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he had were never long term. He had tried in the past, but being a detective with the Homicide Special Section in one of the most violent cities in America had a way of taking its toll on any relationship, no matter how casual.
    Hunter had another sip of his strong black coffee and checked his watch – 4:51 a.m. He’d managed only four hours of sleep, but for him that was as close to sleeping bliss as he could ever get.
    Hunter’s battle with insomnia had started very early in his life, triggered by the death of his mother when he was only seven. The nightmares were so devastating that as a self-defense mechanism his brain did all it could to keep him awake at night. Instead of falling asleep, Hunter read ferociously. Books became his refuge, his castle. A safe place where the ghastly nightmares couldn’t breach the gates.
    Hunter had always been different. Even as a child he could solve puzzles and work out problems faster than most adults. It was like his brain was able to fast-track just about anything. In school, his teachers had no doubt he wasn’t like most students. At the age of twelve, after being put through a series of exams and tests suggested by Doctor Tilby, Hunter’s school psychologist, he was accepted into the Mirman School for the Gifted as an eighth-grader, two years ahead of the usual age of fourteen.
    Mirman’s special curriculum didn’t slow Hunter down. Before the age of fifteen, he had glided through their entire program, condensing four years of high school into two. With recommendations from all his teachers, and a special mention from Mirman’s principal, he was accepted as a ‘special circumstances’ student at Stanford University. Hunter decided to study psychology. By then his insomnia and nightmares were relatively under control.
    In college, his grades were just as impressive, and Hunter received his PhD in Criminal Behavior Analysis and Biopsychology just before his twenty-third birthday. The head of the psychology department at Stanford University, Doctor Timothy Healy, made it clear that if Hunter ever showed interest in a teaching position, there would always be a place on his staff for him. Hunter respectfully declined, but said that he would keep it in mind. Doctor Healy was also the one who forwarded Hunter’s PhD thesis paper entitled An Advanced Psychological Study in Criminal Conduct to the head of the FBI National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. To this day, Hunter’s paper was still mandatory reading at the NCAVC and at its Behavioral Analysis Unit.
    Two weeks after receiving his PhD, Hunter’s world was rocked for the second time. His father, who at the time was working as a security guard for a branch of the Bank of America in downtown Los Angeles, was gunned down during a robbery that had escalated into a Wild West shoot-out. Hunter’s nightmares and insomnia came back with a vengeance, and they had never left him since.
    Hunter finished his coffee and placed the cup down on the window ledge.
    It didn’t matter how tightly he closed his eyes or ground his fists against them, he couldn’t shut down the images that had been eating away at him since yesterday afternoon. It was like he’d memorized every second of the footage, and someone had turned on the endless loop switch inside his head. Questions were being lobbed at him from every corner of his mind, and so far he hadn’t come up with a single answer. Some of them bothered him more than others.
    ‘Why the torture?’ he whispered to himself now. He understood very well that it took a certain type of individual to be able to torture another human being before killing him or her. It might sound simple but, when the time comes, very few were ever able to go through with it. One needed a level of detachment from regular human emotions that few can achieve. The ones who can are referred to by psychologists and psychiatrists as psychopaths.
    Psychopaths show no empathy, or remorse, or love, or any other