‘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.