An Evil Mind (34 page)

Still with his gaze firmly set on Hunter, Lucien paused, giving his old friend’s brain a chance to try to match his words to the images locked away in Hunter’s memory.

And then he delivered a final blow.

‘But you know the real difference between that and all the other photographs that were vandalized in the house, don’t you, Robert? That was the only one on which the word “PIG” was written vertically, instead of horizontally.’

Seventy-Seven

Hunter felt his heart stall, his blood freeze in his veins, and the pit in his stomach turn into a black hole that threatened to swallow his soul into oblivion. He wanted to speak, but his voice seemed to have gotten stuck in his throat.

His eyes were focused on Lucien, but not his mind. All of his thoughts had traveled back to the night that part of him had died with Jessica. He didn’t need to search long. Every detail of what he’d seen that night had been locked away somewhere in his brain. Accessing those memories was painful, but simple. He could practically see the photograph Lucien was talking about, right in front of him – the smashed glass, the silver frame, and the word ‘PIG’ written in large blood letters – vertically. As Lucien had said, that had been the only photograph on which a word had been written that way.

Trying his best to think logically, Hunter somehow managed to restrain his anger before it boiled out of his body.

If Lucien had somehow managed to get his hands on the crime-scene police reports from Jessica’s murder, then there was also a possibility that he’d managed to obtain copies of the crime-scene evidence report and inventory, which Hunter knew were very detailed.

Hunter breathed out.

Lucien picked up on his doubt.

‘Still not convinced, huh? Isn’t the brain’s defense mechanism intriguing, Robert? To try to avoid the intense psychological pain that it can see coming, it will, sometimes, even subconsciously, try everything to find an alternative answer. It will even disregard facts and try to hang on to things it knows not to be true. But I can’t blame you, Robert. If I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t want to believe it either. But the reality is – it’s true.’

Taylor could feel on her skin how volatile the air had become down in that basement corridor.

‘You’re bluffing again,’ she tried one more time, her voice angry and a few decibels louder than before. ‘Robert said that there were two perpetrators. Forensics found two sets of fingerprints at the scene. Are you going to tell us that you had a partner this once?
And
. . .’ she stressed before Lucien could respond, ‘we now have your fingerprints on file. One of the first things the FBI’s computer system does is to check the fingerprint of any apprehended individuals for a match against the records in IAFIS, which are linked to any unsolved crimes. If your fingerprints had matched any of the ones found inside Jessica’s home, or at the crime scene of any other unsolved crime, we would’ve had red alerts screaming at us from all four corners days ago.’

IAFIS is the Integrated Automated Fingerprints Identification System. After collecting a DNA sample, the FBI computer system also does the same check against the National DNA database.

Lucien waited patiently for Taylor to finish.

‘As I have brought to your attention before, Agent Taylor, you can be quite naive sometimes. Do you think that staging a crime scene is hard? Do you think that making a murder look like a by-product of a robbery is difficult? Do you think that acquiring and planting someone else’s fingerprints inside Jessica’s house would’ve posed a problem to someone like me?’ He laughed. ‘I can give you the names of the two men those fingerprints belonged to. Not that you’ll be able to verify it anyway, but I can also give you the location where you’ll find their remains. I wanted it to look like a robbery by gang members. I wanted the police to look for two suspects, instead of one. Why do you think the FBI had no clue I existed, Agent Taylor? Why do you think that after so many murders, your Behavioral Science Unit was never able to link any of them? Why do you think you haven’t been searching for a murderer who’s been killing people for twenty-five years?’

Defeat and anger began to draw lines across Taylor’s face.

‘It’s called deception, Agent Taylor. Making the police believe one thing, while the truth is something very different. It’s an art, and I’m very good at it.’

Lucien reverted his attention back to Hunter.

‘Maybe this will clear all the doubts from your mind once and for all, Robert. You said that all the jewelry Jessica had in the house was taken, but did you tell the detectives exactly what was taken?’

Hunter felt an awkward sensation crawling like a rash across his skin.

‘Of course not,’ Lucien said. ‘I doubt you knew every piece of jewelry she owned. But I can tell you exactly what was taken. She kept everything inside this cute little flowery box on the dresser in her room. Next to another picture of the two of you. A picture that wasn’t touched, wasn’t vandalized. The two of you at the beach.’ He paused, and in Hunter’s face saw the punch hit its target. But he wasn’t done yet. ‘I took the whole box. But from her body, other than the engagement ring you’ve already said was taken, I also took her two single diamond earrings, and her dainty necklace. The pendant on it was a white gold humming bird. Its eye was a tiny ruby.’

No amount of self-discipline would’ve been able to keep Hunter’s anger locked inside this time. He exploded forward and slammed both of his fists against the Plexiglas several times.

Tears welled up in Hunter’s eyes. The deep pain in them was as clear as words on a page. Without even realizing, and through gritted teeth, a single word escaped his lips.

‘Why?’

Seventy-Eight

Hunter’s outburst was so sudden and so violent that it made Taylor jump on the spot. Lucien, on the other hand, barely blinked. He was expecting it.

When Hunter’s fists finally stopped pounding the Plexiglas, the skin on his hands had turned red raw and was already starting to bruise. His whole body was trembling with rage, sadness and confusion. Lucien was simply enjoying the show, but he didn’t fail to hear Hunter’s question.

‘You want to know why?’ Lucien said.

Hunter just glared at him. He couldn’t stop shaking. At that particular moment, he was in a place very far away from his sane starting point.

Lucien gathered himself, lifting up as if what he wanted to say needed an injection of strength into the nape of his neck.

‘The real reason is because I couldn’t help it,’ Lucien explained. ‘I’d really missed you, Robert. I missed the only true friend I ever had. So eight months before the incident with Jessica, I decided to look you up in Los Angeles. I didn’t get in contact with you first because I wanted to surprise you. I wanted to see if you’d recognize me if I suddenly knocked on your door.’

Hunter allowed his hands to drop to the side of his body.

‘I found out where you lived,’ Lucien continued. ‘That wasn’t very hard. So I just hung around your apartment block one evening, waiting for you to come home. I thought that maybe after the huge surprise, or at least what I thought would be a huge surprise for you, we could go and grab a beer somewhere, talk about old times . . . catch up.’ Lucien shrugged. ‘Maybe deep inside I had a masochistic desire to see if you would pick anything up – any psychopathic traits, I mean. Maybe I wanted to check if you could see behind my everyday mask. Or maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe I was so confident that I just wanted to put myself through a test, to prove to myself that I was that good. And what better test than to spend a few days in the company of the best criminal behavior psychologist I knew. Someone who was also a police officer, and about to become a detective. If you weren’t able to read the signs, Robert, then who would?’

Hunter’s stomach was in turmoil, and he had to concentrate hard not to be sick.

‘But that night you didn’t come home alone,’ Lucien proceeded. ‘I watched you park your car, get out and, like a gentleman, go around to the other side and open the passenger’s door for someone. Out stepped this beautiful woman. And I have to hand it to you, Robert, she was stunning.’

Hunter held his breath to stop his chest from heaving with emotion.

‘I couldn’t really tell you what it was exactly,’ Lucien said. ‘But one thing that my experiences had already taught me, was that despite all the desires, despite all the violent thoughts and impulses one gets, despite the unstoppable drive to take someone’s life, there still needs to be some sort of trigger to finally push one over the edge.’

Immediately, Hunter and Taylor’s thoughts went back to the passage they’d read in Lucien’s notebook, which Kennedy had showed them the day before.

‘With Jessica it was the way she looked at you when you took her hand to help her out of the car, Robert,’ Lucien moved on. ‘The way she kissed you right there in the parking lot. There was so much love between the two of you that I could feel it on my skin all the way from where I was standing.’

Hunter’s fingers closed into a fist once again.

‘I tried, Robert. I tried to resist it. That’s why I never approached you that time. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to take Jessica from you. I left Los Angeles the next morning, and I did all I could to forget about her. If ever I tried to resist an urge, that was it. But what neither of you will ever understand is that once that trigger goes off inside your head, you’re doomed. The obsession drives you crazy. You can delay it, but you can’t contain it. It comes back night, after day, after night, hammering your brain, until you just can’t take it anymore. Until the visions take over your life. And that point came eight months later.’

Hunter took a step back from the Plexiglas.

‘So I planned everything to look like a robbery,’ Lucien said. ‘I killed two men just to get their fingerprints. I knew they would never be found, so no matter how hard and long the police searched for them, the prints would never be matched to anyone. I returned to Los Angeles. I saw the two of you together again, and then I followed her back to her place.’

Even Taylor was now starting to feel numb.

‘There was no torture,’ Lucien added. ‘No sexual gratification. I did it as fast as I could.’

‘No torture?’ Taylor interjected. ‘Robert said that there were stab wounds all over her body.’

‘Post-mortem,’ Lucien replied, his eyes seeking Hunter. ‘If the autopsy team was competent enough, they should’ve found out that her first wound, the one to her throat, was the fatal one. All the others were inflicted post-mortem. That was part of the “robbery-deception” plan.’

That fact had always intrigued Hunter once he’d read the autopsy report. He had put it down to a burst of anger from the perpetrators because Jessica was engaged to a police officer.

‘I staged the scene with the broken picture frames, the vandalized photographs, the disturbed house and the stolen jewelry and money. And that was it. That’s how it happened. That’s
why
it happened.’

Hunter’s eyes remained unblinking on Lucien’s face as he stepped up against the Plexiglas once again, the fingers on both of his hands still clenched into fists.

‘You were right before, Lucien.’ His voice was so calm, it scared Taylor. ‘Screw being a detective. Screw what I’ve sworn to uphold. You
are
a dead man.’

He turned and walked out of that corridor and basement.

Seventy-Nine

Ninety seconds later, Hunter and Taylor were standing inside Director Adrian Kennedy’s office. Doctor Lambert was also there.

‘I understand that this whole scenario has changed for you, Robert,’ Kennedy said, as Hunter stood looking out the window. ‘No one could’ve anticipated that sort of revelation, and I am deeply sorry. I’m not going to lie to you and say that I completely understand how you feel, because I don’t. No one does. But I have a pretty good idea.’ Kennedy’s voice sounded fatigued.

He walked over to his desk and picked up a printout that was by his computer monitor before retrieving his reading glasses from his breast pocket.

‘But there’s one thing that hasn’t changed,’ he said before reading from the printout. ‘Madeleine Reed, twenty-three years old, born in Blue Springs City, Missouri, but at the time was living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was last seen by her housemate on April 9, just before she left her apartment to go out for dinner with someone she’d met a few days earlier in a bar. Madeleine never came back that night, which her housemate found strange, because Maddy – that’s what everyone called her – didn’t make a habit of spending the whole night with anyone on her first date.’

Hunter kept his focus on the world outside Kennedy’s window.

‘Two days later, she still hadn’t turned up,’ Kennedy added. ‘That was when the housemate, someone called Selena Nunez, went down to the police station and reported her as missing. Despite all efforts from the missing-persons’ investigators, they’ve got absolutely nothing. No one knows what this mysterious man who took her out for dinner on the evening of April 9 looks like. The barman at the bar Madeleine was the night before remembers her. He also remembers seeing her talking with someone who looked to be a little older than her, but he didn’t pay enough attention to the man’s face to be able to give the police an accurate description.’ Kennedy adjusted his reading glasses on his nose. ‘Madeleine worked for CancerCare. Her specific job was to provide support and friendship to children with terminal cancer, Robert. She’s a good person.’

Kennedy offered the printout to Hunter.

Hunter didn’t move.

‘Look at her, Robert.’

A few seconds went by before Hunter finally dragged his eyes away from the window and onto the sheet of paper Kennedy had in his hand. Attached to it was a second printout – a 6x4 portrait photograph of Madeleine Reed. She was a very attractive woman, with light and seemingly smooth skin, eyes that had a slightly oriental appearance and were green in color, and hair that dropped in a vibrant black sheen past her shoulders. The smile she had on when the photograph was taken looked pure and innocent. She looked happy.