The Night Stalker Read Free Page A

slowly.
    All eyes went back to her.
    ‘Do you know something we don’t?’ Hunter asked.
    ‘Autopsy room four is sometimes used as a lecture room,’ the doctor explained. ‘It’s the only examination suite we have equipped with a video camera connection hub. It links directly to our mainframe computer. That means that the images are simultaneously stored into our mainframe hard drive. To videotape a lecture or an examination, all a doctor has to do is set up a digital camera, hook it to the hub and they’re good to go.’
    ‘Can we find out if Doctor Winston did that?’
    ‘Follow me.’
    Doctor Hove moved purposefully back to the same stairway they’d come down and went up to the ground floor. They passed the reception area before continuing through a set of metal double doors and into a long and empty hallway. Three-quarters of the way down, they turned right. A single wooden door with a small frosted glass window stood at the end of the corridor. Doctor Hove’s office. She unlocked it, pushed the door open, and led them inside.
    Doctor Hove went straight to her desk and logged onto her computer. Both detectives gathered behind her.
    ‘Only mine and Doctor Winston’s login has administrator’s rights access to the video directory on the mainframe computer. Let’s see if we got anything.’
    It took Doctor Hove only a few clicks to get to the video directory where all recordings were stored. Inside the main folder there were three subdirectories – New, Lectures and Autopsies. The doctor expanded the directory named new to find only one .mpg file. The timestamp on it indicated that it had been created an hour ago.
    ‘Bingo. Jonathan did record the autopsy.’ Doctor Hove paused and anxiously looked at Hunter. He noticed that she had fractionally pulled her hand away from the mouse.
    ‘It’s OK, Doc; you don’t have to watch this. We can take it from here.’
    Doctor Hove hesitated for a second. ‘Yes I do.’ She double-clicked the file. The screen flickered and the computer launched its default video player application. Hunter and Garcia moved closer.
    The pictures weren’t of great quality, but clearly showed a white female body on an autopsy table. The image had been filmed from above and at an angle, and was partially zoomed in so that the table occupied most of the screen. On the right, two other people in white lab coats could be seen from mid-torso down.
    ‘Can you zoom out?’ Garcia asked.
    ‘The image was recorded this way,’ Hunter replied, shaking his head. ‘We’re not controlling a camera here. This is just playback.’
    On the screen, one of the two people to the right of the table moved towards the body’s head and bent down to examine it. Doctor Winston’s face suddenly appeared in the shot.
    ‘There’s no sound?’ Garcia asked as he watched Doctor Winston’s lips move in silence. ‘How come there’s no sound?’
    ‘The microphones on the cameras we use to video examinations aren’t of great quality,’ the doctor explained. ‘We usually don’t even turn them on.’
    ‘I thought pathologists had a habit of dictating every step of their examinations.’
    ‘And we do,’ she confirmed. ‘Onto our own personal recording devices. We take them into the examination rooms with us. Whatever Jonathan was using, is now mangled up with everything else in that room.’
    ‘Great.’
    ‘ Eyes – hazel, skin is well cared for, earlobes look like they’ve never been pierced . . . ’ Hunter said before the video showed Doctor Winston turning away from the camera. ‘Damn! I can’t see his mouth any more.’
    ‘You can lip-read?’ The question came from Doctor Hove, but her surprised look was mirrored on Garcia’s face.
    Hunter didn’t reply. He kept his attention on the screen.
    ‘Where in the world did you learn to do that?’ Garcia asked.
    ‘Books,’ Hunter lied. Right now, the last thing he wanted to do was talk about his past.
    They watched in silence for the next