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.
Thirty-One
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.’
Like a Mexican wave, agreement nods started with the person to Hunter’s right, and moved around the table all the way to Taylor.
Token collectors do in general take only one token from each victim. Usually a very intimate item. Something that will easily trigger very strong memories of the victim and the murder act, and remind them of how powerful they are. A lot of the time they go for intimate items of clothing because they’re in close contact with the victim’s skin, more precisely sexual parts, and they’ll frequently hold the victim’s smell. Some perpetrators even believe they’ll be able to smell the victim’s fear on the item for months afterward, maybe years if properly stored, heightening their exhilaration, because many of them become aroused, sexually or otherwise, by the fear they command over their prey. With that in mind, taking two or more intimate items that belonged to the same victim would become pointless because they would not increase the satisfaction perpetrators get from reliving the murder act. One is usually more than enough.
‘Detective Hunter is right,’ Doctor Lambert said. ‘There’d be very little point in taking more than one token from each victim.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Jennifer Holden from PROFILER exclaimed. ‘So you’re saying that we now might have another fourteen “possible” victims to add to the “possible” seven we’ve already got?’
‘Twenty-six “possible” new victims,’ Hunter corrected her, pointing to the jewelry pieces on the screen.
Six pairs of wide-open eyes honed in on him. Kennedy and Doctor Lambert were the only ones who showed no surprise.
‘Right again,’ Doctor Lambert confirmed, nodding at the group. ‘Following the double-token theory, if Mr Folter had already taken an underwear item from a victim, also taking a piece of jewelry from the same victim makes the second token pointless.’ He nodded at the screen. ‘We’ve got twelve pieces of jewelry. It would be safe to assume that the jewelry came from different victims, increasing the total to a possible twenty-six. Add that to what was found in his trunk and in his basement, and we might be looking at thirty-three victims so far.’
A few headshakes were followed by a couple of deflated sighs and whispers.
‘There’s something else,’ Hunter said.
The room’s attention returned to him.
‘Two of those rings, all three watches, and one of those necklaces aren’t feminine pieces of jewelry.’
All eyes moved back to the screen.
‘If these really belonged to his victims,’ Hunter moved on, ‘it doesn’t look like Lucien killed only women.’
Thirty-Two
At 7:30 a.m. sharp, the heavy metal door to the cell corridor in sublevel five of the BSU building buzzed open. The hallway beyond it was wide, well lit and about seventy-five yards long. The cinder-block wall on the right was painted a dull shade of gray. The shining resin floor carried almost the same color, just a touch darker, with two guiding yellow lines running along the edge of it. The left wall was a series of high-security cells. Ten in total. Each cell was separated by a wall as wide as the cell itself, which was about eleven feet. There were no metal bars. The cells were all fronted by very thick, shatterproof Plexiglas. On the Plexiglas, positioned in a cluster at the center of it and about five and a half feet from the floor, there were eight small conversation holes, about half an inch in diameter each. The cells were all empty, their lights turned off, with the exception of the one at the far end of the corridor.
Hunter and Taylor stepped through the door and into the echoey hallway. Despite being with the FBI for several years now, and having visited the BSU building on many occasions, this was the first time Taylor had been down in sublevel five. Hunter had never seen it either.
There was definitely something quite ominous and sinister about that long stretch of corridor, as if they had just stepped over the threshold between good and evil. The air inside it felt a touch too cold, a touch too dense, a touch less breathable.
Taylor did her best to fight the awkward shiver that sped up and down her spine as she took the first steps toward the last cell, but failed miserably. Something about that place reminded her of the Halloween haunted houses she used to be so scared of when she was a kid.
‘I don’t know about you,’ she said, steadying her body. ‘But I’d much rather do this up in the interrogation room.’
‘Unfortunately we don’t have that choice,’ Hunter replied as their shoes click-clacked against the shiny floor with every step. He suddenly stopped and faced Taylor. ‘Courtney, let me tell you something about Lucien.’ His voice was barely louder than a whisper. He didn’t want it to echo all the way to the last cell. ‘He always liked to play games — mind games — and he was very good at it. He’s probably even better now. I’m sure he’ll target you more than he will me. He’ll try to get under your skin with comments, innuendos, direct digs, whatever. Some will probably be very nasty. Just be prepared for it, OK? Don’t let it affect you. If he manages to get into your mind, he’ll rip you apart.’