Before he Kills (A Mackenzie White Mystery—Book 1) (12 page)

Mackenzie found herself walking into a
small coffee shop with the barest flicker of hope. After she’d made the awkward
call to her sister, she’d placed another phone call to someone she hadn’t
spoken to in quite some time. The conversation had been brief and to the point,
concluding in agreeing to meet over coffee.

She looked up now and spotted the man
she had called right away. He was hard to miss; in a crowd of rushed people on
their way to work, mostly young and well-dressed, his white hair and flannel
shirt stood out drastically.

He was turned away from her, and she
approached him from behind and placed a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“James,” she said. “How are you?”

He turned and smiled widely at her as
she sat down in front of him.

“Mackenzie, I swear you just get
prettier and prettier,” he said.

“And you just get smoother and
smoother,” she said. “It’s good to see you, James.”

“Likewise,” he said.

James Woerner was pushing seventy but
looked closer to eighty. He was tall and skinny, something that had once
prompted the officers he once worked with to call him Crane, after Ichabod
Crane. It was a name that he’d adapted to himself after he retired from the
force and had spent eight years as a consultant for the local PD and, on two
occasions, for the state police.

“So what’s going on that might be so bad
as to have you reach out to an old fart like me?” he asked.

There was humor in the question but Mackenzie
felt herself shrinking away from him as she realized that James was the second
person in less than two hours to assume that she had called because she was in
a spot of trouble.

“I was wondering if you ever had a case
that got under your skin,” she said. “And I don’t mean something that just
bothers you. I’m talking about a case that affects you so badly that you get
paranoid when you’re at home and it feels like every failed lead is your
fault.”

“I assume you’re talking about the
poorly named Scarecrow Killer?” James asked.

“How…” she almost asked but then
realized she knew the answer, even as James answered it for her.

“I saw your picture in the paper,” he
said before sipping his coffee. “I was happy for you. You need a case like this
under your belt. I seem to remember telling you that you were destined to crack
cases like this several years ago.”

“You did,” she said.

“Yet you’re still hanging out in the
trenches with the local PD?”

“I am.”

“Is Nelson treating you okay?”

“As well as he can, given the crew he
has working for him. He’s all but put me at the front of this case. I’m hoping
it’s a way for him to let me prove myself so all of the macho bullshit from the
others can come to an end.”

“Still working with Porter?”

“I was, but he was reassigned when an
FBI agent showed up.”

“Working with the feds,” James said with
a smile. “I believe that was another prediction I made about you. But I digress.”

He smiled and leaned forward.

“Tell me about why this case is
affecting you so badly. And if you keep it at a surface level, I’ll take my
coffee and leave. I have a busy day of doing absolutely nothing ahead of me.”

She smiled.

“The glamorous retired lifestyle,” she
said.

“You’re damned right,” James said. “But
don’t try to sidestep.”

She knew better than to dance around a
direct request. She’d learned that when he had taken her under his wing five
years ago, teaching her the basics of profiling and how to get into the mind of
a criminal. The man was stubborn as hell and always got right to the
point—which, Mackenzie always thought, was why they had gotten along so well.

“I think it’s because it’s a man that
seems to be killing
only
women. More than that, he’s killing women that
use their bodies to make a living.”

“And that bothers you why?”

It stung her heart to say it, but she
got it out anyway.

“It makes me think of my sister. And
when I think of my sister, I think of my father. And when I go there, I feel
like a failure because I haven’t caught this guy yet.”

“Your sister was a stripper?” James
asked.

She nodded.

“For about six months. She hated it. But
the money was good enough to help her get on her feet after a rough patch. It
always made me sad to think of her doing that for a living. And while I don’t
see my sister on those wooden poles when I visit the sites, I know that the
chances are good that the women this guy is killing probably had lives very
similar to Steph.”

“Now, Mackenzie, you do know that always
going back to your father when things aren’t going your way on a case is
self-abuse, right? There’s no need to torment yourself over that.”

“I know. But I can’t help it.”

“Well, let’s look away from that for
now. I assume you called me for guidance of some sort, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the bad news is that everything I
have read in the news is dead-on to what I would say. You’re looking for a man
with an aversion to sex that has likely had issues with a wife, sister, or
mother in his life. I’d also add, though, that this guy doesn’t get out much.
His inclination to display his victims in such rural areas makes me think he’s
a small-town boy. He probably lives in a ramshackle part of town. If not
this
town, then certainly nowhere outside of a one-hundred-mile radius or so. But
that’s just a guess.”

“So we could narrow our search for
someone that has cedar poles at the ready in the seedier parts of town?”

“For a start. Now, tell me, are there
any details you have noticed about the scenes that might have taken the back
seat to the overarching horridness of the scenes themselves?”

“Just the numbers,” she said.

“Yes, I read about them, but only twice.
The media is too obsessed with the profession of the women to dwell on
something they don’t understand right away. Like those numbers. But remember:
never take a crime scene for granted. Every scene has a story to tell. Even if
that story is hidden in something that is seemingly trivial at first, there’s a
story. It’s your job to find it, read it, and figure out what it means.”

She pondered that. What, she wondered,
had she overlooked?

“There’s something else I need to ask
you,” she said. “I’m about to do something I’ve never done before and I don’t
want it to make my situation worse. It could potentially get deeper under my
skin.”

James eyed her for a moment and gave her
the same sly smile that had sometimes creeped her out when he had served as her
mentor. It meant he had figured something out without being told and he now
held that over her.

“You’re going back to the murder
scenes,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’re going to try to enter the mind
of the killer,” he said. “You’re going to try to see the scenes as a man with
some flaw inside of him—with a hatred of women and a deranged sort of fear
towards sex.”

“That’s the plan,” she said.

“And when are you doing this?”

“As soon as I leave here.”

James seemed to consider this for a
moment. He took another sip from his coffee and nodded his approval.

“I know you’re fully capable of it,” he
said. “But are you mentally
ready
?”

Mackenzie shrugged and said, “I have to
be.”

“That can be dangerous,” he warned. “If
you start seeing the scenes through the eyes of the killer, it can also distort
the way you’ve been trained to see those sorts of scenes. You need to be ready
for that—to draw the line between that sort of dark inspiration and your
ultimate need to find this guy and take him down.”

“I know,” Mackenzie said softly.

James drummed his fingers along the
sides of his cup. “Would you like for me to come with you?”

“I thought about asking you,” she said.
“But I think this is something I’m going to have to do by myself.”

“That’s probably the right decision,”
James said. “I must warn you, though: as you try to see things from a killer’s
point of view, never allow yourself to jump to conclusions. Try to start fresh.
Don’t close your mind off with assumptions like, this guy just hates women. Let
the scene talk to you before you project yourself towards the scene.”

Mackenzie grinned in spite of herself.
“That sounds pretty New Age,” she said. “Have you turned a new leaf?”

“No. The leaves stop turning after
retirement. Now, how much longer do you have before you set out on this little
quest?”

“Soon,” she said. “I’d like to visit the
first one by noon.”

“Good,” he said. “That means you have
some time. So, for the time being, push this Scarecrow Killer crap to the side.
Go order yourself a coffee and entertain an old man for a while. What do you
say?”

She gave him a look that she had tried
so hard to keep from him for the year or so he’d mentored her. It was the look
of a young girl looking to her father with a need to please and make him happy.
While she had never psychoanalyzed herself to uncover this truth, she had known
it right away, from the first week she’d spent two hours of two days with him.
James Woerner had been a father figure to her during that time in her life and
it was something for which she would be forever grateful.

So when he asked her to grab a cup of
coffee and keep him company, she happily obliged. The cornfield, the gravel
roads, and that old abandoned house had been sitting for ages, unmoving. They
could wait another hour or so.

Under James Woerner’s brief tutelage,
one of the things he had praised her for over and over again was her instinct.
She had a gut, he had said, that was better than reading palms or tea leaves
for an indication of what to do next. That’s why she wasted no time with the
cornfield where Hailey Lizbrook’s body had been discovered or the open field
where the second body had been strung up.

She went directly back to the abandoned
house where the latest victim had been displayed. During her first visit, she’d
felt as if the darkened windows had been a set of eyes, watching her every
move. She had known it deep in her heart then and there that the scene had more
to offer. But after everything that had happened with Ellis Pope, it had been
an inclination that she had not been able to investigate.

She parked her car in front of the place
and stared at the house through the windshield for a moment before getting out.
From the front, the house looked just as foreboding, like the model for every
haunted house that had ever been committed to page or film. She looked at the
house, trying to see it the same way a murderer would see it. Why choose this
location? Was it the house itself or the overwhelming sense of isolation that
had appealed to him?

This, in turn, made her wonder how long
the killer had scoped out the sites for where he would display his victims. The
coroner’s reports seemed to indicate that the bodies were brought to these
sites and killed—not killed beforehand and simply put up for viewing at the
display sites. Why? What was the point?

Mackenzie finally got out of the car.
Before walking toward the dilapidated porch, she walked around the side of the
house and to the place where the third victim had been strung up. The body and
the pole had been removed; the area was visibly unsettled, trampled by the foot
traffic of the handful of authorities that had visited the site. Mackenzie
stood where the pole had been, the hole still visible and the loose dirt
perfectly outlining it.

She hunkered down and placed her hand on
the hole. She looked to the surrounding forest and the back of the house,
trying to see what the killer had seen in the moment he had started to assault
the woman. A chill traced her spine as she closed her eyes and tried to
envision it.

The whip he was using had multiple
lashes at the end, potentially barbed, gauging from the wound patterns. Even
still, it had to be used with great force to open up the flesh the way it did.
He would probably stalk the victims first, walking circles around the pole,
enjoying their cries and their pleading. Then something happens. Something
clicks in his head or maybe the victim says something that triggers him. That’s
when he starts whipping them.

Here, at this location, he had attacked
with more fury than before; the lashes weren’t contained just to the back as
they had been before, but reached to the chest and stomach, a few even slicing
into her lower buttocks. At some point, the killer thinks his work is done and
stops. And then what? Does he make sure they are dead before he leaves the site
in a truck or a van? How long does he stay here with them?

If he’s killing for more than just
pleasure but out of some aversion to women and/or sex, then he probably hangs
out for a while, watching them bleed, watching the life slip out of their eyes.
As they die, maybe he is then brave enough to look at their bodies, to cup a
breast experimentally with a trembling hand. Does he feel safe or powerful,
disgusted or elated to see them bleed, to watch the cloak of death fall over
them, leaving their bare bodies on display?

Mackenzie opened her eyes and looked to
the hole that her hand still rested on. The reports showed that all three holes
had been dug crudely with a shovel, at a rapid pace rather than with much
cleaner and more accurate post-hole diggers. He’d been in a hurry to get things
started and then he’d placed the poles in each hole and packed the dirt back
in. Where had the women been then? Drugged? Unconscious?

Mackenzie stood up and walked back to
the front of the house. While she had no real reason to believe the killer had
been inside, the fact that he had selected the yard outside as one of his
trophy stands made the house guilty by association.

She stepped up onto the porch and it
creaked under her weight right away. In fact, the entire porch seemed to settle
around her weight. Somewhere out in the forest, a bird called out in response.

She made her way inside the house,
pushing past a mostly deteriorated wooden door that scuffed against the floor.
She was instantly assaulted by the smell of dust and mildew, the overall scent
of neglect.

Stepping into the house was like
stepping into a black-and-white movie. Once inside, that old gut instinct that
James had once held in such a high regard told her there was nothing abnormal
here, no huge
a-ha
sort of clue that would bring this case to a close.

Still, she couldn’t resist. She explored
the empty rooms and hallways. She observed the cracked walls and peeling
plaster, trying to imagine a family once living in this ruined space.
Eventually, she made her way to the back of the house where it looked like a
kitchen had once thrived. Old cracked linoleum clung to the floor in curling
sheets, revealing a rotten floor beneath. She looked across the kitchen and saw
the two windows that looked to the backyard—the same two windows that she’d
felt were staring at her on her first time out here.

She walked across the kitchen, sticking
beside the neglected counter along the far wall in order to avoid the
questionable floor. As she moved, she realized how utterly quiet it was in the
house. This was a place for ghosts and memories, not a desperate detective
reaching blindly for some sense of what a killer was going through. Regardless,
she made her way to the rear wall and looked out of the first window, sitting
to the left of an old battered kitchen sink.

The location of where the pole and the
third victim had been was visible from the window without obstruction. From
inside the house, it did not look nearly as intimidating. Mackenzie tried to
envision the order of things from her place at the window, as if looking at the
imagined scene through a TV. She saw the killer bringing the woman to the pole
that he had already placed there. She wondered if she was unconscious or
somehow inebriated, wobbling on her feet with his hands under her arms or at
her back.

That spurred a thought that no one had
bothered checking yet.
How does he get them to the pole? Are they knocked
out? Drugged? Does he simply overpower them? Maybe we should get the coroner to
check for any substance that causes lethargic behavior…

She stared at the scene for a bit
longer, starting to feel the seclusion of the forest along the backyard
pressing in on her. There was nothing out there, only trees, hidden animals,
and just the slightest stirring of wind.

She exited the kitchen and made her way
back out into what had once been a living room. An old scarred desk sat against
the wall. It was visibly warped along the top and many of the scattered papers
on it looked like leaves that had been cast to the ground and rained on for
years. Mackenzie made her way over to the desk and rummaged through the few
papers.

She saw invoices for pig feed and grain.
The oldest was dated June of 1977 and came from a farm supply in Chinook, Nebraska.
Notebook paper that had been aged so badly that its blue lines were missing
held someone’s faded handwriting. Mackenzie glanced over the writing and saw
what looked to be notes for a Sunday school lesson. She saw references to Noah
and the flood, David and Goliath, and Samson. Under the mess of paper were two
books: a devotional called
God’s Healing Word
and a Bible that looked so
old that she feared it would crumble into dust at her touch.

Still, she found that she was unable to
look away from the Bible. Seeing it brought to mind visions of the crucifixion
that she had learned about during the handful of times she had ventured into a
church with her mother at an early age. She thought of Christ on the cross and
what it had represented, and found herself reaching for the book.

She thought of the cross Christ had died
on and superimposed that sight with the sight of those three women on their
poles. They had ruled out religious motive but she couldn’t help but wonder.

She opened the Bible and flipped past
the front matter, heading directly for the table of contents. She knew very
little about the Bible, so half of the names of the books were not familiar to
her.

She scanned the table of contents
absentmindedly, about to put it down, when suddenly she spotted something and
her heart started beating faster. The names of the books. The numbers beside
them.

As she saw the abbreviations, it
reminded her of something else.

The pole.

The numbers.

N511

J202

With trembling hands, she started at the
top of the Contents page, placing her finger on
Genesis.
She then
scrolled down with her finger, looking for a book that began with “N.”

Within seconds, she stopped at the
listing for the book of Numbers.

She flipped through the dusty pages, the
smell of rot wafting into her face. She located Numbers and then scanned
through for Chapter 5. When she found that, she then ran her finger along the
page until she came to verse 11.

N511. Numbers, Chapter 5, verse 11.

She read, and with each word, her heart
beat faster. It felt as if the temperature of the house had dropped by about
twenty degrees.

And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying,
Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, If any man’s wife go
aside, and commit a trespass against him, and a man lie with her carnally, and
it be hid from the eyes of her husband, and be kept close, and she be defiled,
and there be no witness against her, neither she be taken with the manner; and
the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be
defiled: or if the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his
wife, and she be not defiled: Then shall the man bring his wife unto the
priest…

She read it several times, hands
shaking, feeling excited and sick at the same time. The passage filled her with
a sense of foreboding that made her stomach a little queasy.

She flipped back to the table of
contents. She saw that there were several books that began with J, but solving
that little riddle wasn’t her specialty. Besides, she was pretty sure she had
enough to go on with the passage from Numbers.

Mackenzie closed the Bible and placed it
back with the forgotten papers. She ran out of the house and back to her car,
suddenly in a hurry.

She needed to get back to the station.

More than that, she needed to speak with
a pastor.

This killer was not as random as
everyone thought.

He had an MO.

And she was about to crack it.