The Luke Titan Chronicles: Books 1-4: The Luke Titan Chronicles Boxset Page 9

  He brought one hand to his brow, half hiding his eyes.

  "I can't run from this," he said, though his voice traveled only inside his mansion. "Not if I want to help. That's why I joined. To help."

  He didn't remove his hand and the movie began playing.

  Inside Christian's head, the connections to the killer were being formed.

  CHRISTIAN SEES A YOUNG BOY. His face is blurred but that's because Christian hasn't yet formed the connections to see what the boy looks like—or the man who is now a killer, for that matter.

  The boy is naked; he must be about ten years old. He's out in the open, on a field of some kind, with no one else around. Christian can't see any clothes, so the boy must have walked here this way.

  He's standing over a trap. A primitive thing, a wooden box with a piece of food placed in the middle of it. The box's front door was attached to a stick that had been placed next to the food. When the field rat moved the food, the door slammed shut.

  Christian sees the boy looking over the rat. It is pressed in a corner, looking up at the large creature, clearly terrified. There is no sign of the food that had once been there.

  A name is screamed out across the field, but Christian can't make out the actual name—another problem with the still forming connections. The boy turns and looks in the direction of a house. It's maybe a mile off. The boy had walked a long way out here to see this rat.

  "LUUUUNNNCCCHHH!"

  Christian hears the word, knowing that the boy's mother calls him now.

  The boy turns and looks at the rat for another second. Finally, he squats down, the sun shining on his bare back, and opens the box. He looks inside at the animal, the two as close as they will ever come. He then stands up and takes off across the field.

  CHRISTIAN CLOSED his eyes and took a deep breath. The movie paused as he did, allowing him to take in the information. His unconscious mind had already categorized and analyzed all of it, but his consciousness needed to understand it—to help him make the needed leaps.

  "Okay," he said. "You weren't born evil."

  Is anyone? he wondered.

  Christian didn't want to go on, even more so now than when he first entered. The boy let the animal go, hadn't tortured or killed it. But he knew that what came next wouldn't be as nice. Because something happened that turned a boy who would free an animal into a person who would shove a bedpost into a woman's womb.

  "CATCH ANYTHING?" the faceless mother asks. Christian can see nothing more of her face than he can the boy’s, besides her eyes. He sees those perfectly clear, but he didn't need to ... he already knows the color: blue.

  Christian stands at the kitchen doorway. The boy is inside the kitchen, and the mother's arms are elbow deep in soapy water at the sink.

  "No," the boy lies.

  "That's two days in a row," the mother says.

  "I don't know why."

  The boy is still naked, and as the mother turns around, Christian sees for the first time that she is too. Both boy and mother stand without clothes, looking at one another.

  "Your father isn't going to believe you," she says.

  A bright red streaks up the boy's neck and into his face. Christian knows what the boy had done—he had opened the box's door, but the wooden stick had been tripped and the food eaten. All his father needed to do was walk out to the box to know the boy was lying.

  The mother watches the rising red across her son's face and knows what it means—the boy is lying.

  "You tell me right now. Was there an animal out there?"

  The boy nods.

  The mother rushes across the kitchen, her naked breasts swinging as she does. She grabs the back of the boy's neck and Christian sees sinewy muscle popping up across her forearms. The woman is strong, and the boy tries to cry out, but her other hand clamps over his mouth.

  "Your father is out working all goddamn day to put food on this table and you're going to free some rat? That's how you repay his hard work? It's time for you to start carrying your weight around here." She speaks with a calmness that contrasts harshly with the underlying hatred in her voice. "Give me your hand.”

  The boy extends his arm upward, and his hand is shaking horribly.

  The mother rushes him across the kitchen to a chopping board on the counter. She moves quickly, like some kind of animal herself—like the rat that had huddled in the corner of the box. One of her hands grabs a large butcher knife from the holder next to the board. She raises it above the boy's wrist.

  "So we'll eat you tonight. How does that work for you?"

  The boy is crying and he's saying he's sorry, that he didn't want to hurt the animal, that he won't disappoint her again. His penis has shriveled up to something nearly indistinguishable from the flesh around it.

  "Do you want us to eat you?" she asks in that same calm voice.

  "No," he blubbers.

  CHRISTIAN WINCED, his eyes shutting again as the movie turns off. He didn't want to continue.

  "I want to go home," he said.

  You can't, Melissa told him. You have to see this if you're going to help.

  He knew she was right and opened his eyes. The movie resumed playing.

  THE BOY IS STILL NAKED, though Christian is watching him on a different day.

  He's in the field again, in front of the box. A rat is inside, perhaps a different one than the time before. Or, maybe it's the same, a rat that couldn't learn from the lessons of the past. Or maybe the lesson the boy taught it was that the box was safe. Someone would free it.

  Christian doesn't think anyone will free it this time.

  The boy squats down and opens the door. He looks for a second, and then says, "No one's going to eat me."

  He reaches in, his hand moving like his mother's had—quick and ruthless. He grabs the small field rat, and the thing squeals and bites his hand.

  This enrages the boy. The thing is attacking him. It isn't his mother. It isn't his father. What right does it have to bite him? Especially after he freed it, or at least one of its brothers.

  The boy brings the rat to his face, standing up as he does. A tiny bit of blood wells at the rat’s teeth, lodged into the skin between the boy's thumb and pointer finger. The blood slides down the inside of his hand, meeting the rat’s fur. The animal doesn't stop struggling and the boy hardens his stare.

  "No. No one's eating me. We'll eat you."

  Christian knows that the boy—for a brief second—considers biting the thing's head off, but ... what will Momma think? he wonders, and Christian hears the thought as clearly as he heard the mother's call for lunch earlier.

  The boy reaches up with his left hand and twists the rat's neck. It stiffens briefly and then goes limp in his hand. The body is still warm and the boy doesn't release its head right away. He stands there, staring at the blood leaking from his hand.

  Finally, he removes his left hand and sees the rat lie still over his thumb. He squeezes the body slightly, watching it puff up above his closed fist. He squeezes harder and sees the dead animal's tongue protrude from its mouth.

  "You bit me," he says, and squeezes even harder. Its eyes are bulging now.

  Don't mess up dinner, a part of him thinks. Not if you don't want to be eaten.

  The boy turns from the box and runs back across the field. He's smiling as he does, because Momma and Daddy will be proud.

  CHAPTER 15

  C hristian placed the sub sandwich down on Tommy's desk.

  "Only one today?" Tommy asked.

  "I didn't want to listen to you making fun of me," Christian said. He didn't look up. so he didn't see the smile cross Tommy's face for a second, clearly thinking Christian joking.

  "Hey," Tommy said. "I'm just kidding about that. You can eat whatever you want."

  "You're going to give him a complex," Luke said from the chair in front of Tommy's desk.

  "Okay," Christian said. "I'll eat what I want. Listen, we need to talk." He looked around for another chair, and found on
e at the small table in the corner of the room. He pulled it over, leaving the sandwich sitting on Tommy's desk.

  They left the crime scene three hours ago and were just now meeting. Christian didn't know what Luke and Tommy had been doing, only that after he left the body, he went to his apartment and lay on his couch. He hadn't turned on the television or even any music. He laid in silence and thought about what he'd seen.

  "Well, what do you want to talk about?"

  Christian looked up, realizing he'd been sitting in silence for a few seconds, lost in his thoughts.

  "It's not going to make sense how I know the things I'm about to say, but I'm reasonably confident they're true."

  "What's reasonably confident?" Luke asked.

  "Ninety-two percent."

  Tommy laughed. "Okay, let's hear it."

  "I think the person we're looking for is going to have some scars, and they're going to stem from abuse. I think one or both of his parents might be dead. If it's both, we need to start looking in foster homes, orphanages, and juvenile detention centers for someone with scars who attended the orphanages perhaps ten years ago. If only one parent is dead, we need to look at farms that went under in the past ten years. The farms are going to be a little bit south of us."

  "Slow down there, champ," Tommy said. "What the hell are you talking about? We can't just start sending out manpower on hunches, and that's what I'm gathering this is."

  "It's not a hunch," Christian said and met his eyes. "It's correct and we need to send whatever we have to investigate the leads."

  Tommy looked over to Luke, and Christian could feel the other man's eyes staring at him.

  "Tell us why you think this, then," Luke said.

  "I can't explain it. I've never been able to explain any of it. If I have to try, I guess I'd say the anger we saw with the last woman was the catalyst. He's mad at someone. He's harboring a lot of anger for that person, and it exploded on the old woman. Also, people don't just start cutting off ...." Christian paused for a second, uncomfortable with the next word. "People's breasts. Not without reason. No, this guy has seen some very bad things, and not in the movies. He wasn't born like this; he was made."

  "Luke?" Tommy said.

  "You two look into it. I'll keep with the interviews."

  "DON'T YOU GET TIRED?"

  Tommy closed the car door as Christian got in on the other side. "What do you mean?"

  "You work longer hours than anyone I've ever seen," the kid said. "You're here before I am, and you leave after me."

  Tommy smiled. He'd heard things like this since his youth, and the answer was always the same. He started the black sedan and reversed. "Christian, look at who I'm working with. You and Luke. Both of you are two of the smartest people in the country, and I'm supposed to contribute. Now, you might be crazy—I'm not sure yet. It really depends on what we find when we start looking into your theories, but if you're right ... Well, I'm going to have to work even harder if I want to keep up. I don't have the minds you two have, so I use what God gave me."

  Christian fell into silence as the car rolled out of the parking deck. Tommy said nothing either; he liked being around the kid ... there was a certain comfort that came with his unease. As if Christian was worrying enough for everyone, so Tommy didn't need to—which was a first for him. Luke never worried, about anything, and that meant Tommy needed to. The price of security is insecurity, and all that.

  "You don't think I'm right?" Christian asked once they traveled a few more miles. They were heading to the Department of Social Services, looking into orphanages. The farms would come next.

  "I don't know," Tommy said. He paused a second, but knew Christian wanted him to continue. "I don't know how you can be right. We all saw the same things in there and three hours later you come back with this theory. Luke didn't think of it. I didn't think of it. Nothing in that house really suggested it."

  "If I tell you something, do you promise not to laugh?"

  Tommy glanced over at the kid, but he was staring out the passenger window.

  "Yes."

  "There's a place I go inside myself. It's what separates me from most people, I think. My therapist says it’s both real and symbolic. It's real in the sense that my mind can hold almost anything I want it to. It's symbolic in that it allows me to be different in a way I can't out here. Like right now. I hate wearing shoes. I hate shoes, Tommy. They're like casts for your feet. Why do I need to wear a cast on something that has evolved to be the perfect instrument for walking. My skin would grow calluses, and my bones and tendons would toughen. I wouldn't need shoes after the first two weeks, but here I am in my mid-twenties wearing them everywhere I go. Inside my head, I never wear shoes. Does that make sense?"

  " ... Sort of ..."

  "That's fine. 'Sort of' works, I guess," Christian continued. "But when I go to this place, I can find anything I've seen, and when my subconscious works on things while I'm sleeping or concentrating on something else, it shows them to me when I return. It's like watching a movie, to be honest. Well, when I saw the body this morning, I went inside and watched the movie. What I saw was a boy that was abused. On a farm."

  Tommy remembered his promise not to make a joke. Christian was looking at him now, and his face said he needed Tommy to understand. Perhaps not believe, but understand.

  "I don't have a place like that in my own head, but I do in real life. When we're done here, do you want to see it?"

  "Are you playing with me?"

  "No," Tommy said. "I'll show it to you."

  "Okay," Christian said. He turned and stared out the window.

  LUKE'S new friend had taken quite a few liberties with the woman Luke gave him. He hadn't expected that, at least not such savageness. Luke had, of course, spent a lot of nights over the past week figuring out the person he would give his friend—settling on an old woman with no family, no job, and barely any outside contact with the world.

  She had to have blue eyes, though. Luke needed to know if the color mattered or if the friend was simply creating a kaleidoscope of eyes somewhere.

  But no, the color definitely mattered. Not the skin tone or the age, or even the relative beauty. The eye color.

  Luke stood in front of the body's head, the pathologist, Roger Linson, on its right side. Roger was almost finished with the autopsy, but Luke wanted to see if his friend had slipped up during his rage, left a fingerprint or something.

  So far, at the house, they found no fingerprints, but five different sets of hair. Three were cats, one was the old woman, and the third was an unidentified person—most likely Luke's friend, which was careless. For Luke's needs, the friend had to be very careful for as long as possible. Mishaps early on would end Luke's goal prematurely.

  "Did our perpetrator leave anything? Semen, fingerprints, a written address where he can be found?"

  Roger grunted and moved away from the table to the sink. He pulled his gloves from his hands, trashed them, and started washing his hands. "No. There were smudges from the blood stemming off the severed breasts, but that's indicative of a latex glove. The woman wasn't raped, either before or after death, so no semen inside her. I'd ask the techs if they found any in the house. A lot of times guys will bust their load when they're abusing someone like this."

  Luke hated talking to Roger. The man always said the simplest things, as if he was the only one who knew a killer's psychology and Luke couldn't possibly figure out that he should check the crime scene for semen as well. Perhaps one day Roger could fit into his plans.

  "Alright, thanks," Luke said.

  "There is one thing."

  Luke was on his way out the door, but he stopped, holding it open. He knew Roger loved doing this, holding him up just as he was about to leave. Yes, Roger would find his way in to Luke's plans at some point.

  "Yeah?"

  "I found a partial eye lens."

  "Where?"

  "Come back in and I'll show you."

  Luke let the door cl
ose and returned to the metal table. Roger pulled out a light and was shining it in one of the dark eye holes.

  "When you remove an eye completely, if you go down deep enough in the cavity, you'll touch brain. There was an eye lens there. I haven't run DNA matches, so I don't know if it's the woman's or not conclusively. However, there were traces of water on it, which leads me to believe it isn't the woman's. I think it had been frozen."

  LUKE IGNORED TOMMY'S CALL.

  He wanted to concentrate on his friend. Perhaps he wasn't as careless as Luke originally thought. He had brought the eye lens with him, and then placed it where it might not ever be found. Even when Roger removed the brain, it was too small to be noticed.

  That was a thank you, Luke thought. A ‘thanks for your help’.

  It also meant his friend was more trusting than he portrayed. He brought the piece of eye with him to the house, meaning he thought Luke's offer might be legitimate.

  That was good.

  Trust meant Luke could do more.

  And there was a lot more to be done.

  "WHAT ABOUT THAT MOVIE?" Mother asked.

  "Not right now. I have a headache."

  Bradley picked up the plate from his mother's bed. It was past one in the morning and she was in here asking for a goddamn movie, like he hadn't just worked all fucking day. Not work that she would respect, though. No, now that Father was dead, she was a damned saint.

  "Tomorrow?"

  He looked at the old hag and knew his migraine would disappear if he strangled her to death right now.

  She hadn't turned toward him, of course. She never did. Not since ... well, since what Bradley had done to her.

  "I don't know right now."

  He turned away and walked from her room, needing to get away. If he didn't, he'd kill her. He would do almost anything to make sure this headache didn't return. And it had to be from that damn Johnny Consultant. There wasn't any other reason for Bradley to be having migraines; he hadn't felt like this since before his father died. Years and years ago.