The voice sounded scared and filled with emotion.
DISPATCHER: ‘What’s the problem there, ma’am?’
FEMALE VOICE: ‘My ex-husband has just broken into my house. He’s screaming and raving like a lunatic. He’s out of his mind, and he’s a violent man.’
DISPATCHER: ‘OK, and where is he now?’
FEMALE VOICE: ‘Right outside my door. Please, send somebody.’
DISPATCHER: ‘Outside your door? Where are you, ma’am?’
FEMALE VOICE: ‘I’ve locked myself inside my bedroom.’
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Hunter and Garcia heard what sounded like three loud knocks to a door.
DISPATCHER: ‘OK. Has he been drinking? Do you know?’
FEMALE VOICE: ‘Probably. That’s what he always does.’
DISPATCHER: ‘Has he hit you?’
FEMALE VOICE: ‘No. He hasn’t had the chance yet. As soon as he broke through the front door, I ran and locked myself in here. But if he gets in here...’
DISPATCHER: ‘OK, ma’am, what’s your name?’
FEMALE VOICE: ‘Rose Landry.’
DISPATCHER: ‘And your address is 231 Loma Avenue — Long Beach?’
FEMALE VOICE: ‘Yes, that’s right.’
Hurried keyboard clicks.
DISPATCHER: ‘OK, a unit is on its way to you now. They won’t be long. Can you stay on the phone with me, Rose?’
FEMALE VOICE (sounding desperate): ‘No, I can’t. I can’t. I’ve got to go.’
The call ended.
Garcia sat back on his chair and ran a hand over his mouth and chin, as if smoothing down an imaginary goatee.
‘This time the address given was to a house just around the corner from Karen’s apartment building,’ he said. ‘Less than thirty seconds away. It belonged to a retired schoolteacher and his wife — John and Judith Marble.’
‘Response time?’ Hunter asked.
Another scroll down on the email. ‘Eight minutes. The fastest time of them all.
Hunter wrote the time down.
‘Now, let me repeat myself here.’ Garcia said. ‘What the fuck is going on? It’s a female voice. Is he working with someone, or was this just a coincidence?’
‘No, not a coincidence, Carlos,’ Hunter said, checking his notes. ‘All four bogus calls were made inside the same thirty-minute interval — between ten-fifty-five p.m. and eleven-twenty-five. Do you remember what was the time logged for Tanya Kaitlin’s nine-one-one call?’
‘Not from the top of my head,’ Garcia replied. ‘But I’m guessing somewhere inside that half-hour bracket.’
‘Eleven-nineteen p.m.,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘All four bogus calls were also made on a Wednesday evening. Karen Ward was murdered two nights ago, on a Wednesday evening.’
Garcia’s gaze jumped back to his computer screen. All four calls had been date-stamped in the usual format — month/day/year. He hadn’t yet worked out that they had all fallen on a Wednesday.
‘If you average the four response times,’ Hunter continued. ‘You come to nine and three-quarter minutes. Round it up, and that’s exactly the average response time the caller told Tanya over the phone.’ He shook his head. ‘This was no coincidence, Carlos. Our killer made all four calls.’
Garcia thought about the last call for a moment.
‘A voice modifier?’ he half stated, half questioned.
‘Audio forensics will confirm it,’ Hunter replied. ‘But with the right equipment, changing a male voice into a female one is just a question of sliding a few faders up and down, that’s all.’
‘He probably also thought that a female voice would be a nice touch,’ Garcia accepted.
‘Certainly less suspicious,’ Hunter agreed. He knew that about 70 to 75 percent of all bogus 911 calls in the USA were made by men, not women. ‘Remember, Carlos, he’d already made three fake calls prior to that one — all using a male voice, all directing Long Beach PD to the same exact area. This was the last call before the actual murder. He wouldn’t want to risk it.’
‘Well, he certainly knew how to fake these calls,’ Garcia said. ‘Because I’ll tell you this, If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought that they were all legit — sometimes tense, sometimes frightened, sometimes anxious, and absolutely no hesitation in his voice. Every question he was asked by the dispatcher, he answered it in character. I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy has trained as an actor.’ Garcia rethought his words. ‘Then again, half of this city has trained as an actor.’
Hunter said nothing, but right at the back of his mind, something else began bothering him.
Twenty-Six
Hunter and Garcia spent the next hour revising crime-scene photographs, going over various documents, and trying to obtain a more thorough profile on Karen Ward. Garcia had been searching the Internet for the past thirty-five minutes when he paused and frowned at his computer screen.
‘Wait a second,’ he whispered, leaning forward and placing both elbows on his desk.
Hunter looked at his partner over the top of his screen.
Garcia looked completely absorbed as he began scrolling down the webpage.
‘Something wrong?’ Hunter asked.
Garcia lifted his index finger. ‘I’m not sure yet. Give me a minute.’
Hunter went back to the file he’d been reading, but his thoughts were still on the four 911 calls they’d heard. The more he tried, the less sense he could make of everything — the less sense he could make of everything, the more the stalker theory bothered him.
In general, stalkers were fragile people who were highly impulsive and almost always enslaved to their own emotions, rarely being able to control them. Sure, some were known for being very well organized when it came to certain aspects of their obsession. They observed the object of their affection compulsively because they simply needed to know all there was to know about them. They followed them. They took pictures. They fed the fire of their obsession in any way they could because, the sad truth was, most of them led somewhat boring, unadventurous lives and, strangely, that obsession gave their lives a ‘sense of purpose’, something to live for, and that was the catch.
If the object of their affection were to die all of a sudden, then so would that ‘sense of purpose’, substituted by a void so deep that it could potentially tear them apart inside. So why kill them?
History has shown that in most cases, when that had actually happened, it hadn’t been a planned action. They hadn’t set out to kill the one they were stalking. What happened was a return to that volatile individual who struggled to control his/her emotions. In short — a thoughtless, impulsive act that resulted in the death of the one being stalked. And that was nothing like this killer had shown so far. No, this killer was well prepared, methodical, very clever, resourceful, and if he’d begun clocking the police response time three months before the actual murder, he no doubt planned well ahead. Impulsiveness... thoughtlessness... simply didn’t come into his equation.
‘Sonofabitch,’ Garcia said, ripping Hunter away from his thoughts.
They locked eyes.
‘Maybe there’s a different reason why Tanya can’t remember having another one of those conversations with anyone else.’
‘And what reason would that be?’ Hunter asked.
Garcia pointed at his computer screen. ‘You’ve got to come have a look at this.’