Father of Fear (22 page)

Heather Womack exited the elevator into the parking garage with a spring in her step, despite the damn high heels that were putting blisters on her feet. She hated the stupid things, but if she got this promotion, she supposed she’d have to buy a better pair because she’d be presenting to a lot more of the firm’s power clients. She had just left a meeting with the primaries from a company in Tokyo that had approached the architectural firm she worked for about designing a series of new department stores here in the US. If they got the contract, it would mean millions for the firm, and she had been given the job of presenting the designs. It was her chance to prove herself, and she had come through in a big way. The clients had been extremely impressed, and while it wasn’t yet time to pop open the champagne, it was a giant leap in the right direction. Before long, she could be earning more money and have a new title.

She pulled out her cell phone to tell her husband the good news, but she forgot that she never got any signal in the parking garage. The structure had been packed early in the day, but now it was only dotted with a few vehicles. In her excitement, she hadn’t even realized how late it was and that the garage would be nearly deserted.

Ever since her cousin had told her a story about a coworker being raped while walking to her car after work, Heather had been frightened at the prospect of traversing the garage alone at night.

She heard a noise behind her but willed herself not to look. It was just her imagination.

But there it was again.

No, she told herself. It was a stupid cat or her own footsteps echoing off the concrete.

But what if it wasn’t? Had that rape victim heard something and told herself the same thing?

Making up her mind, Heather reached casually into her purse as if she were just retrieving her keys. But then she abruptly whirled around with a can of pepper-spray held in her outstretched hand like a talisman.

There was no one there. No attacker. Not even a cat.

She kept watch for a moment and then, shaking her head at her own silliness, headed toward her car.

Her cream-colored Toyota Corolla was only a few years old, but she had made up her mind that if she got this job then she would trade it in for something sportier, something with a little flash, something to tell the world that she’d made it. She smiled at the thought as she retrieved her keys from her purse and pushed the button to unlock the car.

Her fingers wrapped around the handle of the door, and she was about to pull it open when a terrible pain shot up from the heel of her foot into her leg.

Her leg could no longer hold any weight, and she started to fall. She caught herself on the door but was unable to stay upright. She looked down, and her heart froze in her chest as she saw a man’s hand holding a bloody scalpel slide back under the car.

It only took a split second for her brain to process what had happened. Someone had been hiding under the car and had slit her Achilles tendon when she’d gone to open the door.

Heather tried to cry out but couldn’t find her voice. She landed flat on the pavement, the air expelling from her lungs and making it impossible to scream.

The next few seconds were a blur of flailing limbs and overwhelming fear as she saw the dark figure beneath the vehicle and watched helplessly as powerful hands lunged forward, grabbed hold of her throat, and covered her mouth.

Maggie almost missed the turnoff to the plantation house. It was a dirt lane overgrown with weeds and was barely visible from the main road. They followed the lane through the trees for a couple of miles, working their way deep into the bayou. Bald cypress, tupelo, and water elm trees flanked the one-lane path. A couple of spots were submerged under pools of water, and she wasn’t convinced that their commandeered vehicle—a Chevy Malibu—would be able to plow through. Eventually, they made it up a rise and spotted the end of the line and their destination: an old raised Creole-style plantation house with an exposed basement and a main floor supported by brick pillars. Even in the waning light of dusk, she could see that it was good-sized, but definitely nothing luxurious. It was old and the white paint was peeling, but it looked like it had been kept up moderately well and was structurally sound if not aesthetically pleasing. A small yard surrounded the house but quickly gave way to wild vegetation and melded with the swamp. She could see a river or lake or some large body of water that butted up against the rear of the property. A closed-in boathouse hung over the water’s edge.

Maggie stopped the car thirty yards from the main house and shut off the engine. She glanced over at Ackerman. He had a strange expression on his face. She said, “Any idea what to expect?”

“I only met my grandfather once when I was a boy. I know he and my father had a very strained relationship, but that’s about all I know. I’ve never given him much thought over the years, but now that I know he’s alive and we’re here, I feel strangely…”

“Nervous? Excited?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Are you okay? I’ve never seen you like this.”

“Of course.” Ackerman seemed to shake off the momentary weakness and added, “He may not be very happy to see us. And he’s not likely to want to cooperate with us finding my father—otherwise he would have helped law enforcement track him down years ago.”

“You think we may have to dangle him over a pit filled with hungry alligators to get him to talk?”

Maggie was, of course, being sarcastic, but Ackerman didn’t seem to grasp that. He just shook his head and replied, “We don’t have time to dig a pit or lure in a bunch of alligators. Besides, I don’t like working with animals. They’re too unpredictable.”

She raised her eyebrows and opened her door, saying, “Well, let’s do this.” Within ten seconds of leaving the car, she’d killed her first mosquito.

They ascended the front steps, and their noses were assaulted by the smell of dead fish. A trio of large catfish hung from the porch like macabre wind chimes. The tails had been sliced off, allowing the blood to drip down into buckets sitting beneath the hanging bodies.

Maggie knocked on the front door, but instead of someone answering from inside the house, the sound of a shotgun shell being jacked into a chamber answered from the front yard. An old man with snow-white hair and a bushy beard wearing a pair of bib overalls emerged from the shadows with a pump-action shotgun trained on them. “Get off my property,” the old man said.

Ackerman turned around and moved halfway down the wooden steps. He said, “Hello, Grandfather. It’s been a long time.”

Louis Ackerman’s eyes went wide, and the color drained from his face. He whispered, “You.” Then he raised the shotgun to his shoulder and said, “I should kill you where you stand. Do the world a favor.”

Ackerman moved slowly to the bottom of the steps and said, “Do it, then. Pull the trigger. But I guess you always knew what my father was, and you never had the balls to put a bullet in
his
brain when you had the chance.”

Tears formed in the old man’s eyes, but before he could say another word, Ackerman lunged forward and closed the distance between them. He grabbed the barrel of the shotgun and jerked it upward. The gun discharged into the air, and Ackerman slammed an elbow into the old man’s temple, knocking him out cold. The killer bent down and checked his grandfather’s pulse.

“Is he okay?” Maggie asked as she joined Ackerman in the yard.

“He’s fine,” Ackerman said. Then he glanced back at her and smiled. “Don’t you just love family reunions?”

The inside of Louis Ackerman’s house was beautiful but dated and crumbling. The high ceilings had exposed beams, and the crown molding was elegant but decaying in spots. Scuffs and gouges from years of wear and abuse marred the hardwood floors. The whole house smelled of musty decay. They sat the unconscious old man at a French walnut table resting in what Maggie guessed to be the dining room, although the tabletop was covered with various types of tools apparently used in mask-making. A few unfinished examples and some raw materials rested beside the tools.

“Should we tie him up?” Maggie asked.

Ackerman was staring at some black and white photographs hanging on one wall. Without looking away from the pictures, he said, “He’s an old man. I think we can handle him. Besides, I probably took the last bit of fight out of him.”

“So what now?”

Ackerman walked over and picked up a small coffee cup sitting on the table. He sniffed the liquid inside and said, “We wake him up” as he tossed the contents of the cup into the old man’s face. The liquid collected in his beard and dribbled down onto his shirt. He shook himself awake, and his eyes opened. He glanced around, orienting himself, and then his gaze shifted between Maggie and Ackerman and back again.

Maggie spoke first, figuring that there was no point in beating around the bush after the reception they’d been given. “We need to find your son.”

Louis said, “I can’t help you.” His voice was soft and tinged with a slight accent that she couldn’t place.

“I’m a federal agent, Mr. Ackerman. I work with your grandson.” Louis looked at Ackerman, but Maggie added, “Not him. Your other grandson, Marcus. He’s a good man. He helps people. But your son resurfaced and took Marcus. That was over six months ago. We…I need your help.”

“I’m sorry about your friend Marcus, but I don’t know where my son is.”

Ackerman slammed his fist down on the table and screamed at the old man, “You’re lying!”

Maggie said, “Ackerman, calm down. I’ll handle this.”

But Ackerman didn’t listen. He grabbed the old man by the shoulders and said, “Tell me. Tell me why he did it.”

Louis said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

Ackerman moved to a window and pulled back the curtain. He leaned a hand on the window frame and said, “I want you to tell me why. I know why I am who I am. I may not be able to justify it or easily quantify and categorize it, but I can trace back the roots of my psychosis and learn from it. But in the end, it all stems from him. He put the darkness in me, but how did it get into him in the first place? I need to understand why my father hated…why he did those things to me. Not just his psychobabble and his talk of research and understanding the minds of psychopaths. I want to know why he’s broken, and why he insisted on breaking me.”

Louis leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. His bearded face clenched up but small sobs escaped. Through the tears, he said, “I’ve asked myself that for years. Asked myself if I had done something differently could I have helped him, or at least stopped him. I really don’t think it was one thing. No simple explanation or singular event, but a thousand little things. Death by a thousand cuts. I suppose you deserve the whole story.”

The old man stood up and walked over to the wall of photos. He grabbed one off the wall and handed it to Maggie. “That’s Marcus’s grandmother. I guess it started with the day she died.”

Louis dropped back into his chair and continued, “I was drunk that day. I was drunk most days back then. The three of us were in my old pickup truck, and I think something was in the road, although, to be honest, I can’t even be sure if there was anything there or not. I might just have been too drunk to keep the damn thing between the ditches. Truck swerved and flipped. Landed on top of a guard rail. Thing rammed right through the passenger side of the truck. The crash knocked me unconscious and killed my wife on impact. Lord only knows how long I was out, but I do know that whole time my son was awake and staring into his mother’s lifeless eyes. He was only four years old.”

Maggie looked over at Ackerman. He slid down to the floor and stared off into space as his grandfather told his story. She thought that she saw moisture forming in his eyes.

“After that day,” Louis said, “he didn’t speak for nearly a month, and I could barely get him to eat or do anything. He screamed all the time. He would just sit there and shake and cry. I had one of those head doctors look at him, and they called it panphobia, the fear of everything. It was as if he thought that everyone and everything in the world was out to get him.”

Maggie shook her head. “That’s awful. Were they able to help him?”

“We tried all sorts of things, and some of them helped a little. At least they got him to the point where he wasn’t screaming and crying all the time. But you could still see it in his eyes, the fear. That constant dread. It killed me seeing him like that, but we weren’t rich. My shop was doing well, but the doctors were expensive. I started reading up on the treatments, studying the books. I thought that maybe I could treat him myself. And maybe that’s where it all took a turn for the worse.”

Louis ran his fingers through his snow-white hair and then tapped his fist on the table. “I had read that the most effective treatments involved forcing the person to confront their fears. So I started exposing him to things. Little things at first. Basically just forcing him to do all the normal things he didn’t want to do. When that didn’t seem to help, my methods got more extreme.”

Maggie wasn’t sure that she wanted to know what that meant, but she asked anyway. “What do you mean by ‘extreme’?”

“All the details aren’t important, but to give you an idea, I once locked him in a cedar trunk filled with snakes.”

Maggie’s left hand involuntarily covered her mouth at the thought of such abuse.

“I’m not proud of what I did, and I’m not trying to justify it, but to be honest, some of those things seemed to help him. But the biggest change came when I took him hunting up north. We killed a whitetail deer, and he helped me field dress it. I taught him how. He was scared to death at first, but by the end, he seemed to enjoy it. At the time, I thought it was a good thing. Until I started finding all kinds of other dead animals around. He would dissect anything he could get his hands on.”

Maggie nodded her head in affirmation. The torture and murder of small animals was a major warning sign identifying those individuals with the potential to grow up to become murderers. Nearly all the great killers were proven to share that characteristic. Budding serial killers, it seemed, were the arch-nemeses of alley cats everywhere.

“I confronted him about it. He said that he was just curious. He wanted to understand how their insides worked. He became curious about lots of things, wanting to understand how they worked. Again, I thought these were all good things. If you can understand something, then maybe you’re not afraid of it anymore. It seemed to work. He improved enough by junior high that he could start attending regular school, and he did well. He was a smart boy. Maybe too smart. I heard a lot of reports that he was a bit of a bully. The teachers said he liked to play with people’s heads, turn kids against one another, see what they’d do. Kid stuff mostly. When he wanted to go to college to study psychology, I thought it was a natural next step.”

Louis looked over at Ackerman. “I don’t think he started killing people until your mother left him. I think that was when he finally snapped. But honestly, for all I know, that could have just been when he stopped hiding it. He could have graduated to dissecting people long before that.”

Maggie asked, “So at that point you knew what he was doing to his son and to others? But you didn’t do anything to stop him?”

“I didn’t know what to do. He was my son. My flesh and blood. And I always knew deep down—I still know—that whatever he had become was because of me. I understand that he probably had some spark of insanity inside of him from the moment he was born, but I was the one who fanned those flames.”

Maggie added, “And that’s why you’re still protecting him? Please help us to make this right. You know something. Please, help us find him. Marcus has a son. His name is Dylan. Your great-grandson. And your boy has taken him too.”

Louis looked up into her eyes and swallowed hard. “I don’t know where he is, but I may be able—”

Ackerman cut his grandfather short. “Quiet.”

Maggie wanted to slap him. The old man had been about to open up. But when she saw the look on Ackerman’s face, she knew that something was terribly wrong. “What is it?” she asked.

He got to his feet. “It’s too quiet outside. The bugs have stopped their chirping.”

“What does that mean?”

“We’ve got company.”

And then the whole world exploded.