An Evil Mind (27 page)

‘Read on,’ he said. ‘There’s a twist.’

I didn’t face up to Jed. Not there. I wasn’t about to get into a fistfight with him in a public place. That would’ve been way too reckless.

I placed thirty dollars on the bar to cover my drinks, got up and took a couple of steps back.

‘What’s the problem, fag?’ Jed said, sounding and moving his hands like a ghetto rapper. ‘Too scared?’

Tom, who had moved from behind the bar, quickly jumped in, putting himself between Jed and myself.

‘C’mon, Jed, there’s no problem here. The guy didn’t say anything, and he was just leaving, right?’

Tom twisted his neck to look at me, his eyes begging me not to engage, and leave.

I finally snapped out of my staring trance, looked down at the floor, and began walking away.

‘That’s right, fag, get your pussy ass out of here before I fuck you up.’

I opened the door and stepped outside into the warm and damp night.

I didn’t go anywhere. I just got into my car, drove it over to the other side of the road, and parked it in a dark spot, next to a rusty dumpster. From there, I had a clear view of the bar’s entrance.

I waited.

Jed walked out the door forty-six minutes later and staggered over to a battered Ford pick-up truck. It took him almost a minute to manage to slot his keys into the keyhole and open the door. He didn’t drive off straight away either, and for a moment I thought that he would fall asleep in the truck, but he didn’t. He lit up a spliff and smoked the whole damn thing before he turned on his engine.

I followed him as he pulled onto the road. I kept my distance, but I didn’t really have to. Jed’s senses were mushed. He wouldn’t have noticed a pink elephant in a golden tutu following him.

Jed’s driving was all over the place, and what scared me the most was the possibility of him being stopped by a cop. If that had happened, Jed would’ve spent the night in a cell for driving under the influence, and I would’ve probably walked away from the whole situation. Unfortunately for Jed, Forest City in Scott County, Mississippi, seemed deserted of cops that night.

Jed lived just outside town, in a single-story, dirty, old and faded-blue wooden house by the side of the road. There was no garage, and the driveway was nothing but dirt and gravel, flanked by shrubs and overgrown grass. He parked his truck by the rusty metal fence that circled the property, and smoked another spliff before finally wobbling his way into the house.

I found a hidden place to park, waited twenty minutes, and very quietly crossed over to the house. The front door was locked, but it didn’t take me long to find an open window. I knew there’d be one. With no air conditioning, the night was too hot and stuffy for Jed to have kept all the windows and doors shut.

The inside of the house smelled of grease, fried onions, stale cigarettes and dry rot. The place was filthy and looked an absolute mess but, after meeting Jed, I expected nothing less.

I tiptoed my way deeper into the house. Finding the bedroom was easy. All I had to do was follow the snoring sound. And Jed snored like a dinosaur in heat. But I decided that I didn’t want to kill him in his bed. That would’ve been too easy.

I felt my blood bubbling inside my veins with excitement as my heart changed rhythm. My adrenal glands caught up to the new beat and began pumping full throttle, while my mouth salivated like a hungry dog in a butcher’s shop. I wanted to prolong that feeling for as long as I could. Nothing is more exciting than hiding inside the victim’s house and waiting for the right moment.

I chose a sharp knife from his kitchen. Thankfully, there was a good selection to choose from. I knew that a fat greaseball like Jed would no doubt get up in the middle of the night and either hit the kitchen for some more food, or the bathroom to go piss a gallon. With that much booze inside of him, the bathroom was a safer option. I hid behind the shower curtain where he wouldn’t see me until it was too late.

I covered my shoes with plastic bags that I’d also found in the kitchen, carefully pulled the shower curtain back, climbed into his soiled bathtub, leaned back against the tiled wall, and waited. I can stay still for hours if I have to.

The waiting made my whole body tingle as if I were soaked in an Alka-Seltzer bath, high on my power.

Jed finally came into the bathroom ninety-four minutes later, dragging his feet.

I took a deep breath to keep myself from going for him too early. I had carved a small slit in the plastic curtain so I could see out. Looking lost, Jed paused once he entered the bathroom.

And then the right moment came.

Sixty

As if hypnotized by the words, Hunter and Taylor’s eyes just couldn’t tear themselves away from the pages in Lucien’s notebook. It was like reading a blockbuster paperback book, with the added difference that every single word was true.

Still drunk, high, and half-asleep, Jed faced the shower curtain and stretched his huge arms high above his head. His mouth opened into a black hole as he started yawning, and even from behind the curtain I could smell his putrid breath. His eyes were bloodshot from a combination of the weed he’d smoked earlier, alcohol, and the heavy sleep he’d just woken up from. He was wearing nothing but a pair of filthy boxer shorts. It almost made me laugh.

For an instant, it looked to me as if his eyes tried to focus on the shower curtain. Maybe he’d noticed the tear I’d created, I’m not sure, but I knew that that was my cue.

I was so wired up from adrenaline and excitement that I must’ve moved twice as fast as normal. Jed’s brain and reflexes were so screwed up from the alcohol, the drugs and the sleep that he would’ve reacted twice as slow as normal. Put those two factors together, and Jed never saw me coming.

With my left hand I pulled the shower curtain to one side, while already throwing my body forward. My right hand and the knife were also moving fast, creating a high arc from right to left.

The blade hit Jed exactly where I wanted it to – across his neck and throat. The combination of how sharp the blade was and the strength of the movement would’ve proven lethal to anyone. The knife cut through skin and muscle as if they were made of rice paper. From the amount of arterial spray that flew high into the air, hitting first my face, then the curtain and wall behind me, I knew I had sliced through both of Jed’s internal jugular veins. I also ruptured his upper airway. His eyes settled on me for a brief moment, but I’m not sure he recognized me, or even understood what was happening.

I didn’t care if he knew or not. My body was already floating on air with the ecstasy of it all. I grabbed the back of Jed’s head with my left hand and pulled it back hard, exposing the fatal wound further. I enjoyed watching the blood squirt out of his neck, cascade down his body, and froth in his mouth. A muffled, gurgling sound was all his vocal cords could produce. I held him in that position until his crazed eyes went still. Until the gurgling sound was gone. Until his body became nothing but a dead weight.

After Jed fell to the ground, I stayed in the bathroom for another seven minutes, still high on all the natural chemicals that my brain had thrown at me. I felt no guilt. No remorse.

I washed my face and hands, but wasn’t very concerned with my clothes. I would just burn them as soon as I left the house.

It was time to move on.

But fate is a funny thing, and as I walked down the short corridor and past Jed’s room, something grabbed my eyes and I stopped. The door was wide open, and that was the first time I saw her.

It was hard to believe that a large bag of human excrement like Jed would have a girlfriend. I know she wasn’t his wife because neither of them had a wedding ring. But still, he did, and there she was, passed out on the bed. Surprisingly, she wasn’t nearly as big or as ugly as Jed was: short dark hair, high cheekbones, delicate lips, and smooth honey-colored skin. She was attractive, very much so. How she ended up with Jed will always be a mystery to me.

I stood by the door, staring at her asleep in bed for a little while. I was still buzzing from cutting Jed’s throat. How can anyone, high on his favorite drug, walk away when some more is so freely offered to him?

I felt my body start to tingle again, and I felt the trigger being pulled inside my head for the second time in the same night. I decided that I wouldn’t fight the urges anymore, so I carefully and quietly walked into the room and lay in bed beside her. I could still feel the warmth from where Jed had lay.

I didn’t move for twenty-two minutes. I just lay there, watching Jed’s girlfriend asleep, waiting, inhaling the scent from her hair, feeling the warmth of her body so close to mine.

Then she moved.

She rolled over and threw her arm over my chest in a sleepy hug, like couples do. Her eyes remained closed. Her hand fell on my shoulder, and I couldn’t contain myself. As softly as I could, I took her hand, brought it over to my lips, and began kissing and licking her fingers. They smelled and tasted of hand cream.

I guess she enjoyed the kissing and nibbling, because she moaned quietly and slowly threw her leg over me. As it settled over my body, subconsciously and understandably, she missed Jed’s body volume. That’s what she was used to. The nerves in her leg registered it, but it took a few seconds for the signals to be decoded by her drowsy brain. As they did, she frowned even before her eyes blinked open.

The light in the room wasn’t great. All she had to go by was the full moon, now low in the sky outside the open window on the east wall. My face was half obscured by shadows.

I guess I hadn’t washed myself as well as I thought I had, because at that exact moment, a drop of Jed’s blood dripped from my hair onto my forehead, ran down over my eyebrow, and onto the white pillowcase.

The woman blinked again. This time a nervous, full-of-fear kind of blink. Her brain, registering that something wasn’t right and sensing danger, became awake fast. She jerked her head back a couple of inches so her eyes could better focus, and as they did, fear froze them in place.

All she saw was a stranger with his clothes soaked in blood, lying where her boyfriend was supposed to be, staring straight into her eyes, with two of her fingers stuck into his mouth.

Sixty-One

Hunter stopped reading and closed the notebook.

An uncomfortable Special Agent Taylor took a step back and finished her Scotch in one gulp.

‘Where are the others?’ Hunter asked, nodding at the notebook.

‘That’s the only one,’ Kennedy answered. ‘All the other notebooks found in the house in Murphy contained nothing. A few drawings and sketches but nothing else. Nothing like this.’

‘But there must be others.’ Hunter sounded a little confused. ‘Are you sure they’ve checked through all the books and notebooks they found?’

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Kennedy confirmed. ‘Lucien must’ve kept them somewhere else, or even scattered around several different locations. That wouldn’t surprise me, and that’s something else you must find out during the course of your interviews.’

Hunter’s stare hardened.

Kennedy read it. Tiredness began really showing in his hoarse voice, which was now starting to croak.

‘Look, Robert, there’s no way on earth I approve of what Lucien has done, but if you’re right about him writing down everything he’s done and experienced into notebooks, then it’s already done, and it cannot be
undone
. If these notebooks do indeed exist, then we might as well have them. For one, they’ll constitute evidence in a serial murder case that I have no doubt will go down in history. Two, the psychological and behavioral knowledge, the understanding that we’ll gain from those notes and texts, may prove to be a game changer in our fight against extreme violent repeat offenders. As a law-enforcement officer and as a psychologist, you know that full well, Robert.’

Hunter had no argument to come back with.

‘Nothing inside the storage facility in Seattle?’ Taylor asked.

‘Nothing but the chest freezer and the severed body parts,’ Kennedy confirmed.

Everyone appeared to have gone into thinking mode for a beat.

‘I checked with the Scott County Sheriff’s Department in Mississippi,’ Kennedy moved on. ‘Jed Davis and his girlfriend, Melanie Rose, were butchered inside the house they shared just outside Forest City twenty-one years ago. They were found by her mother who had dropped by with a homemade apple pie about two days after the incident. No one was ever arrested.’ He paused for effect and to catch his breath. ‘According to the medical examiner, Melanie Rose’s head was hacked off with a kitchen knife. The head was left on the dining table in the living room. That was the first thing her mother saw when she looked in through the window.’ Kennedy looked at Hunter, the expression on his face as serious as a heart attack. ‘He killed her just because she was home, Robert. He killed her for pure pleasure.’

Hunter closed his eyes and pressed his lips against each other.

‘You read the accounts,’ Kennedy added. ‘They were written the day after he butchered them. The narrative and the words are clear and concise, not hysterical or even nervous. We all know that that spells total emotional detachment. As you’ve said, his accounts are like a study into what goes on inside the mind of a vicious killer – how he thinks, how he feels, what drives him – prior, during, and after each attack. Call me selfish, Robert, but I want that knowledge. We
need
that knowledge. If those books exist, I want them.’

Hunter walked over to the window and had a look outside. Night and rainy clouds had darkened the sky, but it somehow made him see things clearer, understand something that until now he hadn’t. And he cursed himself for not having seen it earlier.