The Ackerman Thrillers Boxset Page 9

  And he knew he had missed something. He could feel it.

  His eyes shifted back and forth, as his mind traveled over every minute detail. An observer would have seen a man staring at a wall. In reality, he didn’t even notice the wall. He looked through it, into the past, into his memories.

  As he had thought, there was much that he had overlooked, but he still couldn’t make sense of any of it. He needed time, but a killer was on the loose. And he owed it to Maureen Hill to stop him before another suffered as she had.

  He thought about Maggie. After taking her statement, her father had sent her home with one of the deputies. He decided to give her a call and see how she was holding up.

  He sifted through a few papers lying on his kitchen table. Two items drew his attention. One was Maggie’s number scrawled on a small sheet of paper. The other was a tattered business card that her father had given him after the questioning.

  Both Maggie and her father had given him their numbers within the past day. Each number represented a different path, one of love and life and fond memories and one of pain and death. One path offered great happiness, but if he could stop the killer, the other offered great meaning. He knew which path any normal, sane person would choose. He hated to admit it, even to himself, but the path of happiness wasn’t the one that called to him.

  Since he had yet to purchase a cell phone that worked in the area, he picked up the handset of an old rotary phone that had come with the house and dialed Maggie’s number. He didn’t need to read it from the sheet of paper. He’d only seen it once, but he had it memorized. Each subsequent ring made his heart sink. For some reason, he had expected her to be sitting by the phone awaiting his call.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hi, it’s Marcus. I was beginning to think you weren’t home.”

  “I was in the shower. I’ve been in there since I got back to the apartment. I didn’t even go into that house, but somehow I still feel dirty.”

  He searched for words that could comfort her. He found none. “I know what you mean.”

  “My God, Marcus, that poor woman. She was a wonderful person and definitely didn’t deserve...not that anyone …” Her unfinished words hung in the air, and only silence transmitted over the telephone lines.

  Once again, Maggie broke the silence with a question that made him cringe. “Did you ever see anything like that when you were a cop?”

  Now I remember. This is why I don’t get into relationships.

  “I saw some things that I wish I could forget,” he said.

  Silence. She changed the subject. “We didn’t really get a chance to talk at the scene, but I was wondering about what you did after you found the body. Were you in shock?”

  He didn’t want to talk about it anymore, but he did anyway. “I stood there, looking into her eyes. It was like she was calling out to me, screaming for help … a silent scream.” Tears rolled down his face. “I felt completely powerless. It was the same feeling as when … Maybe we all have a monster inside. Maybe we all have the same capacity for evil as we do for good. I don’t know. But I do know that my monster lives a little bit closer to the surface, and sometimes I can’t control it.” He forced a laugh. “If that doesn’t scare you off, then I don’t know what will.”

  “I’m not scared of you. Go on.”

  “When I looked into her eyes, I lost control. I ran through that house, and then I ran to that back door, and I … unlocked it.”

  His eyes grew large as his mind fixed upon the one important factor that he had missed. When he had used his memory trick earlier, he had focused on the body and the bedroom. He had yet to think of the rest of the house.

  I had to unlock the deadbolt on the back door, and it could only have been locked from the inside or with a key. The killer was gone, and unless he cleaned the blood from his feet and came back in for some reason … Someone else was in that house before me … someone other than the killer.

  “I’m going to have to let you go.”

  “Wait. What’s going on? What did—”

  He hung up the phone and ran to grab the Sheriff’s business card.

  A flood of urgency washed over him. He knew that the first forty-eight hours were the most important in any investigation. He wanted to look at the whole scene with this new information in mind. Maybe there was something else that he had missed, something that could only be seen once you knew that someone else had been in the house?

  He spun each digit on the rotary phone, and his annoyance grew with every rotation of the antique device. After a few rings, the Sheriff said, “Hello?”

  “This is Marcus, Sheriff. Where are you now?”

  “I just left the crime scene. Packed everything up for the night. Why? What’s happened?”

  “I need you to meet me back there, as soon as possible.”

  “Wait a minute, I—”

  “You told me to call if I thought of anything. Well, I thought of something. And it can’t wait.”

  9

  Marcus waited in the driveway of Maureen Hill’s beautiful home. Earlier in the day, he had wished to never set foot inside the grandmother’s house again. It was a dark place that he wished he could forget.

  Now, however, he needed to get back inside. The urgency to discover the truth overwhelmed him, a feeling that had once been a daily part of his life. He felt like a cop again.

  In the distance, he saw headlights approaching. The car pulled into the driveway, and the Sheriff stepped out of the vehicle onto the dusty ground. “What was important enough to drag me away from my supper?”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what happened here. When I got home today, I kept replaying everything in my mind, searching for something I had missed, something that I overlooked. Finally, it hit me.”

  “What hit you?”

  “Let me show you.”

  He led the Sheriff through the house to the kitchen.

  “When I saw her upstairs, her body desecrated like that, I was so angry that I ran through the house like a madman. That’s why, when I went to the back door, I didn’t notice that it was locked from the inside. Which could mean that—”

  “Someone else was in the house before you and locked the door behind them,” the Sheriff said. The older man’s face took on a dark, somber expression. “Or it could mean absolutely nothing.”

  The Sheriff turned to Marcus and voiced his concerns. “Say that it does mean what you think it means. Who, other than the killer, would have come in this house and not immediately reported the murder? Accomplice of some kind? And whoever it was must have taken great care not to step in any of the blood that the killer left behind. We didn’t find any other sets of footprints, other than the killer’s and yours. Any ideas?”

  Marcus shook his head. “I was hoping that maybe this new information might shed light on some other clue. Lead us in the right direction. I don’t know, I just …” He looked out the back window and noticed something strange. He walked to the back door, unlocked it, and stepped outside. The Sheriff followed.

  The skyline had morphed into a glistening spectrum of reds and purples as the last fingers of the sun spread out across the darkening sky and began to lose their grip on the world. It was a sight of deep and majestic beauty. Under any other circumstance, he would have stood in awe of its magnificence. Now, however, something else had caught his eye.

  A light shone in the window of one of the farm buildings behind the house.

  “We checked all of the buildings and found nothing. None of them had any lights on,” the Sheriff said.

  “You know that old cliché about the killer returning to the scene of the crime? This time, that may hold true.”

  “You may be right.” The Sheriff pulled up his right pant leg to reveal a holster containing a backup weapon. The elder cop pulled back the slide, checked the gun, and then handed it to Marcus. “I suppose you know how to use one of these?”

  The compact nine-millimeter resembled
a backup weapon that he had carried himself in another life. It had been a long time since he had held a gun. He hated guns, even though he had always been talented in their use. He loathed the fact that his only real skills seemed to be the ability to cause damage and inflict pain.

  Why couldn’t I have been born a painter?

  *

  Aware of their presence, a dark figure moved like a shadow among the buildings behind Maureen Hill’s home. He moved in the direction opposite the house. He floated unseen among the out-buildings. Then, he doubled back and swung around the far corner of the property. He circled behind Marcus and the Sheriff, preparing to spring the trap.

  *

  Marcus and the Sheriff crept up to the building, trying to stay out of sight. The small tool shed had doors on both ends, and the Sheriff motioned for Marcus to enter the east door.

  Well, at least I’m getting a chance to bond with Maggie’s dad.

  Marcus moved to the door and mentally prepared himself. His heart raced with adrenaline-inducing anticipation. He could feel that on the other side of the door lurked a wolf in the hen house. It fell on him to play the part of the good shepherd and drive the wolf back into the darkness from whence it came.

  Steeling himself, he entered the small shed. He scanned the room, paying special attention to the corners, but found no one on first glance.

  The shed contained all manner of tools and equipment. Woodworking implements and devices that he guessed would be used in the butchering of animals littered the shelves. The shed was larger than the impression given by its exterior. The inside consisted of one open room lined with several rows of tall shelves.

  He had expected the shed to provide little cover to someone trying to avoid detection, but he had been mistaken. It offered several places to hide.

  With cautious movements, he checked every row of the shelving.

  A cold and foreboding silence filled the space. The only audible sound that he registered was a slight rustling of dirt that he reasoned to be the footfalls of the Sheriff. The smell of oil and dirt clung to everything.

  A main workbench surrounded by open space stood in the middle of the room. He glanced around the corner of a shelf and could see a few other tables and tools littering the open space.

  Weapon at the ready, he stepped around the corner, and his heart jumped as he realized that he had been right. The killer had returned to the scene of the crime.

  A man with cold, gray eyes sat next to one of the tables. They were eyes that had stared down upon countless victims. They were the dead eyes of a predator that killed without remorse or mercy and held no capacity for either emotion.

  Marcus knew that no good would come of this. Good things never came from days when the devil climbed up to play.

  PART TWO:

  THE WOLF AND THE SHEPHERD

  10

  In a shed behind the home of a murdered woman, Marcus Williams stared into the eyes of a madman. He stood frozen, entranced by the killer’s hypnotic gaze. It took a moment for him to look beyond the eyes and notice the rest of the man.

  Handcuffs and ankle chains bound Ackerman’s hands and legs to the chair. An old cloth with duct tape placed over it covered his mouth and ensured that the killer would issue no screams for help. Dried blood encrusted his face. The term Southern Justice was the first thing that came to mind, and after seeing the psychopath’s handiwork, Marcus couldn’t pose much of an argument against the concept.

  The man in the chair deserved whatever he had coming to him. But then again, where was the line drawn? When does a person cross the boundary between punishing a murderer and becoming one? What’s the real difference between justice and vengeance? It wasn’t his job to ask those questions anymore. That was the Sheriff’s concern now.

  He expected the Sheriff to join him in his astonishment, but as the older man came around the corner, he seemed no more surprised to see the bound man than he would be surprised to see stars in the heavens.

  The Sheriff stood with his gun dangling in his left hand. His posture wasn’t indicative of a man entering a room containing even a murder suspect, let alone a serial killer. Unless, the Sheriff already knew what to expect …

  This is going to be a really long day.

  He turned the aim of his weapon away from the killer and toward the Sheriff. “It looks like you’ve caught a big one this time. Are you going to keep him or throw him back?”

  “I think he’s a keeper,” the Sheriff said, his gun still pointed at the floor. The Sheriff seemed almost as worried about the gun pointed at him as he would be about rain on a Sunday afternoon.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on here?”

  Their eyes met. In that moment, he realized from whom he had received the gun. He chastised himself for not checking the ammo. Now that he thought about it, the gun did seem light. He should have known that it wasn’t loaded. I’m getting rusty—no doubt about it.

  Since the Sheriff was still going along with the charade, he figured that he might as well keep up the act as well. He continued to point the nine-millimeter paperweight at its target.

  “I bet you were a good cop, Marcus,” the Sheriff said. “I think being a law-enforcement officer is one of the hardest jobs in the world. People count on you to make the world safe. And the fact of the matter is that sometimes the world is a dark place filled with evil. There are monsters under the bed. There are wolves out in the darkness, waiting for one of us to stray from the herd. And to whom do we turn to keep the darkness at bay? We look to the police, a group of regular men and women who have taken a supreme oath to protect and serve.”

  The Sheriff walked forward as he spoke. “We’re not like knights in shining armor. We can’t just ride out and slay the beasts of this world. But sometimes, we’re expected to rise to that challenge anyway. We operate within a system where an innocent man can be put to death, and a man who’s without a doubt a cold-blooded murderer can go free on a technicality. Where are the people who will stand up for what’s right, even when it’s not popular; the ones who sacrifice themselves for the good of others? You know, I don’t think of myself as an enforcer of the law. I think a cop is more like a shepherd, protecting the flock. We keep the wolves away.”

  “Is that what you’re doing here? You keeping the wolves away?”

  “I don’t expect you to understand. But in a sense, that’s precisely what I’m doing. I’ve caught up to a lot of people who thought they could run from justice. But contrary to popular belief, true justice isn’t blind. She’ll find you, no matter where you go. No juries, no trials. We skipped all the formalities and went straight to the punishment.”

  “That’s not your decision to—”

  The Sheriff moved closer and interrupted. “I found a car that he had stolen and abandoned. Knew he was on foot, so I set the dogs on him and tracked him here. If only I would have gotten here sooner … Well, anyway, thoughts like that’ll drive you crazy. I followed the trail out here and caught this psychopath sharpening one of the knives he had used on Maureen. Apparently, he wanted to make sure it was nice and sharp for the next kind grandmother he planned to mutilate. So I caught him, chained him up, and beat him unconscious. Then, when I went back into the house, I must have locked the back door behind me. Force of habit, I guess.”

  While the Sheriff spoke, Marcus considered the older man’s words. In many ways, he agreed with what the Sheriff was doing, but he also knew that the more you kill, the easier it becomes. The more you rationalize your actions, the more excuses you tell yourself. The farther you go down that path, the more the lines between good and evil begin to blur until you don’t know which side you’re standing on anymore.

  He didn’t know what to think about the moral ramifications of what the Sheriff was doing, but it didn’t really matter. Whether he agreed with him or not, he did know one thing for sure. The Sheriff had no intentions of letting him leave there alive.

  “Don’t come any closer,” he said.

&
nbsp; The Sheriff ignored him. “My plan was to cover up Maureen’s death and somehow make it look like an accident. And then … I had some bigger plans for our friend, Ackerman. Your theory from earlier was accurate.”

  “What theory?”

  “The one about it being the perfect time to kill someone. Like you said, we’ve got the perfect scapegoat right here. Completely believable. And, you see, I have someone that I need to kill.” The Sheriff sighed and shook his head. “But damn it, kid, you stumbled into this mess and changed those plans. I guess I didn’t act soon enough. I’m telling you this because I just want to say that I’m sorry, son, but sometimes the wolves aren’t the only danger to the flock. Sometimes, one of the flock becomes sick and is a danger to the whole group. For the greater good, you have to sacrifice the one for the many. Sometimes, people need to be protected from themselves, and I’m truly sorry for that.”

  *

  “How about I develop a case of amnesia, let you get on with your business, and go along my way like nothing happened?” Marcus said, having no intentions of doing so and no expectations that the Sheriff would agree.

  “You think I’m completely crazy, don’t you?”

  “No, actually, I think you’re in perfect mental health, and I’d be willing to testify to that at your trial.”

  The Sheriff laughed. “I wish we would have met under different circumstances, but you can’t change the hand that you’ve been dealt. You know in your heart that what I’m doing is right. Take this animal we have here.” He gestured toward Ackerman. “He’s probably sitting there thinking of all the different ways he could make us suffer. I feel for the little boy in that video, but that little boy is dead. I can’t let another person suffer at his hands. I won’t allow it. These aren’t men we’re dealing with here. They’re monsters, and they don’t deserve to live.”