The Ackerman Thrillers Boxset: 1-6

by Ethan Cross

  “We’re small, very specialized. Only work … special cases.”

  “Ones that are extra-bad?”

  “I guess you could say that. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, regular law enforcement are good at what they do. They don’t need a guy like me. But sometimes, extreme cases need extreme … tactics.”

  “They need a guy who notices stuff.”

  Marcus shrugged. “Among other things.”

  “You like what you do?”

  His face went serious, and he took a long sip of his coffee. “Sometimes destiny doesn’t care whether or not you like the path it sticks you on.”

  Vasques nodded. She had seen first-hand what happened to some agents at the BAU. It wasn’t uncommon for the monsters to get inside a person’s head and follow them home. Marcus had chosen a booth in the back of the restaurant with his back to the wall. Still, his body language was that of someone who was hyper-alert, as if he was expecting an attack at any moment. Yet he didn’t come across as a nervous type. He wasn’t tense. He seemed perfectly calm, as if it was merely second nature to him. Her dad had been that way as well, but not nearly to this extent. She had once seen the same look in the eyes of a friend’s husband who was a special-operations soldier and had just returned from a war zone.

  “What do you see?” she said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You keep glancing around the room. What do you see?”

  He held her gaze with those piercing green and brown eyes. “Everything. I see everything.”

  “You can’t turn it off, can you?”

  “It’s exhausting, really. Every piece of clothing, every gesture, every movement. All stored away and analyzed. And it goes beyond that. I also can’t help breaking objects down in my head. Analyzing their parts. I guess the best way to explain it is to think of it like TV screens. Me sitting across from you is one screen, but then imagine if there was a TV sitting next to me. And the remote’s broken. It keeps flipping through the channels over and over.”

  “That would definitely be annoying.”

  “Now imagine that it’s not one TV. It’s a whole wall of them like you’d see in the control booth of a news program or maybe one of those big sports betting places out in Vegas with a thirty-foot wall of TVs. That’s why I love movies and books. When I’m sitting in a movie theater, it’s not so much that they all turn off, but it is like someone clicks the mute button. It’s the only time that I can escape from me.”

  “You don’t like yourself?”

  “Who does?”

  “Like you?”

  He smiled. “Who likes themselves? Anyway, now you know why I say that it’s a curse, not a gift.”

  “I can see what you mean about that being exhausting, but I can also see how it could help in an investigation.”

  The waiter walked by and refilled her wine glass. Marcus added, “The problem is that I’m really not that smart. I’m not some brilliant Sherlock Holmes. I have all the info in there, but that doesn’t mean that I can always make sense of it or even realize what’s significant.”

  Her eyes went distant as she considered something. There was one fact of the case that wasn’t contained in any of the reports. Only she, Belacourt, and Stupak knew of it. “In all the reports you’ve looked through for this case, you haven’t read the name Anthony C, have you?”

  He looked down and to the left, pausing like a computer accessing its hard drives. “No, nothing comes to mind. Why?”

  “After my father died, I found a note on his desk at home that read Anthony C—The Anarchist?”

  “You think he was on to something.” He looked down again and added, “There’s nobody on the suspect list with that name or alias.”

  “I know. It could be nothing, and it’s hard to get much from just a last initial. It could have been an informant, a suspect, a lead, anything. I did have them check the list of Camry owners, but nothing there either.”

  “Well, I’ll file it away in my head. Right next to the crime-scene photos and that awful smell of Belacourt’s aftershave.”

  Vasques laughed and put on her best smile. “It is pretty bad.”

  Marcus mirrored her playful grin.

  But then his face fell and his eyes went wide. She turned to see what he was looking at and noticed a beautiful young blond woman approaching them. She was wearing jeans and a tight leather jacket. Vasques could see the gun beneath the woman’s coat and the badge clipped to her belt. The woman grabbed a chair from a nearby table, and turning it around backward, she pulled it up next to their booth and sat down.

  The newcomer glared at Marcus and said, “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  43

  Maggie forced a smile onto her face, but she was shaking so badly and felt so overwhelmed with rage that the gesture was impossible to hold. Marcus sat dumbfounded for a moment, apparently unsure of what to say or how to react. She had caught him red-handed. His betrayal crept inside her heart and made her feel cold all over.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Marcus?”

  He glanced between them and finally said, “Maggie, this is Special Agent Vasques with the FBI. She’s working on this case with us. And Vasques, this is Special Agent Carlisle. She works out of my unit at the DOJ.”

  Maggie looked at Vasques, sizing up the competition. The dark-haired agent was quite beautiful with a tanned complexion the color of light caramel, high cheekbones, and large brown eyes. She resisted the urge to punch the woman in the face. It wasn’t Vasques’s fault that Marcus had stabbed her in the back.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” Maggie said in a clipped tone, and they shook hands.

  Vasques’s thoughts were written across her face. The FBI agent could tell that something was going on here, and she said, “You know, I’m sure you want to get Agent Carlisle caught up to speed, and I want to check in with Belacourt. So I think I’m going to head on out.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you a ride back to your office.”

  As Vasques grabbed her purse and slid from the booth, she said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just catch a cab.”

  Marcus opened his mouth to protest, but Maggie gave him a fierce look. His words died in his throat. They sat silently for a few moments, just staring at each other. Maggie broke the silence first. “Now I see why you didn’t want me to come along.”

  “Oh please, Maggie. I don’t know what you’re suggesting, but you’re way out of line.”

  “You know damn well what was going on here.”

  “I do know one thing. I have an agent under my command that’s disobeyed my direct orders. Just like she did in Harrisburg. What do you think I should do about that?”

  She couldn’t contain herself any longer. She spun from her chair and slapped his coffee cup off the table and into his lap. Then she stormed out of the restaurant. She felt like falling to her knees and crying, screaming, breaking things. How could she have been so stupid and blind?

  She heard Marcus calling after her, but she didn’t want to see him at that moment. She wasn’t sure if she ever wanted to see him again.

  His hand wrapped around her bicep, but she ripped free of his grasp. “Don’t touch me!”

  “Dammit, Maggie! What the hell has gotten into you? You’re acting crazy.”

  “So now I’m crazy, huh? I suppose that’s why you don’t want me with you on investigations. Because I’m so nuts.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth. I said you’re acting crazy. There’s a difference.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Doesn’t matter, anyway.” She rammed her fist against the elevator call button. “Maybe, if you hurry, you can still catch your girlfriend.”

  He breathed out with a low growl and cracked his neck to the side. She recognized the gesture. He did it, whether consciously or unconsciously, every time he was getting ready for a fight. “Maggie, let’s just calm down and talk about this.”

  “I don’t have anythin
g to say.”

  “Then shut up and listen! There’s nothing going on. And even if there was, it’s really none of your business.”

  Her eyes went wide. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. First, he betrayed her, and then he acted like they’d never had anything going between them to start with. Not knowing what else to say, she just slapped him across the face. The elevator dinged behind her, and its doors slid open. Maggie stepped inside and pounded the button to close the doors again and shut out the rest of the world.

  44

  When Marcus entered the hotel room, Andrew was standing in front of the display board, looking at images of some type of small office building. He turned at his partner’s approach and said, “Did Maggie find you?”

  Marcus slapped his leather jacket down onto the room’s couch and shot Andrew a contemptuous look. “Oh, she found me. By the way, thanks for the heads-up. Nice to know you’ve got my back.”

  “Why? What happened?” Andrew looked him up and down. “Are you wet?”

  Marcus dropped onto the couch as though his legs could no longer support his weight. He rubbed his temples and growled in the back of his throat. “To be honest, I have no idea what just happened. Maggie, who I had ordered to stay behind, shows up, causes a scene, dumps coffee on me, slaps me. The way she was acting, I suppose I’m lucky she didn’t shoot me.”

  “Really? Did she have any reason to be upset?”

  “Don’t you start too. Number one, we were just having dinner. Number two, Maggie and I called things off a while back. We should never have got involved. It was a mistake.”

  Andrew sat down on the small mahogany coffee table in front of the couch. “You don’t really believe that. Besides, to hear her tell it, the two of you are just on a break while you get your head together.”

  “Is that what she told you?”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “When?”

  “When you called it off.”

  Marcus thought about the incident in Harrisburg. They had been investigating a string of shootings where the killer was targeting young mothers. Maggie had gone to check out a lead that paid off with a name and address. He ordered her to wait, but she decided to question the guy on her own. The killer shot her in the shoulder with a little Davis .32 ACP pistol right there on his own front porch. It was a cheap gun that had a reputation for jamming up, and true to form, a shell casing stovepiped just as he was about to shoot her in the head. It had given her just enough time to get out her backup weapon and take the killer down. But she had almost died that day. It had only been pure dumb luck that had kept her alive.

  Marcus realized then that he could never have any semblance of a normal life. Anyone that he loved was in danger because of his line of work. He had always wanted a family of his own. Emily Morgan would probably have said that it stemmed from a subconscious desire to replace the family he had lost, and maybe she would have been right. Either way, fate had other plans for him.

  It was only a few days after Harrisburg when he had ended their relationship. He had told Maggie that the stress of the job was too hard and he needed some time to …

  “Oh crap. I can see how she might have gotten that impression.”

  “Why would you want to break up with her, anyway? Maggie’s incredible. I don’t know what she sees in you.”

  “Thanks, wingman. I’m glad that I can always count on you.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “You say too much.”

  Andrew added, “You don’t say enough. You keep it all bottled up inside. So are you going to tell me?”

  Marcus sighed and reached for a cup of day-old cold coffee sitting on an end table. He choked back the contents with a cough and a wince. “After what happened in Harrisburg, I just couldn’t imagine doing what we do and trying to have a real relationship or a family. It’s just not worth the risk. You know what they call a brave man with a family?”

  Andrew shook his head. “No.”

  “They call him a coward.”

  Andrew laughed. “So what’s your plan? Are you going to be a warrior monk devoted to a higher cause?” He groaned and tapped his fist on the coffee table. “You just …”

  “Spit it out,” Marcus said.

  “You’re so smart and yet sometimes you are so dumb. You can’t refuse to enjoy life out of fear that something bad may happen. If you do that, something bad already has happened.”

  “You don’t understand. Everyone that I’ve ever cared about has been taken from me. I don’t want to worry about anyone anymore.”

  Andrew bit down on his lower lip as his eyes took on a watery sheen. Then he leaned in close and whispered, “You don’t think I understand? I’d give anything, anything, to have my little girl back. But even as bad as it hurts, if I had to choose, I would much rather have known her and lost her than never to have had her at all.”

  Marcus swallowed hard and clenched his eyes shut. Andrew was right. He was an asshole. “Andrew, listen, I’m sorry to have—”

  Andrew stood up and walked back to the display board. “Forget it. Just get over here and take a look at this. Stan’s found a lead on the Anarchist.”

  45

  Marcus punched the icon to connect with Stan, and after a moment of watching the loading indicator spin, Stan’s bearded face appeared on the screen. “Hey there, boss. How’s it hanging?”

  Stan’s head and chest filled a three-foot section of the screen. His long sandy blond beard stretched down his chest, cutting a path between a tattoo of Popeye on one pectoral and Super Mario smashing through a block on the other side. Marcus cocked his head and said, “Stan, tell me you’re wearing pants.”

  “There’s nobody else here. Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

  With a shake of his head, Marcus ignored the remark and continued, “Andrew said you found something.”

  “Right,” Stan said. “I was trying to figure out a way to narrow down the list of psychologists and therapists, so I contacted an old friend that works for the NSA to get her thoughts. She works in an offshoot of the Echelon Project. You know, Big Brother kind of stuff. They have a monitoring system in place that tracks all email and phone traffic in the country. But it’s not all read or stored. Only items containing flagged keywords are investigated. So my friend tells me that they actually monitor for certain religious keywords, watching out for extremists. Stuff like Jihad, Great Satan, Apocalypse, Cleansing Fire. That kind of thing. I’m not sure exactly how the algorithm works, but I assume it’s more complicated than just pulling out those words, otherwise they’d be sorting through false positives well after the world goes boom. It’s a pretty slick set-up. This chick is the real deal, boss. And, good lordy, she is uber-hot. Back at MIT, she used to—”

  “What did she find, Stan?” Marcus interrupted.

  “There was an email flagged from a therapist asking a colleague for some advice about a patient that he thought was really dangerous. It had a lot of those naughty keywords in it as the doc describes the patient. And then … you ready for it? Gimme a drum roll.”

  Marcus waited for the pay-off, but Stan actually seemed to be waiting for him to give a drum roll. He raised his eyebrows, and Stan said, “Fine. You’re no fun. As I was saying, this patient believes himself to be the Antichrist.”

  “Okay, that could be our guy. You have an address? We’ll pay him a visit.”

  “That’s the problem. This therapist is like a caveman. He still keeps his records on paper.” Stan raised his eyebrows and bobbed his head. “I know, right, craziness.”

  Marcus thought about it for a moment and then replied, “Send me the address and any details you have about the building. Security, blueprints, anything you can find. What about my satanism expert? Did you track somebody down?”

  “Of course I did. Found a dude named Ellery Rowland. You’ve got a meeting with him later this evening. I’ll text you the details.”

  Andrew said, “How are we going to ch
eck out the therapist lead and meet with this guy at the same time? It would sure be nice if we had another agent here in town to help us out.”

  Marcus groaned, but he knew that Andrew was right. They needed to use every resource at their disposal, and he refused to allow his personal issues to interfere with an investigation. “Fine. Stan, contact Maggie and have her meet with Ellery Rowland.”

  “Why can’t you ask her, boss? You two not speaking?” The big man chuckled in a throaty staccato rhythm. “Sounds juicy. Come on. Gimme the details.”

  “Goodbye, Stan,” Marcus said, killing the connection.

  He checked the time on his phone. The staff from a therapist’s office would surely have all gone home for the evening. If the Anarchist followed his pattern, and there was no reason to think that he wouldn’t, he’d abduct another woman within a few hours. Another dead girl, another grieving family. More pain, blood, and tears. Unless they could find him first.

  He turned to Andrew and said, “Are you ready to do a little breaking and entering?”

  46

  It took some time for Stan to hack into the database of the security company employed to keep watch over the therapist’s office, but it had been well worth the wait. They had all the info they needed to make sure that they could get in and out of the building without any complications. So after changing their clothes and gathering the necessary supplies, Marcus and Andrew headed out toward the psychologist’s office on Chicago’s South Side.

  Andrew drove the Yukon while Marcus sat in the passenger seat and tried to close his eyes and rest for a few minutes. He was out of his migraine medicine, but he’d swallowed a handful of extra-strength Tylenol before leaving. The pills had helped to quell the throbbing in his skull, but they did little to shut out the other images and thoughts that kept his mind burning through a constant stream of data. And that day had contained more than its fair share of unpleasant data to be processed. First, he had made an ass out of himself at the briefing and had humiliated Vasques. At least he had been able to recover from that one. He hadn’t been so lucky in his confrontations with Belacourt and Maggie. And then there was Ackerman.