Psycho by Onley James

Cricket smiled when Lucas and August entered the coffee shop, smirking when she saw their fingers threaded together. This morning, her hair was acid green and she wore purple lipstick. She waved hello and immediately started to make their usual orders as they took a table near the door. The place was completely empty. Still, Lucas couldn’t help but note how August took the seat facing the door. It was such a cop thing to do. Ironic considering August was anything but.

Once their order was complete, August snagged it from the counter, dropping too much money into Cricket’s tip jar. He placed Lucas’s coffee and muffin on the table as he returned to his seat, tangling their legs together. They didn’t talk much, but it was a comfortable silence filled with glances that made Lucas blush like a fucking school girl thinking about what they’d done just hours before.

Lucas slowly dissected his chocolate chip muffin, tearing it into tiny pieces before popping them into his mouth. August had chosen a cheddar jalapeño scone, which he was eating with a delicacy Lucas found amusing, like he was concerned about getting crumbs on his jeans and t-shirt.

As they ate, Cricket watched them carefully, her gaze darting from them to something behind the counter, to the door, and back again. It wasn’t that she was behaving any weirder than usual, but something in her behavior was making Lucas uneasy, which in turn was making August scan the restaurant for whatever perceived threat might be lurking.

When August’s phone rang, he turned it over to view the screen, immediately picking it up when he saw who was calling. He placed the phone between them and hit the speaker button. “Morning, Calliope.”

August putting it on speakerphone seemed like a weirdly intimate gesture. Lucas rolled his eyes at the ridiculous thought, earning a confused look from August. Lucas waved a hand to let him know to ignore him.

“How’s the arm?” Calliope asked in lieu of a greeting.

August’s mouth formed a hard line. “Who told?”

Calliope chuckled. “Who do you think? Adam texted me before you two had even left the warehouse. You let that bitch get a hold of a scalpel? That’s not like you.”

“Thank you. That’s what I said,” Lucas interjected, giving August a superior look.

There was a long pause, and then, “Oh, my God. Are you him? Are you Lucas? The Lucas?” Calliope asked with the same reverence and awe she might give a celebrity.

August smirked at him, taking a sip of his coffee.

Lucas leaned closer to the phone. “Um, yeah. Hi.”

“Hi. Hi,” she said again. “I’ve heard so much about you. Is it true you’re psychic? I totally believe in all of that. Astrology. Tarot. Ghosts. My mother knew when people were going to die before they did. She said she used to look at their faces and instead of their normal face, she’d see a skull instead. It started when she was a kid, in church no less—”

“Calliope,” August interjected, “was there a reason you called?”

Lucas liked her instantly. Unlike August’s cocky brother, Adam, Calliope seemed more like Noah, more…human. Friendly. Excited to know him. It was an odd feeling after being surrounded by hundreds of people—from doctors to co-workers—who thought he was crazy.

“Can you get to your father’s house? I want to walk you through what I found, but I think you need to see it on the big screen.”

August flicked his gaze to Lucas, who shrugged. “I can be there in an hour or so.”

“We can be there in an hour or so,” Lucas corrected, giving August a hard look so he knew he wasn’t going to debate this with him.

August studied him for a long moment. “We will be there shortly.”

Calliope sounded giddy as she said, “He’s going to meet the family? Already? You work faster than Adam.”

August sighed. “Calliope…”

Lucas smiled. August had a way of using people’s names like a warning. He’d done the same thing last night when Lucas had him tied to the bed. His whole body flushed at the thought. He’d had August Mulvaney tied to his bed, had experienced what was probably the single most erotic and intimate moment of his life to date…and there was literally nobody to tell.

“Ugh, fine. Do you want me to let your father know you’re coming?” Calliope asked, defeated.

“No. It’s fine. I imagine, if he’s home, he’ll find his way to us eventually. He has a sixth sense about these things. And, whatever you do, do not tell the others. Lucas doesn’t need to be overwhelmed by the rest of the family.”

“Aww,” Calliope simpered.

August disconnected with an eye roll, then looked at Lucas. “Are you sure you’re up for this? My father hazed the shit out of Noah when Adam brought him home the first time.”

Lucas’s chest squeezed. “He can’t be worse than the people I thought were my friends. I need to see this through. I’ve wasted too much time running scared since I got out. Who knows what Kohn’s been doing or how much blood I have on my hands because of it.”

August frowned. “You didn’t do any of this. You tried to warn others. You tried to do the right thing and they punished you for it. This is on them.”

When August stood, Cricket called out, “Um, Lucas?”

Something in the way her voice wavered made his original uneasiness ramp up a notch. “Yeah?”

She hesitated, then reached under the counter and retrieved a box. “I know you said to call you if I saw that man again, but…” She trailed off, her face pale.

There was nothing ominous about the box, but she held it gingerly like it was a bomb. It was just a black shoebox with an elaborate red ribbon around it and a small white tag.

She came around the counter, chewing on her bottom lip. “Um, this was outside our door this morning. It had your name on it. It wasn’t August’s writing. Something about it gave me the creeps, but I wasn’t sure if it was from that guy or not. I was going to show you when you came in but you just looked so happy. But now that you’re leaving…what should I do with it?”

Lucas’s stomach dropped, but August took it from her calmly and gave her a reassuring smile. “We’ll take it from here. If you get any more packages like this, give us a call. Don’t touch them, just call me.” He fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Lucas is going to be staying with me from now on.”

“What?” Lucas asked, head snapping up.

August set his jaw like he was ready to fight if necessary. “You heard me. He’s toying with you. You’re not going to play some cat and mouse game with a serial killer.”

Cricket gasped. “Serial killer? He said he was an FBI agent.” She frowned, muttering to herself, “That badge looked so legit.”

“He is a serial killer and it is a real badge,” August said with a matter-of-fact tone that floored Lucas. “So, you can imagine how dangerous he is. If you see him, call me. No matter what time of day or night. Understand? Don’t call the cops. Call me.”

Cricket’s eyes went wide, and she nodded, clearly spooked.

Lucas probably shouldn’t find this bossy and authoritative August as attractive as awkward and stilted August, but he did. The man was a dozen different people all rolled into one sexy, brainy package and Lucas’s psychotherapist heart was there for it. He would never be bored with August.

Cricket swallowed audibly, her hand crumpling August’s card in a death grip. “Am I going to die or something?”

August gave her a surprisingly gentle smile. “You’re not his type. People will care if you go missing.”

A myriad of expressions played across Cricket’s face as she was at once relieved but also horrified at the implications of his statement. Nobody wanted to think their safety came at the expense of somebody less fortunate.

Lucas raised his hand to touch her arm but then thought better of it. He didn’t need any accidental transference. He was anxious enough as is. “It’s going to be okay.”

Cricket gave him an incredulous look. He got it. He wasn’t sure he actually believed his words any more than she did. But he had to keep telling himself it would be okay.

Until it wasn’t.

* * *

Thomas Mulvaney’s home looked like something out of a movie. Sprawling grounds with lush landscaping. A garage big enough to fit Lucas’s apartment five times over. A giant house that looked like it could easily hold the college’s entire social sciences department with no trouble.

August didn’t knock, just pushed open the door, nodding at a young woman in a polo shirt and khakis pushing a vacuum cleaner across a Persian rug, her ponytail swinging as she moved. All throughout the house were other cleaners, dozens of them. How many people did it take to upkeep a house of this size?

August paid little attention to any of them, giving a head nod to anybody who frowned in their direction, but otherwise dragging Lucas through the house without justifying his presence. Lucas supposed just understanding the complicated layout of the place had to give some indication he belonged there. Lucas hadn’t been in a house this big since he worked a case where a corporate mogul had fallen victim to a serial arsonist, and that house had been missing most of its walls by the time they’d arrived on the scene.

August led him down a narrow corridor to a solid door with a keypad. He dialed the code without worrying about Lucas watching over his shoulder. Maybe the code changed daily or something.

Once inside, they entered what looked like a boardroom. The room August had showed him in his mind the night he’d broken into his apartment and said he was Batman. There was a large table, screens that encompassed two walls, a murder board on a third wall…and four men staring at him from where they were seated around the enormous conference table.

August sighed, setting the shoebox on the table. “Why are you all here?”

The older man stood, giving Lucas a friendly smile. Thomas Mulvaney was even hotter than his pictures, objectively speaking. Lucas tried to recall if he’d ever read how old the man was, but nothing came to mind. He could have been anywhere from his late forties to early fifties, but he was fit and well-dressed and walked with the confidence of a man who was used to going unquestioned.

“Lucas, this is my father,” August said begrudgingly, like he only did it because it was expected. “You know my brother, Adam. The redheaded one who looks like he smelled something bad is my older brother, Atticus, and the one who looks like he just rolled off a pirate ship is my brother, Archer. This is Lucas.”

Thomas reached out and took Lucas’s hand without waiting for him to reciprocate. He was instantly hit with a barrage of images. A much younger Thomas crying over five caskets. A man looking at a little boy through an observation window. Thomas fighting with a much younger man with russet hair and haunted eyes. Thomas telling those gathered around the table to be nice to Lucas, and their many objections. Lucas snatched his hand away, a shiver running through him.

Thomas tilted his head, gaze sharp. “What did you see?”

Lucas hesitated. Had that been a test of some kind? August had said they’d hazed Noah. Was that what was happening now? Was Lucas earning his way into the meeting? There was no way Thomas had intended Lucas to see everything he had. The first few images had felt…intimate. Too intimate to share out loud. “You telling the others to be nice to me because it might set August off. Adam sulking because you were mean to Noah when he first came here. Atticus complaining about somebody named Kendra never being allowed to be in the loop.”

They all stared at him, then swung their gazes to Thomas as if waiting for him to pass judgment on Lucas. Thomas just smiled and gestured to the row of empty chairs. “Have a seat, Lucas. Please,” he added, almost as an afterthought. Lucas continued to stand, reading the room as hostile despite Thomas’s sudden change in demeanor.

“Why are you all here?” August asked again.

Atticus snorted. “Because you have Calliope spying on an FBI agent for this man—a former FBI agent, a stranger—and didn’t feel the need to tell the rest of the class.”

August was fuming. “And, instead, she snitched and helped stage this little intervention?”

Thomas sighed. “Calliope didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already heard from the boys. And she knew not telling me was a greater risk than pissing you off.”

“You told her not to do the background check on Laurence Kohn?” August asked. Lucas’s heart sank. He thought they were finally getting somewhere.

Thomas frowned. “No. I let her do the investigation. I just asked her to do another background check of my own. On your friend here.”

Yeah, this wasn’t going to end well. He shouldn’t have dragged August into this. Wait, had he dragged August into this, or had he invited himself in? Lucas couldn’t even remember anymore.

August’s affect went cold. “I didn’t think I needed to tell you I was utilizing Calliope for a personal matter. And I definitely didn’t think you’d run a background check on my boyfriend without even talking to me first.”

Atticus dipped his head towards Adam, stage whispering, “Did he just say boyfriend?”

“Uh-huh,” Adam confirmed, leaning forward, like he was anticipating a fight. Archer reached for a highball glass filled with amber liquid, clearly bored.

Thomas was eerily calm. “You asked Calliope to investigate a federal agent. That affects us all.”

“So, is this an ambush?” August asked. “If Calliope didn’t actually find anything, we’ll go. We have jobs. I’ll make sure we do our own investigating from now on.”

He grabbed Lucas’s hand, tugging him towards the door.

“August, stop.” August froze at his father’s harsh tone. “Calliope did find information about your agent.”

August didn’t turn around. “She can forward it to me at my apartment. It will minimize any blowback on you.”

Lucas had never experienced August this…livid. He wasn’t showing any outward sign of anger, but Lucas could feel his rage like a living thing, filling Lucas with heat from the point where they touched. August didn’t like his father’s lack of trust in him, and the images he projected to Lucas were almost cartoonish images of increasing violence as August processed his fury.

Thomas’s voice was firm but not unkind. “August. Sit. Now.”

Lucas leaned into August’s space, pressing his lips to his ear. “Don’t start a war over me. Hear him out. We’re already here.”

Lucas tugged him back to the two seats at the end of the table, relieved when August followed without a fight. Once they were both seated, Lucas asked, “What did you find about me? I should at least be able to explain myself, no?”

Thomas gave the barest hint of a smile. “To start, I wanted to know if you were mentally unstable, or if there was any way you truly were clairvoyant. I thought, perhaps, it was a clever way to trick my son into thinking you already knew all our secrets. That you were undercover.”

“And now?” Lucas said, guarded.

“After reviewing your record with the FBI, your rapid mental decline, and your medical charts from the facility, I made some phone calls to a few trusted friends in the profession and concluded that nobody spends that kind of time in a mental health facility to sell a good cover story.”

“So, you believe him?” August asked.

“He just said he thinks he’s truly crazy, not undercover. Not a glowing endorsement,” Atticus said.

Thomas flicked a gaze to his oldest son. “Atticus, quiet.”

The large man began to sulk. The Mulvaney boys didn’t like being questioned and they certainly didn’t like not getting their way. They were like murderous toddlers, willing to defend their toys and their status as Daddy’s favorite with violence. The criminologist in Lucas wanted to sit with each of them and see how they ticked. But that wasn’t why they were there.

Thomas looked at Lucas. “I believe you can do what you say you can, and I believe you’ve been set up. I’ll reserve my judgement on anything else until we hear what Calliope has found.”

Thomas hit a button on the conference room speaker. “Calliope, we’re all here.”

The screen directly in front of them lit up, but there was no information presented. “Sorry, August,” she said sheepishly. “Okay, here’s what I know. Laurence Kohn transferred here permanently about two weeks after Lucas took the job at the university. He actually settled in before Lucas officially moved here. He lives alone as far as I can tell, is working a desk job as a supervisory special agent, and pays his bills on time. His computer is pristine, his bank records boring. On paper, he’s clean enough to squeak.”

“Did you find anybody who might be his partner?” August asked.

“Yeah, that’s the thing, his phone records are the only thing that stand out as strange. He receives an obscene number of calls from burner phones. At first, I thought maybe this partner was just overly cautious, tossing burner phones after limited use, but then I realized the numbers overlap. He’s getting repeat calls from burner phones, but they’re all coming from different people.”

“Human traffickers?” Archer enquired.

Lucas shook his head. “Kohn was torturing these women. Traffickers don’t damage their merchandise. Traffickers use drugs and debt to control their victims. They don’t mutilate them unless keeping them becomes a liability. These women were taken solely for his perverse pleasure. There’s too short a window between when they’re taken and when the bodies are discovered.”

August turned to Lucas. “But you said only three bodies were recovered, despite several young women going missing. Could there have been a reason he didn’t keep them? Maybe they’d caused too much trouble? Maybe the others were trafficked, but these women were…a warning? Or, like you said, a way to taunt you?”

“Maybe. But it just feels…off. Wrong somehow. I can’t explain it. If he was trafficking them, he’d have to be hiding his money somewhere, no?”

Archer shifted in his seat. “If the transactions are taking place on the darknet, he could be using cryptocurrency. It’s the preferred currency of the underworld.”

“So, we have nothing? For all intents and purposes, he’s just another upstanding citizen,” Lucas said, disgust leaking into his tone.

“Except, we know he’s not. He’s fucking with you. That Post-it note wasn’t just a warning, it was a clue,” August said. “He wants to play with you, drag you into his twisted fucking game. Whatever is in that box, I guarantee it will be something that forces you to experience something terrible for another piece of the puzzle. We know he’s guilty. Just let me fucking kill this guy. Nobody is going to miss him.”

Lucas shook his head, his gaze locked on the shoebox. August was right about the box. Kohn was fucking with him. “What if he’s taken more girls? We don’t know there aren’t other women out there being tortured.”

“Lucas is right. Girls are going missing here,” Calliope said, drawing everybody’s attention back to the speaker in the center of the room.

“Who?” Thomas asked sharply.

A cursor appeared on the screen as Calliope said, “I can’t tell you who, but I can tell you where.”

“What do you mean?” Thomas asked.

A map appeared on the screen. “Do you see this six block radius?”

“Yes,” Thomas confirmed, looking at the blocks she’d highlighted in pink.

Calliope was rapidly typing even as she spoke, like she was somehow multitasking. “It’s our version of skid row. This place houses the greatest number of our homeless population, addicts, and sex workers. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of overlap.”

“Okay?” August prompted.

“There’s a certain number of indigent people who regularly go missing. Strangely, the statistic remains fairly static. Two weeks after Laurence Kohn moved into the city, that number began to spike...steeply. People are disappearing from this part of town at an alarming rate.” Missing person posters began to fill the screen, overlapping each other until no one person stood out. “If I get rid of the men and those found dead, all of these women and young girls are left.”

Lucas could feel his breakfast creeping back up his esophagus. “Calliope, is there any overlap in profiles? Can you cross-reference details of their lives? Their features, characteristics? Anything that denotes a pattern?”

“I can try. It’s going to take time. This population tends to live off-grid, whether they mean to or not.”

“In the meantime, maybe we should just do it the old fashioned way,” August suggested.

Lucas frowned. “Meaning what?”

“Let’s just tail him,” August suggested.

Lucas shook his head. “We have lives. We can’t just follow the man around day and night.”

August’s brows knitted together. “Not us. We’ll put a GPS locator on his vehicle. Bug his house.”

Adam scoffed. “I don’t recommend breaking into an FBI agent’s house.”

Thomas sighed. “Yes to the GPS tracker. No to the breaking and entering.” At August’s incredulous look, Thomas said, “For now.”

August huffed. “Fine.”

“Calliope, let’s make this the priority. Put Noah’s other cases on the back burner, see if you can narrow down the most likely victims as Lucas suggested, and also see if you can find any reference to Kohn owning any form of cryptocurrency.”

Nails resumed their clicking. “I’ll do my best, but if it’s not Bitcoin or Ethereum, if it’s one of these lesser known currencies, it’s going to be nearly impossible.”

“Do your best,” Thomas said. “Keep me in the loop. Nobody does anything without my say so. Understand?”

August’s nostrils flared but he gave a single nod. “Calliope, send me what you have on Kohn. I want to get a tracker on his car today.”

“Got it.”

With that, she was gone. Thomas looked at Lucas. “You need to make peace with the fact that you might never get the proof you need. If we can’t find his victims, there may come a time when you have to decide between a few missing women and a world full of potential victims.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” Lucas said, choking on the thought of leaving these women to die somewhere.

“Then we’ll do it for you,” Archer said before shooting the rest of his drink.

“Yeah, there’s a clock on this operation,” Thomas said. “If we can’t nail this down in the next week or so, we’re going to take him out. We have no choice.”

Lucas scrubbed his hands over his face. He understood their logic, he did. They couldn’t hunt for these missing women forever. They didn’t even know who they were. It would be like chasing ghosts, maybe literally. At what point did he just let the Mulvaneys do what they did?

And could he live with himself when it was over?