An Evil Mind

Twenty-Five

This time, Lucien Folter was already sitting at the metal table inside the interrogation room when the door buzzed open and Hunter and Taylor walked in. Just like before, his hands were cuffed, linked together by a metal chain. His feet were also shackled, with the ankle chain already securely fastened to the thick metal loop on the floor by his chair. Standing right behind him were two armed US Marines. They both nodded at Hunter and Taylor before exiting the room without saying a word.

Lucien was leaning forward on his chair. His hands were resting on the table with his fingers interlaced together. He was very slowly and calmly tapping his thumbs against each other in a steady rhythm, as if he was doing it to the beat of some song that only he could hear. His head and his eyes were low. His stare was fixed on his hands.

Taylor deliberately allowed the door to slam shut behind her, but the loud bang didn’t seem to reach Lucien’s ears. He didn’t flinch, didn’t look up, didn’t stop with the thumbs tapping. It was like he was in a world of his own.

Hunter stepped forward and stopped across the table from him, his arms loose and relaxed by the side of his body. He didn’t take a seat. He didn’t say a thing. He simply waited.

Taylor stood by the door, anger burning inside her eyes. On their trip back to Quantico, she had promised herself that she wouldn’t let that anger show, that she would be pragmatic. . professional. . detached. But seeing Lucien again, sitting in that room seemingly unperturbed, made her blood boil inside her veins.

‘You sick sonofabitch,’ she finally blurted out. ‘How many have you actually killed?’

Lucien just kept staring at his thumbs, following the beat that no one else could hear.

‘Did you skin them all?’ Taylor carried on.

No reply.

‘Did you make one of those sick trophies out of every victim?’

Still no reply, but this time Lucien stopped with the thumbs tapping, slowly lifted his head, and locked eyes with Hunter. Neither of them said anything for a very long moment. They simply studied each other like two complete strangers who were about to go into battle. The first thing Hunter noticed was that Lucien’s demeanor had totally changed from their previous interview. The emotional Lucien, the one who seemed scared that a huge injustice was being done to him, the one who needed help, that Lucien was all but gone. The new Lucien sitting before Hunter now looked stronger. . more confident. . fearless. Even his face looked tougher, like a fighter who wouldn’t walk away from any sort of confrontation — someone who was ready for come what may. There was also something very different about the look in his dark brown eyes. Something very cold and disconnected, void of any emotion. It was an empty look that Hunter had seen several times before, but never in Lucien’s eyes. It was a psychopathic look.

Lucien breathed out.

‘By the look on your face, Robert, I’m sure you’ve recognized the tattoo on one of the frames on my wall.’

Hunter realized now that that had been the real reason why Lucien had mentioned Susan and her tattoo earlier. Not because he was trying to steer the conversation away from a fragile topic until his nerves settled, but because he wanted to make absolutely sure Hunter would remember it before sending him to the house.

Hunter wasn’t exactly sure of what to say, so he remained silent.

‘That piece is by far my favorite,’ Lucien continued. ‘Do you know why, Robert?’

No reply from Hunter.

Lucien gave him a pleased smile, as if the memories filled his heart with joy.

‘Susan was my first.’

‘You sick sonofabitch,’ Taylor said again, stepping forward as if she was about to launch onto Lucien, but sense seemed to take over right at the last second and she paused by the metal table.

Lucien’s icy gaze slowly moved to her. ‘Please stop repeating yourself, Agent Taylor. You’ve already called me a sick sonofabitch.’ His voice was flat. No emotion. No warmth.

‘Maybe I am one, but swearing doesn’t really suit you.’ He ran his tongue over his lips to wet them. ‘Name-calling is for the weak. For people who lack the intellect to argue intelligently. Do you think you lack the intellect, Agent Taylor? Because if you do, you have no business being an FBI agent.’

Taylor took a deep breath to steady herself. Though her eyes still burned with anger, she knew Lucien was just trying to push her.

‘I understand that right now you’re still a little in shock from your discovery back in the house,’ Lucien continued, ‘so your emotions are running a little high.’ He shrugged, unconcerned. ‘Understandable. But I bet that little outburst of yours isn’t really what’s expected from a senior FBI agent, is it? I bet it surprised even you, because I bet you promised yourself that you wouldn’t lose it. You promised yourself that you would remain calm and professional, didn’t you, Agent Taylor?’ Lucien gave her no time to reply. ‘But being able to control one’s emotions is a very tricky thing. Even with the best of intentions, your emotions can still easily boil up inside you. It takes a lot of training to be able to properly control them.’ Another shrug. ‘But I’m sure you’ll get there someday.’

Taylor strained to hold her tongue. It was obvious to her that Lucien was counting on another emotional reaction, but she didn’t comply.

‘How many were there, Lucien?’ Hunter asked in a steady voice, finally breaking his silence. ‘You said Susan was your first. How many victims were there?’

Lucien sat back and smiled a smile that looked rehearsed.

‘That’s a very good question, Robert.’ He looked deep in thought for a long instant. ‘I’m not really sure. I lost count after a while.’

Taylor felt her skin starting to goose-bump again.

‘But I have it all written down,’ Lucien said, as he began nodding. ‘Yes. There really is a diary, Robert. Actually, there is more than one, where I documented everything — places I’ve been, people I’ve taken, methods I’ve used. .’

‘And where are they?’ Taylor asked.

Lucien chuckled and moved his hands, making the chain rattle against the metal table. ‘Patience, Agent Taylor, patience. Haven’t you ever heard the saying: “Good things will come to those who wait”?’

Though Lucien’s words were intended for Taylor, all of his attention was on Hunter.

‘I know that right now you have a thousand questions tumbling over each other inside that brain of yours, Robert. I know that all you want is to understand the why’s and how’s. . and obviously, since you’re a cop, to identify all the victims.’ Lucien rotated his neck from side to side, as if trying to release some tension. ‘That could take a while. But believe me, Robert, I really do want you to understand the why’s and how’s. That’s the real reason why I called you here.’

Lucien looked past Hunter at the two-way mirror behind him. He wasn’t speaking to Hunter or Taylor anymore. He knew that after what they had uncovered in North Carolina, a more senior FBI figure would be on the other side of that glass. Someone with the authority to call all the shots.

‘I know that you also want to know the why’s and how’s,’ he said in a chilling tone, staring at his own reflection. ‘After all, this is the famous FBI Behavioral Science Unit. You live to study the minds of people like me. And believe me, you have never encountered anyone quite like me.’

Lucien could practically feel the tension growing behind the glass.

‘More than that,’ he continued. ‘You need to identify the victims. It’s your duty. But I’m telling you now, you’ll never be able to do that without my cooperation.’

Hunter saw Taylor uneasily shift her weight from foot to foot.

‘The good news is that I’m willing to do that,’ Lucien said. ‘But I’ll do it on my terms, so listen up.’ His voice seemed to have gone even more serious. ‘I will only speak to Robert, no one else. I know he isn’t with the FBI, but I also know that that can easily be remedied.’ He paused and looked around the room. ‘The interviews will not be conducted in this room anymore. I don’t feel comfortable here, and. .’ He lifted his hands and moved them about, allowing the chain between his wrists to rattle against the metal table once again. ‘I really don’t like being shackled. It puts me in a very bad state of mind, and that’s not good, for me, or for you. I also like to move around when I talk. It helps me think. So from now on, Robert can come down to my cell. We can talk there.’ He stole a quick peek at Taylor. ‘Agent Taylor can sit in on the interviews if she wants. I like her. But she’ll have to learn how to control that temper of hers.’

‘You don’t get to negotiate,’ Taylor said, keeping her voice as calm as she could muster.

‘Oh, I think I do, Agent Taylor. Because I take it that by now you’ll have a team of agents going over every inch of my house in Murphy. And if they’re competent in the least, they should find out that what you and Robert saw in that house earlier. .’ Lucien paused and he and Hunter locked eyes once again. ‘Well. . that’s only the beginning.’

Twenty-Six

Lucien was right in his assumption — a specialized FBI team had already been deployed to scrutinize every inch of his house back in Murphy.

Special Agent Stefano Lopez was the agent in charge of the very experienced, eight-strong search team. That particular crew had been put together eight years ago by Director Adrian Kennedy himself, who had little trust in forensic specialists. A few years back, most forensic work around the country had started to be outsourced to private companies. Their overpaid forensic agents, if one could call them that, no doubt fueled by the increasing number of forensic-investigation TV shows that had hit the airwaves in the past decade, truly believed they were stars, and acted accordingly.

Kennedy’s team had been highly trained in the collection and analysis of forensic evidence, and all eight of them had a degree either in chemistry, or biology, or both. Three of the agents, including Lopez, the team leader, had also been premed students before joining the FBI. They were all qualified, and had brought with them enough lab equipment and gadgets to perform a variety of ‘on the spot’ basic tests.

To expedite the search, Agent Lopez had compartmentalized the house and split the crew into four teams of two: Team A — Agents Suarez and Farley — was in charge of going through everything in the living room and kitchen; Team B — Agents Reyna and Goldstein — was searching both bedrooms down the corridor, and the small bathroom; Team C — Agents Lopez and Fuller — was downstairs in the basement; Team D — Agents Villegas and Carver — was outside searching the property grounds.

Team C had already photographed the entire basement in its original state, and was now in the process of sieving through everything as it was collected, tagged, and placed inside plastic evidence bags for further analysis. The first items to be taken down were the framed human skin pieces.

As Agents Lopez and Fuller carefully unhooked the first frame from the east wall, they both realized that the frames had been simply, but cleverly homemade. First, the human skin piece had been either soaked or sprayed with a preserving substance like formaldehyde or formalin, which is a solution of gas formaldehyde in water. Then, the piece had been stretched out and placed flat against a sheet of Plexiglas that was about 2 millimeters thick — equivalent to two regular microscope slides stacked together. A second sheet of Plexiglas, of identical thickness, was then placed over the human skin piece, sandwiching it between both Plexiglas sheets. To keep skin deterioration down to a minimum, the Plexiglas/human skin sandwich was finally airtight locked using a special sealant, before being framed just like any regular painting or picture.

‘This is one hundred percent fucked up,’ Lopez said, after dusting the last of the frames for fingerprints. There were none.

Lopez was tall and slim, with short curly hair, piercing dark brown eyes, and a hooked nose that had earned him the nickname Hawk.

‘No shit, Hawk,’ Agent Fuller said as he started tagging and bagging the frames. ‘You know we’ve seen enough killers’ trophies over the years, among them quite a few body parts, but this is pushing the boundaries.’ He made a head gesture toward the frames. ‘This guy didn’t just cut a finger or an ear off his victims. He skinned them, at least partially, maybe even while they were still alive, and to me that puts him in a new category I haven’t seen before.’

‘And what category is that?’

‘Psychopath freak show — level: grandmaster. One with a lot of skill and patience too.’

Hawk agreed with a nod. ‘Yeah, that is messed up, but what really gets me is this room.’ He looked around him.

Fuller’s gaze circled the room, following Hawk’s. ‘What do you mean?’

‘How many serial killers’ trophy rooms would you say that we’ve seen over the years?’

Fuller pulled a face and shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Hawk. More than enough, for sure.’

‘Since this unit was put together, thirty-nine,’ Hawk confirmed. ‘But we’ve all seen hundreds of photographs of other trophy rooms, and you know they all look similar — small, smelly, grimy, dark, you know what I’m talking about. It’s usually just a cupboard-sized space or a shed somewhere where the perpetrators keep whatever parts they chopped off their victims. Somewhere they can go to jerk off, or fantasize, or whatever it is they do when they’re reliving the time they spent with their victims. You’ve seen them. They all look like some sort of sick shrine out of a Hollywood horror movie.’ Hawk paused, turned both of his gloved hands upward, and looked around the room again. ‘But look at this place. It looks like an average family’s sitting room. It’s just a little dusty.’ He ran two fingers over the top of the chest of drawers, showing the result to Fuller just to emphasize his argument.

‘OK, and your point is?’

‘My point is that I don’t think this guy came down here to be reminded of his murders, or of the time he spent with his victims. I think this guy came down here to watch TV, drink beer and read, just like regular folk. The difference is that he did all that surrounded by the framed skin of his victims.’

Hawk had walked the entire house before assigning the agents to their teams. He knew that the only TV set in the house was the old tube one down in the basement. He also knew that the small fridge in the corner had nothing but a few bottles of beer inside.

Something in Hawk’s voice concerned Fuller.

‘So what are you really saying, Hawk?’

Hawk paused by the bookcase and scanned through some of the titles.

‘What I’m saying is that I don’t think those were trophies.’ He pointed to the evidence bags on the floor now holding the five frames. ‘Those were just simple decorating items. If this guy really has a trophy room somewhere, this isn’t it.’ He paused and breathed in a worried breath. ‘I’m saying brace yourself, Fuller, because if this guy has a trophy room, we haven’t found it yet.’

Twenty-Seven

Upstairs in the house, Team B — Agents Miguel Reyna and Eric Goldstein, had just finished their swipe of the small bathroom and the first bedroom. They’d managed to collect several fingerprints from both rooms, but even without a more in-depth analysis, Goldstein, who was the team’s expert when it came to fingerprints, could tell that their patterns seemed identical, which hinted that they’d all come from the same person. The size of all the thumbprints found also indicated that the prints had probably come from a male subject.

The shower’s plughole had given them several hair strands, all of them short and dark brown in color. The high-intensity UV-light test they’d conducted in the first bedroom and in the bathroom had revealed no traces of semen or blood anywhere, not even in the bathroom’s washbasin from what could’ve been an old shaving cut. Several spots, some small, some large, did light up on the floor all around the toilet seat, and on the seat itself, but that was to be expected. Urine is extremely fluorescent when illuminated with ultraviolet light.

Just to be sure, they also ran a UV-light test on the walls. It’s not uncommon for perpetrators to try to cover bloodstained walls by giving them a new coat of paint. Though that would make them completely invisible to the naked eye, paint-covered bloodstains will still quite clearly reveal themselves under high-intensity UV-light scrutiny.

A few scattered speckles did light up on the corridor walls. Reyna and Goldstein collected samples of them all, but none of them were hidden behind the topcoat of paint. Both agents had their doubts that the samples they collected in the hallway would turn out to be blood.

They approached the last room at the end of the corridor, the master bedroom, and paused by the door, allowing their eyes to take everything in before proceeding.

The décor inside was sparse, cheap and messy, like a college dorm room furnished on a very low budget. The double bed pushed up against one of the walls looked like it had come from a Salvation Army shop, and so did the mattress and the black and gray bed cover and pillow cases. A wooden, drawerless bedside table, with a reading lamp on it, was also pushed up against the same wall, on the right side of the bed. An old-looking double-door wardrobe was centered against the west wall. The only other piece of furniture in that room was a small bookcase, crammed with books.

‘At least this shouldn’t take very long,’ Reyna said, slipping on a brand-new pair of latex gloves.

‘Good,’ Goldstein agreed. Even with the nose mask the strong mothball smell was starting to burn the inside of his nostrils.

They started like they had in the two previous rooms, with a high-intensity UV-light test, and as soon as they switched the UV light on, the bed covers lit up like a Christmas tree.

‘Well, no surprise there,’ Goldstein said. ‘Those sheets look like they’ve never been washed.’

While a variety of body fluids are fluorescent under high-intensity UV light — semen, blood, vaginal secretion, urine, saliva and sweat — using the light alone will not confirm exactly what sort of stain one is looking at. More tests are certainly needed. Also, several other non-body-fluid substances, like citric fruit juices or toothpaste, will certainly light up bright under a UV-light test.

‘Let’s bag all the bed covers and sheets,’ Goldstein said. ‘The lab will have to deal with this.’

Reyna quickly pulled everything off the bed and placed each item into individual evidence bags. The white mattress under the sheets showed no visible signs of any blood splatter, but they ran a UV test on it anyway. Once again, several speckles lit up here and there, but nothing that could get any alarm bells ringing. Nevertheless, Reyna and Goldstein marked and collected samples of them all.

When they were all done, Goldstein crossed over to where the small bookcase was, and carefully began retrieving each and every book. Reyna stayed by the bed, dusting its frame for fingerprints. As he moved over to the other side, he noticed something different on the side of the mattress — a long, horizontal makeshift flap, made from a thick white fabric that blended easily with the mattress, hiding it extremely well. He frowned at it and slowly ripped it from the mattress. Concealed underneath the flap, he found a long slit in the mattress.

‘Eric, come have a look at this,’ he called with a hand gesture.

Goldstein put down the book he was looking through, and walked back over to where Reyna was.

‘What do you think this is?’ Reyna asked, pointing to the long opening in the mattress.

Goldstein’s eyes widened a touch. ‘A hiding place.’

‘You bet,’ Reyna replied, slipping his fingers into the slot, and horizontally, pulling both sides apart, as wide as he could.

Goldstein bent down and shone his flashlight into the aperture. Neither of them could see anything past Reyna’s hands.

‘I’ll check,’ Goldstein said, putting his flashlight down, and slowly slipping his right hand into the gap. Very carefully he started touch-feeling his way around the inside of the mattress. First left, then right — nothing. He slid his arm in a little deeper, all the way up to his elbow. Left, right. Still nothing.

‘Maybe whatever was hidden here is already gone,’ Reyna offered.

Goldstein wasn’t about to give up just yet. He bent forward and shoved his whole arm into the mattress — all the way up to his shoulder. This time he didn’t have to feel around. His fingers immediately collided with something solid.

Goldstein paused and looked at Reyna in a particular way.

‘You’ve got something?’ Reyna asked, instinctively bending his head to one side to look into the gap again. He saw nothing.

‘Give me a sec,’ Goldstein said, spreading his fingers to grab whatever object was hidden inside the mattress. Whatever it was, it was about five inches thick.

‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘I’ve got it.’ He tried to pull it out, but the object slipped from his grip. ‘Hold on, hold on,’ he said again, now sliding his other arm into the mattress. With his arms shoulder-length apart, he grabbed hold of the object with both hands. ‘It feels like some sort of box,’ he announced, and slowly started dragging it out.

Reyna waited.

‘OK, here we go,’ Goldstein said as he got the object to the opening.

Reyna moved his hands out of the way, and felt an odd excitement run up and down his spine.

Goldstein dragged the whole object out of the mattress and placed it on the floor between them. It was a box. A wooden box of about twenty-nine inches long by twenty-one wide.

‘Gun box,’ Reyna said, but without much conviction. Goldstein’s thick eyebrows arched up inquisitively. The box was actually large enough to hold a submachine gun like an MP5 or an Uzi, or even two or three handguns.

‘Only one way to find out,’ Goldstein said.

Surprisingly the box had no locks, just two old-style flip latches. Goldstein undid them both, and flipped the lid open.

There were no guns inside, but still its contents made both agents pause, their eyes opening wide.

The box had a division down the center of it, splitting it into two separate compartments.

After several seconds of complete silence and absolute stillness, Goldstein finally used a pen to cautiously rifle through the contents inside both compartments.

‘Holy shit,’ he whispered before looking over at Reyna. ‘You better go get Hawk.’

Twenty-Eight

At 01:30 a.m., Hunter and Agent Taylor were called into a special NCAVC meeting, which was held inside a sound-proof conference room on the third floor of the BSU building. Four men and three women sat around a long, polished red oak table. A large, white projection screen had been lowered from the ceiling toward the far wall. As soon as Hunter was ushered into the room, he could sense the heavy, worried atmosphere, which was further emphasized by the tense look on everyone’s faces. Director Adrian Kennedy was sitting at the head of the table.

‘Please come in and have a seat,’ he said without standing up, indicating the two empty seats by his side, one to his right, one to his left.

Hunter took the seat to Kennedy’s right.

‘OK, let’s start with introductions,’ Kennedy continued. ‘I know everyone here is familiar with Detective Robert Hunter’s paper,’ he said to the group, ‘but I believe this is the first time most of you have met the man behind that work.’ He glanced at Hunter then in turn nodded at each person around the table. ‘Jennifer Holden oversees our PROFILER computer system; Deon Douglas and Leo Hurst are with our Criminal Investigative Analysis Program — CIAP; Victoria Davenport is with the FBI’s Violent Crime Apprehension Program — VICAP; Doctor Patrick Lambert, who you met earlier, is our chief of forensic psychiatry, and Doctor Adriana Montoya is one of our chief pathologists.’

They all nodded a silent ‘Hello’ at Hunter, who returned each and every one a nod of his own.

‘To my left, is FBI Special Agent Courtney Taylor,’ Kennedy said. ‘She’ll be heading this investigation.’

More silent nods.

‘I already took the liberty of contacting your captain with the LAPD once again, Robert,’ he said to Hunter. ‘We now need you in this case, and I know you want in, but we’ve got to do this by the book. A request has already been expedited and sanctioned by both sides.’ He drew quotations in the air with his fingers. ‘You’re now officially “on loan” to the FBI.’ He placed an FBI ID card with Hunter’s name and photograph on the table in front of him. ‘So, until we’ve got this all figured out, you are Special Agent Robert Hunter.’

Hunter seemed to cringe at the title. He left the ID card where it was.

‘OK,’ Kennedy said to the whole room. ‘Sorry to have dragged you all out here for such a late, unscheduled meeting, but there’s no doubt that today’s turn of events constitutes a major game changer.’ He sat back on his seat, locked his fingers together, and rested his hands on his lap before addressing Hunter and Taylor directly.

‘Doctor Lambert and I were in the observation room earlier today, during your second interview with Lucien Folter.’

Hunter didn’t look surprised. He knew that Taylor had called Kennedy from the house in Murphy right after their discovery. She had also used her smartphone to email him pictures of the framed human skin pieces, and a short video of Lucien’s basement room. Hunter had expected that Kennedy would’ve postponed whatever he had on for the rest of the day, and made the trip back from Washington, DC to Quantico, ASAP.

‘Everyone in this room has also watched the recorded footage of both interviews at length,’ Kennedy added before nodding at Doctor Lambert, who took over.

‘The transformation Mr Folter went through in the space of just a few hours, from interview one to interview two, was nothing less than astounding.’ He looked a little embarrassed. ‘I must admit that after the first interview, after the drug addiction story he told you, some part of me had started to believe him. I felt sorry for him.’

Victoria Davenport with VICAP nodded her agreement before Doctor Lambert carried on.

‘I had really started to entertain the possibility that Mr Folter had in fact been just another victim of an elaborate plan by a very sadistic killer, or killers. That he’d been just a pawn, a delivery boy in something much bigger.’ The doctor ran a hand through the little hair he had left on his head, just a handful of white strands that never seemed to want to stay in place. ‘In all my years as a forensic psychiatrist, I’ve seen very few people who were able to lie so convincingly, and most of those suffered from dissociative identity disorder.’ He looked straight at Hunter. ‘And you know that’s not the case we have here.’

Hunter said nothing, but he knew Doctor Lambert was right. Lucien had shown absolutely no indications of split personality. He never claimed to be, or hinted at being, two or more different people.

With someone suffering from dissociative identity disorder, once an identity takes over, it’s like a whole new person, with his/her own feelings, emotions, history and memories. Feelings, emotions, history and memories that aren’t shared between identities. So if Lucien suffered from DID, causing him to display a different identity in the second interview from the identity he’d displayed during the first one, the second identity wouldn’t have remembered the first interview, or anything that was said during it. The crimes committed by one of his identities also would not be remembered, and possibly not even known, by any other identity his brain had developed. But that hadn’t been the case. Lucien knew exactly how he’d acted, and what he’d said in both interviews.

‘After what I saw,’ Doctor Lambert said, ‘I have very little doubt that Mr Folter had simply acted a very well-thought part during the first interview to perfection. The real Lucien Folter is the one we all saw and heard in the second interview — cold, emotionless, psychopathic and in total control of his actions.’

He paused, allowing his words to hang in the air for a moment before proceeding.

‘He might have been caught by chance after that freak accident in Wyoming, but he willingly guided Detective Hunter and Agent Taylor to his house in North Carolina, knowing very well that they would find the framed human skin pieces. Knowing that Detective Hunter would personally recognize one of them. That shows a very high level of cruelty, arrogance, and pride, together with a tremendous sense of achievement and pleasure in what he’s done.’ The doctor paused for breath. ‘This guy really likes hurting people. . physically and emotionally.’

Twenty-Nine

Doctor Lambert’s last few words caused almost everyone sitting inside the conference room to shift uneasily in their seats.

Kennedy took the opportunity to glance over at the pathologist in the room, Doctor Adriana Montoya. She had short black hair, striking hazel eyes, full lips, and a tiny tattoo of a broken heart on her neck, just behind her left ear.

‘DNA analysis might still take a couple of days,’ she said, leaning forward and placing her elbows on the table. ‘We might have the results of the skin pigmentation test and epidermis analysis sometime later today. There’s a chance that they will show that the pieces came from five different people.’ A short pause. ‘If that’s the case, that’ll gives us seven victims so far, which already makes Lucien Folter a very prolific serial killer. One the FBI had no knowledge of until about a week ago. And I have to agree with Doctor Lambert. His level of brutality and cruelty is astonishing. The two victims in his trunk were decapitated. The five in his basement were skinned.’ She softly shook her head as she considered the possibilities. ‘And, according to him — this is only the beginning.’

Hunter noticed that for some reason Doctor Montoya’s last words made Kennedy tense a fraction further.

Leo Hurst from CIAP — early forties, heavily built, somber — flipped a page on the document sitting on the table in front of him. It was a transcript of both interviews.

‘This guy knows his game,’ he said. ‘He knows that the FBI doesn’t give in to a psychopath’s demands. Whatever the situation is, we dictate the rules. . always. The problem is that in this case he has managed to tip the scales in his favor, and there isn’t much we can do about it. He knows that we’ll have to play ball because the investigation’s priority has just shifted from arresting a subject to identifying the victims.’

Everyone’s attention moved to him.

‘OK, let’s suppose for a moment that he’s lying about this being only the beginning,’ he continued. ‘Let’s suppose that all we get are these seven “possible” victims. Yes, there’s a likelihood that we could positively identify all seven of them without his help, depending on DNA analysis, and if they had all been added to the national missing-persons database.’ He scratched the skin between his two very thin eyebrows. ‘But even if we manage to identify them all without his help, then we’re faced with problem number two.’

‘Finding the bodies,’ Kennedy said, and for a brief moment he locked eyes with Hunter.

‘Precisely,’ Deon Douglas, Hurst’s partner at CIAP, agreed. He was African-American and also looked to be in his early forties, with a shaved head and a stylish goatee that no doubt took some maintenance. ‘Their families will want closure. They’ll want to give the bodies, or whatever remains are found, a proper burial, and this Folter character knows that without his cooperation, we probably won’t have a prayer finding the location where he disposed of them.’

Again, Hunter noticed that Kennedy seemed to tense up more than anyone else in the room, which seemed very uncommon. Adrian Kennedy had been with the FBI NCAVC and the Behavioral Science Unit for as long as Hunter could remember. He wasn’t easily rattled by any sort of crime or perpetrator, no matter how brutal or unusual. Hunter sensed that there was something else. Something that Kennedy wasn’t telling them, at least not yet.

‘He could be lying about this being only the beginning,’ Jennifer Holden said. ‘As you’ve said —’ she nodded at Leo Hurst ‘— he seems to know his game. He knows that by saying that, the scales would tip in his favor. Maybe we should put him through a polygraph test.’

Hunter shook his head. ‘Even if he’s lying, he’d easily beat it.’

‘He would beat a lie-detector test?’ Jennifer Holden asked, a little surprised.

‘Yes,’ Hunter replied with absolute conviction. ‘I’ve seen him do it before just for fun, twenty-five years ago, and my guess is that he’s gotten better at it.’

A few odd looks circled the room.

‘You all saw the recording of the first interview,’ Hunter offered. ‘Even the facial analysis software that was being used failed to pick up any significant changes in his expressions. It looks to me that Lucien has almost no psychological response to lying. His pupil dilation and breathing remained exactly the same throughout. I’m sure that he’s trained himself, and we’ll find that even his pore size and skin flush will remain unchanged. He’s probably counting on a polygraph test. Whether we put him through one or not, it will make no difference to him.’

Doctor Lambert nodded his agreement. ‘Long, elaborate lies take a certain type of individual and a great amount of talent to do it convincingly. It requires creativity, intelligence, control, great memory and, most of the time, very high improvisational skills. And I’m only talking about regular circumstances here. When a person has to do all that before an authoritative figure, like a cop, or a federal agent, knowing that his freedom is on the line, those qualities will multiply themselves by a factor of X. Judging by how convincing he was in that first interview, I really wouldn’t be surprised if Lucien Folter waltzed his way through a polygraph test.’

‘Do you think he’s lying about this being only the beginning?’ Taylor asked Hunter.

‘No, I don’t, but what I, or any of us think, is irrelevant. Like Leo said, Lucien knows his game. He knows that after what we’ve seen, we don’t have the luxury to doubt. Right now, he’s calling the shots.’

No one said anything, because no one really knew what to say.

Hunter took the silent break opportunity and turned to face the man sitting at the head of the table.

‘How’s the house searching going, Adrian?’ he asked. ‘Any news?’

Kennedy looked at him as if Hunter had read his thoughts.

There was a stretched, worried pause.

‘Well,’ Kennedy said at last, ‘that’s the real reason we’re here tonight. The search team found something inside Lucien Folter’s bedroom. It was hidden inside his mattress.’

The tension in the room climbed up a few degrees.

Everyone waited.

‘And this is what they found.’

Kennedy clicked a button on the small remote-control unit on the table in front of him, and the image of the closed wooden box Goldstein and Reyna had found was immediately projected onto the white screen on the far wall.

‘Looks like a gun case,’ Deon Douglas commented. ‘Big enough for a machine gun, or a disassembled long-range rifle. Has it been opened yet?’

Kennedy nodded. ‘Unfortunately, a weapon wasn’t what was found inside it,’ he replied.

‘So what did we get?’ Taylor asked.

Kennedy’s eyes circled the table and paused on Hunter before he pressed the remote-control button one more time.

‘We got this.’

Thirty

Despite lights off and the total darkness that surrounded him, Lucien Folter lay awake in his cell down in sublevel five of the BSU building. His eyes were open, and he was staring at the ceiling as if some fascinating movie that only he could see were being projected against it. But this time he wasn’t lost in one of his meditation trances. The time for meditation was well and truly over. He was simply reorganizing his thoughts, putting them in an appropriate order of execution.

A step at a time, he thought. Take it a step at a time, Lucien.

And step one seemed to have gone perfectly so far.

Lucien would’ve given anything to have seen Hunter’s face when he entered the basement down in the house in Murphy and finally realized that the wall frames weren’t drawings. He would’ve given anything to have seen Hunter’s face when he finally recognized Susan’s tattoo.

Yes, that would’ve been worth a small fortune.

He felt his blood warming as memories of his last night with Susan came rushing back to him. He could still remember the sweet smell of her perfume, how soft her hair felt, how smooth her skin was. He reminisced on those memories for just a while longer before pushing them aside.

Lucien wondered how long it would take the FBI search team to find the box he had hidden inside the mattress in the master bedroom.

Probably not that long, if they’re any good.

Instinctively, he started going over the contents of the box in his head, and that filled him with excitement, bringing a proud but curbed smile to his lips. He could remember every item. But that box and its contents were nothing compared to what was still to come. They were all in for a big surprise.

Lucien swallowed his smile down and finally closed his eyes.

One step at a time, Lucien. One step at a time.

Thirty-One

The next image to appear on the projection screen was a snapshot of the same wooden box they’d all seen seconds earlier, but this time the lid was open. They could all clearly see that the box had a division down its center, creating two distinct compartments. As if on cue, everyone in the room, with the exception of Adrian Kennedy, craned their necks forward and squinted at the screen at the same time.

The compartment on the right was packed full of what at first seemed like just a bunch of colorful fabrics. The compartment on the left was filled with a variety of different jewelry items.

Silence.

More squinting.

A few chairs shuffled.

‘Are those women’s underwear?’ Agent Taylor finally asked, indicating the compartment on the right.

‘Let me clear that up for you,’ Kennedy said, clicking the remote control button yet again.

The image on the screen changed one more time. It now showed all the contents from the box neatly arranged over a white surface. Taylor was right. The fabrics that were in the right compartment were all women’s underwear, panties to be more precise, in a multitude of colors, sizes and styles, but now that they were all unbundled and plainly displayed in rows, an unseen detail became clear to everyone. Many of the garments were covered with dried blood.

The jewelry items that had occupied the left box compartment were also clearly arranged in rows, divided by type — rings, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, watches, chains, and even a couple of belly button bars.

The air inside the conference room seemed to have become stale and intoxicating all of a sudden.

‘Inside the right compartment, we found fourteen pairs of women’s underwear,’ Kennedy said, standing up. ‘Out of those, eleven were covered with blood.’ He allowed the gravity of what he’d just said to sink in before continuing. ‘All the items have already been expedited to our forensics lab. The garments vary in size, from extra small, or size zero, to large — size thirty-four — which would indicate that they belonged to different people.’

‘They would have,’ Hunter said, more as an instinctive comment to himself than to the room, but Kennedy heard it.

‘Sorry, what was that, Robert?’

Hunter paused for an instant.

‘Those are tokens, Adrian, and I’m sure that everyone in this room knows that, in general, token collectors only take one token from each victim.’

Like a Mexican wave, agreement nods started with the person to Hunter’s right, and moved around the table all the way to Taylor.

Token collectors do in general take only one token from each victim. Usually a very intimate item. Something that will easily trigger very strong memories of the victim and the murder act, and remind them of how powerful they are. A lot of the time they go for intimate items of clothing because they’re in close contact with the victim’s skin, more precisely sexual parts, and they’ll frequently hold the victim’s smell. Some perpetrators even believe they’ll be able to smell the victim’s fear on the item for months afterward, maybe years if properly stored, heightening their exhilaration, because many of them become aroused, sexually or otherwise, by the fear they command over their prey. With that in mind, taking two or more intimate items that belonged to the same victim would become pointless because they would not increase the satisfaction perpetrators get from reliving the murder act. One is usually more than enough.

‘Detective Hunter is right,’ Doctor Lambert said. ‘There’d be very little point in taking more than one token from each victim.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ Jennifer Holden from PROFILER exclaimed. ‘So you’re saying that we now might have another fourteen “possible” victims to add to the “possible” seven we’ve already got?’

‘Twenty-six “possible” new victims,’ Hunter corrected her, pointing to the jewelry pieces on the screen.

Six pairs of wide-open eyes honed in on him. Kennedy and Doctor Lambert were the only ones who showed no surprise.

‘Right again,’ Doctor Lambert confirmed, nodding at the group. ‘Following the double-token theory, if Mr Folter had already taken an underwear item from a victim, also taking a piece of jewelry from the same victim makes the second token pointless.’ He nodded at the screen. ‘We’ve got twelve pieces of jewelry. It would be safe to assume that the jewelry came from different victims, increasing the total to a possible twenty-six. Add that to what was found in his trunk and in his basement, and we might be looking at thirty-three victims so far.’

A few headshakes were followed by a couple of deflated sighs and whispers.

‘There’s something else,’ Hunter said.

The room’s attention returned to him.

‘Two of those rings, all three watches, and one of those necklaces aren’t feminine pieces of jewelry.’

All eyes moved back to the screen.

‘If these really belonged to his victims,’ Hunter moved on, ‘it doesn’t look like Lucien killed only women.’

Thirty-Two

At 7:30 a.m. sharp, the heavy metal door to the cell corridor in sublevel five of the BSU building buzzed open. The hallway beyond it was wide, well lit and about seventy-five yards long. The cinder-block wall on the right was painted a dull shade of gray. The shining resin floor carried almost the same color, just a touch darker, with two guiding yellow lines running along the edge of it. The left wall was a series of high-security cells. Ten in total. Each cell was separated by a wall as wide as the cell itself, which was about eleven feet. There were no metal bars. The cells were all fronted by very thick, shatterproof Plexiglas. On the Plexiglas, positioned in a cluster at the center of it and about five and a half feet from the floor, there were eight small conversation holes, about half an inch in diameter each. The cells were all empty, their lights turned off, with the exception of the one at the far end of the corridor.

Hunter and Taylor stepped through the door and into the echoey hallway. Despite being with the FBI for several years now, and having visited the BSU building on many occasions, this was the first time Taylor had been down in sublevel five. Hunter had never seen it either.

There was definitely something quite ominous and sinister about that long stretch of corridor, as if they had just stepped over the threshold between good and evil. The air inside it felt a touch too cold, a touch too dense, a touch less breathable.

Taylor did her best to fight the awkward shiver that sped up and down her spine as she took the first steps toward the last cell, but failed miserably. Something about that place reminded her of the Halloween haunted houses she used to be so scared of when she was a kid.

‘I don’t know about you,’ she said, steadying her body. ‘But I’d much rather do this up in the interrogation room.’

‘Unfortunately we don’t have that choice,’ Hunter replied as their shoes click-clacked against the shiny floor with every step. He suddenly stopped and faced Taylor. ‘Courtney, let me tell you something about Lucien.’ His voice was barely louder than a whisper. He didn’t want it to echo all the way to the last cell. ‘He always liked to play games — mind games — and he was very good at it. He’s probably even better now. I’m sure he’ll target you more than he will me. He’ll try to get under your skin with comments, innuendos, direct digs, whatever. Some will probably be very nasty. Just be prepared for it, OK? Don’t let it affect you. If he manages to get into your mind, he’ll rip you apart.’

Taylor made a face as if she already knew all this.

‘I’m a big girl, Robert. I know how to take care of myself.’

Hunter nodded. He hoped she was right.

Thirty-Three

Two metal fold-up chairs had already been placed side by side at the end of the corridor, directly in front of the last cell.

Lucien Folter was lying on his bed, motionless, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He could hear the steps coming down the hallway toward him. He stood up, faced the Plexiglas and waited. He looked and felt completely relaxed. Not an ounce of any sort of emotion showing on his face. A couple of seconds later Hunter and Taylor came into his line of sight, and the blank mask vanished, like an experienced actor who’d just been given his cue for the big scene.

He gave them a warm smile.

‘Welcome to my new home,’ he said in a calm voice, looking around himself. ‘As temporary as it may be.’

The cell was a rectangular box, eleven feet wide by thirteen feet deep. Just like the corridor outside, its walls were made up of cinder blocks painted a dull shade of gray. Other than the bed, which was mounted against the left wall, there was only a latrine and a washbasin against the far wall, and a small metal table with a metal bench, both bolted to the right wall and floor.

As if about to conduct a business meeting, Lucien pointed to the two chairs in the corridor.

‘Please have a seat.’

He waited for Hunter and Taylor to be seated before taking a seat himself at the edge of the bed.

‘Seven-thirty in the morning,’ Lucien said. ‘I love an early start. And as far as I can remember, so do you, Robert. Still can’t sleep?’

Hunter said nothing, but his insomnia wasn’t a big secret, or something he kept hidden from anyone, anyway. He had started experiencing sleepless nights at the early age of seven, just after cancer robbed him of his mother.

With no family other than his father, coping with his mother’s death proved to be a very painful and lonely task. He would lie awake at night, too sad to fall asleep, too scared to close his eyes, too proud to cry.

It was just after his mother’s funeral when he started fearing his dreams. Every time he closed his eyes he saw her face, crying, contorted with pain, begging for help, praying for death. He saw her once fit-and-healthy body so drained of life, so fragile and weak, she couldn’t even sit up on her own strength. He saw a face that had once been beautiful, that had once carried the brightest smile and the kindest eyes he’d ever seen, transformed during those last few months into something unrecognizable. But it was still a face he’d never stopped loving.

Sleep and his dreams became the prison he’d do anything to escape from. Insomnia was the logical answer his body and brain found to deal with his fear and the ghastly nightmares that came at night. A simple but effective defense mechanism.

Lucien studied Hunter and Taylor’s faces for several seconds. ‘You’re still very good at not giving anything away, Robert,’ he said, shaking his finger in Hunter’s direction. ‘Actually, I’d say you got better at it, but you, Agent Taylor.’ His finger moved to her. ‘Are close, but not quite there yet. I assume you’ve found the box.

‘See, Agent Taylor.’ A new smile found its way onto Lucien’s lips. ‘That quick glance you gave Robert just confirmed my suspicion. You still have a bit to learn.’

Taylor looked unfazed.

Lucien’s smile widened.

‘You see Agent Taylor,’ he said. ‘Keeping a steady poker face takes a lot of practice. Creating a deceptive façade takes a lot more energy though, isn’t that right, Robert?’ Lucien knew Hunter wouldn’t reply, so he moved on. ‘Even you have to admit that I’ve now got mine down to perfection, haven’t I? You thought you could always tell when I was lying, didn’t you?’ He breathed in. ‘And you could, all those years ago, but not anymore.’ Lucien paused and scratched his chin. ‘Let me see now. What was it again? Oh yes. . this.’

Lucien looked straight into Hunter’s eyes, and suddenly his stare became a touch more focused, more determined. Then, for fraction of a second, his lower left eyelid tightened in an almost imperceptible movement. If you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t have seen it.

‘Did you catch that, Agent Taylor?’ Lucien followed his question with a smile. ‘Of course you didn’t, but don’t beat yourself up just yet. It’s not your fault. You had no idea what you were looking for or where to look.’ His gaze moved to Hunter. ‘Robert noticed it because he knew he had to look at my eyes, especially my left one. I’ll do it again, a little slower this time. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it, Agent Taylor.’

He repeated his eye movement, this time with so much control it was almost frightening.

‘You told me about it in college once, Robert, after a party, remember? We were both a little drunk and you thought I’d taken no notice of it, didn’t you?’

Hunter cast his mind back, and a hazy memory surfaced.

‘But it stayed with me,’ Lucien continued. ‘You said that it was something very subtle, not everyone would notice, but I know that you could always pick it up. You always had a great eye for that kind of stuff, Robert. I know I didn’t do it often. At least not if I was telling just a simple white lie, but if it were anything more serious. . BANG, my eye movement always gave me away.’ Lucien used his thumb and forefinger to rub his eyes a couple of times. ‘So I practiced, and practiced, and practiced in front of a mirror until it was all gone. No more telltale signs. No more being betrayed by psychological motor reactions. It took me a while, a long while actually, but I learned to control them. In fact, I got so good at it that I can flash-create new ones any time I like, just to throw people off course. That is a terrifying thought, isn’t it?’

Hunter and Taylor stayed quiet.

‘I knew that you’d be looking for the eye movement giveaway, Robert. I could sense your concentration in order to read me.’ A new smile. ‘I was fucking great, wasn’t I? A performance worthy of an Oscar.’ Without losing a beat, Lucien changed the subject and moved on. ‘I’d offer you a drink,’ he said. ‘But all I’ve got is tap water, and I only have one cup.’ Again, he studied his two interviewers for an awkward moment. ‘Coffee would be nice, but I don’t have any.’ His stare lingered on Taylor.

She got the hint, looked up at the CCTV camera on the ceiling high above the cell, and gave it a single nod.

‘Black with two sugars, if you please,’ Lucien said, looking up at the same camera before addressing Hunter and Taylor again. ‘OK, let me tell you how this is going to work. I’ll allow you to ask me a few questions. I’ll answer them truthfully, and I mean that. I won’t lie. Then it’s my turn to ask you a question. If I sense that you haven’t answered me honestly, the interview is over for twenty-four hours, and we can start again the next day. I tell you the truth, you tell me the truth. Does that sound fair to you?’

Taylor frowned. ‘You want to ask us questions? About what?’

Her reaction amused Lucien.

‘Information is power, Agent Taylor. I like feeling powerful, don’t you?’

They all heard the door at the end of the corridor buzz open again. A Marine carrying a steaming cup of coffee made his way toward them. Taylor took the cup, placed it in the Plexiglas slide tray, and slid it into the cell toward Lucien.

‘Thank you, Agent Taylor,’ he said, retrieving the cup. He brought it to his nose and drew in a deep breath before sipping it. If the coffee was too hot, he showed no reaction. ‘Very nice.’ He nodded his approval. ‘OK,’ he said, sitting back down, ‘let’s start the great reveal. What’s your first question?’

Thirty-Four

Hunter had been silently studying his old friend since he and Taylor got to his cell. Lucien had an even more victorious, self-glorifying air about him that morning than he had the day before, but that wasn’t all that surprising. Lucien knew he was holding the upper hand. He knew that, at least for now, they all had to dance to his tune, and that seemed to please him immensely. But there was something else. Something new about Lucien’s persona — conviction, confidence, deep pride even, as if he really wanted everyone to know the truth about what he’d done.

Taylor glanced at Hunter, who made no move to ask the first question.

‘So far we’ve found indications that you might’ve committed thirty-three murders,’ she began, her voice flat, calm, calculated, her eyes not shying away from Lucien’s. ‘Is that correct, or have there been any more victims we don’t yet know about?’

Lucien sipped his coffee again before shrugging matter-of-factly.

‘That’s a good first question, Agent Taylor, straight away trying to figure out just how big a monster I am.’ He tilted his head back ever so slightly and started running his index finger from his Adam’s apple to the tip of his chin, in a shaving motion. ‘But tell me this, if I’d murdered only one person, savagely or not, would that make me less of a monster than if I’d murdered thirty-three, or fifty-three, or one hundred and three?’

Taylor kept her cool. ‘Is that one of your questions for us?’

Lucien smiled, unconcerned. ‘No, it isn’t. I was just curious, but never mind, ’cos like I said, Agent Taylor, it was a good first question. It just wasn’t the right one. And that’s very disappointing coming from a senior FBI agent like yourself. I was really expecting more from you.’ He looked at her in a derogatory way. ‘But I don’t mind schooling you this once. After all, life is nothing but a big learning experience, isn’t that right, Agent Taylor?’

Taylor said nothing, but a tiny hint of anger trickled into her eyes.

‘Your first question should’ve had more purpose. It should’ve addressed the main topic of why you’re here. The question should’ve prompted an answer that would’ve indicated if you’re wasting time or not.’ Lucien sipped his coffee again before addressing Hunter. ‘But let’s see if we can fix that for her, shall we? I still remember how good you used to be in college, Robert, always a step ahead of everyone, including all the professors. Now, with so many years of experience as an LAPD detective, I’m guessing you’ve got better, sharper, wittier even. So, for the grand prize, let’s hear it, Robert. In this situation, what would your first question have been? And please don’t disappoint Agent Taylor here. She wants to learn.’

Hunter didn’t have to look. He could feel Taylor’s eyes on him.

Hunter was sitting back against the chair’s backrest. His position was relaxed and calm. His left leg was crossed over his right one. His hands were resting on his thighs. There was no tension in his shoulders or neck, and his facial expression didn’t seem worried.

‘Don’t keep us waiting, Robert,’ Lucien urged him. ‘Patience is a virtue, but a pain in the ass to master.’

Hunter knew he had no alternative but to play Lucien’s game.

‘Location,’ he said at last. ‘Do you really know the exact location of every body you disposed of?’

Clap, clap, clap.

Lucien had put his cup of coffee down on the floor, and had begun clapping slowly.

‘He’s good, isn’t he?’ Lucien asked Taylor in a sarcastic tone. ‘If I were you, I’d pay attention, Agent Taylor. You might learn a thing or two here today.’

Taylor did her best not to glare at him.

‘You know why that’s the right question, Agent Taylor?’ he asked rhetorically, like a lecturing teacher. ‘Because if I answer “no” to it, this whole thing is over. You can pack me up and send me off to the electric chair. I’m no use to you, or the FBI anymore.’ Without taking his eyes off Taylor, he picked up his coffee cup from the floor. ‘You’re not here to get a confession from me, Agent Taylor. That part is done and dusted. I am a killer. I murdered all those people. . brutally.’ There was a chilling pride in Lucien’s last few words. ‘The only reason I’m still here is because you desperately need something from me.’ He glanced at Hunter. ‘The location of all the bodies. Not really because you need proof of what I’ve done, but because families need closure. They need to give their loved ones a proper burial, isn’t that right, Agent, Taylor?’

Again Taylor didn’t reply.

‘If I answer “no” to Robert’s question, there’s no point in having any more interviews. There’s no point in asking any more questions. There’s no point in keeping me here, because I can’t give you what you need.’ A ghost of a smile graced Lucien’s lips. This was certainly amusing him. ‘Tell me, Agent Taylor, does it make you mad that an outsider can do your job better than you?’

Don’t let it get to you, the voice inside Hunter’s head said to Taylor. Don’t get upset. Don’t let him under your skin. From the corner of his eye he could see Taylor struggling with her anger, and if he could see it, so could Lucien.

Taylor didn’t take the bait. She did struggle with her anger, but she kept it under wraps.

Lucien chuckled proudly and his attention returned to Hunter.

‘The answer to your question, Robert, is — yes. I can tell you the location of all the bodies that can be found.’ He calmly sipped his coffee. ‘As you might understand, some can never be found. It’s a physical impossibility. Oh,’ he said casually, ‘and I also know all of their identities by heart.’

Once again, Lucien tried to read Hunter’s expression. Once again he failed, but he detected a hint of doubt in Taylor’s eyes.

‘I’m willing to sit through a polygraph test if you think I’m deceiving you, Agent Taylor.’

He’ll easily beat it. Hunter’s words from the early-morning meeting came back to her. He’s probably counting on a polygraph test.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ she finally said.

Lucien laughed animatedly. ‘I see. Did Robert tell you that we both beat the polygraph when we were in college, just for fun?’

Taylor didn’t confirm it, but she didn’t know that Hunter had beaten it as well.

‘He was much better than I was, though,’ Lucien said. ‘It took me months to master the technique, but he got it down in just a few weeks.’ He looked at Hunter. ‘Robert always had tremendous self-discipline and concentration control.’

Something different coated Lucien’s last few words. Taylor thought it was jealousy, but she was wrong.

Lucien lifted a hand in a ‘wait’ gesture.

‘But why should you believe a word I’m saying? I haven’t done much other than lie to you up to now.’ There was a lengthy pause. ‘As I’ve suggested, you could try a lie-detector test.’ Lucien threw his head back and laughed a full-fat laugh. ‘I wish you had. That would’ve been fun.’

Neither Hunter nor Taylor looked amused.

‘You don’t have to say it, Robert,’ Lucien commented, anticipating what Hunter was about to say. ‘I’m pretty sure I know the procedure. To establish a thread of trust between us, you’ll need some sort of token of good faith, isn’t that right? If I were a terrorist holding hostages, this is the point where you would ask me for a hostage, just to prove that I’m willing to play fair.’

‘You’ve got to give us something, Lucien,’ Hunter agreed. He hadn’t shifted from his relaxed sitting position yet. ‘Like you’ve said, you’ve given us nothing but lies so far.’

Lucien nodded and finished his coffee.

‘I understand that, Robert.’ He closed his eyes and drew in a deep, tranquil breath, as if he were just sitting in a flowery garden outside somewhere, appreciating the delicate perfume that traveled the air. ‘Megan Lowe,’ Lucien said without opening his eyes. ‘Twenty-eight years old. Born December 16 in Lewistown, Montana.’ He slowly ran the tip of his tongue across his upper lip, as if his mouth had started to salivate at the memory. ‘Kate Barker, twenty-six years old. Born eleventh of May in Seattle, Washington. Megan was abducted on July second, Kate on July fourth. Both were independent street-working girls, working in Seattle, Washington. Megan was the brunette whose head was found inside the trunk of the car I was driving. Kate was the blonde one.’

Lucien finally opened his eyes and looked at Hunter.

‘The remains of their bodies are still in Seattle. Would you like to write down the address?’

Thirty-Five

Director Adrian Kennedy, who was watching and listening to the interview from the holding cells’ control room, immediately got the bureaucratic machine running to obtain a federal search warrant. Being an FBI director has its advantages, and despite the early hour and the fact that Washington State is three hours behind Virginia, Kennedy managed to get a warrant signed by a Seattle federal judge in record time.

Even though Lucien had told Hunter and Taylor that the key to the location where the two victims’ remains were stored was on the same keychain they had used for the house in Murphy, Kennedy wasn’t willing to wait. He wasn’t about to send Hunter, Taylor or any other agent all the way from Quantico to Seattle, just to check if Lucien was lying again or not.

With a federal search warrant secured, Kennedy placed a call to the FBI field office on 1110 3rd Avenue in Seattle, Washington. At 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time, a team of two agents was dispatched to the address Lucien had given Hunter and Taylor — a commercial storage unit.

‘So where are we going, Ed?’ Special Agent Sergio Decker asked, as he took the driver’s seat and switched on the engine of the midnight-black Ford SUV.

Special Agent in charge, Edgar Figueroa, had just climbed into the passenger seat. He was in his mid-thirties, tall and broad-shouldered, with a bodybuilder’s physique. His dark hair was cropped to a centimeter of his skull, and one just needed to look at his nose to know that it had been broken at least a couple of times.

‘To check a self-storage unit on North 130th Street,’ he replied, buckling up.

Decker nodded, backed the car up, took a right on 3rd Avenue and headed northwest toward Seneca Street.

‘What case is this?’ he asked.

‘Not ours,’ Figueroa replied. ‘I think a call came in from high above in Washington, DC or Quantico. We’re just going to verify the veracity of the address.’

‘Narcs?’ Decker questioned.

Figueroa shrugged and shook his head at the same time. ‘Not sure, but I don’t think so. DEA isn’t involved as far as I know. I wasn’t told much, but I think this is supposed to be victim’s remains.’

Decker’s eyebrows arched. ‘Stashed in a commercial storage unit?’

‘That’s the address we have,’ Figueroa confirmed.

Decker took another right and merged onto the I-5 North, heading toward Vancouver, British Columbia. Traffic was slow, as expected at that time in the morning, but not excessively so.

‘Do they have somebody in custody?’ Decker asked.

‘As far as I understand, yes. And again, I think they’re holding him either in DC or Quantico.’ Another shrug from Figueroa. ‘Like I said, I wasn’t told very much, but I did get the impression that this is something big.’

‘Do we have a warrant, or are we just going to talk our way through this, using our FBI charm?’ Decker joked.

‘We do have a warrant,’ Figueroa said, consulting his watch. ‘A court marshal is meeting us at the address.’

The trip from the FBI office on 3rd Avenue to the independent self-storage building, located on the north side of the city, took them about twenty-five minutes. Just like most self-storage buildings, from the outside this one also looked like a regular warehouse. It was painted all in white, with the self-storage trade name in huge green letters across the front of the building. The large customers’ car park at the front of the unit was practically empty, with only a handful of cars scattered around the lot. A young couple was unloading the contents of a rented white van onto an industrial-size wheeled cart. The van was parked by loading dock number two.

Decker parked the SUV by the side of a small decorative green garden directly in front of the unit’s main office. The ground was still wet from the rain that had stopped about forty minutes earlier, but judging from how dark the sky looked, rain was on its way back.

As both agents stepped out of the car, a woman, probably in her early forties, exited a white Jeep Compass that was parked just a few yards away, four spaces to their right.

‘I’m US Court Marshal Joanna Hughes,’ she said, offering her hand. She didn’t have to ask. She could easily tell that Figueroa and Decker were the two FBI agents she was supposed to meet.

Hughes’ chestnut hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, which made her forehead seem too large for her round face. She wasn’t exactly an attractive woman. Her nose looked a little too pointy, her lips too thin, and her eyes seemed to be constantly squinting, as if trying to read something that was just a touch too far away. She was elegantly dressed in a cream business suit and beige, pointed high-heel shoes. The agents formally introduced themselves and shook hands.

‘Shall we?’ Hughes gestured toward the reception.

An electronic ‘ding-ding’ bell rang as Figueroa pushed the office door open and he, Decker and Hughes stepped into the excessively brightly lit rectangular room. Both FBI agents kept their dark shades on. Hughes just wished she had hers with her.

There was a small seating area to the left of the door. A light brown four-seater sofa and two matching armchairs had been positioned around a round chrome and glass low table. A few magazines and several brochures of the storage facility were neatly arranged on the tabletop. There was also a water cooler in the corner. Sitting behind the wood and acrylic reception counter was a young man who looked to be no older than twenty-five. His eyes were glued to his smartphone. He seemed to be either texting ferociously, or really absorbed in some ridiculously entertaining videogame. It took him at least five seconds to finally look up from the tiny screen.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked, putting the phone down next to the computer monitor in front of him and standing up. He gave the visitors an overenthusiastic smile.

‘Are you the person in charge here?’ Marshal Hughes asked.

‘That would be correct, ma’am.’ The kid nodded once. ‘How can I help you today?’

Hughes stepped closer and displayed her credentials. ‘I’m US Federal Marshal Joanna Hughes,’ she said. ‘These two gentlemen are federal agents with the FBI.’

Figueroa and Decker reached into their suit jacket pockets, producing their IDs.

The kid checked them before taking a step back. He looked a little confused. ‘Is there some sort of a problem?’ His enthusiastic smile had completely vanished.

Hughes handed him a piece of paper with the US government stamp on it.

‘This is a federal search warrant giving us legal permission and right to search storage unit number 325 in this establishment,’ she said calmly but in a very authoritative voice. ‘Would you be so kind as to open it for us?’

The kid looked at the warrant, read a few lines, pulled a face as if it were written in Latin, and hesitated for a second. ‘I. . I think I need to call my boss for this.’

‘What’s your name, kid?’ Decker asked.

‘Billy.’

Billy was about five-foot-eight with short blond hair, which was spiked at places with styling gel. He had a three-day-old stubble and a couple of earrings in each ear.

‘OK, Billy, you can call whoever you like, but we don’t really have time to wait.’ He nodded at the warrant. ‘As Federal Marshal Hughes has explained, that piece of paper, which has been signed by a US federal judge, gives us the legal right to look inside unit 325, with or without your cooperation. Neither you nor we need your boss’s permission to do so. That’s all the permission we need right there. If you don’t open the door for us, unfortunately for you, we’re just going to have to bust it open, using any means necessary.’

‘And we won’t be legally responsible for any damage caused,’ Figueroa added. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Billy had started to look very uncomfortable. His cellphone beeped on the counter, announcing a new incoming text message, but he didn’t even glance at it.

‘That copy of the warrant stays with you,’ Decker added. ‘So you can show it to your boss, your lawyer, or whoever you please. That guarantees that you’re not breaking the law, or company rules, or doing anything you shouldn’t be doing.’ He paused and checked his watch. ‘We’re on a pretty tight schedule here, Billy. So what’s it going to be? Are you going to let us into the unit, or are we busting it open? You’ve got to make a choice.’

‘You guys aren’t punking me, are you?’ Billy asked, his stare moving to the glass window behind both agents, as if he was trying to spot a candid camera somewhere.

‘This is official, Billy,’ Hughes replied, her tone telling Billy that that was no joke.

‘You guys really FBI?’ Billy now sounded a little thrilled.

‘We really are,’ Decker replied.

‘Look, I’d like to help,’ Billy said. ‘I can let you into the building. No problem. But I can’t open the door to unit 325 because it’s padlocked. None of our doors has an actual key locking mechanism, just a very thick sliding bolt. Our customers can buy a padlock from us.’ He quickly indicated a display just behind him with several padlocks in all different sizes. ‘Or bring their own, but they’re not required to supply us with an extra key, so none do. Once a unit is rented out, we don’t have access to it anymore. It’s a completely private affair.’

Figueroa nodded, and thought about it for a moment. ‘OK. Can you give us the details of that account?’

‘Sure.’ Billy started typing something into the computer behind the reception desk. ‘Here we go,’ he said after just a few seconds. ‘The unit is one of our medium, special ones — ten feet by ten feet.’

‘Special?’ Decker asked.

‘Yeah,’ Billy said. ‘It’s one of our units that’s fitted with a power socket.’

‘OK.’

‘It was rented out eight months ago, on the fourth of January, to a Mr Liam Shaw,’ Billy continued reading from his screen. ‘He paid for it a whole year in advance. . cash.’

‘No surprise there,’ Decker said.

‘The unit is located on Corridor F,’ Billy added. ‘I can take you there now if you like.’

‘Let’s go,’ Figueroa and Decker said at the same time.

Thirty-Six

Until they had some sort of confirmation that Lucien was telling the truth about the self-storage unit in Seattle, no one saw any point in moving forward with the interviews. Director Adrian Kennedy told Hunter and Taylor that Washington FBI agents, armed with a federal search warrant, had already been sent to verify the veracity of Lucien’s statements, and they should have an answer in the next sixty minutes or less.

Taylor was sitting alone inside one of the conference rooms on sublevel three of the BSU building, staring at the untouched cup of coffee on the table in front of her, when Hunter opened the door and stepped inside.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

For a moment it seemed like Hunter’s question hadn’t reached her, then she slowly turned and looked up at him.

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

An awkward few silent seconds followed.

‘You did well down there,’ Hunter said in a non-patronizing or condescending tone.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Taylor replied with a sarcastic nod. ‘Except for starting out with the wrong first question, you mean.’

‘No,’ Hunter told her, taking a seat across the table from her. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, you see. No matter what first question you came up with, Courtney, Lucien would’ve thrown it back at you and tried to discredit you, tried to make you feel inferior, tried to shake your confidence and make you believe you’re not good enough, because he wants to get under your skin. And he knows he’s good at it. In college he used to bully professors that way.’

Taylor kept her eyes on Hunter.

‘He wants to get under my skin too, but he knows me a little better than he does you, or at least he did, so right now he’ll want to test the water with you to see how you respond, and he’s going to keep on pushing harder and harder, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Let him push,’ Taylor replied firmly.

‘Just remember that to Lucien this is like a game, Courtney. . his game, because he knows he has the upper hand. Right now, there’s only one thing we can do.’

Taylor looked back at Hunter. ‘We play the game,’ she said.

Hunter shook his head. ‘Not the game, we play his game. We give him what he wants. Make him believe he’s winning.’

Adrian Kennedy pushed the conference-room door open and peeked inside. ‘Ah, here you are.’ He was carrying a blue dossier with him.

‘Anything from Seattle yet?’ Hunter asked.

‘Not yet,’ Kennedy responded. ‘We’re still waiting, but it doesn’t look like Lucien was lying about the identities of the women found in his trunk.’ He flipped open the dossier. ‘Megan Lowe, twenty-eight years old. Born December 16 in Lewistown, Montana. She left Lewistown when she was sixteen, six months after her mother allowed her then boyfriend to move into their house.’ Kennedy instinctively nodded at Hunter. ‘She first moved to Los Angeles, where she spent the next six years. All indicates that she was indeed a street-working girl. After LA, Megan moved to Seattle. Line of work seemed to have stayed the same.’ He turned a page on the report he was reading. ‘Kate Barker, twenty-six years old. Born May 11 in Seattle, Washington. She left home when she was seventeen and moved in with a boyfriend, who at the time was an “aspiring musician”. Not confirmed, but it seems like the boyfriend was the one who first got Kate to prostitute herself.’

‘Money for drugs?’ Taylor asked.

Kennedy shrugged. ‘Probably. The abduction dates Lucien gave us, July second for Megan and July fourth for Kate, will be hard to confirm, as neither of them were ever reported missing.’

That wasn’t surprising. Prostitutes account for the third-largest number of unsolved murders in the USA, just behind gang and drug-related killings. Every day thousands of street-working girls in America are raped, beaten up, robbed or abducted. They aren’t targeted because of how attractive they look, or because they carry cash with them. They are targeted because they are easily accessible and extremely vulnerable, but most of all because they are anonymous. The vast majority of street-working girls live alone, or share with other working girls. They don’t normally have a partner for obvious reasons. Many of them are runaways with little or no links to their families anymore. They live lonely lives, with very few friends. Statistically, only two in every ten street workers that go missing are ever reported to missing persons.

Kennedy handed a copy of the report to Hunter and one to Taylor. The reports each carried a mugshot of their subjects. Both women, Megan Lowe and Kate Barker, had been arrested a couple of times for prostitution. Despite the mugshots, it was impossible for anyone to match the photographs to the two heads found inside Lucien’s trunk, such was the brutality of the wounds inflicted on them.

‘If Lucien wasn’t lying about their identities,’ Kennedy said, as he was leaving the room, ‘chances are, he isn’t lying about Seattle either.’

Thirty-Seven

The inside of the storage facility was just as brightly lit as the reception office, with extra-wide corridors and rounded corners for ease of movement with wheeled carts and pallet trucks. The resin floor had been painted in light green. The storage unit doors were all white with their respective numbers painted in black at the center of it, and again on the wall to the right of the door. It took Billy about two minutes to guide them through all the turns and hallways until they reached corridor F. Unit 325 was the third door on the left.

‘Here we are,’ Billy said, indicating the unit.

Just as he’d explained earlier, centered on the right-hand edge of the rolling door was a metal bolt, locked in place by a thick, brass-colored padlock.

Figueroa and Decker moved forward to have a better look at it.

Unlike the military-grade padlock that Lucien had used to secure the door to the basement in the house in Murphy, this one was a Master ProSeries, shrouded padlock, not as impenetrable, but still formidable.

‘This is a pretty heavy duty padlock,’ Figueroa said, looking at Decker and then at Billy. ‘Do you think you can breach it with that bolt cutter?’

Billy had already assumed that he’d have to breach the padlock to the unit, and had brought with him a red and yellow forty-two-inch bolt cutter.

‘No problem,’ Billy said, stepping forward. ‘We had to cut through a similar one a few weeks ago. I’m pretty sure this one will be no different.’

‘So go right ahead and do your thing, Billy,’ Figueroa said, stepping out of the way.

Billy moved closer, opened the jaws of the cutter as wide as it would go and carefully positioned them around one of the shrouded ends of the padlock’s shackle. He put most of his weight behind the cutter, and gave it a firm squeeze.

Clank.

The cutter slid off the padlock as if nothing had happened, but they all saw something bounce onto the floor and slide away a couple of yards down the corridor. Billy had managed to cut off part of the protective shroud. Now the shackle was exposed on one side.

‘I told you,’ Billy said, nodding at the cutter. ‘This bad boy is the shit. Now comes the easy part.’ He placed the cutter jaws around the exposed shackle and gave it one more firm squeeze.

Click.

This time the cutter didn’t slide off the padlock. Its jaws simply cut through the shackle as if slicing through wet clay.

Everyone looked impressed.

‘I need to cut it again,’ Billy explained. ‘The shackle is too thick and too sturdy for us to be able to twist it out of place and free the lock. I need to cut a chunk off the shackle.’

‘Knock yourself out, Billy,’ Decker said.

Billy repeated the same steps as seconds earlier, this time placing the cutter’s jaws about three centimeters up the shackle from where he’d cut through the first time.

Click.

As the cutters sliced through the metal again, a small piece fell to the ground, leaving a sizable gap on the padlock’s shackle.

‘And Bob’s your uncle,’ Billy announced triumphantly, removing the padlock from the door bolt.

‘Great work, Billy,’ Figueroa said.

Billy stepped away and Figueroa slid the door bolt back and rolled the metal door up. All four of them stood still for a moment, staring into the almost empty, ten feet by ten feet, storage unit. There was nothing there, except a large industrial chest freezer pushed up against the back wall.

‘Thanks, Billy,’ Decker said, slipping on a pair of latex gloves. Figueroa did the same. ‘You can go back now. We’ll call you if we need anything else.’

Billy looked disappointed. ‘Can’t I stay and have a look?’

‘Not this time, Billy.’

They all waited until Billy had rounded the corner before entering the storage unit. Hughes stayed a couple of paces behind both agents.

A low hum that came from the freezer’s motor provided a very unnerving and creepy background soundtrack. There was no padlock or lock on the freezer’s lid.

Figueroa moved closer and studied the freezer for several seconds, checking underneath and behind it as well.

‘Looks OK,’ he said at last.

‘So let’s check inside,’ Decker replied.

Figueroa nodded and lifted the lid open.

They all frowned in almost perfect synchronization as Figueroa, Decker and Hughes looked inside.

‘What exactly are we looking for here, guys?’ Hughes asked in a semi-sarcastic tone. ‘Supplies for an ice-cream parlor?’

All they could see inside the large freezer were stacks of two-liter plastic tubs of ice cream. In fact, they were about three layers high. From the labels they could see on the top layer, they had a rainbow of flavors: chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, pistachio, cookies and cream, apple cinnamon, and banana choc-chip.

Decker was still frowning at all the tubs, but Figueroa had a much more concerned look on his face.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he finally said in a deflated breath, reaching for one of the tubs. He picked up a strawberry one.

Hughes and Decker were now frowning at him.

Holding the opaque white ice-cream tub with his left hand, Figueroa slowly pulled the lid undone.

Hughes’ eyes went wide as she saw what was inside it. A second later, she vomited.

Thirty-Eight

Hunter and Taylor were called into Director Adrian Kennedy’s office fifty-five minutes after Kennedy had left them with the report on Megan Lowe and Kate Barker.

The office, which was located on the third floor of the BSU building, was spacious and nicely decorated, without being too imposing. There was an old-fashioned mahogany desk, two dark brown Chesterfield leather armchairs, a furry rug that looked comfortable enough to sleep on, and a huge bookcase with at least one hundred leather-bound volumes. The walls were mostly adorned with framed diplomas, awards and photographs of Kennedy posing next to political and government notables.

Kennedy was sitting behind his desk, his reading glasses high up on his nose, staring at his 27-inch computer screen. ‘Come in,’ he called in response to the door knock.

Taylor pushed the door open and stepped inside. Hunter was just a couple of paces behind her.

‘Don’t sit down,’ Kennedy said, motioning them to come closer and nodding at his screen. ‘We got word from Seattle. Come have a look at this.’

Hunter and Taylor moved past the armchairs and positioned themselves behind Kennedy’s desk. Hunter was to his left, Taylor to his right. The screen showed only Kennedy’s desktop. He had minimized the application he was looking at.

‘About forty minutes ago,’ Kennedy began, ‘two of our agents and a US federal marshal breached the padlock on the storage unit’s door in Seattle. This is what they found inside.’

Kennedy clicked his mouse and brought back the application he had minimized seconds earlier. It was a regular image-viewing program.

‘I received these photographs about five minutes ago,’ he explained.

The first picture on the screen was taken from just outside storage unit 325’s open door. It was a standard, wide-angle ‘crime-scene’ photograph, depicting the whole room. It gave everyone a good idea of the size of the unit. It also indicated how unsuspicious the space looked. Pushed up against the back wall, they could all see the large chest freezer.

Kennedy clicked the mouse again.

The second picture showed the freezer by itself, with its lid closed. Again, nothing suspicious there either.

Another click.

The third photograph was taken from an up/down view angle, showing what the agents saw as they lifted the freezer’s lid.

For a moment, Taylor frowned at all the ice-cream tubs.

‘From now on it gets sick,’ Kennedy said, clicking his mouse again.

The image on the screen was substituted by a close-up snapshot of an agent holding one of the ice-cream tubs in his left hand. Its lid had been pulled open.

Taylor hesitated for a split second while squinting, trying hard to understand what exactly she was looking at. . and then she finally saw it.

‘Oh, Christ,’ she whispered, bringing a hand to her mouth.

Hunter’s stare stayed on the screen.

Frozen inside the ice-cream tub were two pairs of human eyeballs and a pair of human tongues.

It was easy to see why Taylor had struggled to understand the image at first. Due to dehydration and lack of blood, everything had shrunk in size. The eyeballs were on the left of the picture, stuck together like a bunch of grapes. The tongues sat to their right, also stuck together, one on top of the other, creating an odd X shape.

Kennedy gave Hunter and Taylor a few more seconds to study the picture before clicking his mouse again. The next image showed a second ice-cream tub. Inside it was a frozen human hand, severed at the wrist. No fingers. They had all been cut off.

Another click.

A second frozen hand inside an ice-cream tub.

One more click.

A different severed and frozen body part.

Kennedy stopped clicking.

‘It carries on,’ he said. ‘There were sixty-eight ice-cream tubs inside that freezer. Every single one of them holding a frozen body part. Some of them held internal organs too, or parts of it. . heart, liver, stomach. . you get the picture, right?’

Hunter nodded.

‘That section of the self-storage facility in Seattle has been locked down for the time being,’ Kennedy explained. ‘They guaranteed me two, three hours max, just so our forensics team can go over the entire unit and collect the freezer with all the ice-cream tubs. The lab will do a DNA analysis and compare it to the one we’ve got from the severed heads in Lucien’s trunk. Not that I have too much doubt they’ll match.’

Neither Hunter nor Taylor seemed to have any doubt either.

‘The clerk working at the storage facility helped the agents breach the unit’s door earlier, but he had no idea what was kept inside,’ Kennedy moved on. ‘We’re keeping this as under wraps as we can. The press has got no word of it yet, and we’ll try to keep it that way for as long as possible but, as we all know, Lucien Folter will have to be tried by a US court of law, so this story will eventually break. And when it does, it’ll break big, because now I have no doubt that what we have locked up downstairs is a fucking monster, and this really is only the beginning.’

Thirty-Nine

Lucien Folter had just finished the last set of his exercise routine when he heard the heavy metal door at the end of the corridor unlock, followed shortly by the sound of footsteps. He got up from the floor, used the sleeve of his orange jumpsuit to wipe the sweat from his forehead, took a seat at the edge of his bed, and calmly waited. When Hunter and Taylor appeared before him and took the seats in front of his cell, Lucien had a proud smirk on his lips.

‘I’m guessing you had confirmation from Seattle,’ he said, his eyes slowly moving from Hunter to Taylor. Both of their faces carried nothing more than a blank expression. ‘Too bad you didn’t go there to see it for yourself. I think that I can safely say that my dismembering and chopping skills have become very polished over the years.’

‘Have you disposed of all the bodies in the exact same way?’ Taylor asked. She didn’t seem affected by Lucien’s bragging. ‘By dismembering them?’

Lucien and Taylor held each other’s stare for several seconds.

‘No, not all of them,’ he replied matter-of-factly. ‘You see, Agent Taylor, at first, like all the scientists in your BSU, I was curious. I really wanted to understand what drives a person to kill without emotion or remorse. The big question in my head was — are all psychopaths born that way, or can one be created out of sheer will? I read everything on the subject I could get my hands on, and I found that none of it had any of the answers I was looking for. There’s nothing out there, Agent Taylor, no book, no thesis paper, no detailed work of any kind that will tell you what really goes on in here.’ He tapped his index finger against his right temple a couple of times. ‘Inside the mind of someone who became a senseless killer, someone who taught himself to be a psychopath.’ Lucien smiled cryptically. ‘But you never know. Maybe one day that will change. But allow me to give you a little preview.’

Calmly Taylor crossed her right leg over her left one and waited.

Lucien began.

‘What so many seem to fail to understand, Agent Taylor, is that there’s a huge learning curve when it comes to becoming a man like me. I’ve had to evolve, adapt, improvise and become more resourceful throughout the years.’ He gave them a quick shrug. ‘But I always knew I would have to. Right from the start I wanted to try different things. . different methods. . different approaches, and though death is universal, essentially every victim has to be handled differently.’ Lucien made it sound as if killing was nothing more than a simple lab experiment. ‘But someone like me will always face one huge problem.’

‘And that is?’ Taylor asked, her interest measured.

Lucien smiled at her humorlessly.

‘Well, while you have countless resources and teams of agents and officers working around the clock to catch criminals, Agent Taylor, people like me are lone souls. My resources were very limited. Everything I had to rely on was in my head.’ He stared Taylor down coldly, still ignoring Hunter’s gaze. ‘I’m sure you are aware that not so long ago, the FBI published a study showing that at any one time there are at least five hundred serial killers loose in the USA.’ He chuckled. ‘Astonishing, isn’t it? People like me are a lot less rare than what many might believe. I’ve encountered several other murderers throughout the years. People who want to torture and kill for no reason other than pure pleasure. People who hear voices, or think they do, telling them to go out and kill. People who believe they are doing some divine work on earth, ridding God’s creation from sinners, or whatever. Or people who simply want to give their darkest desires wings. Some of them want to learn. They want to find someone who’d teach them. Someone like me.’

Lucien gave Hunter and Taylor a few seconds to fully savor the implications of what he’d said.

‘If I wanted to take on an apprentice, do you really think it would take me long to find one? All I would have to do is search the streets of any major city in this great country of ours.’ He spread his arms wide as if wanting to embrace the world. ‘The streets of America are overflowing with the next Ted Bundy, the next John Wayne Gacy, the next Lucien Folter.’

As outrageous as the boastful claim sounded, Hunter knew Lucien was right.

‘We could even have a talent show to search for America’s next Superstar Serial Killer.’ Lucien pulled a face as if he were seriously considering it. ‘I should actually suggest that to some cable TV channels. And it wouldn’t surprise me if one did consider such a show, because one thing is for sure — they would have a bigger audience than most of their other shit.’

Memories of Hunter’s latest investigation with the LAPD exploded in his mind like fireworks — a serial killer who had created his own reality Internet murder show. And just like Lucien had suggested, the audience logged in to watch it in droves.

Lucien stood up, grabbed the plastic cup from the small metal table, walked over to the washing basin in the corner, and poured himself some water before returning to the edge of the bed.

‘But returning to your question, Agent Taylor,’ Lucien continued. ‘I didn’t always disposed of my bodies in the same way.’ He had a sip of his water.

‘Susan,’ Hunter said, breaking his silence. ‘You said she was your first victim.’

Lucien’s attention turned to Hunter.

‘I knew you’d want to start with her, Robert. Not only because she was a friend, but also because you’re right. I did tell you that she was my first one. And that really is the perfect place to start, isn’t it?’ He took a deep breath and the look in his eyes changed, as if he weren’t bound by the walls around him anymore. As if the memory and the images were so vivid he could touch them. ‘So let me tell you how it all began.’

Forty

Palo Alto, California.

Twenty-five years earlier.

‘So, are you really going to go traveling?’ Lucien asked, placing a new round of drinks on the table.

Susan Richards nodded. ‘I sure am.’

Lucien and Susan had both graduated in psychology from Stanford University just a week ago, and were still flying high on their achievement. They’d been celebrating every night since.

‘Before I have to start job-hunting,’ Susan said, reaching for her drink — a double Jack Daniel’s and Coke. ‘I want to take a little time for myself, you know? Visit some different places. Maybe even take a trip to Europe. I always wanted to go there.’

Lucien laughed. ‘Job hunting? Have you gone mad? We just graduated from Stanford, Susan, which is the top psychology university in the country. If you decide not to start your own, practices from all over will be hunting you.’

‘Is that what you’re going to do?’ Susan asked. ‘Start your own practice?’

‘Nah, I don’t think so. I’ve been giving it a little thought lately, and I think that I might do the same as Robert.’

‘PhD?’

‘I’ve been thinking about it, yeah. What do you think?’

‘Yeah, if that’s what you really want, go for it, Lucien.’

Lucien tilted his head to one side and shrugged at the same time. ‘I just might.’

‘Talking about Robert,’ Susan said, adjusting herself in her seat, ‘it’s a pity that he had to go back to LA today.’

Young Robert Hunter had been there for their graduation ceremony and for the first three nights of their week-long party spree, but he had taken the bus back to Los Angeles that morning to spend a week with his father, before he had to go back to Palo Alto to start his summer job.

‘Yeah, I know,’ Lucien replied, sipping his new cocktail.

They were sitting at The Rocker Club in Crescent Park, on the north side of Palo Alto. It was their favorite lounge — the staff were friendly, the booze was cheap, the crowd was usually young and up for a good time, and the music was rocking and upbeat.

‘He does miss his father quite a bit,’ Lucien added. ‘It’s the only family he’s got left.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Susan said. ‘His mother passed away when he was very young, didn’t she?’

Lucien nodded. ‘I think he was about seven or eight, but he never really talks about it. Even when he’s a little drunk, Robert still manages to avoid the subject. I think that there’s more to it than just standard trauma of losing a parent when young, you know?’

Susan paused halfway through sipping her drink. ‘Oh, please don’t.’

‘What?’

‘Please tell me that you’re not going to be one of those dopey psychology graduates who can barely have a conversation with someone without psychoanalyzing them, Lucien. Especially your friends.’

‘I. .’ Lucien shook his head with a half-embarrassed smile on his lips. ‘I wasn’t psychoanalyzing Robert.’

‘Yes, you were.’

‘No, I wasn’t. I was just saying that we’ve shared the same tiny dorm room for four years. He’s an odd person. Brightest guy I’ve ever met, but odd nonetheless, and I think that his mother’s death might go a little deeper than he lets on.’

‘Oh, really?’ Susan said, putting her drink down on the table and pulling a face. ‘Like what, for example, Doctor Lucien? Let’s hear your theory.’

‘I’m not a doctor, and I don’t have a theory,’ Lucien replied, pulling a face of his own. ‘I was just saying. .’ He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. ‘Look, never mind. I’m not even sure why we’re talking about this. We’re here to party and celebrate.’ He reached for his drink. ‘So let’s party and celebrate.’

Susan raised her glass. ‘Yeah, I’ll drink to that.’

Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ started playing through the speakers. Lucien finished his cocktail in two big gulps.

‘C’mon, let’s go dance,’ he said, getting to his feet.

‘But. .’ Susan pointed at her drink.

‘Drink it down, girl. . rock and roll style,’ Lucien replied, urging her with a series of hand movements. ‘C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.’

Susan gulped her drink down, took Lucien’s hand and allowed him to drag her to the dance floor.

A couple of hours and several drinks later they were both ready to leave. Susan looked to be really drunk, while Lucien looked in much better shape.

‘I think we should leave your car here and take a cab,’ Susan said. Her words were starting to skid into each other. ‘You can pick it up tomorrow sometime.’

‘Nah,’ Lucien came back. ‘I’m still good. I can drive.’

‘No, you can’t. You drank just as much as me, and I. . am. . wasted.’

‘Yeah, but I was drinking cocktails, not double shots of JD and Coke. You know the cocktails here are mainly juice with a splash of booze. I could drink them all night and still be OK to drive home.’

Susan paused and regarded Lucien for a long instant. He did look quite steady on his feet, and he was right, the cocktails at the Rocker Bar weren’t very strong.

‘Are you sure you’re OK to drive?’

‘Positive.’

Susan shrugged. ‘OK then, but you’re driving slowly, you hear? I’m going to keep my eye on you.’ She made a V with her index and middle fingers, pointed at her eyes, and then slowly moved her hand in the direction of Lucien’s.

‘Ten-four, ma’am,’ Lucien said, giving her a military salute.

Lucien had parked down the road, just around the corner. At that time in the morning, the street looked deserted.

‘Buckle up,’ he said, taking the driver’s seat. ‘It’s the law.’ He smiled.

‘Says the man who had a truckload of cocktails before taking the wheel,’ Susan joked, struggling with the seatbelt.

Lucien waited, giving her the look.

‘I’m trying, all right?’ she said, a little flustered. ‘I can’t find the goddamn hole.’

‘Here, let me help you.’ Lucien leaned over, grabbed her seatbelt buckle, and quickly slid it into its lock. Then, with no warning, he moved a little closer and kissed her full on the lips.

Susan pulled back, surprised. ‘Lucien, what are you doing?’ It looked like she had gone sober all of a sudden.

‘What do you think I was doing?’

A very awkward few seconds flew by.

‘Lucien. . I’m. . very sorry if I’ve given you the wrong impression tonight, or any other night. You’re a fantastic person, a really good friend, and I get along with you great, but. .’

‘But you don’t have those kind of feelings for me.’ Lucien finished Susan’s sentence for her. ‘Is that what you were about to say?’

Susan just stared at him.

‘What if instead of me being the one sitting here, it were Robert?’

Susan was taken aback by the question.

‘I bet you wouldn’t pull back like you did. I bet you’d be all over him like a two-dollar whore. Your clothes would probably be gone, and you’d be sitting on his lap, undoing his belt with the utmost urgency.’

‘Lucien, what the hell is going on? It’s like I don’t even know you right now.’

Lucien’s eyes went stone cold, as if all the life and emotion had been sucked out of them.

‘And what makes you think you knew me at all?’

The arctic tone of Lucien’s words made Susan shiver. She was still struggling to understand what was happening when Lucien exploded into action, violently launching his body forward, and using his left hand to pin Susan’s head against the passenger window.

Lucien hadn’t fastened his seatbelt, which gave him a lot more freedom of movement.

Susan tried to scream, but Lucien rapidly slid his hand over her mouth, muffling whatever sounds came out of it. With his right hand, he opened the small compartment that sat between the two front seats and reached inside.

Susan grabbed at Lucien’s left hand and tried to push it away. . tried to free her mouth. . her head, but even if she’d been sober, he’d still be way too strong for her.

‘It’s OK, Susan,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘It’ll all be over soon.’

With incredible speed, Lucien’s right hand shot toward Susan’s face. She felt something prick the side of her neck, and in that instant their eyes met.

Hers full of fear.

His full of evil.

Forty-One

Lucien recounted the events that took place that night with the same enthusiasm as someone recollecting what he’d had for breakfast. All the while his eyes were locked on Hunter.

Hunter tried his best to remain impassive, but hearing Lucien’s account of how he had subdued Susan had started to slowly tighten a knot in his throat. He shifted his weight in his chair, but never once broke eye contact with Lucien.

Lucien paused, had another sip of his water, and said nothing else.

Everyone waited.

Silence.

‘So you drugged her,’ Taylor said.

Lucien gave her an unenthusiastic smile. ‘I injected her with Propofol.’

Taylor glanced at Hunter.

‘It’s a fast-acting general anesthetic,’ Lucien clarified. ‘It’s incredible what you can get your hands on when you manage to get access to the medical school building at Stanford.’

‘So what happened next?’ Taylor asked. ‘Where did you take her? What did you do?’

‘No, no, no,’ Lucien said with a slight shake of the head. ‘It’s my turn to ask a question. That was the agreement, was it not? So far, this “question game” has been very one-sided.’

‘Fair enough,’ Taylor agreed. ‘Tell us what happened next and then ask your question.’

‘No deal. It’s my turn now. Time to finally feed my curiosity.’ Lucien massaged the back of his neck for a moment before looking back at Hunter. ‘Tell me about when you were a kid, Robert. Tell me about your mother.’

Hunter’s jaw tightened.

Taylor looked a little confused.

‘Quid pro quo,’ Lucien said. ‘You as cops, or profilers, or federal agents, or whatever, are always looking to try to understand what makes people like me tick, isn’t that right? You’re always trying to figure out how the mind of a ruthless killer works. How can a human being have such disregard for another human life? How can someone become a monster like me?’ Lucien delivered every word in a steady, mono-sounding rhythm. ‘Well, on the other hand, a monster like me would also like to know what makes people like you tick. The heroes of society. . the best of the best. . the ones who’d risk their lives for people they don’t even know.’ He paused for effect. ‘You want to understand me. I want to understand you. It’s as simple as that. And as Freud would tell you, Agent Taylor, if you want to delve deep into someone’s psyche, if you want to understand the person they became, the best place to start is with their childhood and their relationship with their mother and father. Isn’t that right, Robert?’

Hunter said nothing.

Lucien slowly cracked every knuckle on both of his hands. The creepy, bone-creaking sound reverberated against the walls in his cell.

‘So, Robert, please indulge me in a twenty-five-year-old curiosity of mine, will you?’

‘I don’t think so, Lucien,’ Hunter said, his voice as serene as a priest’s in a confessional.

‘Oh, but I do, Robert,’ Lucien replied in the same peaceful tone. ‘I really do. Because if you want to know any more about what happened to Susan, including where you could find her remains, you will indulge me.’

The knot in Hunter’s throat got a little tighter.

‘Tell me what happened, Robert? How did your mother die?’

Silence.

‘And please don’t lie to me, Robert, because I can assure you that I’ll know if you do.’

Forty-Two

For a moment Hunter’s memory flashed back to Susan Richards’ parents. He and Lucien had met them a couple of times when they’d made the trip from Nevada to Stanford to visit their daughter. They were a very sweet couple. Hunter couldn’t remember their names, but he remembered how thrilled and proud they were of Susan for being accepted into such a prestigious university. She was the first person in either of their families to have ever gone to college.

Just like Hunter’s parents, Susan’s mother and father had come from very poor backgrounds, and neither of them had been able to finish high school, having to drop out before their freshmen year and find jobs of their own to help their families. When Susan was born, they’d promised themselves that they would do whatever it took to offer their daughter a better chance at life than the ones they had. When they started saving for her college fund, Susan was only three months old.

According to the law in the USA, death in absentia, or presumption of death, occurs when a person has been missing from home and has not been heard from for seven years or more, though the amount of years may vary slightly from state to state. Despite what the law says, in the absence of remains or any concrete proof, Hunter was sure that if Susan Richards’ parents were still alive, they’d still be holding on to a sliver of hope. The least he could do was give them some closure, and the chance to bury their daughter with dignity.

‘My mother died of cancer when I was seven years old,’ Hunter said. He still looked pretty relaxed in his seat.

Lucien smiled triumphantly. ‘Yes, that much I already know, Robert. What type of cancer?’

‘Glioblastoma multiforme.’

‘The most aggressive type of primary brain cancer,’ Lucien said, his voice emotionless. ‘That must’ve been a tough blow. How fast did it develop?’

‘Fast enough,’ Hunter said. ‘Doctors found it too late. Within three months of the diagnosis she passed away.’

It was Taylor’s turn to shift her weight in her chair.

‘Did she suffer?’ Lucien asked.

Hunter’s jaw tightened again.

Lucien leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees, and very subtly started rubbing his hands against each other.

‘Tell me, Robert.’ The next four words were delivered slowly, with a pause between each of them. ‘Did your mother suffer? Did she scream in pain at night? Did she go from being the strong, smiling, full-of-life person to an unrecognizable sack of skin and bones? Did she beg for death?’

Hunter could see that Lucien had switched his game, at least for the time being. He wasn’t interested in getting under Taylor’s skin anymore. Today, Hunter was his target. And Lucien was doing a damn good job.

‘Yes,’ Hunter replied.

‘Yes?’ Lucien said. ‘Yes to what?’

‘To everything.’

‘So say it.’

Hunter breathed in.

Lucien waited.

‘Yes, my mother suffered. Yes, she did scream in pain at night. Yes, she did go from being a strong, smiling, full-of-life person to an unrecognizable sack of skin and bones, and yes, she did beg for death.’

Taylor stole a peek at Hunter and felt goose bumps creep up all over her body.

‘What was her name?’ Lucien asked.

‘Helen.’

‘Was she in a hospital or at home when she died?’

‘At home,’ Hunter said. ‘She didn’t want to be in a hospital.’

‘I see.’ Lucien nodded. ‘She wanted to be with her family. . with her loved ones. Very noble, though strange and a little sadistic that she’d want her seven-year-old son to witness first-hand all of her suffering, all of her pain. . and I’m guessing it must’ve been something quite excruciating.’

Through the avalanche of memories, keeping a steady face had become impossible. Hunter looked away and pressed his lips together, taking a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was as steady as he could muster, but there was no hiding the sadness in it.

‘My mother worked as a cleaner for minimum wage. My father worked nights as a security guard, and to complement the little money he earned, during the day he would take any odd job he could get. The end of each and every month was always a struggle in our house, even when they were both healthy. We had no savings because there was never anything left to save. My father’s small health insurance wouldn’t cover the costs. We couldn’t afford the hospital bills. Back home was the only place she could be.’

A long, dragged silence.

‘Wow, that’s one sad story, Robert,’ Lucien finally said coldly. ‘I can practically hear the violins. Tell me, were you at home when your mother died?’

Hunter shook his head. ‘No.’

Lucien returned to a regular seating position and nodded calmly before standing up. ‘I told you that if you lied to me, Robert, I’d know. And that was a lie. This interview is over.’

Taylor’s surprised gaze waltzed between Hunter and Lucien.

‘Fuck Susan’s remains,’ Lucien said. ‘You will never find those. Good luck explaining that to her family.’

Forty-Three

Lucien turned and slowly walked over to the washbasin.

Taylor tensed on her seat, but the awkward moment lasted just a few seconds before Hunter lifted both of his hands in a surrender gesture. ‘OK, Lucien, I’m sorry.’

Lucien ran a hand through his hair, but kept his back to Hunter and Taylor. He took his time, as if he was considering Hunter’s apology.

‘Well, I guess I can’t really blame you, can I, Robert?’ he said at last. ‘You needed to give it a shot to see if I could really tell if you were lying or not. It’s only logical. Why would you trust me now? I could never tell with you before, could I? You never really had any telltale signs. You were always the one who could keep a straight face through any situation.’ He finally turned to face his interrogators again. ‘Well, old friend, I guess you’re getting old, or perhaps it’s because I’ve gotten much, much better at reading people.’

Hunter didn’t doubt that for a second. Many serial killers become experts in observing people and reading their body language and hidden signs. It helps them choose the right victim and pick the precise moment to strike.

‘So,’ Lucien continued. ‘For old times’ sake, I’m going to let this one slide, but don’t lie to me again, Robert.’ He sat back down. ‘Maybe you would like to rephrase your answer?’

A short pause.

‘Yes, I was home when my mother died,’ Hunter began again. ‘As I’d said, my father worked nights as a security guard, and my mother passed away during the night.’

‘So you were alone with your mother?’

Hunter nodded.

Lucien waited, but Hunter offered nothing more. ‘Don’t stop now, Robert. Did her screams scare you at night?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t go hide in your room, did you?’

‘No.’

‘And why not?’

‘Because I was more scared of not being there for her if my mother needed me.’

‘And did she? On that last night? Did she need you?’

Hunter held his breath.

‘Did she need you, Robert?’

Hunter saw something in Lucien’s eyes that he hadn’t noticed before — total certainty, as if he already knew all the answers, and if Hunter deviated from the truth even a little bit, Lucien would know.

‘Yes,’ Hunter finally replied.

‘How did she need you?’ Lucien asked. ‘And remember, don’t lie to me.’

‘Pills,’ Hunter said.

‘What about them?’

‘My mother used to take them. They made the pain go away, at least for a little while. But as the cancer grew stronger inside her, the effect of the pills grew weaker.’

‘So she needed more,’ Lucien said.

Hunter nodded.

A pensive look came over Lucien’s face; a moment later, his lips stretched into a wicked smile.

‘But they were prescription painkillers, right?’ he said. ‘Probably very strong, probably schedule two, probably opioids, which means that exceeding the dosage was a big no-no. Those pills weren’t by her bedside, were they, Robert? They couldn’t have been. The risk of accidental overdose would’ve been too great. So where were they? In the bathroom? In the kitchen? Where?’

Silence.

‘The pills, Robert, where were they kept?’ Lucien insisted.

Hunter could hear the threat in his voice.

‘My father kept them in the cupboard, in the kitchen.’

‘But your mother asked you for them that night.’

‘Yes.’

Lucien scratched the scar on his left cheek.

‘She couldn’t handle the pain anymore, could she?’ he pushed. ‘She’d rather be dead. In fact, she begged for death, and you were the messenger, because you brought them to her, didn’t you? How many pills did you bring her, Robert?’ Then it dawned on him and he lifted a hand at the same time as his eyes widened a touch. ‘No, wait. You brought her the whole bottle, didn’t you?’

Hunter said nothing, but his memory took him back to that night.

Nights were always worse. Her screams sounded louder, her groans deeper and heavier with pain. They always made him shiver. Not like when he felt cold, but an intense shiver that came from deep within. Her illness had brought her so much pain, and he wished there was something he could do to help.

Seven-year-old Robert Hunter had heard his mother’s painful screams and had cautiously opened the door to her room. He felt like crying. Since she’d gotten ill, he felt a lot like crying, but his father had told him he mustn’t.

Her illness had made her look so different. She was so thin he could see her bones poking at her sagging skin. Her striking long blonde hair was now fine and frizzled. Her once-sparkling eyes had lost all the life in them and had sunk deep into their sockets.

Shaking, he paused by the door. His mother was curled up into a ball on the bed. Her knees pushed up against her chest. Her arms wrapped tightly around her legs. Her face contorted in pain. She screwed up her eyes and tried to focus on the tiny figure standing at the door.

‘Please, baby,’ she whispered as she recognized her son. ‘Can you help me? I can’t take the pain anymore.’

It took all his strength to keep his tears locked in his throat. ‘What can I do, Mom?’ His voice was as weak as hers. ‘Do you want me to call Dad?’

She managed only a delicate shake of the head. ‘Dad can’t help, honey, but you can. Could you come here. . please. Can you help me?’

His mother looked like a different person now. Her eyes had the darkest bags under them. Her lips were cracked and crusted.

‘I can heat up some milk for you, Mom. You like hot milk.’

He would do anything he could to see his mother smile again. As he stepped closer, she winced as a new surge of pain took over her body.

‘Please, baby. Help me.’ Her breath was coming in short gasps.

Despite what his father had told him, he simply couldn’t hold his tears anymore. They started rolling down his face.

His mother could now see he was scared and shaking. ‘It’s OK, honey. Everything will be fine,’ she said in a trembling voice.

He stepped closer still and placed his hand in hers.

‘I love you, Mom.’

His words brought tears to her eyes. ‘I love you too, honey.’ She gave his hand a subtle squeeze. It was all she could muster with the little strength she had left in her. ‘I need your help, honey. . please.’

‘What can I do, Mom?’

‘Can you get my pills for me, honey. You know where they are, don’t you?’

He ran the back of his right hand against his running nose. He looked scared. ‘They’re very high up,’ he said, hiding his eyes from her.

‘Can’t you reach them for me, baby? Please, the pain has been going on for so long. You don’t know how much it hurts.’

His eyes were so full of tears everything appeared distorted. His heart felt empty, and he felt as if all his strength had left him. Without saying a word, he slowly turned around and opened the door.

His mother tried calling after him, but her voice was so weak, it didn’t travel more than just a few yards.

He came back a few minutes later carrying a tray with a glass of water, two cream biscuits and the bottle of medicine. She stared at it, hardly believing her eyes. Very slowly, and through unimaginable pain, she pushed herself up into a sitting position. He stepped closer, placed the tray on the bedside table and handed her the glass of water.

She wanted to hug him so much, but she barely had the strength to move; instead, she gave him the most honest smile he’d ever seen. She tried, but her fingers were way too weak to twist the bottle cap open. She looked at him, and her eyes begged for help.

He took it from her trembling hands, pressed down on the cap and twisted it counterclockwise, before pouring two of the pills onto her hand. She placed them in her mouth and swallowed them down without even sipping the water. Her eyes pleaded for more.

‘I read the label, Mom. It says you shouldn’t have more than eight a day. The two you just had make it ten today.’

‘You’re so intelligent, my darling.’ She smiled again. ‘You’re very special. I love you so much and I’m so sorry I won’t see you grow up.’

His eyes filled with tears once again as she wrapped her bony fingers around the medicine bottle.

He held on to it tightly.

‘It’s OK,’ she whispered. ‘It’ll all be OK now.’

Hesitantly, he let go. ‘Dad will be angry with me.’

‘No, he won’t be, baby. I promise you.’ She placed two more pills in her mouth.

‘I brought you these biscuits.’ He pointed to the tray. ‘They’re your favorite, Mom. Please have one. You didn’t eat much today.’

‘I will, honey, in a while.’ She had a few more pills. ‘When Daddy comes home in the morning, tell him I love him, and that I always will. Can you do that for me?’

The boy nodded. His eyes locked on the now almost empty medicine bottle.

‘Why don’t you go read one of your books, darling? I know you love reading.’

‘I can read in here, Mom, so you’re not alone. I can sit in the corner if you like. I won’t make a noise, I promise.’

She extended her hand and touched his hair. ‘I’ll be OK now, honey. The pain’s starting to go away.’ Her eyelids looked heavy.

‘I’ll guard the room then. I’ll sit just outside the door.’

She smiled a pain-stricken smile. ‘Why do you wanna guard the room, honey?’

‘You told me that sometimes God comes and takes ill people to heaven. I don’t want him to take you, Mom. I’ll sit by the door and if he comes I’ll tell him to go away. I’ll tell him that you’re getting better and not to take you.’

‘You’ll tell God to go away?’

He nodded vigorously.

She started crying again. ‘I’m going to miss you so much, Robert.’

Taylor looked at Hunter and felt her heart shrivel inside her chest.

A cold smile began to crack on Lucien’s lips, like ice over a dark, frozen lake. ‘So you left the room,’ he said.

Hunter nodded.

‘And that was when the nightmares started,’ Lucien said in conclusion, like a psychologist who had finally broken through a patient’s barrier.

A disconcerting silence took over the entire basement corridor, but not for long. With his gaze fixed on Lucien, Hunter finally let go of the memory.

‘Susan, Lucien,’ he said. The sadness had vanished from his voice. ‘You have what you wanted, now tell us what happened after you drugged her in the car?’

Forty-Four

La Honda, 18 miles from Palo Alto, California.

Twenty-five years earlier.

Susan Richards was jolted awake by the loud sound of a heavy door slamming shut. Despite the sudden noise, her eyes opened slowly, blinking constantly, as if grains of sand had been blown into them and were now scratching at her cornea. Her eyelids felt heavy and tired, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get her eyes to focus on anything. Everything around her came as nothing but a big blur.

The first thing she realized was how dizzy she felt, as if she were stuck in a hazy dream with no way of waking up. Her mouth was bone dry and her tongue felt like sandpaper. Then she noticed the smell — dirty, damp, moldy, old and sickening. She had no idea where she was, but it smelt as if the place had been neglected for years. In spite of the horrible stench, Susan’s lungs demanded that she took in a full breath of air, and as she did, she could almost taste the rancid quality of the room. One deep breath and it made her gag.

All of a sudden, between desperate coughs, sharp and excruciating pain came to her. It took her exhausted body a few seconds to finally home in on it. It was coming from her right arm.

Susan realized then that she was sitting down on some sort of hard and terribly uncomfortable chair. Her wrists were tied together behind the chair’s backrest, her ankles to the chair’s legs. She was soaking wet, drenched with sweat. She tried lifting her head, which was awkwardly slumped forward, and the movement sent waves of nausea rippling through her stomach.

She couldn’t identify the light source inside the room, maybe a corner lamp or an old light bulb hanging overhead, but whatever it was, it bathed the room in a weak yellowish glow. Her eyes finally moved right and tried to focus on her arm and the source of the pain. She still felt groggy, so it took a moment for her vision to steady itself and for the blurriness to dissipate. When it did, her heart was filled with terror.

‘Oh, my God.’ The words dribbled out of her lips.

An enormous chunk of skin was missing from her arm — from her shoulder all the way down to her elbow. In its place she saw raw, blood-soaked flesh. For an instant, it looked as if the wound were alive. Blood was cascading down her arm, over her hands, through her fingers, and onto the concrete floor, forming a large crimson pool at the feet of the chair.

Instantly, Susan jerked her head away and vomited all over her lap. The effort made her feel even weaker, even dizzier.

‘Sorry about that, Susan,’ she heard a familiar voice say. ‘You could never really stand the sight of blood, could you?’ Susan coughed a few more times and tried to spit the awful vomit taste from her mouth. Her eyes moved forward, finally focusing on the figure standing in front of her.

‘Lucien. .’ she said in a feeble whisper.

Flash images of last night at the Rocker Club came back to her. Then she remembered sitting in Lucien’s car. . the angry way he had looked at her. And then nothing.

‘What. .’ She was unable to finish the sentence, her throat way too frail to produce the sounds. Instinctively, her eyes shot toward the raw flesh in her right arm once again and her whole body shivered.

‘Oh,’ Lucien said, unconcerned, reaching behind him. ‘Don’t worry about that. I don’t think you’ll miss this horrible thing, will you?’

He showed her a large glass jar filled with some pale pink liquid. Something was floating in it. Susan squinted, forcing her tired eyes, but still couldn’t tell what it was.

‘Oh, sorry,’ Lucien said, picking up on her confusion and reaching inside the jar with his gloved hand to collect the floating object. ‘Allow me to show you. The edges have curled in a little bit now.’ He uncurled them and stretched the wet piece of skin he had carved off her arm less than an hour ago. ‘This is a hideous tattoo, Susan. I have no idea why you’d think that this is cool in any way.’

Acid-tasting bile found its way back into Susan’s mouth, resulting in a new desperate gagging/coughing frenzy.

Amused, Lucien waited until it was over.

‘But I think that it will make a great token,’ he said, nodding a couple of times. ‘And do you know what? I do think that I will give the “token collector” thing a shot. See how it makes me feel. Test the theory behind it. What do you think?’

Susan’s head throbbed with the rhythm of her thudding heart. The rope that had been used to tie her wrists and ankles felt as if it had cut through to her bones. She wanted to speak, but fear seemed to have erased every word from her terrified mind. Her eyes, on the other hand, mirrored her fear and desperation.

Lucien returned the tattooed piece of skin to the jar.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve had that syringe hidden in my car for almost a year now. I thought about using it many times.’

Susan breathed in and the air seemed to travel into her nose in lumps.

‘But never on you,’ Lucien moved on. ‘I thought about picking up a prostitute many times. As I know you’ll remember from our criminology classes, they are easy targets — approachable, accessible and, most of the time, anonymous.’ He shrugged indifferently. ‘But unfortunately it didn’t quite work out that way. I never really felt ready for it before, but tonight I felt different. I guess I can say that tonight I felt my first real “killer’s” impulse.’

Tears welled up in Susan’s eyes. To her, the air inside the room became denser, even more polluted. . almost unbreathable.

‘I felt this amazing drive to simply do it and not think of the consequences,’ Lucien said.

His eyes shone with a new purpose. Susan saw it, and that sent a new current of panic traveling through her body.

‘So I decided not to fight it,’ he proceeded, moving a step closer. ‘I decided to act on it. So I did. And here we are.’

Susan tried to calm her breathing, tried to think, but everything still felt like a horrible dream. But if it were, why wasn’t she waking up?

‘Lucien. .’ she said, her voice rasping, catching on her swollen throat, ‘. . I don’t kno—’

‘No, no, no,’ Lucien interrupted, shaking his left index finger at her. ‘There’s nothing you can say. Don’t you see, Susan? There’s no turning back now.’ He stretched his arms out to his sides, calling attention to the room. ‘We’re here now. The process has started. The floodgates are open, or any cliché sentence you’d care to come up with. But no matter what, this is happening.’

That was when Susan noticed the look in Lucien’s eyes — distant and ice cold, like a man without a soul. And it paralyzed her.

Her fear filled Lucien with excitement. He was expecting that excitement to conflict with something inside of him — maybe morals, or emotions. . he wasn’t quite sure what, but something. That conflict never came. He felt nothing but exhilaration to be finally doing something he’d fantasized about for so long.

Susan wanted to speak, to scream, but her panic-frozen lips wouldn’t move. Instead, her eyes begged him for mercy. . mercy that never came.

Without any warning, Lucien exploded forward, and in a flash his hands were on Susan’s neck.

Her eyes went wide with terror, her neck muscles tightened as her body tried to defend itself from the attack, her jaw dropped open, gasping for air, but her brain knew that the battle was already lost. Lucien’s thumbs were already compressing Susan’s airway, while his large palms were applying enough pressure to the carotid arteries and jugular veins to cause significant occlusion, and interfere with the flow of blood in her neck.

When Susan’s body started kicking and wriggling on the chair, Lucien placed most of his body weight on her lap to keep her steady. That was when he felt something collapse under his thumbs. He knew then he had just crushed her larynx and trachea. Susan would be dead in seconds, but Lucien never stopped squeezing, at least not then. He carried on until he had fractured the hyoid bone in her neck, all the while his mad and frantic-looking eyes locked on to Susan’s dying ones.

Forty-Five

Hunter sat in silence. Not once did he interrupt Lucien’s account of events, which was conveyed coldly and without sentiment, but all throughout it Hunter fought to keep his emotions in check.

Taylor had also listened to everything in silence, no interruptions, but she found herself shifting in her chair at least a couple of times. Every tiny nervy movement she made seemed to please and amuse Lucien more and more.

‘Before you ask,’ Lucien said, looking at Hunter, ‘there was no sexual gratification. I did not touch Susan in that way.’ He shrugged. ‘Truth be told, she was never supposed to be my first. She was never supposed to be a victim at all. She was never part of the thousands of fantasies I had before that day. It was just very unfortunate that it happened that way.’

‘Thousands?’ Taylor asked.

Lucien smiled. ‘Please don’t be so naive, Agent Taylor. Do you think that people like me just suddenly decide to start killing and that’s that? We’re ready to go out the next day and pick our first victim?’ He shook his head sarcastically. ‘People like me fantasize about hurting others for a long time, Agent Taylor. Some might start fantasizing when kids, some a lot later in life, but we all do, and we do it all the time. Me, I guess I can say that my fascination with death started very early. You see, my father was a great hunter. He used to take me hunting up on the mountains in Colorado, and there was something about waiting, stalking, and looking straight into the animal’s eyes just before pulling the trigger that captivated me.’

Lucien scratched his chin while regarding Hunter. Then he smiled.

‘Look at you, Robert. I can practically hear your brain working. The psychologist in you already starting to make theoretical connections between my early hunting days and the killer I became.’ He laughed. ‘Before you ask, I didn’t wet the bed when I was a kid, and I never liked setting fire to anything.’

Lucien was referring to the Macdonald triad: a psychology-based theory that suggests that a set of three behavioral individualities — animal cruelty, obsession with fire setting, and persistent bedwetting past the age of five — if all are present together while young, can be associated with violent tendencies later in life, particularly homicidal behavior. Though studies have shown that statistically no significant links between the triad and violent offenders have been found, if the triad is split, animal cruelty is by far the individuality that had been proven to manifest itself in the early lives of a great number of apprehended serial killers. Hunter was well aware of that.

Lucien used his index finger to pick at something that was stuck between his two front teeth. ‘Well, knock yourself out, old buddy. Analyze what you like, but I’m sure I will surprise you.’

‘You already have.’

The edges of Lucien’s lips curved up smugly.

‘Despite my hunting days,’ he continued, ‘it was during my first year in high school that I started having dreams.’

Interest grew across Taylor’s face.

‘In these dreams I wasn’t hunting. I was hurting people. Sometimes people I knew, sometimes people I had never seen before. . just random creations of my imagination. They were very violent, and supposedly scary dreams, but they filled me with excitement, they made me feel good, so good that I didn’t want to wake up. I didn’t want them to stop. . and that was when I started fantasizing during the day, while wide-awake. The star role in these. .’ Lucien searched the air around him for the right words: ‘. . let’s say, “intense fantasies” of mine, usually belonged to people I disliked. . teachers, school bullies, some family members. . but not always.’ He paused and made a ‘whatever’ face. ‘Anyway, Susan was never one of them. She was never part of any of my violent fantasies or dreams. She just happened to fit the perfect profile that night.’

Lucien stood up, crossed over to the washbasin and refilled his cup with water.

‘That was the real reason I wanted to study psychology and criminal behavior,’ he continued, returning to the edge of the bed. ‘To try to understand what was going on in my head. Why I had these violent fantasies swimming around in here.’ He tapped his right temple with the tip of his index finger. ‘Why I enjoyed them so much, and if there was anything I could do to get rid of them.’ He chuckled. ‘But wouldn’t you know it? College had the adverse effect. The more I studied and the more theories I read about how psychologists believed the mind of a killer worked, the more intrigued I became.’ Lucien paused and had a sip of water. ‘I wanted to test them.’

‘Test them?’ Taylor asked. ‘Test who, or what?’

‘The theories,’ Hunter said, reading between the lines.

Taylor looked at him.

Lucien pointed at him and made a face as if saying, You got it in one, Robert. ‘I wanted to test the theories.’ He leaned forward a little. ‘Weren’t you intrigued, Robert? As a student with such an eager mind, didn’t you want to understand what really goes on inside a killer’s head? What really makes them tick? Didn’t you want to know if the theories we were taught were true, or just a pile of shit guesses put together by a bunch of nerd psychologists?’

Hunter continued studying Lucien in silence.

‘Well, I did,’ Lucien said. ‘The more theories I studied, the more I compared them to how my fantasies made me feel. And then, one of those theories finally proved true for me.’

Lucien looked at Taylor in a way that made her feel naked, vulnerable.

‘Care to take a guess at what theory that was, Agent Taylor?’

Taylor refused to be intimidated. ‘The theory that says you need to be a sick scumbag and fucked in the head to do what you did?’ Taylor replied, no anger or excitement in her voice.

It only made Lucien smile. ‘Robert?’ His gaze moved toward Hunter and his eyebrows arched.

Hunter wasn’t in the mood for games, but Lucien was still holding all the cards.

‘Fantasies may one day not be enough,’ he said.

Lucien’s smile widened before he addressed Taylor again. ‘He really is good, isn’t he? That’s right, Robert. I carried on fantasizing until one day I realized that the fantasies just weren’t enough. They weren’t making me feel as good as they used to. I realized that to get the same high, I needed to move it to the next level.’ His stare settled back on Hunter as if he owed him a debt of gratitude. ‘Then you said something that triggered everything, Robert.’

Forty-Six

If Lucien was expecting any sort of reaction from Hunter, he was disappointed. Hunter stayed perfectly still, matching Lucien’s stare. It was Taylor who showed surprise.

‘How do you mean?’ she asked, wiggling her body on her chair.

Lucien kept his eyes on Hunter a little longer, still looking for a reaction.

Nothing.

‘Robert and I used to have very long discussions about many of those theories,’ Lucien began. ‘It was only natural. Two young and hungry minds trying to make sense of the crazy world we lived in, trying to be the best students we could be. But it was during a debate in our second year at Stanford that Robert said something that really got my brain going.’

Taylor peeked at Hunter.

Hunter kept his attention on Lucien.

‘I’ll clarify it for you, Agent Taylor,’ Lucien offered with a smirk. ‘We were studying brain physiology. The debate was whether science would one day find a way to identify a sector of our brain, no matter how small, that controlled our urges to doing something, anything, including becoming a killer.’

Lucien looked at Hunter. Even without any acknowledgment, he knew Hunter remembered that debate.

‘I hope you don’t mind if I use the same example as you did then, Robert,’ Lucien said. ‘I still remember it well.’ He didn’t wait for a reply from Hunter. ‘Two brothers,’ Lucien began, addressing Taylor, ‘identical twins. Grew up under identical circumstances and environment. Both were shown the same amount of love and affection by their parents. They went to the same schools, attended the same classes, and were taught the same moral values. Both very popular students. Both very good students.’ Lucien shrugged. ‘Attractive too. The point I’m trying to put across here, Agent Taylor, is that there was absolutely no difference in their upbringing.’

Taylor’s frown was minimal, but Lucien noticed it.

‘Stay with me,’ he said, ‘things will get clearer. Now, let’s say that these two brothers became avid music fans.’ Lucien winked at Hunter. ‘And they both liked the same style of music and the same music groups. They changed their looks and hairstyles to match the ones of their idols. They bought the albums.’ Lucien paused and smiled. ‘Well, that was back then, now they would just download the music, isn’t that right? Anyway, they had the T-shirts, the baseball hats, the posters, the badges. . everything. They went to every concert that came to their town. But there was one difference. Brother “A” was content in just being a music fan. He was happy with just going to the gigs, listening to the songs back in his room, and dressing up like his idols. Brother “B”, on the other hand, wanted something more. Just being a fan, going to gigs, and listening to the music wasn’t enough for him. Something inside him told him that he needed to be part of the music circus. He needed to experience the real deal for himself. So brother “B” learns how to play an instrument, and he joins a band. And there we have it.’

Lucien allowed his words to float in the air, giving Taylor a moment to digest them before moving on.

‘It’s that little difference that makes all the difference, Agent Taylor. Why does brother “B”, after growing up in identical circumstances, wants something that little bit more than brother “A”? Why is one content with just being a fan, and the other isn’t?’

If Taylor was trying to think of an answer, Lucien didn’t wait.

‘That same theory can be easily transposed across to the desire to murder.’ This time his smirk was even more confident. ‘Some people with violent tendencies may be content with just fantasizing, with watching violent films, or reading violent books, or looking at violent pictures on the Internet, or punching a punch bag, or whatnot, but some. .’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Some will feel the need to go that little bit further. To become brother “B”. And it’s this drive, the drive that makes us want something more than others, that Robert argued he didn’t think science will ever be able to pinpoint, at least not physically, because that drive is what makes us individuals. It’s what makes us all different from each other.’

Hunter kept on observing Lucien. He was getting excited with his own discourse, like a preacher in a church. Even more so because he could see that he’d made Taylor wonder.

‘Are you saying that Robert’s debate argument all those years ago is what tipped you into starting killing?’ Taylor said with a sarcastic lilt to her voice. ‘Are you looking for someone else to blame for everything you’ve done? Well, that’s typical.’

Lucien threw his head back and laughed animatedly. ‘Not at all, Agent Taylor. I’ve done what I’ve done because I wanted to.’ He pointed a finger at Hunter. ‘But physiology aside, that argument got me thinking, old friend, because that was when I realized that that was exactly what I needed to do. I needed to stop fantasizing. I needed to stop fighting the urge. I needed to move it to the next level. . brother “B”. So I started planning. You see, one of the great things about studying criminology, Agent Taylor, is that we learn about some of the most infamous killers that have walked this earth. And believe me, I studied them in depth. I read and subscribed to specialized newspapers and magazines. I studied the writings of numerous prominent forensic psychiatrists. I learned about sex murderers, serial murderers, military murderers, mass murderers, and professional murderers. I studied massacres and murder conspiracies. I learned just about everything I could on the subject, but the one thing I paid particular attention to was. . perpetrators’ mistakes. Especially the mistakes that led to their capture.’

Taylor decided to bite back. ‘Well, it looks like you didn’t pay that much attention after all, given your current predicament.’ She allowed her eyes to circle around his cell.

Lucien didn’t seem bothered by Taylor’s sharp comment.

‘Oh, I paid more than enough attention, Agent Taylor. Unfortunately no one can foresee accidents. The only reason I’m sitting here right now is not because I made a mistake, or due to any merit of your own or the organization you work for, but because an unfortunate chain of chance events took place seven days ago. Events that were out of my control. Admit it, Agent Taylor, the FBI had no idea I existed. You weren’t investigating me, any of my aliases, or any of the acts I committed.’

‘We would have eventually got to you,’ Taylor said.

‘But of course you would.’ Lucien grinned confidently. ‘Anyway, as I was saying, I started planning. And the first thing on my list was to find an isolated and anonymous place. Somewhere where I wouldn’t be disturbed. A place where I could take my time.’

‘And you found such a place in La Honda,’ Hunter said.

‘I sure did,’ Lucien confirmed. ‘Just an old, abandoned little house in the middle of the woods. It was close enough to Stanford that it wouldn’t take me long to get there. And the best thing about it was that I could use remote back roads to reach it. No one would spot me.’

Lucien stood up and stretched his powerful frame.

‘The place is still there,’ he said. ‘I visited it not that long ago.’ He didn’t sit back down. ‘You know what? I’ve got a little bit of a headache and I’m getting hungry. So what do you say we all take a break?’ He pulled his sleeve up and looked at his wrist as if he had a watch. ‘Let’s start again in two hours, how does that sound?’

‘Not good, Lucien,’ Hunter said. ‘Susan’s remains, where are they?’

‘Another two hours before you find out won’t make a difference, Robert. It’s not like you have to rush to save her, is it now?’

Forty-Seven

Outside, the sun was shining bright in yet another cloudless sky. It was the kind of warm and joyful day that made most people smile for no apparent reason, but the magic of the day didn’t seem to reach as far as the BSU building.

Hunter had found an empty meeting room somewhere on the second floor. He was standing by the window, staring out at nothing at all, when Taylor stepped inside and softly closed the door behind her.

‘So there you are.’

Without turning, Hunter checked his watch. It had only been ten minutes since they’d left Lucien in his cell, but to him it felt like hours.

‘Are you all right?’ Taylor asked, stepping closer.

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ Hunter replied, his voice firm and confident.

Taylor hesitated an instant. ‘Listen, I need to get out of here for a while.’

Hunter turned and looked at her.

‘I need to go outdoors for an hour or so, breathe some fresh air or something before I go back down into that basement.’

Hunter could easily sympathize with her argument.

‘I know a place not very far from here where on a day like this, they’ll have tables outside,’ Taylor added. ‘Their food is great, but if you’re not hungry, their coffee is even better. What do you say we get the hell out of here for a bit?’

She didn’t have to ask twice.

Forty-Eight

Despite them having had their last meal over four and a half hours earlier, neither Hunter nor Taylor felt like eating. Hunter ordered a simple black coffee, while Taylor went for a double espresso. They were sitting at one of the outside tables at a small Italian cantina-style restaurant in Garrisonville Road, less than fifteen minutes’ drive from the FBI Academy.

Taylor stirred her coffee and watched the thin layer of dark brown foam slowly disappear from the surface. She thought about telling Hunter how sorry she was for what had happened to his mother. She thought about maybe telling him about her own mother, but as she thought better of it she decided that neither subject would benefit anyone. She finished stirring her coffee and placed the spoon down on the saucer.

‘What did Lucien mean when he said that your friend Susan just happened to fit the perfect profile that night?’ she asked.

Hunter was waiting for his coffee to cool down a little. He’d never been one of those people like Carlos Garcia, his partner back at the LAPD, who could pretty much pour boiling hot coffee into a cup, give it five seconds, and then drink it down as if it were just lukewarm.

Hunter raised his eyes at Taylor.

‘Lucien and Susan, had both just graduated from Stanford,’ he said. ‘For Susan, her college days were over. She didn’t need to be in class anymore. She had no job, no boss, no boyfriend, no husband, no “punching the clock” anywhere, so to speak. Her family lived in Nevada. No one was expecting to hear from Susan again soon, especially because she had already let everyone know that after graduation, she had her mind set on traveling.’

‘So, if she disappeared,’ Taylor said, picking up on Hunter’s line of thought, ‘people would’ve just assumed that she’d really acted on her promise of traveling. No reason for anyone to get worried, at least not for a while.’

‘Exactly,’ Hunter agreed. ‘The circumstances of that particular moment in time made her the best possible kind of victim. The anonymous kind. The unmissed. And Lucien knew that very well.’

A tall and young-looking waitress, with her long dark hair pulled back into a fishtail braid, stepped up to their table.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to have a look at the menu?’ she asked with a hint of an Italian accent. ‘I can recommend the gnocchi with the chef’s special cheese, tomato and basil sauce.’ She gave them a charming smile. ‘It’s so good you’ll want to lick the plate.’

Gnocchi was Hunter’s favorite Italian dish, but he still had no appetite.

‘Wow, that does sound very tempting,’ he said, matching her smile. ‘But I’m not very hungry today. Maybe another time.’ He nodded at Taylor.

‘Yeah, I’m not hungry either. Just the coffee for me today, thanks.’

‘No problem,’ the waitress said. She paused. Looked back at them. ‘I hope you guys work things out,’ she added kindly. ‘You look good together.’ She gave them one last sympathetic smile before moving over to take the order of a small group sitting just a few tables away.

‘Is that the vibe we’re giving out?’ Taylor asked once the waitress was out of earshot. ‘That we’re a couple trying to work things out?’

Hunter had an amused smile on his lips. He shrugged. ‘I guess.’

For an instant, Taylor almost looked embarrassed, but in a flash her game face was back on. ‘Do you really believe that Susan was never part of any of Lucien’s violent fantasies?’ she asked. ‘Do you believe she really was his first ever victim? And that he didn’t rape her?’

Hunter leaned back on his chair. ‘Why do you think he would lie about any of that?’

‘I’m not sure. I guess that what I’m trying to understand is — if Susan really was Lucien’s first ever victim, and he’d never had any “violent fantasies” about her, how come he went for her and not someone else. . a stranger?’

Hunter frowned. ‘I thought we just covered that a minute ago.’

‘No, I’m not talking about that particular night, or even that week, Robert. What I’m talking about is that despite the circumstances back then, giving Susan the quality of “perfect victim”, unless it was all an act, she and Lucien were supposed to be “friends”. From what he said, he even had some romantic interest in her, which suggests some sort of emotional attachment.’

Hunter’s coffee had cooled down enough for him to have a healthy sip. ‘And you’re thinking, it’s got to be a lot harder for a perpetrator to kidnap, partially skin, and then kill someone he knew, someone who was supposedly a friend, someone who he had a crush on.’

‘Exactly.’ Taylor nodded. ‘Especially if that person is his

first ever victim. If Lucien hadn’t fantasized about killing Susan in particular, then why torture and kill a “friend”? He could’ve easily found another anonymous victim — a total stranger — someone he could’ve picked up in a bar or a club, a hooker, I don’t know, but someone who he had zero feelings for, someone he couldn’t care less about.’

‘And to Lucien, that was exactly who Susan was.’

Taylor frowned.

‘You’re trying to look at it with your own eyes, Courtney,’ Hunter said, putting his coffee cup back down on the table. ‘You’re trying to understand it with your own mind. And when you do that, your emotions get in the way. You have to try to look at it through Lucien’s eyes. His psychopathy isn’t victim-centered.’

Taylor held Hunter’s gaze for a long while. Every agent with the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit is aware that there are two major types of aggressive psychopaths. The first kind — victim-centered — are the ones to whom the victim is the most important part of the equation. The perpetrator fantasizes about a specific type of victim, so everyone he chooses has to match that type, fit the profile. And it usually boils down to physical type. With victim-centered psychopaths, the whole fantasy revolves around the way the victim looks. It’s the victim’s physical attributes that excites and ‘turns them on’. Most of the time because it reminds them of someone else. In those cases, there’s always some sort of strong emotional connection, and nine out of ten times their fantasies will involve some sort of sexual act. The victim being sexually assaulted either before or after being murdered is almost a certainty.

The second major type of aggressive psychopaths — violence-centered — are the ones to whom the victim is secondary. The most important part of the equation is the violence, not the victim. It’s the killing act that pleasures them. They don’t fantasize about a certain type of victim. They don’t fantasize about having sex with the victim, because sex will bring them little, or no pleasure at all. On the contrary, it’s a distraction from the violence. What they fantasize about is torture, about how to inflict pain, about the God-like power that it gives them. To those psychopaths, anyone can become a victim, even friends and family. There is no distinction. Because of that, they achieve a much higher level of emotional detachment than the victim-centered ones. They can easily kidnap, torture and kill a friend, a relative, a lover, a spouse. . To them it doesn’t matter. Emotions simply have no relevance.

‘How do you know Lucien’s psychopathy isn’t victim-centered?’ Taylor finally asked.

Hunter finished his coffee and used a paper napkin to dab his mouth.

‘Because of what we have so far.’

Taylor leaned in slightly and cocked her head.

‘The tokens that were found inside that box in Lucien’s house, remember?’ Hunter elaborated. ‘Not all of them came from women, and the ones that did drastically varied in size. That tells us that the victim’s physical type and even the gender aren’t that important to him. But Lucien also told us so himself. . twice.’

Taylor paused, and Hunter could tell that she was searching her mental record of that morning’s interview.

‘He told us that when he was in high school he dreamed of hurting people.’ Hunter reminded her. ‘Sometimes people he knew, sometimes people he had never seen before. . just random creations of his imagination — not a specific type.

Taylor remembered Lucien saying that, but she hadn’t fully made the connection.

‘Then he told us that when he started fantasizing while wide-awake, the star roles in his violent fantasies usually belonged to people he disliked. Sometimes teachers, sometimes school bullies, sometimes family members. . but not always. No physical attributes, or gender came into play. In Lucien’s dreams and fantasies, who he was hurting made no difference to him. What excited him was the act of murder, itself.’

Hunter consulted his watch. It was time to get going.

‘Trust me, Courtney, whatever feelings Lucien felt for Susan wouldn’t have stopped him. Not even love.’

Forty-Nine

For lunch Lucien had been given an aluminum tray containing one portion of bread, lumpy mashed potatoes, a small amount of vegetables, and two pieces of chicken, which were swimming in some sort of yellowish sauce. Everything lacked salt and seemed to have been seasoned with an extra pinch of absolutely nothing at all. Lucien was convinced that the FBI had redefined tasteless food, but he didn’t really mind. He wasn’t eating for taste or pleasure. He ate to keep his body and mind fed, to give his muscles at least some of the nutrients they needed. And he ate every last scrap.

Just ten minutes after he’d finished his lunch, Lucien heard the familiar buzzing and unlocking sound that came from the door at the end of the corridor.

‘Two hours almost to the second,’ he said, as Hunter and Taylor came into his line of sight. ‘I had a feeling you two would be punctual.’ Lucien waited for them to sit down. ‘Do you mind if I stand up and walk about a little while we talk? It gets the blood flowing to my brain better, and it helps me digest that crap you guys call food around here.’ He jabbed his head toward the empty tray.

No one had any objections.

‘So,’ Lucien said. ‘Where were we?’

Hunter and Taylor both knew that Lucien hadn’t forgotten where they’d left off. The question was just part of his game.

‘Susan Richards,’ Taylor said, calmly crossing her legs, interlacing her fingers together, and resting her right elbow on one of the chair’s arms.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Lucien replied as he slowly started pacing from left to right at the front of the cell. ‘What about her again?’

‘Her remains, Lucien,’ Hunter said in a firm but unthreatening tone. ‘Where are they?’

‘Oh, that’s right. I was about to tell you, wasn’t I?’ There was a perverse quality to Lucien’s new smile. ‘Have you contacted her parents yet, Robert? Are they still alive?’

‘What?’

‘Susan’s parents. We met them a couple of times, remember? Are they still alive?’

‘Yes. They’re still alive,’ Hunter confirmed.

Lucien nodded his understanding. ‘They seemed to be nice people. Will you be the one in charge of giving them the news?’

Hunter suspected he would be, but he was getting tired of Lucien’s games. The way he saw it, right then, any answer was an answer, as long as it got Lucien talking.

‘Yes.’

‘Will you be doing it over the phone, or do you intend to do it face to face?’

Any answer.

‘Face to face.’

Lucien chewed on that for a beat before returning to Hunter’s original question. ‘You know, Robert, that night I experienced things. . feelings, actually, that until then I had only read about in criminology books, interview transcripts, and accounts from apprehended offenders. Personal and intimate feelings that the more I read about them, the more I wanted to experience them for myself, because that’d be the only real way to find out if they’d be true for me or not.’

He paused and stared at the wall in front of him, as if fascinated by some invisible work of art hanging from it.

‘That night, Robert, I could actually feel Susan’s life-light fading away right at my fingertips.’ Lucien’s gaze moved down toward his hands before continuing. ‘I could feel her heart pulsating in my palms, and the more I squeezed, the weaker it got.’ He turned and faced Hunter and Taylor one more time. ‘And that was when I was elevated, like an out-of-body experience. That was when I realized that what so many had testified to, the feeling we read about so many times, was indeed true.’

Taylor’s eyes darted toward Hunter and then back to Lucien. ‘What feeling are you talking about?’

Lucien didn’t answer, but his eyes passed the question over to Hunter.

‘The “God-like feeling”,’ Hunter said.

Lucien nodded once. ‘Right again, Robert. The “God-like feeling”. A feeling of such supreme power that until then I believed it was reserved only for God. The power to extinguish life. And let me tell you, it’s true what they say. That feeling changes your life forever. It’s intoxicating, Robert, addictive, hypnotizing even. Especially if you’re looking straight into their eyes as you squeeze the life out of their bodies. That’s the moment when you become God.’

No, Hunter thought. That’s the moment when you delude yourself that you had, for the quickest of instants, equated yourself to God. Only a deluded person would believe that he or she could become God, however briefly. He said nothing, but noticed Lucien’s fingers slowly closing into fists before he turned and faced Taylor.

‘Tell me, Agent Taylor, have you ever killed someone?’

The question caught Taylor completely by surprise, and in a whirlwind of memory, her heartbeat took off like a fighter jet.

Fifty

It’d happened three years after Taylor had graduated from the FBI Academy. She’d been assigned to the New York field office, but the events that took place that night had nothing to do with any of the investigations she’d been working on at that time.

That night, Taylor had spent hours poring over NYPD’s and New Jersey PD’s combined investigation files into a serial killer that they had named ‘The Ad Killer’, or TAK for short.

In the past ten months, TAK had sodomized and killed six women — four in New York and two in New Jersey. All six of them had been private sex workers. All six of them fitted a specific physical profile — dark, shoulder-length hair, brown eyes, aged between nineteen and thirty-five, average weight, average height. The pseudonym ‘The Ad Killer’ was used because the only solid fact that the police had been able to gather over nine months of investigations was that all six women had placed private advertisements, offering their ‘tantric massage’ services, in the back pages of free local newspapers.

After nine months and not much to show for it, the Mayor of New York had demanded that the chief of police requested the assistance of the FBI. Courtney Taylor was one of the two agents assigned to assist with the case.

It was past midnight by the time Taylor left the FBI office on the twenty-third floor of the Federal Plaza building that late October night. She drove slowly through Manhattan before crossing the Midtown Tunnel in the direction of her small one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, in the northwest corner of Queens. Her mind had been so busy, sifting through an earthquake of thoughts and trying to piece together a few aspects of the investigation, that it was only after spotting a 24-hour grocery store on 21st Avenue, that she remembered she had completely run out of several supplies back home.

‘Oh, damn!’ she breathed out, quickly swinging her car right and taking a parking spot just past the store. As she turned off the engine, her stomach also decided to remind her of how hungry she was by demonstrating its own version of a whale’s mating call.

At that time in the morning the store wasn’t busy at all — two, maybe three customers browsing the aisles. The young clerk at the counter nodded a robotic ‘good morning’ at Taylor, before returning his attention to whatever paperback he was reading.

Taylor grabbed a basket by the entrance and, without putting too much thought into what she needed, started throwing items into it. She’d just picked up a half-gallon of milk from one of the fridges at the back of the store when she heard some sort of loud commotion up front. She frowned and took a glance around the corner but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Still, her instincts told her that something wasn’t right, and Taylor had learned a long time ago to always trust her instincts. She put the basket on the floor and walked around to the next aisle along.

‘Hurry the fuck up, man, or I’ll blow your fucking brains all over this dirty floor. I ain’t got all fucking night,’ she heard somebody say in a very anxious voice, even before she had a chance to peek around the corner again.

Instantly, Taylor reached for her Glock 22, thumbed the safety off, and very quietly chambered a round. Her stomach’s mating whales had gone quiet all of a sudden, giving way to a heavy-metal drum solo from her heart. This was no well-prepared and thought-out FBI operation. This was no drill. This was sheer bad luck. This was real, and this was happening right there and then.

Crouching down to keep herself hidden from view from the front counter, Taylor moved stealthily up the aisle. She paused before reaching the end of it, and through a gap between some items on one of the shelves, was able to check the round surveillance mirror in one of the ceiling corners.

‘Motherfucker, you think I’m playing wit’ you?’ she heard the anxious voice say again. ‘You think this is a fucking game? You better speed the fuck up or I’ll pop a cap in your ugly ass. You dig what I’m saying, holmes?’

The drum solo in Taylor’s heart gathered momentum. Through the mirror she could see a single perpetrator. He looked young. He was tall and skinny, wearing blue jeans, a dark, loose, New York Yankees sweatshirt, and had a red and black bandana covering most of his face. He was pointing a Beretta 92 semi-automatic pistol directly at the terrified store clerk’s head.

Like a frantic chicken, the perpetrator kept on quickly turning his head every few seconds to check the store’s entrance and aisles. Even from a distance, Taylor could tell that he was completely wasted, wired up on some kind of drug. And that made everything a lot worse.

Despite his incessant checking, the kid with the Beretta was so out of it that he didn’t even notice the police car that had parked just outside the shop.

Officer Turkowski wasn’t responding to a distress call. That small grocery store, stashed away in a dark corner of Queens, had no silent alarm or panic button hidden behind the counter. No, Officer Turkowski simply got hungry and decided to grab a couple of donuts and maybe a few Twinkies to keep him going for the next hour or so. He thought about grabbing a burrito from the Taco Bell on Jackson Avenue, but he was just around the corner from the 24-hour grocery store, and he decided that he fancied something sweet.

Turkowski was a young officer who had been with the NYPD for two and a half years. He’d only started doing solo patrols — twice a week — in the past two months. Tonight, as luck would have it, was a solo-patrol night.

He stepped out of his Crown Vic and, for once, closed the driver’s door without slamming it shut — no noise.

Inside the shop, the terrified store clerk had finished placing all the cash from the register into a paper bag, and was about to hand it over to his assailant when he saw the young police officer appear at the shop’s door.

Turkowski saw the kid with the Beretta a second before the kid saw him. No time to call for backup. Hardcore police training kicked in, and in a flash he had unholstered his gun and, in a two-hand grip, had it aimed at the kid.

‘Drop it,’ he called out in a steady voice.

The kid had already forgotten everything about the money and the store clerk. His only concern now was the cop with the gun. He swung his body around, and in a split second he had his Beretta aimed at Turkowski’s chest.

‘Fuck that, cop. You drop it,’ the kid said, holding his gun sideways in a one-hand grip — street gangster-style.

It was obvious the kid was nervous, but he was no first-timer. In a very agile move, as he pivoted his body to face the police officer, he had taken a step back and strategically positioned himself with his back to the front of the shop. He now had the store clerk slightly to his left, the police officer slightly to his right, and the shop aisles directly in front of him, giving him, out of the three of them, the best overall viewpoint of the entire scene.

Hiding in the aisle, Taylor had the kid’s inverse viewpoint.

‘I said drop it,’ Turkowski repeated, easing himself one step to his right. ‘Put your weapon on the ground, take a step forward, and kneel down with your hands behind your head.’

Still crouching down, Taylor had silently moved up the aisle and was now almost at the front of the shop. No one had noticed her yet. From her hidden position, she got a better look at the entire scene, especially the perpetrator. The kid’s eyes were wild with a mixture of adrenaline, anxiety and drugs. His posture was rigid, but fearless, as if he’d been in that position before. As if he had everything under total control. Turkowski, on the other hand, seemed edgier.

‘Fuck you, cop,’ the kid said, using his left hand to pull the red and black bandana down from his nose and mouth, allowing it to hang loosely around his neck, and revealing his face.

Taylor instantly knew that that was a bad sign. She instantly knew it was time to act before the whole situation got out of control.

Too late.

Like a film on the big screen, as Taylor started getting up from her crouching position, the entire scene switched into slow motion. The kid hadn’t yet noticed her, and no one will ever know if he sensed her presence before she revealed herself, but he gave Officer Turkowski no chance. . no warning. He squeezed the trigger on his Beretta 92 three times in quick succession.

The first bullet hit Turkowski on his right shoulder, rupturing tendons, shattering bone, and blowing up a red mist of blood. The second and third hit him square on the chest, directly over his heart, destroying the organ’s left and right atria, and the pulmonary artery and veins. Turkowski was dead before he hit the ground.

Despite the mess and the blood, the kid didn’t panic. He quickly swung on the balls of his feet to face the store clerk again, grabbed the bag with the cash, and raised his gun. The way he saw it, since he’d already killed a cop, why leave a living witness?

Taylor had read that resolve in the kid’s crazed eyes and movement. She could foresee what was coming, and before he could turn the nightmare into a reality, Taylor was up on her feet. She had stepped away from her aisle cover and into clear view, her Glock 22 firmly aimed at the kid with the Beretta.

Through the corner of his eye, the kid caught a glimpse of movement coming from his right. Instinctively he began spinning his body around, his finger already starting to apply pressure to the trigger.

Taylor had no time to shout out a command or a warning, but she also knew that it would make no difference. The kid wouldn’t have responded. He would’ve shot her with the same determination with which he had shot the police officer.

Taylor squeezed her trigger only once.

The .40 Smith & Wesson bullet was intended to just wound. To hit the kid on the upper arm or shoulder. To force him to drop his weapon, but the shot had been hurried and the kid was in mid-movement. The bullet hit him higher than intended and a few inches to the right. The kid fell back. A chunk of his throat splattered onto the wall behind him. It took him three and a half minutes to bleed out. It took the ambulance ten minutes to get to the store.

He was only eighteen years old.

Fifty-One

Doing her best to keep her face and movements as steady as she could manage, Taylor blinked away the memory.

‘Excuse me?’ She angled her head in a way that suggested she hadn’t heard Lucien’s question properly.

‘I’m sure you’ve been involved in hundreds of FBI investigations, Agent Taylor,’ Lucien said. ‘What I want to know is: have you, in any of them, had to pull out your gun and kill someone, even if in “self-defense”?’

Taylor wasn’t prepared to go through any of what had happened that night all those years ago with Lucien, but she knew that if she answered truthfully he would pick at that wound until it bled again. Trying to concentrate on her breathing, her eyes, and everything else that could give her away, she gave him her answer.

‘No.’

Lucien was observing Taylor, but this time her poker face worked. If anything had betrayed her answer, he didn’t seem to notice it.

‘Robert?’ Lucien moved the question over. His head skewed sideways. ‘Don’t lie to me now.’

Once again, Hunter had the feeling that somehow Lucien already knew the answer.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, I’ve killed people in the line of duty.’

‘How many?’

Hunter didn’t have to think about it. ‘I’ve shot and killed six people.’

Lucien savored those words for an instant. ‘And you weren’t overcome by a feeling of tremendous power? You didn’t get the “God-like feeling”? Not even once?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ Hunter didn’t hesitate. ‘If I could have avoided it, I would’ve.’

For several seconds, they exchanged a fierce stare, as if their eyes were fighting their own private tug-of-war.

‘Susan’s remains, Lucien,’ Hunter finally said. ‘Where are they?’

‘Very well,’ Lucien agreed, breaking eye contact. He breathed in deeply. ‘Like I said before, Robert, the place I used in La Honda is still there. Once the magic of the moment had worn off that night, once I stopped shaking from the adrenaline rush, I knew I had to dispose of the body in a way that no one would find it. But I had already given that a lot of thought. That was just another reason why I chose that place — it was surrounded by wild woods.’ A careless shrug. ‘I didn’t know it would happen that night though,’ he added. ‘It wasn’t my intention when I left the dorm to go meet Susan. As I said, it just turned out that way.’

He started pacing his cell again, his hands behind his back.

‘So I dug for the rest of the night, all the way until morning. Ended up with a four, maybe five-foot-deep grave. I had already bought bags and bags of coffee powder and a few bottles of mountain lion urine.’

Both Hunter and Taylor knew that coffee powder is a very strong animal scent distractor. It confuses them, and usually makes them lose a scent trail, if they were on to one. Mountain lion urine can be easily bought in several shops around America, and it’s used for its predator scent quality. Its smell scares away a multitude of other animals, like foxes, wolves and coyotes. It’s a simple law of nature — the stronger and deadlier the predator, the more animals its scent will scare off.

‘I buried her body in the woods behind the house,’ Lucien said, ‘under layers of dirt, coffee powder and mountain lion urine. Covered it all with some leaves and sticks. And I can tell you, it’s never been disturbed by man or animal.’

‘So where is this house?’ Hunter asked.

Lucien spent the next two minutes giving Hunter and Taylor specific instructions of how to get to it from Sears Ranch Road.

Lucien paused directly in front of Hunter. ‘Will you tell them everything? Will you tell them the truth?’

Hunter knew Lucien was talking about Susan’s parents again.

‘Yes.’

‘Um. . I wonder how they’ll feel. What their reaction will be?’

‘What do you care?’ Taylor spat the words. ‘At least they’ll have closure at last. They’ll be able to bury their daughter’s remains with dignity. And they’ll also have the certainty that the monster who took her away from them will be locked up for the rest of his natural life.’

Lucien was still pacing his cell, but instead of moving from left to right, he’d started walking back and forth between the back wall and the Plexiglas at the front.

‘Oh, no, I wasn’t talking about that, Agent Taylor.’ Lucien’s lips broke into something that looked like half a smirk, half an amused smile. ‘I meant. . I wonder how they’ll feel when they find out that they ate their own daughter.’

Fifty-Two

Adrian Kennedy had decided to cancel all of his appointments back in Washington, DC and stay at the FBI Academy in Quantico, at least for another day or so. In all his years with the Bureau, no single investigation or suspect had intrigued him as much as Lucien Folter had.

He’d ordered a check on Susan Richards’ parents late last night. That was how Hunter knew they were still alive. Her father was now seventy-one and her mother sixty-nine, both retired. Kennedy had also told Hunter that they were still living in the same old house in Boulder City, Nevada, and they were still calling the police departments in Palo Alto and Santa Clara County at least once a month asking for any news.

Kennedy and Doctor Lambert had been following all the interviews through the monitors in the holding cells’ control room. Every once in a while one of them would make a brief comment on something that was said, but mostly they watched in silence. As soon as Kennedy heard Lucien’s instruction of how to get to Susan Richards’ grave behind the house in La Honda, he reached for the phone on the desk in front of him.

‘Get me the Special Agent in charge of our field office in San Francisco. . ASAP!’

Within seconds Kennedy was speaking to Special Agent Bradley Simmons, a softly spoken man who had been with the FBI for twenty years, nine of those with the San Francisco office. He still had a strong southern Texas accent.

Kennedy had paid intense attention to Lucien’s instructions. He didn’t even need to listen back to the recording or check his notes. He could easily recount word for word.

‘Get in touch with the La Honda Police Department and County Sheriff’s office only if you need to, you understand?’ Kennedy said, once Agent Simmons had taken everything down. ‘This is exclusively an FBI operation. From what we understand the location is isolated by woods, no neighbors, no one around, that was the main reason why it was chosen, so if there’s no need for you to let anyone else know. . don’t let anyone else know. Get on to it now, and get back to me the second you find anything.’

Kennedy put the phone down and returned his attention to the monitors and the interview just in time to hear Lucien’s last comment. His body tensed and he looked at Doctor Lambert.

‘Did he just say that they ate their own daughter?’

Doctor Lambert was sitting before one of the monitors with a disbelieving look on his face. He wanted to play back the recording just to be sure, but he knew he didn’t need to. He knew he’d heard right. Without diverting his attention from the monitor, he nodded slowly.

At that precise moment there was a knock on the door to the control room. The person didn’t wait for a reply, pushing the door open.

‘Director Kennedy,’ the man said, stepping into the room.

Chris Welch was in his early forties with short blond hair that was brushed back off his forehead. He was carrying what looked to be a notebook of some sort.

‘Sorry to disturb you, sir.’ Welch was with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. ‘You asked me to notify you immediately if we came across anything that seemed relevant in any of these books.’ He nodded at the notebook he was holding. It was a regular 8x10.5-inch notebook, with a marbled brown and black hardcover.

All the books and notebooks that were retrieved from Lucien’s house in Murphy had been handed in to the FBI’s BAU. Their task was to scrutinize their content.

‘I thought you’d like to have a look at this.’ Welch Hipped the notebook open and handed it to Kennedy.

Kennedy’s eyes scanned through several pages before he let out a heavy breath.

‘Jesus!’

Fifty-Three

Even with the ventilation system on full blast, the heat down in sublevel five of the Behavioral Science Unit building seemed oppressive. Hunter felt beads of sweat form on the nape of his neck and slowly start to trickle down his back, only to be frozen in place by Lucien’s words. They seemed to have chilled the air like an arctic blast.

‘They what?’ he asked, his voice puncturing the silence that had clouded the air since Lucien last spoke.

Lucien had reached the back wall again and had stopped pacing. His back was toward Hunter and Taylor.

‘Yes, you heard right, Robert,’ he said. ‘Susan’s parents ate her. .’ He bobbed his head to one side. ‘I mean. . not all of her, of course, just a few diced-up organs.’

Taylor felt something start to spin circles inside her stomach.

‘How?’ Hunter asked. ‘By then they’d already traveled back to Nevada after her graduation.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Lucien said. ‘I visited them.’

‘You what?’ Taylor this time.

Lucien faced them. ‘I visited them two days after that night. . took a gift with me. . a pie I baked myself.’

The circles inside Taylor’s stomach became scary roller coasters.

‘A trip from Stanford to Boulder City in Nevada doesn’t take that long,’ Lucien said to Taylor. ‘Susan had introduced them to us — Robert and I, that is — a year or two before. We met them again after the graduation ceremony. Susan and I had both graduated cum laude, and they were very proud of her. Any parent would be.’

It was barely noticeable, but Hunter picked up a sting of pain in Lucien’s last few words.

‘They were a sweet couple,’ Lucien proceeded. ‘Susan was a sweet girl. I decided it was the right thing to do.’

‘The right thing to do?’ Taylor had been knocked off balance so hard that she couldn’t contain herself. She had to ask. ‘How could that be the right thing to do?’

‘You’re the investigator in this case, Agent Taylor. You tell me.’ Lucien sounded condescending. ‘Let me throw you a pop quiz. Let’s say this was a completely different investigation. Let’s say that you didn’t have me in custody. Let’s say that you had a case where you found out that the UNSUB had fed some of his victim’s organs to her family, what would your conclusion be, Agent Taylor? I’m interested to know.’

‘Play his game. Let him believe he’s winning.’ Hunter’s words came back to Taylor. She knew that what Lucien wanted was to get under her skin, to shake her confidence. She now understood that every time she lost her temper, Lucien felt like he’d won another battle. ‘Give him what he wants.’

‘Because you’re a deranged psychopath?’ she said. ‘Because to you it sounded like something fun to do? Because it fed your “God” delusion?’

Lucien crossed his arms over his chest and looked at Taylor, intrigued. A challenging smile threatened to stretch his lips.

‘That’s a very interesting conclusion, Agent Taylor,’ he replied, sarcasm dripping off his words. ‘Spoken like a true professional. You know, I always found that there’s nothing as entertaining as seeing people feed off their emotions. The problem with it is that it takes away objectivity. It clouds judgment. It opens the door to a world of mistakes. I learned that a long time ago.’

As if he didn’t have a care in the world, Lucien pulled his sleeve up and again looked at his wrist as if he had a watch.

‘Anyway, I’m quite bored of all these questions, and I guess you two have got a lot of work to do now, don’t you? You know. . bones to dig up, explanations to make, stories to tell.’

Leisurely, Lucien lay down on the bed and interlaced his fingers behind his head.

‘Give Susan’s parents my best for me, will you, Robert? Oh, and by the way, if you’re wondering. . yes, I did sit down and have dinner with them that night.’

Fifty-Four

Hunter’s fist connected with the punch bag with so much force, it sent it swinging backward almost a whole meter. He’d been hitting one of the 45-kilo leather bags that hung from the ceiling in the BSU building’s boxing gym for a little under an hour. His shirt and shorts were drenched in sweat, which was pouring down from his forehead like rain. His whole body was sore from the grueling workout and he felt mentally exhausted. But he needed some time to think, to try to organize the mess of thoughts inside his head, to disconnect, even if only for a few minutes, and for Hunter, more times than not, heavy exercise did the trick.

Today was not one of those times. Frustration ran through his body like bad blood, and no matter how hard Hunter punched that bag or how much weight he lifted, he just couldn’t seem to get rid of it.

‘If I were thirty years younger, I’d spot you with that punch bag,’ Kennedy said, standing at the door to the gym. The place was deserted, except for Hunter. ‘But even so, the way you’re punching that thing, you’d probably put me through the wall. I’m surprised your hand isn’t broken yet.’

The long day and a full pack of cigarettes made Kennedy’s hoarse voice sound even weaker, even more guttural.

Hunter delivered one quick final series of heavy punches to the bag — jab, jab, cross, left hook, cross. The bag swung back and sideways awkwardly, as if it’d had enough and had been finally defeated, before Hunter embraced it into a stop. His breath was tortured, his face a dark shade of pink, the veins on his arms and shoulders swollen from the whole effort and the extra blood flow. Panting, he rested his head against the bag for a moment, taking his time, waiting for his breathing to slowly return to normal. Sweat dripped from his chin onto his shoes and the floor.

Kennedy stepped closer.

‘Any news from La Honda?’ Hunter asked at last, his arms still hugging the punch bag.

Kennedy nodded with very little enthusiasm.

Hunter used his teeth to pull free the Velcro straps on both of his gloves and turned to face the director.

‘I had four agents check the site.’

Hunter used the inside of his left arm and the left side of his torso to grab his right glove and pulled his hand free, before undoing his left glove.

‘They found the house Lucien mentioned.’ Kennedy threw Hunter a towel. ‘The agents followed Lucien’s instructions to the specific location and began digging. They dug for an hour.’ He handed Hunter an A4-size envelope. ‘And this is what they found.’

Hunter quickly dried his face and hands before reaching inside the envelope and retrieving a couple of printed-out photographs. As his eyes devoured the images, his heartbeat picked up speed once again.

The first photograph showed a full human skeleton, its bones old and time-discolored, lying inside what looked to be a five-foot-deep grave.

The second one was a close-up snapshot of the skull.

In silence, Hunter stared at both pictures for a long time, dwelling on the second one for a lot longer than the first, as if he were mentally reconstructing Susan’s face over her skull.

Kennedy took a step back, giving Hunter a moment before he spoke again. ‘Since we already know that Lucien is a serial offender, protocol dictates that we now dig up the entire site,’ Kennedy said, ‘looking for possible remains of other bodies. It’s a huge operation, and there’s no way of doing that without getting the local authorities involved and bringing a Hollywood-size spotlight to this case.’

‘I’d wait a while, Adrian,’ Hunter said. He’d never been a big fan of protocol. ‘At least until we’re finished interviewing him. So far Lucien has been straight with us. If there are other bodies buried around that same area, I have a feeling he will tell us. Bringing a spotlight to this investigation right now won’t benefit anyone.’

Kennedy usually played by the book, but right then he was inclined to agree with Hunter.

‘It will take at least a couple of days and a few tests to confirm if what we’ve got really is Susan Richards’ skeleton,’ Kennedy said.

‘It will be,’ Hunter replied, returning the printouts to the envelope.

Kennedy looked a question at Hunter.

‘Lucien had no reason to lie,’ Hunter said.

The question remained in Kennedy’s eyes.

‘We already know he killed Susan,’ Hunter clarified. ‘He told us that, and the framed tattooed piece of skin in his basement confirmed it. If he had disposed of Susan’s body in a way where no remains could be found, he would’ve just told us so.’ He jabbed a finger at the envelope. ‘If those were the remains of someone else’s body, who he’d also have killed, because he knew the exact location where it was buried, there was no point in telling us it was Susan’s, because he knows we will be testing it anyway.’

Kennedy’s head bobbed down once. ‘I understand, but just to be on the safe side, I think you’d better wait for official confirmation before contacting her parents.’

Hunter nodded slowly before using the towel on his face and arms again. Bringing the news to Susan’s parents was one job he wasn’t looking forward to. ‘I’ve got to take a shower.’

‘Come up to my office when you’re done,’ Kennedy said. ‘There’s something else I need to show you.’

Fifty-Five

Twenty minutes later, Hunter, his hair still wet from his shower, was back inside Director Kennedy’s office. Special Agent Taylor was also there. She had lost the ponytail. Her blonde hair was loose and wavy, falling naturally over her shoulders. She was wearing a dark pencil skirt with a tucked-in blue blouse, black nylon stockings, and black strappy court shoes. She was sitting in one of the armchairs in front of Kennedy’s desk. In her hands, the same photographs Hunter had looked at down in the gym, the ones of Susan Richards’ remains.

Kennedy got up from behind his desk.

‘You still drink Scotch?’ he asked Hunter.

Single-malt Scotch whisky was Hunter’s biggest passion. Unlike so many, he knew how to appreciate its palate instead of just getting drunk on it. Though sometimes getting drunk worked just fine.

Hunter nodded. ‘Do you?’

‘When at all possible.’ Kennedy walked over to the cabinet to his left, opened it and retrieved three tumblers and a bottle of Tomatin 25-year-old.

‘Not for me, sir, thank you,’ Taylor said, placing the photographs back inside the envelope.

‘Relax, Agent Taylor,’ Kennedy said in a reassuring tone. ‘This is an informal meeting, and after what we’ve all been through today, I’d say a drink is more than appropriate.’ A hesitant pause. ‘Unless you don’t drink Scotch. In that case I can get you something else.’

‘Scotch is fine, sir,’ Taylor replied confidently.

‘Ice?’

Hunter shook his head. ‘Just a drop of water, please.’

‘Same here,’ Taylor said.

Kennedy smiled. ‘Looks like I’ve got a couple of true Scotch drinkers in my office.’

He poured the three of them a healthy dose, added a splash of water, and handed a glass to Hunter and one to Taylor.

‘I need to ask you something, Robert,’ Kennedy said in a more serious tone.

Hunter sipped his Scotch. It was pleasantly rich without being overpowering, with notes of citrus and fruit. A complex but very smooth palate. He enjoyed the taste for a moment.

Taylor did the same.

‘Do you think Lucien was lying about the cannibalism?’ Kennedy asked. ‘That’s something that we have no way of proving.’

‘I can’t see what he would achieve by lying about that,’ Hunter replied.

‘Maybe he was going for the “shock” effect, Robert,’ Kennedy said. ‘People with a “God” complex thrive on the attention. You both know that.’

Hunter shook his head. ‘Not Lucien. He doesn’t want notoriety. At least not yet. As sickening as it sounds, I don’t think he’s lying about what he’s done. . about eating some of Susan’s flesh or organs. . or about feeding it to her parents.’

Kennedy paused, doubt bubbling in his eyes. ‘You know I don’t come from a psychology background, Robert, so let me ask you the same question Lucien asked Agent Taylor.’ His head jerked in her direction. ‘Why would he do that? Lucien drove across state lines with parts of her cooked into a dish just to offer it to her parents, for chrissakes. That’s beyond deranged, beyond evil, beyond immoral, beyond anything I’ve ever seen or heard. And I’ve seen and heard a lot in my life. What kind of evil mind drives anyone to do such a thing?’ He had another mouthful of Scotch.

Taylor looked at Hunter curiously.

He shrugged and looked away.

‘I’ve read studies, books, papers, theses. . you name it, about cannibal killers, serial or not,’ Kennedy added. ‘God knows, we’ve had many of them down in those same cells over the years. And I understand that a good number of them believe that they do it because to them their victims are special, and the act of eating them solidifies their bond with their victims. They feel that if they eat even a small part of them, the victims will stay with them forever and all that crap.’ He gave Hunter and Taylor a subtle headshake. ‘I guess everyone deludes in their own way. But feeding it to others. .? That’s just pure sadism and psychosis. What else can explain it?’

Hunter said nothing.

Kennedy pushed it.

‘So if you have anything that could throw any sort of light on the “whys” of this madness, Robert, please humor me, because I can’t figure it out. Why did he feed her to her parents? Was it pure sadism?’

Hunter sipped his drink again and leaned against the bookcase. ‘No, I don’t think it was sadism. I think he did it because he felt guilty.’

Fifty-Six

Kennedy’s doubtful look bounced between Hunter and Taylor. The FBI Agent didn’t look at all surprised.

‘Could you please elaborate, Robert,’ he said in his whispering voice. ‘Because to me, feeding someone to her own parents doesn’t quite sound like the actions of a person stricken by guilt.’

Hunter looked around him, as if searching for an answer that might’ve been floating around in the air.

‘We could theorize as much as we like here, Adrian, but the only one who really knows what was going on inside his head is Lucien himself.’

‘I understand that,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But I still would like to know your thoughts on why you think guilt had anything to do with it.’

‘If Lucien is being truthful about Susan being his first ever victim,’ Hunter said, ‘and right now we have no reason to doubt that, then, as you know, guilt and remorse are the first two common psychological emotions that usually torment a first-time killer.’

Kennedy and Taylor both did know that. According to the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, ‘serial murder’ is defined as: a series of three or more killings, committed on three or more separate occasions, with a ‘cooling-off’ period between murders. These murders must also have common characteristics such as to suggest the reasonable possibility that the crimes had been committed by the same person or persons.

That cooling-off period, Kennedy knew, especially between the initial killings of a series, was almost always due to the perpetrator or perpetrators experiencing intense feelings of guilt and/or remorse directly after committing the crime.

That was easily understandable. Most aggressors who eventually become serial murderers struggle with fantasies, urges, destructive impulses and even rage attacks for a long time, sometimes years, finding them harder and harder to resist until the urges finally win the battle. The simple fact that they struggle with these impulses for such a long time clearly indicates that they know that killing another human being is wrong. It then becomes a simple psychological human response.

Most people usually experience some level of guilt if they do something they know to be wrong — cheat in an exam, steal the paper from the neighbor’s door, cheat on a partner, tell a lie, or whatever. That sense of guilt is directly proportional to how wrong they believe their actions were — the worse the actions, the bigger the guilt trip. And bad actions don’t come much worse than murder. For that reason, many first-time murderers will be thrown into the depths of dark depression and experience a tremendous feeling of guilt directly after killing someone. With that in mind, it stood to reason that Lucien had also experienced enormous lows, and was overwhelmed by incredible feelings of guilt after his first ever murder.

‘OK, I agree that Lucien must’ve struggled with different stages of guilt in the aftermath of murdering Susan,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘But I still can see no reason why, overwhelmed by guilt or not, he would’ve fed parts of her body to her own parents, Robert.’

‘I can see two possible reasons,’ Hunter said, with a hand gesture. ‘The first one you mentioned just a moment ago.’

Kennedy’s eyes squinted a fraction. ‘And what was that?’

‘The belief that by consuming the flesh of their victims, the victims will then stay with them forever. They will become part of them,’ Taylor said in a half whisper. ‘Or whoever eats them.’ She allowed Kennedy a few seconds to reanalyze that statement.

Kennedy caught on quickly. ‘Jesus! Third-party transference.’ He looked at Hunter for confirmation but proceeded anyway. ‘So Lucien believed that if her parents consumed some of her flesh, then Susan would stay with them forever?’

‘As Lucien said,’ Taylor commented, ‘she was never meant to be a victim, and he also thought that her parents were nice people. So Robert could be right. He might’ve done it because he felt guilty at taking their daughter away from them.’

Kennedy considered that for a long, silent moment.

‘And the second possible reason?’ he finally asked.

‘The second reason links to the first,’ Hunter said. ‘Lucien told us that he used to hunt with his father, right?’

‘Yes, I remember that.’ Kennedy said.

‘He also said that his father was a great hunter.’

‘Yes, I remember that too.’

‘OK, many hunters inherit a belief that’s been passed down through generations and generations of Native Americans,’ Hunter explained.

Kennedy’s eyebrows arched curiously.

‘Native Americans never hunted for fun or sport. They hunted exclusively for food, and they believed that they must eat whatever they killed, always, because to eat their prey was to honor them. They believed that it kept their spirit alive in this world. It showed respect. To let their flesh go to waste, that would be a dishonor.’

Kennedy didn’t know that, but his memory and his eyes instantly flashed back to Susan Richards’ file sitting on his desk. Her mother was second-generation Shoshone, a Native American tribe, mostly from the area that became the state of Nevada. Her family name was Tuari, which meant ‘young eagle’. Kennedy was well aware that Lucien knew that too.

Taylor looked at Hunter intriguingly.

‘I read a lot,’ Hunter offered before she was able to ask the question.

‘So you think that, in his mind at least, Lucien was redeeming himself, even if only a little bit,’ Kennedy stated rather than asked. ‘He was being compassionate, by feeding her flesh to her own parents, he was trying to keep Susan’s spirit alive for them, even without their knowledge.

‘Everyone deludes in their own way.’ Hunter repeated Kennedy’s words from a little earlier. ‘But like I said, we can theorize as much as we like here, but the only one who really knows what was going on inside his head is Lucien himself.’

‘So in that case, let me ask you this,’ Kennedy said. ‘Why do you think he took part? Lucien said that he did sit down to have dinner with them that night.’

‘Because Lucien was experimenting.’

Kennedy pinched the bridge of his nose as if he could feel an oncoming headache.

‘In college, Lucien didn’t exactly doubt any of the theories behind these sadistic acts,’ he said. ‘He knew they were based on true accounts from apprehended offenders, but he was on the verge of almost obsessing with the feelings and emotions described by such offenders.’

Kennedy remembered something Lucien had said during one of the interviews. ‘He wanted to experience them for himself.’

‘Back then, he never said so in so many words,’ Hunter agreed. ‘But now we know that that was exactly what he wanted, to experiment. And that’s what makes Lucien so different from most psychopaths I’ve ever come up against.’

Kennedy’s eyebrows moved up inquisitively.

‘We know that he killed Susan, his first victim, by strangulation,’ Hunter elaborated. ‘But if we compare her murder to his latest one, the two victims in his trunk. . the MO, the level of violence, everything has skyrocketed. I’m willing to bet that the violence in every murder he’d committed in between moved up a step at a time. But Lucien escalates not because he’s being guided by uncontrollable urges inside of him.’

‘He does it consciously,’ Taylor said, picking up Hunter’s thread of thought. ‘He does it because he wants to know how he would feel as he becomes more and more violent.’

‘That’s a frightening thought,’ Kennedy said. ‘The level of determination and self-discipline one needs to carry on escalating murder after murder for twenty-five years is mindboggling. And you think he did it just so he could experience the feeling?’

Hunter had paused, his memory digging out something long forgotten. ‘I’ll be damned!’ He finally exclaimed.

‘What?’ Kennedy asked.

‘I can’t believe he’s really doing it,’ Hunter murmured.

‘Doing what?’

‘I think Lucien might’ve been writing an encyclopedia.’

Fifty-Seven

Kennedy’s shoulder’s stiffened as he felt an awkward shiver grab hold of his whole body, something that didn’t happen very often when it came to BSU investigations. He waited for Hunter to continue.

‘I remember this discussion we had once.’ Hunter’s memory searched the past. ‘I think it was during our second year in college. We were discussing emotional triggers and drives in extreme violent murders — what psychological factors could drive an individual to sadistically and brutally offend and reoffend.’

‘OK,’ Kennedy said, still intrigued.

‘Back then, all we had were a bunch of theories put together by several psychologists and psychiatrists, and a handful of accounts by apprehended killers. Now bear in mind that notorious cannibal killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Armin Meiwes, or Andrej Chikatilo hadn’t been caught yet. Their interviews, accounts and thoughts weren’t on file.’

Kennedy and Taylor both nodded together.

‘As I’ve said,’ Hunter moved on, ‘Lucien didn’t doubt the veracity of the accounts we had then, but he wasn’t quite convinced by many of the psychological theories. What I remember he used to say a lot was: “How can they know for sure?”’

‘They couldn’t,’ Taylor said. ‘That’s why it was a theory, not a fact.’

‘Precisely,’ Hunter agreed. ‘And Lucien understood that.’

‘But he wasn’t satisfied,’ Kennedy concluded.

‘No, he wasn’t. And that day he suggested something so far-fetched, I had completely forgotten about it.’

‘And that was?’

Hunter took a deep breath while trying to remember the details.

‘The surreal possibility of someone becoming a killer solely to experiment,’ he finally said. ‘Lucien argued how ground-breaking it would be for criminal behavior psychology if a fully mentally capable individual went on a killing rampage, escalating his or her way through different levels of violence, and experimenting with different methods and fantasies, while at the same time taking comprehensive notes of everything, including feelings and psychological state of mind at the time, and in the aftermath of each murder. Some sort of in-depth psychological study of the mind of a killer, written by the killer himself.’

Kennedy’s body tensed just a little, fighting the same awkward shiver that had run deep inside him just moments ago.

‘He believed that a notebook, or even a series of notebooks, filled with such true accounts would become an encyclopedia of knowledge, a bible of sorts to criminal behavioral scientists.’

Kennedy scratched his left cheek. He couldn’t help thinking that, as absurd as it sounded, Lucien was right. If such a book, or books, existed, they’d prove invaluable and probably become one of the most referred-to works by criminologists, psychologists and law enforcement officials and agents all around the world. Such a book, especially if written by someone with a criminal psychology degree, someone who understood the importance of such information and knew exactly what to add, would no doubt become some sort of holy book in the never-ending fight against violent predators.

‘I think that might be what he was doing,’ Hunter said, his thoughts beginning to turn his stomach. ‘Jumping from murder to murder, escalating the violence with each one, trying different things, different methods. . and keeping a diary of how he felt, especially emotionally.’ In his mind, that would give him the excuse he wanted.’

Kennedy’s forehead creased as he looked at Hunter. ‘Excuse?’

‘Lucien is a sociopath, no doubt about that, we know it and he knows it. The difference is: he’s known it for a long time. He told us that, remember?’

Taylor nodded. ‘He started fantasizing while still in school.’

‘That’s right, and I think that that knowledge hurt him. A regular kid shouldn’t be fantasizing about killing people. Maybe it all made him feel like something inside his brain was broken, that he didn’t belong. He even told us that the reason why he decided to study criminal behavior psychology was to understand himself.’

‘But that backfired,’ Kennedy said.

‘No, it didn’t,’ Hunter replied. ‘If anything, it pushed his imagination further. It made him come up with what to him sounded like a plausible motive.’

‘What better excuse to commit atrocious acts of violence than to fool yourself into believing that you’re doing it for a noble cause,’ Taylor said, following Hunter’s line of thought. ‘All in the name of research.’

‘That false belief would’ve eased his internal pain,’ Hunter added. ‘Lucien could then start feeding his hunger because in his mind, he wasn’t a sociopath anymore. . he was a scientist, a researcher. Everyone deludes in their own way, remember?’

Kennedy broke eye contact.

‘Is there something else?’ Hunter asked. ‘Something you’re not telling us?’

Kennedy shrugged and pursed his lips in reply. He walked over to his desk, opened the top right-hand drawer and pulled out a notebook. It was the same notebook Special Agent Chris Welch had handed him in the holding cells’ observation room earlier.

Hunter immediately recognized the notebook as one of those he and Special Agent Taylor had seen in Lucien’s basement.

‘Unfortunately, you might be right, Robert,’ Kennedy said. ‘Because we found this.’

Fifty-Eight

As if it were something he’d been dreading for years, Hunter took the notebook from Kennedy’s hands and flipped open its cover.

Taylor moved to Hunter’s side.

On the first page all they saw was a crude, black-and-white pencil sketch of a female face, screaming, contorted in agony.

Hunter’s eyes left the page and moved to Kennedy.

The BSU Director gestured for Hunter to carry on.

Hunter turned to the second page. No more drawings, just plain handwritten text. Hunter immediately recognized Lucien’s handwriting.

He began reading:

Hunter flipped the page but stopped reading to look at Kennedy again. He had his hands tucked deep inside his trouser pockets. His saggy cheeks seemed to have gained more weight in the past few days, and the dark circles under his eyes had taken an even more morbid appearance. His gaze was locked on the notebook in Hunter’s hands.

Hunter went back to the words on the pages:

Fifty-Nine

Hunter stopped reading and looked at Kennedy.

Even though he was looking at the words upside down, Kennedy had been following Hunter’s eyes and he knew exactly where he’d paused.

‘Read on,’ he said. ‘There’s a twist.’

Sixty

As if hypnotized by the words, Hunter and Taylor’s eyes just couldn’t tear themselves away from the pages in Lucien’s notebook. It was like reading a blockbuster paperback book, with the added difference that every single word was true.

Sixty-One

Hunter stopped reading and closed the notebook.

An uncomfortable Special Agent Taylor took a step back and finished her Scotch in one gulp.

‘Where are the others?’ Hunter asked, nodding at the notebook.

‘That’s the only one,’ Kennedy answered. ‘All the other notebooks found in the house in Murphy contained nothing. A few drawings and sketches but nothing else. Nothing like this.’

‘But there must be others.’ Hunter sounded a little confused. ‘Are you sure they’ve checked through all the books and notebooks they found?’

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Kennedy confirmed. ‘Lucien must’ve kept them somewhere else, or even scattered around several different locations. That wouldn’t surprise me, and that’s something else you must find out during the course of your interviews.’

Hunter’s stare hardened.

Kennedy read it. Tiredness began really showing in his hoarse voice, which was now starting to croak.

‘Look, Robert, there’s no way on earth I approve of what Lucien has done, but if you’re right about him writing down everything he’s done and experienced into notebooks, then it’s already done, and it cannot be undone. If these notebooks do indeed exist, then we might as well have them. For one, they’ll constitute evidence in a serial murder case that I have no doubt will go down in history. Two, the psychological and behavioral knowledge, the understanding that we’ll gain from those notes and texts, may prove to be a game changer in our fight against extreme violent repeat offenders. As a law-enforcement officer and as a psychologist, you know that full well, Robert.’

Hunter had no argument to come back with.

‘Nothing inside the storage facility in Seattle?’ Taylor asked.

‘Nothing but the chest freezer and the severed body parts,’ Kennedy confirmed.

Everyone appeared to have gone into thinking mode for a beat.

‘I checked with the Scott County Sheriff’s Department in Mississippi,’ Kennedy moved on. ‘Jed Davis and his girlfriend, Melanie Rose, were butchered inside the house they shared just outside Forest City twenty-one years ago. They were found by her mother who had dropped by with a homemade apple pie about two days after the incident. No one was ever arrested.’ He paused for effect and to catch his breath. ‘According to the medical examiner, Melanie Rose’s head was hacked off with a kitchen knife. The head was left on the dining table in the living room. That was the first thing her mother saw when she looked in through the window.’ Kennedy looked at Hunter, the expression on his face as serious as a heart attack. ‘He killed her just because she was home, Robert. He killed her for pure pleasure.’

Hunter closed his eyes and pressed his lips against each other.

‘You read the accounts,’ Kennedy added. ‘They were written the day after he butchered them. The narrative and the words are clear and concise, not hysterical or even nervous. We all know that that spells total emotional detachment. As you’ve said, his accounts are like a study into what goes on inside the mind of a vicious killer — how he thinks, how he feels, what drives him — prior, during, and after each attack. Call me selfish, Robert, but I want that knowledge. We need that knowledge. If those books exist, I want them.’

Hunter walked over to the window and had a look outside. Night and rainy clouds had darkened the sky, but it somehow made him see things clearer, understand something that until now he hadn’t. And he cursed himself for not having seen it earlier.

‘I guess you will have them, Adrian,’ he said. ‘Because Lucien wants you to have them.’

Taylor frowned and Kennedy threw Hunter a skewed look.

‘What do you mean?’

‘This was all planned,’ Hunter said.

Taylor and Kennedy’s confused looks intensified.

‘What was all planned, Robert?’ Taylor asked.

‘Being caught.’ Hunter turned to face them. ‘Well, maybe the timing wasn’t one hundred percent there. Maybe Lucien would’ve liked to carry on doing what he’s been doing for a while longer. He could never have predicted the accident in Wyoming that led us to him, but I think that he was always counting on being caught one day.’

Kennedy took just a few seconds to board Hunter’s thought ship. ‘Because what’s the point in writing an encyclopedia on killing and behavioral motivation if no one will read it. . or study it, right?’

Hunter agreed in silence.

Taylor thought about it for a second but wasn’t as convinced. ‘Yeah, but then why would he want to be caught? He could’ve arranged for the books to be delivered to the FBI, or he could’ve sent them in anonymously, or something.’

‘It wouldn’t have had the same effect,’ Hunter disagreed.

‘Robert is right.’ Kennedy backed him up. ‘The notebooks on their own wouldn’t have had the same “weight” as if we’d caught the perpetrator. It would’ve taken us a lot longer to follow it up because there would always be doubts as to whether the books were a hoax or not. Having Lucien in custody. . the interviews, him guiding us to the remains of his victims’ bodies. . it all adds to the whole credibility of the notebooks.’

Kennedy paused as a new realization finally hit him. He looked at Hunter. ‘And that’s why he asked for you.’

Hunter breathed out and nodded.

‘Because you add even more credibility to Lucien’s character,’ Kennedy said. ‘You went to college together. You shared a dorm. You were the best of friends. You know how intelligent he is and he knew that you could vouch for that.’ He walked over to the other side of his desk. ‘I bet that he’s counting on you remembering the conversation you had about the “killing encyclopedia” idea. He knew you would remember Susan Richards. You were always a major part of his plan, Robert.’

‘So now that his credibility is more than established,’ Taylor cut in, ‘why not just ask him for the notebooks? If you’re right, and the idea from the beginning was for the Bureau to get those books, he should be forthcoming with the information.’

‘No, he won’t be,’ Hunter said. ‘Not yet.’

‘And why is that?’

‘Because he’s not done yet.’

Sixty-Two

Hunter managed only three and a half erratic hours of sleep. He was up by 5:00 a.m. By 6:30, he’d already been for a five-mile run, and at 7:30, he and Taylor were back down in sublevel five.

Like the previous day, Lucien was sitting at the edge of his bed, right leg crossed over his left one, hands clasped together and resting on his lap, calmly waiting for them.

Hunter, Taylor and Kennedy had decided the night before that pushing Lucien to talk about the notebooks now, if they indeed existed, wasn’t the best strategy. His victims’ remains were still the priority.

‘I was wondering if you’d still be here or not, Robert,’ Lucien said as his interrogators took their seats. ‘I thought that maybe you’d want to see Susan’s remains for yourself. I thought that you might be halfway to Nevada to see her parents by now.’ He studied Hunter’s expression but got nothing. ‘You did find her, didn’t you?’ The question sounded unconcerned.

‘We found her,’ Taylor confirmed.

‘Ah, but of course,’ Lucien said as he’d just remembered something. ‘Tests and more tests. You know that it’s her, don’t you, Robert?’

No reaction.

‘But the FBI won’t move a muscle until they have lab confirmation. It’s protocol. Contacting her parents without being one hundred percent sure that you have Susan’s remains is careless, and potentially very damaging for both sides. That’s very understandable.’

‘Are there any other victims buried in the vicinity of the house in La Honda, Lucien?’ Hunter asked.

Lucien smiled. ‘I did think about it. It’s a great location. Hidden from everything. No neighbors. No one to sneak up on you.’ He shook his head. ‘But no. Susan was the only one in La Honda. This is a huge country, Robert. Similar places aren’t that hard to find. Anyway, after Susan it took me a long time to get my shit together.’ He cracked the knuckles on his hands against each other. ‘We’ve all heard and read about the “cooling-off” period between serial murders, but let me tell you. . it can be one hell of a dark time.’

Hunter wasn’t very interested in hearing Lucien’s personal accounts of how he felt, and though he knew Lucien would want to stretch every interview as much as he could, he still pushed for the information he wanted.

‘So give us the name and the location of another victim, Lucien.’

Lucien carried on as if he’d never heard the question.

‘On the days, weeks, months, after Susan, as the “killing drug” effect wore off —’ he had drawn quotations marks in the air with his fingers — ‘I was as sure as I could be that I’d never do it again. But as time went by, all the urges started to creep up on me again. And they came back stronger, more demanding. I missed the transcendent high. I missed the feeling of power that I had that night with Susan. And I knew that my body as well as my brain were dying to experience it again.’

‘How long was it?’ Taylor asked. ‘The cooling-off period? How long between Susan Richards and your second victim?’

‘Seven hundred and nine days.’

Lucien didn’t even have to think about the answer. The number was etched in his brain. Every detail about everything he’d done was etched in his brain.

‘I was already at Yale,’ he proceeded. ‘Her name was Karen Simpson.’

Hunter frowned.

Lucien looked at him and nodded. ‘That’s right, Robert, Karen was real, with all the tattoos, the lip and nose piercings, the left ear stretched to a full centimeter, the Bettie Page-style fringe. . I met her at Yale, just like I told you, but I did lie about something. Karen was never a drug addict. That was just something I made up because it fit the story I wanted to tell you a couple of days ago. That’s something I learned along the way. If you’re going to lie, then use as many true facts as you can — real people, names, descriptions, locations, time frames or whatever. They’re easier to remember, and if you need to retell your story at a later date, you reduce your chances of being caught out.’

Hunter knew the theory.

‘Like I told you before, Karen was a very sweet woman. She was also doing a PhD in psychology. We used to study together. In fact. .’ Lucien gave them a goofy smile, one that said, ‘I know something that you don’t.’ ‘Both of you have already made her acquaintance.’ He gave Hunter and Taylor a challenging look.

‘The other framed tattoos down in that basement,’ Hunter said.

‘That’s right, Robert,’ Lucien agreed. ‘The cranes.’

One of the framed human skin pieces found in Lucien’s basement had a colored tattoo of a pair of cranes. The design had been taken from a painting called Cranes on a Snowy Pine, by the artist Katsushika Hokusai.

‘She had it tattooed on her upper right arm,’ Lucien said. ‘Now, despite Karen being only my second victim, I decided to get adventurous.’

Sixty-Three

There was something in the way Lucien phrased his last words that seemed to freeze the air for an instant, as if evil had been waiting around the corner all this time, and was just about to make its presence felt.

‘As I’ve said,’ Lucien continued, ‘the urges started coming back to me a few months after I left Stanford, but they didn’t become unbearable until much later. At first, I thought I could deal with them. I thought that they’d be easy to curb, but just like every repeat offender eventually finds out, I was wrong.’

Lucien used both of his hands to rub the back of his neck while closing his eyes and tilting his head back. After several silent seconds, he breathed out.

‘There was a difference this time. Like I said before, I had never looked at Susan as a potential victim until the night it all happened. This time, I knew Karen would be the one. I’d known it from the day I met her.’

‘What guided you toward that decision?’ Taylor asked. ‘What made you choose Karen?’

Lucien pulled an impressed face. ‘Very good question, Agent Taylor. Looks like you’re learning.’

The tattoos, Hunter thought. Even if physically, Karen didn’t resemble Susan at all, the tattoos would’ve reminded Lucien of her. And as he’d already admitted, he was chasing the same high. A new victim also carrying large tattoos meant that Lucien would’ve been able to partially skin her just as he’d done with Susan. By repeating the same methods, the same MO, most perpetrators believe they can achieve the same feelings and highs as they have in previous murders.

Lucien looked as if this was the first time he had actually thought about the reasons behind choosing Karen.

‘I guess the first thing that guided me toward Karen were her tattoos.’

Hunter didn’t even blink.

‘You’ve got to remember that large, colored tattoos weren’t as popular twenty-three years ago as they are now,’ Lucien said. ‘Especially on women. They reminded me of Susan.’ His words were dry as bone. They seemed to suck all the moisture out of the air. ‘I began having dreams about them. I began fantasizing about skinning those drawings off Karen’s body just like I’d done to Susan. And that was when I realized that another theory was proving true.’

Lucien nodded at Hunter as if they’d had some sort of secret bet all those years ago about which theories would prove true and which ones wouldn’t.

‘Subconsciously, my brain kept on going back to the same MO as I had used with Susan, and we all know the reason why, don’t we? Though it had been nowhere near perfect, I knew I’d feel more comfortable going back to an MO I had used before and knew it worked. Familiarity, Agent Taylor. That’s why repeat offenders rarely change their MO.’ He pointed to her notebook. ‘You can write that down if you want.’

Lucien got up, poured himself a glass of water from the washbasin, and returned to the edge of his bed.

‘But I decided that I wasn’t looking for comfortable. I wasn’t looking to do something I’d already done. That wasn’t part of what I had planned in my head. So I started to think about what I’d do differently. Even before I met Karen, I knew I would do it again. There was no doubt in my mind anymore. The urges had become too great for me to resist them. I knew that it was just a matter of time, and finding the right victim. So the search for a new hidden place began.’

‘Where is she?’ Hunter asked.

‘Oh, she’s still in Connecticut,’ Lucien confirmed. ‘Actually, not that far from New Haven and Yale University.’ An otherworldly feeling appeared to radiate out of Lucien, like a fatal sort of calm that could creep out just about anyone.

‘Where exactly?’ Hunter pushed.

More for effect than anything else, Lucien hesitated, moving his head from side to side as if half in doubt.

‘I’ll tell you, but let me ask you this first.’

Taylor was attentively observing Lucien. She would never forget the evil smile he threw their way.

‘Do you know what a LIN charge is?’

Sixty-Four

Lucien had met Karen Simpson right at the beginning of his second year at Yale University. Karen had just transferred from some place in England, and was still settling in. Lucien had never forgotten the first time he saw. . no, heard her. That was what caught his attention at first, her voice. . her British accent.

It was right at the end of a rather boring lecture in Investigative Psychology and Offending Behavior, when Karen put her hand up to ask a question. Lucien had already gathered his books together and was ready to leave when the sound of her voice made him stop. There was something in the calm and unconcerned way in which she pronounced every word. There was a charming cadence to her sentences that was almost hypnotizing to the ear. The icing on the cake was the way everything was dressed up in the most charismatic British accent.

Lucien’s eyes found Karen sitting at the other end of the lecture hall, almost hidden away among the other students. She couldn’t have been any taller than five-foot-two, Lucien guessed. He took a step to the side to get a better look at her. Her makeup looked quite different — heavier, more Gothic than most. She was wearing a dark T-shirt with ‘The Cure’ written on it and a photograph of someone with messy dark hair, heavy black eye makeup, and badly applied red lipstick.

But what really grabbed his attention was the large colored tattoo on her right upper arm. As he caught sight of it, it made him hold his breath for a moment or two. All of a sudden his memory was slapped with images of Susan and what had happened that night just over two years ago. Images of him carefully slicing the skin off her arm. The memories brought with them a tremendous head rush, something he hadn’t felt since that night, and for an instant Lucien felt light-headed and almost lost his balance.

What is that? he thought as he recomposed himself, squinting his eyes at the tattoo. It looked like a couple of large birds, but from where he was standing he couldn’t be sure. What he was sure of was that Karen Simpson would never graduate from Yale. Her fate would be much, much different.

It didn’t take Lucien long at all to befriend Karen. In fact, it happened later that same day. From a distance, he’d followed her around campus for the next couple of hours, until a perfect opportunity presented itself during mid-afternoon. Karen had just stepped out of the Psychiatric Hospital building, just south of the old campus, when she paused, seemingly looking for something inside her rucksack. She rummaged through it for about two minutes before giving up. After letting go of a deep, exasperated breath, she allowed her eyes to circle around her, looking a little lost.

‘Everything OK?’ Lucien asked, recognizing the opportunity and tentatively approaching her. The expression on his face was pleasant, innocent.

Karen smiled shyly. ‘Yes, everything’s fine. I just seem to have lost my campus map, which is not the best thing to do on your first week in a campus this big.’

Yale University is spread over 837 acres of ground, with over 11,000 students.

‘That’s very true,’ Lucien agreed with a sympathetic chuckle. ‘But you might be in luck. Give me a sec,’ he said, lifting a finger in a “wait” gesture before reaching into his own rucksack. ‘Here we go. I knew it would be here somewhere. Have this one.’ He handed Karen a new campus map.

‘Oh!’ Her eyes lit up with surprise. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, of course. I know my way around quite well. I just never really cleaned out my bag, so that map’s been there for a while.’ He gave her a “What can you do?” kind of shrug. ‘Anyway, where do you need to go just now?’

‘I’m trying to find Grove Street Cemetery.’

Karen’s British pronunciation of cemetery brought a new smile to Lucien’s lips.

‘Wow, that’s quite a walk from here.’ He pointed south. ‘Why do you want to go to the cemetery, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘Oh, no, I don’t really need the cemetery. That’s just my point of reference. I need to go to the Dunham Lab building, but I remember that it’s just across the road from the cemetery.’

Lucien nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right, but hey, I’m heading that way myself. I can walk you there if you like.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, of course. I’m going to the Becton Center, which is right opposite the Dunham Lab building.’

‘Oh, that’s a piece of good luck,’ Karen said, hooking her rucksack over her right shoulder. ‘Well, if it really is no bother, that would be great. Thank you very much.’

Then, with a thoughtful expression on his face, Lucien looked at Karen a little sideways. ‘Wait a second.’ He pointed a finger at her. ‘You were in the Investigative Psychology and Offending Behavior lecture this morning, weren’t you?’ His performance could’ve won him a place in drama school.

Surprised flourished on Karen’s face. ‘I was indeed. You were there?’

‘Yeah, sitting right at the back. I’m doing a psychology PhD.’

Even more surprise now.

‘So am I. I just transferred from University College in London.’

‘Wow, London? I always wanted to go to London.’ Lucien offered his hand. ‘I’m Lucien, by the way.’

And so they became friends.

Lucien already knew he would kill again. He’d started fantasizing about how he would do it around eight months ago, and the more he thought about it, the harder it got to control his impulses. Meeting Karen Simpson filled him with an immense feeling of relief, as if he’d just found a long-lost piece of a puzzle that had been eating at his brain for months.

Lucien didn’t want to overdo it, though. He knew that people would see them together, so he didn’t want to appear like he was Karen’s best friend, or even a romantic interest. Those were the first people whose doors the authorities would come knocking once she disappeared. No, Lucien was careful to appear like just another student in Karen’s circle of friends. Even an acquaintance, rather than a friend.

His planning took another six months. Four of them were spent searching for a hidden place where he’d be able to take Karen and take his time, undisturbed. He finally found an abandoned shack hidden deep in the forestland by Lake Saltonstall, not that dissimilar to the one he’d found back in La Honda. One thing Lucien was very certain of was that he would skin Karen alive. Skinning was what had given him the biggest high that night with Susan. And that meant he would have to keep Karen in captivity for at least a few hours.

But Lucien also wanted to experiment. He didn’t want to use his hands on Karen’s neck like he’d done with Susan. He wanted something new, something different. The idea came to him one morning as a friend of his, who was reading Molecular, Cellular and Development Biology at Yale, told him about an experiment gone badly wrong inside Pierce Laboratory. As his friend described what had happened, Lucien felt his blood prick inside his veins. He now knew how he wanted Karen to die.

Sixty-Five

Yale University closed for summer in mid-May. Lucien had been eagerly waiting and planning for it for some time, and he played his cards absolutely right.

Around April Lucien had asked Karen if she intended going back to England for the summer holidays.

‘Are you joking?’ she had replied. ‘Summers in England are like a mild spring around here. I’ve been looking forward to my first summer in the US for quite a while now.’

‘Are you staying around here?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I’m thinking about taking a trip down to New York first. I’ve always wanted to see New York, you know, Broadway and all. Maybe even get a new tattoo. There are some great studios over there. After that, I was thinking I could perhaps travel down to Florida and the coast. Spend a few days at the beach? They don’t call it the sunny state for nothing.’ Karen smiled.

‘Are you planning on doing all that by yourself?’ That was Lucien’s key question.

Karen shrugged. ‘I guess.’ She looked at him inquisitively. ‘But I could do with a travel mate, what do you say, Lucien? It could be fun. . New York, then the beach?’

Lucien saw the opportunity but he screwed up his face and gave her a quick excuse, saying that he already had a few things organized — a few summer jobs. He knew that if he’d said ‘yes’, Karen would probably tell someone else that they’d be traveling together — a friend, a professor, her parents, whoever. Then, if she never came back from their summer trip but he did, his name would be right at the top of the police’s enquiry list. On the other hand, if Karen disappeared when she was supposed to have taken a trip on her own, questions wouldn’t start being asked until much later. Many would just assume that she had given up Yale after one year and gone back to England. It probably wouldn’t be until her parents started worrying from the lack of communication that a few alarm bells would start ringing.

They met again just five days before summer break, and Karen told Lucien that she was planning on leaving for her New York and Florida vacation in four days’ time. That gave him three to get everything prepared. But Lucien had been meticulously organizing everything for two months. He had almost everything he needed in place. The only things missing were a few chemical canisters, and he knew exactly where to get them.

Lucien dropped by Karen’s efficiency apartment the day before she was due to leave for New York. His plan was simple. He would invite her to take a drive with him to Lake Saltonstall that morning for a picnic, saying that they’d be back before nightfall. If Karen said that she couldn’t for any reason, then Lucien would invite her for a quick goodbye drink later that evening, which he was sure she would’ve said yes to. Anyway, the final purpose was the same — to be alone with Karen either at a remote picnic site or inside his car before she was due to leave.

Karen said yes to the picnic.

They set off at around 11:00 a.m. He drove at a steady pace, and the ride to the isolated location he’d chosen by the lake took just under twenty-five minutes. But this time Lucien didn’t subdue his victim inside his car. There was no surprise attack. No needle to the neck. Lucien did actually prepare a picnic, with sandwiches, salads, fruit, donuts, chocolates, beer and champagne. They ate, drank and laughed like a couple of best friends. It was only when Lucien poured the last of the champagne into Karen’s glass that he added enough sedative to throw her into a deep, dreamless sleep for at least an hour.

It took less than five minutes for the drug to work.

When Karen reopened her eyes, there was no more picnic, no more outdoors. She came to very slowly, and the first thing she realized was that her head ached with such ferocity, it felt like an animal was inside her skull, clawing at her brain.

In the poor light and through the pain, it took her eyes four whole minutes to finally regain focus. As they did, she struggled to understand her surroundings. She was sitting inside a dark, stuffy and soiled room. The walls seemed to be made of plain wood, like a large tool shack in someone’s back garden. But something inside her told her that she wasn’t in anyone’s back garden. She was somewhere else. Somewhere no one would find her. . a place where no one would hear her if she screamed. And as that realization dawned on her, that was exactly what she tried doing — screaming. And that was when she became aware that her lips weren’t really moving. Her jaw wasn’t moving either. Panic took hold of her body and she tried to look around her. Her neck wasn’t moving.

Oh, Jesus!

She tried to move her fingers.

Nothing.

Her hands.

Nothing.

Her feet and toes.

Nothing.

Her legs and arms.

Nothing.

All she could move were her eyes.

They stirred down to her body, and she saw that she was sitting down on some cheap metal chair, unrestrained. Her arms were loose and falling down the sides of the chair.

For a second, she thought she was dreaming, that she would very soon wake up back in her bed, that she would laugh and wonder why her brain had produced such tormenting images, but then there was movement in the shadows to her right, and the fear she felt growing inside her told her that this was no dream.

Her eyes darted in that direction.

‘Welcome back, sleepyhead,’ Lucien said, stepping out of the darkness.

It took Karen just a few seconds to notice that everything about him seemed different, starting with what he was wearing — a long, lab-like, plastic, see-through coverall. His sneakers were also covered with blue-plastic shoe covers.

Lucien smiled at her.

Karen tried to speak but her tongue felt heavy and swollen. Only undecipherable noise came from her throat.

‘Unfortunately, you won’t be able to say much,’ Lucien explained. ‘You see, Karen, I’ve injected you with a succinylcholine-based drug.’

Fear exploded inside Karen’s eyes.

Succinylcholine is a neuromuscular-blocking agent. It blocks transmission at the neuromuscular joint, causing paralyses of whichever skeletal muscle was affected. In Karen’s case, her entire body. The nervous system, though, stays intact. She would still be able to feel everything.

Lucien checked his watch. ‘You’ll be in this state for a while longer.’ He stepped closer. ‘You know, I’m not a big fan of tattoos. I’m not sure if I’ve told you that before, but I will admit that that design you have on your upper right arm is very nice. Japanese, isn’t it?’ As he said that, he moved his right hand from behind his back, and the metallic blade glistened in the dim light.

There was no room for any more fear in Karen’s eyes. They just teared up as more unrecognizable sounds escaped her throat.

Lucien stepped closer still.

‘The main reason why I paralyzed you,’ he said. ‘Was because I wouldn’t want you to wiggle about and mess this up. This is very delicate work.’ He looked at the blade — a laser-sharp surgical scalpel. ‘This will hurt a little bit.’

Tears just rolled down Karen’s cheeks.

‘But the good news for you is that. . I’ve done this before.’

Sixty-Six

Karen implored her body to move. She tried to gather together all the strength she had left inside her, all the will-power she could muster, but it simply wasn’t enough. Her body just wouldn’t respond, no matter how hard she willed it to. She tried screaming, talking, pleading, but her tongue still felt like a huge hairy moth inside her mouth.

Slowly and skillfully, Lucien used the scalpel to rupture the skin at the top of Karen’s shoulder blade. The first blob of blood came out, and he used a piece of gauze to clear it up. He proceeded to gradually slice and very carefully pull the skin off her arm.

Karen’s head had been paralyzed in a sitting-up sleeping position, slumped forward and slightly to the right. Her chin was low and almost touching her chest. Lucien had placed her in that position deliberately. He knew that once the drug had taken effect, Karen wouldn’t be able to move her neck, only her eyes. He wanted her to be able to see.

And so she did.

As Lucien moved closer, her eyes shot right and she saw the scalpel pierce her skin and the blood come out of her arm, but she was so scared that the pain effect was delayed. It took several seconds for a sharp and deep penetrating pain to finally hit her, releasing an animal-like, guttural growl that came from deep inside her.

The skinning, together with Karen’s contagious fear, filled Lucien with a mind-numbing satisfaction he couldn’t explain. Much better than any drug he could think of.

The entire process didn’t take him very long, and at the end of it Lucien was floating on air, high on the chemicals his brain had released into his bloodstream. He would’ve completed the skinning in half of the time, but Karen could only manage a few minutes before she passed out. Lucien wanted her awake, he wanted her panic, and so he interrupted the skinning process to bring her back to consciousness before starting again. That took time.

When he was finally done, he waited for Karen to come to again and lifted the bloody, tattooed piece of skin to show her.

Her internal organs weren’t paralyzed, and as her eyes caught sight of what used to be part of her upper right arm, her stomach shot half of its contents back up her esophagus and she vomited all over herself.

‘Don’t worry, Karen,’ Lucien said as he began to clean her up.

Karen shuddered inside at his touch.

‘That’s the only tattoo I want from you. I will not be taking any of your other ones.’

Karen had five tattoos in total.

‘But I do have a surprise for you.’ Lucien got up and disappeared into the shadows for a moment.

Karen heard a muffled scratching metallic sound, as if Lucien had begun dragging a beer keg across the floor. When he reappeared, she finally saw what he was dragging, and it was no beer keg. Lucien had with him a couple of metallic tanks, very similar in appearance to the large oxygen tanks one would find in hospitals. But somehow Karen knew that the contents of those tanks wouldn’t be oxygen.

At the top, a hose was attached to the nozzle of each tank. Lucien placed the tanks about five feet in front of Karen’s chair before returning to the shadows. Seconds later, he resurfaced, bringing with him a telescopic boom microphone stand that had been specially adapted. The alteration was that the stand had two boom arms instead of one.

He placed the stand in between Karen and the tanks before adjusting the two boom arms — one up, one down. The up one was leveled at Karen’s chest, the down one at her waist.

Karen’s eyes were following every movement with anticipation and an enormous sense of dread. She could almost feel her organs trembling inside her.

Lucien proceeded to hook a tank hose to each of the boom arms, so both hoses were now pointing directly at Karen.

‘I have a question for you, Karen.’

There was nothing Karen could do but just stare at him.

‘Have you ever heard of a LIN charge?’

He twisted both tanks so that their labels were facing Karen. As she read them and understood what their contents were, her heart froze.

Sixty-Seven

Taylor had frowned at Lucien’s question, but Hunter knew exactly what he was talking about.

LN₂, LIN and LN are all known abbreviations used for liquid nitrogen. A LIN charge is a supercooled liquid nitrogen blast. It became known as a LIN charge because the military had created liquid nitrogen grenades and explosive charges that could be magnetically attached to structures like doors, walkways, bridges and so on. Their main purpose was to hyper-freeze anything — alloys, metal, plastic, wood — making them extremely vulnerable and easy to breach. The real problem comes when a LIN charge hits human skin.

Liquid nitrogen grenades differ from all other known types of grenade in one simple way. Their charge doesn’t need to break or penetrate the skin of the target in order to kill them.

The premise behind their effectiveness is based on the special chemical properties of the most abundant mineral on earth — water.

Water is the only naturally occurring substance on the planet that expands when cooled. If a human body is struck by a blast of supercooled liquid nitrogen, it will become very cold, very fast. When that happens, blood cells will freeze instantly in what is known as a ‘shock freeze’. The real messy part comes because blood cells are made of approximately 70 percent water, and the water in the blood cells will begin to expand very, very rapidly. The result of all those water molecules in one’s bloodstream expanding so quickly is total body hemorrhage. The subject will bleed from just about everywhere — eyes, ears, mouth, nose, nails, sexual organs and through the skin.

Because of the supercooled charge, the molecules’ expansion doesn’t stop, and in consequence every single blood cell in the human body eventually explodes. It’s an excruciating death, and a totally horrifying sight.

For Taylor’s sake, Lucien briefly explained the entire process.

‘I’ll tell you this,’ Lucien said to Hunter and Taylor. ‘What happened to her body once I blasted it with liquid nitrogen was hell-scary, even for me. It was like everything inside her exploded, and all that blood came pouring out through. .’ He sighed deeply and scratched his beard, sweeping his eyes over his barren cell. ‘Everywhere, really. I spent four days just cleaning and disinfecting that shack so wild animals wouldn’t take over once I was gone.’ Lucien paused, remembering. ‘My friend back at Yale told me that they were performing this experiment on a live frog in one of the labs. It involved liquid nitrogen. When he told me what had happened, I just tried to imagine how a human body would react. But even my fertile imagination didn’t reach as far as reality.’

If Hunter or Taylor had any doubts that they were sitting before pure evil, those doubts had just vanished in the last few minutes. Neither of them wanted to hear any more details.

‘The location, Lucien?’ Hunter asked. His voice was steady and reasonable. ‘Did you bury her around Lake Saltonstall?’

Lucien ran a finger around the grooves surrounding one of the cinder blocks on the wall to his left. ‘That I did. And I have a surprise for you. I revisited that site four more times after Karen, if you know what I mean.’ He pursed his lips in a ‘What can I do?’ way and followed it with a careless shrug. ‘It was a good site, well hidden.’

‘Are you saying we’ll find five bodies at the site, instead of only one?’ Taylor asked.

Lucien held the suspense up for a moment longer before nodding. ‘Uh-huh. Would you like their names?’

Taylor glared at him.

Lucien laughed. ‘But of course you would.’ He closed his eyes and breathed in as if his memory needed an extra burst of oxygen. When he reopened them again, they looked dead, emotionless. He began.

‘Emily Evans, thirty-three years old, from New York City. Owen Miller, twenty-six years old, from Cleveland, Ohio. Rafaela Gomez, thirty-nine years old, from Lancaster in Pennsylvania. And Leslie Jenkins, twenty-two years old, from Toronto, Canada. She was an international student back at Yale.’

Lucien paused and drew in another deep breath.

‘Would you like me to tell you how they died as well?’ His lips smirked, but his eyes didn’t.

Hunter had no intentions of sitting in that basement and listening to Lucien boost about how he had tortured and killed every one of his victims.

‘The location, Lucien, nothing more,’ Hunter said.

‘Really?’ Lucien pulled a disappointed face. ‘But it was just starting to get fun. Karen was only my second victim. I got better with each new one, believe me.’ He winked at Taylor suggestively. ‘Much better.’

‘You’re a fucking psycho,’ Taylor couldn’t contain herself anymore. She felt disgusted just looking at him.

Hunter matter-of-factly turned his head to look at her, silently pleading with Taylor not to engage.

‘You think so?’ Lucien seized the moment.

Taylor disregarded Hunter’s look. ‘I know so.’

Lucien looked like he was considering that statement for a moment. ‘You know, Agent Taylor, you really do have a problem with naivety. If you think I’m unique in the urges I have, then you’re unmistakably in the wrong profession.’ He threw a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Every single day thousands, millions of people out there have murderous thoughts. Some start having them very, very young. Every day there are people out there who in their own way consider killing their spouses, their partners, their neighbors, their bosses, their bank managers, the asshole bullies who torment their lives. . the list goes on and on.’

Taylor glanced at Lucien as if his argument didn’t have a leg to stand on.

‘What you’re talking about are spur of the moment, heated thoughts,’ she returned calmly, emphasizing the word ‘thoughts’. ‘They are understandable, angry psychological reactions to a particular action. It doesn’t mean that any of it will ever materialize.’

‘The location, Lucien,’ Hunter intervened. For the life of him he couldn’t understand why Taylor was still feeding the fire. ‘Where are Karen’s remains?’

Lucien ignored him. Right then, he was more interested in pushing Taylor a little further.

‘Naive, naive, naive, Agent Taylor,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘With every human thought, spur of the moment or not, there’s always a risk that the thought might one day — fed by anger, hurt, disillusion, jealousy. . there are a thousand factors that could help it grow — become much more than just a thought. It’s called the law of probability. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Your databases are overflowing with such examples. And it happens because anyone, and I mean anyone, independent of upbringing, gender, class, race, beliefs, status or anything else, could, under the right circumstances, become a killer.’

Let it go, Courtney, Hunter pleaded in his head.

Taylor didn’t. ‘You are delusional,’ she replied without thinking.

Her response only amused Lucien more.

‘I don’t think that I’m the one who’s delusional here, Agent Taylor. You see? It’s very easy for anyone to say that he or she will never cross a certain line, when that line is never presented to them.’

Lucien allowed his words to float in the air, giving Taylor a moment to digest them before moving on.

‘If one day they come face to face with such a line, they’ll sing a very different tune. Trust me on this, Agent Taylor. It was one of my experiments — presenting that line to someone who swore she could never take a life.’ Lucien looked at his nails as if considering if they needed trimming or not. ‘And, boy, did she cross it.’

Taylor choked on her own breath.

Hunter stared at him in disbelief.

‘Are you saying that you forced someone to commit murder as an experiment? To prove a point?’ Taylor asked.

Hunter had no doubt that Lucien was very capable of such an act. He was very capable of much more. But Hunter had heard enough, and despite Taylor being the lead agent in this investigation, he lifted a stop hand at her and took over.

‘The location, Lucien. Where in New Haven are those bodies?’

Lucien scratched his beard again while studying Hunter.

‘Of course I’ll tell you, Robert. I promised I would, didn’t I? But I’ve been telling you things for far too long now, and it’s my turn to ask a question again. That was the deal.’

Hunter could feel that coming. ‘Tell us where the bodies are first, then, while the FBI verifies the site, you can ask your question.’

Lucien agreed with an eye movement. ‘I can see your logic, but I’m sure that the FBI is already verifying the four names I’ve just given you.’ He looked up at the CCTV camera on the corner of the ceiling inside his cell and smiled at it. ‘Which means that I’ve already given you something to keep you busy. So now it’s my turn.’

Lucien gathered himself before staring deep into Hunter’s eyes.

‘Tell me about Jessica, Robert.’

Sixty-Eight

Back in the holding cells’ control room, once Director Kennedy heard the four names Lucien had given Hunter and Taylor, he immediately got on the phone to one of his research teams.

‘I need proof that these people are real,’ he said to the lead agent. ‘Social security numbers, driving licenses, whatever.’ He dictated the first three names with the respective ages and home towns, just as Lucien had mentioned. ‘The fourth person — Leslie Jenkins — is from Toronto in Canada. She was an international student at Yale, probably in the early 90s. Check with Yale, and if need be check with the Canadian Embassy in Washington. I also need to know if these people have been reported missing. Get back to me ASAP.’ He quickly put the phone down.

Kennedy remembered once having a conversation with a military weapons expert who had joined the FBI. They had discussed LIN grenades and charges. The weapons expert had showed him actual footage of what happens to a human body when it’s exposed to a blast of supercooled liquid nitrogen. Kennedy had probably seen more dead bodies and attended more violent crime scenes than most people in the entire FBI, but he’d never seen anything quite like that footage.

Kennedy was ready to contact the FBI field office in New Haven, Connecticut, and ask them to dispatch a team to whatever set of directions Lucien was about to give them, when Lucien changed the game and asked Hunter about Jessica.

‘Who’s Jessica?’ Doctor Lambert asked, looking at Kennedy.

Kennedy gave him a delicate headshake. ‘I have no idea.’

Sixty-Nine

While Lucien’s question resonated against the walls, Hunter felt the air being sucked out of his lungs as if somebody had just hit him in the stomach with a baseball bat. He looked at Lucien with narrow eyes, half doubting his ears.

Taylor couldn’t help but let her gaze wander over toward Hunter.

‘I’m sorry?’ Hunter said. No amount of poker face could mask his surprise.

‘Jessica Petersen,’ Lucien repeated, clearly enjoying Hunter’s reaction. The name traveled through the air slowly, like smoke. ‘Tell me about Jessica Petersen, Robert. Who was she?’

Hunter couldn’t tear his eyes away from Lucien, his brain trying hard to understand what was happening.

Police or medical records, he concluded. That’s the only possible way. Somehow Lucien gained access to either police or medical records, or both. Hunter then remembered the feeling he had when Lucien kept on asking him about his mother. Hunter felt as if Lucien already knew all the answers, and he would have, if he’d gotten his hands on police or medical records. The medical examiner’s report would’ve stated that Hunter’s mother had died of a pain-killers’ overdose, and put the time of death sometime in the middle of the night. Finding out that Hunter’s father worked nights, and therefore wasn’t at home, wouldn’t have been very difficult. The only other person in that household at that time was a seven-year-old Robert Hunter. Lucien would’ve had no problem putting together most of what had really happened that night. He just needed Hunter to fill in the gaps.

‘Who was she?’ Lucien asked again, coolly.

Hunter blinked the blur of confusion away. ‘Someone I knew years ago,’ he finally replied in the same tone.

‘C’mon, Robert,’ Lucien shot back. ‘I know you can do better than that. And you know you can’t lie to me.’

Their stares battled for a moment.

‘She’s someone I used to date when I was young,’ Hunter said.

‘How young?’

‘Very. I met her just after I finished my PhD.’

Lucien sat back on his bed and stretched his legs in front of him, getting as comfortable as he could. ‘How long did you date her for?’

‘Two years.’

‘Were you in love?’ Lucien asked, tilting his head slightly to one side.

Hunter hesitated. ‘Lucien, what does this have to do with—’

‘Just answer the question, Robert.’ Lucien cut him short. ‘I can ask whatever I like, relevant or not, that was the deal, and right now I would like you to tell me more about Jessica Petersen. Were you in love with her?’

Taylor shifted on her chair.

Hunter’s nod was subtle. ‘Yes, I was in love with Jessica.’

‘Did you make plans to marry her?’

Silence.

Lucien’s eyebrows arched, indicating that he was waiting for an answer.

‘Yes,’ Hunter said. ‘We were engaged.’

For the briefest of moments Taylor heard Hunter’s voice croak.

‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ Lucien commented. ‘So what went wrong? I know that you aren’t married or divorced. So, what happened? How come you never married the woman you were in love with? Did she leave you for someone else?’

Hunter gambled. ‘Yes, she found someone else. Someone better.’

Lucien shook his head and noisily sucked his teeth with every head movement. ‘Are you sure you want to test me again, Robert? Are you sure you want to lie to me? Because that’s what you’re doing right now.’ Lucien’s look and voice became hard as steel. ‘And I really don’t like that.’

Taylor kept a steady face, but her eyes looked lost.

‘You know what?’ Hunter said, lifting both of his hands up. ‘I’m not talking about this.’

‘I think you’d better,’ Lucien countered.

‘I don’t think so,’ Hunter replied in the same conservative tone a psychologist would use to address a patient. ‘I was brought here because I thought I’d be helping an old friend. Someone I thought I knew. When they showed me your picture back in LA just a few days ago, I was sure that there had been some sort of bad mistake. I agreed to fly over here because I thought I could help the FBI clear all this up and prove you’re not the man they thought you were. I was wrong. I can’t help because there’s nothing to clear up. You are who you are, and you did what you did. Unfortunately, no one can change that. But you said so yourself — there’s no rush to any of this because there’s no one we can save — and when I leave, the FBI will carry on interrogating you about the location of all your victims’ remains.’

Hunter peeked at Taylor. A frown had creased her forehead after she heard the word ‘leave’.

‘They’ll just use different methods,’ Hunter continued. ‘Less conventional ones. I’m sure you know what’s coming. It might take a few days longer, but trust me, Lucien, in the end you will talk.’

Hunter got up, ready to leave.

Lucien looked as calm as he’d ever looked.

‘I would really suggest that you sit back down, old friend, because you’ve misquoted me.’

Hunter paused.

‘I didn’t say that there was no rush to any of this. I said that there was no rush in finding Susan’s remains, because you couldn’t save her anyway.’

Something in the way Lucien phrased his words made Hunter’s heartbeat stumble, pick itself up, and then stumble again.

‘And I’ve never said that you couldn’t save anyone. Because I think there’s still time.’ A tense pause as Lucien looked at his wrist, consulting his invisible watch once again. ‘I haven’t killed all the victims I’ve kidnapped, Robert.’ Lucien accompanied those words with a look so cold and devoid of feelings, it could’ve belonged to a cadaver. ‘One is still alive.’