‘And it didn’t happen.’
Another shake of the head. ‘None of it. In fact, Lucien came to my rescue on a couple of occasions, when other students tried to gang up on me. He was the one who got me into martial arts and gave me tips on how to exercise, eat well and bulk up. All in all, during my college years, Lucien was my best friend.’
Garcia looked like he’d missed something. ‘I’m a little confused, Robert. I keep on hearing that this Lucien character is evil personified, but the person you’re describing sounds like a pretty decent guy.’
‘That’s just one of his tricks, Carlos,’ Hunter said, sitting back on his chair. ‘Deception. And Lucien is the best there is at it.’ He paused, measuring his next words. ‘There’s no confirmed number, and I’m not sure that there ever will be, but the presumption is that he has murdered over one hundred people.’ Now Garcia looked impressed. ‘What?’ He knew that Hunter would never joke about such a thing. ‘But that would’ve made him one of the most prolific serial killers in US history.’
‘Yes, it would,’ Hunter agreed.
‘So how come I’ve never heard of him?’
‘No one had. No one knew who he was or what he was doing until we caught him, just a few years ago.’
‘We?’ Confusion had recolored Garcia’s face. ‘We who?’
‘I was helping the FBI and the NCAVC.’
‘When was that?’
Hunter breathed out. ‘About three and a half years ago.’
‘Three and a half years ago?’ Garcia’s confused look intensified. ‘We’ve been partners for ten and I don’t remember that at all.’
Hunter said nothing.
‘When, three and a half years ago? Where was I?’
‘On vacation.’
‘On vaca—’ Garcia paused, frowning at thin air, as the memory exploded inside his head. Three and a half years ago, after concluding a serial murder investigation that had almost cost him his life together with his wife’s, Anna, Hunter and Garcia were ordered by their captain to take some time off – two weeks, to be exact. Garcia took Anna to New Orleans, while Hunter was supposed to have gone to Hawaii. The memory that had just popped up inside Garcia’s head took him back to the morning he and Hunter met again, after Garcia and his wife had come back from Louisiana. It had been inside that same office. Garcia remembered their conversation almost word for word.
‘You don’t look so tanned for someone who’s just been to Hawaii,’ he had said, before frowning at his partner. ‘You did take your vacation, right?’
‘Sort of,’ had been Hunter’s reply.
‘And what does that mean?’
‘I did take my break. I just didn’t go to Hawaii in the end.’ Garcia had found that a little strange, as he knew how much Hunter had always wanted to visit Hawaii, but never really had the chance to.
‘So where did you go?’
‘Nowhere special, just visiting a friend back east.’
Garcia had never pushed for a more informative answer, but now it all made sense. ‘Visiting a friend’ – Adrian Kennedy – ‘back east’ – Quantico, Virginia.
‘So that was your “sort of” vacation?’ Garcia asked, incredulous. ‘You went to Quantico to help the FBI?’
‘I wasn’t given too much of a choice, Carlos,’ Hunter explained. ‘I was all packed and ready to go when I got a call from our captain.’
‘You got a call from Captain Blake?’
‘That’s correct,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘She asked me to come by the office. Said that something really important had come up and it couldn’t wait. I got here and Adrian Kennedy was in her office. He had flown all the way over here because the FBI had, by chance, arrested someone in Wyoming who could possibly be connected to a double homicide.’
‘By chance?’
Hunter nodded. ‘Consequence of a freak accident.’
‘This is getting better by the second,’ Garcia said, taking a seat behind his desk. ‘OK, let’s hear this one from the beginning.’
Nine
For the next hour or so, Garcia listened in almost complete silence as Hunter proceeded to tell him most of what had happened during those fateful two weeks, three and a half years ago, but not exactly everything. The personal details . . . the revelations that changed Hunter’s life forever were kept locked away somewhere inside his mind. Somewhere cold, dark and overflowing with sorrow and hatred. Nevertheless, Hunter’s facial expression gave nothing away.
‘So what you’re telling me,’ Garcia said when Hunter was finally done recounting the facts, ‘is that this Lucien character went on a lifelong killing spree because he wanted to write a . . .’ He paused and searched the air around him for a word. ‘. . . “murder manual” of sorts?’
‘It was much more than that, Carlos,’ Hunter rectified. ‘Lucien documented everything he possibly could: victims’ names and addresses, what specifically triggered his desire to kill them, his planning, every detail of every different MO he experimented with, his signatures, his emotions . . . everything. His notebooks read like a self-psychological evaluation of the kind of insanity and turmoil that goes through the mind of a killer, before, during, and after the murder act. So no, he wasn’t writing a manual. He was writing an encyclopedia.’
‘How many notebooks did you say you found again?’
‘Fifty-three,’ Hunter replied. ‘Every one about three hundred pages long.’
Garcia shook his head at the thought. ‘That’s just absolutely nuts.’
‘For most people, yes,’ Hunter agreed. ‘But for Adrian Kennedy, getting hold of those notebooks was a must.’
Garcia pinched his bottom lip as he pondered on that for an instant.
‘Though it sounds like madness,’ he said, ‘as the head of the FBI NCAVC and the BAU, I can understand why he would want them.’
‘Yes,’ Hunter said. ‘I’m not debating that at all. It’s just that—’
‘Wait a second,’ Garcia said, pausing and narrowing his eyes at Hunter.
‘Something wrong?’ Hunter asked.
‘These notebooks you’re talking about,’ Garcia replied.
‘That was how you found him after he escaped for the first time, isn’t that right?’
‘That’s correct,’ Hunter agreed. ‘We crosschecked the false names Lucien had been using against the names of his male victims and—’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Garcia interrupted him with a wave of the hand. ‘I got the name crosschecking thing. I know that was how you finally caught him in the end, but you also told me that before you figured out that he’d been taking over the identity of some of his victims, you scrutinized his notebooks for safe-house locations, didn’t you?’
Hunter looked back at his partner thoughtfully. He knew where Garcia was heading with his question because he had thought about it as well.
Hunter had just told him that Lucien had documented everything he possibly could in his ‘murder encyclopedia’, including the locations of obscure places he either bought or took over. Places no one knew about – safe houses. Those safe houses, which were distributed all over the land, had been used mainly as torture chambers, so Lucien could experiment with his victims, but they could very easily serve as hide-out shelters for when he felt threatened, and that was what Garcia was talking about.