by J. D. Barker
Sammy gave Jessica a sideways glance, then said, “We’ve gone through his phone records. From what we’ve gathered, Mitchell paid him to sneak files out of Windham Hall, anything he could find to back up what Fitzgerald was doing. There was a twenty-five-thousand-dollar payment on the sixteenth. That’s the most recent. We think that was to fund his break from the LAPD.”
This is what you paid me to do.
Sammy went on. “Roland’s sister, Erma, kept a diary. She was careful about what she wrote, though. She didn’t want to incriminate her brother. There was only one entry on Mitchell a few years back. Roland told her Mitchell and Michael were nearly identical, like two people competing for the same life. He wondered what would happen if both of them were in the same room. He wanted to reach out to Michael, but we haven’t found any evidence to suggest he ever did—not until the LAPD thing, anyway.”
Dobbs handed me another picture. “We found Roland in his car.”
When I glanced down at the photo, I immediately turned away, but not before the image became etched in my mind. A body burned, completely unrecognizable.
Jessica frowned at him. “She doesn’t need to see that. Nobody does.” She reached across the table and patted my hand. “Sorry about that.”
I pulled my hand out from under hers and placed it on my lap.
Dobbs said, “He didn’t die in the fire. Somebody shot him first.” He made a gun out of his thumb and pointer finger and pointed it at his own forehead. “The fire was just an attempt to destroy evidence. To further frame your brother.”
Jessica leaned forward and said, “We think it was Mitchell, like the others. We placed him in LA.”
Chapter One Hundred Forty-Three
Megan
You need to tell the press! They’re blaming everything on Michael.”
Jessica nodded at the man in the T-shirt. “Show her, Sammy.”
He clicked several buttons on his MacBook, then turned it around so we could see the screen. “This is Barton Fitzgerald’s American Express account. See right here? We’ve got a charge on the fourteenth of September for Crossover Airlines.”
I pulled the computer a little closer. “He was using Dr. Bart’s credit card?”
Sammy nodded. “We think he had access to your e-mail account and possibly the text messages from your iPhone too.”
I sat back in my chair. “How?”
Detective Dobbs reached back into his box and pulled out an iPad in a plastic evidence bag. “They found this in the basement room at Windham Hall where Dr. Fitzgerald kept him. It’s fried, but when our techs moved the SIM card to a working iPad, we realized it was set up to mirror all your accounts.”
My stomach sank. “I have an account with one of Dr. Bart’s credit cards.”
“And with this iPad, Mitchell had access too.”
Sammy pulled up a spreadsheet on the Mac. “From what we’ve gathered, Mitchell monitored your communication with Michael, particularly when the two of you talked about his work, and when one of Michael’s routes intersected with the location of one of Mitchell’s potential victims, he’d fly out and rent a car and tail Michael. At some point, he’d remove the GPS system from Michael’s truck, move it to his rental, then return it after committing the murder. He made it look like Michael drove to each crime scene.”
I must have seemed puzzled, because he asked if I had any questions.
“How can you tell he moved the GPS? How do you know it was him?”
Jessica smiled. “The device also recorded RPM data. RPMs for a truck are very different from a regular vehicle’s. Sammy caught that.”
There was a small refrigerator in the room. She reached inside, grabbed a Coke, popped the top, and took a drink. “Are you sure you don’t want something?”
I shook my head. “I’m fine.”
Sammy gave Jessica a wry smile. “Can I ask her?”
She rolled her eyes. “Go ahead.”
He turned to me. “How did you trick the cameras back at the truck stop?”
I might have shrunk back a little in my chair. “I didn’t…”
Jessica waved a hand. “It’s okay, you can tell him. Nobody is prosecuting you for that.”
“I can’t get in trouble?”
“Nope.”
I looked at all three of them. It didn’t really matter; they couldn’t prove it. “I tapped into the truck stop’s DVRs and used facial-recognition software to find video of Michael. It wasn’t hard; he visited that truck stop on nearly every trip. Then I clipped the footage, changed the time stamp, and uploaded it back. Piece of cake.”
Sammy asked, “How did you access their system? It’s a closed network secured with two-fifty-six-bit encryption.”
I stifled a laugh. “If you try to go in from a terminal or the internet to gain access to the network, sure, it’s nearly impossible. The people who install these things aren’t idiots.”
Sammy didn’t say anything, and the cute detective seemed confused, so I broke it down. “It’s like a house—they put an impossible-to-break dead bolt on the front door but they don’t worry about keeping out the person who’s standing in the kitchen. I just unplugged the CAT-5 cable from one of the cameras and plugged it into my laptop. The cameras are already on the network, beyond the security. I just mimicked the camera’s MAC address and I was in. Child’s play. Full access to everything on their system.”
Sammy considered this. “Where did you learn how to do that?”
I shrugged. “A guy named Roy turned me on to a YouTube video. Everything is on the internet these days.”
It was Jessica’s turn to smile. “Does that answer your question, Sammy?”
He nodded and fell back in his chair. “Yep.”
Jessica took another sip of her Coke and set the can down on the table. “Did you ever ride with Michael on any of his deliveries, Megan?”
“Sure. A couple of times, I flew out and met him,” I told her. “Everybody likes a road trip. It gave us a chance to spend some time together.”
To the detective, Jessica said, “That explains the holes in her attendance records. Quality time with her brother.”
“Brother by adoption,” he corrected.
“You looked at my attendance records?”
She didn’t answer me. Instead, she said, “Did you ever see Mitchell on one of these road trips when you were with Michael?”
“No, of course not. I didn’t know there was a Mitchell until he showed up at Jeffery Longtin’s cabin.” I looked back at the detective. “What else did you find in that room in the basement?”
He glanced down at his box, then back to me. “Photographs, mostly. Hundreds of them—both you and Michael.” He lowered his voice. “You were naked in some of the shots. They were hidden-camera pics, kinda creepy. He had some of your underwear too. There was a box filled with your clothes.”
“Ew.”
“Most of it was destroyed in the fire.” He glanced down at the box again. “The rest will be locked away in evidence. You don’t need to worry about the wrong people seeing any of that stuff.”
I looked down at my hands. “I can’t believe Dr. Bart kept him down there.”
“I’m sure it was horrible,” Jessica said. “Somehow he managed to get out when he needed to. Apparently with Roland Eads’s help.”
“Mitchell said it was like being in a cage.”
Jessica and the detective exchanged a glance.
The IT guy was fiddling with his MacBook again. He turned it back to me, and a video began to play. “Have you ever seen this?”
The image was grainy. The only light in the room came from a candle on a nightstand. The camera was focused on a bed. A woman on top of a man. “Is that—”
“It’s Alyssa Tepper,” the detective replied. “And that is—”
I covered my face. “Michael! Oh my God, turn it off. I can’t watch that!”
He didn’t, though. He let it continue to play. “When we first saw this, we thought it was
filmed in Alyssa Tepper’s apartment. Why wouldn’t we think that, right? We found the camera in her bedroom pointing at the bed. Same bedspread as in the video. The image is so dark, it’s hard to make out the furniture, but if you look carefully, it doesn’t match Tepper’s—it’s close, but not the same. See?”
He paused the video and handed me another photograph, a picture of a dresser, and said, “That’s hers. Different, right?”
I looked at the photograph, then slid it back to him. “It’s hard to tell. It’s dark in the video.”
The detective handed me another picture. “We found this one in an album in Michael’s storage unit back in Los Angeles. It’s old—he’s just a teenager—but look at the dresser. I think it’s a match. What do you think?”
I recognized Michael’s room. He was sitting on his bed. The dresser was clearly visible.
Jessica’s finger settled on the photograph. “That’s the same bedspread too. From the video.”
Detective Dobbs put the photograph back in his box. “When we caught that, we took a closer look at the tape and at the time code embedded in the tape, and we realized the video was nearly seven years old. It was shot about six months before Michael moved out of the Fitzgerald home. Alyssa Tepper was a patient of Dr. Bart’s at one point. Michael told us he didn’t know her, but he lied about that, didn’t he?”
“Or this is Mitchell,” I countered. “They look exactly the same.”
“Looked.”
I really didn’t need this. Not now. “Fine. Looked. Whatever.”
“Again, I’m sorry for your loss,” Detective Dobbs said.
I frowned. “So Mitchell somehow staged Alyssa’s apartment to make this video look recent. That makes sense, right? If he was trying to frame Michael?”
Jessica nodded. “He even altered several recent photographs to make it appear the two of them were dating. Planted a mobile phone at your brother’s place filled with bogus text messages. He placed some of Michael’s clothes in her apartment.”
Sammy added, “Flight records and credit card charges put him in Los Angeles at the time of her murder.”
“Couldn’t it have been Mitchell in the pictures? Posing as Michael?”
Sammy shook his head. “Nope. They were photoshopped. Edits like that leave a trace. Easy enough to tell with the right equipment.”
That seemed weird to me. Why would Mitchell bother? He looked just like Michael.
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and glanced up at the window. Our housekeeper, Ms. Neace, was standing in the hallway looking in, looking at me. When our eyes met, she quickly shuffled away. Several agents were huddled around her. “What is she doing here?”
Jessica reached into her pocket and took out a pill bottle. She set it in the center of the table. “Can we talk about these?”
Chapter One Hundred Forty-Four
Megan
I snatched the bottle from the table. “These are Michael’s. How did you get them?”
Jessica took another drink of her Coke. “At Longtin’s cabin, after Michael said he saw you get in the car with Mitchell, after he turned himself in so he could help rescue you from…Mitchell, we found those in his pocket.” Her mouth was a thin line. “Do you know what they are?”
“Of course I do. They’re dorozapine. Dr. Bart prescribed them.”
“That particular medication isn’t common here in the States. I had to look it up. It’s primarily used in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Bloc, places like that. Less…regulated places.”
I really wasn’t in the mood for a pharmaceutical geography lesson.
Jessica nodded at the bottle. “Michael did have a prescription for dorozapine; he started taking it years ago. But that bottle there, those aren’t his. Are they, Megan?”
I twisted the bottle in my hand, and the pills made a sound like slow rain. I pointed back at the window. “Tell me why Ms. Neace is here.”
Jessica smiled again. “We’ll get to her in a minute. I want to talk about those pills, the dorozapine. It’s an antipsychotic. A dangerous one. It’s primarily used to treat schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder. It can be very helpful to someone with one of those conditions. But if it’s given to someone not suffering from those conditions, someone like me or Detective Dobbs here, there can be substantial adverse effects—hallucinations, memory loss, paranoia, anxiety. Are you aware of that?”
I said nothing.
She continued. “Dr. Fitzgerald was. Apparently, medications like dorozapine were key to his research, his attempts to induce psychosis, like dissociative identity disorder. That’s why he prescribed it to Michael, right? To try and induce multiple personality disorder?” She leaned forward and tilted her head. “That’s not why he prescribed it for you, though, is it?”
I squeezed the bottle tight. I wasn’t going to look at the name on the label. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
Jessica eased back in her chair and turned to the guy with the MacBook. “Sammy, play our interview with the Fitzgeralds’ housekeeper, please.”
He nodded, clicked several buttons, and turned the laptop monitor to face me.
Ms. Neace’s face filled the screen. She was twitchy, nervous. “He pushed that boy so hard from the moment he brought him home. He was only four or five at the time, but Dr. Fitzgerald would keep him in his office for hours—session after session after session. Drilling him about the atrocities he witnessed, forcing him to relive those memories. Sometimes they’d take breaks; other times he’d insist they eat their meals in there.” She leaned forward and shook her head. In a lower voice, she said, “He’d lock him in that horrible little room—no lights, nothing—and pump him full of medications. The others too—he did it to all of them. Him and his damn research. Rose was no saint either. She was right there with him, encouraging him. What he did to those children, it was nothing short of torture.”
Jessica’s voice came from somewhere off camera. “Why didn’t you report him? Say something?”
Ms. Neace huffed. “Who would believe me? Do you have any idea who was funding him? You don’t report that kind of thing. Not if you want to live. I did all I could. I stayed in that horrible house and helped the boy when he was in my care. I withheld the meds when I could. Made him throw them up sometimes. Taught him to pretend he was on the meds when they were watching.” She shook her head. “Little good that did. Fitzgerald was relentless. He was determined to split that boy into a dozen different parts, shatter his fragile mind. He created this entire Mitchell persona down to the smallest detail and tried to force it on him, make it part of him. He wanted to create a killer without remorse, a personality that could kill with the flip of a mental switch, then go back without any memory of what he’d done, without guilt. The perfect killing machine. Michael was so tough, so strong. He built walls. Where a weaker mind would have caved, he pushed back. It didn’t work with Michael. Fitzgerald tried for years, but it didn’t work. He eventually moved on—”
Sammy stopped the video.
The time stamp at the bottom was an hour earlier.
The heat flared in my cheeks.
Jessica took the pill bottle from me, then wiped away a thin line of moisture on her Coke can. “Michael knew. Didn’t he? That’s why he covered for you. That’s why he told us he saw Mitchell take you.”
I looked at the three of them. Two people I didn’t know were standing at the window watching us. “What are you saying?”
“Megan, who’s on the mark? Right now.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“A few days ago, I wouldn’t have believed it either.”
“Mitchell kidnapped me! He killed Michael. He tried to kill me! Nicki!” I slammed my hand down on the table. The slap echoed through the room. “Mitchell killed all those people and tried to frame Michael!”
Gimble nodded at Sammy.
“On it,” he said. And he loaded another video. Apparently, Nicole Milligan was awake.
Chapter
One Hundred Forty-Five
Megan
Nicki was in rough shape.
She was in a hospital bed, raised into a semi-sitting position and propped up with pillows. Her hair looked greasy, plastered to her head. She had a black eye, several cuts and bruises on her face. When she spoke, her voice was quiet, mouse-like. “Patchen tried to warn me, but by the time he called, I heard someone shouting outside my front door. A man’s voice, familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I hadn’t heard that voice in years. Someone kicked my door in. I ran to the back bedroom, grabbed my gun, and hid in the closet. He was shouting at me. I heard a woman’s voice too, and both of them were getting closer. When I saw shadows through the closet door and knew they were in the room with me, I fired. I panicked and just started shooting, kept shooting until the gun was empty. Then she yanked the door open and pulled me out.”
“Where was the man?” Detective Dobbs’s voice.
Nicole blinked at the camera.
“Nicole?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t see him. I figured he ran off somewhere in the house.” Nicole licked her cracked lips. “She pulled me from the closet. Started shouting at me, ‘Where is it! Where is it!’ And I recognized her then—the doctor’s daughter. She—”
“She’s lying!” I shouted.
Sammy glanced at Jessica and paused the video.
My face burned. “Mitchell broke the door in! I chased him through the house! I wasn’t even in the room when she fired the shots at him—I was—”
“You were what?”
My voice dropped lower. “I was on the phone.”
“You were on the phone? Who did you call?”
“I…I didn’t call anyone. It was Dr. Bart. He called—”
Jessica smirked. “The dead Dr. Bart called Nicole’s house?”
I tried to remember. Everything had happened so fast, it was hazy. “Not him. Obviously not him. I think it was a recording. Had to be.” I was mumbling. Pull it together, Meg. I looked Jessica square in the eye. “Somebody was fucking with me.” I drew in a deep breath and went on as calmly as I could. “I hung up and found a pair of scissors in Nicole’s drawer—I stabbed Mitchell. I got him off Nicki long enough to get her to the car. He barely slowed down. He got to us before we could drive away and knocked me out.”