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The drilling sound was muffled by the thick walls, but it was still annoying. Aiden looked at her watch again and sighed.
5:30
She should be in bed.
She should be home.
The firemen rescue team had arrived some forty minutes before and, aware of the task ahead of them, they had come prepared.
The three people trapped inside the bunker had listened to the scuffling sounds as the heavy machinery was set up to the right of the former entrance, and soon a new hole was being cut in to the multilayered concrete. Figuring that it wouldn't be easy to breach the bunker's ceiling, the CSIs had returned to work.
Apart from the lack of fingerprints and hairs anywhere else in the bunker but the four chairs, the killer had shown little concern about the amount of evidence he had left behind.
Murder weapons had been left barely hidden from view; inside one of the many boxes inside the storage room, the CSIs had managed to find a roll of rope, half used; and two bottles of diazepam, bearing the label of the New York Presbyterian Hospital, confirming Mac' suspicions that the killer had indeed stolen them from Ramirez's workplace. Next to it was a grocery bag, an opened magnetic letters kit inside.
"The rope and pills I get… but why the toy letters?" Aiden asked, picking up a purple W.
Mac spread the letters on the floor.
"Notice the size and shape of the letters," he said, quickly selecting the letters he needed to prove his theory. "They are consistent with the bruises on the victims' backs and…"
He stepped back, leaving the words 'cop killer' written on the floor.
"He used them like stamps," Stella figured, grabbing one of the letters and pressing it against her palm. The faint mark took less than a second to disappear.
Aiden notice the metal pipe leaning against the wall and picked it up.
"Or maybe he used a little more force than that."
The W's magnet in her hand grabbed on to the metal of the pipe with ease. Pressing the letter against one of the cardboard boxes, she punched the other end of the pipe, leaving a clear W impression on the box.
The experiment would have to be retest in the lab, using a proper human skin substitute and taking accurate measurements of the amount of force needed to leave marks similar to the victims', but, under the circumstances, Mac and Stella both agreed with her.
"What I don't understand is why a guy that has managed to dump six bodies all over town, with out leaving a single clue behind, leaves a clue-feast place like this for us to find," Stella said, leaving the cluster confinements of the storage room and returning to the larger room.
"He didn't leave us this place, he led us to this place," Mac added, following her. "That cell phone was seating exactly on top of the entrance hatch. It was no coincidence that it'd fell there, it was place there."
Stella could feel the palm of her hands growing sweaty.
"You think this was all a set up, a trap?"
Mac rubbed his tired eyes, wishing this day to be over. Better yet, he wished that this day had never happened.
"That cell phone was the only lead we managed to follow on this case, and that cell phone led us straight here. Minutes after we descend, the hatch explodes, leaving us trapped here," Mac resumed, seating on the brown couch. "The killer was watching us somehow, there is no other way he could've known when to blow the hatch," he said, looking up at Stella.
The woman was looking at him, but he could tell she wasn't seeing him. Her eyes were unfocused, deep in thought.
"That explosion was too small to cause us harm, unless we were standing on the ladder," she voiced, putting her thoughts to work. "So the killer knew that we would eventually find all of this. To show this little concern about what we can learn about him from this bunker, he either wants us to get him or…"
"… or he made sure that we wouldn't be leaving here with any proves," Mac finished for her.
"He'd better have planned it right, because we got him," Aiden announced from the table, holding a file in her hand.
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