by Ethan Cross
“That’s enough. I’m going to use the phone. Don’t you move.”
“Or you’ll what, Mr. Marmoset? You’re still not getting the picture. When someone comes in the night like this, they don’t ring the bell. They slip in like a shadow and attack you while you’re most vulnerable.”
“But you didn’t do that.”
“No, we came to your door in the middle of the night, rousing you with your shotgun. But you see, we paid your errand boy, Tyson, to remove the firing pins from the loaded shotgun you keep at your bedside.”
Willoughby’s eyes went so wide that Ackerman thought they may slip from his skull.
Ackerman had noticed the employee’s name beside the door when they came in, on a cheap plaque proclaiming “Employee of the Month.” He had known at the time that Tyson would serve as a perfect distraction. The betrayal and the seemingly inside information would combine to put Willoughby over the top.
“Tyson would never do that.”
“You know the two of you look a bit alike. Don’t be too hard on the little hobbit. He’s not disloyal. He’s just gullible and ignorant. Much like his mentor. We came to him with a wonderful story about a television show called Scaredy Cat where we scare people and then film it. We told him that we needed his help with safety concerns, like your loaded weapons and security systems. He’s probably waiting on his front porch as we speak. I told him we would pick him up and let him join in the fun. Maybe we’ll pick him up later. Maybe have some fun with him too.”
The shop owner looked to Emily Morgan for rescue, but to her credit, she maintained an unsympathetic and impenetrable mask. Tears formed in the man’s eyes. “Please. Leave him out of this. He doesn’t know.”
“He doesn’t know what? That you’re a criminal?”
“No, he knows about that, but he doesn’t know that I’m his biological father. It was a college thing that started at a party, and I think she put me down on the birth certificate. Not sure, but I know the info is out there somewhere, since Oban threatened me the same way. That’s why I gave Tyson this job and …”
Ackerman glanced at Emily, confusion causing him to break character. “And he doesn’t know you’re his father?”
Willoughby, his grip on the shotgun loosening, said, “Please. I can’t tell you anything. Mr. King would kill me and my son. That’s the way he works. Vengeance is swift and absolute.”
“Look into my eyes. Do you think that whatever they did to you could approach the horrors which my imagination could devise?”
“You’re insane.”
“Probably. Many have said so. But it’s a very vague term based purely on your perspective of what is sane and normal. And where’s the fun in being just like everyone else?”
Willoughby licked his lips, his breathing labored and short, his eyes darting back and forth between Ackerman and Emily.
“We’re not here to hurt you. Put the gun down, and we’ll talk. King doesn’t have to know that you spoke a single word about him.”
The barrel of the shotgun moved slowly up and away. Willoughby looked down at the gun as if it had chosen to betray him. But then his expression changed, and he said, “Wait. Tyson’s been out sick all week.”
With a quick flick of his wrist, Ackerman hurled the pocket knife at the shop owner. The blade embedded itself into the center of Willoughby’s right hand, traveling through the soft flesh and into the wooden stock of the shotgun.
Emily pulled her Glock 19 pistol but seemed unsure where to aim it.
54
The single bedroom of Kevin’s apartment had been converted into what he called his “Command Center.” Electronic components, soldering guns, swivel-mounted magnifying glasses, wires, tools, and multiple working computer systems. The rest of the apartment seemed to simultaneously be very normal and yet very wrong. It took Baxter a moment to realize why, but when he made the connection, it made perfect sense. The kitchen and living room contained all the normal items: refrigerator, table, couch, television, coffee table. What the rooms lacked was a single decoration or photograph. The walls were beige and bare. All in all, Kevin’s domicile reminded Baxter of a well-kept crackhouse.
Unlike the rest of the apartment, movie posters adorned the walls of Kevin’s Command Center. Beneath the posters, a metal cage lined the interior walls of the former bedroom. Kevin explained that it was a Faraday cage and went on to describe the importance of the countermeasure. At which time, Baxter zoned out for a moment.
After completing his spiel, Kevin led them to the living room, pulled the blanket and pillow off his gray suede couch and said, “Please, sit. Would you like a refreshment?” Kevin spoke in a clipped, unnatural tone, like a waiter on his first day, as if he were reading from a script.
Baxter dropped onto the couch and put his feet up on the coffee table. He said, “I’d love a Fresca or something like that, if you have it.”
Kevin was silent a moment, his face hidden behind the shroud of his hood. Finally, he said, “All I have is coffee, Jolt Cola, and bottled water.”
“Don’t worry about it, little buddy. Have a seat. Let’s communicado.”
Kevin reluctantly sat on the edge of the coffee table, his hooded face only a couple of feet from the couch. Baxter said, “Are you sure you don’t want to just sit between us?”
Kevin seemed to consider this.
Baxter shook his head and continued, “Never mind that. Remember a couple weeks back when you were telling me about how you had hacked into all of the bus cameras, and that you are basically big brother, and how you were sure that the government was using those cameras against us.”
“Right. They claim that all the extra cameras are because they’re beta testing some type of automation software, but I don’t buy that for a second. These asshats basically have mobile surveillance vans traveling all over the city.”
“I read in the paper it had something to do with insurance liabilities.”
Kevin said, “What’s ‘The Paper?’ I’m not familiar with that group.”
“The newspaper.”
“I didn’t know they still made those.”
With a roll of his eyes, Baxter said, “Kids these days. Anyway, doesn’t really matter. Important thing is that I want to exploit those mobile surveillance vans for my own gain.”
Kevin didn’t seem to be following.
“I want you to help me use their system to save a young woman’s life. So I just got one question for you, Kevmeister, are you ready to be a hero today?”
Kevin shrugged. “I guess. What do you wanna see?”
Fifteen minutes later, Kevin had accessed the transit authority video systems and recalled the archived footage from the night Corin Campbell went missing. Unfortunately, the video from the bus nearest Corin’s house showed nothing of interest.
Staring at one of Kevin’s massive flat screen monitors, Baxter said, “Can you pull up a street map with the Muni lines over the top?”
Kevin, sitting in his command chair in front of the four twenty-seven inch screens, said, “No problem.” A few seconds later the map appeared on the screen.
Leaning close, Baxter studied the different colored lines. “Can you print this out for me?”
“I don’t have a printer. What’s the point anymore? If you have a coupon or something, you can just show it to the cashier on your phone.”
“Kids. No worries. I’ll make do.” After a moment of staring at the map, he said, “We know that Corin’s car wasn’t there. So whoever took her must have also taken the car. If we trace back the cameras, and we map that out, and we kind of think fourth dimensionally, then I ascertain that we could track his path with the car and then maybe find a bus that intersected with them. We could get lucky. But what bus do we need to check next?”
Kevin said, “While you were yammering on, I pulled up the exact hexadecimal color of Corin Campbell’s car. Now I’m going to run a search through all the archive footage from that time period searching for that specific colo
r. We’ll get a lot of false positives, but if I narrow those results by geographic area, that will give us the best chance of finding her car on the footage.”
With a nod, Baxter replied, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it sounds beautiful.”
“The search is running now.”
A few moments later, after having sorted through a couple of false positives, Kevin said, “And there is Corin Campbell’s car.” He pulled the video up on the screens and added, “This is all the footage they caught.”
The video played on, showing Corin’s car as it passed one of the city’s electric trolleybuses. Baxter studied the video, searching for any reflections or views into the car, but unfortunately, all the angles were wrong. They didn’t have a clear shot of who was driving.
“Can you replay that again? This time in slow motion.”
The video played at a slower speed. Baxter watched again and said, “Stop it there.”
Pointing to a spot on the monitor, he said, “Can you zoom in here and enhance?”
Kevin complied, and when he was finished, they had a clear picture of a man’s hand reaching across the car to close the glovebox.
But, more importantly, the hand was inked with a very distinctive tattoo.
Baxter, slapping his hands together excitedly, said, “There it is, dos compadres. Bingo, bango, bongo. Now, all we have to do is take this down to a Kinkos or Staples or something, get a printout, and head over to see my old partner.”
Kevin said, “Absolutely not. No cops. I have a strict no police policy. It was in the waivers that you two signed.”
Having mostly just hung back, taking it all in, Jenny asked, “Why do we need the cops anyway?”
Baxter said, “It’s time we get the proper authorities involved. We’ve proven that there’s more to this case than just a missing person, and we’ve given the cops a great lead. I’ve earned my pay and done my duty. And now it’s time for the cops to step in and do their thing. Plus, I need Detective Ferrera to run that crazy tattoo through the database. With a little luck, we may have a suspect in custody this time tomorrow.”
“How about I run the image of the tattoo against all social media photos in the San Francisco area?” Kevin asked. “Then we’ll have the guy’s name and know everything about him.”
Jenny said, “You can do that? How? Do you pull all the images and run some kind of pixel recognition for the tattoo?”
“Something like that. Who’s asking? Are you affiliated officially or unofficially to any kind of law enforcement agency?”
Jenny raised an eyebrow and looked at Baxter. He said, “Take it easy there, Kevieronymus Bosch. Go ahead and run your search.”
“It’ll take a few minutes,” the young computer expert said, still eyeing Jenny cautiously from beneath his hood.
“We’ll wait,” Baxter said as he walked over to the one item in Kevin’s living room that wasn’t a cookie-cutter bare necessity. It was an old record player hooked up to a new sound system. A stack of worn records sat beneath the record player’s stand. Baxter mused, “I’m gonna take a minute to explore your record collection, Kevin.”
“Those are sorted and alphabetized by genre and band name.”
“You just go do your thing. I’ll put them back exactly as I found them.”
Sorting through the stack of timeworn records, Baxter was careful to keep them in the same order. It wasn’t long before he found a nice Hendrix album and placed it on the turntable. Moving the needle into place, he closed his eyes and listened to Jimi sing about castles made of sand.
Jenny came up beside him and said, “Funny that we may catch that woman’s killer based on some tattoo.”
“We don’t know she’s dead. There’s always hope. But I certainly wouldn’t envy the torment she’s endured if she’s still alive after all this time.”
“That’s one heck of a creepy tattoo. It was like the bottom half of some mangled skull.”
“Yeah, it seems somehow familiar to me, but I can’t quite place it. Speaking of tattoos, what’s with your new ink?”
“Noticed that, huh?”
“I’m a detective.”
She rolled up her sleeve and displayed her wrist. The new tattoo was small, barely larger than a half dollar in size, but intricate. The artist clearly had tremendous talent. The swirls and flourishes of ink, which were now outlined in irritated skin, depicted a Yin Yang symbol. Only the emblem was composed of the images of a white and black dog.
Admiring the artistry, Baxter said, “It’s gorgeous. What was the thinking behind it? What’s its significance?”
Jenny stared out the window as she bobbed her head along with Jimi. “My grandmother used to tell me that we all have two dogs inside us. A white dog and a black dog, good and evil, love and fear, that kind of thing. She would say that the one who survives will be the one we choose to feed.”
“I like that. Think I’m going to steal it. Next time you hear it, just go along with me and pretend like I made it up.”
She punched him in the arm and shook her head. “Do you really like the tattoo?”
“I think it may be my new favorite,” he said with a big smile, showing off his dimples.
Kevin stepped back into the room and said, “I know this sounds crazy, but I don’t think this guy has a social media account. And he apparently doesn’t have any friends who take pictures either.”
Baxter shrugged. “Why is that so strange? I don’t have a Facebook or Tweeter account.”
Jenny curled her lip and looked him up and down. “Yes, you do. You’re always posting on there about your blog stuff.”
“Damnit, Kevarino, I told you not to do that.”
“It’s a requirement for the blog. It’s not like I’m using it to pick up chicks.”
“I don’t like having my name and face on stuff that isn’t me. I don’t even know the username and password for my own accounts.”
“I programmed them to all be accessible through your cell phone.”
Baxter shook his head. “I barely know how to answer that thing.”
“But you texted me directions earlier. How did you do that if you can’t work your phone?” Jenny asked.
“I saw your message come in, and I saw that my phone sent you the directions you wanted.”
“Your phone doesn’t just do that.”
Kevin cleared his throat. “I thought you knew all this, Bax. I’ve been handling that kind of thing for you for a while now. I manage your calendar, help with tech stuff, read your messages. I—”
Holding up a hand to stop his pale young friend, Baxter said, “So you responded to Jenny’s message for me, and you’ve been monitoring all my phone conversations.”
“Just doing my part to help out.”
“Stop helping me, Kevin. We’re going to have a long talk about this later, but for now, it looks like I have no choice but to go see a cop about a tattoo.”
55
The past…
Marcus considered merely running up and trying to scare the big man with the useless weapon he had taken from the panic room. But his father had also taught him a thing or two about fighting. One of the most important lessons was to use your weaknesses as strengths. If you’re small, you have a lower center of gravity, and you needed to use that to your advantage. If you’re big, you have a longer reach.
In Marcus’s case, he was a scared little kid, and he intended to use that weakness to kick the man in black’s ass.
He pinched his arm until he drew blood, and then repeated the procedure until his eyes were full of tears. Then he ran screaming down the concrete corridor, straight toward the big man in the black suit. The guard started to reach into his coat, but Marcus ran right up and buried his tear-soaked face in the big man’s stomach. He said, “Please, help me! I’m so scared.”
The big man asked, “What the hell, kid? How did you get down here?”
Under his breath, Marcus mumbled, “Have you ever been punched in the
nuts?”
“What?”
Then Marcus reached into his New York Yankees jacket, grabbed the handle of the gun, and using it like a club, he attacked the big man’s crotch. The blow connected with a crunch and rattle.
Marcus stepped back as the behemoth of a man leaned over as if he was going to retch. He looked at Marcus with confusion in his eyes.
Marcus smiled and said, “Hurts, doesn’t it?”
And then he hammered the side of the gun into the big man’s temple. The guard toppled forward, slamming his head against the concrete wall.
Marcus backed up several steps, keeping the gun trained on his opponent, but the man didn’t move. He was out cold.
Wasting no time, Marcus ran to the steel door and pulled it open. There was no handle on the other side. The room beyond was lit with two red bulbs, the kind Marcus had seen on emergency signs, giving everything a hellishly red tint. The space was nothing more than a giant concrete box with a drain in the center. There were two people strapped to gurneys in the middle of the room. The young couple—a man and woman, much older than him but still what his dad would call “kids”—were naked and bleeding, their blood flowing toward the drain like watercolors. The man’s head had nearly been cut off.
Marcus was too terrified to be disgusted, too frightened to feel anything else.
The woman was alive, despite wounds that covered her whole body. She still screamed and moaned.
When he spoke, it didn’t seem to be his voice, but someone older. “I’m here to help.”
The sound must have broken death’s hold on the woman because she stopped screaming and bent her head up in his direction. Her face had been severely beaten, causing her words to sound as if she had a mouth full of gum. She said, “Thank God. Dude, you gotta help me.”
“No shit,” Marcus said.
He ran forward and clawed at her restraints.
The only time he had ever seen a woman without her clothes on was in some of Eddie’s Playboy magazines. The woman on the gurney was like one of them—young, beautiful. At least, he guessed she would have looked like that if it wasn’t for pieces of her flesh being cut away. She had a dark tuft of hair between her legs and large breasts. Or, at least, they seemed large to him.