Robert Hunter 06 - An Evil Mind

by Chris Carter

  He’d taught himself that technique a long time ago. It had taken him many years to master it, but he could now practically empty his mind from most thoughts. He could easily block out sounds and blind himself to what was happening around him, despite having his eyes wide open. It was a sort of meditation trance that elevated his mind onto an almost unearthly level; but most of all, it kept him mentally strong. And he knew that that was exactly what he needed right now.

  Since last night, the agents had stopped bothering him. But he knew they would. They wanted him to talk, but he just didn’t know what to say. He knew enough about police procedure to know that whatever explanation he gave them wouldn’t suffice, even if it were the truth. In their eyes, he was already guilty, no matter what he said or didn’t say. He also understood that the fact that he wasn’t being held by a regular police or sheriff’s department, but had been turned over to the FBI, complicated matters immensely.

  He knew he had to give them something soon, because the interrogation methods were about to change. He could feel it. He could sense it in the tone of voice of both of his interrogators.

  The attractive blonde woman who called herself Agent Taylor was softly spoken, charming and polite, while the big man with the crooked nose who called himself Agent Newman was much more aggressive and short-tempered. Typical good-cop-bad-cop team play. But their frustration due to his total commitment to staying silent was starting to show. The charm and politeness were about to end. That had become obvious in the last interrogation session.

  And then the thought came to him, and with it came a name:

  Robert Hunter.

  Ten

  Hunter eventually made it back to his apartment to pack his bags, but the flight he took just a couple of hours later wasn’t the one he had booked to Hawaii.

  After taxiing its way up the runway, the private Hawker jet finally received the takeoff ‘go ahead’ from the Van Nuys airport control tower.

  Hunter was seated toward the back of the plane, nursing a large cup of black coffee. His job didn’t really allow him to travel much, and when he did, if at all possible, he usually drove. He’d been on a few commercial planes before, but this was his first time inside a private jet, and he had to admit that he was impressed. The plane’s interior was both luxurious and practical in equal measures.

  The cabin was about twenty-two feet long by seven feet wide. There were eight very comfortable, cream leather seats, set out in a double-club configuration – four individual seats on each side of the aisle, each with their own power outlet and media system. All eight seats could swivel 360 degrees. Low-heat LED overhead lights gave the cabin a nice, bright feel.

  Agent Taylor was sitting on the seat directly in front of Hunter, typing away on her laptop, which was sitting on the fold-out table in front of her. Adrian Kennedy was sitting to Hunter’s right, across the aisle from him. Since they left Captain Blake’s office, he seemed to have been on his cellphone the whole time.

  The plane took off smoothly and quickly climbed up to a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. Hunter kept his eyes on the blue, cloudless sky outside his window, wrestling with a multitude of thoughts.

  ‘So,’ Kennedy said, finally coming off his phone and placing it back inside his jacket pocket. He had swiveled his seat around to face Hunter. ‘Tell me about this guy again, Robert. Who is he?’

  Taylor stopped typing into her laptop and slowly rotated her seat around to face both men.

  Hunter kept his eyes on the blue sky for a moment longer.

  ‘He’s one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met,’ he said at last. ‘Someone with tremendous self-discipline and control.’

  Kennedy and Taylor waited.

  ‘His name is Lucien, Lucien Folter,’ Hunter carried on. ‘Or at least that’s the name that I knew him by. I met him on my first day at Stanford University. I was sixteen.’

  Hunter grew up as an only child to working-class parents in Compton, an underprivileged neighborhood of South Los Angeles. His mother lost her battle with cancer when he was only seven. His father never remarried and had to take on two jobs to cope with the demands of raising a child on his own.

  Hunter had always been different. Even as a child his brain seemed to work through problems faster than anyone else’s. School bored and frustrated him. He finished all of his sixth-grade work in less than two months and, just for something to do, he read through all the modules for the rest of his lower-school years. After doing so, he asked his school principal if he was allowed to take the final exams for grades seven and eight. Out of sheer curiosity and intrigue, the principal allowed him to. Hunter aced them all.

  It was then that his principal decided to get in contact with the Los Angeles Board of Education; after a new battery of exams and tests, at the age of twelve, he was accepted into the Mirman School for the Gifted.

  But even a special school’s curriculum wasn’t enough to slow his progress down.

  By the age of fourteen he’d glided through Mirman’s high school English, History, Math, Biology and Chemistry curriculums. Four years of high school were condensed into two and at fifteen he’d graduated with honors. With recommendations from all of his teachers, Hunter was accepted as a ‘special circumstances’ student at Stanford University.

  By the age of nineteen, Hunter had already graduated in Psychology – summa cum laude – and at twenty-three he received his PhD in Criminal Behavior Analysis and Biopsychology.

  ‘You said he was your roommate?’ Taylor asked.

  Hunter nodded. ‘From day one. I was assigned to a dorm room on my first day in college.’ He shrugged. ‘Lucien was assigned to the same room.’

  ‘How many sharing the room?’

  ‘The two of us, that’s all. Small rooms.’

  ‘Was he also a psychology major?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Hunter’s gaze returned to the sky outside his window as his memory started to take him back to a long time ago. ‘He was a nice guy. I never expected him to be so friendly to me.’

  Taylor frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  Hunter shrugged again. ‘I was a lot younger than anyone around. I had never been too much into sports, going to the gym, or any sort of physical activity, really. I was very skinny and awkward, long hair, and I didn’t dress like most people did at the time. In truth, I was a bully magnet. Lucien was almost nineteen then, loved sports and worked out regularly. The kind of guy who’d usually have a field day with someone who looked like me.’

  From Hunter’s look and physique, no one would ever have guessed that he’d been a skinny and awkward kid when young. He looked like he’d been a typical high school jock. Maybe even captain of the football or the wrestling team.

  ‘But he didn’t,’ Hunter continued. ‘In fact, it was because of him that I didn’t get picked on as much as I would have. We became best friends. When I started going to the gym, he helped me with workouts and diet and all.’

  ‘And how was he on a day-to-day basis?’

  Hunter knew that Taylor was referring to Folter’s inner-character traits.

  ‘He wasn’t the violent kind, if that’s what you’re asking. He was always calm. Always in control. Which was a good thing, because he sure knew how to fight.’

  ‘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’.

  Government subsidy wasn’t nearly enough so, for the next three years, Taylor worked whatever jobs she could get and took care of her little brother and mother, but despite all the medical support, Adam’s health kept on deteriorating, and he died two months after his third birthday. Her mother’s depression worsened considerably, but without medical insurance, professional help was nearly impossible to find.

  One rainy night, when Taylor came back from working a late waitress shift in a restaurant downtown, she found a note from her mother on the kitchen table:

  Sorry for not being a good mother to you or Adam, honey. Sorry for all the mistakes. You’re the best daughter a mother could ever hope for. I love you with all my heart. I just hope that you can one day forgive me for being so weak, so stupid, and for all the burden I’ve
put you through. Please be happy, honey. You deserve to.

  Reading the note filled Taylor with a heart-stopping dread, and she rushed to her mother’s room . . . but it was way too late. On her mother’s bedside table there were three empty bottles – one of sleeping pills, one of antidepressants, and one of vodka. Taylor still has nightmares about that night.

  A black GMC SUV with tinted windows, FBI-style, was already waiting for them on the runway when they landed.

  Hunter stepped off the plane and stretched his six-foot frame against the early morning breeze. It felt good to be breathing clean air again, and to finally get out of such confined space. No matter how luxurious the jet’s passenger cabin was, after five hours locked inside it, it felt like a sky prison.

  Hunter checked his watch – the sun wouldn’t be up for another two hours, but surprisingly, the night air in Virginia at that time of year felt just as warm as it did back in Los Angeles.

  ‘We all need to try to get some sleep,’ Kennedy said, coming off his cellphone again. All three of them boarded the SUV. ‘And a decent breakfast later on. Your quarters are ready,’ he addressed Hunter. ‘I hope you don’t mind staying at one of the recruit dorms at the academy.’

  Hunter gave him a subtle headshake.

  ‘Agent Taylor will come get you at ten a.m.’ Kennedy consulted his timepiece. ‘That’ll give everyone around six hours’ break. Get some sleep.’

  ‘Can’t we make it any earlier than that?’ Hunter asked. ‘Like now? I’m here already. I don’t see the point of delaying this any longer.’

  Kennedy looked straight into Hunter’s eyes. ‘We all need some rest, Robert. It’s been a long day and a long flight. I know that you can work on very little sleep, but that doesn’t mean that your brain doesn’t get tired like everyone else’s. I need you sharp when you walk in there to talk to your old friend.’