‘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.’