The Ackerman Thrillers Boxset

by Ethan Cross

  14

  WHEN THEY HAD FIRST PULLED UP TO THE SCENE, MARCUS HAD NOTICED THE FOR-SALE SIGN IN THE YARD OF A BIG YELLOW BUNGALOW ACROSS THE STREET. The sign was blue with white letters. It sat at a lopsided angle, and a layer of grime covered it, as if it had weathered more than its share of storms in the same spot. As he considered how the killer had watched his victims, Marcus remembered pictures from the other abduction scenes. The KCPD had been thorough in their jobs and had photographed the view up and down each block for context. It was a smart move. He remembered other homes for sale sitting opposite the other scenes. It might even have been the reason why those families were chosen—homes opposite properties that had been vacant for an extended amount of time. Although that knowledge wouldn’t help them find future victims, it was still another piece to the puzzle, another question answered.

  Marcus picked the lock while Andrew stood guard in the alley. A big oak tree shaded the backyard, and a faded white privacy fence provided some cover. He smelled burning leaves and barbecue in the air. The door had a simple deadbolt mechanism. A bit of maneuvering and a few seconds’ time, and they were inside as easily as if they owned the place.

  “What are we going to tell the locals if we find something?” Andrew asked.

  “We’re not supposed to tell them anything.”

  “Does that mean you’re actually going to follow orders?”

  Marcus didn’t reply. He was focused on the scene. The back door opened into a kitchen. Tan linoleum covered the floors, and the cabinets looked like they were straight from the 1950s, with a flat pale yellow finish. A layer of dust covered everything, and the house smelled faintly of excrement.

  They walked through a dining room and past a set of pocket doors into a front room that had been remodeled. The carpet had been pulled up and the hardwood refinished. The old plaster had been replaced with drywall. It was like stepping from the past into the present. He supposed that the owner had started updating the house one room at a time and then decided it was easiest to buy new.

  The entire house was empty of furniture except for a folding chair leaning against the wall beside the front bay window. Marcus unfolded the chair and sat down, facing the Dunham house. From here, he could see the entire property. He could see the bedroom windows, the garage, and even a portion of the backyard. It was a perfect spot for surveillance.

  Andrew bent down and examined a spot on the floor. “Look at these scratches. Could be from the legs of a tripod.”

  Marcus noticed another spot near where Andrew was pointing. The dust had been disturbed, and a circular object had left a ring. It was maybe a foot in diameter. Andrew noticed it too. “Wonder what was sitting there?” he said.

  “A bucket,” Marcus replied, sighing and rubbing the bridge of his nose.

  “Why would he have a bucket?”

  “When I was a kid, my dad ...” Marcus hesitated. Thinking of the New York city cop who had raised him brought back thoughts about how he had always thought of himself as being a second-generation police officer. The realization still stung as he thought of his true heritage. “John Williams, my adopted father, liked to go camping. We’d get away from the city and spend a weekend out in the woods. Just the two of us. He would take a bucket along to use as a mobile toilet.”

  “So you think Ackerman Sr. didn’t even take time off from his surveillance to use the bathroom? That’s some pretty serious dedication. Robots aren’t that committed.”

  “You know the word ‘robot’ comes from the Czech word ‘robotnik,’ which means ‘slave,’ and that description might not be far from the truth. I don’t think my father took them.”

  “We know he did.”

  “We know he’s involved. I’m starting to think that he has an apprentice. Which also means that the FBI’s profile is going to be all wrong. They’re looking for one killer and building their assessment from that. Two killers means a totally different profile. And we can’t tell them a thing.”

  15

  KALEB STEPPED OUT THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR OF THE DUNHAM HOUSE AND EXAMINED THE FACES OF THE PEOPLE IN THE CROWD OF ONLOOKERS STANDING BEHIND THE POLICE CAUTION TAPE. A crime scene always drew a crowd. And criminals often liked to stand in the crowd and bask in the aftermath of their deeds. He knew that officers would be discreetly taking pictures of the crowd and comparing them with photos from past scenes, but a part of him hoped that he would be the one to notice that person who was enjoying himself just a bit too much.

  His encounter with the governor’s reps had been relatively painless, and he had even had a chance to discuss the case with one of the FBI agents assigned to the task force. Kaleb had invited the agent to dinner with the hope of picking his brain about applying to the FBI academy. The sooner he could get out from beneath his mother’s command the better.

  As he surveyed the crowd, his gaze strayed across the street to two old men sitting on a blacktop driveway in a pair of rusty lawn chairs. They were both white-haired. One in a sweater, even though it wasn’t sweater weather. The other in a tan and white striped shirt and blue polyester pants. They each had a beer in their hand and a cigar in their mouth.

  Kaleb stepped beneath the police tape and approached the two men. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. Have any of the officers talked to you?”

  The man in the polyester pants puffed his cigar and said, “They came by earlier. I’m glad to tell you what I told them. Which was pretty much nothing. We’d love to help, but we didn’t see anyone or anything out of the ordinary. Just the usual folks leaving for work, mailmen, deliveries and such.”

  “Deliveries? What kind of deliveries?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. The usual. That big brown truck.”

  “UPS,” the other man added in a soft and frail voice.

  Kaleb’s pulsed quickened. His father had liked to take him deer hunting before he died. Kaleb recognized the same sensation now as when he had sat in the tree-stand, heard the breaking of branches, and seen a twelve-point buck poke its head through the foliage. “Did this truck deliver to the Dunham house?”

  The two men exchanged glances. Polyester pants said, “I can’t say for sure, son.”

  “Just think back. Take your time. Did you see the delivery person? Did you see what kind of packages they were carrying?”

  Polyester pants shook his head, but his soft-spoken friend said, “I didn’t see the delivery man, but it must have been a big package, now that you mention it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They usually park out by the curb, walk the parcels up to the door, and ring the bell. But today the truck backed into a driveway like they were delivering a big icebox or stove or something.”

  “At the Dunham house?”

  “I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “And you didn’t see the driver?”

  “No, sorry. Everybody has stuff delivered nowadays. Nobody goes to the store to interact with their neighbors like they used to. You see those damn trucks everywhere. They blend right in.”

  Kaleb suppressed a grin—that would be exactly why the killer would choose to drive one. “Yes, they do. Thanks for your help, gentlemen.”

  “Anytime, kid,” polyester pants said as he sipped his can of Pabst beer as though it were a fine wine.

  Kaleb trotted across the street, excitement quickening his pace. He couldn’t wait to tell the lead detective and the FBI agents what he had learned. This could be the best real lead they had uncovered. Before entering the house, as an afterthought, he pulled out his phone and sent a text message to the governor’s rep, Garrison. That way no one could say that he had neglected to keep them in the loop.

  16

  THE OLD HOUSE CREAKED AND GROANED AS THE AUTUMN WIND POUNDED AGAINST ITS WOODEN SIDING. The air was cold and smelled of bleach and varnish. Thomas White checked the vitals and fluids connected to the mother and her son. They rested on two old gurneys, the kind used in earlier twentieth-century mental institutions. Bags of chemicals hung fro
m hooks, and the liquids ran into their arms through intravenous needles. White had put them into chemically-induced comas, just as he had the others. If the patriarch of their family chose to kill in their name, they would be released with little memory of the encounter. If the father failed, he would wake them from their drugged stupor just in time to see death coming.

  They had set up shop in the old home’s parlor, which White found humorous—the room was still being used to entertain guests. He moved to the son’s side and stroked the boy’s face. The young man’s face would make a nice addition to his collection, if it came to that. Looking at the boy, he couldn’t help but think of his own son—his only son—Marcus.

  He had first noticed Marcus during a national news broadcast out of Colorado. Thomas had set up a Google alert to notify him of any news stories or pages mentioning the term Francis Ackerman. One article that popped up described a fire at a hospital in Colorado Springs. He had watched the video of the broadcast online and saw a man being taken from the scene who looked eerily like himself—minus thirty years, fifty pounds, and the balding head. Under normal circumstances, he would have dismissed this as a coincidence, but in a story that involved the name Ackerman, there had to be a connection.

  His research into the young man from the broadcast yielded wonderful results. He learned all he could about Marcus Williams, things that even Marcus himself didn’t know. His heart had ached to find his true son for years, and now he had. That information, coupled with the loss of the only woman he had loved since Marcus’s mother, had forced Thomas to consider his legacy and what he would leave behind for the world. He didn’t want to be merely a footnote to the exploits of the monster that shared his name. And his plans were coming together nicely.

  Returning to the mother’s side, he leaned down and kissed her cheek. “I’ve been doing this for a long time, Mrs. Dunham. I know people. I know them better than they know themselves. Your husband is going to fail. And when he does ... well, we don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

  He stroked her cheek and imagined what her now serene features would look like when they were twisted in agony.

  17

  MARCUS AND ANDREW WERE ON THEIR WAY BACK TO THE FARMHOUSE WHEN ANDREW RECEIVED THE TEXT FROM KALEB ABOUT THE DELIVERY TRUCK. Marcus pulled their black Suburban over at a gas station and initiated a video call with the team’s technical guru, Stan Macallan. Stan didn’t look like a typical MIT graduate and former owner of a major dot com company; he looked more like the bass player from a ska band or some kid from a skate park if you added twenty years, ten inches, and a hundred pounds.

  Stan’s face and chest filled the screen of Marcus’s iPhone. A long beard covered the face. Nothing covered the chest, exposing a tattoo of Popeye on one pectoral and Super Mario smashing through a block on the other. Marcus said, “Stan, what have I told you about wearing clothes in the office?”

  “Hey, this might be your office, but it’s my home. And why the hell are you video chatting with me anyway? Video calls are so stupid. They’re only good for parents to check that their kids aren’t at a party or for long-distance couples to get naked and—”

  “Fascinating, Stan. Write a blog post about it. But before you do that, I’ve got some work for you to do.” Marcus explained about the brown delivery truck possibly being spotted at the abduction scene and told Stan to run a check on any trucks within a hundred-mile radius that had been stolen or sold.

  After a few moments of clicking keys and Stan humming the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the technical genius said, “Okay, brown trucks mean UPS. I found one case of some UPS trucks being stolen in Topeka, but the police think that it’s insurance fraud. But I got to thinking about it, and someone could just as easily paint any truck brown to look like a UPS truck. So I checked on that and found a few possibles with the most interesting being a FedEx employee that went missing with his truck six months ago and neither he nor his truck has been seen since. The police think that he stole the vehicle. The dude’s name is Joe Colwell, and he has a record a mile long, including several violent offenses. Bounced around foster homes at a young age, but his mother kept regaining custody. She had been in and out of prison, rehab, and mental institutions for drugs and increasingly erratic behavior. Colwell only got the job at FedEx because a friend’s father was a manager at the distribution center.”

  From the passenger seat, Andrew said, “Sounds like Colwell could be your father’s apprentice. He fits the mold.”

  “It’s the best lead we have right now,” Marcus said. “Do you have a last-known for him, Stan?”

  “Yeah, it’s his mother’s house, but it’s the address he used on his FedEx application. Cops have questioned her, and she claims that she has no idea what happened to him. I’m sending the details to your phone.”

  “Good work. Thanks, Stan,” Marcus said as he killed the call. A second later, his phone dinged with the address, and he put the car into drive and pulled out into traffic.

  *

  Marcus rang the bell three times before they heard movement inside the house. The place was more of a shack, with brown shingle siding and a front yard piled with junk and two-foot-tall grass. The woman who answered the door was blonde and surprisingly pretty. She looked like a former model, except for the T-shirt yellowed from sweat and teeth the same color. When she opened the door, he could see stacks of old newspapers and piles of trash covering the floor behind her.

  “Hello, ma’am,” Marcus said, flashing his ID. “We’re from the Hetfield and Ulrich Detective Agency. We’ve been hired to find your son Joe because he’s come into a large sum of money.”

  “Money? How?” she asked.

  Marcus expected her voice to sound harsh like that of a long-time smoker, but it was high and sweet with a slight Southern drawl.

  “I’m not at liberty to say, ma’am. But I can tell you this, it is a substantial amount. We’ve also been told that if we make every reasonable effort to find Joe and are unable to locate him, then the money will default to his closest living relative.”

  Her eyes narrowed in suspicion, and she looked both of the men up and down. She glanced to the street at the SUV sitting by the curb. She seemed hesitant but must have decided that even the slight prospect of the money outweighed any loyalty she had to her son. She said, “I haven’t seen him in months. But I know the last place he was living.”

  18

  THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE GLASS IN THE INTERROGATION ROOM WAS A SPACE THAT FEW PEOPLE EVER SAW. It reminded Kaleb of a walk-in closet. The interrogation room itself was fifteen by fifteen foot square with off-white walls, a gray metal table, three chairs, and fluorescent lighting humming overhead. The viewing room matched the interrogation room’s length but was only a third of the width. Along one wall, it held a small table supporting a computer monitor and some recording equipment. The rest of the space was dedicated to observation.

  Kaleb leaned against the back wall. Two senior homicide detectives stood with their noses to the glass as an FBI agent questioned Brad Dunham in the interrogation room. Brad, of course, wasn’t a suspect of any kind, but he might have possessed information about why his family had been chosen or he might have seen something that he didn’t even realize was pertinent. The FBI agent handled Brad with skill and consideration, not pushing too hard but deep enough to get the information they needed. Brad was being helpful but was also growing visibly anxious and agitated. Time was running out, and he knew it.

  The door to the observation room opened, and the light stung Kaleb’s eyes. Captain Maria Duran, Kaleb’s mother, walked into the darkness and shut the door behind her. She squinted as her eyes adjusted, and she noticed him in the corner. “What the hell are you doing in here?” she said.

  “He wanted to observe the questioning, boss,” one of the lead detectives said.

  Her gaze didn’t leave Kaleb. “I would think that Detective Duran would have better things to do than stand around. We do have two people about to be killed out there
somewhere.”

  Kaleb resisted the urge to rise to her challenge. Instead, he maintained his composure and said, “I’m glad you’re here, Captain. I have an idea that might buy those people some time.”

  “The best way to help them is to do your job.”

  “Fine, but I was thinking that—”

  A commotion in the interrogation room drew the attention of the group. Brad Dunham knocked over his chair and screamed, “I should never have gone to the police! I hope you’re doing more than asking me a bunch of pointless questions!”

  The FBI agent tried to calm him down, but fear had overcome Brad’s sensibilities, and he stormed from the room.

  “Go after him,” Captain Duran said to one of the detectives.

  The detective hurried from the room, and Maria Duran said, “Okay, Kaleb, what’s your big idea?”

  19

  THE ADDRESS THAT COLWELL’S MOTHER HAD GIVEN THEM LED TO A TWO-STORY WHITE COLONIAL. It was the kind of place that would have made a nice home fifty years ago and with a little help from someone who enjoyed working with their hands could be nice again. In its current state, it was the perfect place for someone like Joe Colwell to hide.

  Marcus pulled the Suburban up to the curb across the street and two houses down. Then they watched the property for a half-hour, searching for any signs of life. Unfortunately, time wouldn’t permit a stakeout.

  “Go around to the back. I’ll come at him from the front. We’ll go in fast and hard on my signal,” Marcus said.

  They each stuck small flesh-colored radio receivers in their ears, and Andrew said, “Do you read me?”

  Marcus nodded, and Andrew stepped away from the vehicle, winding his way around to the back of the house from a neighboring alleyway. Marcus checked his Sig Sauer pistol and then waited for Andrew to take up position. He cracked his neck to the side, getting in fight mode, and took a deep breath before opening the driver’s door. Situations like this never seemed to get any easier. No matter how good he was, one meth-head with a shotgun could put a real damper on his day. Death was always there waiting in the corner of his eye. He wondered where the Reaper would send him when that moment came. A part of him longed for the release. A part of him feared it.