The Ackerman Thrillers Boxset: 1-6

by Ethan Cross

  “Only you would put a bomb in a baby carriage.”

  Ackerman’s smile returned. “At least I took the baby out first.”

  7

  BRAD DUNHAM WAS A SIMPLE MAN, BUT NOT A STUPID ONE. He enjoyed working with his hands and his strong back, but he also had a good business sense which led him to focus on areas that most other general contractors ignored. Customer service, marketing, public relations, strategic partnerships—these things and a strong work ethic were what had taken Brad from a one-person handy man operation to a full-blown construction firm with five teams of workers handling different projects. His success had brought other perks as well, like being able to come home in the middle of the day and surprise his wife Julie with lunch at a nice restaurant and an afternoon excursion into the city.

  But Brad knew that something was wrong the moment he pulled into his garage and stepped out of his truck.

  A large white envelope, the same kind he used for mailing contracts, was taped to the door leading into his kitchen. He stood there and stared at it for a moment. It was a little larger than a normal sheet of paper. Maybe nine by twelve inches. Crisp, clean, white, new. Open Me was written across its front in large red letters.

  His mind reeled with possibilities. Divorce papers? A goodbye note? He and Julie had their problems, just like any other couple. But he hadn’t seen anything like this coming. He moved toward the door with hesitant footsteps. The smell of gasoline and engine exhaust still hung in the air, and he listened to the truck’s engine pinging and crackling as it cooled down from the drive home.

  Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to grab the packet. Maybe he was jumping to conclusions? Maybe it was just a note saying to turn down the crockpot or that she’d be home late? Maybe it was a good thing? A surprise?

  The packet bent in half as he pulled it free. He turned it over and undid the fastening. It contained some papers and photos of a man he didn’t recognize, but there was also something heavier in the bottom—a silver home-made DVD in a clear jewel case. Watch Me was written across the front of the disc in the same red lettering.

  Maybe it was a game of some kind? But Julie wasn’t the spontaneous or playful type.

  He opened the door and called out, “Julie? Are you home? Hello?”

  Silence filled his home’s corridors. No response came. He repeated himself three more times, but still nothing. Then he realized that Julie’s car was still in the garage. But maybe she had left with a friend? He chastised himself for being so indecisive and concluded that he might as well stop speculating and just watch the video.

  Brad threw his keys on the gray and black Formica countertop, just as he did every other day. Then he kicked off his boots and placed them next to the door. The kitchen smelled of vinegar. Julie used a vinegar mixture as a natural cleaning fluid. He would have preferred the smell of bleach or other harsh chemicals, but he stayed out of her business.

  His son’s backpack still sat on the woodgrain surface of the kitchen table.

  He swallowed hard. Something wasn’t right.

  He wasted no more time. He moved to the living room, flicked on the television, booted up the DVD player, and activated the surround-sound system. Then he slid the disc into the tray and sat down on the coffee table as he waited for it to load.

  It was a short wait, and then the face that filled the screen made him flinch back and shudder. The visage was horrific. It was that of a man in his mid-thirties with dark features and high cheekbones. The features were twisted in terrible agony, but they were also frozen and dead. The eyes didn’t match the rest of the face. They were alive with a sinister glee.

  After a second, Brad realized that it was some terrible but realistic mask.

  The lips didn’t move, but a voice came out from behind the mask and thundered from the surround-sound speakers. Brad grabbed for the remote and adjusted the volume.

  The voice inside the grotesque mask was hypnotic, eerily calm, and compelling. Not malevolent, but not friendly.

  “Hello, Mr. Dunham. I’m sure you’re wondering what’s going on, so I’ll cut to the heart of the matter. The papers have started calling me the Coercion Killer. It’s as good a name as any. But you and your family might as well call me God, because I have your world in my hands. I’ve studied you. I’ve watched you. But you can’t truly know another human being until you’ve seen them in crisis. Will you be at your best when things are at their worst? Let’s find out.”

  Brad couldn’t believe this was happening. Something like this hadn’t even crossed his mind when he’d first seen the packet.

  The killer’s hypnotic voice continued on. “I know that you own a gun. A 9mm Beretta. You’re going to use it to kill someone. Inside the packet is all the information you need to know about your target. A twelve-hour timer starts at five o’clock this evening. If the timer runs out and the man whose details are in the packet is still living, I will return your wife to you in pieces. She will die a very horrible and painful death. When she takes her last breath, I’ll start another timer. If your target is still living at the end of that timer, then your son will share his mother’s fate, and our experiment will be over. If you’ve followed my saga in the papers, you’ll know that I’m a man of my word. If you follow through at your end, your family will be released unharmed. If you don’t, they’ll die. They have been sedated the entire time they’ve been with me. They can come home and wake up in their beds and barely know that anything’s even happened. They can’t identify me or provide any information to the police. I have no reason beyond the reaches of our little game to kill them. So now you must ask yourself what you’ll do for them. Dying for them is easy, but will you kill for them? Will you spend the rest of your life in prison to save them? I have my theories about what will happen next. I believe that I know what kind of a man you are ... Do you?”

  The grotesque death mask hovered on the big screen of the TV for a moment longer, and then the screen faded to black. As the nightmarish face disappeared, Brad Dunham dropped to his knees and threw up all over the living room’s new carpet.

  8

  THE CIA CONTRACTORS HAD CLAMPED A PAIR OF FLEX-CUFFS ON THE SURRENDERING ACKERMAN AND HAD DRAGGED HIM BACK TO THE APARTMENT. They closed around him like a protective detail covering a foreign diplomat. Except that they had guns that were held low and were leveled at the person whom they would have been shielding. They moved with assurance and efficiency but tried not to draw attention to themselves.

  Marcus followed a few steps behind, pushing the explosive-filled stroller and watching the strange cavalcade. Ackerman didn’t resist at all. He let them almost carry him over the sidewalk, through the door of the apartment building, up a dimly lit stairwell, and into their makeshift headquarters.

  Andrew’s eyes went wide as they entered. “I’ll be damned. This may sound funny, but I actually didn’t think we’d catch him. At least, not alive.”

  Ackerman said, “Thank you, Andrew, for the vote of confidence.”

  “He surrendered and has agreed to help us,” Marcus added, more for the ears of the overzealous clandestine operators than for Andrew.

  “Good job, men,” Fagan said.

  The Director walked up and punched Ackerman in the gut. The killer doubled over and chuckled. “Good to see you as well, Phillip.”

  Confused, Marcus turned to his brother. “You know his name?”

  Ackerman reared back to his full height and looked the Director squarely in the eyes. “Of course. I know all. See all.”

  The Director met Ackerman’s gaze without flinching, his hands clenched at his sides.

  Marcus shook his head in disbelief. The Director was a bit of a strange man. To Marcus’s knowledge, no member of their team had ever called the Director by his real name, nor did they know what it was. He supposed that was one thing about his brother—Ackerman was full of surprises.

  The CIA contractors shoved Ackerman down into a chair at the kitchen table and their big blond leader s
aid, “We can’t keep him here. My men are bringing the transport van around. You have until then to ask him a few questions. Then we’re moving him to an isolated facility we’ve acquired beyond the city limits.”

  “An isolated facility,” Ackerman said. “That sounds exciting. But first things first. How do you know that our father is alive?”

  “We’re asking the questions,” Fagan said.

  Marcus rolled his eyes, knowing that it was pointless to play tough with Ackerman. “A package addressed to me was sent to the Attorney General’s office. It contained two items. A missing video from your childhood, and a newspaper clipping from Kansas City about a series of elaborate murders. His fingerprints were all over both. Still, we were worried that they were from you and had been staged somehow. That is, until we ran voice-print analysis comparisons between videos left by the killer in this case—the media call him the Coercion Killer—and the videos of the experiments our father conducted on you when you were a boy. The voice was a match. Since we’re playing show-and-tell, what made you sure that he was dead?”

  “Typically, when you stab someone six times in the back and shove them into an alligator-infested swamp, they stay dead.”

  “Why were you in a swamp?”

  “This was after the police had caught on to what father was doing to me. And some time after we traveled to New York to kill our mother and your adopted father, Marcus. We were hiding on a stolen houseboat in Louisiana. We were playing one of Father’s favorite games. He always forced me to read literature and study random topics, then he would quiz me on the details. If I answered a question incorrectly, he would hurt me in some diabolically clever way. In this case, he stabbed a knife through my hand. Then he made the mistake of turning his back on me. I pulled the knife free, and the rest belongs in a history book.”

  The Director said, “Okay, but then why have we never seen or heard anything from him for all these years?”

  Ackerman ignored the question and asked Marcus, “Are these restraints really necessary?”

  Marcus cocked an eyebrow. “I honestly cannot believe you just asked me that. Answer the Director.”

  “I didn’t hear the magic word.”

  The Director struck Ackerman across the face, a firm open-fisted blow. Marcus put a hand on the Director’s chest. “Come on. You know he doesn’t even feel it.”

  “I know that. But I still enjoy it.”

  Ackerman gave the older man a wink. “It was good for me too, sweetie.”

  Marcus held the Director back and said, “Please.”

  “Father trained me how to kill without people even being aware that a murder had occurred. He had all these theories about how someone with our particular tastes could operate without detection for years. He made an art form of it. But that never appealed to me. What’s the point in committing the perfect murder if no one knows it? I wanted to be infamous. But Father, if he’s still alive as you say, then I suspect he’s been active all these years, and you didn’t even realize he was out there.”

  Marcus had already considered that possibility. Which was why he had been studying the cases of every missing person in a hundred-mile radius of KC. He had spent hours diving into every detail of those cases, memorizing every face. But, so far, he hadn’t discovered any pattern or accomplished anything beyond occupying the time when he should have been sleeping.

  “So why show himself now?” Marcus asked. “These killings are very dramatic. The person doing this wants attention and a lot of it. He takes the family of one victim and then forces them to murder someone else in order for the family to be set free.”

  Ackerman nodded. “That does sound like him. Don’t you see? The whole thing is a social experiment. Father’s a very inquisitive student of human nature. That’s why he chose psychology as a field of expertise. He gets to observe the reactions of people in extreme circumstances and also to study the effects that the killings have on a community and society at large.”

  To his men, Fagan said, “Bastard sounds jealous that he didn’t think of it first.”

  Ackerman smiled. “Maybe I am.”

  The Director asked, “What about aliases?”

  “I heard him use a few from time to time, but I’d have to think about what they were.”

  The blond CIA contractor received a message over his radio that their transport had arrived. “We can finish this at the holding facility,” he said.

  Ackerman looked at Marcus as the goon squad dragged him to his feet. He said, “You asked the right question. Why did Father come out of hiding? And in such a public way? There has to be a reason. An initiating event that made him decide to track you down and to stage this big production. If you can figure out what made him emerge from the shadows, then you can force him the rest of the way into the light.”

  9

  THE CIA CONTRACTORS HAD ACQUIRED AN OLD FARMHOUSE NORTH OF HARRISONVILLE, MO TO SERVE AS ACKERMAN’S TEMPORARY DETENTION CENTER. Built in the 1920s, the one-and-a-half-story yellow craftsman-style home sat on forty acres and rested within a small valley. The place came pre-filled with furniture that looked as if it hadn’t been moved since the 1960s. Hardwood floors, beautiful wood trim, French doors. Kitchen, back porch, dining room, laundry room, and living room on the main floor, with three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. The topography of most of the area was flat, but small hills crowned with sporadic trees surrounded the house and yard. Beyond that was farmland. And beyond that was the highway.

  Marcus didn’t like the place. Ackerman would have places to run to if he got loose, and the perimeter wasn’t easy to defend. He supposed neither factor mattered much. They weren’t expecting an attack, and Ackerman wouldn’t try to escape—at least, not yet.

  The goon squad had set up shop in the living room and converted the dining room into a makeshift prison. That left the upstairs for Marcus, Andrew, Maggie, and the Director, which worked out perfectly since Marcus and Maggie would share a room.

  Marcus watched through a second-story window as a gray panel van pulled up and the black-ops team unloaded Ackerman. They were calm and efficient, as though they’d previously carried out the same type of extraction many times. But Marcus knew that they’d never dealt with a prisoner like Ackerman before, and thinking of his brother as just another high-value target could lead to all of their deaths.

  The first thing Maggie had done upon entering the room was strip off the bed sheets and replace them with a newly purchased set. Then she had scrubbed the bedroom from top to bottom with a strong-smelling cleaning fluid. She was just starting to organize her clothes in the closet, each garment covered by a layer of plastic, when the van pulled up. She turned away from her organizing and joined Marcus at the window.

  She chewed on her fingernails as she watched Ackerman through the pane of dusty glass. She ground her teeth at the sight of him. “I can’t believe that we didn’t just kill him,” she said.

  “He surrendered,” Marcus replied.

  “What difference does that make? He doesn’t deserve to be breathing.”

  “We need him.”

  “He won’t help us. It’s not in his nature.”

  Marcus turned away from the window and leaned back against the old yellowing plaster of the bedroom wall. “My father is out there right now on a killing spree that has this whole state living in terror. And Ackerman is the only one who knows him. We have no good leads. Nothing. We need every bit of help we can get.”

  “We can’t trust him.”

  “Who said anything about trusting him? Besides, the only person that hates my father more than me is my big brother.”

  “That’s another thing. I don’t like how easily you’ve started referring to him as your brother. He’s not your family.” Maggie placed a hand on his chest. “We’re your family. He’s a monster.”

  “If he’s a monster, then what does that make me?”

  “You’re nothing like him.”

  Marcus sat down on the bed and closed his ey
es. The room stank of Maggie’s cleaning fluids. “You don’t know me,” he said. “Not really.”

  She walked over to him, the hardwood protesting at each step, and leaned down into his face. “How dare you say that! You know how hard I’ve had to work to crack your shell. And just when I think we’re making progress, you start pulling away.”

  “I start pulling away? That’s funny. I believe I was the one who asked you to leave all this behind.”

  “Marcus, you know I—”

  “You know why I can’t sleep, Maggie?” Marcus said. “Because when I sleep, I dream of murdering people. And in my dreams, I like it. I’m exactly like him.”

  “That’s just your own fears coming through in your dreams. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I don’t want to have this conversation right now. I need to talk to my brother.”

  Marcus walked out and closed the door behind him. He stood there a moment in the hall and heard Maggie start to cry. He reached for the knob and was about to go back in and apologize when the Director called up from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Marcus! You need to get back to the city. There’s been another abduction. A woman and her young son, and this time we’re finally ahead of the game.”

  “What about Ackerman?”

  “He’ll be here when you get back. You and Andrew need to check out that scene. The clock’s ticking.”

  Marcus double-timed it down the stairs. Andrew was already waiting by the door, but before Marcus could join him, Fagan stepped in from the living room and said, “And remember, Agent Williams, you’re just there to observe. Take the info they give you but keep your conclusions and anything you find to yourself.”

  “If they don’t have all the information, then the locals and the FBI will just be spinning their wheels. I thought we were all on the same team.”

  “The same team, yes, but with different parts to play. Don’t draw attention to yourself or to this organization. That’s an order.”