Maintaining a 4.0 Grade Point Average – the highest possible – during his university years had been a walk in the park, but he soon grew tired of the bullying, the beatings and of being called ‘tooth-pick boy’. Following the advice of a friend, he decided to join a weights gym and started taking martial arts classes. Despite the physical exhaustion that came with the workouts, Hunter stuck to it with the enthusiasm of a professional bodybuilder. Within a year the effects of such heavy training were clearly visible. His body had bulked up impressively. ‘Tooth-pick boy’ became ‘fit boy’ and it took him a little less than two years to receive his black belt in karate. The bullying stopped and all of a sudden girls began paying attention to him.
By the age of nineteen, Hunter had already obtained a degree in Psychology – summa cum laude – and at twenty-three years of age he received his Ph.D. in Criminal Behavior Analysis and Biopsychology. Thanks to one of his professors, Hunter’s thesis paper, titled ‘An Advanced Psychological Study in Criminal Conduct’, became, and remains, mandatory reading at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
But only two weeks after receiving his Ph.D., Hunter’s entire world was turned upside down for the second time.
For the past three and a half years, his father had been working as a security guard for a branch of the Bank of America in Avalon Boulevard. During a robbery gone wrong, Hunter’s father took a bullet to the chest. The operation to try to save his life took several hours, at the end of which Hunter’s father slid into a coma. There was nothing more anyone could do but wait.
And wait Hunter did, sitting by his father’s side, watching him slip away little by little each day, until he finally passed away twelve weeks later. Those twelve weeks transformed Hunter. He could think of nothing else but revenge and when the police told him that they had no suspect, Hunter knew they’d never catch his father’s killer. He felt utterly powerless and the feeling filled him with rage. It was after the burial that he made the decision that studying the minds of criminals wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. He would have to go after them himself.
After joining the police force, Hunter moved through its ranks at lightning speed, becoming the youngest ever officer to make detective for the LAPD. As a detective, he was immediately assigned to the Homicide Special Section (HSS) – a dedicated branch within the LAPD’s Robbery–Homicide Division that dealt solely with serial and high-profile homicide cases requiring extensive investigative time and expertise. But when it came to homicides, the city of Los Angeles was like no other city on earth. For some reason, it seemed to attract, or even breed, its own very particular type of psychopath, which triggered the Mayor of Los Angeles and the LAPD to create an elite entity within the HSS. All homicides involving overwhelming sadism and brutality were tagged by the LAPD as Ultra Violent Crimes. Hunter was the head of the LAPD’s Ultra Violent Crimes Unit and as such, he had seen more brutal homicide crime scenes than anyone else in the entire LAPD . . . ever. Nothing ever really fazed, scared or shocked him anymore. And that was what had surprised Garcia so much.
‘Who the hell is Lucien Folter?’ he asked again, his gaze still traveling between Hunter and Director Kennedy.
Eye contact was not reciprocated.
‘Robert,’ Garcia called. This time he sounded like an annoyed parent reprimanding a disobedient child. ‘Who the hell is Lucien Folter?’
‘To put it in simple terms . . .’
Though Hunter had finally locked eyes with his partner, the reply came from Director Kennedy, his voice sounding even more ominous than it did just a moment ago.
‘Lucien Folter is . . .’
Garcia turned to face him.
‘. . . evil in human form.’
Four
By the time Director Kennedy received the phone call informing him of the prison break, Lucien Folter had already crossed the border between Virginia and Tennessee and was now fast approaching the city of Knoxville. His target destination, at least for the time being, was a small wooden shack by a remote wetland in southern Louisiana, but Lucien knew that the worst thing he could do right at that moment was to keep on running. He knew that by then the alarm at Lee high-security penitentiary would’ve been raised, the FBI and the State Attorney General’s office would’ve been informed and US Marshals had probably already been mobilized. His face wouldn’t have made the early morning news – not enough time to get that particular ball rolling – but urgent ‘breaking-news’ bulletins, reporting his escape would be hitting the airwaves in a hurry and by lunchtime his mugshot would be splattered all over the country. Before continuing on his way, Lucien needed to change his appearance – drastically – and for that he needed a few supplies, which in a city as large as Knoxville wouldn’t be that hard to come by, but first things first. Before getting to Knoxville, Lucien needed to ditch the silver Chevrolet Colorado he’d been driving.
The pickup truck belonged to prison guard Manuel Vargas. After murdering everyone inside the infirmary control room, Lucien had taken their clothes, their weapons, their wallets and their car keys. With the alarm raised, it wouldn’t take long for them to realize that Lucien had taken one of the guards’ vehicles. By now, Lucien was certain that an APB on the Chevrolet Colorado had already been put out. Every cop in the country would be on the lookout for that car. He needed to get rid of it and he needed to do it pronto.
Suddenly, as Lucien considered his options, Lady Luck smiled at him. A rest area was coming up on his right and from about two hundred yards out he could see that there was only one other car parked there – a jet-black Audi A6, one of the newer models.
‘Well, hello there,’ Lucien said to himself as he straightened up, slowed down and veered off into the rest area. As he approached the parked vehicle, he saw a woman in the driver’s seat talking on her cellphone. There was no one sitting next to her. There were no kids in the backseat.
‘Perfect.’
Lucien parked four spaces away and quickly scanned the surrounding area for a short while – he could see no one in the bushes, in case the woman’s passenger, if there was one, had needed an emergency bathroom break. He smiled at himself and allowed his attention to return to the Audi driver. The woman, who had her window shut all the way, looked to be around forty years old. From where he was sitting, her profile just missed beauty – her chin was a bit too pointy, her nose a bit too round. Her black hair was cut short and neat and she wore a thin brown leather jacket.
So as not to look suspicious, Lucien got out of the car and pretended to check his driver-side tires. For the next twenty seconds, Lucien studied the woman from afar. Her cellphone hand was blocking the view to her mouth, which kept him from reading her lips, but the expression on her face, her eyebrow movements and the way in which she gesticulated every now and then, suggested that she was having an argument with someone.
Lucien rounded the truck to check the tires on the other side, all the while keeping an eye out for any other vehicles slowing down to enter the rest area. None did. When he looked back at the Audi, he saw that the woman was now off the phone, her body slumped forward, her eyes shut, her head low, buried against the steering wheel. It was obvious that the argument she was having on the phone hadn’t ended too well.