‘How long was it?’ Taylor asked. ‘The cooling-off period? How long between Susan Richards and your second victim?’
‘Seven hundred and nine days.’
Lucien didn’t even have to think about the answer. The number was etched in his brain. Every detail about everything he’d done was etched in his brain.
‘I was already at Yale,’ he proceeded. ‘Her name was Karen Simpson.’
Hunter frowned.
Lucien looked at him and nodded. ‘That’s right, Robert, Karen was real, with all the tattoos, the lip and nose piercings, the left ear stretched to a full centimeter, the Bettie Page-style fringe. . I met her at Yale, just like I told you, but I did lie about something. Karen was never a drug addict. That was just something I made up because it fit the story I wanted to tell you a couple of days ago. That’s something I learned along the way. If you’re going to lie, then use as many true facts as you can — real people, names, descriptions, locations, time frames or whatever. They’re easier to remember, and if you need to retell your story at a later date, you reduce your chances of being caught out.’
Hunter knew the theory.
‘Like I told you before, Karen was a very sweet woman. She was also doing a PhD in psychology. We used to study together. In fact. .’ Lucien gave them a goofy smile, one that said, ‘I know something that you don’t.’ ‘Both of you have already made her acquaintance.’ He gave Hunter and Taylor a challenging look.
‘The other framed tattoos down in that basement,’ Hunter said.
‘That’s right, Robert,’ Lucien agreed. ‘The cranes.’
One of the framed human skin pieces found in Lucien’s basement had a colored tattoo of a pair of cranes. The design had been taken from a painting called Cranes on a Snowy Pine, by the artist Katsushika Hokusai.
‘She had it tattooed on her upper right arm,’ Lucien said. ‘Now, despite Karen being only my second victim, I decided to get adventurous.’
Sixty-Three
There was something in the way Lucien phrased his last words that seemed to freeze the air for an instant, as if evil had been waiting around the corner all this time, and was just about to make its presence felt.
‘As I’ve said,’ Lucien continued, ‘the urges started coming back to me a few months after I left Stanford, but they didn’t become unbearable until much later. At first, I thought I could deal with them. I thought that they’d be easy to curb, but just like every repeat offender eventually finds out, I was wrong.’
Lucien used both of his hands to rub the back of his neck while closing his eyes and tilting his head back. After several silent seconds, he breathed out.
‘There was a difference this time. Like I said before, I had never looked at Susan as a potential victim until the night it all happened. This time, I knew Karen would be the one. I’d known it from the day I met her.’
‘What guided you toward that decision?’ Taylor asked. ‘What made you choose Karen?’
Lucien pulled an impressed face. ‘Very good question, Agent Taylor. Looks like you’re learning.’
The tattoos, Hunter thought. Even if physically, Karen didn’t resemble Susan at all, the tattoos would’ve reminded Lucien of her. And as he’d already admitted, he was chasing the same high. A new victim also carrying large tattoos meant that Lucien would’ve been able to partially skin her just as he’d done with Susan. By repeating the same methods, the same MO, most perpetrators believe they can achieve the same feelings and highs as they have in previous murders.
Lucien looked as if this was the first time he had actually thought about the reasons behind choosing Karen.
‘I guess the first thing that guided me toward Karen were her tattoos.’
Hunter didn’t even blink.
‘You’ve got to remember that large, colored tattoos weren’t as popular twenty-three years ago as they are now,’ Lucien said. ‘Especially on women. They reminded me of Susan.’ His words were dry as bone. They seemed to suck all the moisture out of the air. ‘I began having dreams about them. I began fantasizing about skinning those drawings off Karen’s body just like I’d done to Susan. And that was when I realized that another theory was proving true.’
Lucien nodded at Hunter as if they’d had some sort of secret bet all those years ago about which theories would prove true and which ones wouldn’t.
‘Subconsciously, my brain kept on going back to the same MO as I had used with Susan, and we all know the reason why, don’t we? Though it had been nowhere near perfect, I knew I’d feel more comfortable going back to an MO I had used before and knew it worked. Familiarity, Agent Taylor. That’s why repeat offenders rarely change their MO.’ He pointed to her notebook. ‘You can write that down if you want.’
Lucien got up, poured himself a glass of water from the washbasin, and returned to the edge of his bed.
‘But I decided that I wasn’t looking for comfortable. I wasn’t looking to do something I’d already done. That wasn’t part of what I had planned in my head. So I started to think about what I’d do differently. Even before I met Karen, I knew I would do it again. There was no doubt in my mind anymore. The urges had become too great for me to resist them. I knew that it was just a matter of time, and finding the right victim. So the search for a new hidden place began.’
‘Where is she?’ Hunter asked.
‘Oh, she’s still in Connecticut,’ Lucien confirmed. ‘Actually, not that far from New Haven and Yale University.’ An otherworldly feeling appeared to radiate out of Lucien, like a fatal sort of calm that could creep out just about anyone.
‘Where exactly?’ Hunter pushed.
More for effect than anything else, Lucien hesitated, moving his head from side to side as if half in doubt.
‘I’ll tell you, but let me ask you this first.’
Taylor was attentively observing Lucien. She would never forget the evil smile he threw their way.
‘Do you know what a LIN charge is?’
Sixty-Four
Lucien had met Karen Simpson right at the beginning of his second year at Yale University. Karen had just transferred from some place in England, and was still settling in. Lucien had never forgotten the first time he saw. . no, heard her. That was what caught his attention at first, her voice. . her British accent.
It was right at the end of a rather boring lecture in Investigative Psychology and Offending Behavior, when Karen put her hand up to ask a question. Lucien had already gathered his books together and was ready to leave when the sound of her voice made him stop. There was something in the calm and unconcerned way in which she pronounced every word. There was a charming cadence to her sentences that was almost hypnotizing to the ear. The icing on the cake was the way everything was dressed up in the most charismatic British accent.
Lucien’s eyes found Karen sitting at the other end of the lecture hall, almost hidden away among the other students. She couldn’t have been any taller than five-foot-two, Lucien guessed. He took a step to the side to get a better look at her. Her makeup looked quite different — heavier, more Gothic than most. She was wearing a dark T-shirt with ‘The Cure’ written on it and a photograph of someone with messy dark hair, heavy black eye makeup, and badly applied red lipstick.
But what really grabbed his attention was the large colored tattoo on her right upper arm. As he caught sight of it, it made him hold his breath for a moment or two. All of a sudden his memory was slapped with images of Susan and what had happened that night just over two years ago. Images of him carefully slicing the skin off her arm. The memories brought with them a tremendous head rush, something he hadn’t felt since that night, and for an instant Lucien felt light-headed and almost lost his balance.