by J. D. Barker
Like the lock on a bedroom door.
They didn’t control me. Their world was a movie and I controlled the house lights.
Dr. Bart’s door was on the right.
I slipped my homemade key into the dead bolt carefully, finessing the plastic into the slot, passing the tumblers a little at a time. When it jammed, I resisted the urge to force the key deeper. Patience—a vital habit of highly effective lockpickers. I pulled it back just enough to work it free, then gave it a gentle nudge. I repeated this maneuver several times until the plastic was buried to the handcrafted hilt.
I closed my eyes.
And twisted.
The plastic began to bend. The colorful bank logo on the front of the card turned white at the stress point, I kept the pressure steady and easy. If this sucker broke off in the dead bolt, my career as a thief, not to mention my freedom, was on the chopping block.
Nobody entered Dr. Bart’s office. That was his private space, and you had to respect that.
I would never violate Dr. Bart’s private space, Dr. Rose.
I kept twisting the plastic key.
Forced it to turn.
Easy, easy. Like Sunday morning.
It didn’t break.
The tumbler turned, and I heard the bolt slide from the jamb and retract with a quiet click.
I turned the doorknob and stepped inside.
The room smelled like Dr. Bart’s sessions.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Dobbs
The moment Dobbs saw the two black Chevy Suburbans pull up to the LAPD roadblock on Alameda just outside the Stow ’n’ Go warehouse complex, he knew they belonged to the feds. The driver flashed some kind of identification at one of the patrol officers, and the officer guided them around the barricade, into the complex, and toward the back of the courtyard where Dobbs now stood. The officer motioned to his right and watched them park.
Four men got out of the first SUV dressed in full tactical gear, U.S. MARSHAL stamped across the front and back of their vests. From the second SUV three men and a woman emerged. Two of the men wore white button-down dress shirts, sleeves rolled up, with dark slacks. The third, at least ten years younger, wore a black T-shirt and jeans. The woman, early thirties with chestnut hair pulled back, wore a white tank top, jeans, and mirrored sunglasses. Petite. Attractive. At about five two, she was dwarfed by the men, but from the moment she stepped out of the vehicle, it was clear she was in charge.
She crossed the blacktop at a swift pace and took off her sunglasses. “Detective Dobbs?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He held out his hand, but she didn’t take it.
“Special Agent Gimble, Agent Gimble, or just Gimble, but never ‘ma’am,’” she said with the hint of a Southern drawl. “Where do we stand?”
He told her. A SWAT team had arrived at the Stow ’n’ Go twelve minutes after Dobbs placed his initial call. Wilkins had ushered them inside, and within fifteen minutes, they completed a search of the entire structure. The few patrons in the building were escorted out to the sidewalk as each hallway and open storage unit was thoroughly searched.
They’d found no sign of Michael Kepler.
“Who’s running SWAT?” Gimble asked.
“Darrick Atkinson. He should be in the main office.” Dobbs pointed to the door leading back inside.
Gimble turned to the U.S. marshals at the first Suburban. “Garrison, you and your team check in with Officer Atkinson, figure out where they need you, follow his lead. Understand?”
A tall, stocky African-American man with a shaved head nodded at her and gestured to the three men behind him; all four took off in the direction of the door at a jog.
Gimble glanced at Dobbs, then at the building behind him, at the open garage door. “This his storage space?”
“Yes, m—y-yes,” Dobbs stammered.
The warrant had come in about thirty minutes ago, but Dobbs hadn’t waited. With the bolt cutters from the trunk of his car, he had snapped off the lock and gotten inside.
Gimble pulled a pair of latex gloves from her back pocket, slipped them on, took several steps toward the opening, then stopped. “Pretty obvious we’ve got something missing here, Detective, don’t you think?”
Dobbs came over to her and looked inside.
Kepler’s storage space was ten feet wide, thirty feet deep, and more orderly than most units Dobbs had seen. Uniform-size cardboard boxes labeled with neat handwritten script and clear plastic storage bins lined the walls on the right and left. At the back, there were more boxes at least two rows deep, floor to ceiling. A workbench and a metal clothing rack with several plastic garment bags hanging from the rods fronted those, creating a U shape, with the center of the storage unit empty. Two tire tracks were clearly visible in the dust, leading out the front.
“Do we know the make and model?” Gimble asked. “We’ve gotta have cameras, right?”
Dobbs led her to the end of the row, back near the front of the complex, and pointed up. A small cardboard box covered the security camera mounted on the wall. “We’ve already checked the footage,” Dobbs said. “Before pulling the car out, he covered up this one, another across the courtyard there, and a third at the exit gate. We’ve got nothing.”
Gimble didn’t seem surprised by this. “What about traffic cams? Anything out there on Alameda?”
“One camera two blocks down at Seventh Street and another at the freeway overpass; that’s about a half a mile.”
“Sammy!” Gimble shouted toward the second Suburban. The lanky man in the T-shirt glanced at her, his phone pressed to his ear. She snapped her fingers and started rattling off orders. “I need you to pull all camera footage in a two-mile radius starting with Alameda, pull all footage from inside this place, isolate some images of Birdman, then run facial and try to make a match. We need to identify his vehicle. He would have left”—she turned back to Dobbs—“what’s our window?”
“Eight thirty to nine thirty,” he told her.
“Pull everything from eight a.m. to ten a.m. Probably made a beeline for the freeway, so focus on that, got it?” she shouted.
“Already on it!” the man in the black T-shirt shouted. He pressed his free hand over his other ear and returned to his call.
She took several steps toward the Suburban. “You two, why are you standing around? Get some gloves on and get in that warehouse. I want a complete inventory of everything in there within an hour, understand?”
Both men nodded and started toward the open garage door.
“What did you call him?” Dobbs asked her.
Her brow furrowed. “Who, Sammy? That’s Sammy Goggans. He specializes in IT forensics. The other two are Special Agents Waylon Begley and Omer Vela—they’re all on the task force.”
“No, not him. Kepler, Fitzgerald—your unsub.”
“Birdman. Vela came up with the name, and it stuck. On account of the feathers—he’s left one with each body.” Gimble must have seen the confusion in his eyes. She took a step closer, placed a hand on her hip, tilted her head. Her shampoo smelled like cherries. “You have no idea who he is, do you?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Written Statement,
Megan Fitzgerald
As I pressed my back into the door, my eyes fell on Dr. Bart’s desk across the room. He had been sitting there when it happened. You know, the long nap. Reading through patient notes, preparing for his three p.m. appointment, then a sharp pain in his temple, a bright flash, a switch turning off, and then head to the desktop. Like one of those cartoons—facedown in the soup.
I made up that last part. Nobody had been in the room when it happened, but in my mind, I imagined that was how his final seconds played out. I like to think he shit himself, but if he did, nobody told me.
His three p.m. appointment, Latasha Gillock, a sophomore at Binghamton, sat out in the waiting area until nearly four o’clock waiting for him to summon her into his office. She finally knocked because soccer practice was at five
, and when he didn’t answer, she opened the door. Latasha found him slumped over his desk, his eyes wide open, the left eye facing forward and the right staring at the short bookcase. I don’t know her, but she wasn’t shy about sharing what happened with anyone who would listen and pretty soon it got back to me. Whether or not she embellished, I suppose I’ll never know. She said she froze there for at least a minute before running off to get help. She said she didn’t touch anything. Latasha Gillock said a lot of things. Her unchecked diarrhea of the mouth was probably the reason she was seeing Dr. Bart in the first place. Had I been asked to diagnose her, pathological liar would have been my first guess.
Dr. Bart’s home office was fifteen feet by twenty. I knew that because Dr. Rose once complained that her home office was thirteen feet by twenty—forty square feet smaller. His desk sat in the back left corner facing the room and two plush leather chairs. I still remember when Dr. Bart bought his desk chair—an Eames Executive fashioned after the ones designed for the Time-Life Building back in the sixties. He paid a little over five thousand dollars for that single piece of furniture. I had been around nine or ten at the time and couldn’t imagine spending so much on a chair. In my mind, that was enough to buy a car or a house or maybe a horse.
I don’t remember being adopted—I was just a baby—but Dr. Rose and Dr. Bart had never hidden the fact that I was. When Michael and I were growing up, they brought it up regularly. Dr. Bart caught me sitting in his new chair on the day it was delivered, and he immediately reminded me of where I had come from. He told me my real parents couldn’t have afforded a five-thousand-dollar chair. He said my real parents left me at the orphanage door in a box with nothing but a filthy diaper and a rash—they couldn’t even afford to clothe me. He said I was never to sit in his chair unless I asked first. Every time I did ask, I was told no. He said I had to earn the right to sit in a chair like that.
I crossed the room, rounded his desk, and plopped my butt firmly in his prized fucking seat.
How about today, Dr. Bart? Today a good day?
His office did not smell like piss or shit, as I’d hoped, but the stale coffee still sitting on his desk in his favorite mug gave off a ripe odor and was mixed with his lingering scent. A film of some kind of nastiness floated in the liquid, congealed creamer or something, an island of lumpy white, green, and yellow in a sea of black. Beside the mug sat a plate with the remains of a ham sandwich, the bread covered in mold, the edges of the meat crusty with dried rot. This smelled too but, oddly, not as bad as the coffee. I found it strange to think Dr. Bart had taken a bite of that sandwich just last week, that he’d been the last to touch it. It made me wonder about the condition of his body in that drawer today, waiting for his hole in the ground.
Dr. Rose hadn’t allowed anyone to enter this room since his death, not even Ms. Neace, judging by the science experiment on that plate and in his cup. Yet something felt off.
His baseball collection filled three glass cases along the east wall. Beside the cases was a door. Although painted white to match the other doors, I knew it was made of steel, the frame too. Dr. Bart once told me that the room behind that door was originally meant to be a safe room. Someplace we could hide if people decided they wanted to break in and steal a nice office chair and some diplomas from elite schools.
A safe room.
I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d somehow taken joy in that description. Just looking at it made my skin crawl and my stomach churn. My fingers twitched as I thought about just how cold the surface of that door and the room on the other side was. Nothing safe about that room.
I shook off the feeling. No time for that.
I stood, went to those glass cases, tried not to look at that door.
Dr. Bart told patients and colleagues alike that he was an avid baseball fan and had been since childhood. He would share stories about how he’d stood outside Yankee Stadium as a kid and listened to the crowd, how he’d scrounged pennies in hopes of eventually having enough for a ticket. He would go on to say that his parents barely got by and his humble beginnings had forced him to strive, to achieve, to become the man he’d become. As Dr. Rose stood beside him, he’d point out the various items in the glass cases he’d collected over the years: Bats once held by famous Yankees such as Babe Ruth and Alex Rodriguez. A glove worn by Yogi Berra. A Mickey Mantle jersey and a cap signed by Whitey Ford. There were about a dozen baseball cards too, both old and new, some signed and some not. Balls from various games sitting on wooden stands with brass plaques identifying their origins. Dr. Bart’s eyes would often become glossy with tears as he recounted how and when he’d acquired each item, how each represented a moment in his life where he clawed his way up from poverty to his current elite stature.
What a load of horseshit.
He held season tickets to Yankee Stadium but never attended the games. The stories he told so fondly of the players—meetings, autographs obtained, balls caught—none of it was true. He’d purchased everything over the years from stores in the city or online, and while the collection was extremely valuable, it was so only in the financial sense. The items carried none of the emotional weight he so diligently described. The collection was nothing more than window dressing for him, part of the well-crafted persona Dr. Bart wished others to see. At times, I think even he believed these little tales; he’d told them so often, they eventually seemed true.
The cases themselves had been designed, built, and installed by a Missouri company that specialized in displays for jewelry stores. Dr. Bart had once told me the glass wasn’t actually glass; it was something called Lexan and couldn’t be shattered, not even with a sledgehammer. The locks were biometric, requiring his thumb to open, and each case was wired with sensors connected to the house’s extensive alarm system.
None of this changed the fact that Dr. Bart’s 1936 Joe DiMaggio baseball card was missing, nor did it explain the sparrow feather resting in the place the card belonged.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Dobbs
Begley, where’s your tablet?” Gimble called into the storage unit.
The older of the two agents looked up from one of the plastic bins. He cocked a thumb out toward the courtyard. “Suburban, back seat, passenger-side door pocket.”
Gimble crossed the blacktop, opened the back door, and retrieved an iPad. She set it on the hood of the vehicle and began tapping at the screen.
Dobbs caught a glimpse of two marshals and someone from SWAT examining the first row of garages on the opposite end of the courtyard. When they turned down the second row and disappeared from sight, he joined Gimble at the SUV.
She didn’t look up. Instead, she swiped back through several photographs to an image of a map of the United States with more than a dozen points marked with virtual red tacks. “Like I said on the phone, we’ve got homicides in at least ten states—California to New York. The earliest dates back a little over two years, about the same time Kepler started working for that Nadler outfit.”
Gimble turned the tablet toward him, traced a slender finger from Los Angeles to the East Coast. “When we pull the GPS data from Kepler’s truck, I’d be willing to bet we get a map that looks a lot like this one.”
When Dobbs didn’t reply, she turned the tablet back, opened up a different folder, and swiped through a series of crime scene photographs. “No discernible preference in race or gender on any of the vics. We’ve got both men and women, Caucasian, black, Hispanic. Only commonality appears to be age—late twenties to mid-thirties, every one. Initially, he presents an organized dichotomy.” She weighed this for a moment, then continued. “He appears to identify his victims long before any attack. Observes them. Plots out a strategy. No signs of struggle at the initial abduction, which suggests he determines the ideal moment for a grab before he moves. In the few instances where security systems are in place, he takes the time to disable cameras and sensors in advance. He’s highly adaptable, patient. At least when it comes to stalking his victims. Then
the profile flips, and he leans toward disorganized when he goes in for the kill.”
Dobbs frowned. “Aren’t serials usually one or the other, not both?”
“Nothing usual about this guy,” Gimble said. “Aside from the occasional use of propofol to subdue or kill his victims, he tends to improvise and use items found on scene for each murder. He’s used electrical cords for binding and strangulation. I’ve seen him puncture the femoral artery with a screwdriver. Suffocate with pillows.” Gimble quickly swiped to the left and brought up a photograph of a woman with short red hair in a T-shirt and panties, splayed out at the base of a staircase. “With Darcey Haas here, bruising indicates he picked her up with one hand under her left arm and another under her right leg and threw her down these stairs into her basement—three times. Kept picking her up and carrying her back to the top for another go. On the third, he finally got the angle right, and her neck snapped.”
Gimble scrolled forward three images to an African-American man sitting at a dining-room table, his head tilted back, a funnel in his mouth. “With Issac Dorrough, he bound him to this chair with Saran Wrap from the vic’s kitchen, broke two teeth forcing that funnel into his mouth, then poured nearly a quart of Drano down his throat.”
“Christ,” Dobbs said.
“He doesn’t leave prints. Not ever.”
“Just the feathers.”