Author's note: Luna – what's odd about Agent Krause? Just a variant spelling of my wife's maiden name.
Steel – um, I didn't make up Clinton Correctional Facility – that's a real honest-to-God prison where New York State keeps its death row (ever since we voted it back in back in 1995).
It was time for a new victim.
The Bludgeon Man was ready. The murder of Mariana Medina had satisfied him for a few weeks, but it was time again. Very carefully, he sat down at the table and began to prepare his kit. This was something he was exceedingly good at. He'd sought out a new target. Found her from work. His work at the hospital was excellent for finding targets; he got names, addresses, everything he could need.
He picked up the yellow sheet of paper he'd taken from work and observed it. Mary Morales. Same initials as his previous victim, he pondered. Address was over in Alewife. That would be convenient; he could hop on the T to escape.
The Bludgeon Man stared at himself in the mirror of the cheap apartment. He was satisfied with his own reflection. Here, his shame hardly showed. What stared back at him was a man in full. His goatee was thick and bristly. No one knew of what had happened to him. What that…bitch….had taken from him before she dumped him in prison.
The thought of his transformation always brought rage, more rage than he could bear. For now, he needed to calm down. The Bludgeon Man stood up and took several deep breaths. He stuck his arms out to the side and forced his rage to flow out of his fingertips. It would be there when he needed to work, he knew that. Then he began.
He began as he always did, putting on the brown shirt and pants of his stolen UPS uniform. It was great camouflage for his urban hunting grounds. People saw the uniform and forgot the person wearing it. Plus, it gave him a great way to bring his killing kit along with him.
It was his killing kit that he began to work on now. The Bludgeon Man sat down at his cheap kitchen table. On it was a black nylon duffle bag and a large cardboard box. In the duffle bag, he began assembling his equipment. There was a policeman's nightstick. The Bludgeon Man held it in his arms for a few minutes before placing it in the bag. A polished piece of black polycarbonate. It was such a wonderful tool. Now, restraints: rope, duct tape, and handcuffs. Next came a blowtorch and a butane lighter. After that, a blackjack of shiny black leather. That was another good tool. After that, a wickedly sharp Ka-bar knife in its brown leather sheath. Finally, there was a Gurkha Kukri knife, a wide-bladed heavy thing that could be used to amputate limbs, if that was to your desire.
Next, the Bludgeon Man took out a few syringes and filled them. One was with sodium pentothal, a quick-acting sedative. It would put his target to sleep very quickly. Next came two syringes of muscle relaxant. He usually put one of these into his victim's jaw, to immobilize the mouth and throat, and another into the spinal cord to paralyze the body. He put these into a pencil case. The Bludgeon Man was not a doctor, but his job at the hospital had enabled him to get access to controlled substances. The pencil case went on his clipboard, which in turn went into the side pocket of his bag.
Then again, he pondered, his job at the hospital had brought him to his shame beforehand. But he could not think of that lest he become enraged again. No, this was work. This was what he did to prove himself to the world.
The Bludgeon Man took a pair of oversized jeans and a leather jacket from where they hung in his closet door. The jeans had extremely wide legs and he was able to put them on with his shoes on. The leather jacket covered up his UPS uniform shirt. He gathered up the bag and put it into the box, which he taped shut.
There was a T station a few blocks from his home. The Bludgeon Man picked up the box and put it under his arm. Although it was heavy, he was strong enough to carry it with ease. After all, he was a man. Even despite what the bitch had done to him, he was still a man.
No one paid much attention to him on the subway. He was calm and quiet. He switched trains when he had to and got onto the Red Line train heading out to Alewife. No one thought anything of him, which was exactly what he wanted.
As he got out of the train station, he slipped down an alleyway and hid behind a Dumpster. There, he was able to slip out of the jeans and jacket and donned a UPS cap. From the box he took his clipboard. He hid the jeans and jacket behind the dumpster, where they would likely remain until he needed them again.
The Bludgeon Man whistled a merry tune as he came out of the alleyway and headed down to his victim's apartment. He remembered for a moment how he had chosen this victim. Blood work sent down to the lab. ER patient, that was it. She'd cut her foot on a rusty nail and they'd screened for tetanus. Unwittingly, they'd also given her a death sentence. He'd seen her paperwork and there he was. Something in the name had called to him. He understood only partly what made him choose his victims: somewhere, sometime, he would get the bitch, and then everything would be perfect.
He strolled up to the apartment building and waited at the door. It was five-thirty or so, and people were starting to get home from work. One of the residents held the door for him. He grinned. It was so easy sometimes. People saw the uniform and assumed he was just there to deliver his package. The Bludgeon Man's purpose was much more unspeakable.
He strolled up to Mary Morales's door and knocked briefly. Standing there, package at his feet and clipboard in hand, he looked exactly as he should. A voice came from inside.
"Who is it?"
"UPS," the Bludgeon Man said calmly. He took his pencil case out and got his hypo ready. The rattle of the door unlocking made his stomach swell with anticipation. The door opened. Mary Morales was a young woman with dark brown hair and dark eyes. The Bludgeon Man tilted his head. Was this the bitch? Had he finally gotten lucky?
He smiled disarmingly and handed her the clipboard. "I need you to sign for this package," he explained. She smiled back and reached for the clipboard. She took the proffered pen and began to sign her name. Boy oh boy, sometimes it was just so easy.
Quickly, the Bludgeon Man grabbed her arm. She gave him a shocked and surprised look. He jabbed the hypodermic into her arm and pressed the plunger. Just in case, he put his foot in the door. Once, one of his victims had gotten the door shut on him and locked it. He'd had to force it open. Since then, he'd learned. She only had about ten or so seconds before she went bye-bye anyway.
"Express service, bitch," he grinned, and shouldered his way inside, closing the door behind him. She turned and headed for the phone. Yeah, right, that was gonna work. She stumbled and fell to the floor, the drug working its magic. The Bludgeon Man loomed over her, chuckling. He picked her up, handcuffed her, and looked around for the bedroom. That was usually the best place to get set up.
The Bludgeon Man brought his victim to the bed and tied her down. He injected the muscle relaxant in the usual two sites. That job at the hospital came in real handy about now. Her eyes fluttered and she stared at him. Now she was terrified, realizing what was about to happen to her. Carefully, the Bludgeon Man removed his tools, taking time to line them up neatly on the bed next to her. He lit the blowtorch with a floop and waved the lighter out.
"Hey there," the Bludgeon Man said, and picked up the nightstick. He tapped it against his palm. It made a fleshy thock sound when he did. He grinned.
"Gonna show you a thing or two," he said. Thock. Thock. Thock.
The woman let out a wordless whimper and squirmed on the bed.
Thock. Thock. Thock.
He raised the nightstick high over his head.
"This is gonna hurt," he whispered.
…
The Paris airport was quite noisy and busy, but the airline's executive lounge was calm and quiet, a fortress for the wealthy to take shelter in against the proletarian masses thronging the airport. Uniformed waiters offered juice or coffee to the waiting travelers. There was also a complete wet bar available, if alcohol was what you wanted. Televisions tuned to CNN and a few French TV stations were mounted overhead, where the passengers sitting in soft, comfortable chairs could watch them. Finally, they could plug their laptops into the lounge's LAN and enjoy free Internet access while they waited. And that was what Susana was doing.
Her co-workers believed she was attending a surgical conference in Philadelphia. She actually did have a registration package for that, in another name. Susana knew that Lisa knew of her cover identity as Suzanne Arsenault Lesage. Just in case, she was traveling under another cover identity. Susana was relatively confident that the FBI had never heard of Dr. Sabine Duval before, since she only existed in a series of expertly falsified documents. Dr. Duval had a plane ticket and a hotel reservation in the United States. She also had a passport, a driver's license, and some other ID, including a membership in the airline's travel program. Now this was the only way to travel.
Susana had bought the laptop a few days ago for cash, and there was little to no chance they could track her this way. She surfed to the Boston Herald's website, reviewing the latest news articles about the Bludgeon Man. It seemed that he was still quite busy. A murder yesterday; that was good.
For a moment Susana Alvarez Lecter wondered exactly what it was she was doing. To travel back to the United States was quite a risk. If she was caught she could potentially face the death penalty. At the least, she might well never see her son again. That had argued that she should have stayed in France, where she was relatively safe.
In France, though, Susana had found herself feeling curiously empty despite the real joys of her son and career. She loved her son; she enjoyed her career. But something was missing. It hadn't taken her too long to realize what it was. Susana wanted a man in her life. Her only prior experience had been Luke Taylor, and he'd been far too religiously obsessed to be a suitable partner.
She could have had her pick of Parisian men, but she found that they didn't please her. Oh, there were plenty of wealthy doctors who would've wanted to be with her, but Susana wanted a man who could cope with both of her natures: the medically trained daughter of privilege and the sociopathic killer. For that, she realized, her choices were limited. When her son had been two, she had come to the realization that in order to satisfy her, a man would need to be like her father. A man for whom elegance and brutality were but two facets of his personality, complementing each other and the whole. A man capable of the same sort of atrocities she was, but also just as able to appreciate fine wine or fashion.
She wasn't unreasonable. He didn't have to be as wealthy as her or even close. She knew that there were relatively few men who had met her criteria; the odds of finding one with her level of riches was infinitesimal. But Susana was a daughter of privilege, and like many women born rich, she was indifferent to money. When she celebrated her son's second birthday, she had decided to seek out her soul mate in the prisons and asylums of the world, where perhaps he would be waiting.
Most of them were useless to her, human flotsam that had made the mistake of committing murder and getting caught. More like Miggs or Sammie than her father. But eventually she had settled on a few likely men and begun to write them. After joining a few anti-death-penalty groups, it was easy to gain enough protective camouflage to weed out the candidates to a final selection. Oddly, Susana agreed with the anti-death-penalty groups. If someone had tried to murder her or her family, she would have preferred to take her own revenge. Having the state do it was weak, in her view.
She'd heard of Professor Creed's crimes when she was living in Virginia. There hadn't been much, as Professor Creed had been in upstate New York and she had been in DC. Once she'd been able to refresh her memory on his crimes, he had seemed the likeliest. The letters she got from him were erudite, educated, and polite. She was relatively sure she had found the man she sought.
Being on Death Row had made it difficult. She was rich enough that she could have paid off some guard somewhere to allow a prisoner in a regular prison to escape, but Death Row was another matter. Professor Creed was only allowed out for court visits. The last had been two years ago. Another would not be likely at all for some time to come.
It was other matters that had made it possible. Susana had corresponded with a Boston lawyer for several years after she had lived there. The lawyer received a very healthy fee for checking into a matter for her once a month and calling a relatively inexpensive voice-mail number in New York City. It had been six months since she had gotten the answer she had wanted.
Susana Alvarez Lecter was not a profiler, and the only relations she had ever had with the FBI were as hunter and prey – from both sides of the equation. But she had known a few things that those in the FBI would have given a great deal to know. She knew that the Bludgeon Man would eventually turn to serial murder. In addition she knew why he was killing. It had taken him rather longer than she expected to get around to it, but eventually he had. She also knew something that her cousin would have given a great deal to know. She knew the name of the Bludgeon Man. So long as he didn't screw up and get caught, Susana believed that she could play these cards to get Professor Creed safely to freedom.
Her flight had arrived, and Susana strolled down to the gate to board the plane. She was able to pre-board, along with the rest of the elite travel members, and she settled into her first-class seat with relish. This would be a pleasant flight. While the rest of the passengers shuffled back into steerage, Susana took out her compact and studied her face in the mirror.
Her face was not the same as it had once been. She'd disdained the collagen injections that her father had once used, instead doing the work on herself. Her face was not so different from her old face, but with cosmetics, differently colored and styled hair, and spectacles, it would do. Fortunately, she was already imperially slim. Even so, she'd dieted so as to look like a typical French woman. That had been difficult; Susana enjoyed her food a great deal. She wore a severely tailored suit and had recently had her eyebrows tweezed until even she, a veteran of different painful beauty rituals, had gritted her teeth and wished death on the young woman doing the tweezing. She wanted to look the way an American would think a French woman looked. Had she been male, she would have worn a striped shirt and a beret, but this would do.
As the plane flew over the Atlantic, Susana thought about things past and present. She thought of her father, and what he might think of the man she was intending to free. Would he approve? She thought that he would. She thought of Professor Creed's letters. He'd been quite friendly, although by mutual agreement the letters themselves had largely been small talk.
She thought about Lisa Starling, and what she might be doing. Lisa was heading up the hunt for the Bludgeon Man. She wondered idly what would happen if Lisa knew of her involvement. For now, she doubted that – Lisa could hardly be tracking every last visitor to the US from France. Her identity documents indicated her to be about five years older than she actually was. Susana knew that her FBI file indicated her to be quite vain. In that, they were more correct than they thought. But if they thought she would balk at making herself older on an identity that she'd be throwing away as soon as she was safely past Customs, they were mistaken. Was Lisa close? Had she figured out who the Bludgeon Man was? Susana didn't think so, but Lisa was smarter than a lot of people gave her credit for.
She wondered about what Professor Creed would be like when she finally had him free. She wasn't so naïve as to think he would be perfect, but he seemed to be pretty close to what she was looking for. In the event things didn't work out, she would simply offer him the same deal she had once planned to offer Luke Taylor: some money, a new identity, and a ticket to wherever he wanted. All the same, she rather hoped things would work out for the best. He seemed to be her type.
Then she thought about the Bludgeon Man, and her first encounter with him back in Boston. That had been a surprise. But all those years ago, the Bludgeon Man had set into motion a series of events that would hopefully culminate in freedom for Professor Creed. Then, they would be together. As far as the Bludgeon Man, Susana cared not a whit whether he was free or not, so long as he remained free until he was able to unwittingly play his role in freeing the professor. Then, she might give Lisa the final piece of the puzzle she needed.
After several hours, the plane landed at Kennedy, and Susana Alvarez Lecter waited patiently in the non-citizens line. A bored customs officer took her passport, looked at her, saw only the well-dressed Frenchwoman, and asked her what her purpose was. Susana's response was a bit frosty, just the sort of thing he was expecting.
"I am here for a medical conference," she said with a pronounced French accent. "For one week. Do you want to see the registration from the conference?"
"Sure," the man said in a lackluster tone.
Susana handed him the informational packet. He glanced at it for a moment.
"Anything to declare?"
"Non," Susana said. "Only for personal use."
The official stamped her passport and handed it back to her along with her paperwork, and Susana Alvarez Lecter proceeded into the country where she was wanted for over twenty counts of first-degree murder. She headed over to the check-in counter and checked in for her flight to Philadelphia. She was vaguely nervous about being in an airport and had strongly considered getting a car and driving to Philly, but that would make her stick out. So she went calmly to the gate for her connecting flight to Philadelphia.
That flight was much shorter, and Susana had little time to ponder what would happen next. That did not bother her terribly much. She knew what she had to do for right now. Once she landed, she collected her luggage and her rental car. In the airport gift shop, she purchased an inexpensive postcard. Her hotel was not far away from the airport. It wasn't quite as fancy as she normally favored, but this was not for the long haul. Besides, she had a job to do here. In her own way, Susana Alvarez Lecter was as disciplined as her mother when it came to a job. She had learned very well what being cocky got her. But it was clean and reasonably comfortable for the night.
In her room, Susana showered and changed into jeans and sneakers. She hadn't worn such things for years, and she frowned at herself in the mirror. But it was necessary for what she wanted to do. Consulting the phone book helped her find what she wanted – a convenience store not far away from the hotel, but far enough away that she wouldn't be seen. She drove by the store and noticed a sign in the window, advertising PREPAID PHONES HERE.
Susana entered the convenience store and skulked around for a bit, picking out a diet coke she had no intention of drinking, before going up to the counter and asking about the phones. The cashier, a young woman who looked like life had been a lot harder on her than it should have been, shrugged.
"The phones are a hundred bucks. You call and they walk you through programming it. Then you buy cards when you need to charge it up. They've got a rebate where you get fifty bucks back." Her tone was short and without interest.
"Oh," Susana said. "Okay. Can I get one of those?"
Susana knew it was likely that she was being videotaped, but she also knew it wasn't likely that it would matter. So long as nothing happened, they would eventually recycle the tape. And by the time the FBI got around to running down the phone, it wouldn't matter any more at all. Besides, from the look of the dilapidated store, the camera probably would show a woman about five foot four, dressed casually, wearing jeans, a baseball cap, and sunglasses.
She pulled out several crumpled twenties from her pocket and the uninterested cashier gave her a small box containing the phone and some accessories. Susana liked these phones a great deal for one simple reason: you could buy them with complete anonymity and get them activated with whatever name and address you wanted to. They didn't work for the long term – eventually, even the FBI would figure it out – but they were harder to trace than most, and were generally reliable for a week or so. Before, once, she'd called and had it turned on with her cousin's name and address.
For now, she simply returned to her hotel and found a pay phone, located conveniently at the end of the hall, where she called the phone company. A representative was most helpful in helping her to activate and program the phone. Her service was activated in the name Elisa Chesoyo. The company representative told her that her phone would be active in just a few hours.
Susana plugged in the phone to charge and took out the postcard she had bought at the airport. She tapped the hotel pen against her nose and thought for a moment. Then she began.
Dear Thomas,
I know it's been a while since I wrote you last. It's been difficult. But we are still cousins and I do think of you from time to time. I know your time is short, and so I'd like to try writing to you. You may write me or call me if you prefer – (215) 555-8437.
Your cousin,
Elisa Chesoyo
She took the postcard out to the mailbox across the street and dropped it in. In a few days it would arrive at the prison and Professor Creed would have her phone number. While she waited for the professor's call, she did have a few other things to take care of. But the groundwork had been laid.