by Chris Carter
Hunter held his breath.
‘Did she need you, Robert?’
Hunter saw something in Lucien’s eyes that he hadn’t noticed before – total certainty, as if he already knew all the answers, and if Hunter deviated from the truth even a little bit, Lucien would know.
‘Yes,’ Hunter finally replied.
‘How did she need you?’ Lucien asked. ‘And remember, don’t lie to me.’
‘Pills,’ Hunter said.
‘What about them?’
‘My mother used to take them. They made the pain go away, at least for a little while. But as the cancer grew stronger inside her, the effect of the pills grew weaker.’
‘So she needed more,’ Lucien said.
Hunter nodded.
A pensive look came over Lucien’s face; a moment later, his lips stretched into a wicked smile.
‘But they were prescription painkillers, right?’ he said. ‘Probably very strong, probably schedule two, probably opioids, which means that exceeding the dosage was a big no-no. Those pills weren’t by her bedside, were they, Robert? They couldn’t have been. The risk of accidental overdose would’ve been too great. So where were they? In the bathroom? In the kitchen? Where?’
Silence.
‘The pills, Robert, where were they kept?’ Lucien insisted.
Hunter could hear the threat in his voice.
‘My father kept them in the cupboard, in the kitchen.’
‘But your mother asked you for them that night.’
‘Yes.’
Lucien scratched the scar on his left cheek.
‘She couldn’t handle the pain anymore, could she?’ he pushed. ‘She’d rather be dead. In fact, she begged for death, and you were the messenger, because you brought them to her, didn’t you? How many pills did you bring her, Robert?’ Then it dawned on him and he lifted a hand at the same time as his eyes widened a touch. ‘No, wait. You brought her the whole bottle, didn’t you?’
Hunter said nothing, but his memory took him back to that night.
Nights were always worse. Her screams sounded louder, her groans deeper and heavier with pain. They always made him shiver. Not like when he felt cold, but an intense shiver that came from deep within. Her illness had brought her so much pain, and he wished there was something he could do to help.
Seven-year-old Robert Hunter had heard his mother’s painful screams and had cautiously opened the door to her room. He felt like crying. Since she’d gotten ill, he felt a lot like crying, but his father had told him he mustn’t.
Her illness had made her look so different. She was so thin he could see her bones poking at her sagging skin. Her striking long blonde hair was now fine and frizzled. Her once-sparkling eyes had lost all the life in them and had sunk deep into their sockets.
Shaking, he paused by the door. His mother was curled up into a ball on the bed. Her knees pushed up against her chest. Her arms wrapped tightly around her legs. Her face contorted in pain. She screwed up her eyes and tried to focus on the tiny figure standing at the door.
‘Please, baby,’ she whispered as she recognized her son. ‘Can you help me? I can’t take the pain anymore.’
It took all his strength to keep his tears locked in his throat. ‘What can I do, Mom?’ His voice was as weak as hers. ‘Do you want me to call Dad?’
She managed only a delicate shake of the head. ‘Dad can’t help, honey, but you can. Could you come here . . . please. Can you help me?’
His mother looked like a different person now. Her eyes had the darkest bags under them. Her lips were cracked and crusted.
‘I can heat up some milk for you, Mom. You like hot milk.’
He would do anything he could to see his mother smile again. As he stepped closer, she winced as a new surge of pain took over her body.
‘Please, baby. Help me.’ Her breath was coming in short gasps.
Despite what his father had told him, he simply couldn’t hold his tears anymore. They started rolling down his face.
His mother could now see he was scared and shaking. ‘It’s OK, honey. Everything will be fine,’ she said in a trembling voice.
He stepped closer still and placed his hand in hers.
‘I love you, Mom.’
His words brought tears to her eyes. ‘I love you too, honey.’ She gave his hand a subtle squeeze. It was all she could muster with the little strength she had left in her. ‘I need your help, honey . . . please.’
‘What can I do, Mom?’
‘Can you get my pills for me, honey. You know where they are, don’t you?’
He ran the back of his right hand against his running nose. He looked scared. ‘They’re very high up,’ he said, hiding his eyes from her.
‘Can’t you reach them for me, baby? Please, the pain has been going on for so long. You don’t know how much it hurts.’
His eyes were so full of tears everything appeared distorted. His heart felt empty, and he felt as if all his strength had left him. Without saying a word, he slowly turned around and opened the door.
His mother tried calling after him, but her voice was so weak, it didn’t travel more than just a few yards.
He came back a few minutes later carrying a tray with a glass of water, two cream biscuits and the bottle of medicine. She stared at it, hardly believing her eyes. Very slowly, and through unimaginable pain, she pushed herself up into a sitting position. He stepped closer, placed the tray on the bedside table and handed her the glass of water.
She wanted to hug him so much, but she barely had the strength to move; instead, she gave him the most honest smile he’d ever seen. She tried, but her fingers were way too weak to twist the bottle cap open. She looked at him, and her eyes begged for help.
He took it from her trembling hands, pressed down on the cap and twisted it counterclockwise, before pouring two of the pills onto her hand. She placed them in her mouth and swallowed them down without even sipping the water. Her eyes pleaded for more.
‘I read the label, Mom. It says you shouldn’t have more than eight a day. The two you just had make it ten today.’
‘You’re so intelligent, my darling.’ She smiled again. ‘You’re very special. I love you so much and I’m so sorry I won’t see you grow up.’
His eyes filled with tears once again as she wrapped her bony fingers around the medicine bottle.
He held on to it tightly.
‘It’s OK,’ she whispered. ‘It’ll all be OK now.’
Hesitantly, he let go. ‘Dad will be angry with me.’
‘No, he won’t be, baby. I promise you.’ She placed two more pills in her mouth.
‘I brought you these biscuits.’ He pointed to the tray. ‘They’re your favorite, Mom. Please have one. You didn’t eat much today.’
‘I will, honey, in a while.’ She had a few more pills. ‘When Daddy comes home in the morning, tell him I love him, and that I always will. Can you do that for me?’
The boy nodded. His eyes locked on the now almost empty medicine bottle.
‘Why don’t you go read one of your books, darling? I know you love reading.’
‘I can read in here, Mom, so you’re not alone. I can sit in the corner if you like. I won’t make a noise, I promise.’
She extended her hand and touched his hair. ‘I’ll be OK now, honey. The pain’s starting to go away.’ Her eyelids looked heavy.
‘I’ll guard the room then. I’ll sit just outside the door.’
She smiled a pain-stricken smile. ‘Why do you wanna guard the room, honey?’
‘You told me that sometimes God comes and takes ill people to heaven. I don’t want him to take you, Mom. I’ll sit by the door and if he comes I’ll tell him to go away. I’ll tell him that you’re getting better and not to take you.’
‘You’ll tell God to go away?’
He nodded vigorously.
She started crying again. ‘I’m going to miss you so much, Robert.’
Taylor looked at Hunter and felt
her heart shrivel inside her chest.
A cold smile began to crack on Lucien’s lips, like ice over a dark, frozen lake. ‘So you left the room,’ he said.
Hunter nodded.
‘And that was when the nightmares started,’ Lucien said in conclusion, like a psychologist who had finally broken through a patient’s barrier.
A disconcerting silence took over the entire basement corridor, but not for long. With his gaze fixed on Lucien, Hunter finally let go of the memory.
‘Susan, Lucien,’ he said. The sadness had vanished from his voice. ‘You have what you wanted, now tell us what happened after you drugged her in the car?’
Forty-Four
La Honda, 18 miles from Palo Alto, California.
Twenty-five years earlier.
Susan Richards was jolted awake by the loud sound of a heavy door slamming shut. Despite the sudden noise, her eyes opened slowly, blinking constantly, as if grains of sand had been blown into them and were now scratching at her cornea. Her eyelids felt heavy and tired, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get her eyes to focus on anything. Everything around her came as nothing but a big blur.
The first thing she realized was how dizzy she felt, as if she were stuck in a hazy dream with no way of waking up. Her mouth was bone dry and her tongue felt like sandpaper. Then she noticed the smell – dirty, damp, moldy, old and sickening. She had no idea where she was, but it smelt as if the place had been neglected for years. In spite of the horrible stench, Susan’s lungs demanded that she took in a full breath of air, and as she did, she could almost taste the rancid quality of the room. One deep breath and it made her gag.
All of a sudden, between desperate coughs, sharp and excruciating pain came to her. It took her exhausted body a few seconds to finally home in on it. It was coming from her right arm.
Susan realized then that she was sitting down on some sort of hard and terribly uncomfortable chair. Her wrists were tied together behind the chair’s backrest, her ankles to the chair’s legs. She was soaking wet, drenched with sweat. She tried lifting her head, which was awkwardly slumped forward, and the movement sent waves of nausea rippling through her stomach.
She couldn’t identify the light source inside the room, maybe a corner lamp or an old light bulb hanging overhead, but whatever it was, it bathed the room in a weak yellowish glow. Her eyes finally moved right and tried to focus on her arm and the source of the pain. She still felt groggy, so it took a moment for her vision to steady itself and for the blurriness to dissipate. When it did, her heart was filled with terror.
‘Oh, my God.’ The words dribbled out of her lips.
An enormous chunk of skin was missing from her arm – from her shoulder all the way down to her elbow. In its place she saw raw, blood-soaked flesh. For an instant, it looked as if the wound were alive. Blood was cascading down her arm, over her hands, through her fingers, and onto the concrete floor, forming a large crimson pool at the feet of the chair.
Instantly, Susan jerked her head away and vomited all over her lap. The effort made her feel even weaker, even dizzier.
‘Sorry about that, Susan,’ she heard a familiar voice say. ‘You could never really stand the sight of blood, could you?’ Susan coughed a few more times and tried to spit the awful vomit taste from her mouth. Her eyes moved forward, finally focusing on the figure standing in front of her.
‘Lucien . . .’ she said in a feeble whisper.
Flash images of last night at the Rocker Club came back to her. Then she remembered sitting in Lucien’s car . . . the angry way he had looked at her. And then nothing.
‘What . . .’ She was unable to finish the sentence, her throat way too frail to produce the sounds. Instinctively, her eyes shot toward the raw flesh in her right arm once again and her whole body shivered.
‘Oh,’ Lucien said, unconcerned, reaching behind him. ‘Don’t worry about that. I don’t think you’ll miss this horrible thing, will you?’
He showed her a large glass jar filled with some pale pink liquid. Something was floating in it. Susan squinted, forcing her tired eyes, but still couldn’t tell what it was.
‘Oh, sorry,’ Lucien said, picking up on her confusion and reaching inside the jar with his gloved hand to collect the floating object. ‘Allow me to show you. The edges have curled in a little bit now.’ He uncurled them and stretched the wet piece of skin he had carved off her arm less than an hour ago. ‘This is a hideous tattoo, Susan. I have no idea why you’d think that this is cool in any way.’
Acid-tasting bile found its way back into Susan’s mouth, resulting in a new desperate gagging/coughing frenzy.
Amused, Lucien waited until it was over.
‘But I think that it will make a great token,’ he said, nodding a couple of times. ‘And do you know what? I do think that I will give the “token collector” thing a shot. See how it makes me feel. Test the theory behind it. What do you think?’
Susan’s head throbbed with the rhythm of her thudding heart. The rope that had been used to tie her wrists and ankles felt as if it had cut through to her bones. She wanted to speak, but fear seemed to have erased every word from her terrified mind. Her eyes, on the other hand, mirrored her fear and desperation.
Lucien returned the tattooed piece of skin to the jar.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve had that syringe hidden in my car for almost a year now. I thought about using it many times.’
Susan breathed in and the air seemed to travel into her nose in lumps.
‘But never on you,’ Lucien moved on. ‘I thought about picking up a prostitute many times. As I know you’ll remember from our criminology classes, they are easy targets – approachable, accessible and, most of the time, anonymous.’ He shrugged indifferently. ‘But unfortunately it didn’t quite work out that way. I never really felt ready for it before, but tonight I felt different. I guess I can say that tonight I felt my first real “killer’s” impulse.’
Tears welled up in Susan’s eyes. To her, the air inside the room became denser, even more polluted . . . almost unbreathable.
‘I felt this amazing drive to simply do it and not think of the consequences,’ Lucien said.
His eyes shone with a new purpose. Susan saw it, and that sent a new current of panic traveling through her body.
‘So I decided not to fight it,’ he proceeded, moving a step closer. ‘I decided to act on it. So I did. And here we are.’
Susan tried to calm her breathing, tried to think, but everything still felt like a horrible dream. But if it were, why wasn’t she waking up?
‘Lucien . . .’ she said, her voice rasping, catching on her swollen throat, ‘. . . I don’t kno—’
‘No, no, no,’ Lucien interrupted, shaking his left index finger at her. ‘There’s nothing you can say. Don’t you see, Susan? There’s no turning back now.’ He stretched his arms out to his sides, calling attention to the room. ‘We’re here now. The process has started. The floodgates are open, or any cliché sentence you’d care to come up with. But no matter what, this is happening.’
That was when Susan noticed the look in Lucien’s eyes – distant and ice cold, like a man without a soul. And it paralyzed her.
Her fear filled Lucien with excitement. He was expecting that excitement to conflict with something inside of him – maybe morals, or emotions . . . he wasn’t quite sure what, but something. That conflict never came. He felt nothing but exhilaration to be finally doing something he’d fantasized about for so long.
Susan wanted to speak, to scream, but her panic-frozen lips wouldn’t move. Instead, her eyes begged him for mercy . . . mercy that never came.
Without any warning, Lucien exploded forward, and in a flash his hands were on Susan’s neck.
Her eyes went wide with terror, her neck muscles tightened as her body tried to defend itself from the attack, her jaw dropped open, gasping for air, but her brain knew that the battle was already lost. Lucien’s thumbs were already compressing Susan
’s airway, while his large palms were applying enough pressure to the carotid arteries and jugular veins to cause significant occlusion, and interfere with the flow of blood in her neck.
When Susan’s body started kicking and wriggling on the chair, Lucien placed most of his body weight on her lap to keep her steady. That was when he felt something collapse under his thumbs. He knew then he had just crushed her larynx and trachea. Susan would be dead in seconds, but Lucien never stopped squeezing, at least not then. He carried on until he had fractured the hyoid bone in her neck, all the while his mad and frantic-looking eyes locked on to Susan’s dying ones.
Forty-Five
Hunter sat in silence. Not once did he interrupt Lucien’s account of events, which was conveyed coldly and without sentiment, but all throughout it Hunter fought to keep his emotions in check.
Taylor had also listened to everything in silence, no interruptions, but she found herself shifting in her chair at least a couple of times. Every tiny nervy movement she made seemed to please and amuse Lucien more and more.
‘Before you ask,’ Lucien said, looking at Hunter, ‘there was no sexual gratification. I did not touch Susan in that way.’ He shrugged. ‘Truth be told, she was never supposed to be my first. She was never supposed to be a victim at all. She was never part of the thousands of fantasies I had before that day. It was just very unfortunate that it happened that way.’
‘Thousands?’ Taylor asked.
Lucien smiled. ‘Please don’t be so naive, Agent Taylor. Do you think that people like me just suddenly decide to start killing and that’s that? We’re ready to go out the next day and pick our first victim?’ He shook his head sarcastically. ‘People like me fantasize about hurting others for a long time, Agent Taylor. Some might start fantasizing when kids, some a lot later in life, but we all do, and we do it all the time. Me, I guess I can say that my fascination with death started very early. You see, my father was a great hunter. He used to take me hunting up on the mountains in Colorado, and there was something about waiting, stalking, and looking straight into the animal’s eyes just before pulling the trigger that captivated me.’