The Ackerman Thrillers Boxset: 1-6

by Ethan Cross

  Maggie reached the bottom of the rusty metal stairs and stormed across the garage bay toward the Yukon. The doors of the black SUV stood open, and Marcus and Andrew were piling the vehicle up with equipment. She could hear them bickering.

  Andrew opened up the top of an ammo box and said, “Why in the hell do we need this much firepower?”

  Marcus’s reply echoed across the cracked and patched floor. “It’s the condom principle.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, I’d rather have one and not need it, than need one and not have it.”

  “We have two fully auto KRISS Super Vs and 5,000 rounds of .45 ACP ammo. Plus multiple sidearms. What are you expecting, zombie apocalypse?”

  “You never know. But the next time we go close-quarters, I want the firepower on our side.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Maggie said as soon as she reached them.

  Marcus dropped a duffle bag back to the gravel and turned toward her. His eyes were unreadable behind a pair of dark Oakley sunglasses. “I need you to stay here, Maggie. We may come up with additional leads that we’ll need you to investigate outside the Chicago area.”

  She looked to Andrew for support, but he only raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders in a way that told her she was on her own. “Dammit, Marcus. You can’t do this to me. This is the third case where you’ve stuck me on the sidelines doing paperwork. Ever since Harrisburg you’ve been coddling me like I’m some kind of child that needs babysitting. I made a simple mistake that could have happened to any of us. I don’t deserve to be benched over it.”

  “A simple mistake? You disobeyed my orders, and you were almost killed. But that’s beside the point—it’s not why you’re hanging back. We may need you here. End of discussion.”

  She reached out and grabbed his arm. She whispered, “Is this because of what’s been happening between us? I’m a professional. I would never allow our personal relationship to affect my performance.”

  Marcus closed his eyes for a second and then said, “It has nothing to do with that, either. I really just need you here. Okay?”

  Maggie sensed some emotion in his voice. Fear. Shame. Regret. But regret over what? Was he sorry for the way he was handling their relationship or that they had a relationship at all? She didn’t know how to respond, and so she said nothing.

  Heavy footsteps slapped the concrete at her back, and she turned to see Stan Macallan, their unit’s technology guru, approaching. Stan said to Marcus, “I emailed you those statistics and files you wanted on Chicago.”

  Marcus nodded. “Thanks.” To Maggie, he said, “I’ll call you tomorrow morning with an update on the case.”

  Andrew had finished loading the Yukon and raised the door to the garage. He gave Maggie a little wave as he climbed behind the wheel. Marcus glanced at the SUV and back to her. It looked as if there was something more he wanted to say, but as usual, he held his tongue. With a nod, he walked over to the Yukon and climbed inside.

  As Maggie watched the big black vehicle pull away from the building and down a dirt path dotted with alternating patches of grass and gravel, she wondered why the man she loved didn’t reciprocate her feelings. And if he did, why did he push her away?

  Day Three – December 17 Evening

  12

  Special Agent Victoria Vasques thanked the pale-faced young man at the Starbucks drive-through for her coffee and pulled the gray Crown Victoria out into traffic on Route 30. The Jackson’s Grove PD crime techs had already cleared the second abduction scene, and the woman’s husband was down at the station answering questions. She wanted to get another look without all the distractions, and tonight would be her best opportunity. It was only a short drive across Lincoln Highway and down Division Street to reach the young woman’s house on Hickory.

  The Chicago Metropolitan Area consumed over ten thousand square miles of land and had a population of 9.8 million people. The suburbs stretched out as an interconnected series of towns and villages, each almost filled with wall-to-wall houses and businesses. All of them had their own quaint little names and self-contained police departments with jurisdictions defined by street names rather than geography. The actual city of Chicago was the epicenter, but it was all Chicagoland.

  As Vasques traveled through the peaceful suburban neighborhood, she couldn’t help but consider how the residents would never expect such a thing to happen here. No one ever did. But she knew that the Anarchist could live in any one of the houses she passed, a wolf nestled unseen among the sheep.

  She followed the path the killer would have taken and pulled into the alley behind the cream two-story house. From the passenger seat, her little Yorkie puppy yapped and hopped onto her lap. The pink dog tag on its collar jingled like a bell when it moved. It sniffed her face and licked her on the nose. She recoiled and patted it lightly on its head, still not used to its affections. Her brother, Robbie, had given her the dog as an early Christmas present, commenting that if she was never going to find a man she should at least have a dog. Luckily, she had an elderly neighbor who could care for it while she was away at work. Robbie was impulsive. He never considered things like that.

  “Okay. That’s great,” she said as the little dog’s tongue lapped at her cheeks. She pressed its head down, away from her face. “Okay, enough. I’ve got work to do. If you crap in this car while I’m gone, I’ll buy a big snake and feed you to it.”

  She looked at the back of the house and thought of the missing woman, Jessie Olague. The poor girl was still out there somewhere at that very moment. Terrified, alone, waiting for someone to save her, wondering what would happen if no one came, brooding on the fact that her own death might be approaching.

  A cigarette craving attacked Vasques as it usually did when she was stressed. She popped in another stick of gum and chomped on it frantically. She had picked a hell of a time to quit smoking.

  As she worked on the piece of gum, she noticed something strange about the house. The lights were still on in several of the rooms. The crime-scene techs surely would have turned off all the lights when they left, and the husband was still at the station.

  She reached for her phone and dialed Belacourt’s number. “Hey, Trevor. I figured you’d be questioning the husband.”

  The tinny voice on the other end of the line said, “We’re taking a break. Letting him get it together. He’s pretty torn up about the whole thing.”

  “So you don’t think there’s any chance of him being involved?”

  “Too early to say for sure. But if he is, he’s trying for an Oscar. So what’s up at your end?”

  “Do you have any units still at the house?”

  “The Olague house? No, they buttoned it up a couple hours back.”

  She was afraid that she was just being paranoid, but it was better to be safe than sorry. “The lights are still on.”

  “I guess they might have forgotten to turn them off. It was still daylight when they left, but those guys are obviously pretty detail-oriented individuals. Tell you what, you stay put, and I’ll send over a couple units to give you backup.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Vasques ended the call and then watched as another light flipped on in the home’s second story. Her hand flew to her .45 caliber handgun, and she stepped out of the Crown Vic, leaving a yipping Yorkie behind.

  Someone was inside the house, and she didn’t have time to wait for backup.

  13

  Vasques made her way into the house through the sliding glass door and stopped to listen. She heard movement on the second floor and headed toward the stairs, taking aim at the railing above her head. Her weight automatically shifted forward, and her arms locked straight out. Her heart rate pulsed, and her index finger twitched against the trigger guard of her .45 caliber Sig Sauer 1911. Situations like this never seemed to get any easier.

  She crept up the stairs and cursed them as they cracked and popped beneath her feet. At the top, she paused again to listen. Footsteps
sounded from the victim’s bedroom, the same room where the killer had left his signature.

  This could be him. Killers often returned to the scene of a crime in one way or another in order to relive the events of the crime or re-enact their fantasy. The Anarchist could be less than twenty feet away.

  Breathing in deeply, she pressed forward down the hall and nudged the bedroom door open with her right foot. Inside the room, she saw a man in a gray button-down shirt and khakis staring at the pictures resting on Jessie Olague’s oak dresser. He was turned away from her.

  In a calm but firm voice, Vasques said, “Put your hands on your head.”

  He complied and raised his arms slowly. But something wasn’t right. Too late, she sensed a presence behind her.

  She spun toward the second intruder, but he was already on top of her. She caught only a flash of him from the shadows as he lunged forward. Black hooded sweatshirt, leather jacket, blue jeans.

  He caught her gun hand in a strong fist, and with frightening precision, he twisted her wrist and wrenched the weapon from her grasp. Before she could react, he thrust out a palm into her breastbone, driving her through the doorway of the bedroom.

  As she fought to regain her balance, she immediately regretted not waiting for backup.

  From behind her, she heard the man in the khakis say, “I think it’s your turn to put your hands up.”

  The man in the hallway stepped into the light of the bedroom and aimed her own weapon at her chest. He was slightly larger than average size, maybe six foot one, and had dark brown hair. His clothes fit loosely, but she could see the ridges and contours of firm muscles hiding within the folds of cloth and leather. He had bright, intelligent eyes, but cracks of red cut through the whites. She wondered if she’d stumbled onto some kind of robbery. Maybe these guys had heard what had happened and didn’t expect anyone to be coming home anytime soon. Society was full of parasites like that, waiting in the wings to take advantage of someone else’s pain.

  Vasques raised her hands and placed them against the sides of her head.

  The man holding her gun surprised her by ejecting the magazine and jacking back the slide to remove the shell loaded into the chamber. He caught the ejected bullet, slid it back into the magazine, and tossed it along with the .45 onto Jessie Olague’s bed. Without a word, he reached into his front pocket and held up an ID that read Department of Justice, Special Agent Marcus Williams.

  Her hands immediately dropped from her head, and she jammed a finger into his chest. “What the hell are you doing here? This is a crime scene. You never go to a crime scene without first contacting the agency conducting the investigation. Of all the stupid things to do. I could’ve killed the both of you.”

  Williams actually rolled his eyes. Vasques wanted to kick him squarely in the balls. That would have wiped that smug look off his face. “I’m sure we’ll all lose sleep over it,” he said.

  “Who do you think you are? Since when does Justice investigate cases like this? You have no right even to be here.”

  Agent Williams stepped forward, closing the distance between them to inches. “We’re special investigators ordered here by Thomas Caldwell himself. You’ve heard of him, right? Attorney General of the US. Highest-ranking law-enforcement officer in the country.”

  “I don’t care who sent you. That doesn’t give you the right to bypass the proper channels and ignore protocol.”

  Willams’s eyes narrowed to slits. “There’s a woman’s life on the line. I don’t have time to stand here and listen to you blow smoke. You can take your proper channels and protocols and ram them straight up your—”

  The man in the khakis cut into the conversation and stepped between them. “Okay, well, I’m Special Agent Andrew Garrison, and we’re very sorry that we didn’t follow protocol. We were coming through this area and wanted to save some time, but you’re right, we should have called ahead.” Williams rolled his eyes again and stepped away. Garrison shot him an irritated look. “We’ve been sent here to consult on the investigation. I think we might have gotten off on the wrong foot, but same team and all, so no reason we can’t start fresh. How would that be? And I don’t believe we got your name.”

  She started to tell Garrison that they didn’t need any help, but she knew government bureaucracies well enough to know that it wouldn’t do any good to shut them out. If they really had been sent by the AG, then these two were about as well connected as anyone could be. “Fine. Special Agent Victoria Vasques, FBI. What were you doing here, anyway?”

  Williams said, “I wanted to get a look at the crime scene without all the distractions.”

  She remembered her own motives for coming there and then realized that Belacourt had called in other officers. She swore as she grabbed for her phone and canceled the backup units. Then she gestured toward the hallway and said, “Since we’re already here, I guess I might as well give you the grand tour.”

  14

  Ackerman punched a key on the laptop to bring up the command-line interface. Then he activated the back-door Trojan that would give him access to a workstation located within the office of the Director of the Shepherd Organization. The Trojan was a small program embedded within the actual operating system of the host machine and, according to his expert, it was virtually undetectable. He had used his special skills to kidnap the sister of a renowned hacker and force the man’s cooperation. The hacker’s skills had proven well worth his trouble. Ackerman had always found it easy to get what he wanted when he was willing to cause pain or take life to achieve his goal. And he was an expert in pain.

  He pulled up the active case files for Marcus’s unit and began to read about this man the media had dubbed The Anarchist. The more he read, the more impressed he became. He admired the Anarchist’s work. This fellow knew about the hunger. Ackerman could tell that for sure.

  He closed the laptop and gathered his things. Chicago. He could easily be there by morning.

  His gaze found the clock on the nightstand, and his mind calculated the travel time for any police units in the area. The cheap hotel room had wi-fi included with the price of a night’s rental. He had routed his activity through remote nodes and proxy servers as his hacker friend had shown him—mainly through those located in foreign and less than friendly countries like Belarus, nations that would be unlikely to cooperate with US government investigations. But, as an extra precaution, he never stayed in the location where he accessed the files. He got in and out quickly like a ghost in the machine, as though he had never even been there. Then he simply slipped away into the night. They had tried to track him through his calls to Marcus, but he was too careful for that. And he was too careful to be caught by his computer access as well.

  The walls of the hotel room were blank and white. Pictures had been hanging there when he had first entered but he had removed them all. Ackerman had spent his childhood in a tiny cell being tortured by his father. After that, he had spent several more years in mental institutions and prisons. He had become accustomed to a lack of possessions and decorations, and it made him feel strangely uneasy to sleep in a room with pictures hanging on the walls. In fact, he preferred a room without furniture of any kind, and he often slept on the floor.

  He considered putting the pictures back but decided against it. He needed to get on the road. Marcus would soon be needing his special brand of help.

  15

  Vasques watched Agent Williams with suspicion as his stare crawled over every inch of the crime scene. He seemed to be lingering on and absorbing every minute detail. She checked her watch and tried to fight down her growing anxiety. She said, “The killer’s very careful. He leaves virtually no evidence behind.”

  “Everywhere you go, you take something with you, and you leave something behind. Locard’s Exchange Principle,” Williams said.

  Vasques replied, “I had that class, too. Of course he’s left behind traces. Unfortunately, this guy hasn’t left behind anything to tell us where to find him. He�
��s left shoe prints, size ten and a half, but he changes the shoes after every scene. The shoes he wears are as common as you can get. They can be picked up at any Walmart. We’ve found talcum powder on the door handles.”

  “Latex gloves.”

  “Right. No hair samples or skin cells that we’ve found. No fingerprints. He drugs the women so there’s no struggle and no blood left behind. He—”

  Agent Williams held up a hand to stop her and said, “I’ve read all this in the files. I really just need you to be quiet. I’ll let you know if I have any questions.”

  His rudeness and audacity struck Vasques speechless. She fought for words. “What exactly is your specialty at the Department of Justice, Special Agent Williams?”

  His mouth curled into a lopsided grin. “Call me Marcus. And that’s classified.”

  He stepped past her and headed toward the back door. She was dumbfounded. She turned to the other agent, the one who had introduced himself as Andrew Garrison. She gave him an is-he-always-like-this? look to which Garrison answered with an awkward sorry-about-my-partner shrug.

  She followed Williams out the sliding glass door, furious that she had to babysit these idiots instead of catching a killer.

  16

  Marcus exited the Olague house and made his way through the backyard. The snowfall crunched beneath his feet, and the cold irritated his cheeks. He reached the alley and released a deep breath. It hung in the air as a puff of white vapor. His eyes closed, and he tried to shut out all the distractions and center himself. Somewhere in the distance, he heard Vasques complaining to Andrew and Andrew playing the role of the diplomat, but he ignored them.

  He reached down inside and felt the hunger churning in his gut. It waited for him down in the depths, in the dark place, and he called it to the surface.