Chris Carter - An Evil Mind

Hunter quickly exited Madeleine’s room and found a bathroom down a long and empty hallway. Once inside, he reached for his cellphone and dialed Kennedy’s number. He knew Kennedy would still be awake.

Kennedy answered his phone with the second ring. ‘You’ve speed-read through all eight notebooks already?’

‘Almost there,’ Hunter replied. ‘One more to go. How’s your team doing?’

‘They’ve each been through four of the notebooks,’ Kennedy explained. ‘But I’ve got nine of them on the go, five notebooks each. At this rate, we should have a list by dawn.’

‘That would be great,’ Hunter said. ‘But you’ll have to ask them all to go back to the beginning and start again. They need to look for something else other than the locations. Create another list.’

Hunter could practically hear Kennedy frown.

‘What? What do you mean, Robert? What else? What other list?’

Hunter quickly told him.

‘Why?’

Hunter explained the reason why, and now he could almost hear Kennedy thinking.

A long pause.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Kennedy said in an outbreath. ‘Do you think. .?’

‘It’s another shot,’ Hunter replied. ‘And we agreed to take every shot we could.’

‘Absolutely. .’ Another thoughtful pause. ‘If you’re right, Robert, we might get a result. The problem is that that result could come tomorrow, next week, next month, or any time in the next twenty or thirty years. There’s no way of knowing.’

‘To get my hands on Lucien, I’m prepared to wait.’

‘OK,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But the team is just about to finish with the locations list, and you know that we can’t lose time on that, so let’s get that list first and then I’ll tell them to start again.’

‘OK. You’ll have my list of locations within the next hour.’ Hunter disconnected and went back to Madeleine’s room.

He finished skimming through the last notebook he had with him in thirty-one minutes — no new locations. His location list contained three entries. He texted Kennedy his list, went back to the first notebook, and started it all over again.

When Kennedy called Hunter at 11:22 a.m., Hunter’s eyes were strawberry red from tiredness and reading fatigue.

‘I thought you’d like to know,’ he said. ‘We have fifteen locations in total, spread across fifteen states. FBI and SWAT teams are getting ready as we speak. We should be ready to coordinate a mass crackdown in about an hour to an hour and a half.’

‘It sounds good,’ Hunter said.

‘How are you doing with the second list?’

‘Almost there. Give me another half an hour. How’s your team doing?’

‘Exhausted and overworked. Living on strong black coffee. People here are calling them “the pink-eye squad”.’

‘Yeah, I guess I can relate.’

‘They should also be finished in the next hour. How’s Madeleine doing?’

‘Still unresponsive.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘She’ll come out of it,’ Hunter said. ‘She’s a strong woman.’

Kennedy had to admire the confidence in Hunter’s voice.

‘Once you get the new list, you know what to do, right, Adrian?’

‘Yes, of course.’

They disconnected.

Back inside Madeleine’s hospital room, it took Hunter just another twenty-four minutes to complete his new list. This time he had four entries. He texted the new list to Kennedy and received a reply back in five seconds: ‘ Will initiate procedures as soon as I have all the entries. Locations crackdown will be in T–53 minutes. Will keep you posted .’

Hunter received the next text message from Kennedy in exactly fifty-three minutes.

‘ Locations crackdown is a go. Will keep you posted. Second list now completed — every procedure initiated. ’

There was nothing Hunter could do now but sit and wait. He massaged the back of his neck for an instant. Exhaustion had slowly worn its way into his brain, joints and muscles. Every time he moved, he could feel the tendons pulling tight across his whole body, as if they were about to snap. He closed his eyes only for a moment, and the next thing he felt was his cellphone vibrating in his chest pocket.

Hunter had dozed off for eighty-four minutes. To him, it felt like two seconds. He quickly left the room and answered Kennedy’s call.

‘We’ve drawn a blank, Robert,’ Kennedy said. ‘Lucien was in none of the locations.’ Kennedy’s voice sounded defeated, as if all hope had gone out of him. ‘And it doesn’t seem like he’d been in any of them for weeks. Judging by the photographs I’ve received back from the crackdown teams, some of those places were a torture haven, a slaughterhouse. You wouldn’t believe the torture paraphernalia found in them.’

Hunter was sure he would believe it.

‘It will take our forensics teams weeks, maybe months, to sift through everything in those fifteen locations, and it still might give us no clue to Lucien’s whereabouts. I’d say that those notebooks are our best bet of finding anything. . if there is anything to be found. But they have to be read thoroughly and scrutinized to the minutest detail, and that will also take a long time.’ Without realizing, Kennedy let out a beaten sigh. He had no doubt that by the time they finished analyzing everything Lucien had left behind, the killer would be long gone, vanished forever. As Lucien had said, they’d never see him again.

Hunter came to a sudden stop as he returned to Madeleine’s bedroom. All the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Madeleine was still lying flat and still, but her eyes were open, or semi-open, her eyelids struggling with their own weight.

Hunter rushed to her bedside.

‘Madeleine?’

She blinked hazily.

Hunter gently touched her hand. ‘Madeleine, remember me?’

She blinked again and her eyes finally found his face. She didn’t say a word, but her lips stretched into a thin, but very truthful smile.

Hunter smiled back. ‘I knew you’d beat this,’ he whispered. ‘I’m going to go get a doctor. I’ll be right back.’

She gave his hand the faintest of squeezes.

Hunter rushed out of the room, and in less than a minute was back with a short and plump doctor who walked as if carrying his body weight was an everyday penance. As the doctor approached Madeleine’s bed, Hunter felt his cellphone vibrate in his chest pocket again. He excused himself and quickly left the room.

‘Robert,’ Kennedy said as Hunter answered it, ‘the second list, the idea you came up with?’

‘Yes, what about it?’

‘You’re not going to believe this.’

Seven hours later.

John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York.

‘Would you like a drink while we wait for the rest of the passengers to board, Mr Tailor-Cotton?’ the young stewardess asked with a bright smile. Her blonde hair was pulled back and styled into a perfect bun, and her carefully applied makeup accentuated her facial features perfectly. ‘Perhaps champagne, or maybe a cocktail?’ she offered.

Champagne and cocktails were some of the many perks of flying first class.

The passenger’s eyes broke away from the window and found her pretty face. The nametag on her blouse read KATE. He smiled back.

‘Champagne would be perfect.’ His voice was soft, with a gentle Canadian accent. His dark green eyes had an intense, but knowledgeable look in them.

The smile never left the stewardess’s lips. She found Mr Tailor-Cotton mysteriously charming, and she liked that.