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.’