‘But you just said that he wasn’t the violent kind,’ Taylor said.

‘That’s right.’

‘But you’ve also just implied that you’ve seen him in a fight.’

Half a nod. ‘I have.’

Taylor’s eyes and lip-twist asked a silent question.

‘There are certain situations that, no matter how calm or easy-going you are, you just can’t get out of,’ Hunter replied.

‘Such as?’ Taylor insisted.

‘I only remember seeing Lucien in a fight once,’ Hunter explained. ‘And he really tried to get out of it without using his fists, but it didn’t work out that way.’

‘How so?’

Hunter shrugged. ‘Lucien had met this girl in a bar at the weekend and spent the night chatting to her. As far as I am aware, that was it. There was no sex, no kissing, nothing bad, really, just a few drinks, a little flirting and loads of laughs. On the Monday after that weekend, we were coming back from a late study session at the library, when we got cornered off by four guys, all of them pretty big. One of them was the girl’s “very pissed off” ex-boyfriend. Apparently, they’d split not that long ago. Now the thing about Lucien was that he’d always been a great talker. As the saying goes: He could sell ice to an Eskimo. He tried to reason his way out of that situation. He said that he was sorry, that he didn’t know that she had a boyfriend, or that they had just split. He said that if he’d known, he would’ve never approached her and so on. But the guys didn’t want to know. They said that they weren’t there for an apology. They were there to fuck him up, full stop.’

‘So what happened then?’ Taylor asked.

‘Not much. Until then I had never seen anything quite like it. They just went for him. Me? As skinny as I was, I wasn’t about to sit and watch my best friend get beat up by four Neanderthals, but I barely got a chance to move. The whole thing was over in ten . . . fifteen seconds, tops. I couldn’t really tell you what happened in detail, but Lucien moved fast . . . too fast, actually. In absolutely no time, all four of them were on the floor. Two had a broken nose, one had about three or four broken fingers, and the fourth one had his genitals kicked to the back of his throat. After we got out of there, I asked him where he learned to do that.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He gave me a bullshit answer. He said he watched a lot of martial arts movies. One thing I had learned about Lucien was that there was no point in trying to push him for an answer when he didn’t want to give you one. So I just left it at that.’

‘You said that he’s a great talker,’ Taylor said with a slight lilt in her voice. ‘Well, he hasn’t made that much conversation in the past few days.’

‘When did you last see him?’ Kennedy asked.

‘The day I got my PhD diploma,’ Hunter explained. ‘In college I graduated a year before him.’

Taylor knew from Hunter’s résumé that he had sped through his college years as well, condensing four years into three.

‘But I stayed in Stanford,’ Hunter said. ‘I was offered a second scholarship to carry on studying for a PhD So I took it. Lucien and I continued to share the dorm room for one more year, until he graduated. After that, he left Stanford.’

‘Did you keep in touch?’

‘We did, but not for very long,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘He took a few months off after he graduated. Went traveling for a little while, and then decided that he wanted to go back to university. He also wanted to get a PhD.’

‘Did he go back to Stanford?’

‘No. He went to Yale.’

‘Connecticut?’ Taylor was surprised. ‘That’s all the way on the east coast. Why so far away when you have Stanford, Berkley, Caltech, and UCLA right there in California? Four of the best universities in the whole of the country.’

‘Yale is also a great university,’ Hunter countered.

‘I know that. But you know what I mean. Connecticut is a hell of a hike from California. I’m guessing that, after living there for so many years, he probably had lots of friends and some sort of life back in LA. Why the sudden change? Is that where his family is from, Connecticut?’

Hunter paused for a second, trying to remember.

‘I don’t know where his family is from,’ he said. ‘He never talked about them.’

Taylor’s gaze slowly moved to Kennedy and then back to Hunter.

‘Don’t you think that’s a little odd?’ she asked. ‘You two spent years together sharing a dorm room. As you’ve put it, you became best friends. He never said anything about his family at all?’

Hunter shrugged matter-of-factly.

‘No, and I don’t think that’s odd at all. I never talked about my family, to him, or anyone else for that matter. Some people are more private than others.’

‘So you last saw him when you received your PhD diploma,’ Kennedy said.

Hunter nodded. ‘He flew over for the graduation ceremony, stayed for a day, and flew back the next morning. I never heard from him again since.’

‘He just flew back to Connecticut and disappeared?’ Taylor spoke again. ‘I thought you were best friends.’

‘Maybe I was the one who disappeared,’ Hunter said.

Taylor hesitated for an instant.

‘Why? Did he try to get in contact with you?’

‘Not that I am aware of,’ Hunter replied. ‘But I didn’t try to keep in touch with him either.’ He paused and looked away. ‘After my graduation I didn’t keep in touch with anyone.’

Eleven

The private Hawker jet touched down on Turner Field landing strip in Quantico, Virginia, almost exactly five hours after taking off from Van Nuys airport in Los Angeles.

After Hunter’s conversation with Kennedy and Taylor about what he could remember of his old best friend, they all sat in silence for the rest of the long flight. Kennedy fell asleep for a couple of hours, but Hunter and Taylor stayed awake for the duration, each one lost in their own thoughts. For some reason Taylor’s memory took her back to when she was still a child, and how she was forced to learn how to take care of herself at a very young age.

Her seemingly healthy father died of an unexpected heart attack, triggered by a coronary aneurysm, when she was fourteen years old. Taylor took his death very badly, and so did her young mother. The next couple of years became a tremendous battle, emotionally and financially, as her mother – who had been a housewife for the past fifteen years – struggled with a series of odd jobs and the pressures of being a recent widow, and consequently a single parent.

Taylor’s mother was a tender woman with a kind soul, but she was also one of those people who just couldn’t handle being by herself. What followed was a string of deadbeat boyfriends, some of them abusive. Taylor was just about to graduate from high school when her mother became pregnant again. Her mother’s boyfriend at the time told her that he just didn’t want that kind of responsibility, that he wasn’t ready to become a father and have a family, and that he had no intention of becoming a father to someone else’s daughter – a girl that he couldn’t care less for. When Taylor’s mother refused to follow through with the abortion clinic appointment he’d set up for her, he simply dumped her and left town the next day. They never heard from him again.

With her mother heavily pregnant and unable to work, Taylor gave up on the idea of going to college and started working full time at the local mall. A month later, her mother gave birth to a baby boy, Adam – but unfortunately Adam was born with an abnormality on chromosome eighteen, resulting in moderate mental retardation, muscle atrophy, craniofacial malformation, and huge difficulty in coordinating movement. Instead of bringing her joy, Adam’s birth threw Taylor’s mother into an out-of-control depression spiral. She didn’t know how to cope with it and found solace in sleeping tablets, antidepressants and alcohol. At the age of seventeen, Taylor had to become ‘big daughter’, ‘big sister’, and ‘man of the house’.