1 The Question of the Missing Head

by E. J. Copperman

Ms. Washburn was not far behind me, and Epstein, on his cellular phone, was giving us very specific instructions to the area in which Ackerman was holding my mother. I cannot recall whether I was breathing as we ran toward the stairwell.

  “Tell Epstein to be ready to open the door to the stairs,” I told Ms. Washburn as I ran. “The elevator is just too slow.”

  “He’s already heading that way,” she answered a moment later. Ms. Washburn was breathing heavily. I realized I was running very fast, but I could not wait for anyone. I wasn’t even sure if Captain Harris or Lapides had followed us. I assumed they had, and that they had alerted any uniformed officers left in the building to converge on the area in question, just outside the storage chamber’s outer door.

  Epstein let us through the stairwell door only eighteen seconds later, Ms. Washburn puffing behind me. I heard another sound that I could not immediately identify, which turned out to be my own breathing. I hadn’t realized I was taking in so much air so rapidly.

  “He’s down there,” Epstein said, pointing toward the corridor’s bend. “There are already a couple of cops holding guns on him, but he’s calling for you, Samuel.”

  On cue, I heard Ackerman shout, “Is that you, Hoenig? I’ve got your mother. Come out and see us.”

  I started in the direction of the voice, but Epstein grabbed my left arm to stop me. “Before you do, Samuel, you should know: He’s got a scalpel to her throat.”

  Ms. Washburn caught her breath.

  There was no advantage to running now. I had to banish from my head the idea that Mother could be killed, and that I would have had at least a small role in the events that would lead to her death. I had to focus more closely and specifically than I ever had before. I would walk around the corner and see the image that Epstein had prepared for me to see.

  That was the plan.

  But I felt my hands start to flap at my sides and my head begin to quiver. I made sounds that were involuntary and must have seemed more animal than human. My eyes rolled upward, and I saw only marginally what was in front of me. I dropped to my knees. My teeth clenched. My hands went to the sides of my head and pressed. I started to bend rhythmically at the waist, head tilted forward. I was completely incapacitated.

  And then I saw Ms. Washburn lean over me and hold my face in her hands, the way teachers and doctors would do when I was learning about social skills and proper classroom behavior. She gently forced my gaze toward hers and she said, “Your mother needs you now. No one else. Just you. And you can do this. Show Ackerman that you are the better man.”

  There was something about her voice, just the sound of it, that reached the rational part of my brain. I stopped shaking and listened.

  “Breathe,” Ms. Washburn said.

  I took in a breath. I let it out.

  “That’s good,” Ms. Washburn said. “Keep doing that.”

  “You have to come to where I can see you,” Ackerman called from around the corner. “You can stop me from killing your mother, but you have to be in my line of sight.”

  Anger started to overcome fear in my mind. But anger would not be any more useful. Anger also leads to quivering and incapacitation, what the teachers in my middle school used to call a meltdown.

  “Use your brain,” Ms. Washburn said. “That’s your best weapon.”

  I stood up, remembering to breathe. I took Ms. Washburn’s hands, and she looked surprised. “I’m sorry,” I said. Her hands were remarkably soft.

  “It’s okay,” she told me. “Any rational person would be upset under these circumstances. Now, let’s go.”

  I held her hands for one more second. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Not yet.”

  I stood straight and walked, a bit stiffly, toward the corner. I tried to picture the worst thing I could see, so that what I did see would not be as bad. But I couldn’t imagine something worse than this.

  Ackerman was backed up, literally, against the door to the storage chamber. There were two police officers in uniform holding their weapons up, trained on Ackerman. But they could not get a clear shot because Ackerman was using something as a shield.

  Mother.

  And her first words when she saw me were, “I’m sorry, Samuel.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry for,” I told her, trying to eliminate any quiver from my voice. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “I was trying to help. I couldn’t just wait in the car. I was looking for exits they could have used. And when I came inside, he found me. It’s my fault.”

  Ackerman, looking quite frightened himself, stopped our conversation. “You can help her,” he told me. “You can get your mother back completely unharmed.”

  “What is it I have to do to accomplish that?” I asked. “Your plan is uncovered. Your accomplices are in custody. We know that you killed Dr. Springer.”

  “Oh, no,” Ackerman said. “That wasn’t me. I had no beef against Rebecca. It was Rita who wanted her out of the way. ‘No witnesses,’ she said. She injected Rebecca with succinylcholine. We keep it there in case a patient is still alive and needs to be on a breathing apparatus. It temporarily paralyzes the muscles and makes it impossible to breathe, so the machine can do it for you. But without the machine, it looked like Rebecca had suffocated. Then Rita fired a gun into the storage chamber that was supposed to have held her head.”

  “That made it clear to everyone who looked that the receptacle was empty,” I said. “Was it also Rita who tried to kill your wife, Dr. Ackerman?”

  Once again, I knew the answer to the question: Rita Masters-Powell, seeing that the money was not coming to herself and Ackerman, had decided to eliminate the competition for Ackerman and blame it on the mythical thieves of her own fictitious bodily remains. Ackerman acknowledged that plan and added, “That’s when I knew she was really crazy.”

  “That’s when you knew?” Mother asked.

  I was inching toward Ackerman, attempting to get close enough to engage him physically, or at least wrench Mother away. But he saw what I was doing and tightened his hold. Mother gasped a little, and her eyes widened.

  “I’m not kidding, Hoenig,” Ackerman said. “You have one chance to save her life, and that’s to escort me out of this building and into my car, and to get the police to guarantee they won’t track me. I need an hour; that’s all. Now, that’s reasonable, isn’t it?”

  “He’s bluffing, Samuel,” Mother said. “I dealt with tougher cookies than him in the sixties.”

  “Don’t help, Mother,” I said.

  “Make your choice,” Ackerman said. “I’m not going to stand like this forever.”

  “The police won’t agree to it,” I said. “I have no special influence with them. They’ll send a hostage negotiator, who will promise you many accommodations until you let my mother go, and then they will shoot you. If you kill my mother, they will shoot you. Your only option is to surrender and hope that the state of New Jersey does not reinstitute the death penalty during your prison sentence, which I assume will be for life without parole.”

  Ackerman used his free hand to swipe the key card through the reader next to the door. I did not understand why getting into the next room and cornering himself more than he already had would advance his cause.

  “This may not be helping, Samuel,” Ms. Washburn hissed from behind me.

  “You’re wrong,” Ackerman answered. “The cops think you’re some kind of genius. You should have heard them all day: ‘Samuel Hoenig figured it out; Samuel Hoenig would have made a great detective. Why did you fire Samuel Hoenig? Bring back Samuel Hoenig.’ Blah, blah, blah.”

  So this was what ranting was like. It was my first time hearing it in a real-life situation. Of course he had fired me from the case; he was not the least bit interested in my discovering the truth, and I had exceeded his expectations. I had to go. The only reason he had called
Questions Answered back after the ransom note was probably because Lapides and Laverne Masters had insisted on it.

  “Voice recognition,” the system’s voice requested.

  “Marshall Ackerman.”

  “I am unable to help,” I assured him. “Let my mother go, and you will not be shot. That I can promise. Otherwise, you have very little hope.”

  “Say good-bye to your mother, Hoenig,” Ackerman said. I saw his hand move.

  I took no time at all to interpret that statement, and launched myself at Ackerman. But the hand I’d seen moving was not the right hand, which was holding the scalpel to Mother’s neck, but the left, and it moved behind him.

  His hand landed on the door handle. He pushed the door open with his back leg, and he and Mother stumbled into the storage chamber. I was only two seconds behind them.

  Once inside, I saw the first stroke of good luck Mother had experienced so far in this ordeal—Ackerman had fallen backward into the room and skidded on the smooth floor in the chamber. He had instinctively thrown out his arms to cushion his fall, and in doing so, released Mother. Ackerman landed on the floor next to the nearest computer console. There was no one else in the room.

  I took steps to ensure that would remain the case. While I would have welcomed the assistance of the police, I was concerned that any aggressive action against Ackerman at this point would send his fragile mental state into a much more dangerous stage. Even as I saw Captain Harris and Detective Lapides rushing the chamber door, I locked it from the inside and then turned to move on Ackerman.

  It was too late to take physical action against him, however. Ackerman had regained his balance and stood in front of me. Mother, exhibiting her intelligence, had rolled away from him the second she was released, and now sat on the floor near the inner chamber door behind a front console, hidden from Ackerman’s view. She was breathing heavily, and I worried about her heart.

  From the corridor, I heard the police and Ms. Washburn call to me to unlock the door.

  Ackerman still wielded the scalpel defensively, swiping it through the air and appearing to enjoy the sound it made.

  “You really are trapped now, Ackerman,” I said. “You’ve cornered yourself. You have no choice but to surrender now. You can kill me and still not be able to escape.” I purposely did not mention Mother, as I was especially interested in having Ackerman forget she was in the room.

  He did not appear to hear me, or at least did not process what I had said. “This isn’t my fault, Hoenig,” he said. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I just wanted the money.”

  One thing that can be learned from motion pictures is that police negotiators and psychologists always try to establish a rapport with the subject. Fortunately for the ones in motion pictures, they are fictional and have writers inventing their dialogue. Also, very few of them have Asperger’s Syndrome (perhaps this is the moment to point out that Adrian Monk of the television series Monk had Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, not an autism spectrum condition), which brings a certain difficulty in creating an instant connection with a person one does not know well.

  I searched my memory of social skills training for clues on how to make people want to like you. Agreeing with them on an issue is one way to do so, but I had always been taught that doing so when you really disagree is dishonest and will not be received well in the long term.

  Right now, I did not have to worry about the long term.

  “Of course you didn’t want to hurt anyone,” I said, resisting the urge to call him Marshall, which I thought would have been too obvious an indicator that I was not sincere. “Your plan was to get the money from Laverne Masters and her company. Then you’d leave your wife and go off to live with Rita.” If I could inch toward him, perhaps I could kick his legs out from under him and subdue him once the scalpel was out of his hand.

  But something I had said clearly was not what Ackerman wanted to hear. “No, no!” he shouted. “That’s not what I wanted at all! Rita thought I was going to run off with her, but she’s crazy. You know she tried to kill Eleanor?”

  He was very confused at this point, and the only thing I could do was try to get him under control. Logic would not convince him to surrender to the police, who were still calling to me from the corridor. I saw Mother sitting near the inner door, and she seemed to be texting on her cellular phone, which I would have thought was strange if I had been focusing on anything but Ackerman.

  “She came in to my bedroom and tried to shoot my wife,” Ackerman went on. “We never planned a message threatening Eleanor; she was supposed to send a text threatening Laverne. But Rita saw the money wasn’t coming right then, and she figured she’d just kill my wife! Can you imagine?”

  I was very close to Ackerman now, but not so close he could use the scalpel on me. “Let’s sit down and talk about it,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but my legs are very tired.” Perhaps if I sat, he would take the example and follow me without thinking about it.

  So I sat down at the nearest computer console, but Ackerman did not duplicate my move. He did, however, set the scalpel down on the console, and within one second, I reached out and took it in my hand. I exhaled. The danger had passed.

  Unfortunately, I was in error. Ackerman had divested himself of the sharp blade in favor of the more offensive weapon he pulled from the pocket of his white lab coat, with Dr. Marshall Ackerman stitched on the left breast over the GSCI symbol.

  A gun.

  “She left this for me,” he said. “Rita shot the receptacle marked for her own head, then shot at my wife with this gun, and then she left it in my desk. She wanted the police to think I had killed Rebecca. And all the time she said she loved me!”

  It is possible that no one else would have asked the question at that point, but I felt obligated to do so: “Why did you use the scalpel when you had a gun?”

  “I was going to put the gun back in Rita’s bag when she was supposed to be Charlotte Selby,” he said. “I didn’t want to touch it and leave my fingerprints on the weapon. But she left me no choice. Just let me load it. And then I’m going to use it.”

  Mother looked up from her cellular phone, alarmed. I confess that I was not very confident at that moment, either. People say their minds “race” in such situations. I am not sure what that might mean, but I do know it was difficult for me to think usefully just then. Ackerman began loading the gun with bullets from his jacket pocket. I lunged for them, but he slapped the revolver closed and pointed it at me.

  “As I said, killing me will not help your chances of escape,” I reminded Ackerman.

  He continued to point the gun but was not making eye contact with me. In retrospect, I am no longer sure he knew who was in the room with him.

  “The first three bullets should start the process,” he said.

  The process? Clearly, Ackerman was not talking about shooting me. I began to reconsider my decision to lock the chamber door, and started to walk toward it, seeing Lapides and Captain Harris, but not Ms. Washburn, through the window.

  Ackerman shouted at me, “Don’t unlock that! Opening the door will spoil the effect!”

  Since he seemed to have no objection to explaining his plans, I decided to ask directly. “What effect?” I said. “What is it you intend to do?”

  Ackerman looked at me as if I must surely be a complete fool. Clearly, his intentions were obvious: “I’m going to shoot the big tanks.” He gestured with the gun toward the inner chamber.

  That was a terrifying thought. If he ruptured enough of the larger stores of liquid nitrogen, the oxygen in the inner and outer chambers would be depleted to the point that anyone inside—and possibly some of those in the corridor, although that was unlikely—would asphyxiate.

  “But you’ll die, too,” I said.

  Ackerman ignored me and walked to the inner chamber door. I looked toward the floor, but Mothe
r was no longer there.

  Then I saw some movement near the ceiling of the room. One of the tiles in the dropped ceiling, no doubt put in for cosmetic purposes when the room was being insulated for its special usage, began to slide back on its own.

  “I think with three bullets, I can put holes in at least five tanks,” Ackerman said, now seeming to talk to himself more than to me. “If I have time to reload, I could take out another five. That should be plenty.”

  An arm, which appeared to be in a blue police uniform, appeared through the opening created by the moved ceiling tile. The hand was holding a police baton. It let go, and the baton dropped to the floor, but I did not hear it hit the tile, which did not seem to make sense. I understood the gesture—Mother had been texting with someone in the corridor, who had sent a uniformed officer through air vents to the ceiling. The baton had been dropped because another gun would simply multiply the danger of a tank being punctured.

  Now if I could only make it to the dropped baton before Ackerman noticed it, or started shooting.

  “If you’re going to commit suicide, just shoot yourself,” I suggested to Ackerman. “Why kill innocent people with you and destroy all your work?”

  Ackerman began to laugh. “Innocent people?” he asked. “Who is innocent here?”

  I did not want to mention Mother, since she was no longer in sight. I hoped she was crawling around the room to unlock the door, but I did not see her in that area of the outer chamber.

  “I believe that I am innocent,” I said.

  “You are irrelevant,” Ackerman said. “Just stand back and enjoy the show.” And he reached for the handle to open the inner chamber door.

  That was my chance. I lunged forward and reached into Ackerman’s right jacket pocket. He turned at the movement, but did not point the gun. He seemed to be taken completely by surprise, as if he had forgotten I was behind him. I got what I wanted out of his pocket—his key ring—and stood back as he leveled the gun at me.

  “My keys?” Ackerman laughed. “Couldn’t you see the gun in my hand?”