There was a long, silent break.

‘How did you find me?’ Lucien finally asked.

‘Your notebooks,’ Hunter explained. ‘Your lifelong project. Your “gift” to us, as you put it. Or, better yet, your encyclopedia.’

Lucien looked at Hunter, curiously.

‘Yes,’ Hunter said, ‘I still remember the day you mentioned the idea to me back in Stanford.’

Lucien smiled. ‘You thought it was a crazy idea.’

Hunter nodded. ‘I still do.’

‘Well, the crazy idea became a reality, Robert. And the information inside those books will forever change the way the FBI, the NCAVC, the BAU, and every law-enforcement agency in this country, maybe in the world, look at violent and sadistic repeat offenders. It will make you understand things that up to know no one ever did, and otherwise the world never would. Intimate things and thoughts that have never been explained. Things that will exponentially better your chances of capturing those offenders. That’s my gift to you, and to this fucked-up world. My work and those books will be studied and referenced for generations to come.’ He shrugged. ‘So what if I took a few lives in the name of research? Knowledge comes at a price, Robert. Some much higher than others.’

Hunter nodded as his eyebrows arched. ‘All that knowledge about psychology and criminal behavior, and you failed to see your own psychosis. You’re not a researcher, Lucien, much less a scientist. You’re just another run-of-the-mill killer, who, to justify your actions and feed the sociopath inside you, deluded yourself into believing that what you were doing was for a noble cause. It’s pathetic, really, because it’s not even original. It’s been done so many times before.’

‘Nothing I’ve done has been done before, Robert,’ Lucien shot back.

Hunter shrugged carelessly. ‘I’m not your therapist, Lucien. I’m not here to help you and this isn’t a session, so you can carry on deluding yourself as much as you like. No one cares, but the good thing was that in your books, you were kind enough to note absolutely everything concerning your experiments – locations, methods used, victims’ names, and much more. I spent the night going through some of them.’

‘You read through fifty-three books in one night?’

‘No, but I managed to skim through eight of them. And that’s where I got lucky, and you didn’t.’

Lucien’s expression showed interest.

‘While skimming through one of them, I came across the name of one of your victims that I knew I’d heard somewhere before – Liam Shaw.’

Lucien’s eyes went cold.

‘It took me a little while to place it,’ Hunter said, ‘but I did eventually remember. That was the name you were using when you were first arrested in Wyoming.’

Lucien stayed quiet.

‘You were also kind enough to very thoroughly describe all your victims,’ Hunter continued. ‘And that was when I realized that Liam Shaw shared several physical characteristics with you – same height, same body type, same skin complexion, same facial shape, including the shapes of his eyes, nose and mouth. You were also of similar age.’

Still silence from Lucien.

‘Then I remembered something else you’d said in one of our interviews. You told Courtney that the reason you were caught wasn’t merited to the FBI. They weren’t investigating any of your murders, or any of the aliases you used.’

Lucien shifted on his chair.

‘Well, that got me thinking, so I went back and checked for all other male victims you described in the books. There weren’t that many, but all of them shared those same physical characteristics with you.’

Lucien scratched his chin.

Hunter tucked his hands inside his trouser pockets. ‘And that was why you picked them. Not because you wanted them to be part of your encyclopedia of torture and death, but because you were creating a list of identities you could steal at the drop of a dime.’

Lucien’s gaze moved back to the window and the darkness outside.

‘Some of your male victims were prostitutes,’ Hunter moved on. ‘Some were people who were down and out on their luck, but all of them had one major thing in common – they were all lone souls. People who were misunderstood and probably cast aside by their family and friends somewhere else. People who had left their lives behind to start something new in a new city. People with no attachments to anyone. The ones who’d never get reported as missing. The forgettables. The ones no one would miss.’

‘They’ve always made the best victims.’ Lucien still sounded unconcerned.

‘Because of their natural physical resemblance to you, taking their place was never a hard thing to do – a little makeup, some hair dye, maybe some contact lenses, a new accent, and, “Goodbye Lucien Folter, hello new identity.” In this case, Anthony Tailor-Cotton, from Halifax in Canada.’

Lucien finally caught up with Hunter. ‘So you and the FBI spent the night flying through those books, looking for every male victim’s name you could find.’

Hunter nodded. ‘A nationwide APB was put out for every name in the list we came up with. But I’ll admit that our hopes were very, very low. The best we were hoping for was that maybe, if we were very lucky, a few years from now one of those names would show up in a credit card transaction somewhere. Just a sniff of a clue to where you could be. Now, you can imagine our surprise when within a couple of hours we got word that Anthony Tailor-Cotton, holder of a Canadian passport, just like one of the victims described in one of your notebooks, had purchased a ticket for a flight to Brazil tonight.’

‘I guess I should’ve taken an earlier flight,’ Lucien commented.

Hunter could easily see Lucien’s logic. Initially he had two options. One was to stay in the USA and lay low for a while . . . a long while, and while doing so, he would probably have to live under the shroud of a disguise. His name would’ve made the list of the top ten most wanted by the FBI, and his picture would’ve been circulated to every police department and sheriff’s office in the country. Lucien Folter wasn’t the unknown ghost of a killer he used to be anymore.

Option number two was to disappear quickly, preferably somewhere outside the USA. Hunter knew that Lucien didn’t underestimate the FBI. He knew that his encyclopedia would be scrutinized to the tiniest detail, because that was exactly what he wanted. He was counting on the Bureau linking the name of one of his victims to the same name he was using when he was arrested, and then making the physical connection between all of his male victims and himself. So, if Lucien disappeared quickly and to somewhere outside the USA, then when all those connections were made it wouldn’t matter, because the FBI wouldn’t be able to get their hands on him anyway. He just never imagined that the Bureau would’ve managed to connect everything in a matter of hours.

‘Maybe you should’ve,’ Hunter said. ‘Like I said, this time I got lucky and you didn’t, because the name “Liam Shaw” so happened to be in one of the eight books I had with me. If I hadn’t come across that name, it would’ve probably taken the FBI a few months to connect the dots, by which time you would’ve been long gone.’

Hunter’s eyes finally left Lucien’s face and moved down the aisle toward the dividing curtain at the front. All of a sudden the curtain was pulled aside and Director Adrian Kennedy, together with four FBI agents, began making their way toward Hunter. At the opposite end of the aisle, four armed NYPD SWAT officers had appeared, and were also making their way toward them.

For the first time, Lucien showed real surprise.

‘You’re going to hand me over to the FBI?’

Hunter said nothing.

‘That’s very disappointing, Robert. I thought you were a man of your word. I thought that you had promised not only yourself, but also the memory of your murdered fiancée, that you’d find who’d so violently taken Jessica from your life, and kill him. That’s what you’ve been searching for for twenty years, isn’t it? To avenge Jessica’s death. Well, here I am, old friend. All you have to do is put a bullet through my head and your twenty-year-long search is over. You can be proud of yourself.’ Lucien quickly checked the aisles. ‘So c’mon, Robert. Here I am, a sitting duck. I promise you I won’t react. It’ll be an easy shot.’