THE DOOR OF MARCUS’S CELL CRACKED OPEN, AND HIS FATHER LAID A COMPUTER PRINTOUT ON THE FLOOR. With a smile, Ackerman Sr. said, “I just found that article on CNN.com. Our escapades are national news already. I’ll leave the light on so you can read it. Think you’ll find it intriguing. But just wait. That’s a taste of what’s to come. Merely a test of the binary explosive that I’ve acquired. The real show will be two days from now. My grand finale for the people of Kansas City. But don’t worry, the three of us—you, me, and Dylan—will carry on somewhere else. Three generations of the Ackerman clan, together at last. Your education has only just begun, my boy.”
The door clanged shut. Marcus heard the lock engage, but the lights stayed on. He dragged his pale, broken body over to the door and gathered up the two pieces of paper. The headline read, “Eight Die in Kansas City Courthouse Bombing.”
He crumpled up the papers and threw them across the cell. The tears came fast and hard. His body shook, and he banged his head against the stone floor. He couldn’t go on like this anymore. He wanted to stay strong and alive for Dylan, but his “education” was just giving his father an excuse to kill more and more innocent people. The death toll was rising, and Marcus could no longer bear so much blood on his hands. He was drowning in it. It was choking the light from his soul. A little piece of his humanity died with every one of his father’s victims.
And worse yet, what if his father succeeded? Marcus knew he was capable of the same evil that possessed his father and brother. What if Ackerman Sr. was able to unleash that darkness in him? He couldn’t let that happen.
Marcus looked down at his wrists. They were pale and thin, and he could see the veins through his ashen skin. His mind made up, he brought his forearm to his mouth and bit into his own flesh.
*
Thomas White, the man formerly known as Francis Ackerman Sr., walked back toward his workshop and admired his masks that covered one whole wall. His skill was growing. Although he might never reach the level of ability that his father possessed, he definitely felt that he had captured the pain and torment of his subjects.
He grabbed one of the masks from its perch and admired it. The three-dimensional expression of death and agony was so vivid and alive, much better than any picture or video. The masks truly took him back to the moments of his victims’ deaths and allowed him to relive their exquisite suffering over and over again. Reconnecting with his father and perfecting the craft was one of the best decisions he had made.
His cell phone rang, and he recognized it as the number of the music store. He had instructed the teenager he had hired to man the store not to disturb him unless absolutely necessary, and so he knew it must be important. Duty called.
“Yes?” he answered.
“Sorry to bother you, boss, but there’s a couple up here who said they’re thinking about purchasing a new sound system and a grand piano for their church. They wanted to speak to an expert, so I figured you would want to handle it.”
Thomas thought about that. It was very fortuitous timing. He could definitely use some extra cash for his coming relocation. “I’ll be up in just a moment.”
*
The kid manning the music store said, “The boss will be right up.”
Ackerman nodded and ran his fingers over the strings of an expensive Martin guitar with intricate gold inlay. He had never learned how to play an instrument himself. He enjoyed music, but the thought of playing had never interested him. Still, he remembered lying on the floor of his cell as a boy and listening to the melancholy notes of his father’s guitar on the other side of his door. He had always wondered how such beautiful and flawless music could come from a man with such an ugly and broken soul.
Ackerman heard movement from a back room and directed his gaze toward the wall behind the counter. A honey-colored door creaked on its hinges, and an older man stepped through. He wore a sweater over a white dress shirt and gray slacks. He looked like a professor. His eyes were bright with intelligence and madness. Ackerman felt his knees tremble upon seeing his father alive after so many years. The man who had tortured and molded him into a monster. The man who had stolen his childhood, his innocence, and any hope he had ever had of a normal life. And here he was, in the flesh.
His nose was different. The chin. The cheekbones. But not the eyes. He couldn’t change the eyes. And those were the eyes that Ackerman had seen in his nightmares for as long as he could remember.
His father froze, recognition and understanding passing over his features like a creeping shadow, the mask he wore to the world fading away, the facade peeling back to reveal the killer beneath.
“Everything okay, Mr. White?” the kid behind the counter asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
From the corner of his eye, Ackerman saw Maggie go for her gun.
The man the teenager knew as Mr. White acted quickly and decisively before Maggie could bring her pistol to bear. If he had hesitated for just a fraction of a second, Maggie would have had him dead to rights, but Mr. White moved with a speed and assurance that surprised even Ackerman.
He spun the teenager around, using him as a shield and a distraction.
Ackerman ran forward, but it all happened so fast. There was nothing he could do.
Maggie fired. The bullets struck the honey-colored door as Mr. White shoved the teenager forward and slipped through to the other room, pushing the door shut behind him.
The kid fell onto Ackerman, but he shoved the teenager away and rushed through the door. The room beyond was a small storage room. Another door stood in the back left corner of the room. He tried the handle and found it locked.
But it was only a standard door. He braced his back against the rear wall and kicked the doorknob at an angle. It broke free as the housing snapped. Maggie joined him with her pistol at the ready. She nodded at the door, and Ackerman pulled it open as she aimed the gun into the darkness beyond.
There was a stairwell going down. They descended the set of old concrete steps into the bowels of the structure. At the bottom of the steps was another door. This one, however, was made of metal and looked as though it would take an explosion to open it. They tried the handle but found it locked as well.
Ackerman rammed his shoulder into it, trying to test the strength of the frame. People often placed a heavy security door into a frame that was one step above cardboard. That wasn’t the case this time. He didn’t feel it give in the slightest.
He slammed the side of his fist against it and screamed, “Dammit! It would take a tank to get through this thing.”
“Could we pick it?”
“He probably has it braced from the other side. We’d have to drill the hinges to get through, and we definitely don’t have time for that. He wouldn’t have trapped himself in there. He has another way out.”
Maggie said, “Then there must be another way in. Come on.”
He followed her up the stairs and back into the main part of the store. The teenager was still there, lying on the floor and rubbing his ankle. Ackerman supposed the young man must have twisted it and had fallen when he’d shoved him away.
Maggie went to the boy and asked, “Is there another way into the basement?”
The kid seemed in shock from the whole situation, but he stammered, “I don’t know. I’m never supposed to go down there. It’s off limits.”
“Think,” Maggie said. “Is there an outside door? Another way in? Maybe some kind of cellar door in the back?”
The kid said, “I think Mr. White owns the building next door. He uses it as a warehouse. The basement there might be connected with this one. A lot of the old buildings here have these weird tunnels beneath them that connect. But most of the businesses have them sealed off from one another.”
“Call 911 and tell the cops to get here asap. Tell them it’s about the Coercion Killer.”
The teenager’s eyes registered his shock, but he nodded and started to stand.
Maggie ran out the front door at a sprint and halted in front of the neighboring building. It had a large display window that had been blacked out so that passersby couldn’t see in. Ackerman watched as Maggie raised her gun and fired into the glass. The window cracked and shattered, revealing an old storefront now stacked with boxes and junk.
Ackerman was the first to leap through the window. The layout of the building’s interior was similar to its neighbor, probably built at the same time by the same people. Seeing this, he concluded that the door to the basement would be in the same spot.
Racing to the back room, his suspicions were confirmed, and the pair bounded down the stairs.
The door at the bottom was unlocked, and they stepped into the darkness beyond.