Robert Hunter 06 - An Evil Mind

by Chris Carter

  Kennedy nodded and paused for a second. ‘You’re saying that Lucien had a dormant procedure in place? A preplanned strategy in case he was captured?’

  Hunter agreed with a head gesture. ‘I’m sure he did. There’s a reason why Lucien has managed to torture and kill so many people for so many years without anyone suspecting a damn thing, Adrian, even people close to him. And that reason is: he’s too well prepared. He’s methodical, meticulous, disciplined and he’s very well organized. What happened in here was planned a long time ago.’

  While he pondered over Hunter’s words, Kennedy let his eyes circle the room once again. They paused on the pool of blood by the door that led into the corridor – Agent Taylor’s blood. Sadness and anger collided inside his eyes.

  ‘I’m sure that Lucien had told the truth about having left Madeleine with enough food and water to last her just a few days,’ Hunter carried on. ‘But a simple code word or signal would’ve gotten this whole plan in motion. If he weren’t already here, Ghost would’ve made the trip from wherever he was to keep her from dying. He obviously got here with plenty of time because he managed to feed and rehydrate her enough. He knew that within days of the code signal, Lucien would’ve made whomever had him under custody bring him here.’

  Kennedy stayed quiet, his mind grinding through the information.

  ‘Ghost wasn’t his first ever “apprentice”,’ Hunter added. ‘Lucien said so.’

  Kennedy looked at Hunter, intrigued.

  ‘Lucien said that Ghost had outlived his usefulness, like all the previous ones. He said that they all did eventually, so he just finds himself a new little helper.’

  A thoughtful pause from Kennedy.

  ‘I’m sure that the only reason Lucien found apprentices was so that plans like this could work if he ever needed it. He probably found them, taught them the procedures, kept them for a while, then got rid of them and found a new one, and the process would start again.’

  ‘Because in the long run they’d become a liability,’ Kennedy said. ‘A risk he didn’t need.’

  Hunter nodded.

  Kennedy still looked uncertain. ‘But to get the procedure in motion, Lucien would’ve had to have gotten the code word or signal out to this Ghost character. So how did he do that?’

  ‘Phone call?’

  Kennedy shook his head. ‘Lucien did not have access to a phone. He wasn’t granted any phone calls. He was incommunicado at all times.’

  ‘Since he was taken in by the FBI, you mean,’ Hunter said back. ‘But he was arrested by the sheriff’s department in Wheatland, Wyoming. Any calls then?’

  A pause, then Kennedy shut his eyes for a second as if in pain.

  ‘Sonofabitch,’ he whispered. He now remembered reading in the arrest report that the arrested subject was granted a single phone call. The call went unanswered. A code telephone number – a dead line that was never supposed to ring, unless . . . That was the code signal.

  ‘How did this Ghost guy get in here,’ Kennedy asked. ‘You said that the door to this hellhole was padlocked from the outside.’

  ‘Last room on the right down the corridor,’ Hunter answered. ‘There’s a door inside that leads to another passageway, which leads to an exit at the back of the house. Ghost got in through there. The first room on the left,’ Hunter said, pointing to the corridor, ‘is an observation room with two computer monitors. Lucien had eight motion-sensor equipped CCTV cameras hidden outside. As soon as anything moved within range of the cameras, a red-light alarm would go off inside the whole shelter.’ Hunter indicated a red bulb on the wall behind Kennedy. ‘One of the cameras is set on a tree at the end of the dirt path that leads to the front of the house.’

  ‘Where you parked the Jeep,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘That’s right. That would’ve given Ghost more than enough time to pull Madeleine out of her cell – the last room on the left – tie her to the chair, and come hide inside that box.’

  Kennedy turned and looked at the cardboard boxes pushed up against a dark corner.

  ‘He hid in there?’

  Hunter nodded. ‘He had a small frame, and according to Lucien it sounded like he also had the flexibility of a contortionist.’ An awkward pause. ‘This was all rehearsed, Adrian. We walked into a trap, and I’m sorry I didn’t see it coming.’

  ‘A very well-prepared trap,’ Kennedy said. ‘Lucien put you and Agent Taylor under incredible time pressure to save a hostage’s life. He put you under even more mental pressure by revealing he was your fiancée’s murderer just minutes before forcing you to bring him here. The door was padlocked from the outside, and we all believed that Lucien always worked alone. There was no reason for you or Agent Taylor to suspect that there’d be someone in here waiting for you.’

  ‘I still should’ve checked the room properly,’ Hunter said. ‘I’m so terribly sorry for what happened to Courtney.’

  No one said anything for about a minute.

  ‘He’s not going to stop killing,’ Kennedy finally said. ‘We both know that. And when he kills again, we’ll pick up the trail and we’ll hunt him down.’

  ‘No, we won’t,’ Hunter said.

  Kennedy glared at him.

  ‘He killed for twenty-five years without anyone ever knowing, Adrian. No links. Lucien doesn’t follow a pattern. He doesn’t repeat the same MO. He experiments. He kills indiscriminately – old, young, male, female, blonde, brunette, American, foreigner. Nothing matters to him, except the experience. He could kill someone later today, he could have done it already for all we know. We could find the body, search the crime scene, and we still wouldn’t be able to say with any certainty if the killer had been Lucien or not.’

  ‘So you believe what he told you?’ Kennedy asked. ‘That we’ll never see him again?’

  Hunter nodded. ‘Unless we outsmart him.’

  ‘And how do you suppose we do that?’

  ‘Maybe we can find something in those books.’

  Kennedy’s gaze moved to the dust-covered books on the shelves.

  ‘Those are the notebooks you were looking for,’ Hunter explained. ‘Lucien told me that he was leaving us a gift. Well, that’s it. There are fifty-three books in total. All of them are somewhere between 250 and 300 pages long.’

  Kennedy approached one of the shelves, randomly picked up one of the notebooks, and flipped it open. The pages were all handwritten. There was no date stamp, no mention of time whatsoever. Groups of written pages were separated by a single blank one, as if to isolate them into numberless and nameless chapters.

  ‘I don’t know exactly what we’ll find in them until we go through all of them thoroughly,’ Hunter said. ‘But I did have an idea.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘I skimmed through a couple of them before you got here. Judging by what I saw, these books will not only contain Lucien’s emotions, frame of mind, how he felt during the build-up and aftermath of a murder, his different MO’s and so on, but also everything he did, everyone he met, and everywhere he’s been since he started this murderous encyclopedia, including hide-out places like this one. Places no one knows about.’

  Kennedy caught on fast. ‘And right now Lucien needs a place to go. A hiding place. And the house in Murphy and this fallout shelter are probably not the only two hiding, or captive, or torture places he has under his wing.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Kennedy thought about it for a beat. ‘Our problem is that if you’re right, Lucien might be halfway there already, and I’m sure he won’t hide in the same place for too long. He’ll get organized quickly, and then he’ll probably vanish.’

  Hunter said nothing.

  Kennedy looked back at the shelves. Fifty-three books, each about 300 pages long. Hunter could see the doubt in his eyes.

  ‘How quickly can you organize a team of the best speed readers you can find, Adrian?’ he asked. ‘People who can skim through pages fast, looking for something specific. In this case, a location.’
>
  Kennedy checked his watch. ‘If I get on to it now, by the time I get these books back to Quantico, I’ll have a team there waiting for me.’

  ‘So if we’re fast enough, we’ll have our list by the morning,’ Hunter said.

  ‘Then we’ll hit every place on that list at the same time,’ Kennedy agreed.

  ‘I know it’s a long shot,’ Hunter said, ‘but with Lucien, we need to take every shot we get, because we won’t get many.’ He walked over to the bookshelves and collected eight random books.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘I’m the fastest speed-reader you’ll find.’

  Kennedy knew that to be true.

  ‘I’ll go through these, and you can get your people to go through the rest. You’ll have my list in a few hours.’ Hunter started moving toward the exit.

  ‘Where are you going?

  ‘To the hospital. I promised Madeleine that I would be there.’

  Kennedy knew that going after a list of places wasn’t the only reason Hunter wanted to go through those notebooks. If he could, he would’ve taken them all.

  ‘Robert,’ Kennedy called out.

  Hunter paused.

  ‘Finding Jessica’s passage in one of those books will not soothe the pain. You know that. On the contrary, it will feed the anger and the hurt.’

  Hunter studied Kennedy for a brief moment. ‘As I’ve said, Adrian, you’ll have my list in a few hours.’ He took the stairs out of Satan’s basement.

  One Hundred and Seven

  The doctors had just finished operating on Madeleine Reed when Hunter got to the hospital. They told him that she had lost a lot of blood. A minute or two longer getting her to the theater and there would’ve been nothing they could’ve done for her. But whoever had contained the external bleeding with the belt tourniquet had done a good enough job. If not for that, she would’ve died from loss of blood five minutes before the agents got her to the emergency unit.

  The doctors also told Hunter that the operation had gone as well as they could expect. They had managed to contain the internal bleeding and suture the spleen wound shut before the organ failed, but Madeleine’s strength was already at its minimum before they operated. Now, all they could do was wait and hope that Madeleine’s weak body would somehow find the strength to wake up and breathe on her own. That her will to stay alive would be strong enough. The next few hours were absolutely critical. At the moment, machines were keeping her alive.

  Hunter sat in an armchair pushed up against the corner, just a few feet away from Madeleine’s hospital bed. She lay flat and still under a thin coverlet. Different-sized tubes came out of her mouth, nose and arms, and connected to two different machines, one on each side of the bed. Even with the coverlet, Hunter could tell that her abdomen was heavily bandaged. The heart monitor on the right side of the bed beeped steadily, drawing a hypnotic peak line on its dark monitor screen. While that line peaked, there was still hope.

  Before taking a seat, Hunter had stared at Madeleine’s face for a long time. She looked peaceful, and for the first time in God knows how long, not scared.

  Her parents had been notified just about half an hour earlier, and they were on their way from Missouri.

  ‘I know you’re strong enough, Maddy,’ Hunter had whispered to her. ‘And I know that you can beat this. This time Lucien won’t win. Don’t let him win. I know you’ll walk out of here.’

  Hunter had been flying through Lucien’s notebooks all night. It was 4:18 a.m. and he’d already skimmed through six out of the eight notebooks he had with him. So far, his list contained three different locations Lucien had used as a torture chamber. Each one in a different state.

  He hadn’t come across any mention of Jessica and what had happened that fateful night twenty years ago in Los Angeles. Truthfully, he didn’t really know if he was relieved or angered. He wasn’t sure how he would feel if he did come across the pages that described that night’s events.

  Hunter sped through the pages for another twenty minutes when something made him stop. It wasn’t something on the page he was on, but something his eyes had gone over a couple of pages back, but his tired brain took a few extra seconds to process it. He quickly flipped back to the page and read the passage again.

  Where had he heard that before?

  Hunter wracked his brain for a few minutes searching for it.

  And then it finally came to him.

  One Hundred and Eight

  Hunter quickly exited Madeleine’s room and found a bathroom down a long and empty hallway. Once inside, he reached for his cellphone and dialed Kennedy’s number. He knew Kennedy would still be awake.

  Kennedy answered his phone with the second ring. ‘You’ve speed-read through all eight notebooks already?’

  ‘Almost there,’ Hunter replied. ‘One more to go. How’s your team doing?’

  ‘They’ve each been through four of the notebooks,’ Kennedy explained. ‘But I’ve got nine of them on the go, five notebooks each. At this rate, we should have a list by dawn.’

  ‘That would be great,’ Hunter said. ‘But you’ll have to ask them all to go back to the beginning and start again. They need to look for something else other than the locations. Create another list.’

  Hunter could practically hear Kennedy frown.

  ‘What? What do you mean, Robert? What else? What other list?’

  Hunter quickly told him.

  ‘Why?’

  Hunter explained the reason why, and now he could almost hear Kennedy thinking.

  A long pause.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Kennedy said in an outbreath. ‘Do you think . . .?’

  ‘It’s another shot,’ Hunter replied. ‘And we agreed to take every shot we could.’

  ‘Absolutely . . .’ Another thoughtful pause. ‘If you’re right, Robert, we might get a result. The problem is that that result could come tomorrow, next week, next month, or any time in the next twenty or thirty years. There’s no way of knowing.’

  ‘To get my hands on Lucien, I’m prepared to wait.’

  ‘OK,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But the team is just about to finish with the locations list, and you know that we can’t lose time on that, so let’s get that list first and then I’ll tell them to start again.’

  ‘OK. You’ll have my list of locations within the next hour.’ Hunter disconnected and went back to Madeleine’s room.

  He finished skimming through the last notebook he had with him in thirty-one minutes – no new locations. His location list contained three entries. He texted Kennedy his list, went back to the first notebook, and started it all over again.

  When Kennedy called Hunter at 11:22 a.m., Hunter’s eyes were strawberry red from tiredness and reading fatigue.

  ‘I thought you’d like to know,’ he said. ‘We have fifteen locations in total, spread across fifteen states. FBI and SWAT teams are getting ready as we speak. We should be ready to coordinate a mass crackdown in about an hour to an hour and a half.’

  ‘It sounds good,’ Hunter said.

  ‘How are you doing with the second list?’

  ‘Almost there. Give me another half an hour. How’s your team doing?’

  ‘Exhausted and overworked. Living on strong black coffee. People here are calling them “the pink-eye squad”.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess I can relate.’

  ‘They should also be finished in the next hour. How’s Madeleine doing?’

  ‘Still unresponsive.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘She’ll come out of it,’ Hunter said. ‘She’s a strong woman.’

  Kennedy had to admire the confidence in Hunter’s voice.

  ‘Once you get the new list, you know what to do, right, Adrian?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  They disconnected.

  Back inside Madeleine’s hospital room, it took Hunter just another twenty-four minutes to complete his new list. This time he had four entries. He texted
the new list to Kennedy and received a reply back in five seconds: ‘Will initiate procedures as soon as I have all the entries. Locations crackdown will be in T–53 minutes. Will keep you posted.’

  One Hundred and Nine

  Hunter received the next text message from Kennedy in exactly fifty-three minutes.

  ‘Locations crackdown is a go. Will keep you posted. Second list now completed – every procedure initiated.’

  There was nothing Hunter could do now but sit and wait. He massaged the back of his neck for an instant. Exhaustion had slowly worn its way into his brain, joints and muscles. Every time he moved, he could feel the tendons pulling tight across his whole body, as if they were about to snap. He closed his eyes only for a moment, and the next thing he felt was his cellphone vibrating in his chest pocket.

  Hunter had dozed off for eighty-four minutes. To him, it felt like two seconds. He quickly left the room and answered Kennedy’s call.

  ‘We’ve drawn a blank, Robert,’ Kennedy said. ‘Lucien was in none of the locations.’ Kennedy’s voice sounded defeated, as if all hope had gone out of him. ‘And it doesn’t seem like he’d been in any of them for weeks. Judging by the photographs I’ve received back from the crackdown teams, some of those places were a torture haven, a slaughterhouse. You wouldn’t believe the torture paraphernalia found in them.’

  Hunter was sure he would believe it.

  ‘It will take our forensics teams weeks, maybe months, to sift through everything in those fifteen locations, and it still might give us no clue to Lucien’s whereabouts. I’d say that those notebooks are our best bet of finding anything . . . if there is anything to be found. But they have to be read thoroughly and scrutinized to the minutest detail, and that will also take a long time.’ Without realizing, Kennedy let out a beaten sigh. He had no doubt that by the time they finished analyzing everything Lucien had left behind, the killer would be long gone, vanished forever. As Lucien had said, they’d never see him again.