The Hunter Inside (3 page)

He pulled on a pair of
running shoes and went outside, walking down the drive towards the gleaming
Mercedes with the license plate ‘PW 1’ that glittered seductively in the early
morning sunshine.

The car distracted his
attention momentarily, and he thought back to the day six years previous when
they had bought the car. Marcie had been so excited when he had thrown her the
keys and now he relived a moment of his life that he had relived a thousand
times before. He was no longer in his own drive but outside a car showroom with
his bride of six months, and a briefcase containing a considerable amount of
money that he had worked his balls off to earn as a salesman at Colins’, the
biggest importer of flowers in America (well not any more, not since Marcie
died and he left. It was slipping dangerously towards bankruptcy nowadays).

He’s there. As he stands
looking at the car he’s aware of everything around him. The hazy early morning
sunlight through the trees, reflecting in a line down the bonnet of the car.
Birds singing from the trees as they bathe in the sunlight and prepare for
their food-seeking missions. Marcie, standing at the other side of the car, her
laughter ringing out as he throws her the keys. She fumbles them as she tries
to get into her dream car and now it’s him who’s laughing at her…

‘Morning Paul, you okay?’
His neighbor Janice, a retired teacher from Boston, interrupted his daydream.

‘I’m never better Janice,
never better.’ But he wasn’t okay, because he remembered why he was in the
drive, shaking like a leaf, with profusely sweating hands. The mail.

He eased open the mailbox
in a way that suggested he was expecting to see a cobra, and exposed the two
envelopes to lukewarm June sunshine. Moving the top piece of junk mail he saw
what he expected. An envelope with his surname crudely written on its front. It
was unmistakably from the person who had been sending him the threatening mail.
The envelope alone was enough to tell him that.

They were always the same.

Taking what was the
twenty-ninth letter from the mailbox, he realized just how badly his hands were
shaking. Not just like a leaf, but like a leaf in a gale force wind.

‘This is stupid,’ he
murmured, as he removed the single sheet of A4 paper from its envelope. His
false optimism didn’t make him feel any easier, and he looked around to make
sure that Janice had gone inside before slowly and deliberately opening the
sheet of paper.

The only words that Paul
Wayans was able to get from his mouth before vomiting across the bonnet of his
gleaming Mercedes, were:

‘Oh my god, Jesus Christ.’

‘Kids come on, we’re already late,’
Sandy Myers yelled from the foot of the stairs, becoming impatient with her
seven year old twins, Sean and David.

‘For Christ’s sake, what
are you doing up there?’ she called out when she received no answer, swearing
to herself that if they didn’t come downstairs right away they would have to
walk to school, alone.

‘Okay, okay, don’t get your
panties in a panic, we’re on our way.’ The voice belonged to David, the younger
of the two by four minutes.

‘Can’t we get a moment’s
peace in this dump? How are we getting to school, a ride on your broomstick perhaps?’
That cheeky voice belonged to Sean, and Sandy felt, just for a second, like
beating the shit out of him. She had taken him to a psychologist to find out
what was responsible for his sometimes violent mood swings, only to be told
that all children go through ‘phases of rebelliousness’ and that as she had
twins, she could expect her ‘other little fellow’ to follow suit pretty soon.
Sandy didn’t know how she would cope if this transpired but for the time being,
thank god, it wasn’t the case.

David had picked up some of
Sean’s cheekiness, but he never went overboard with his sarcasm. She was told
to put up with Sean’s moods and he would outgrow them – probably sooner than
later. She hoped so.

The two faces appeared in
the doorway: David smiling like an angel, Sean wearing a sulky expression.
Looking at his frowning face, she pictured a set of horns coming out of the top
of his head and a laugh escaped her. It was impossible to stay mad at the
little imps. They had a direct line to her heartstrings.

‘Come on, shake your tail,’
she said, laughing more than ever and grabbing the one piece of mail from the
mailbox. It was a thin white envelope with her name on the front. But it was
not addressed to Sandy Myers; it was addressed to Sandy Carson, using her maiden
name.

It can’t be
, she thought to herself.

It was.

The fact that she was
already running twenty-five minutes late meant that she would have to wait to
find out its contents. She had cursed her boys for their apparent inability to
comply with her early morning requests. She should have thanked them for
earning her a bit more time before the same process of horror, followed by fear
that had started for Paul Wayans and Bill Arnold, re-started for her.

A process that would change
all of their lives, forever.

Special Agent Sam O’Neill stepped out
of his car and into the New York morning. Huddling for warmth inside his thin
summer jacket, he cursed his choice of attire. For a June morning it was
remarkably chilly. On top of the chill that seemed to be entering his body and
pushing the warmth out through his skin, Sam O’Neill had the added knowledge
that he was about to witness a pretty gruesome murder scene.

The fact that he was faced
with such a scene didn’t come as anything new to O’Neill. Having been a part of
the FBI’s homicide team for more than twenty-five years, he had gotten used to
witnessing the kind of scene that most people would find impossible to handle.
While many people would almost certainly be mentally scarred for life if they
were to see the things that he had seen throughout his career, Sam O’Neill
relished the challenge of solving the puzzles that were set before him.

His love for his job had,
in the past, been perceived by some as a very real and very extensive game of
Cluedo, with O’Neill the favorite every time. Nowadays he wasn’t always
considered the favorite, and this fact made his job difficult to enjoy, and
made crimes more difficult to solve.

The satisfaction that came
with the successful conviction of the perpetrator of a crime such as the one he
was about to investigate was his reward. The wage he received was a handsome
one also. If he so desired, he would be able to afford a holiday in Europe
every year for the rest of his life with the money already deposited into high
interest accounts.

What bothered him was the
fact that he stood no chance of getting the time off to pursue his dreams of
visiting Venice with its gondolas, Paris with its Eiffel Tower or London and
Buckingham Palace. Such was the condition of life in New York that he would be
lucky if, barring retirement or injury, he ever managed to get any time off
again. There was always a murder to be solved, or at least that was how it
seemed nowadays. Despite the pressure, early retirement was not an option. He
had a strong feeling that some of the people around him were waiting for him to
slip up so that they could force early retirement on him, and for the first
time in his long career, he was nervous about putting a foot wrong.

This was the third murder
scene that O’Neill had visited within the space of three days in and around New
York. The other two had been like so many murder scenes he witnessed –
motivated by robbery, and executed with a detachment and randomness that made
tracking the killers down a very difficult task.

Sam O’Neill needed a rest.

His early morning slumber
and his dreams of the Roman Coliseum had been interrupted by his boss, Lineker,
who had told him to ‘shake’ his ‘lazy ass’ down to Atlantic Beach where he
would be greeted in Number Seven, Hillman’s Point by ‘a particularly gruesome
murder scene.’

Now, as he walked from his
car towards the house in question, he got the feeling. It was impossible to
explain how or why he knew, but the feeling in his stomach told him that the
perpetrator of this crime had already killed, or would kill again. All this
before he had even reached the scene. It was a knack many law enforcement
officials shared: an ability to sense the nature of a crime outside the methods
of criminal psychology. A
feeling
. That was the best way he could
describe it – the reason he got up in the mornings. To stop evil from wreaking
havoc on innocent people. He had seen the purest of evil across the years.

He ducked under the tape
that stretched around the perimeter of the house (marked ‘Crime Scene – Do Not
Enter’), and walked through the front door. At first glance around, he saw
about twenty federal agents, and was surprised to realize that he didn’t know
at least five of them.

He had spent thirty years
as part of the policing system of America, quickly graduating from a patrol
officer to become a part of the FBI homicide team that he once led, and he had
gotten to know an awful lot of people during his time. He was proud to serve
the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Now, slowly looking around
the room and taking in the scene in the lounge of the apartment he saw nothing
amiss. There didn’t seem to be anything strange or out of order, and O’Neill
began to build a profile of the crime inside his head. None of the furniture
seemed out of place, and the slovenly appearance of the room was obviously a
way of life for whoever was the victim of this crime.

He stood pondering,
wondering if the victim knew his killer.

‘Mornin’ Chief, have you
seen the carnage down the hall yet?’ The voice belonged to Hoskins, a young
up-and-comer on the team. Having been told of O’Neill’s arrival, he wanted to
seem eager and make a good impression. The note of excitement in his voice only
appalled O’Neill.

‘No Hoskins, I have not.
Maybe if you moved out of my way I’d have a better chance of seeing it,’ came
the reply from O’Neill, still pissed at being forced away from his dream and
out of his bed at 7:30 am, half an hour before his alarm clock was due to
sound.

‘Sorry Boss.’

Hoskins did as he was told,
and Sam walked down the hall, entering the crime scene unprepared for what he
was about to witness. The amount of blood was unbelievable. There was so much
of it that it seemed to cover the entire room from top to bottom. He went over
to where the body lay. It was that of a man, aged between twenty-five and
thirty. He was shackled to a bed, his wrists tied with twine to the bedposts.
He had what looked to Sam like a hundred stab wounds. The amount of damage that
was visible was excessive.

This was someone who took
pleasure in his work.

Hoskins loomed up behind
O’Neill. ‘Name’s John Riley, he was a keeper at a zoo not far from here. No
sign of forced entry, so I believe he knew his killer. Reckon he’s been dead
for two days. Nobody bothered to check where he was because he’d been visiting
his friend in Greenwich. Flew out late Friday night.

‘When he wasn’t in work on
Monday morning they figured he was having such a good time he decided to stay
for a bit longer. When he didn’t show on Tuesday they were a little pissed that
he hadn’t called. So when he never turned in today, Wednesday, they either got
mad or worried. His boss tried to call him and got the answering machine. So he
came over. It was him who found the body, the poor bastard.’

Hoskins’ smugness was
another thing that irritated Sam O’Neill. Half of the reason for O’Neill’s
dislike was the suspicion he had that Hoskins was being primed to take over as
Special Agent In Charge of the Albany office, a position he himself had once
held. He didn’t like this, and he had a hard time concealing it, but the
eagerness of the young agent meant that he didn’t notice the annoyed or
patronizing look on O’Neill’s face that appeared every time Hoskins spoke to
him. He thought he was demonstrating his hard studied-for skills as an agent,
not undermining the veteran’s ability to notice the most elementary things
about a crime scene, which was the way the impatient O’Neill preferred to look
at it.

O’Neill turned away from
Hoskins and back towards the corpse of John Riley. The feeling he had in the
pit of his stomach was almost unbearable, and O’Neill was already convinced
that this was not like most of the other crime scenes he had witnessed lately.

This was a killer that
would be on the mind of Sam O’Neill twenty-four hours a day, until he either
caught him or was called to another scene like the one that lay before him. He
was certain of that. There would be more murders, unless O’Neill could catch
this twisted soul before he was permitted to execute his murderous will on the
innocent people of America again, the people who paid O’Neill to protect them.

This was a multiple killer.
He sensed it in every bone in his body, and he was determined to stop this from
happening again. He was sure that whoever had committed this crime had not banked
on having Special Agent Sam O’Neill after him.

Sam O’Neill thought that he was the
hunter.

Paul Wayans cleaned the mess from the
front of his under-used and under-valued Mercedes, using a cloth that he
grabbed from inside the small closet in the hallway of his house.