The Coast-to-Coast Murders

by J. D. Barker

  I reached for the zip tie on her left foot, pretended to tighten it.

  Mitchell frowned, rounded the bed, and tugged at the plastic tie hard enough to get a wince out of Nicole. “Like that,” he said, pulling at the one on her other foot next.

  The scissors were in his other hand, the blades opening and closing as he absentmindedly worked the handle. He raised them toward Nicole’s face. She shook her head violently back and forth.

  “I suppose you remember these. Dr. Bart loved to play with them in that little room of his, in the dark. Remember what he’d make you say? He’d make you whisper it in the dark before you’d lash out with these and try to cut me. How did it go again?”

  Nicole didn’t answer him. Of course, she couldn’t because of the duct tape. But it was clear she knew what he meant.

  Mitchell leaned in close, whispered in her ear, “‘I’m the night. I’m death. I’m rot. I’m you.’”

  She glared at him, her body trembling.

  “You’d whisper that over and over again. And in that damn little room, sound carried, so I could never quite tell where you were, not in the pitch-black. There were only the whispers. Then you’d cut me—”

  He moved so fast. The scissors sliced her cheek in one quick, fluid motion and were back at his side again before the first sign of blood appeared. He didn’t cut her deep, but it was enough. She jerked at her bindings, twisted, arched her back. She couldn’t get away, though. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  I remained still.

  I watched.

  What else could I do?

  Mitchell laughed. “You got me good. More times than I can count. I still have the scars to prove it. Hours of that. You wouldn’t stop, he wouldn’t let you stop, not until my personality retreated and the other one came out. His little game as he scribbled down notes, as he checked his various recorders. ‘Mitchell, Mitchell, come out and play!’ And if it wasn’t Mitchell, it was Michael, and then back again. So many times, so often, I didn’t know who I was. How could I?”

  He leaned into her; his lips brushed her forehead. “How much did he pay you to make me scream? Was it worth it? All those times? How ’bout we play a game? Let’s see how much you can handle before you become someone else. Before you want to be someone else. Today you get to be Mitchell, and I’ll play you. No need to pay me. I’ll take on the role pro bono. It’s all for science, right? For knowledge. Let’s see if we can take Dr. Bart’s research to the next level.”

  Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Seven

  Dobbs

  Dobbs raised his left arm, his good arm, above his head and waved it around. The movement hurt like hell but it worked—the light above him flicked back on, illuminating the room.

  He didn’t want to look at his other arm but knew he had to. When he glanced down, he winced. The hatchet blade had left a cut at least an inch deep and four inches long in the upper part of his arm, just below his shoulder. He could still move the arm, his hand, but he barely felt his fingers—they were numb and prickly, as if asleep. Blood flowed freely down his arm with each pump of his heart. His head was spinning. If he didn’t stop the loss of blood quickly, he’d black out, or worse.

  The light blinked back out.

  Dobbs cursed, waved his hand again, and turned it back on.

  He took the material from his torn shirt and tied it around the wound. Pain raced down his arm, up his back; he pressed against the wall, closed his eyes, waited for the nausea to pass and the cloud of white to leave his vision.

  The room went dark again.

  Dobbs waved.

  He looked at his arm.

  The flow of blood hadn’t stopped, but it slowed substantially. This was good. He was worried the blade had cut an artery. Although, if that was the case, he’d probably be dead by now.

  Using the wall at his back to maintain his balance, he stood carefully.

  The world spun.

  Dobbs spotted his gun in the far corner and picked it up. His right hand was useless, and he was a shit shot with his left, but a gun in any hand was better than no gun. He tucked it back into his holster.

  The lights went out again.

  “Shit,” he muttered. He reached into his back pocket and took out his cell phone—he wasn’t surprised to see he had no signal. He switched on the flashlight app. The walls appeared to be stone with a layer of concrete. They were covered in photographs. Photographs of Michael Kepler and Megan Fitzgerald, hundreds of them, from when they were children through the present. There was no particular order to them. It looked like they had just been taped up over time, wherever space could be found. Some were yellowed and frayed with age; others appeared to be no more than a few weeks old. In some places, they were several layers thick.

  A cot sat against the far wall, filthy soiled sheets balled up on top. Several milk crates were lined up against another wall, and when Dobbs peered inside them, he found clothing. One contained nothing but Windham Hall uniforms, faded with age. Another contained men’s clothing. The third held women’s undergarments, bras and panties of various colors and sizes. Like the photographs, some were old; the older ones looked like they’d belonged to a teen. There was a pair of red lace thong panties too. They looked brand-new. Dobbs knew at once they all belonged to Megan Fitzgerald—trophies of some sort, pilfered over time.

  He went to the metal door and beat on it. “Open the door, Patchen!”

  At first, there was no reply. When Patchen did speak, he sounded like he was on the opposite side of the basement. “That’s where he kept that godforsaken child. That room.”

  “Michael?” Dobbs shouted back.

  “No, the other one. The one he called Mitchell.”

  Dobbs frowned. “Who’s Mitchell?”

  Patchen didn’t reply. Instead, there was a loud twang. Metal striking metal.

  Dobbs shook the door handle but it did no good. “Let me out of here—cooperate and I can still help you!”

  Another twang. Harder, more forceful.

  “I felt it was important for you to see that room, Detective. For someone to see it, before all of this is gone. Fitzgerald’s greatest success, our success, is one that will never be talked about. Perhaps behind closed doors, in professional circles, but never publicly. Who would believe such a thing?”

  Twang!

  “What are you doing out there?” Dobbs called out.

  Patchen’s reply sounded strained. He was slightly out of breath. “Fitzgerald truly was a master of the mind. He was taken from us far too soon. I can’t imagine what else he might have accomplished had he been given another decade or two. I’m honored to have helped in what little ways I could. Rose helped too—she was instrumental, of course. But Bart opened doors in the field most researchers either didn’t know existed or didn’t have the balls to consider. A true pioneer who deserves to be up there with Jung and Freud.”

  Twang!

  “Ah, there it is!” Patchen cried out. “These old gas lines are cast iron, tough as nails!”

  “Open the door, Patchen!” Dobbs shook the door, kicked the base. It barely rattled in the solid frame. His legs felt like rubber; he was weak from the loss of blood.

  “Not much longer now, Detective. Get comfortable. I suggest you make peace with your God, if you believe in that sort of thing.”

  Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Eight

  Gimble

  Kepler’s code worked on the front door of Windham Hall like it did at the gate—the numbers on the keypad that corresponded with M-i-t-c-h-e-l-l. Gimble was standing in the foyer when she heard a metallic clanking noise from somewhere deep within the building.

  Vela came up behind her and cocked his head. “What the hell is that?”

  Gimble drew her weapon. “Federal agents! Identify yourself!”

  Her words echoed off empty halls. No reply came.

  Vela took out his own gun and pointed toward several signs on the wall next to some staircases. “Administrative office is that way,” he said.
/>   Gimble nodded and started toward the hallway, her gun at the ready. Something in the air felt off, too still. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she shivered.

  They found the administrative office.

  They found Begley.

  Gimble gasped at the sight of him, lying still in a large pool of his own blood. Blackened hole in his shirt, his chest. She motioned for Vela to check on him, silently pointing toward Begley with two fingers. As he knelt beside the body, she swept the small room—behind boxes, under the desk, anyplace someone could hide.

  They were alone.

  She turned back to Vela.

  His fingers were pressed to Begley’s neck. He shook his head.

  The loud, metallic ping again. The sound echoed through the building. She couldn’t pinpoint the source.

  The nameplate on the door read DIRECTOR LAWRENCE C. PATCHEN. Another on the desk said the same. There was a framed photograph, too, next to a half-filled cardboard box, a gilt frame displaying three young men wearing smug smiles and matching Cornell sweatshirts. The first man was clearly the younger self of the man in several other photographs on the office walls—thin with a large forehead and ears that were a little too big for his head.

  Lawrence Patchen—had to be.

  She recognized the second man from the author photograph on the paperback of Fractured. Like Patchen, Dr. Barton Fitzgerald was much younger here, an early version of the man she’d become familiar with over the past several days. He had one arm around Patchen’s shoulder, the other around the third man. At first, she didn’t recognize the third man. There were several reasons for that—he was just a kid in the photograph, and at least forty pounds lighter. He wasn’t wearing glasses. His hair was thick and in a completely different style. Even the color was different. She didn’t recognize him for all those reasons along with one other, the one her brain screamed out at her—she didn’t recognize him at first because he shouldn’t have been there. He had no business being in that photograph. Special Agent Omer Vela had told her he’d gone to Berkeley.

  When she turned back to him, he was no longer crouching beside Begley’s body. He was standing beside an empty bookcase, his gun leveled at her chest.

  “Patchen always was a nostalgic idiot,” he said. “Packs up this entire place and leaves something like that out for the world to see.”

  Gimble moved slowly, her grip tightening on her gun, her finger slipping around the guard to the trigger. “What is this?”

  He waved his own gun at her. “Set your weapon down on the floor and kick it over to me.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t want to kill you, but I will.”

  Eighteen inches. That’s how high she’d have to raise her Glock in order to get a chest or head shot in. A quick swing of her arm. A flick of her wrist. No chance to aim, not really. Pure Wild West.

  “You’ll never get the shot off. Not before me.”

  Gimble knew he was right, but that didn’t make what she did next any easier.

  She lowered her gun, dropped it by her side, and kicked it away. The Glock skirted across the floor into the blood pooled around Begley, came to a stop near his waist.

  His eyes remained on her. “Step around the desk. Take a seat in his chair.”

  Gimble stepped back instead, toward the door.

  Vela pursed his lips. “You’re going to make me kill you, aren’t you?”

  Gimble took another step back. “You’re a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “I was a scientist first, a psychologist foremost. Some things aren’t so black-and-white. Not in a way someone like you might prefer. Some things are bigger.”

  Vela stepped toward her.

  Gimble took another step back. “You’ve been part of this from the beginning?”

  His face was smug. “I’ve had an interest for a very long time.”

  “You could have stopped him. None of those people had to die.”

  “Every experiment has its share of dead lab rats.” Vela pulled the trigger. The bullet buried itself in the wall about an inch from her left arm. He nodded toward the wooden chairs just outside Patchen’s door. “Take a seat, Gimble. I’m not going to ask again. We don’t have time.”

  Gimble looked down at the chair on the left. As she did, her eyes fell on a word carved into the armrest. She read it several times before looking back over at Vela.

  He was smiling. “That’s where it all started, right there.”

  The word wasn’t really a word at all, but a name—Mitchell.

  The metallic ping echoed again, louder than the last, followed by a thunk. Something broke with that last one.

  From somewhere in the building, a woman screamed.

  Vela looked up toward the ceiling and smiled. “Mitchell’s here. He’s early.”

  Gimble took another step back.

  “Don’t.”

  Gimble’s finger twitched. She dived through the opening onto the floor to the right of the doorway.

  Vela fired two quick shots—bang-bang!

  Both sailed over her and embedded themselves in the wall on the opposite side of the hallway.

  She rolled, came up in a crouch.

  Vela ran toward her.

  Gimble reached to her right, grabbed the base of a tall wooden coatrack, and swung it around like a long baseball bat. It cracked against Vela’s shin, throwing him off balance, and he flew forward, his arms flailing. His head crashed into the marble with a sickening crunch. His gun skittered across the floor.

  Vela didn’t move.

  There was blood. Not at first, but it came—a puddle spreading out from under his temple. His leg jerked.

  Gimble stood, breathing hard. Her right hand was shaking. She reached for it with her left, massaged her wrist.

  She took out her phone.

  No signal.

  When she started back down the hallway toward the door, she felt someone watching her. She froze.

  Michael Kepler was standing about halfway down the hall, utterly silent, a Glock in his hand. His eyes met hers. Neither moved.

  Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Nine

  Written Statement,

  Megan Fitzgerald

  Mitchell drew the blade of the scissors down Nicole Milligan’s forearm, from the inner part of her elbow to her wrist, pressing just enough to draw blood but careful to avoid the veins beneath. She tried to jerk away from him. She pulled as far to the side of the mattress as she could, but her bindings wouldn’t allow her to move much. Her head thrashed back and forth; she glared at both of us.

  I screamed again.

  I didn’t want to—it just came out.

  Mitchell was getting off on this. He smiled at me. “You want to try?”

  I shook my head.

  “She’s done it to you; I’ve seen your scars,” he said. “When Dr. Bart locked you in the dark room, who do you think was in there with you?”

  I looked down at my own arms, at the thin white lines—a dozen or so on the left, eight more on the right. Had I been wearing sleeves, I would have pulled them down, covered them up, but in my tank top I was exposed. I rubbed at them instead. I folded my arms over my chest. “That was a long time ago.”

  “That doesn’t make it right. What he did to you. What she did. You were just a little girl. He had no right. You trusted him—same as I did, same as Michael—and he treated all of us like objects, like things he could use up and toss out with the trash.”

  I looked down at Nicole, at her pleading eyes. “He used her too.”

  “Not like us.”

  “She wanted to be a psychologist. He told her he’d help her—put in a good word with her instructors at Cornell, write her a letter of recommendation. He even said he’d cite her help in his research when he published.”

  Mitchell laughed. “He never intended to publish. Not about all this.”

  “Not in traditional circles,” I replied. “But there’s a place for it.”


  “How do you even know that?”

  I rounded the bed and ran a finger over Nicole’s palm. “We talked, didn’t we, Nicki? All that time alone in the dark room. It wasn’t always about what Dr. Bart wanted. Sometimes we talked.”

  Nicole nodded her head.

  “She’s not your friend,” Mitchell shot back. “We were tortured—by him, by her, by all of them.” He lashed out with the scissors and slashed Nicole’s other arm. She flinched, tried to pull away again. Her fingers tightened around mine.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Turned my head away.

  “I want you to watch,” Mitchell said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s for you.”

  “It’s not what I want.”

  “It’s what you need.”

  Mitchell rounded the bed. His eyes fixed on the blade of the scissors, a little bead of red dripping down the metal. He twisted them ever so slightly in the air, watched the blood roll back down the other side. When he reached Nicole’s feet, he pulled off her shoes and socks, threw them to the corner of the room. He ran the tip of the scissors over her heel, across the sole of her right foot. Left a faint line but didn’t break the skin. “Ticklish, Nicki?”

  Her toes curled back, her feet jerked, but the zip ties held them in place.

  Mitchell slashed in fluid, quick movements. First the right foot, then the left. Cuts across her heels, deep this time. Nicole yelled beneath the duct tape on her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears.

  We all heard a loud bang, then—a gunshot from somewhere downstairs.

  Mitchell’s head jerked up.

  Two more quick shots.

  “They’re here,” he said. “We need to hurry.”

  “Don’t kill her. Please.”

  Mitchell ignored this; he licked his lips and looked around the room. “Where’s your backpack?”

  I glanced down at my feet. My backpack was leaning against the side of the bed.

  “Take everything out, scatter it all around the room. Put some stuff on the bed too. When they pick through all this, after the fire, we’ll want them to believe she’s you.”