by J. D. Barker
Dobbs
Rain coming down in sheets.
Dobbs was halfway back to the fuel pumps when his phone rang. He fished it from his pocket and swiped at the wet screen. “Yeah?”
“It’s Tanner. Your white van was full of illegals, sixteen of them. That’s why they ran. No sign of Kepler.”
Dobbs hung up without replying, ducked out of the rain, and made his way back to the others at Kepler’s Porsche. “Garrison’s team is here. They locked down the exits and they’re searching vehicles one by one now, but a few got through. Four-wheel-drive SUVs are just crossing the desert back to the highway. A few cars too.” He wiped his face on his shirt, leaving streaks of mud, and glanced down at his watch.
Thirteen minutes.
Thirteen minutes had passed since Kepler left his car.
He could be anywhere.
“You’re limping,” Vela pointed out.
“Tweaked my ankle,” Dobbs said. His eyes darted over the manic crowds, people running everywhere. The cars bumper to bumper, everyone trying to get out. His gaze landed on the state patrol car. Someone had shut down the motor and lights. “Where’s Winkler? He was on him—where the hell did he go?”
“He’s not responding,” Vela said.
Agent Gimble stood in the far corner of the fueling pumps, her back to them, yelling into her phone.
Both the front and rear trunks of the Porsche were open. Several items had been placed on plastic tarps around the car.
“Begley called,” Vela said. “The body back at the Lutz Motel is Molly Fellman, twenty. She ran the night desk. I started processing the car. We’ve got her clothing here. Kepler must have taken it as some kind of souvenir.”
“Anything to indicate where he might be going?”
Vela shook his head.
“How did he…”
“Cut her femoral artery,” Vela told him. “They found her in a small closet off the lobby. No feather. He bagged his clothing too—stuffed everything in with Molly Fellman’s clothes. An Armani suit soaked in her blood. Well, most likely hers. If not, we’ve got another vic out there somewhere.”
“Armani? How many truck drivers wear Armani?”
Vela shrugged. “Matches what we found back at his warehouse.”
Dobbs leaned down in front of a pile of tattered material. “These are like the ones we found in his warehouse too.”
Vela nodded. “Windham Hall uniforms. All shredded.”
Sammy had set up a makeshift desk on a tower of bottled water near one of the pumps. Without looking up from his Mac, he pointed at the corner of the roof. “I’m working on the camera footage. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Gimble returned, shaking her head. “Bureaucratic bullshit. All of it. The judge who signed our warrant won’t approve a full lockdown on this place. He’s giving us thirty minutes, then I have to pull the marshals from the exits. Says he’s already gotten three phone calls—this little pimple on the ass of the American highway system accounts for nearly eighty percent of the local income, and a lockdown will put the Bureau on the hook for the lost revenue. We can’t guarantee Kepler is still here, so he won’t risk giving us more than a half hour.”
“He’s probably right,” Dobbs said.
“Oh, boy,” Sammy muttered while typing feverishly.
Gimble turned on Dobbs, her face red. “Think so? That what your extensive experience in fugitive apprehension is telling you? Aren’t you a homicide cop? Not hard to chase down a dead body.”
Dobbs raised his hands. “All I mean is Kepler is smart. He’d know we’d want to lock this place down the moment we could, so he would have tried to beat us. He could have hitched a ride, stolen a car. Hell, he knows how to drive these rigs—he could have taken a semi.”
Gimble’s fingers began to twitch as she processed this, then she patted her pockets and pulled out Erma Eads’s phone. “Let’s just call and ask him where he is.”
She dialed on speaker.
The phone began to ring.
Another phone began to ring. Distant, muffled.
It was coming from the trunk of the state patrol car.
Gimble drew her weapon as Dobbs popped the trunk.
Winkler lay folded inside, his neck at a grotesque angle, a feather protruding from his mouth. The ringing phone glowed in his shirt pocket.
Dobbs stared down at the man’s body and blew out a defeated breath. “I need a minute.”
Before anyone could reply, he walked off and pushed through the swinging door of the men’s restroom at the corner of the fuel complex. He went to the sink, ran his hand over the faucet’s electronic eye, splashed cold water on his face.
Dobbs didn’t see the man lower himself down from the dark alcove behind the exposed heating and air-conditioning ducts. He didn’t hear him either. It wasn’t until Kepler grabbed him by the hair and slammed his head into the mirror that Dobbs realized he wasn’t alone.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Michael
People were shouting.
Alarms were shrieking.
I squeezed my eyes shut, blocked it out, and my world changed.
I was in a motel lobby.
Needles, California.
“I need a room,” I said.
She grinned at me from behind the counter. Not the fake grin people in hospitality wore so nonchalantly, but the genuine grin of someone happy, someone enjoying life.
MOLLY her name tag read.
“I’ll need to see your ID and a major credit card,” Molly said.
I took out my wallet, thumbed through the bills. “I’d prefer to pay cash.”
Molly shifted her weight, right leg to left, and produced a logbook from beneath the counter. “In that case, it’s seventy-nine dollars for the night, and I’ll need an additional hundred as a deposit. It will be returned to you in the morning when you drop off your key, providing you don’t burn the building down. What is your name?”
“Mitchell. Mitchell Kepler.”
“Mitchell,” she said, scribbling it down in the book.
She turned and took a key from the pegboard on the wall behind her. An actual key, not one of those electronic credit card–looking keys, but a real one with teeth. I took it from her, my fingers brushing her soft skin.
“What are you taking, Mitchell?”
“What?”
“Those pills in your other hand—what are they?”
I looked at the bottle, felt the smooth plastic, the loose cap. I should take another. “Migraine medicine,” I said, the words falling loosely from my lips. “I have the worst headache…”
“Give me those!” She reached out, snatched the bottle from my grip. “Where did you get them?”
Not Molly’s voice anymore. Megan’s voice.
Not in a motel lobby.
“Michael!” she shouted. “Where did you get them? How many did you take?”
Not Molly.
Not the motel lobby.
In a car. Megan driving.
How did I get—
Megan was shouting at me but the words no longer made sense.
“I pulled the fire alarms, Meg. Just like you said.”
My thoughts turned to soup then, and everything went black.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Dobbs
Dobbs woke on the bathroom floor with a female paramedic leaning over him, Gimble kneeling at his side.
“It was Kepler,” he muttered. “Ceiling…hiding in the ceiling.”
“Kepler?” She shook her head. “It was just some guy dealing meth. We grabbed him when he ran out. He saw your badge and attacked. Can you sit up?”
Dobbs forced himself into a sitting position. His brain felt like it was sloshing around in his skull; there was a sharp stinging on his forehead. When he reached for it, the paramedic smacked his hand away.
“You have a small laceration. Nothing serious, but I want to clean it up.” She held her hand out before him. “Follow my finger.”
Dobbs did, his eyes roving ba
ck and forth, up and down. “I saw his face. It was Kepler.”
The paramedic said, “You might have a concussion. You should probably go to the hospital and get a CT scan, make sure you don’t have a head bleed.”
Dobbs shook his head, which he immediately regretted, and stood. He expected the mirror to be cracked, but it wasn’t. Most likely made of something more durable than glass. His forehead was beet red, and there was a bump over his left eye. A small cut was closed with a butterfly bandage. “Where is he?”
Gimble led him from the bathroom to a man sitting on the concrete, his back against the wheel of Winkler’s patrol car. His hands were bound with a thick zip tie. He held them up defensively, blocking his face. “It wasn’t me, man! I told them. You were on the floor!”
Dobbs took out his phone, loaded a picture of Kepler, and thrust it in front of the man. “Did you see this guy?”
His eyes narrowed. His head quickly bobbed up and down. “He hit me with the door, he ran out of there so fast. Heading toward the courtyard. You were already on the ground, I swear!”
“The bathroom has two entrances, one on this side facing the pumps, one opening onto the courtyard facing the restaurants,” Gimble said.
The man nodded again. “I came in that way; he pushed past me. Your people grabbed me when I came out this side. I told you. Either let me go or get me the hell out of here—somebody planted a bomb. This whole place is gonna blow!”
“There’s no bomb,” Dobbs said, putting his phone away.
“Hey!” Sammy called from his makeshift desk. “You need to see this.”
They left the man on the ground. He dropped his bound hands back into his lap with a frustrated sigh.
Sammy pointed at his MacBook. The image, shot from above, showed several gas pumps and was frozen on a man. “That’s Kepler pulling the fire alarm, right over there.” He pointed to the far corner of the structure. The alarm box was centered on the wall near the bathroom entrance. “Got it?”
Gimble frowned. “We know this already. Where does he go next?”
“I’m getting to that,” Sammy said. He clicked several buttons and brought up another photo, Kepler again, an orange and brown wall behind him. “Here he is pulling the alarm at Burger King. He disables the camera right after.”
Sammy paused a moment to give them a chance to view it, then brought up another image. “Here he is at the truck service center.” After a few seconds, he loaded up yet another. “Here’s Kepler at the CAT scales.”
Vela walked up and watched over Dobbs’s shoulder.
“This one is at the truck wash.”
“We get it,” Gimble said with frustration. “He pulled a lot of fire alarms. What’s the point of this?”
“Nineteen alarms went off in total, plus the phoned-in bomb threat. I’ve got two points,” Sammy said. “The first is this—”
Another image filled the screen, this time a woman with her hand on an alarm trigger, her gaze focused on something off camera. “That’s Megan Fitzgerald in the lobby of the Carriage Motel.” The image switched to another shot of her. “Here she is again at one of the supply stores.”
“So she’s here, not in New York. They coordinated this,” Gimble said. “Michael and Megan. We need to get her photo out to everyone—”
“Already done,” Sammy interrupted.
“That explains how he was able to trigger so many alarms,” Vela said.
Sammy was shaking his head. “No, actually, it doesn’t. That brings me to point two.”
He brought up another image. A map of the Flying T Truck Stop littered with virtual red and green thumbtacks filled the screen. “Red is Kepler, green is Megan. Seven for him, twelve for her.” He ran his finger over the screen. “See how Megan’s are all grouped? She primarily hit the motels and the restaurants in this tight little spot in the northeast corner, all right next to each other. Kepler is all over the place.”
Dobbs studied the map. Sammy was right. Kepler had pulled the alarm here at the fuel pumps, at buildings on the opposite side of the large truck stop, and at several more buildings in the far corner of the plaza. “What kind of distance is that? How did he get around so fast?”
“That’s what I said,” Sammy replied, “so I added time stamps to help plot out some kind of path.”
He clicked several buttons, and time stamps appeared next to each pin.
They all saw it, but Gimble was the first to say something. “So the time stamps on the cameras are off. Must be. They can’t be right—these three alarms went off before the one here at the fuel pumps. Before Kepler even got here. Are you sure those weren’t Megan?”
Sammy shrugged. “We’ve got video of Kepler at each, not of her. And the cameras have Megan at the food court within seconds of this alarm at the weigh station. She can’t be in two places at once.”
“Well, neither can Kepler,” Gimble said.
“Maybe somebody tampered with the feed,” Vela suggested.
“Maybe.”
Dobbs said, “Can you load up the feed from here at the bathroom? When I got attacked?”
Sammy nodded. “Already did.”
The MacBook screen split into two images. The one on the left showed the door leading back to the fuel pumps; the right one showed the courtyard side. They all watched as Dobbs walked in. About twenty seconds later, the meth dealer pushed through the door and scrambled past one of the gas pumps, disappearing from the screen. A moment after that, another person exited, this time from the courtyard door. Sammy slowed the video, but the man’s back was to the camera. He too ran offscreen.
“Build and hair color look like a match for Kepler, but there’s no clear shot of his face,” Sammy said.
“It was Kepler,” Dobbs insisted.
Sammy froze the screen and pointed at the time superimposed in a white font at the bottom corner. “That would put him here less than thirty seconds after pulling the alarm at Burger King.”
Gimble sighed, frustrated. “We need to stay on task, can’t get distracted by all this smoke-and-mirror bullshit. Use the camera footage to trace both of them to a vehicle. If they’re in the wind, we need to know what they’re driving. I want to know where they’re going, not where they’ve been.”
“I think I know,” Vela said, staring at his phone.
All eyes turned to him.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Dobbs
Gimble turned to Vela. “You had a theory in the helicopter—that’s why you threw out that line.”
“‘Who is on the mark,’” Vela said, nodding. “From the page marked with the feather in this.” He held up the book they’d found under the body of Erma Eads: Fractured.
“The book not about Kepler,” Gimble said flatly.
Somewhere in the distance, two of the fire alarms shut off. The crowd had thinned substantially. The Flying T had gone from complete chaos to a ghost town in a matter of minutes.
Gimble’s fingers began to twitch. She was growing impatient. “Spit it out, Vela. What’s the connection?”
Vela glanced over at Kepler’s Porsche. “When Judge Rines denied our warrant for Kepler’s adoption and treatment records back in LA, I submitted a request for whatever public information I could pull on Dr. Barton Fitzgerald—state medical boards and licensing, that sort of thing. I expected most of what I got back, the accolades, awards from his peers. I’ve read many of his published papers in the trades. He was highly respected. Here’s the thing—over his career, nearly forty years, only one complaint had been filed against him. That’s remarkable. In today’s world of online reviews and anonymity, people file complaints at the drop of a hat; they feel emboldened to do so. I expected to find a dozen or so complaints, maybe more. That would be normal. The fact that he had only one stood out.”
Vela loaded a document on his phone and handed it to Gimble.
She expanded the text. “J. Longtin, in 1985. Sued him for malpractice. Not much here. No case details. No outcome.”
&nb
sp; “That’s over thirty years ago,” Vela said. “Just a blip in a database somewhere. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s there at all.”
She returned the phone to him. “So how does it help us?”
Vela opened the book to a page near the back containing Dr. Fitzgerald’s bio and photo. “Look at the photo credit.”
She took the book, squinted at the small print. “‘Author photograph copyright Jeffery Longtin.’”
“Early on in this book, Fitzgerald says that John, the subject’s pseudonym, was a photographer, made a living at it before his illness presented. I think Jeffery Longtin is John.”
Gimble handed the book to Dobbs.
Vela hesitated a moment, then said, “I also think Jeffery Longtin is next.”
Dobbs returned the book to Vela. “That’s a big leap.”
Gimble held up a hand. “Vela’s not one to leap. How did you get there?”
Vela fidgeted with the book, his thumb flipping the pages. “You’re not going to like this.”
Gimble’s eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”
“I dug,” he told her. “As a licensed psychologist, I have avenues open to me that are not necessarily available to an FBI agent.”
“What kinds of avenues?”
“I used something called the Gordon Act to pull Fitzgerald’s insurance records,” he told her. “When a doctor passes away, the Gordon Act allows other medical professionals to access certain information pertaining to the deceased’s practice. We can’t get full treatment files, but we can get patient lists. The point of the act is to ensure that the treatment of patients won’t lapse if they lose their doctors. With psychiatry and psychology in particular, some patients, especially the ones most in need, won’t seek a replacement on their own. We use the act to work with the insurance companies to identify at-risk patients and ensure their treatment does not get interrupted.”
“You use it to poach clients from dead doctors,” Gimble said.
Vela shrugged off her comment. “With the mentally unstable, a break in treatment can lead to horrible consequences for the patient; it can also leave the insurance companies exposed legally. The act allows everyone involved to be proactive in the best interest of the patient.”