An Evil Mind (17 page)

As both agents stepped out of the car, a woman, probably in her early forties, exited a white Jeep Compass that was parked just a few yards away, four spaces to their right.

‘I’m US Court Marshal Joanna Hughes,’ she said, offering her hand. She didn’t have to ask. She could easily tell that Figueroa and Decker were the two FBI agents she was supposed to meet.

Hughes’ chestnut hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, which made her forehead seem too large for her round face. She wasn’t exactly an attractive woman. Her nose looked a little too pointy, her lips too thin, and her eyes seemed to be constantly squinting, as if trying to read something that was just a touch too far away. She was elegantly dressed in a cream business suit and beige, pointed high-heel shoes. The agents formally introduced themselves and shook hands.

‘Shall we?’ Hughes gestured toward the reception.

An electronic ‘ding-ding’ bell rang as Figueroa pushed the office door open and he, Decker and Hughes stepped into the excessively brightly lit rectangular room. Both FBI agents kept their dark shades on. Hughes just wished she had hers with her.

There was a small seating area to the left of the door. A light brown four-seater sofa and two matching armchairs had been positioned around a round chrome and glass low table. A few magazines and several brochures of the storage facility were neatly arranged on the tabletop. There was also a water cooler in the corner. Sitting behind the wood and acrylic reception counter was a young man who looked to be no older than twenty-five. His eyes were glued to his smartphone. He seemed to be either texting ferociously, or really absorbed in some ridiculously entertaining videogame. It took him at least five seconds to finally look up from the tiny screen.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked, putting the phone down next to the computer monitor in front of him and standing up. He gave the visitors an overenthusiastic smile.

‘Are you the person in charge here?’ Marshal Hughes asked.

‘That would be correct, ma’am.’ The kid nodded once. ‘How can I help you today?’

Hughes stepped closer and displayed her credentials. ‘I’m US Federal Marshal Joanna Hughes,’ she said. ‘These two gentlemen are federal agents with the FBI.’

Figueroa and Decker reached into their suit jacket pockets, producing their IDs.

The kid checked them before taking a step back. He looked a little confused. ‘Is there some sort of a problem?’ His enthusiastic smile had completely vanished.

Hughes handed him a piece of paper with the US government stamp on it.

‘This is a federal search warrant giving us legal permission and right to search storage unit number 325 in this establishment,’ she said calmly but in a very authoritative voice. ‘Would you be so kind as to open it for us?’

The kid looked at the warrant, read a few lines, pulled a face as if it were written in Latin, and hesitated for a second. ‘I . . . I think I need to call my boss for this.’

‘What’s your name, kid?’ Decker asked.

‘Billy.’

Billy was about five-foot-eight with short blond hair, which was spiked at places with styling gel. He had a three-day-old stubble and a couple of earrings in each ear.

‘OK, Billy, you can call whoever you like, but we don’t really have time to wait.’ He nodded at the warrant. ‘As Federal Marshal Hughes has explained, that piece of paper, which has been signed by a US federal judge, gives us the legal right to look inside unit 325, with or without your cooperation. Neither you nor we need your boss’s permission to do so. That’s all the permission we need right there. If you don’t open the door for us, unfortunately for you, we’re just going to have to bust it open, using any means necessary.’

‘And we won’t be legally responsible for any damage caused,’ Figueroa added. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Billy had started to look very uncomfortable. His cellphone beeped on the counter, announcing a new incoming text message, but he didn’t even glance at it.

‘That copy of the warrant stays with you,’ Decker added. ‘So you can show it to your boss, your lawyer, or whoever you please. That guarantees that you’re not breaking the law, or company rules, or doing anything you shouldn’t be doing.’ He paused and checked his watch. ‘We’re on a pretty tight schedule here, Billy. So what’s it going to be? Are you going to let us into the unit, or are we busting it open? You’ve got to make a choice.’

‘You guys aren’t punking me, are you?’ Billy asked, his stare moving to the glass window behind both agents, as if he was trying to spot a candid camera somewhere.

‘This is official, Billy,’ Hughes replied, her tone telling Billy that that was no joke.

‘You guys really FBI?’ Billy now sounded a little thrilled.

‘We really are,’ Decker replied.

‘Look, I’d like to help,’ Billy said. ‘I can let you into the building. No problem. But I can’t open the door to unit 325 because it’s padlocked. None of our doors has an actual key locking mechanism, just a very thick sliding bolt. Our customers can buy a padlock from us.’ He quickly indicated a display just behind him with several padlocks in all different sizes. ‘Or bring their own, but they’re not required to supply us with an extra key, so none do. Once a unit is rented out, we don’t have access to it anymore. It’s a completely private affair.’

Figueroa nodded, and thought about it for a moment. ‘OK. Can you give us the details of that account?’

‘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.

Thirty-Six

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.’

Thirty-Seven

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.

‘I told you,’ Billy said, nodding at the cutter. ‘This bad boy is the shit. Now comes the easy part.’ He placed the cutter jaws around the exposed shackle and gave it one more firm squeeze.

Click.

This time the cutter didn’t slide off the padlock. Its jaws simply cut through the shackle as if slicing through wet clay.

Everyone looked impressed.

‘I need to cut it again,’ Billy explained. ‘The shackle is too thick and too sturdy for us to be able to twist it out of place and free the lock. I need to cut a chunk off the shackle.’

‘Knock yourself out, Billy,’ Decker said.

Billy repeated the same steps as seconds earlier, this time placing the cutter’s jaws about three centimeters up the shackle from where he’d cut through the first time.

Click.

As the cutters sliced through the metal again, a small piece fell to the ground, leaving a sizable gap on the padlock’s shackle.

‘And Bob’s your uncle,’ Billy announced triumphantly, removing the padlock from the door bolt.