For an instant, it looked to me as if his eyes tried to focus on the shower curtain. Maybe he’d noticed the tear I’d created, I’m not sure, but I knew that that was my cue.

I was so wired up from adrenaline and excitement that I must’ve moved twice as fast as normal. Jed’s brain and reflexes were so screwed up from the alcohol, the drugs and the sleep that he would’ve reacted twice as slow as normal. Put those two factors together, and Jed never saw me coming.

With my left hand I pulled the shower curtain to one side, while already throwing my body forward. My right hand and the knife were also moving fast, creating a high arc from right to left.

The blade hit Jed exactly where I wanted it to – across his neck and throat. The combination of how sharp the blade was and the strength of the movement would’ve proven lethal to anyone. The knife cut through skin and muscle as if they were made of rice paper. From the amount of arterial spray that flew high into the air, hitting first my face, then the curtain and wall behind me, I knew I had sliced through both of Jed’s internal jugular veins. I also ruptured his upper airway. His eyes settled on me for a brief moment, but I’m not sure he recognized me, or even understood what was happening.

I didn’t care if he knew or not. My body was already floating on air with the ecstasy of it all. I grabbed the back of Jed’s head with my left hand and pulled it back hard, exposing the fatal wound further. I enjoyed watching the blood squirt out of his neck, cascade down his body, and froth in his mouth. A muffled, gurgling sound was all his vocal cords could produce. I held him in that position until his crazed eyes went still. Until the gurgling sound was gone. Until his body became nothing but a dead weight.

After Jed fell to the ground, I stayed in the bathroom for another seven minutes, still high on all the natural chemicals that my brain had thrown at me. I felt no guilt. No remorse.

I washed my face and hands, but wasn’t very concerned with my clothes. I would just burn them as soon as I left the house.

It was time to move on.

But fate is a funny thing, and as I walked down the short corridor and past Jed’s room, something grabbed my eyes and I stopped. The door was wide open, and that was the first time I saw her.

It was hard to believe that a large bag of human excrement like Jed would have a girlfriend. I know she wasn’t his wife because neither of them had a wedding ring. But still, he did, and there she was, passed out on the bed. Surprisingly, she wasn’t nearly as big or as ugly as Jed was: short dark hair, high cheekbones, delicate lips, and smooth honey-colored skin. She was attractive, very much so. How she ended up with Jed will always be a mystery to me.

I stood by the door, staring at her asleep in bed for a little while. I was still buzzing from cutting Jed’s throat. How can anyone, high on his favorite drug, walk away when some more is so freely offered to him?

I felt my body start to tingle again, and I felt the trigger being pulled inside my head for the second time in the same night. I decided that I wouldn’t fight the urges anymore, so I carefully and quietly walked into the room and lay in bed beside her. I could still feel the warmth from where Jed had lay.

I didn’t move for twenty-two minutes. I just lay there, watching Jed’s girlfriend asleep, waiting, inhaling the scent from her hair, feeling the warmth of her body so close to mine.

Then she moved.

She rolled over and threw her arm over my chest in a sleepy hug, like couples do. Her eyes remained closed. Her hand fell on my shoulder, and I couldn’t contain myself. As softly as I could, I took her hand, brought it over to my lips, and began kissing and licking her fingers. They smelled and tasted of hand cream.

I guess she enjoyed the kissing and nibbling, because she moaned quietly and slowly threw her leg over me. As it settled over my body, subconsciously and understandably, she missed Jed’s body volume. That’s what she was used to. The nerves in her leg registered it, but it took a few seconds for the signals to be decoded by her drowsy brain. As they did, she frowned even before her eyes blinked open.

The light in the room wasn’t great. All she had to go by was the full moon, now low in the sky outside the open window on the east wall. My face was half obscured by shadows.

I guess I hadn’t washed myself as well as I thought I had, because at that exact moment, a drop of Jed’s blood dripped from my hair onto my forehead, ran down over my eyebrow, and onto the white pillowcase.

The woman blinked again. This time a nervous, full-of-fear kind of blink. Her brain, registering that something wasn’t right and sensing danger, became awake fast. She jerked her head back a couple of inches so her eyes could better focus, and as they did, fear froze them in place.

All she saw was a stranger with his clothes soaked in blood, lying where her boyfriend was supposed to be, staring straight into her eyes, with two of her fingers stuck into his mouth.

Sixty-One

Hunter stopped reading and closed the notebook.

An uncomfortable Special Agent Taylor took a step back and finished her Scotch in one gulp.

‘Where are the others?’ Hunter asked, nodding at the notebook.

‘That’s the only one,’ Kennedy answered. ‘All the other notebooks found in the house in Murphy contained nothing. A few drawings and sketches but nothing else. Nothing like this.’

‘But there must be others.’ Hunter sounded a little confused. ‘Are you sure they’ve checked through all the books and notebooks they found?’

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Kennedy confirmed. ‘Lucien must’ve kept them somewhere else, or even scattered around several different locations. That wouldn’t surprise me, and that’s something else you must find out during the course of your interviews.’

Hunter’s stare hardened.

Kennedy read it. Tiredness began really showing in his hoarse voice, which was now starting to croak.

‘Look, Robert, there’s no way on earth I approve of what Lucien has done, but if you’re right about him writing down everything he’s done and experienced into notebooks, then it’s already done, and it cannot be undone. If these notebooks do indeed exist, then we might as well have them. For one, they’ll constitute evidence in a serial murder case that I have no doubt will go down in history. Two, the psychological and behavioral knowledge, the understanding that we’ll gain from those notes and texts, may prove to be a game changer in our fight against extreme violent repeat offenders. As a law-enforcement officer and as a psychologist, you know that full well, Robert.’

Hunter had no argument to come back with.

‘Nothing inside the storage facility in Seattle?’ Taylor asked.

‘Nothing but the chest freezer and the severed body parts,’ Kennedy confirmed.

Everyone appeared to have gone into thinking mode for a beat.

‘I checked with the Scott County Sheriff’s Department in Mississippi,’ Kennedy moved on. ‘Jed Davis and his girlfriend, Melanie Rose, were butchered inside the house they shared just outside Forest City twenty-one years ago. They were found by her mother who had dropped by with a homemade apple pie about two days after the incident. No one was ever arrested.’ He paused for effect and to catch his breath. ‘According to the medical examiner, Melanie Rose’s head was hacked off with a kitchen knife. The head was left on the dining table in the living room. That was the first thing her mother saw when she looked in through the window.’ Kennedy looked at Hunter, the expression on his face as serious as a heart attack. ‘He killed her just because she was home, Robert. He killed her for pure pleasure.’