‘Where you parked the Jeep,’ Kennedy said.
‘That’s right. That would’ve given Ghost more than enough time to pull Madeleine out of her cell — the last room on the left — tie her to the chair, and come hide inside that box.’
Kennedy turned and looked at the cardboard boxes pushed up against a dark corner.
‘He hid in there?’
Hunter nodded. ‘He had a small frame, and according to Lucien it sounded like he also had the flexibility of a contortionist.’ An awkward pause. ‘This was all rehearsed, Adrian. We walked into a trap, and I’m sorry I didn’t see it coming.’
‘A very well-prepared trap,’ Kennedy said. ‘Lucien put you and Agent Taylor under incredible time pressure to save a hostage’s life. He put you under even more mental pressure by revealing he was your fiancée’s murderer just minutes before forcing you to bring him here. The door was padlocked from the outside, and we all believed that Lucien always worked alone. There was no reason for you or Agent Taylor to suspect that there’d be someone in here waiting for you.’
‘I still should’ve checked the room properly,’ Hunter said. ‘I’m so terribly sorry for what happened to Courtney.’
No one said anything for about a minute.
‘He’s not going to stop killing,’ Kennedy finally said. ‘We both know that. And when he kills again, we’ll pick up the trail and we’ll hunt him down.’
‘No, we won’t,’ Hunter said.
Kennedy glared at him.
‘He killed for twenty-five years without anyone ever knowing, Adrian. No links. Lucien doesn’t follow a pattern. He doesn’t repeat the same MO. He experiments. He kills indiscriminately — old, young, male, female, blonde, brunette, American, foreigner. Nothing matters to him, except the experience. He could kill someone later today, he could have done it already for all we know. We could find the body, search the crime scene, and we still wouldn’t be able to say with any certainty if the killer had been Lucien or not.’
‘So you believe what he told you?’ Kennedy asked. ‘That we’ll never see him again?’
Hunter nodded. ‘Unless we outsmart him.’
‘And how do you suppose we do that?’
‘Maybe we can find something in those books.’
Kennedy’s gaze moved to the dust-covered books on the shelves.
‘Those are the notebooks you were looking for,’ Hunter explained. ‘Lucien told me that he was leaving us a gift. Well, that’s it. There are fifty-three books in total. All of them are somewhere between 250 and 300 pages long.’
Kennedy approached one of the shelves, randomly picked up one of the notebooks, and flipped it open. The pages were all handwritten. There was no date stamp, no mention of time whatsoever. Groups of written pages were separated by a single blank one, as if to isolate them into numberless and nameless chapters.
‘I don’t know exactly what we’ll find in them until we go through all of them thoroughly,’ Hunter said. ‘But I did have an idea.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘I skimmed through a couple of them before you got here. Judging by what I saw, these books will not only contain Lucien’s emotions, frame of mind, how he felt during the build-up and aftermath of a murder, his different MO’s and so on, but also everything he did, everyone he met, and everywhere he’s been since he started this murderous encyclopedia, including hide-out places like this one. Places no one knows about.’
Kennedy caught on fast. ‘And right now Lucien needs a place to go. A hiding place. And the house in Murphy and this fallout shelter are probably not the only two hiding, or captive, or torture places he has under his wing.’
‘Precisely.’
Kennedy thought about it for a beat. ‘Our problem is that if you’re right, Lucien might be halfway there already, and I’m sure he won’t hide in the same place for too long. He’ll get organized quickly, and then he’ll probably vanish.’
Hunter said nothing.
Kennedy looked back at the shelves. Fifty-three books, each about 300 pages long. Hunter could see the doubt in his eyes.
‘How quickly can you organize a team of the best speed readers you can find, Adrian?’ he asked. ‘People who can skim through pages fast, looking for something specific. In this case, a location.’
Kennedy checked his watch. ‘If I get on to it now, by the time I get these books back to Quantico, I’ll have a team there waiting for me.’
‘So if we’re fast enough, we’ll have our list by the morning,’ Hunter said.
‘Then we’ll hit every place on that list at the same time,’ Kennedy agreed.
‘I know it’s a long shot,’ Hunter said, ‘but with Lucien, we need to take every shot we get, because we won’t get many.’ He walked over to the bookshelves and collected eight random books.
‘What are you doing?’ Kennedy asked.
‘I’m the fastest speed-reader you’ll find.’
Kennedy knew that to be true.
‘I’ll go through these, and you can get your people to go through the rest. You’ll have my list in a few hours.’ Hunter started moving toward the exit.
‘Where are you going?
‘To the hospital. I promised Madeleine that I would be there.’
Kennedy knew that going after a list of places wasn’t the only reason Hunter wanted to go through those notebooks. If he could, he would’ve taken them all.
‘Robert,’ Kennedy called out.
Hunter paused.
‘Finding Jessica’s passage in one of those books will not soothe the pain. You know that. On the contrary, it will feed the anger and the hurt.’
Hunter studied Kennedy for a brief moment. ‘As I’ve said, Adrian, you’ll have my list in a few hours.’ He took the stairs out of Satan’s basement.
One Hundred and Seven
The doctors had just finished operating on Madeleine Reed when Hunter got to the hospital. They told him that she had lost a lot of blood. A minute or two longer getting her to the theater and there would’ve been nothing they could’ve done for her. But whoever had contained the external bleeding with the belt tourniquet had done a good enough job. If not for that, she would’ve died from loss of blood five minutes before the agents got her to the emergency unit.
The doctors also told Hunter that the operation had gone as well as they could expect. They had managed to contain the internal bleeding and suture the spleen wound shut before the organ failed, but Madeleine’s strength was already at its minimum before they operated. Now, all they could do was wait and hope that Madeleine’s weak body would somehow find the strength to wake up and breathe on her own. That her will to stay alive would be strong enough. The next few hours were absolutely critical. At the moment, machines were keeping her alive.
Hunter sat in an armchair pushed up against the corner, just a few feet away from Madeleine’s hospital bed. She lay flat and still under a thin coverlet. Different-sized tubes came out of her mouth, nose and arms, and connected to two different machines, one on each side of the bed. Even with the coverlet, Hunter could tell that her abdomen was heavily bandaged. The heart monitor on the right side of the bed beeped steadily, drawing a hypnotic peak line on its dark monitor screen. While that line peaked, there was still hope.
Before taking a seat, Hunter had stared at Madeleine’s face for a long time. She looked peaceful, and for the first time in God knows how long, not scared.