by Chris Carter
As crazy as it seemed, a smile came to her lips. The human brain is a very complex organ, and a fragile and shattered mind sometimes clutches at straws. Right there and then she didn’t think of him as the man who would probably rape her repeatedly before killing her. She thought of him as the man-savior who was coming to bring her food and water, who was coming to take away her overflowing toilet bucket that filled the room with stench and sickness.
She held on to the wall and slowly propped herself up on her feet. With the hesitant steps of a battle-weary soldier, she gradually made her way to the door and placed her ear against it.
‘Hello . . .’ she called in a voice so weak that it seemed to belong to a scared child.
No reply.
‘Hello . . . are you out there? . . . Please?’
. . .
‘Please can I have some water?’ Her voice was now strangled with tears. She was shivering so badly her teeth were shattering against each other.
‘Please . . .?’ She began crying. ‘Please help me . . .? Just a few drops of water, please?’
She heard nothing but absolute silence.
She stayed on the floor by the door with her ear pressed hard against it for a long time – a couple of hours, probably. There was no noise. There never was. Her tired brain was so desperate it was starting to trick her. Her fever was so high, she was starting to hallucinate.
It took some time for her sobs to subside. She wiped the tears from her eyes and her dirty cheeks, and with no strength left in her to get back up on her feet again, she crawled back to her corner and her blanket on the other side of the room.
She was losing her mind. She could feel she was losing her mind.
As she curled herself back into a ball again, she started whispering to herself. ‘Don’t give up. Stay strong. You’ll get through this. Stay strong . . .’ She paused, frowning as her confused eyes circled the room. ‘Stay strong . . .’ she repeated and paused again, forcing her brain to remember, but it was gone. She couldn’t believe it was gone.
‘I’m . . .’
Nothing.
‘My name is . . .’
Blank.
She desperately wanted to tell herself to stay strong, but she couldn’t remember her own name.
She began crying again.
Seventy-One
‘Madeleine,’ Lucien said. He was still sitting on his bed with his legs stretched comfortably in front of him. ‘Her name is Madeleine Reed. But she likes to be called Maddy.’
A prickling began to run deep inside Hunter’s body, as if soda bubbles were racing through his bloodstream in an expanding sense of urgency.
Taylor felt as if someone had just slapped her across the face.
‘What?’ she asked, leaning forward on her chair.
‘Madeleine Reed, or if you wish, Maddy Reed,’ Lucien repeated with a shrug. ‘She’s twenty-three years old. I picked her up on April 9, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but she was born in Blue Springs City, Missouri.’ He jerked his head toward the end of the corridor outside his cell. ‘You can go check it out if you like. Her family must be going crazy by now.’
Hunter and Taylor both knew that Adrian Kennedy was listening in on the interview. He would have the name and everything else checked in a matter of minutes.
‘April 9?’ Taylor said, her eyes wide with surprise. ‘That’s four months ago.’
‘It is indeed,’ Lucien agreed. ‘But don’t worry, Agent Taylor, I’ve got a little system that works. It’s been proven over the years.’ He smiled. ‘I leave her rations of food and water before I leave, and Maddy is very clever. She figured out very quickly that she had to go easy on it, or else it would all run out before I got back with more. And I’ll tell you, she became quite an expert at it.’ He opened his hands and studied the veins crisscrossing the backs of them. ‘But I was supposed to be back four, maybe five days ago.’
He allowed the seriousness of his words to punch everyone square in the face before he continued.
‘If Maddy ran out of food and water a few days ago, she’d be very weak by now, no doubt about that, but she’s probably still alive. Now, how long she’ll stay that way? I can’t tell you.’
‘Where is she?’ Hunter asked.
‘Tell me about Jessica Petersen,’ Lucien came back. ‘Tell me about the woman you loved.’
Hunter sucked in a deep breath.
‘Tell us where she is, Lucien, so we can save her, and I promise you that I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.’
Lucien rubbed the patch of skin between his eyebrows. ‘Umm.’ He pretended he was thinking about it. ‘No. No deal. Like I’ve said, now it’s your turn to answer my questions. I’ve given you enough.’
‘I will answer them, Lucien,’ Hunter said. ‘I give you my word I will. But if she has run out of food and water four days ago, we need to get to her now.’ The urgency in Hunter’s voice filled the air with electricity.
Lucien just looked at him, unperturbed.
‘What’s the point in letting her die this way, Lucien?’ Hunter pleaded. ‘Whatever satisfaction you got from killing your victims, Madeleine’s death will not give it to you.’
‘Probably not,’ Lucien agreed.
‘So please let her live.’
Lucien looked unfazed.
‘It’s over, Lucien. Look around you. You’ve been caught. By chance, but you’ve been caught. There’s no point in taking anyone else’s life.’ Hunter paused. ‘Please, there must still be something human inside you. Have mercy this once. Let us bring Madeleine in.’
Lucien got back on his feet. ‘Nice speech, Robert,’ he said, pursing his lips. ‘Short, to the point, and with just the right amount of emotion. For a second there, I thought your eyes would tear up.’ Sarcasm was like a second skin for Lucien. ‘But I am having mercy. My kind of mercy. And this is how it works. First I want to hear about Jessica; then, and only then, I’ll tell you the location of Karen Simpson and the other four victims’ remains in New Haven, and I’ll tell you where Madeleine Reed is. After that you and Agent Taylor can go be heroes.’
Lucien saw Taylor check her watch.
‘Yes, you are losing time,’ he said, nodding. ‘Every second suddenly became really precious, hasn’t it? You don’t need me to tell you that dehydration can have irreversible neurological consequences. If you don’t get a move on, even if you find her alive, by the time you get to her she might be nothing more than a vegetable.’
Lucien pointed to Hunter’s chair.
‘So sit your ass back down, Robert, and start talking.’
Seventy-Two
Hunter checked his watch, exchanged a quick, worried look with Taylor, and returned to his seat.
‘What do you want to know?’ he said, looking Lucien in the eye.
Lucien’s smirk was triumphant. ‘I want to know what happened. How come you never married the woman you were engaged to? How come you and Jessica aren’t together?’
‘Because she passed away.’
Taylor turned her head and caught Hunter’s gaze. Something glittered in his eyes, and she thought she detected great sadness in them.
Lucien saw it too. ‘How?’ he asked. ‘How did she die?’
Hunter knew he couldn’t lie. ‘She was murdered,’ he replied.
Taylor couldn’t hide the surprise in her eyes.
‘Murdered?’ Lucien frowned. ‘OK, now this is getting interesting already. Please do carry on, Robert.’
‘There’s nothing more to it. We were engaged and she was murdered before I had the chance to marry her. That’s all there is.’
‘That’s never all there is, Robert. That’s only superficial, and that’s not the purpose of this exercise. Tell me how it happened. Were you there? Did you see it happen? Tell me how you felt. That’s what I really want to know. The feelings deep inside you. The thoughts in your head.’
Hunter hesitated for a split second.
‘You can take as long as you want,’ Lucien challenged. ‘It doesn’t
bother me. But remember that the clock is ticking for poor Madeleine.’
‘No, I wasn’t there,’ Hunter said. ‘If I were, it wouldn’t have happened.’
‘That’s a bold statement, Robert. So where were you?’ Lucien sat back down at the edge of his bed. ‘Feel free to start at the beginning.’
Hunter had never talked about what had happened to anyone. Some things he found it better to keep locked inside, in a place he barely visited himself.
‘At that time I hadn’t made detective for the LAPD,’ he began. ‘I was just a police officer with the central bureau. My partner and I were out doing rounds in the Rampart area that day.’
‘I’m listening,’ Lucien said once Hunter paused for breath.
‘Though Jess and I were engaged, we didn’t live together,’ Hunter explained. ‘We were making arrangements to, once I became a detective, which was only a few weeks away, but at that time, we still lived in separate houses. I was supposed to see her that night. We were having dinner together. She’d made reservations in a restaurant somewhere in West Hollywood. But that day, toward the end of the afternoon, my partner and I were dispatched to check on a domestic-violence disturbance in Westlake.
‘We got to the address in less than ten minutes, but it all sounded quiet. Too quiet. The husband must’ve seen our black and white unit approaching through the window. We got out, walked up to the door and knocked. Actually my partner, Kevin, knocked. I walked out to the side of the house to check the window.’
‘So what happened then?’ Lucien urged Hunter.
‘The husband shot Kevin with a sawn-off twelve-gauge shotgun through the letterbox flap on the door. He was hiding behind it, waiting for us.’ Hunter looked down at his hands. ‘The gun was loaded with heavy double-slug terminator ammo. From that distance, the round practically tore Kevin’s body in half.’
‘Wait,’ Lucien said. ‘So just like that, this guy shot a cop through the door?’
Hunter nodded. ‘He was high on crack-cocaine. He’d been high on it for several days. That was also the main reason for the domestic violence. His brain was soup. He’d locked his wife and his little daughter in the house, and had been abusing and beating them. His little girl was six.’
Even Lucien paused for thought. ‘So what did you do after he’d torn your partner in half with a shotgun?’
‘I returned fire. I pulled Kevin away from the door and I returned fire.’
‘And . . .?’
‘I aimed low,’ Hunter said. ‘Lower half of the body. I wasn’t looking for a kill shot, just to maim. Both of my shots got through, but with reduced velocity from breaching the door. The first hit the husband on his right thigh, the second on his groin.’
Lucien coughed a laugh. ‘You shot his dick off?’
‘It was unintentional.’
This time it was a full, throaty laugh. ‘Well, if the scumbag was abusing his six-year-old little girl, then I guess he deserved it.’
Taylor found it rich that someone like Lucien would call anyone a scumbag.
‘He survived?’ Lucien asked.
‘Yes. I called for backup, but the amount of blood he was losing, together with being shot in the groin, scared him sober. Before backup and the ambulance arrived, he opened the door and gave himself up.’
‘But your partner didn’t make it,’ Lucien concluded.
‘No. He was dead before he hit the ground.’
‘Too bad,’ Lucien said, with no emotion in his voice. ‘So I guess that you never made it for dinner with Jess that night.’ He paused and studied Hunter. ‘Do you mind if I call her Jess?’
‘Yes, I do.’
Lucien nodded. ‘OK, I apologize and I’ll rephrase. So I guess that you never made it for dinner with Jessica that night.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
Seventy-Three
Los Angeles, California.
Twenty years earlier.
Hunter had helped place Kevin’s body in the coroners’ van before having to recount the details of what had happened to the detectives now assigned to the case. After that, he drove to the Rampart General Hospital to check on the progress of the man he’d shot.
A doctor came out of the operation room to update him. The man, who went by the name of Marcus Colbert, would live, but he would probably walk with a limp for the rest of his life, and he would never again have active sexual relations with anyone.
Hunter’s head was an absolute mess, but he still had to go back to his precinct and fill in several reports before he could go home.
Protocol dictated that after a shootout with fatal victims, any LAPD officer involved must have at least a couple of sessions with an LAPD shrink before, pending a psychological evaluation, being allowed to return to full duties. His captain told him that his first session with the appointed psychologist would be in two days’ time.
Hunter sat in an empty room, staring at the pen in his hand and the empty reports in front of him for a long time. The events that had taken place earlier that day kept on playing and replaying in his mind like an old movie stuck on an endless loop. He couldn’t believe Kevin was gone – cowardly shot dead by a paranoid crackhead on a drug binge. They’d been partners since Hunter had joined the LAPD, a year and a half earlier. Kevin was a good man.
By the time Hunter was finally done with the reports, it was coming up to ten in the evening. Understandably, he’d forgotten all about his dinner plans with Jessica. He gave her a call to apologize and explain why he hadn’t turned up or called earlier, but the phone rang a few times before going straight to the answering machine.
Jessica was a very pretty and intelligent woman, and she fully understood the complications that came with dating a law enforcement officer – the long hours, the last-minute cancellations, the worries for Hunter’s well-being, everything. She also knew that once Hunter made detective, those complications would step up a level or two, but she was in love, and to her that was all that mattered.
Hunter left a short message apologizing, but he didn’t go into any details; he would tell her everything when he saw her. But Jessica was also very sensitive, and though he’d tried to conceal it, he was sure that she would pick up the sadness in his voice, the seriousness of it all.
Hunter found it strange that Jessica hadn’t answered the phone. He didn’t believe she’d gone out, not at that time on a Tuesday evening. Maybe tonight, she was just a little more upset than the previous times he’d had to cancel on her right on the last minute. Despite his head being all over the place, he still managed to think straight enough to stop by a 24-hour grocery shop and pick her up some flowers.
He got to Jessica’s place just before 11:00 p.m. and, as he parked on the street outside and looked back at her house, he was overwhelmed by a dread sensation so intense it nauseated him. He’d never felt anything like it before. But then again, he’d never lost a partner before.
Hunter stepped out of the car and approached the house, but with every step, the dread sensation inside of him multiplied itself exponentially.
Sixth sense, premonition, gut feeling, whatever name anyone would like to call it, by the time he got to the door, Hunter’s was screaming at him. Something wasn’t right.
He had a copy of the keys, but he didn’t need them. The front door was unlocked. Jessica never left the front door unlocked.
Hunter pushed the door open, stepped into Jessica’s dark living room, and was immediately hit by a faint, metallic, copper-like smell that practically paralyzed his heart and sent a roller coaster of shivers up and down his spine.
Blood does not have any smell while flowing through one’s body. It’s only when it comes into contact with air that it acquires a very distinctive, non-chemical, metallic smell, very similar to copper. Hunter had been surrounded by that same smell that afternoon.
‘Oh, God, no.’ The terrified words dribbled from his lips.
The flowers hit the floor.
His trembling hand reached for the light switc
h.
As brightness bathed the room, Hunter’s world was sent into darkness. A darkness so deep he wasn’t sure if he would ever find his way out of it again.
Jessica lay face down in a pool of her own blood by the kitchen door. The living room around him was a mess – broken lamps, tossed furniture, open drawers – distinct signs of a struggle.
‘Jess . . . Jess . . .’ Hunter ran to her, calling out in a voice that didn’t even seem to belong to him.
He kneeled by her side, his trousers soaking in her blood.
‘Oh, God.’ His voice broke.
He reached for her and turned her over.
Jessica had been stabbed several times. There were lacerations on both of her arms, hands, chest, abdomen and neck.
Hunter looked at her beautiful face and his vision clouded with tears. Her lips had already faded to a pale color. The skin on her face and hands had acquired a peculiar shade of purple. Rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet, but it was well on its way, which told Hunter that she’d been murdered less than four hours earlier – around the time he was supposed to have picked her up for dinner. That knowledge sent the darkness inside of him plunging into new depths. His soul seemed to abandon him, leaving behind just an empty body, drowning in sorrow.
Gently, Hunter pulled her hair away from her face, kissed her forehead, brought her to his chest and hugged her tight. He could still smell her delicate perfume. He could still feel the softness of her hair.
‘I’m so sorry, Jess.’ A suffocating kind of anguish drowned his words. ‘I’m so terribly sorry.’
He held her in his arms until the tears stopped coming.
If he could’ve exchanged places with her, if he could’ve breathed his life into her body, he would’ve done it. He would’ve given his life for hers without a second thought.
He finally let go of her, and as he turned his head he saw something he had completely missed. Written in blood on one of the living-room walls were the words, cop whore.
Seventy-Four
As Hunter finally told Lucien about that night, a dark, endless pit, like an old wound that had never really healed, reopened in Hunter’s stomach, dragging his heart down, and bringing back an emptiness inside of him he’d fought for twenty years to leave behind.