Chris Carter - An Evil Mind

‘Sure.’ Billy started typing something into the computer behind the reception desk. ‘Here we go,’ he said after just a few seconds. ‘The unit is one of our medium, special ones — ten feet by ten feet.’

‘Special?’ Decker asked.

‘Yeah,’ Billy said. ‘It’s one of our units that’s fitted with a power socket.’

‘OK.’

‘It was rented out eight months ago, on the fourth of January, to a Mr Liam Shaw,’ Billy continued reading from his screen. ‘He paid for it a whole year in advance. . cash.’

‘No surprise there,’ Decker said.

‘The unit is located on Corridor F,’ Billy added. ‘I can take you there now if you like.’

‘Let’s go,’ Figueroa and Decker said at the same time.

Until they had some sort of confirmation that Lucien was telling the truth about the self-storage unit in Seattle, no one saw any point in moving forward with the interviews. Director Adrian Kennedy told Hunter and Taylor that Washington FBI agents, armed with a federal search warrant, had already been sent to verify the veracity of Lucien’s statements, and they should have an answer in the next sixty minutes or less.

Taylor was sitting alone inside one of the conference rooms on sublevel three of the BSU building, staring at the untouched cup of coffee on the table in front of her, when Hunter opened the door and stepped inside.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

For a moment it seemed like Hunter’s question hadn’t reached her, then she slowly turned and looked up at him.

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

An awkward few silent seconds followed.

‘You did well down there,’ Hunter said in a non-patronizing or condescending tone.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Taylor replied with a sarcastic nod. ‘Except for starting out with the wrong first question, you mean.’

‘No,’ Hunter told her, taking a seat across the table from her. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, you see. No matter what first question you came up with, Courtney, Lucien would’ve thrown it back at you and tried to discredit you, tried to make you feel inferior, tried to shake your confidence and make you believe you’re not good enough, because he wants to get under your skin. And he knows he’s good at it. In college he used to bully professors that way.’

Taylor kept her eyes on Hunter.

‘He wants to get under my skin too, but he knows me a little better than he does you, or at least he did, so right now he’ll want to test the water with you to see how you respond, and he’s going to keep on pushing harder and harder, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Let him push,’ Taylor replied firmly.

‘Just remember that to Lucien this is like a game, Courtney. . his game, because he knows he has the upper hand. Right now, there’s only one thing we can do.’

Taylor looked back at Hunter. ‘We play the game,’ she said.

Hunter shook his head. ‘Not the game, we play his game. We give him what he wants. Make him believe he’s winning.’

Adrian Kennedy pushed the conference-room door open and peeked inside. ‘Ah, here you are.’ He was carrying a blue dossier with him.

‘Anything from Seattle yet?’ Hunter asked.

‘Not yet,’ Kennedy responded. ‘We’re still waiting, but it doesn’t look like Lucien was lying about the identities of the women found in his trunk.’ He flipped open the dossier. ‘Megan Lowe, twenty-eight years old. Born December 16 in Lewistown, Montana. She left Lewistown when she was sixteen, six months after her mother allowed her then boyfriend to move into their house.’ Kennedy instinctively nodded at Hunter. ‘She first moved to Los Angeles, where she spent the next six years. All indicates that she was indeed a street-working girl. After LA, Megan moved to Seattle. Line of work seemed to have stayed the same.’ He turned a page on the report he was reading. ‘Kate Barker, twenty-six years old. Born May 11 in Seattle, Washington. She left home when she was seventeen and moved in with a boyfriend, who at the time was an “aspiring musician”. Not confirmed, but it seems like the boyfriend was the one who first got Kate to prostitute herself.’

‘Money for drugs?’ Taylor asked.

Kennedy shrugged. ‘Probably. The abduction dates Lucien gave us, July second for Megan and July fourth for Kate, will be hard to confirm, as neither of them were ever reported missing.’

That wasn’t surprising. Prostitutes account for the third-largest number of unsolved murders in the USA, just behind gang and drug-related killings. Every day thousands of street-working girls in America are raped, beaten up, robbed or abducted. They aren’t targeted because of how attractive they look, or because they carry cash with them. They are targeted because they are easily accessible and extremely vulnerable, but most of all because they are anonymous. The vast majority of street-working girls live alone, or share with other working girls. They don’t normally have a partner for obvious reasons. Many of them are runaways with little or no links to their families anymore. They live lonely lives, with very few friends. Statistically, only two in every ten street workers that go missing are ever reported to missing persons.

Kennedy handed a copy of the report to Hunter and one to Taylor. The reports each carried a mugshot of their subjects. Both women, Megan Lowe and Kate Barker, had been arrested a couple of times for prostitution. Despite the mugshots, it was impossible for anyone to match the photographs to the two heads found inside Lucien’s trunk, such was the brutality of the wounds inflicted on them.

‘If Lucien wasn’t lying about their identities,’ Kennedy said, as he was leaving the room, ‘chances are, he isn’t lying about Seattle either.’

The inside of the storage facility was just as brightly lit as the reception office, with extra-wide corridors and rounded corners for ease of movement with wheeled carts and pallet trucks. The resin floor had been painted in light green. The storage unit doors were all white with their respective numbers painted in black at the center of it, and again on the wall to the right of the door. It took Billy about two minutes to guide them through all the turns and hallways until they reached corridor F. Unit 325 was the third door on the left.

‘Here we are,’ Billy said, indicating the unit.

Just as he’d explained earlier, centered on the right-hand edge of the rolling door was a metal bolt, locked in place by a thick, brass-colored padlock.

Figueroa and Decker moved forward to have a better look at it.

Unlike the military-grade padlock that Lucien had used to secure the door to the basement in the house in Murphy, this one was a Master ProSeries, shrouded padlock, not as impenetrable, but still formidable.

‘This is a pretty heavy duty padlock,’ Figueroa said, looking at Decker and then at Billy. ‘Do you think you can breach it with that bolt cutter?’

Billy had already assumed that he’d have to breach the padlock to the unit, and had brought with him a red and yellow forty-two-inch bolt cutter.

‘No problem,’ Billy said, stepping forward. ‘We had to cut through a similar one a few weeks ago. I’m pretty sure this one will be no different.’

‘So go right ahead and do your thing, Billy,’ Figueroa said, stepping out of the way.

Billy moved closer, opened the jaws of the cutter as wide as it would go and carefully positioned them around one of the shrouded ends of the padlock’s shackle. He put most of his weight behind the cutter, and gave it a firm squeeze.

Clank.

The cutter slid off the padlock as if nothing had happened, but they all saw something bounce onto the floor and slide away a couple of yards down the corridor. Billy had managed to cut off part of the protective shroud. Now the shackle was exposed on one side.