Текст книги "An Evil Mind"

Автор книги: Chris (2) Carter

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

‘A very well-prepared trap,’ Kennedy said. ‘Lucien put you and Agent Taylor under incredible time pressure to save a hostage’s life. He put you under even more mental pressure by revealing he was your fiancée’s murderer just minutes before forcing you to bring him here. The door was padlocked from the outside, and we all believed that Lucien always worked alone. There was no reason for you or Agent Taylor to suspect that there’d be someone in here waiting for you.’

‘I still should’ve checked the room properly,’ Hunter said. ‘I’m so terribly sorry for what happened to Courtney.’

No one said anything for about a minute.

‘He’s not going to stop killing,’ Kennedy finally said. ‘We both know that. And when he kills again, we’ll pick up the trail and we’ll hunt him down.’

‘No, we won’t,’ Hunter said.

Kennedy glared at him.

‘He killed for twenty-five years without anyone ever knowing, Adrian. No links. Lucien doesn’t follow a pattern. He doesn’t repeat the same MO. He experiments. He kills indiscriminately – old, young, male, female, blonde, brunette, American, foreigner. Nothing matters to him, except the experience. He could kill someone later today, he could have done it already for all we know. We could find the body, search the crime scene, and we still wouldn’t be able to say with any certainty if the killer had been Lucien or not.’

‘So you believe what he told you?’ Kennedy asked. ‘That we’ll never see him again?’

Hunter nodded. ‘Unless we outsmart him.’

‘And how do you suppose we do that?’

‘Maybe we can find something in those books.’

Kennedy’s gaze moved to the dust-covered books on the shelves.

‘Those are the notebooks you were looking for,’ Hunter explained. ‘Lucien told me that he was leaving us a gift. Well, that’s it. There are fifty-three books in total. All of them are somewhere between 250 and 300 pages long.’

Kennedy approached one of the shelves, randomly picked up one of the notebooks, and flipped it open. The pages were all handwritten. There was no date stamp, no mention of time whatsoever. Groups of written pages were separated by a single blank one, as if to isolate them into numberless and nameless chapters.

‘I don’t know exactly what we’ll find in them until we go through all of them thoroughly,’ Hunter said. ‘But I did have an idea.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘I skimmed through a couple of them before you got here. Judging by what I saw, these books will not only contain Lucien’s emotions, frame of mind, how he felt during the build-up and aftermath of a murder, his different MO’s and so on, but also everything he did, everyone he met, and everywhere he’s been since he started this murderous encyclopedia, including hide-out places like this one. Places no one knows about.’

Kennedy caught on fast. ‘And right now Lucien needs a place to go. A hiding place. And the house in Murphy and this fallout shelter are probably not the only two hiding, or captive, or torture places he has under his wing.’

‘Precisely.’

Kennedy thought about it for a beat. ‘Our problem is that if you’re right, Lucien might be halfway there already, and I’m sure he won’t hide in the same place for too long. He’ll get organized quickly, and then he’ll probably vanish.’

Hunter said nothing.

Kennedy looked back at the shelves. Fifty-three books, each about 300 pages long. Hunter could see the doubt in his eyes.

‘How quickly can you organize a team of the best speed readers you can find, Adrian?’ he asked. ‘People who can skim through pages fast, looking for something specific. In this case, a location.’

Kennedy checked his watch. ‘If I get on to it now, by the time I get these books back to Quantico, I’ll have a team there waiting for me.’

‘So if we’re fast enough, we’ll have our list by the morning,’ Hunter said.

‘Then we’ll hit every place on that list at the same time,’ Kennedy agreed.

‘I know it’s a long shot,’ Hunter said, ‘but with Lucien, we need to take every shot we get, because we won’t get many.’ He walked over to the bookshelves and collected eight random books.

‘What are you doing?’ Kennedy asked.

‘I’m the fastest speed-reader you’ll find.’

Kennedy knew that to be true.

‘I’ll go through these, and you can get your people to go through the rest. You’ll have my list in a few hours.’ Hunter started moving toward the exit.

‘Where are you going?

‘To the hospital. I promised Madeleine that I would be there.’

Kennedy knew that going after a list of places wasn’t the only reason Hunter wanted to go through those notebooks. If he could, he would’ve taken them all.

‘Robert,’ Kennedy called out.

Hunter paused.

‘Finding Jessica’s passage in one of those books will not soothe the pain. You know that. On the contrary, it will feed the anger and the hurt.’

Hunter studied Kennedy for a brief moment. ‘As I’ve said, Adrian, you’ll have my list in a few hours.’ He took the stairs out of Satan’s basement.

One Hundred and Seven

The doctors had just finished operating on Madeleine Reed when Hunter got to the hospital. They told him that she had lost a lot of blood. A minute or two longer getting her to the theater and there would’ve been nothing they could’ve done for her. But whoever had contained the external bleeding with the belt tourniquet had done a good enough job. If not for that, she would’ve died from loss of blood five minutes before the agents got her to the emergency unit.

The doctors also told Hunter that the operation had gone as well as they could expect. They had managed to contain the internal bleeding and suture the spleen wound shut before the organ failed, but Madeleine’s strength was already at its minimum before they operated. Now, all they could do was wait and hope that Madeleine’s weak body would somehow find the strength to wake up and breathe on her own. That her will to stay alive would be strong enough. The next few hours were absolutely critical. At the moment, machines were keeping her alive.

Hunter sat in an armchair pushed up against the corner, just a few feet away from Madeleine’s hospital bed. She lay flat and still under a thin coverlet. Different-sized tubes came out of her mouth, nose and arms, and connected to two different machines, one on each side of the bed. Even with the coverlet, Hunter could tell that her abdomen was heavily bandaged. The heart monitor on the right side of the bed beeped steadily, drawing a hypnotic peak line on its dark monitor screen. While that line peaked, there was still hope.

Before taking a seat, Hunter had stared at Madeleine’s face for a long time. She looked peaceful, and for the first time in God knows how long, not scared.

Her parents had been notified just about half an hour earlier, and they were on their way from Missouri.

‘I know you’re strong enough, Maddy,’ Hunter had whispered to her. ‘And I know that you can beat this. This time Lucien won’t win. Don’t let him win. I know you’ll walk out of here.’

Hunter had been flying through Lucien’s notebooks all night. It was 4:18 a.m. and he’d already skimmed through six out of the eight notebooks he had with him. So far, his list contained three different locations Lucien had used as a torture chamber. Each one in a different state.

He hadn’t come across any mention of Jessica and what had happened that fateful night twenty years ago in Los Angeles. Truthfully, he didn’t really know if he was relieved or angered. He wasn’t sure how he would feel if he did come across the pages that described that night’s events.

Hunter sped through the pages for another twenty minutes when something made him stop. It wasn’t something on the page he was on, but something his eyes had gone over a couple of pages back, but his tired brain took a few extra seconds to process it. He quickly flipped back to the page and read the passage again.

Where had he heard that before?

Hunter wracked his brain for a few minutes searching for it.

And then it finally came to him.

One Hundred and Eight

Hunter quickly exited Madeleine’s room and found a bathroom down a long and empty hallway. Once inside, he reached for his cellphone and dialed Kennedy’s number. He knew Kennedy would still be awake.

Kennedy answered his phone with the second ring. ‘You’ve speed-read through all eight notebooks already?’

‘Almost there,’ Hunter replied. ‘One more to go. How’s your team doing?’

‘They’ve each been through four of the notebooks,’ Kennedy explained. ‘But I’ve got nine of them on the go, five notebooks each. At this rate, we should have a list by dawn.’

‘That would be great,’ Hunter said. ‘But you’ll have to ask them all to go back to the beginning and start again. They need to look for something else other than the locations. Create another list.’

Hunter could practically hear Kennedy frown.

‘What? What do you mean, Robert? What else? What other list?’

Hunter quickly told him.

‘Why?’

Hunter explained the reason why, and now he could almost hear Kennedy thinking.

A long pause.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Kennedy said in an outbreath. ‘Do you think . . .?’

‘It’s another shot,’ Hunter replied. ‘And we agreed to take every shot we could.’

‘Absolutely . . .’ Another thoughtful pause. ‘If you’re right, Robert, we might get a result. The problem is that that result could come tomorrow, next week, next month, or any time in the next twenty or thirty years. There’s no way of knowing.’

‘To get my hands on Lucien, I’m prepared to wait.’

‘OK,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But the team is just about to finish with the locations list, and you know that we can’t lose time on that, so let’s get that list first and then I’ll tell them to start again.’

‘OK. You’ll have my list of locations within the next hour.’ Hunter disconnected and went back to Madeleine’s room.

He finished skimming through the last notebook he had with him in thirty-one minutes – no new locations. His location list contained three entries. He texted Kennedy his list, went back to the first notebook, and started it all over again.

When Kennedy called Hunter at 11:22 a.m., Hunter’s eyes were strawberry red from tiredness and reading fatigue.

‘I thought you’d like to know,’ he said. ‘We have fifteen locations in total, spread across fifteen states. FBI and SWAT teams are getting ready as we speak. We should be ready to coordinate a mass crackdown in about an hour to an hour and a half.’

‘It sounds good,’ Hunter said.

‘How are you doing with the second list?’

‘Almost there. Give me another half an hour. How’s your team doing?’

‘Exhausted and overworked. Living on strong black coffee. People here are calling them “the pink-eye squad”.’

‘Yeah, I guess I can relate.’

‘They should also be finished in the next hour. How’s Madeleine doing?’

‘Still unresponsive.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘She’ll come out of it,’ Hunter said. ‘She’s a strong woman.’

Kennedy had to admire the confidence in Hunter’s voice.

‘Once you get the new list, you know what to do, right, Adrian?’

‘Yes, of course.’

They disconnected.

Back inside Madeleine’s hospital room, it took Hunter just another twenty-four minutes to complete his new list. This time he had four entries. He texted the new list to Kennedy and received a reply back in five seconds: ‘Will initiate procedures as soon as I have all the entries. Locations crackdown will be in T–53 minutes. Will keep you posted.’

One Hundred and Nine

Hunter received the next text message from Kennedy in exactly fifty-three minutes.

‘Locations crackdown is a go. Will keep you posted. Second list now completed – every procedure initiated.’

There was nothing Hunter could do now but sit and wait. He massaged the back of his neck for an instant. Exhaustion had slowly worn its way into his brain, joints and muscles. Every time he moved, he could feel the tendons pulling tight across his whole body, as if they were about to snap. He closed his eyes only for a moment, and the next thing he felt was his cellphone vibrating in his chest pocket.

Hunter had dozed off for eighty-four minutes. To him, it felt like two seconds. He quickly left the room and answered Kennedy’s call.

‘We’ve drawn a blank, Robert,’ Kennedy said. ‘Lucien was in none of the locations.’ Kennedy’s voice sounded defeated, as if all hope had gone out of him. ‘And it doesn’t seem like he’d been in any of them for weeks. Judging by the photographs I’ve received back from the crackdown teams, some of those places were a torture haven, a slaughterhouse. You wouldn’t believe the torture paraphernalia found in them.’

Hunter was sure he would believe it.

‘It will take our forensics teams weeks, maybe months, to sift through everything in those fifteen locations, and it still might give us no clue to Lucien’s whereabouts. I’d say that those notebooks are our best bet of finding anything . . . if there is anything to be found. But they have to be read thoroughly and scrutinized to the minutest detail, and that will also take a long time.’ Without realizing, Kennedy let out a beaten sigh. He had no doubt that by the time they finished analyzing everything Lucien had left behind, the killer would be long gone, vanished forever. As Lucien had said, they’d never see him again.

One Hundred and Ten

Hunter came to a sudden stop as he returned to Madeleine’s bedroom. All the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Madeleine was still lying flat and still, but her eyes were open, or semi-open, her eyelids struggling with their own weight.

Hunter rushed to her bedside.

‘Madeleine?’

She blinked hazily.

Hunter gently touched her hand. ‘Madeleine, remember me?’

She blinked again and her eyes finally found his face. She didn’t say a word, but her lips stretched into a thin, but very truthful smile.

Hunter smiled back. ‘I knew you’d beat this,’ he whispered. ‘I’m going to go get a doctor. I’ll be right back.’

She gave his hand the faintest of squeezes.

Hunter rushed out of the room, and in less than a minute was back with a short and plump doctor who walked as if carrying his body weight was an everyday penance. As the doctor approached Madeleine’s bed, Hunter felt his cellphone vibrate in his chest pocket again. He excused himself and quickly left the room.

‘Robert,’ Kennedy said as Hunter answered it, ‘the second list, the idea you came up with?’

‘Yes, what about it?’

‘You’re not going to believe this.’

One Hundred and Eleven

Seven hours later.

John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York.

‘Would you like a drink while we wait for the rest of the passengers to board, Mr Tailor-Cotton?’ the young stewardess asked with a bright smile. Her blonde hair was pulled back and styled into a perfect bun, and her carefully applied makeup accentuated her facial features perfectly. ‘Perhaps champagne, or maybe a cocktail?’ she offered.

Champagne and cocktails were some of the many perks of flying first class.

The passenger’s eyes broke away from the window and found her pretty face. The nametag on her blouse read KATE. He smiled back.

‘Champagne would be perfect.’ His voice was soft, with a gentle Canadian accent. His dark green eyes had an intense, but knowledgeable look in them.

The smile never left the stewardess’s lips. She found Mr Tailor-Cotton mysteriously charming, and she liked that.

‘Great choice,’ she said in reply. ‘I’ll be right back with a glass.’

‘Excuse me, Kate?’ he called, as she was turning away. ‘How long before we take off?’

‘We have a full flight tonight,’ she replied. ‘And we just started boarding all the other classes. If no one is late, we should start taxiing toward the runway in no more than twenty to thirty minutes.’

‘Oh, that’s great. Thank you.’

‘But if there’s anything I can do to make this short wait more comfortable for you, just let me know.’ Her smile gained a flirtatious sparkle.

Mr Tailor-Cotton nodded, with a flirtatious smile of his own. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

His gaze followed her as she started down the aisle. When she disappeared past the dividing curtain, his attention returned to the window. He’d never been to Brazil before, but he’d heard great things about it, and he was really looking forward to spending time there. It would be a nice change.

‘I’ve heard that the beaches in Brazil are simply breathtaking,’ the passenger sitting directly behind Mr Tailor-Cotton said, leaning forward. ‘I’ve never been there before, but I’ve heard that they’re like paradise on earth.’

For a split second Mr Tailor-Cotton’s heart almost froze, then he smiled at his own reflection staring back at him from the airplane window. He would recognize that voice anywhere.

The passenger behind him stood up, moved forward, and casually leaned against the armrest of the single seat across the aisle from Mr Tailor-Cotton.

‘Hello, Robert,’ Mr Tailor-Cotton said, turning his head to look at Hunter.

‘Hello, Lucien,’ Hunter replied calmly.

‘You look awful,’ Lucien commented.

‘I know,’ Hunter admitted. ‘You, on the other hand, have done a great job on the look. Different hair color, contact lenses, the beard is gone, even the scar is gone. All that in the space of just a few hours.’

Lucien looked like he was accepting a compliment.

‘You can do wonders with makeup and a little prosthetics if you know what you’re doing.’

‘And you have mastered that Canadian accent to perfection,’ Hunter admitted. ‘Nova Scotia, right?’

Lucien smiled. ‘You still have a great ear, Robert. That’s right. Halifax. But I do have a collection of accents I’ve mastered. Would you like to hear some of them?’

That last sentence was delivered with a perfect Midwestern accent – Minnesota to be precise.

‘Not just right now,’ Hunter replied.

Lucien looked at his nails, unconcerned. ‘How’s Madeleine?’

‘She’s alive. She’ll make a full recovery.’

Lucien looked back at Hunter. ‘You mean physically, right? Because mentally, she’s probably fucked-up for life.’

Hunter’s stare became even harder. He knew Lucien was right again. The trauma Madeleine had experienced would stay with her for the rest of her life. The true extent of its consequences wouldn’t be known for many years. Neither would the lasting psychological effects.

There was a long, silent break.

‘How did you find me?’ Lucien finally asked.

‘Your notebooks,’ Hunter explained. ‘Your lifelong project. Your “gift” to us, as you put it. Or, better yet, your encyclopedia.’

Lucien looked at Hunter, curiously.

‘Yes,’ Hunter said, ‘I still remember the day you mentioned the idea to me back in Stanford.’

Lucien smiled. ‘You thought it was a crazy idea.’

Hunter nodded. ‘I still do.’

‘Well, the crazy idea became a reality, Robert. And the information inside those books will forever change the way the FBI, the NCAVC, the BAU, and every law-enforcement agency in this country, maybe in the world, look at violent and sadistic repeat offenders. It will make you understand things that up to know no one ever did, and otherwise the world never would. Intimate things and thoughts that have never been explained. Things that will exponentially better your chances of capturing those offenders. That’s my gift to you, and to this fucked-up world. My work and those books will be studied and referenced for generations to come.’ He shrugged. ‘So what if I took a few lives in the name of research? Knowledge comes at a price, Robert. Some much higher than others.’

Hunter nodded as his eyebrows arched. ‘All that knowledge about psychology and criminal behavior, and you failed to see your own psychosis. You’re not a researcher, Lucien, much less a scientist. You’re just another run-of-the-mill killer, who, to justify your actions and feed the sociopath inside you, deluded yourself into believing that what you were doing was for a noble cause. It’s pathetic, really, because it’s not even original. It’s been done so many times before.’

‘Nothing I’ve done has been done before, Robert,’ Lucien shot back.

Hunter shrugged carelessly. ‘I’m not your therapist, Lucien. I’m not here to help you and this isn’t a session, so you can carry on deluding yourself as much as you like. No one cares, but the good thing was that in your books, you were kind enough to note absolutely everything concerning your experiments – locations, methods used, victims’ names, and much more. I spent the night going through some of them.’

‘You read through fifty-three books in one night?’

‘No, but I managed to skim through eight of them. And that’s where I got lucky, and you didn’t.’

Lucien’s expression showed interest.

‘While skimming through one of them, I came across the name of one of your victims that I knew I’d heard somewhere before – Liam Shaw.’

Lucien’s eyes went cold.

‘It took me a little while to place it,’ Hunter said, ‘but I did eventually remember. That was the name you were using when you were first arrested in Wyoming.’

Lucien stayed quiet.

‘You were also kind enough to very thoroughly describe all your victims,’ Hunter continued. ‘And that was when I realized that Liam Shaw shared several physical characteristics with you – same height, same body type, same skin complexion, same facial shape, including the shapes of his eyes, nose and mouth. You were also of similar age.’

Still silence from Lucien.

‘Then I remembered something else you’d said in one of our interviews. You told Courtney that the reason you were caught wasn’t merited to the FBI. They weren’t investigating any of your murders, or any of the aliases you used.’

Lucien shifted on his chair.

‘Well, that got me thinking, so I went back and checked for all other male victims you described in the books. There weren’t that many, but all of them shared those same physical characteristics with you.’

Lucien scratched his chin.

Hunter tucked his hands inside his trouser pockets. ‘And that was why you picked them. Not because you wanted them to be part of your encyclopedia of torture and death, but because you were creating a list of identities you could steal at the drop of a dime.’

Lucien’s gaze moved back to the window and the darkness outside.

‘Some of your male victims were prostitutes,’ Hunter moved on. ‘Some were people who were down and out on their luck, but all of them had one major thing in common – they were all lone souls. People who were misunderstood and probably cast aside by their family and friends somewhere else. People who had left their lives behind to start something new in a new city. People with no attachments to anyone. The ones who’d never get reported as missing. The forgettables. The ones no one would miss.’

‘They’ve always made the best victims.’ Lucien still sounded unconcerned.

‘Because of their natural physical resemblance to you, taking their place was never a hard thing to do – a little makeup, some hair dye, maybe some contact lenses, a new accent, and, “Goodbye Lucien Folter, hello new identity.” In this case, Anthony Tailor-Cotton, from Halifax in Canada.’

Lucien finally caught up with Hunter. ‘So you and the FBI spent the night flying through those books, looking for every male victim’s name you could find.’

Hunter nodded. ‘A nationwide APB was put out for every name in the list we came up with. But I’ll admit that our hopes were very, very low. The best we were hoping for was that maybe, if we were very lucky, a few years from now one of those names would show up in a credit card transaction somewhere. Just a sniff of a clue to where you could be. Now, you can imagine our surprise when within a couple of hours we got word that Anthony Tailor-Cotton, holder of a Canadian passport, just like one of the victims described in one of your notebooks, had purchased a ticket for a flight to Brazil tonight.’

‘I guess I should’ve taken an earlier flight,’ Lucien commented.

Hunter could easily see Lucien’s logic. Initially he had two options. One was to stay in the USA and lay low for a while . . . a long while, and while doing so, he would probably have to live under the shroud of a disguise. His name would’ve made the list of the top ten most wanted by the FBI, and his picture would’ve been circulated to every police department and sheriff’s office in the country. Lucien Folter wasn’t the unknown ghost of a killer he used to be anymore.

Option number two was to disappear quickly, preferably somewhere outside the USA. Hunter knew that Lucien didn’t underestimate the FBI. He knew that his encyclopedia would be scrutinized to the tiniest detail, because that was exactly what he wanted. He was counting on the Bureau linking the name of one of his victims to the same name he was using when he was arrested, and then making the physical connection between all of his male victims and himself. So, if Lucien disappeared quickly and to somewhere outside the USA, then when all those connections were made it wouldn’t matter, because the FBI wouldn’t be able to get their hands on him anyway. He just never imagined that the Bureau would’ve managed to connect everything in a matter of hours.

‘Maybe you should’ve,’ Hunter said. ‘Like I said, this time I got lucky and you didn’t, because the name “Liam Shaw” so happened to be in one of the eight books I had with me. If I hadn’t come across that name, it would’ve probably taken the FBI a few months to connect the dots, by which time you would’ve been long gone.’

Hunter’s eyes finally left Lucien’s face and moved down the aisle toward the dividing curtain at the front. All of a sudden the curtain was pulled aside and Director Adrian Kennedy, together with four FBI agents, began making their way toward Hunter. At the opposite end of the aisle, four armed NYPD SWAT officers had appeared, and were also making their way toward them.

For the first time, Lucien showed real surprise.

‘You’re going to hand me over to the FBI?’

Hunter said nothing.

‘That’s very disappointing, Robert. I thought you were a man of your word. I thought that you had promised not only yourself, but also the memory of your murdered fiancée, that you’d find who’d so violently taken Jessica from your life, and kill him. That’s what you’ve been searching for for twenty years, isn’t it? To avenge Jessica’s death. Well, here I am, old friend. All you have to do is put a bullet through my head and your twenty-year-long search is over. You can be proud of yourself.’ Lucien quickly checked the aisles. ‘So c’mon, Robert. Here I am, a sitting duck. I promise you I won’t react. It’ll be an easy shot.’

Hunter shifted on his feet.

Kennedy and everyone else were getting closer.

‘I thought you’d said that more than anything else, Jessica deserved justice. Are you telling me that you’re going to betray that promise, Robert? You’re going to betray the memory of the only person you ever loved? The woman who you wanted for your wife? The woman who was carrying your baby?’

Hunter froze.

Lucien saw the hurt in his face. He pushed.

‘Yes, I knew she was pregnant. She told me when she begged me not to kill her, but I did it anyway. And did you know that yours was the last name that came out of her lips before I cut her throat open? Before I murdered her and your child?’

Hunter saw red as his blood began to boil. The thoughts inside his head made no sense anymore. His actions were no longer guided by sense and logic, but by pure rage. His hand was shaking with devastating anger when he reached for his gun holster.

Kennedy saw the look on Hunter’s eyes, but he was still several steps away from him.

‘ROBERT, DON’T DO IT!’ he shouted down the aisle.

Too late.

One Hundred and Twelve

Hunter had acted so fast that his hand had moved onto his gun holster and then back in Lucien’s direction in just a split second.

Lucien flinched and Hunter saw his body go rigid, but not from fear – from expectation – from satisfaction in his accomplishment. That satisfaction was short-lived.

Hunter dropped a pair of handcuffs on Lucien’s lap.

Lucien looked up at him, confused. Hunter was holding no gun.

‘You’re right,’ Hunter said. ‘Jessica deserves justice. Her parents deserve justice. My unborn child deserves justice. And I deserve justice for what you’ve done. Nothing would please me more than to put a bullet in your head right here, right now. But we’re not the only ones who deserve justice for what you’ve done, Lucien. The parents, the families, and the friends of every single victim you tortured and killed over so many years deserve justice too. They deserve to know what really happened to the people who most of them still believe and hope are just missing. They deserve to know where the remains of their loved ones are. They deserve to be able to give them a proper burial according to their beliefs. And most of all, they deserve to know that the monster who killed those loved ones will never kill again.’

Hunter looked at Kennedy, who was now just a couple of feet away, and then back at Lucien.

‘For that reason, yes, I’ll betray my promise to myself and to Jessica. And this time, there will be no more interviews, no more talks, Lucien. You have no more bargaining power, because we have your books, and everything we need to know is in those pages, including the location to the remains of every one of your victims. This really is where it ends for you.’

Hunter nodded at the SWAT agents to his left. ‘You can take him now.’

One Hundred and Thirteen

Despite his insomnia and the carnival of thoughts dancing around in his head, Hunter was so exhausted that he finally managed to sleep for a total of four hours.

After Lucien’s arrest, he had flown back to Quantico. As Kennedy had put it before, he was still officially ‘on loan’ to the FBI and, as such, he needed to fill in his last report. That was done late last night.

Hunter had woken up before dawn. Kennedy had arranged for an FBI jet to fly him back to Los Angeles early in the morning, and Hunter couldn’t wait to get out of that place. Everything still felt too surreal in his mind. Only a few days ago, he was supposed to be boarding a plane to Hawaii, his first vacation in so long, he couldn’t even remember the last time he had one. Instead, he was whisked away to the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, and into something that could only be described as a hellish nightmare. So much was revealed in so little time, his head seemed like it would never stop spinning.