by J. D. Barker
Dobbs was studying the report again. “The security footage only covered the office and the parking lot, no line of sight on the room. Anyone could have come and gone.”
Vela retrieved his phone from Dobbs and dropped it back in his pocket. “That doesn’t explain Pullen’s actions. If he didn’t kill her, why try to cover up the crime?”
“Distraught about losing her, maybe?” Gimble said.
Vela shook his head. “Maybe that’s why he killed himself, but dismemberment is an act of desperation, concealment. His actions suggest remorse too. Possibly an attempt to cover up for someone else.”
“Like the kid?” Dobbs suggested.
Gimble was pacing again. “If the kid killed her, and that’s a mighty big if, and this guy wanted to cover it up, that suggests he had much more of a vested interest in their little family than the report implies. This goes way beyond tweaker boyfriend crashing with mom and little boy. That brings me back to my original question—what does something like this do to a kid?”
Vela chewed on the inside of his cheek, his eyes roving the ground. “Most adults can’t remember anything prior to five years old. Children form memories, retain information, but not efficiently. I read a study of early-childhood development where kids were asked to recall documented events that had taken place when they were three or younger. Between five and seven, they recalled approximately sixty percent of the events. That number dropped to forty percent by eight, and lower as they got older. With an event this traumatic, the mind’s natural defenses move to block it out entirely, regardless of age. It’s also very possible that every second of that night got permanently etched into his subconscious or even conscious memories, meaning those events might have played a role in shaping every decision he’s made since whether he’s aware of it or not.”
“Which might explain why we found Tepper in his bathtub,” Gimble said.
Dobbs turned to Gimble. “You said you have at least eighteen other victims connected with the feathers—any others found in bathtubs?”
Gimble shook her head. “None. Alyssa Tepper would be the first.”
Vela’s eyes grew wide when he realized what Dobbs was suggesting. “Something triggered him. Brought this back.”
“You said he was placed with the Fitzgeralds after his mother’s death in the motel and treated by his adoptive father,” Dobbs said. “Barton Fitzgerald just passed away. Aneurysm.”
Gimble tilted her head. “According to the report, Fitzgerald’s sessions with Kepler were recorded and sealed by a Judge Harry Larson.”
“I looked him up. Larson retired nearly a decade ago. We’d need someone else to overturn his original order. That will take a while. We’ve got a better shot at getting his adoption records,” Vela said.
Gimble stopped pacing. “We need all of it. Every scrap of paper. Whatever we can find on this guy’s real parents too. All of them. It’s all relevant. Find me a judge who will understand that and be willing to sign a warrant.”
Vela bit his lip. “Rines, maybe?”
Dobbs said, “If the adoptive father’s death was a trigger, Tepper was only the first. The eighteen bodies you’ve already got were nothing but a warm-up for what he’ll do next. This is the endgame.”
Gimble turned back toward the burned-out Ford and shouted, “Begley! Finish up. We’re regrouping at Kepler’s truck!” To Dobbs, she said, “We need to look at where this guy’s been if we want to figure out where he’s going. You’re with us until this is over.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Michael
I arrived in Needles, California, in a daze. The desolate landscape of the Mojave Desert rolling past outside, the Colorado River—I saw none of it. I listened to all thirty minutes of the blank side of the cassette, then listened to the first side again. The tape repeated for a third time before I made the turn onto Dunes Road, found number 78, and finally registered that I had arrived.
I drove past the small, neglected mobile home, turned at the end of Dunes, came back around, and parked across the narrow street. I picked up Roland Eads’s driver’s license from the passenger seat and confirmed I had the right address.
A rusty Mazda sat under the sagging carport. Several planters lined the cracked sidewalk, filled with nothing but weeds. There was no lawn, only a small rock garden to the left of the driveway—the source of the dusty white film coating the concrete and the dull metal walls. An American flag, torn and faded, fluttered on a pole near the door.
I slipped a finger under the collar of my shirt and tugged the material away from my neck.
A few hours ago, I remembered thinking it felt good to wear nice things again. Now, the shirt had grown stiff and uncomfortable. The Armani jacket was in a ball on the floor. And I kept thinking about the tennis shoes in the trunk—I wanted to swap them for the Berluti loafers on my feet. I reminded myself who the police were looking for, what they expected that guy to be wearing. It was why I’d donned these clothes in the first place.
My burner phone vibrated on the passenger seat. For much of the drive, I didn’t have service and I’d given up on it.
“Meg? Why are you calling me from your phone? I told you to get a burner before you called me again!”
“Didn’t you listen to my messages? The FBI keeps calling me! The FBI! If they have my number, they can get my records. And once they have your number, they can trace you.”
“Whoa, calm down, Meg.” I regretted the words the moment they left my lips. I pictured Megan’s reddening face in my mind.
“Life is totally Zen now. I feel so much better,” she said mockingly. “What if they’re listening right this second?”
“They’d need to get a warrant first, and they haven’t had enough time,” I told her.
“Where are you getting your intel? Jason Bourne movies? I don’t think we should take any chances. As soon as we hang up, you need to destroy that thing.”
“How will I reach you? You’ll need a new phone too,” I told her.
“I already bought one.” She gave me the number. “You got it?”
I committed it to memory.
Megan went on. “Don’t call my new phone until you have a new burner too.”
I tried to change the subject. “What did you find in Dr. Bart’s office?”
“Man, you really suck at this. Are you listening? We need to be sure they don’t have either number.”
“Yes. I got it. Loud and clear. What did you find?”
She told me about the blue dots on some files but not others. “Do you know any of these names? Nicole Milligan, Darcey Haas, Issac Dorrough, Selena Hennis, Cassandra Shatley, Jeffery Longtin, or Katrina Nickols?”
“No.”
“None of them?”
I thought I recognized one name but I wasn’t sure from where. The memory was like water—when I tried to grab it, my fingers just passed through.
“Michael?”
“No. None of them. Why?”
Megan’s voice dropped to a hush. “They’re all dead, Michael. All but two.”
I heard voices behind Megan, then a girl laughing and some guy shouting something. “Where are you?”
“The Starbucks near campus.”
Good. Away from the house. “Which two?” I asked her.
“Don’t you want to know how they died?”
“Not right now. We don’t have time for that.”
“Murdered, it looks like. Each one.”
The two of us were quiet for a few seconds, then I said, “Which two are still alive?”
Megan didn’t reply.
“Meg, come on.”
“Nicole Milligan and Jeffery Longtin.”
“We need to find them. Can you track them down?”
Again, Megan was quiet.
“Meg.”
“Okay, okay.”
My eyes drifted back to the mobile home. “Was there a file on Roland Eads?”
She sighed. “No. Nothing with that name. Nothing under Philip
Wardwell either.”
I’d thought for sure Dr. Bart would have a file on Eads.
“Michael? How did you know Alyssa Tepper was one of Dr. Bart’s patients?”
I thought I saw movement inside the mobile home across the street.
“Michael? Are you still there?”
“I saw the feather, Meg. I told you. The baseball card too.”
“You didn’t know her? You’d never met her before?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“You just seemed so…sure. You said there’d be a file, and there was.”
“Meg. Someone is trying to frame me,” I said. “Someone connected to Dr. Bart, his patients, his research. This is about the dark room. It has to be. I need you to believe me, Meg. You’re all I’ve got.”
“I believe you, Michael.” The weakness in her voice betrayed her real feelings, though. She wanted to believe me.
The two of us were quiet for a long while.
Megan broke the silence. “What was on the tape?”
I told her.
“Whoa.”
“Yeah.”
Megan said, “Come home, and we’ll figure this out together.”
“I’ll text you as soon as I have a new phone. Then send me whatever you can find on Nicole Milligan and Jeffery Longtin.”
Before she could reply, before she could try to talk me into doing something else, I hung up.
I killed the Porsche’s engine and got out of the car. I stretched my arms and legs right there in the deserted street.
In the mobile home, a curtain was pulled an inch or two to the side, then dropped back. The front door opened a moment later, and a heavyset woman in a floral-print muumuu frowned at me. “What the hell are you doing here? Where’s Roland?”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Michael
Where’s Roland?
I didn’t recognize her—I was certain I’d never seen her before.
Short gray hair. Mid- to late fifties. Dark, leathery skin lined from years of sun damage. A cigarette sagging between her lips. She glanced up and down the street before turning her frown on me and gesturing inside. “Get your ass in here before somebody sees you.”
My body didn’t want to move, my arms and legs stiff.
I’m not sure what I expected to find in my search of Roland Eads’s house, but another person complicated the matter.
Significantly.
Her frown deepened. She pinched the cigarette between her fingers, threw it on the faded doormat, stamped it out. “Damn it, get in here!” She surveyed the street, her neighbors, her teeth clenched.
I closed the car door, crossed the street, and stepped through the lingering smoke into the mobile home.
Behind me, she closed the thin door and twisted the dead bolt. “Christ, you’re all over the news. What a shitstorm. Where the hell is Roland?”
“He’s still in LA,” I told her. Having no idea what she was talking about, I needed to improvise.
“He’s okay, though, right? Nothing happened? I worry about that boy.”
“He thought it would be better if we didn’t stay together. He said the police would be looking for the both of us.” It seemed like the logical answer. Why else would Roland stay behind after breaking me out of LAPD? “He told me to meet him back here. I must have beat him.”
She pulled back the curtain again, looked across the street. “Car like that, it’s no wonder. You couldn’t find something a little less conspicuous? What is that, a Porsche?”
“Yeah. A Porsche.”
She shook her head. “Not registered to you, I hope. You’re not that dumb.”
“It’s registered under one of my parents’ LLCs, not my name.”
“You should dump it, first chance you get. You’re pushing your luck driving something flashy like that.” She dropped the curtain and turned back to me. “How far behind you is he?”
“I don’t know.”
The frown finally faded and she sighed. “Are you hungry? I imagine you’re famished. When was the last time you ate?”
I thought about that and realized I hadn’t eaten anything in nearly twenty-four hours. “Not since yesterday,” I told her.
As if in acknowledgment, my stomach growled, a low, deep rumble.
The interior of the mobile home was larger than I’d expected, but I could still smell stagnant dishwater in the sink in the tiny kitchen. A sixty-inch television filled much of the living-room wall, too large for the small space. Although muted, the television was tuned to one of the twenty-four-hour news networks.
The woman followed my gaze. “The local news in LA has been running stories on you practically nonstop. Nothing on national yet but I keep flipping back.”
From a small built-in table near the kitchen, she picked up the television remote and switched to KNBC out of Los Angeles. My driver’s license photo popped up next to some reporter I didn’t recognize. On the opposite side of his perfectly combed hair was an image of Roland Eads and me in the hallway at LAPD. I thought it came from a camera near the elevators but I couldn’t be sure.
She set the remote down on the table about a foot away from a chrome-plated nine-millimeter pistol; a box of ammunition was beside the gun. Then she went to the refrigerator and started rooting around inside. “I’ve got ham, roast beef, and American cheese. Will that work?”
“Sure.”
“Ham or roast beef?”
“Can you do both? I’m starving.”
My eyes hadn’t left the gun.
She lit another cigarette, then scooped up several items from the refrigerator, including a jar of mayonnaise, and set everything on the counter. She pulled a plate from the cabinet above her on the left, parked the smoke in the corner of her mouth, and began to assemble a sandwich. “You can turn the sound back on if you want. I just got tired of listening to them drone on. They don’t know much.” Her voice dropped into a bit of a singsong as she said, “Michael Kepler killed Alyssa Tepper. Michael Kepler escaped LAPD custody with the help of his attorney. Michael Kepler, Michael Kepler, Michael Kepler.” She paused for a second, slicing the sandwich. “They found the warehouse. Looks like the television crews got there about the same time the local yokels were wrapping up.” She whistled. “The feds were there, U.S. marshals. Roland said this would be big, but I don’t think anyone expected all that.”
I took up the remote and pressed the mute button, bringing back the audio. The camera zoomed in, the image shaky, shot from outside the Stow ’n’ Go complex. I spotted Detective Garrett Dobbs. He was talking to a pretty woman with chestnut hair pulled back in a ponytail. Although she wore jeans and a white tank top, she was clearly FBI.
“That’s Special Agent Jessica Gimble,” the woman told me from the kitchen counter. “The reporter put her name out there about an hour ago, but nothing else. I ran her through Google but got nothing.” She waved a hand at the screen.
I returned the remote to the table, setting it much closer to the nine-millimeter than it had been. My little finger brushed the cold metal.
She turned from the counter and set a plate down on the table in front of me, then went back to the refrigerator, retrieved a can of Coke, and set that beside the plate. “Sit, eat!”
I pulled out the chair and sat. I didn’t eat the sandwich as much as inhale it. The can of Coke I downed in large gulps.
She stubbed out the remains of her cigarette in a filthy MGM Grand ashtray and stared at me in awe. “My God, it’s like you’ve never eaten.”
My eyes drifted over to a stack of unopened letters piled on the far end of the table. Bills, Publishers Clearing House ads. I lifted the empty Coke can and shook it. “Mind if I have another?”
“Yeah, sure.”
When she stood and went to the refrigerator, I glanced at the topmost envelope. It was addressed to Erma Eads.
“Erma, did Roland tell you why Alyssa Tepper had to die?”
When my eyes danced over to the nine-millimeter on the
table, I forced them back on her.
She popped the top on the can of Coke with a satisfying hiss and placed the can in front of me. She glanced at the gun too. “Roland didn’t give me a lot of detail on that,” she said. “Only told me it had to happen. No other way to see this through.”
I took a sip of the Coke. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
Her eyes darted over the gun again, then she smiled. “I’ll wait for Roland.”
On the television, the reporter was in the middle of describing my escape route from the LAPD building when he stopped midsentence. From the corner of my eye, I caught him placing a finger on his left ear, no doubt listening to a voice in his earbud. When he looked back up at the camera, his face had gone solemn. “We have a report of a car fire earlier in the day near the fish market, and we’re going to cut over there live—sounds like there may be a connection.”
The screen flickered and a shot of the parking lot behind the old Edward Hotel came up. The camera focused on a redheaded reporter straightening the collar of her blouse speaking to someone off-screen. When she realized she was live, she dropped her hand and stared into the camera.
I didn’t hear what she said. I was too busy studying the smoldering remains of the car parked behind her.
Roland Eads’s car.
When the reporter said the victim found in the passenger seat of the Ford Escort had been executed with a single shot to the head, both Erma Eads and I dived for the nine-millimeter in the center of the table, sending the television remote skittering.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Michael
The remote flew off the edge of the table, slid over the linoleum floor, and cracked against the wood-laminate cabinet about three feet behind Erma Eads. Her plump form crossed with it in the air, moving at a speed that seemed impossible for someone of her size and age. Her fingers found the nine-millimeter, but she came at the gun from an odd angle, and rather than gripping the cold steel, she sent the weapon spinning.