One last time. Do it. Do it now.

Squirm swung a third and final blow.

Lights out.

‘The Monster’ collapsed to the ground completely unconscious, blood dripping from the gash on his head.

The spectator Squirm flew through the air, back into the movie Squirm.

The eighteen-year-old boy didn’t care if ‘The Monster’ was dead or not. He didn’t check. All he did was grab the keys from ‘The Monster’s’ trouser pocket and transfer the bloody cuff from his wrist to that of ‘The Monster’s.

Seconds later, he unlocked the front door and stepped out into a world he never thought he would see again.

Eighty-Nine

The FBI file that Adrian Kennedy had sent Hunter contained Squirm’s complete deposition, together with a single photograph of the then eighteen-year-old boy. He looked a lot thinner, and his head wasn’t completely shaved like Detective Sanders’ was, but the facial features were still the same, especially those piercing pale-blue eyes. Hunter had recognized him as soon as he had seen the picture.

Hunter coughed again, sending another ripple of searing pain through his brain.

‘Squirm.’ He repeated what Sanders had told him. ‘That’s the name your captor used to call you, right? I read that on your file. You used to call him “The Monster”.’

Upon hearing those words again, Sanders took a step back.

Hunter noticed it.

‘You read the FBI file?’ Sanders asked, surprised. ‘How? I was part of the FBI Victim Relocation Program. That program is as secretive as the Witness Protection Program. Not even FBI agents have access to it, with the exception of a few top guns. That’s how I was able to join the LAPD.’ He lifted both palms up. ‘The program assigned me a completely new identity, with a full, totally legit background history that would stand scrutiny from anybody, anywhere. Banks, insurance companies, private investigators, government agencies, you name it – and that includes the LAPD.’

‘Being a cop was the perfect cover,’ Hunter said.

Sanders glared at him, half amused.

‘Oh, no, no, no, no. Don’t disappoint me, Robert. You were doing great with the figuring-out thing. You think I joined the LAPD so I could start killing people?’

Hunter tiptoed again. This time a little to the right.

‘I joined the LAPD because I genuinely wanted to help people.’ Sanders’ voice became a little harsher. ‘I wanted to become a Missing Persons investigator so I could try to help people like me. So I could arrest people like ‘The Monster’. You, more than anyone, know that he wasn’t unique. The world is full of monsters like him.’ He paused and locked eyes with Hunter again. ‘Monsters like me.’

Hunter drew a deep breath and the air hurt his lungs.

‘Do you want to know what changed me?’

Hunter already knew.

‘Your file,’ he said.

Sanders snapped his thumb and forefinger together, then pointed at Hunter with a Eureka gesture. ‘Exactly, Robert. My file. Being a cop, especially being the head of an LAPD department, gives you access to certain restricted files. Files that, as a civilian, I would never normally have seen. Files on the investigation of certain murders, certain disappearances. They didn’t know it then but they all had one common denominator. Would you like to guess what that common denominator was, Robert?’

‘“The Monster”.’

‘“The Monster”,’ Sanders agreed. ‘And what I found out from those files changed me for ever. Do you know what that was?’

Hunter’s eyes blinked a silent ‘no’.

‘Seven times, Robert.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘In the six years I was kept locked in that disgusting cell, between the LAPD and the FBI “The Monster” was questioned by the authorities seven times. SEVEN TIMES.’ Sanders yelled those two last words at Hunter’s face, spit flying from his mouth.

Hunter flinched but it was too late. Some of the spit got into his mouth.

Sanders was breathing heavily now. Words were coming from between clenched teeth. ‘I was just a boy when I was taken, Robert. I was eleven years old. I was intelligent. I had a future. And for six years, that boy was sodomized and beaten up every day, as if I were nothing more than just a piece of rotten meat.’

Sanders took a step back, grabbed hold of his shirt with both hands and ripped it off his body. Buttons were propelled high up in the air before bouncing down against the concrete floor.

Despite the pain and how fatigued he was, Hunter’s eyes widened. Sanders’ torso was completely covered in scars – some small, some big, some enormous. Many of them hadn’t healed well and the scars looked leathery and lumpy. Some looked like huge welts.

Sanders turned around. His back looked even worse.

Hunter remained silent.

‘During those six years, they had seven chances to end it all. SEVEN.’ Sanders began pacing the room in front of Hunter. Tears looked like they were about to well up in his eyes but they never materialized. Squirm was still keeping true to his promise. His voice became deep, full of gravel. ‘Seven times, Robert. The LAPD and the FBI looked straight into the eyes of pure evil seven different times. The eyes of a complete maniac, and yet they didn’t see the monster inside him.’ He stopped pacing. ‘They were supposed to be the best at what they did. The experts.’

A paragraph of Sanders’ first note to Mayor Bailey popped into Hunter’s head.

Those agencies are supposed to be the best of the best. The experts when it comes to reading people and discerning good from evil. But the truth is that they only see what they want to see. And the problem with that is that when they play at being blind men, people suffer . . . people get tortured . . . and people die.

Sanders began pacing again.

‘They could’ve saved me from my nightmare, Robert. They could’ve saved me from becoming what I have become. They could’ve saved all those women. They could’ve saved all of these women.’

Hunter knew he was referring to his own victims.

‘In those six years, he killed thirty-three women. And he made me watch them all die. He made me memorize all of their names.’

Hunter remembered the file he had read just hours earlier. Once ‘The Monster’ had been arrested, after Squirm finally directed the police to his hiding place, he had confessed to over sixty murders. He’d been killing women for more than ten years.

‘So finding out that you could’ve been saved changed you,’ Hunter said.

‘Wouldn’t it have changed you?’ Sanders shot back. ‘How could the best of the best make so many mistakes that cost so many so much?’

Hunter didn’t reply.

‘Those women are dead, Robert. They’re not coming back. My life was ripped from me.’ Sanders smiled a humorless smile. ‘Mistakes have a flip side to them, Robert – repercussions. You know that. The bigger the mistake, the more devastating the repercussions. I am the repercussion of the mistakes that were made twenty-five years ago.’ Sanders opened his arms as if he were welcoming a gift from the skies. ‘And here I am. I knew that if a similar case happened today, those same mistakes would repeat themselves because people only see what they want to see. You only see what you want to see.’

Hunter’s toes were becoming exhausted and the chain around his wrists was starting to dig deep into his flesh again, shutting down the blood flow to his hands.

‘So, to prove a point, you became “The Monster” yourself,’ Hunter said. ‘You retraced his steps and you began killing women. Women with the exact same name as the ones he killed. In the exact same order. Using the exact same methods. Even the filming.’