Chris Carter - An Evil Mind

‘He could be lying about this being only the beginning,’ Jennifer Holden said. ‘As you’ve said —’ she nodded at Leo Hurst ‘— he seems to know his game. He knows that by saying that, the scales would tip in his favor. Maybe we should put him through a polygraph test.’

Hunter shook his head. ‘Even if he’s lying, he’d easily beat it.’

‘He would beat a lie-detector test?’ Jennifer Holden asked, a little surprised.

‘Yes,’ Hunter replied with absolute conviction. ‘I’ve seen him do it before just for fun, twenty-five years ago, and my guess is that he’s gotten better at it.’

A few odd looks circled the room.

‘You all saw the recording of the first interview,’ Hunter offered. ‘Even the facial analysis software that was being used failed to pick up any significant changes in his expressions. It looks to me that Lucien has almost no psychological response to lying. His pupil dilation and breathing remained exactly the same throughout. I’m sure that he’s trained himself, and we’ll find that even his pore size and skin flush will remain unchanged. He’s probably counting on a polygraph test. Whether we put him through one or not, it will make no difference to him.’

Doctor Lambert nodded his agreement. ‘Long, elaborate lies take a certain type of individual and a great amount of talent to do it convincingly. It requires creativity, intelligence, control, great memory and, most of the time, very high improvisational skills. And I’m only talking about regular circumstances here. When a person has to do all that before an authoritative figure, like a cop, or a federal agent, knowing that his freedom is on the line, those qualities will multiply themselves by a factor of X. Judging by how convincing he was in that first interview, I really wouldn’t be surprised if Lucien Folter waltzed his way through a polygraph test.’

‘Do you think he’s lying about this being only the beginning?’ Taylor asked Hunter.

‘No, I don’t, but what I, or any of us think, is irrelevant. Like Leo said, Lucien knows his game. He knows that after what we’ve seen, we don’t have the luxury to doubt. Right now, he’s calling the shots.’

No one said anything, because no one really knew what to say.

Hunter took the silent break opportunity and turned to face the man sitting at the head of the table.

‘How’s the house searching going, Adrian?’ he asked. ‘Any news?’

Kennedy looked at him as if Hunter had read his thoughts.

There was a stretched, worried pause.

‘Well,’ Kennedy said at last, ‘that’s the real reason we’re here tonight. The search team found something inside Lucien Folter’s bedroom. It was hidden inside his mattress.’

The tension in the room climbed up a few degrees.

Everyone waited.

‘And this is what they found.’

Kennedy clicked a button on the small remote-control unit on the table in front of him, and the image of the closed wooden box Goldstein and Reyna had found was immediately projected onto the white screen on the far wall.

‘Looks like a gun case,’ Deon Douglas commented. ‘Big enough for a machine gun, or a disassembled long-range rifle. Has it been opened yet?’

Kennedy nodded. ‘Unfortunately, a weapon wasn’t what was found inside it,’ he replied.

‘So what did we get?’ Taylor asked.

Kennedy’s eyes circled the table and paused on Hunter before he pressed the remote-control button one more time.

‘We got this.’

Despite lights off and the total darkness that surrounded him, Lucien Folter lay awake in his cell down in sublevel five of the BSU building. His eyes were open, and he was staring at the ceiling as if some fascinating movie that only he could see were being projected against it. But this time he wasn’t lost in one of his meditation trances. The time for meditation was well and truly over. He was simply reorganizing his thoughts, putting them in an appropriate order of execution.

A step at a time, he thought. Take it a step at a time, Lucien.

And step one seemed to have gone perfectly so far.

Lucien would’ve given anything to have seen Hunter’s face when he entered the basement down in the house in Murphy and finally realized that the wall frames weren’t drawings. He would’ve given anything to have seen Hunter’s face when he finally recognized Susan’s tattoo.

Yes, that would’ve been worth a small fortune.

He felt his blood warming as memories of his last night with Susan came rushing back to him. He could still remember the sweet smell of her perfume, how soft her hair felt, how smooth her skin was. He reminisced on those memories for just a while longer before pushing them aside.

Lucien wondered how long it would take the FBI search team to find the box he had hidden inside the mattress in the master bedroom.

Probably not that long, if they’re any good.

Instinctively, he started going over the contents of the box in his head, and that filled him with excitement, bringing a proud but curbed smile to his lips. He could remember every item. But that box and its contents were nothing compared to what was still to come. They were all in for a big surprise.

Lucien swallowed his smile down and finally closed his eyes.

One step at a time, Lucien. One step at a time.

The next image to appear on the projection screen was a snapshot of the same wooden box they’d all seen seconds earlier, but this time the lid was open. They could all clearly see that the box had a division down its center, creating two distinct compartments. As if on cue, everyone in the room, with the exception of Adrian Kennedy, craned their necks forward and squinted at the screen at the same time.

The compartment on the right was packed full of what at first seemed like just a bunch of colorful fabrics. The compartment on the left was filled with a variety of different jewelry items.

Silence.

More squinting.

A few chairs shuffled.

‘Are those women’s underwear?’ Agent Taylor finally asked, indicating the compartment on the right.

‘Let me clear that up for you,’ Kennedy said, clicking the remote control button yet again.

The image on the screen changed one more time. It now showed all the contents from the box neatly arranged over a white surface. Taylor was right. The fabrics that were in the right compartment were all women’s underwear, panties to be more precise, in a multitude of colors, sizes and styles, but now that they were all unbundled and plainly displayed in rows, an unseen detail became clear to everyone. Many of the garments were covered with dried blood.

The jewelry items that had occupied the left box compartment were also clearly arranged in rows, divided by type — rings, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, watches, chains, and even a couple of belly button bars.

The air inside the conference room seemed to have become stale and intoxicating all of a sudden.

‘Inside the right compartment, we found fourteen pairs of women’s underwear,’ Kennedy said, standing up. ‘Out of those, eleven were covered with blood.’ He allowed the gravity of what he’d just said to sink in before continuing. ‘All the items have already been expedited to our forensics lab. The garments vary in size, from extra small, or size zero, to large — size thirty-four — which would indicate that they belonged to different people.’

‘They would have,’ Hunter said, more as an instinctive comment to himself than to the room, but Kennedy heard it.

‘Sorry, what was that, Robert?’

Hunter paused for an instant.

‘Those are tokens, Adrian, and I’m sure that everyone in this room knows that, in general, token collectors only take one token from each victim.’