One by One (Роберт Хантер 5 Поодиночке)

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 got to be joking.’
Forty-Eight
The vast open-plan office floor inside the LA Times headquarters building on West 1st Street sounded like a schoolyard at lunch break. The place was bustling with phone chatter, keyboard clacks, loud conversations and the shuffling of hurried feet, as every reporter rushed to meet the day’s deadline.
Pamela Hays sat at her corner desk, undistracted by the noise and oblivious to the chaos of movement around her. She was the LA Times’ entertainment desk editor, and she too was rushing, reviewing all the articles that would make the final cut of the supplement for tomorrow’s paper.
Entertainment Pam, as everyone always called her, had been working for the LA Times for only seven years, since she graduated from university at the age of twenty-four. Her first year with the paper had been a struggle. Fresh out of college, and with no experience working for a high-circulation newspaper, she was made to prove her worth by writing an infinite number of second-rate articles on stories she was sure only she and her mother read. Many of them never even made it into print. But Pamela knew she was a good reporter, and an expert researcher. It didn’t take long for others to start realizing that too.
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 LA Times. His old job was offered to Pamela Hays, who gladly accepted.
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 LA Times, Pamela didn’t have an office. She didn’t much care for one either, preferring to sit among her reporters and the hustle and bustle of the main room.
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 hablando about, muchacho?’ As a joke between the two of them, she had gotten into the habit of speaking Spanglish with Pedro.
‘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.
Forty-Nine
Hunter woke up at 5:15 a.m. with a headache that could’ve raised the dead. He sat in bed, in the darkness of his bedroom, catatonically staring at the blank wall in front of him, as if he stared long and hard enough it would magically start answering all the questions choking his brain.
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 bang. ‘’Cos the delayed storm is finally here.’
‘Storm?’ Garcia frowned.
‘The shitstorm,’ she replied, slapping this morning’s copy of the LA Times on his desk. The top half of the front page was taken by a series of six small photographs of Christina Stevenson lying inside the glass coffin. They were arranged sequentially. The first three showed her terrified and confused face at different stages of the voting process – EATEN at 211, then at 745, and finally at 1000. The next two showed her sharing the glass coffin with the tarantula hawks. Her face in both pictures was twisted and contorted in agonizing pain.
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 hell did they get this?’
‘Not completely off the net,’ Hunter replied. ‘Just out of most people’s reach. But once something goes on the net, then it’s always on the net. Even if most people can’t find it. The LA Times has enough resources and people on their payroll to be able to track the video down.’