Before he Kills (A Mackenzie White Mystery—Book 1) (11 page)

“I know,” he said. “I never wear it when
I’m working. I hate the way it feels when I have to go for my gun.”

“Oh my God,” Mackenzie said. “I’m—”

“No, it’s okay,” he said. “And believe
me, I’m beyond flattered. I meant everything I said in there. And while I’m
sure the primal male in me will mentally kick my ass for this for the rest of
my life, I love my wife and my daughter very much. I think I—”

“Can you just take me to my car?” Mackenzie
asked, embarrassed. She looked out of the window and felt like screaming.

“I’m sorry,” Ellington said.

“Don’t be. It’s my fault. I should have
known better.”

He started the car and pulled out of the
lot. “Better than what?” he asked as they headed back for the station.

“Nothing,” she said, still refusing to
look at him.

But in the silence that hung heavy on
the way to the station, she thought:
I should have known better than to
believe in something too good to be true.

As they drove home in the silence, she
wanted to curl up in a ball and die, hating herself, wondering if she had just
blown the best opportunity to come along in her life in a long, long time.

Mackenzie woke at 6:45 the following
morning to the sound of an incoming text. She was already awake, dressed in her
underwear. She checked the message and her heart dropped to see it was from
Ellington.

Heading home.
I’ll call you later today to check in.

She thought about calling him right then
and there. She was well aware that she’d acted like an immature jilted teenager
yesterday. Hell, she hadn’t really even been rejected. Ellington had simply
stayed true to his character, adding
faithful husband
to his long list
of admirable characteristics.

In the end, she let it go. She still
felt embarrassed but more than that, she felt defeated. And that was not
something she felt very often. The killer was still out there and they were no
closer to catching him than they had been three days ago. She’d lost her
live-in boyfriend of three years and then found herself infatuated with an FBI
agent less than twenty-four hours later. To make matters worse, she’d seen a
promise of what her future could be when she was with Ellington; she had seen
what her job could be like with someone that respected her and, in a way, was
in awe of her. And now that was gone.

She had only Porter and Nelson to look
forward to, surrounding her with doubt in the midst of a case that was getting
under her skin.

As she slid a shirt on, she sat on the
corner of her bed and looked at her cell phone. Suddenly, it was not Ellington
that she wanted to call. She was thinking of someone else—someone else who
shared the same traumas and sense of failure that she knew so well.

With a sudden pit in her stomach, Mackenzie
picked her cell phone up from the dresser and scrolled through her contacts.
When she reached the name Steph, she pressed CALL and then nearly ended it
right away.

By the time the phone started ringing,
she already regretted making the call. It rang twice on the other end before it
was answered. The voice of her sister on the other end was familiar, but one
she didn’t hear nearly enough.

“Mackenzie,” Stephanie said. “It’s
early.”

“You never sleep past five,” Mackenzie
pointed out.

“That’s true. But I was just making a
point. It’s early.”

“Sorry,” she said. It was a word she
used a lot when she spoke to Steph. Not because she actually meant it, but
Steph had a way of heaping on the guilt in an effortless way about the smallest
of things.

“What did Zack do this time?” Steph
asked.

“It’s not Zack,” Mackenzie said. “Zack
is gone.”

“Good,” Steph said, matter-of-factly.
“He was a waste of space.”

There was silence on the line for a
moment. It was clear that Steph could have gone the rest of her life without
speaking to her sister ever again. It was a fact she had made clear multiple
times. They did not hate each other—not by a long shot—but interacting with one
another brought up the past. And the past was something that Steph had spent
most of her thirty-three years of life running hard from.

As always, Steph sounded half-asleep
when she spoke on the phone.

“No sense in getting into details. Bills
barely paid. Alcoholic boyfriend with a reputation for throwing right hooks at
me. Constant migraines. Which would you like to hear about?”

Mackenzie took a deep breath.

“Well, how about starting with the
boyfriend that’s beating you?” Mackenzie said. “Why don’t you report him for
abuse?”

Steph said only laughed. “Too much
trouble. No thanks.”

Mackenzie bit back a stream of responses
to the other things. Among them were:
How about you go back to college,
finish working toward your degree, and get out of that dead-end job?
But
right now was not the time for such advice. Now, over the phone, things would
stay at the surface. They had both learned long ago that it was better that
way.

“So spill it,” Steph said. “You only
ever call when things are going to shit for you. Is it just Zack leaving?
Because if it is, let me tell you—that’s the best thing that could have
happened to you.”

“That’s part of it,” Mackenzie said.
“But there’s also this case that is getting under my skin in a way that I’ve
never experienced. It’s making me feel, I don’t know,
inadequate.
Throw
in the fact that I invited a married man into bed yesterday and—”

“Did you get lucky?” Steph interrupted.

“God, Steph. That’s all you took away
from that?”

“It was the only interesting thing I
heard. Who was it?”

“An FBI agent that was sent down to help
with the case.”

“Oh,” Steph said, apparently done with
the conversation. Silence fell across the line for about five seconds before
she repeated the question: “Well, did he?”

“No.”

“Ouch,” Steph said.

“Do you not feel like talking?” Mackenzie
asked.

“Rarely. I mean, we’re strangers, Mackenzie.
What do you want from me?”

Mackenzie sighed, overcome with sadness.

“I want my sister,” Mackenzie said,
surprising even herself. “I want a sister that I can call and that will call me
from time to time to tell me about the creep at work that has grab-hands.”

Steph sighed. It was a sound that seemed
to travel the eight hundred miles that separated them and reach out through the
phone to slap her in the face.

“That’s not me,” Steph said. “You know
that every time we talk, Dad will come up. And it all goes downhill from there.
Even worse, we start talking about Mom.”

The word
mom
sent another slap
through the phone line. “How is she?” Mackenzie asked.

“The same as always. I talked to her
last month. She asked me for some money.”

“Did you lend it to her?”

“Mackenzie, I don’t have the money
to
lend her.”

Another silence filled the phone. Mackenzie
had offered to lend Steph money on several occasions but each attempt had been
met with scorn, anger, and resentment. So after a while, Mackenzie had simply
stopped trying.

“Is that all?” Steph asked.

“One more thing, if you don’t mind,” Mackenzie
said.

“What is it?”

“When you spoke to Mom, did she mention
me even once?”

Steph was quiet for a while and then
finally answered. When she did, her sleepy voice was back. “You really want to
do this to yourself?”

“Did she ask about me?” Mackenzie asked,
her voice louder now and more demanding.

“She did. She asked if I thought you
would lend her any money. I told her to ask you herself. That was it.”

Mackenzie felt overwhelmed with sadness.
That was all her mom had ever wanted of her.

She held the phone to her ear, feeling a
tear, unsure what to say.

“Look,” Steph said. “For real, I have to
go.”

The phone went dead.

Mackenzie tossed the phone on the bed
and stared at it for a moment. The conversation had lasted no more than five
minutes but it felt like a lifetime. Still, it had oddly gone much better than
their last few phone calls, which had ended with arguments over the family
dynamic in regards to who was to blame for their mother’s downfall after their
father’s death. Yet in a way, this call was worse.

She thought about the years that sat
like a rotting stretch between the night she found her father dead and the
night her mother had been taken to the psychiatric ward of the hospital for the
first time. Mackenzie had been seventeen when that had happened; Steph had been
in college, working toward a journalism degree. After that, things had gone
south for the three of them but Mackenzie was the only one who had managed to
endure it all, coming out as on top as possible given the dire circumstances.

She thought of her mother as she
finished getting dressed, wondering why the poor woman had chosen to hate her
through all of it. It was a question she kept tucked away in the furthest
corners of her mind, only bringing it out when she was at her lowest.

Doing everything she could to keep
herself from going there, she retrieved her phone, badge, and gun. She then
headed out for work, determined. But where did she go from here? What was her
next step?

For the first time since being promoted
to detective, she felt like she was at a dead end.

Dead end,
she thought,
the words starting to build an idea in her mind.

She thought about the dirt road the
second body had been found alongside. Hadn’t it come to a dead end in that
field?

And how about the abandoned house? The
gravel road that had led to it and the third victim had come to a dead end in a
small square of dirt in front the house.

“Dead end,” she said out loud as she
left her house.

And suddenly, she knew where she had to
go.

His living room was mostly dark,
illuminated only by the thin shafts of morning sun that managed to creep
through the blinds. He sat in an old ragged armchair and looked to the old
roll-top desk against the far corner of the room. The cover was rolled up,
revealing the items he had kept from each sacrifice.

There was a pocketbook with a wallet
inside. Within the wallet, there was a driver’s license belonging to Hailey
Lizbrook. There was also a skirt that had belonged to the woman he had hung up
in the field; a chunk of strawberry blonde hair with black dye at the tips from
the woman he had placed behind the abandoned house.

There was still room for reminders he
would bring back from the rest of his sacrifices—reminders of each woman he
took for the sake of the work the Lord had delegated for him. While he was
pleased with how things had gone so far, he knew that there was still work to
be done.

He sat in the armchair, staring at his
reminders—his
trophies—
and waited for the sun to finish rising. Only
when the morning was fully engaged was he to start working again.

Looking at the items on the roll-top
desk, he wondered (not for the first time) if he was a bad man. He didn’t think
so. Someone had to do this work. The hardest jobs were always left to those who
did not fear to do them.

But sometimes when he heard the women
scream and beg for their lives, he wondered if there was something wrong with
him.

When the shafts of lights on the floor
went from a translucent yellow to an almost too-bright white, he knew the time
had come.

He rose from his chair and walked into
the kitchen. From the kitchen, he exited the house through a screen door that
led into his backyard.

The yard was small and enclosed by an
old chain-link fence that looked both out of place and somehow camouflaged by
the neglect of the neighborhood. The grass was tall and overrun with weeds.
Bees buzzed and other nameless insects scurried as he approached, making his
way through the tall grass.

At the back of the yard, taking up the
entire back left corner, was an old shed. It was an eyesore on the already ugly
property. He went to it and pulled the door open on its old rusty hinges. It
creaked open, revealing the dank darkness inside. Before stepping in, he looked
around to the neighboring houses. No one was home. He knew their schedules
well.

Now, in the safe light of 9 AM, he stepped
into his shed and slid the door closed behind him. The barn was thick with the
smell of wood and dust. As he entered, a large rat scurried along the back wall
and made its exit through a slot in the boards. He paid the rodent no mind,
heading directly to the three long wooden poles that were stacked to the right
side of the shed. They were stacked in a miniature pyramid shape, one on top of
the other two. Ten days ago, there had been three others there. But those had
been put to good use to further his work.

And now, another must be prepared.

He walked to the poles and ran his hand
lovingly along the well-worn cedar surface of the one stacked on top. He went
to the back of the shed where a small work table was set up. There was an old
handsaw, its teeth jagged and rusty, a hammer, and a chisel. He took up the
hammer and the chisel and returned to the poles.

He thought of his father as he hefted
the hammer. His father had been a carpenter. On many occasions, his father
would tell him that the Good Lord Jesus had also been a carpenter. Thinking of
his father made him think of his mother. It made him remember why she’d left
them when he’d only been seven years old.

He thought of the man that lived up the
street and how he would come over when his father was not home. He recalled the
squeaking bedsprings and the filthy words that came from the bedroom among his
mother’s cries—cries that had sounded both happy and hurt all at the same time.

“Out secret,” his mother had said. “He’s
just a friend and your daddy doesn’t need to know anything about it, right?”

He’d agreed. Besides, his mother had
seemed happy. Which was why he’d been so confused when she left them.

He set his hands on the top pole and
closed his eyes. A fly on the wall might have thought that he was praying over
the pole or even communicating with it somehow.

When he was done, he opened his eyes and
put the hammer and chisel to use.

In the scant light that came in through
the cracks in the boards, he started to chisel.

First came N511, then J202.

Next would come a sacrifice.

And he would claim that tonight.