Hunter consulted his watch. It was time to get going.

‘Trust me, Courtney, whatever feelings Lucien felt for Susan wouldn’t have stopped him. Not even love.’

Forty-Nine

For lunch Lucien had been given an aluminum tray containing one portion of bread, lumpy mashed potatoes, a small amount of vegetables, and two pieces of chicken, which were swimming in some sort of yellowish sauce. Everything lacked salt and seemed to have been seasoned with an extra pinch of absolutely nothing at all. Lucien was convinced that the FBI had redefined tasteless food, but he didn’t really mind. He wasn’t eating for taste or pleasure. He ate to keep his body and mind fed, to give his muscles at least some of the nutrients they needed. And he ate every last scrap.

Just ten minutes after he’d finished his lunch, Lucien heard the familiar buzzing and unlocking sound that came from the door at the end of the corridor.

‘Two hours almost to the second,’ he said, as Hunter and Taylor came into his line of sight. ‘I had a feeling you two would be punctual.’ Lucien waited for them to sit down. ‘Do you mind if I stand up and walk about a little while we talk? It gets the blood flowing to my brain better, and it helps me digest that crap you guys call food around here.’ He jabbed his head toward the empty tray.

No one had any objections.

‘So,’ Lucien said. ‘Where were we?’

Hunter and Taylor both knew that Lucien hadn’t forgotten where they’d left off. The question was just part of his game.

‘Susan Richards,’ Taylor said, calmly crossing her legs, interlacing her fingers together, and resting her right elbow on one of the chair’s arms.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Lucien replied as he slowly started pacing from left to right at the front of the cell. ‘What about her again?’

‘Her remains, Lucien,’ Hunter said in a firm but unthreatening tone. ‘Where are they?’

‘Oh, that’s right. I was about to tell you, wasn’t I?’ There was a perverse quality to Lucien’s new smile. ‘Have you contacted her parents yet, Robert? Are they still alive?’

‘What?’

‘Susan’s parents. We met them a couple of times, remember? Are they still alive?’

‘Yes. They’re still alive,’ Hunter confirmed.

Lucien nodded his understanding. ‘They seemed to be nice people. Will you be the one in charge of giving them the news?’

Hunter suspected he would be, but he was getting tired of Lucien’s games. The way he saw it, right then, any answer was an answer, as long as it got Lucien talking.

‘Yes.’

‘Will you be doing it over the phone, or do you intend to do it face to face?’

Any answer.

‘Face to face.’

Lucien chewed on that for a beat before returning to Hunter’s original question. ‘You know, Robert, that night I experienced things . . . feelings, actually, that until then I had only read about in criminology books, interview transcripts, and accounts from apprehended offenders. Personal and intimate feelings that the more I read about them, the more I wanted to experience them for myself, because that’d be the only real way to find out if they’d be true for me or not.’

He paused and stared at the wall in front of him, as if fascinated by some invisible work of art hanging from it.

‘That night, Robert, I could actually feel Susan’s life-light fading away right at my fingertips.’ Lucien’s gaze moved down toward his hands before continuing. ‘I could feel her heart pulsating in my palms, and the more I squeezed, the weaker it got.’ He turned and faced Hunter and Taylor one more time. ‘And that was when I was elevated, like an out-of-body experience. That was when I realized that what so many had testified to, the feeling we read about so many times, was indeed true.’

Taylor’s eyes darted toward Hunter and then back to Lucien. ‘What feeling are you talking about?’

Lucien didn’t answer, but his eyes passed the question over to Hunter.

‘The “God-like feeling”,’ Hunter said.

Lucien nodded once. ‘Right again, Robert. The “God-like feeling”. A feeling of such supreme power that until then I believed it was reserved only for God. The power to extinguish life. And let me tell you, it’s true what they say. That feeling changes your life forever. It’s intoxicating, Robert, addictive, hypnotizing even. Especially if you’re looking straight into their eyes as you squeeze the life out of their bodies. That’s the moment when you become God.’

No, Hunter thought. That’s the moment when you delude yourself that you had, for the quickest of instants, equated yourself to God. Only a deluded person would believe that he or she could become God, however briefly. He said nothing, but noticed Lucien’s fingers slowly closing into fists before he turned and faced Taylor.

‘Tell me, Agent Taylor, have you ever killed someone?’

The question caught Taylor completely by surprise, and in a whirlwind of memory, her heartbeat took off like a fighter jet.

Fifty

It’d happened three years after Taylor had graduated from the FBI Academy. She’d been assigned to the New York field office, but the events that took place that night had nothing to do with any of the investigations she’d been working on at that time.

That night, Taylor had spent hours poring over NYPD’s and New Jersey PD’s combined investigation files into a serial killer that they had named ‘The Ad Killer’, or TAK for short.

In the past ten months, TAK had sodomized and killed six women – four in New York and two in New Jersey. All six of them had been private sex workers. All six of them fitted a specific physical profile – dark, shoulder-length hair, brown eyes, aged between nineteen and thirty-five, average weight, average height. The pseudonym ‘The Ad Killer’ was used because the only solid fact that the police had been able to gather over nine months of investigations was that all six women had placed private advertisements, offering their ‘tantric massage’ services, in the back pages of free local newspapers.

After nine months and not much to show for it, the Mayor of New York had demanded that the chief of police requested the assistance of the FBI. Courtney Taylor was one of the two agents assigned to assist with the case.

It was past midnight by the time Taylor left the FBI office on the twenty-third floor of the Federal Plaza building that late October night. She drove slowly through Manhattan before crossing the Midtown Tunnel in the direction of her small one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, in the northwest corner of Queens. Her mind had been so busy, sifting through an earthquake of thoughts and trying to piece together a few aspects of the investigation, that it was only after spotting a 24-hour grocery store on 21st Avenue, that she remembered she had completely run out of several supplies back home.

‘Oh, damn!’ she breathed out, quickly swinging her car right and taking a parking spot just past the store. As she turned off the engine, her stomach also decided to remind her of how hungry she was by demonstrating its own version of a whale’s mating call.

At that time in the morning the store wasn’t busy at all – two, maybe three customers browsing the aisles. The young clerk at the counter nodded a robotic ‘good morning’ at Taylor, before returning his attention to whatever paperback he was reading.

Taylor grabbed a basket by the entrance and, without putting too much thought into what she needed, started throwing items into it. She’d just picked up a half-gallon of milk from one of the fridges at the back of the store when she heard some sort of loud commotion up front. She frowned and took a glance around the corner but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Still, her instincts told her that something wasn’t right, and Taylor had learned a long time ago to always trust her instincts. She put the basket on the floor and walked around to the next aisle along.