Robert Hunter 06 - An Evil Mind

by Chris Carter

  ‘I’m trying to find Grove Street Cemetery.’

  Karen’s British pronunciation of cemetery brought a new smile to Lucien’s lips.

  ‘Wow, that’s quite a walk from here.’ He pointed south. ‘Why do you want to go to the cemetery, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t really need the cemetery. That’s just my point of reference. I need to go to the Dunham Lab building, but I remember that it’s just across the road from the cemetery.’

  Lucien nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right, but hey, I’m heading that way myself. I can walk you there if you like.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m going to the Becton Center, which is right opposite the Dunham Lab building.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a piece of good luck,’ Karen said, hooking her rucksack over her right shoulder. ‘Well, if it really is no bother, that would be great. Thank you very much.’

  Then, with a thoughtful expression on his face, Lucien looked at Karen a little sideways. ‘Wait a second.’ He pointed a finger at her. ‘You were in the Investigative Psychology and Offending Behavior lecture this morning, weren’t you?’ His performance could’ve won him a place in drama school.

  Surprised flourished on Karen’s face. ‘I was indeed. You were there?’

  ‘Yeah, sitting right at the back. I’m doing a psychology PhD.’

  Even more surprise now.

  ‘So am I. I just transferred from University College in London.’

  ‘Wow, London? I always wanted to go to London.’ Lucien offered his hand. ‘I’m Lucien, by the way.’

  And so they became friends.

  Lucien already knew he would kill again. He’d started fantasizing about how he would do it around eight months ago, and the more he thought about it, the harder it got to control his impulses. Meeting Karen Simpson filled him with an immense feeling of relief, as if he’d just found a long-lost piece of a puzzle that had been eating at his brain for months.

  Lucien didn’t want to overdo it, though. He knew that people would see them together, so he didn’t want to appear like he was Karen’s best friend, or even a romantic interest. Those were the first people whose doors the authorities would come knocking once she disappeared. No, Lucien was careful to appear like just another student in Karen’s circle of friends. Even an acquaintance, rather than a friend.

  His planning took another six months. Four of them were spent searching for a hidden place where he’d be able to take Karen and take his time, undisturbed. He finally found an abandoned shack hidden deep in the forestland by Lake Saltonstall, not that dissimilar to the one he’d found back in La Honda. One thing Lucien was very certain of was that he would skin Karen alive. Skinning was what had given him the biggest high that night with Susan. And that meant he would have to keep Karen in captivity for at least a few hours.

  But Lucien also wanted to experiment. He didn’t want to use his hands on Karen’s neck like he’d done with Susan. He wanted something new, something different. The idea came to him one morning as a friend of his, who was reading Molecular, Cellular and Development Biology at Yale, told him about an experiment gone badly wrong inside Pierce Laboratory. As his friend described what had happened, Lucien felt his blood prick inside his veins. He now knew how he wanted Karen to die.

  Sixty-Five

  Yale University closed for summer in mid-May. Lucien had been eagerly waiting and planning for it for some time, and he played his cards absolutely right.

  Around April Lucien had asked Karen if she intended going back to England for the summer holidays.

  ‘Are you joking?’ she had replied. ‘Summers in England are like a mild spring around here. I’ve been looking forward to my first summer in the US for quite a while now.’

  ‘Are you staying around here?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I’m thinking about taking a trip down to New York first. I’ve always wanted to see New York, you know, Broadway and all. Maybe even get a new tattoo. There are some great studios over there. After that, I was thinking I could perhaps travel down to Florida and the coast. Spend a few days at the beach? They don’t call it the sunny state for nothing.’ Karen smiled.

  ‘Are you planning on doing all that by yourself?’ That was Lucien’s key question.

  Karen shrugged. ‘I guess.’ She looked at him inquisitively. ‘But I could do with a travel mate, what do you say, Lucien? It could be fun . . . New York, then the beach?’

  Lucien saw the opportunity but he screwed up his face and gave her a quick excuse, saying that he already had a few things organized – a few summer jobs. He knew that if he’d said ‘yes’, Karen would probably tell someone else that they’d be traveling together – a friend, a professor, her parents, whoever. Then, if she never came back from their summer trip but he did, his name would be right at the top of the police’s enquiry list. On the other hand, if Karen disappeared when she was supposed to have taken a trip on her own, questions wouldn’t start being asked until much later. Many would just assume that she had given up Yale after one year and gone back to England. It probably wouldn’t be until her parents started worrying from the lack of communication that a few alarm bells would start ringing.

  They met again just five days before summer break, and Karen told Lucien that she was planning on leaving for her New York and Florida vacation in four days’ time. That gave him three to get everything prepared. But Lucien had been meticulously organizing everything for two months. He had almost everything he needed in place. The only things missing were a few chemical canisters, and he knew exactly where to get them.

  Lucien dropped by Karen’s efficiency apartment the day before she was due to leave for New York. His plan was simple. He would invite her to take a drive with him to Lake Saltonstall that morning for a picnic, saying that they’d be back before nightfall. If Karen said that she couldn’t for any reason, then Lucien would invite her for a quick goodbye drink later that evening, which he was sure she would’ve said yes to. Anyway, the final purpose was the same – to be alone with Karen either at a remote picnic site or inside his car before she was due to leave.

  Karen said yes to the picnic.

  They set off at around 11:00 a.m. He drove at a steady pace, and the ride to the isolated location he’d chosen by the lake took just under twenty-five minutes. But this time Lucien didn’t subdue his victim inside his car. There was no surprise attack. No needle to the neck. Lucien did actually prepare a picnic, with sandwiches, salads, fruit, donuts, chocolates, beer and champagne. They ate, drank and laughed like a couple of best friends. It was only when Lucien poured the last of the champagne into Karen’s glass that he added enough sedative to throw her into a deep, dreamless sleep for at least an hour.

  It took less than five minutes for the drug to work.

  When Karen reopened her eyes, there was no more picnic, no more outdoors. She came to very slowly, and the first thing she realized was that her head ached with such ferocity, it felt like an animal was inside her skull, clawing at her brain.

  In the poor light and through the pain, it took her eyes four whole minutes to finally regain focus. As they did, she struggled to understand her surroundings. She was sitting inside a dark, stuffy and soiled room. The walls seemed to be made of plain wood, like a large tool shack in someone’s back garden. But something inside her told her that she wasn’t in anyone’s back garden. She was somewhere else. Somewhere no one would find her . . . a place where no one would hear her if she screamed. And as that realization dawned on her, that was exactly what she tried doing – screaming. And that was when she became aware that her lips weren’t really moving. Her jaw wasn’t moving either. Panic took hold of her body and she tried to look around her. Her neck wasn’t moving.

  Oh, Jesus!

  She tried to move her fingers.

  Nothing.

  Her hands.

  Nothing.

  Her feet and toes.

  Nothing.

  Her
legs and arms.

  Nothing.

  All she could move were her eyes.

  They stirred down to her body, and she saw that she was sitting down on some cheap metal chair, unrestrained. Her arms were loose and falling down the sides of the chair.

  For a second, she thought she was dreaming, that she would very soon wake up back in her bed, that she would laugh and wonder why her brain had produced such tormenting images, but then there was movement in the shadows to her right, and the fear she felt growing inside her told her that this was no dream.

  Her eyes darted in that direction.

  ‘Welcome back, sleepyhead,’ Lucien said, stepping out of the darkness.

  It took Karen just a few seconds to notice that everything about him seemed different, starting with what he was wearing – a long, lab-like, plastic, see-through coverall. His sneakers were also covered with blue-plastic shoe covers.

  Lucien smiled at her.

  Karen tried to speak but her tongue felt heavy and swollen. Only undecipherable noise came from her throat.

  ‘Unfortunately, you won’t be able to say much,’ Lucien explained. ‘You see, Karen, I’ve injected you with a succinylcholine-based drug.’

  Fear exploded inside Karen’s eyes.

  Succinylcholine is a neuromuscular-blocking agent. It blocks transmission at the neuromuscular joint, causing paralyses of whichever skeletal muscle was affected. In Karen’s case, her entire body. The nervous system, though, stays intact. She would still be able to feel everything.

  Lucien checked his watch. ‘You’ll be in this state for a while longer.’ He stepped closer. ‘You know, I’m not a big fan of tattoos. I’m not sure if I’ve told you that before, but I will admit that that design you have on your upper right arm is very nice. Japanese, isn’t it?’ As he said that, he moved his right hand from behind his back, and the metallic blade glistened in the dim light.

  There was no room for any more fear in Karen’s eyes. They just teared up as more unrecognizable sounds escaped her throat.

  Lucien stepped closer still.

  ‘The main reason why I paralyzed you,’ he said. ‘Was because I wouldn’t want you to wiggle about and mess this up. This is very delicate work.’ He looked at the blade – a laser-sharp surgical scalpel. ‘This will hurt a little bit.’

  Tears just rolled down Karen’s cheeks.

  ‘But the good news for you is that . . . I’ve done this before.’

  Sixty-Six

  Karen implored her body to move. She tried to gather together all the strength she had left inside her, all the will-power she could muster, but it simply wasn’t enough. Her body just wouldn’t respond, no matter how hard she willed it to. She tried screaming, talking, pleading, but her tongue still felt like a huge hairy moth inside her mouth.

  Slowly and skillfully, Lucien used the scalpel to rupture the skin at the top of Karen’s shoulder blade. The first blob of blood came out, and he used a piece of gauze to clear it up. He proceeded to gradually slice and very carefully pull the skin off her arm.

  Karen’s head had been paralyzed in a sitting-up sleeping position, slumped forward and slightly to the right. Her chin was low and almost touching her chest. Lucien had placed her in that position deliberately. He knew that once the drug had taken effect, Karen wouldn’t be able to move her neck, only her eyes. He wanted her to be able to see.

  And so she did.

  As Lucien moved closer, her eyes shot right and she saw the scalpel pierce her skin and the blood come out of her arm, but she was so scared that the pain effect was delayed. It took several seconds for a sharp and deep penetrating pain to finally hit her, releasing an animal-like, guttural growl that came from deep inside her.

  The skinning, together with Karen’s contagious fear, filled Lucien with a mind-numbing satisfaction he couldn’t explain. Much better than any drug he could think of.

  The entire process didn’t take him very long, and at the end of it Lucien was floating on air, high on the chemicals his brain had released into his bloodstream. He would’ve completed the skinning in half of the time, but Karen could only manage a few minutes before she passed out. Lucien wanted her awake, he wanted her panic, and so he interrupted the skinning process to bring her back to consciousness before starting again. That took time.

  When he was finally done, he waited for Karen to come to again and lifted the bloody, tattooed piece of skin to show her.

  Her internal organs weren’t paralyzed, and as her eyes caught sight of what used to be part of her upper right arm, her stomach shot half of its contents back up her esophagus and she vomited all over herself.

  ‘Don’t worry, Karen,’ Lucien said as he began to clean her up.

  Karen shuddered inside at his touch.

  ‘That’s the only tattoo I want from you. I will not be taking any of your other ones.’

  Karen had five tattoos in total.

  ‘But I do have a surprise for you.’ Lucien got up and disappeared into the shadows for a moment.

  Karen heard a muffled scratching metallic sound, as if Lucien had begun dragging a beer keg across the floor. When he reappeared, she finally saw what he was dragging, and it was no beer keg. Lucien had with him a couple of metallic tanks, very similar in appearance to the large oxygen tanks one would find in hospitals. But somehow Karen knew that the contents of those tanks wouldn’t be oxygen.

  At the top, a hose was attached to the nozzle of each tank. Lucien placed the tanks about five feet in front of Karen’s chair before returning to the shadows. Seconds later, he resurfaced, bringing with him a telescopic boom microphone stand that had been specially adapted. The alteration was that the stand had two boom arms instead of one.

  He placed the stand in between Karen and the tanks before adjusting the two boom arms – one up, one down. The up one was leveled at Karen’s chest, the down one at her waist.

  Karen’s eyes were following every movement with anticipation and an enormous sense of dread. She could almost feel her organs trembling inside her.

  Lucien proceeded to hook a tank hose to each of the boom arms, so both hoses were now pointing directly at Karen.

  ‘I have a question for you, Karen.’

  There was nothing Karen could do but just stare at him.

  ‘Have you ever heard of a LIN charge?’

  He twisted both tanks so that their labels were facing Karen. As she read them and understood what their contents were, her heart froze.

  Sixty-Seven

  Taylor had frowned at Lucien’s question, but Hunter knew exactly what he was talking about.

  LN2, LIN and LN are all known abbreviations used for liquid nitrogen. A LIN charge is a supercooled liquid nitrogen blast. It became known as a LIN charge because the military had created liquid nitrogen grenades and explosive charges that could be magnetically attached to structures like doors, walkways, bridges and so on. Their main purpose was to hyper-freeze anything – alloys, metal, plastic, wood – making them extremely vulnerable and easy to breach. The real problem comes when a LIN charge hits human skin.

  Liquid nitrogen grenades differ from all other known types of grenade in one simple way. Their charge doesn’t need to break or penetrate the skin of the target in order to kill them.

  The premise behind their effectiveness is based on the special chemical properties of the most abundant mineral on earth – water.

  Water is the only naturally occurring substance on the planet that expands when cooled. If a human body is struck by a blast of supercooled liquid nitrogen, it will become very cold, very fast. When that happens, blood cells will freeze instantly in what is known as a ‘shock freeze’. The real messy part comes because blood cells are made of approximately 70 percent water, and the water in the blood cells will begin to expand very, very rapidly. The result of all those water molecules in one’s bloodstream expanding so quickly is total body hemorrhage. The subject will bleed from just about everywhere – eyes, ears, mouth, nose, nails, sexual organs and
through the skin.

  Because of the supercooled charge, the molecules’ expansion doesn’t stop, and in consequence every single blood cell in the human body eventually explodes. It’s an excruciating death, and a totally horrifying sight.

  For Taylor’s sake, Lucien briefly explained the entire process.

  ‘I’ll tell you this,’ Lucien said to Hunter and Taylor. ‘What happened to her body once I blasted it with liquid nitrogen was hell-scary, even for me. It was like everything inside her exploded, and all that blood came pouring out through . . .’ He sighed deeply and scratched his beard, sweeping his eyes over his barren cell. ‘Everywhere, really. I spent four days just cleaning and disinfecting that shack so wild animals wouldn’t take over once I was gone.’ Lucien paused, remembering. ‘My friend back at Yale told me that they were performing this experiment on a live frog in one of the labs. It involved liquid nitrogen. When he told me what had happened, I just tried to imagine how a human body would react. But even my fertile imagination didn’t reach as far as reality.’

  If Hunter or Taylor had any doubts that they were sitting before pure evil, those doubts had just vanished in the last few minutes. Neither of them wanted to hear any more details.

  ‘The location, Lucien?’ Hunter asked. His voice was steady and reasonable. ‘Did you bury her around Lake Saltonstall?’

  Lucien ran a finger around the grooves surrounding one of the cinder blocks on the wall to his left. ‘That I did. And I have a surprise for you. I revisited that site four more times after Karen, if you know what I mean.’ He pursed his lips in a ‘What can I do?’ way and followed it with a careless shrug. ‘It was a good site, well hidden.’

  ‘Are you saying we’ll find five bodies at the site, instead of only one?’ Taylor asked.

  Lucien held the suspense up for a moment longer before nodding. ‘Uh-huh. Would you like their names?’