Author's note: Yes, I know, working on three fics at once, not recommended. Now I'm going to be in Las Vegas for a week, and figured this might hold people off for a bit until I left. I'd been working on this on and off. I had planned to end the Susana series with 'Those Who Come After'. A few Susana fans protested this, of course, and it set me to thinking: I had neglected to provide my characters with much in the relationship department, and that didn't strike me as a good way to end the series. So here we are, with the hunt for a serial killer bringing two sets of people together…
The small apartment was full of police officers. Most of them were accustomed to the horrible things that people do to each other. Years served on the Boston Police Department generally jade those who serve there. But even the most jaded cop on the beat couldn't help but be a bit put off by the body on the bed. The face was barely recognizable as human. From hairline to chin were nothing but bruises and discolorations. The nose was smashed flat. The bone of the forehead was broken. The mouth was a bloody gash of shattered teeth. It held very little resemblance to the attractive woman that the body had housed in life. The naked body, too, was severely beaten. Bruises and burn marks ranged up and down the corpse's limbs and trunk. The crime committed against this woman was one of insensate rage, a fury so deep and angry it barely seemed to be human.
What was worse was that it was not the first. Mariana Medina was the fifth such woman to meet her end in such a manner. Four other women had been found in crime scenes not unlike this one; the same bruises, the same horrible injury. Some literary-minded reporter had dubbed the criminal the Bludgeon Man, a nickname most horrifically apt for his crimes. The Boston Police Department was doing everything it could to find the killer and bring him to justice. Sometimes, that meant knowing when you need help, and so the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit was now consulting on the case.
Detective Lieutenant Jason Sullivan, the point man on the Bludgeon Man investigation, entered the bedroom and sighed.
"What a waste," he said, observing the corpse on the bed before him. "What a freakin' waste. Well, at least we got one for the FBI to see. Is forensics doing their bit?"
"Yessir," one of the homicide detectives said. "And I called a car for the FBI agent already, she's en route. They're setting up a task force here in Boston. Must mean they're serious on catching the guy."
Sullivan nodded. "Good," he said. "Do we know how the perp entered the apartment?"
"No sign of forced entry. He either picked the lock good or she let him in."
Same as the other cases, Sullivan thought.
"OK, people, what do we have?"
The forensics tech examining the body sighed. "We have a woman who looked like Mike Tyson went after her with a baseball bat and a cheese grater."
"FBI's on its way up," the radio announced. Sullivan sighed.
"Okay," he radioed back.
The FBI had sent out some pretty heavy hitters, Detective Sullivan thought. There was a whole damn task force of them. A few Boston cops didn't like it; he'd heard the Boston PD task force objecting to it. They wanted to catch the crook themselves. Sullivan thought it was great. Anything that helped put this guy away had to be good. The Bludgeon Man was hot, very hot, and he was killing the people Jason Sullivan had sworn to protect.
He stuck his thumbs in his belt and sighed, watching his people do their jobs. They searched for clues; they examined the corpse. Behind him was the rattle of the coroner's gurney, preparing to gather up the corpse and take her back to the morgue, where the pathologists would carefully catalogue the atrocities that had been performed on Mariana Medina. Such a damn shame, he thought, somebody cut down in the prime of their life by this psycho. He knew already the one crime that wouldn't be there – no signs of intercourse. The Bludgeon Man didn't seem to have a taste for it.
A blonde woman in a blue pants suit entered the already crowded room and looked around. Her eyes met Sullivan's. He'd met her at the first joint meeting between the two task forces. But dammit, he'd forgotten her name. Something that made him think of serial killers, though. He walked up to her and stuck out his big, blocky hand.
"Hi," he said. "Detective Sergeant Sullivan. I'm heading up the BPD's task force."
The blonde woman's eyes flicked up to his. He had about a foot of height on her. She offered her own hand calmly.
"Deputy Chief Lisa Starling," she said. "Heading up the FBI's task force. We met in the meeting a few days ago."
"Yeah," Sullivan grunted. "We got forensics going over the scene now. I'll make sure you guys get full copies of everything. Looks like Bludgeon Man's M.O. Damn shame, isn't it?"
Lisa Starling surveyed the scene of frozen carnage. "Yep," she said. "Damn shame. And this is definitely his work. But we'll get him."
…
Death Row was quiet.
Here at the Clinton Correctional Facility, where New York State's death row was located, it was often quiet. The condemned inmates of the block never saw each other. The cells were in perfect seclusion. Half the cell was devoted to living space, if you wanted to call it that. Each cell had a bunk, a desk and chair, a toilet, and a sink. Prisoners were allowed to have radios, but had to use them with headphones. Meals were eaten in the cells. Once a day, a guard in a remote picket would electronically open the door that would allow each man into the small vault that adjoined each prisoner's living area. It contained a shower stall and a visiting booth. It served to keep each man locked down to a minimum of living space and movement.
Professor Thomas Creed, a former professor of philosophy at Cornell, sat at his desk calmly reading a letter. He was an oddity among the world of the condemned. Most of his compatriots on the Unit for Condemned Persons were uneducated; only a few others had a high school diploma, and no one else had so much as a bachelor's degree. Professor Creed possessed a PhD, as was expected for a full professor at an Ivy League school. It was only once his hobbies had come to light that he'd been brought to justice and then brought here.
He finished reading the letter that he'd received calmly. It was in English, as the rules did not permit him to receive letters written in other languages. Only Professor Creed's lawyers were entitled to speak with him in confidence. Any other correspondence had to go under the watchful eye of Professor Creed's guards.
For a man in Professor Creed's situation of blank concrete walls and sensory deprivation, the letter itself was a joy. The paper was fine and creamy. He could bring it up to his nose and inhale the pleasant aroma of top-quality paper. So many people denied themselves the pleasures of fine paper; a ream of whatever was cheapest at Staples would do. The tactile pleasures of the vellum were a welcome treat for the professor. But better yet, the writer of the letter had scented it for him with her perfume. Professor Creed held the end she had sprayed it with and closed his eyes. A pleasant, feminine aroma, a tiny scrap of femininity and beauty smuggled here into his blank world of other men, concrete walls, and isolation.
Had anyone looked at the letter – and the guards ensuring he remained captive here had – they would have seen nothing at all that was abnormal. The return address was from Paris. That raised no eyebrows on the prison staff at all. Europeans commonly disapprove of the death penalty, and it is common for American death-row inmates to receive mail from European women. Some even marry them.
Professor Creed read the letter twice. The first time, he examined the text on the paper. It was quite straightforward. The writer of the letter had deposited money in his prison account, so that he would be able to afford the expense of postage to Europe. She thought of him often and hoped he was well. She told him of the latest anti-death-penalty demonstrations and gestures taking place in Europe. Privately, Professor Creed thought this a foolish, empty, feel-good gesture: the American states that practiced the death penalty did not care a flying fig what European countries thought, regarding the process of execution as an internal matter in which foreign opinion held no sway.
The second time he read it, he employed the method they had agreed upon and extracted the true meaning of the letter. That made his eyebrows rise a bit; it was clever and daring. But he expected no less. Professor Creed took out a sheet of his own paper and carefully set about penning a reply. It took him a great deal of time, and the guards watching him over the camera wondered what he was doing. They attempted to zoom in, but were unable to read the text. They did manage to see Professor Creed's dark black hair, made even darker against his pale skin. The professor had always been quite pale, and his restricted environment had enhanced this pallor. Seeing him sit at his desk, with those fine, aristocratic features prominent in the camera, one might think he was still the professor of philosophy he had been until the FBI unmasked him.
Professor Creed's crimes were quite well known. His unorthodox means of dealing with students who did not meet his standards in one way or another were standard Tattler fodder. Unlike most serial killers, he was educated and had refined tastes, very few of which he'd been able to see to while in prison. There were those who had compared him to Dr. Hannibal Lecter many years before. To do this was not completely incorrect, although the professor had noted in a few discussions via mail that he, unlike the murderous psychiatrist, had never indulged in the peccadillo of cannibalism, nor had he ever obsessed over an agent of the FBI. He had never met the task force who caught him, except when they testified at his trial. And while Dr. Lecter had been found insane, the professor had not. Professor Creed had also wryly noted that the last years of Hannibal Lecter's life had been spent as a rich man in upper crust Buenos Aires, a family man with a wife and daughter. He had died with his wife and daughter at his side after a full and rich life. Here, in this small town's prison fifteen miles from the Canadian border, the professor noted, it was far more likely that he would come to an end on a steel gurney, with two needles in his arms. Currently, the state was battling for this right in the appellate courts, as they had for the past five years.
Finally, his reply was finished. Professor Creed took out a few American-flag stamps and attached them to the envelope. He addressed it to Marie Lavelle, at the appropriate address in Paris. He left it for the guards, who took it, made a copy of it, and sent it on its way. And there we shall leave the professor, sitting calmly in his cell with a feeling of calmness and pleasantness in his gut that he would not explain to us if we asked him. Instead, we shall follow the small white envelope that he has sent in reply.
From the prison, it was driven to the main post office for the area. After that, it was flown to New York City to depart the country with other international mail. Much of the international mail is flown on the very same planes that take people across the Atlantic Ocean, and Professor Creed's letter was bundled into a canvas sack along with many others and loaded into the belly of a 767. Once on the tarmac at Paris, it was offloaded and introduced into the French postal system.
It finally made its way to a private French business that provided mailboxes to those who did not want to use the mail with their own addresses. The business was quite aboveboard, no more dangerous or sly than the Mailboxes Etc chain in the United States. In fact, most of the clients of the business were professionals who sought to establish a private business address without much capital. There, it was put into the box belonging to Marie Lavelle and waited patiently.
The woman known to the business as Marie Lavelle entered a few nights later, on her way home from the private clinic that she worked in and now partially owned. She greeted the employees with a simple bonjour, opened the box, and took the letter. The staff found nothing untoward or suspicious about Dr. Lavelle; they knew she was a doctor and was often busy. But Marie Lavelle was not her name and never had been.
The woman headed out to her Jaguar parked on the street with the letter in hand. She was well dressed, her clothing beautifully cut. This was hardly uncommon for a wealthy woman living in Paris; the couture of Paris outshines all others. She did not open the letter yet. Instead, she simply checked her reflection in the mirror, for the woman the business knows as Dr. Lavelle has always been slightly obsessed with her appearance. The doctor has maroon eyes that shift easily from the mirror to the car's instruments.
Home is a palatial estate in the neighborhood for the wealthy. The Jaguar's taillights disappear into the driveway and vanish into the garage. The doctor alights from the car to discover her butler there, properly attired and deferential. He informs her courteously that the young master is waiting with his nanny, and the doctor leaves her envelope from Clinton Correctional Facility with the mail that the butler has already brought in. If we were to examine this mail, we might notice in the fraction of a second before the butler gathered it away from us that the doctor's name is Dr. Suzanne Arsenault Lesage. This is only true depending on one's viewpoint. The doctor is indeed known by that name here in France, but it is not the name she was born with nor the name she thinks of herself as having.
To the aforementioned young master, of course, she is maman, and this is what the four-year-old shouts as he runs towards her. Guillaume Lesage grasps his mother firmly as she squats for a hug. His nanny, smiling gently, fills the doctor in on how the young master spent his day. But he is delighted to have his maman home, and he tells her this excitedly. She retires to the TV room with her son while the servants prepare dinner. Television was not something she had much truck with growing up, but she denies her son no more than her father in turn ever denied her.
Susana Alvarez Lecter, the only woman on the FBI's Ten Most-Wanted List, and the woman who has murdered more FBI agents than any other, sits down with her son to watch American television programs brought to her by her satellite dish. The day has gone well. It would surprise those who seek her in the FBI that Susana saves lives in her new life, but she does. She is a surgeon by trade, and a good one. Others who have studied further into the Lecter bloodline might take notice in this: Dr. Hannibal Lecter, while brutally murdering some of his more annoying or hopeless patients, helped a great many more than the nine he killed. In his second life, married to Clarice Starling and father to Susana, he trained new doctors at the University of Buenos Aires's medical school -- trained them sternly and demandingly, but not without compassion or understanding where it was warranted.
Guillaume is happily watching the adventures of an animated blue puppy and a man in a green-striped shirt as Susana asks her butler to bring in the day's mail. He does not need the subtitles; English to him is as native a language as French, as is Spanish for that matter. Susana Alvarez Lecter shifts on her couch and tears open the letter. As Professor Creed did in his cell, she reads it once, then again to extract its actual meaning.
"Maman," Guillaume asks, "is that another letter from your friend?"
"Oui, Guillaume, it is," she replies.
"Why doesn't he come and visit us?" the boy asks. "He could come and see us. It would be nice."
Susana Alvarez Lecter smiles wryly. Well, Guillaume, you see, there's a lot of concrete walls and bars and people with guns who don't want him to come visit, is what comes to mind. But she spares Guillaume the gory details just as she was spared the truth about her origins until she was much older.
"Maman is working on it, Guillaume," she says. "He will, soon."