‘Ethan Walsh, the third victim,’ Michelle said, displaying a new photograph to everyone. It showed Ethan having a cigarette outside the restaurant where he worked. Another red circle.
Michelle returned the photograph to the worktable and grabbed the next one from the pile. ‘And this, I can only assume, is the next victim on his list.’
The photograph was of an attractive young woman, probably in her late twenties, sitting outside a coffee shop. She had a petite diamond-shaped face, framed by long straight blonde hair. Her bright blue eyes were a little catlike, and complemented her delicate nose, her small mouth and her shapely cheekbones very nicely. The picture was also marked with a red circle around her face. That new photograph seemed to electrify the air inside the room.
‘Is there a name?’ Hunter asked, quickly moving toward Michelle. Garcia and Captain Blake followed him.
Michelle checked the reverse side of the picture. ‘No, nothing.’ She handed it to Hunter.
Hunter checked it again before allowing his gaze to move to the worktable. ‘Are there any more photographs of her?’ he asked Michelle.
‘Not of her.’
Something in Michelle’s tone of voice made everyone pause for an instant and look at the FBI agent.