Free I Am Death by Chris Carter Page B

their victims’ bodies into specific positions or shapes, with the intention of them being found
that way, are very particular about everything, every detail. Most of them to the point of OCD.’ Hunter indicated the photograph of the body
in situ.
‘The position of the hands,
feet, head, the hair, the clothes and the makeup, if any, the surroundings . . . it all has to perfectly match the picture in the perpetrator’s head.’
    Above them another aircraft approached for landing. Hunter waited for the sound to die down before moving on.
    ‘This guy put a lot of time and effort into what he did – the abduction, the torturing, the kill method, the positioning as he disposed of the body, the note in her throat . . .
everything was done with tremendous attention to detail. There’s no way he would want us to miss any of it. He wants us to know how good he thinks he is.’
    ‘I agree,’ Garcia said. ‘And that’s why this is bothering me. He would’ve wanted the body found, and fast, before the elements started to eat at it, before
something or someone disturbed its placement. For that, this whole site is wrong. It’s too secluded, too far back from the road . . . wait a second.’ Garcia lifted a hand as he looked
at Hunter.
    ‘Who found the body?’ Hunter asked. ‘Who called it in?’
    ‘I was about to ask you the same question,’ Garcia said, already searching through the file he had with him, looking for the 911-occurrence sheet. ‘Who would’ve come
across a body way out here?’ A few more page flips. ‘OK, here it is.’ Garcia pulled a sheet out of the folder. As he read it, his forehead creased with doubt. ‘Anonymous
call, made by a male cyclist at 12:39 a.m.’
    The green field they were in sure as hell wasn’t a city park. It looked more like a small forest than anything else, squashed between an airport and a water treatment plant. People
didn’t walk their dogs there. They didn’t go for runs, or cycle about in a place like that, especially not at night.
    ‘A cyclist riding past here at around half past midnight spotted the body?’ Garcia repeated, pointing to Pershing Drive. ‘From that road? That’s what, about thirty to
forty yards away? In pitch-black darkness?’ He chuckled at the idea. ‘I don’t think so.’

Fifteen
    Taking extra care not to damage her recently manicured pale-pink fingernails, Grace Hamilton opened the FedEx package. Inside, she found a standard, brown paper legal-size
envelope addressed to the Mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Bailey. Across the front, in large red letters, were the words URGENT – PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL.
    She reached for the FedEx wrapper and checked the sender’s name on the back. Tyler Jordan.
    Grace frowned at it. It wasn’t a name she recognized. The address was local, somewhere in Victoria Park, Central LA. Despite having a fantastic memory for names and addresses, she
couldn’t remember seeing it before either. The space for the sender’s contact number had been left blank – typical.
    She pulled her chair closer to her computer desk and called up the application that allowed her to go into Mayor Bailey’s contacts book. After typing in her password, she entered the
family name ‘Jordan’ and clicked ‘Search’. She got three matches, none of them were Tyler. None of them from Los Angeles. She tried ‘Tyler Jordan’ as a
double-barreled name, first with a hyphen, then without.
    Nothing.
    Grace didn’t find that strange at all. It wasn’t unusual for members of the public to mark their mail ‘urgent’, or ‘for your eyes only’, or ‘private and
confidential’, in the hope that it would reach the mayor’s desk unopened. But that rarely happened.
    Mayor Bailey received hundreds of letters from members of the public every month, but it was Grace’s job to make sure that he didn’t waste his valuable time reading the sort of
rubbish that got sent in on a daily basis.
    Whoever Tyler Jordan was, it didn’t