An Evil Mind (21 page)

‘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.’