Before he Kills (A Mackenzie White Mystery—Book 1) (14 page)

Mackenzie’s phone started ringing less
than ten minutes into her ride with Nelson. She checked the number on the
display and although she had not yet saved it, it was fresh and familiar in her
mind. She had nearly forgotten that Ellington had sent a text stating that he
would call her. She knew he’d sent the text that morning but it seemed like a
very long time ago. She checked the time on her phone’s task bar and saw that
it was only 3:16. This day was turning out to be incredibly long.

She ignored the call, not wanting to add
another level of complexity to what was turning out to be an already chaotic
afternoon. At the same time she was ignoring Ellington’s call, Nelson was on
the phone with Nancy. He spoke curtly, straight and to the point. It was clear
that he was on edge and beyond stressed out, something that Mackenzie was
beginning to feel herself.

He ended the call several seconds later
and started nervously tapping at the steering wheel with his thumbs. “Nancy
just spoke to the State boys,” he said. “They’ll have a helicopter flying over
the area within an hour and a half.”

“That’s good news,” Mackenzie said.

“Tell me,” Nelson said. “Do you think
he’s killing the women before he puts them on the poles or does he kill them
there?”

“There’s nothing solid to prove either
way,” Mackenzie said. “However, the first scene in the cornfield makes me think
the women are alive when he puts them on the poles. There were marks on the
ground where the whip or whatever he uses was dragged.”

“So?”

“So, he was pacing. He was anxious and
biding his time. If the woman was already dead, why wait around with the whip?”

Nelson nodded and gave her a smile of
appreciation. “We’re going to nail this bastard,” he said, still drumming on
the steering wheel.

Mackenzie badly wanted to join in on his
enthusiasm, but something felt incomplete. She almost felt as if she had
overlooked something but could not for the life of her figure out what it was.
She remained quiet, pondering this silently, as Nelson drove on.

They entered what Nelson was referring
to as the Area of Interest twenty minutes later. She had listened to several
brief phone calls from Nelson’s end during the drive and gathered that Nelson
was setting up a perimeter of sorts to block in an area of thirty square miles.
The area consisted of mostly scrub land and secondary roads. A few of those
secondary roads were surrounded by cornfields just like the site of the
original crime scene that had started all of this madness.

As Nelson drove them down such a road,
the BC radio squawked at them. “Detective White, are you out there?” a man’s
voice asked.

Mackenzie looked to Nelson, as if for
approval. He gestured to the CD radio installed under the dash with a smile.
“Go ahead,” he said. “It’s your show.”

Mackenzie unclasped the mic from the
radio and clicked down the send button. “This is White. What have you got?”

“I’m out here off of State Route 411 and
came across a side road—nothing more than an old gravel road, really. The road
heads straight into a cornfield and is not on the maps. It’s about half a mile
long and dead ends into a small clearing in the cornfield.”

“Okay,” she said. “Did you find
something?”

“That’s putting it lightly, Detective,”
the officer on the other end said. “I think you need to get out here as fast as
you can.”

*

It was beyond eerie to find herself
standing in another cornfield. It was almost like she had come full circle,
only it did not feel like she was coming to the end of something. Quite the
contrary, it felt like she was starting all over.

She stood at the edge of the clearing
with Nelson and Officer Lent, the man that had contacted her on the radio. The
three of them stood among the thinned cornstalks and looked out to the small
clearing.

A wooden pole had been erected in the
middle of the clearing. Unlike the other poles they had recently seen that were
identical to this one, there was no body strung up on it. The pole was bare and
looked almost like some weird sort of ancient monolith in the empty clearing.

Slowly, Mackenzie walked up to it. It
was cedar, the same as the other three. She got down to her knees and felt the
earth around the bottom of the pole. It was soft and had very obviously been
loosened and then packed back down rather recently.

“This pole hasn’t been here very long,” Mackenzie
said. “The loose dirt is very fresh. I’d almost guess it was done earlier
today.”

“So he preps the sites before he brings
his victims,” Nelson speculated. “I don’t know if that’s genius or cocky.”

While Mackenzie was repulsed by the word
genius
being tied to the killer in any way, she ignored him. She went to
the back of the pole and instantly spied the etchings along the bottom, several
inches from the loose dirt that held the pole into the ground: N511/J202.

“I wouldn’t say it’s either,” Mackenzie
said. “What I do know is that he’s essentially left us his business card. We
know he’s coming back, and he’ll probably have his latest victim with him.”

As she got back to her feet, she was
struck by a sense of vengeance that she had never felt before. The man behind
these crimes had somehow shaken her. He had become a specter of sorts, a ghost
with the ability to haunt her house, her mind, and her confidence. He had her
jumping at the sound of creaking floorboards and getting to such a low point
that she was hitting on larger-than-life FBI agents. He’d affected her so much
that she hadn’t had the energy or emotion to care that Zack had finally left.

On top of that, he was taking women as
his victims simply because they used their bodies as a means to make a living.
And who the hell was he to judge them for that?

“I want to be here,” Mackenzie said. “I
want to be on patrol or stakeout or whatever we do to make sure we catch him. I
want to put the cuffs on the fucker.”

She knew it sounded selfish, but she
didn’t care. In that moment, she didn’t give a damn what Nelson thought of her.
She didn’t care if he went back to the boys at the station and laughed about
how the cute little woman had demanded things from him. Suddenly, catching the
man behind these murders was more important than anything—including her job and
her reputation.

“I can see to that,” Nelson said with a
smile. “Good to see a pissed off spark in you, White. I didn’t know you had it
in you.”

She bit back the remark that danced on
her tongue, simply thinking it instead.

Neither did I
.

Mackenzie felt positive that the killer
would not strike until night, and the others agreed with her. That gave them
all four more hours of daylight to get ready for what they hoped would be a
successful bust. Even if something
did
happen before nightfall, there
were three patrol cars stationed along State Route 411, keeping an eye out for
a vehicle entering the dirt road that led to the site the killer had prepared.
With the addition of a State PD helicopter on the way to assist, it felt like a
victory even before the sun was down.

Mackenzie was in one of the unmarked
cars along State Route 411, relieved to be by herself. Nelson had busied
himself with heading back to the station to meet with an advisor from the State
PD, allowing her to stay behind and keep her eyes on the scene and retain
control of the case. Her car was parked a mile and a quarter away from the dirt
road, partially hidden from 411 by having pulled backwards into the entrance to
what had once been an old cutaway road farmers had used to get from one
cornfield to the other.

She’d been sitting there for fifteen
minutes and the only car she’d seen go by was a police car, leaving the site
and heading back to the station. She still felt certain that there would be no
activity until well into the night and knew that she had a long stretch of
waiting ahead of her. She wondered if Nelson had given her this duty to keep her
out of his hair or if he saw it as giving her a position that kept her front
and center of events as they unfolded.

With a sigh and a glance out to the
uneventful stretch of State Route 411, Mackenzie picked up her phone and stared
at the missed call notification from where Ellington had tried calling her an
hour and a half ago. She did her best not to recall the events of yesterday
evening when she had made an ass of herself in his presence as she pressed the
notification bar. When his number came up, she pressed it right away before she
had time to change her mind.

He answered on the third ring and when
he did, she hated that it was so good to hear his voice. “Ellington here,” he
said.

“It’s Mackenzie White,” she said. “I was
returning your call.”

“Oh, hey! I hear you guys have a
promising break.”

“Seems like it, but time will tell. We
found the next pole, already set up and ready to go.”

“I heard. How do you feel about that?”

“Good,” she said.

“You sound doubtful.”

“It just seems too good to be true. I feel
like there’s something missing.”

“Maybe there is,” Ellington said. “Your
instincts are pretty sharp. I wouldn’t question them.”

“I usually don’t.”

An awkward silence fell between them and
Mackenzie found herself digging for something new to talk about. He’d already
heard about the break in the case, so it was useless to rehash it all.
This
is pathetic, Mackenzie,
she thought.

“So,” Ellington said, breaking the
silence. “I took the liberty of working up a profile after I got word about the
religious ties. The chances are very good that we’re looking for someone with
religion in his background. Maybe even a priest or pastor, although history
points to an upbringing in a strict religious home. Maybe he went to a private
religious school. I’m also thinking he either had no mother at home
or
a
mother that got around. He probably acted out as a kid—not in the extreme ways
we’re seeing right now, but more basic kid-trouble.”

“What’s all this based on?” she asked.
“Just past cases?”

“Yeah, mostly,” he said. “I can’t take
the credit for these insights at all. But truth be told, it’s a formula that
works about seventy percent of the time.”

“Okay, so if this site doesn’t pan out,
we keep an eye out for one of about one thousand possible suspects.”

“Maybe not so many. Based on my profile,
I also assume this guy is a local. If he’s mapping out his own city, as you
have pointed out, I’d say he grew up around there. And because of that, I made
a few calls. There’s a Catholic grade school within sixty miles of Omaha. There’s
one more in the state, but I’m betting the one closest to Omaha is going to be
your best bet.”

“That’s amazing,” Mackenzie said.

“What is?”

“Just like that, you’ve narrowed down
the search and even have a potential source of background information.”

“Well, the
I
in FBI
does
stand for investigation.” He laughed a bit at his own joke but when Mackenzie
did not, he shut it down.

“Thanks, Ellington.”

“Sure. One last thing before you go,
though.”

“What’s that?” she asked, nervous,
hoping he wouldn’t bring up her embarrassing advances of the night before.

“When I gave my report to my director, I
told him you were amazing and that I tried to sway you to the dark side.”

She felt flattered.

“The dark side being the Bureau?”

“Right. Anyway, he seemed interested. So
if you ever do get that itch to head out our way, I can give you his contact
information. It might be a conversation worth having.”

She thought this over and while she
wanted to say more, to tell him how much she appreciated him, she only managed
a simple “Thanks” in response. The very idea seemed too dreamlike. Great things
like that tended not to happen to her.

“You okay over there?” Ellington asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I need to go, though.
This thing is wrapping up down here and I need to stay focused.”

“I hear that. Go get ’em.”

She grinned in spite of herself. While
he may have been a larger-than-life figure to her, Ellington was also proving
that he was just as cheesy and flawed as everyone else.

She killed the call and looked out to
State Route 411 again. She started to feel antsy, like she was wasting her time
by simply sitting there. She pulled up the web browser on her phone and typed
in a search for local Catholic grade schools, and found that Ellington had been
spot on with his findings.

She saved the address to her phone and
then pulled up Nelson’s number. He answered after the fourth ring and sounded
pissed to have been disrupted from brown-nosing the State guys.

“What’s up, White?”

“I want to check on a lead, sir,” she
said. “It will require me to leave 411 for two or three hours, though.”

“Absolutely not,” Nelson said. “You’re
leading this thing, so you have to stay around. This is your show, White. Don’t
even
think
about letting it get away from you. If we haven’t got this
guy by tomorrow, we’ll talk again. If it’s a really promising lead, I can send
someone else to check it out.”

“No,” Mackenzie said. “It’s just a
hunch.”

“Okay,” he said. “Keep put until I say
otherwise.”

She couldn’t even reply before he hung
up.

With that, she pulled up the address of
the Catholic school on her GPS and saved it. She then looked to the right
where, a bit further down State Route 411, a lone pole remained empty in a
cornfield, awaiting a sacrifice.

She knew she should stay put, should
follow orders and sit here for four hours doing nothing.

But as she sat there, something gnawed
away at her. What if he killed the victims
before
he brought them out?

If so, that meant there was a girl
trapped somewhere, right now, being tortured, a girl who would die while Mackenzie
merely sat there and waited for her dead body to show up.

She couldn’t stand the thought of it.

And what if that Catholic school—the
only one in the area, the one that fit the FBI’s profile perfectly—could give
her a name? An ID?

That could bring them to the killer
before he arrived her. It could perhaps save the next victim before it was too
late.

Mackenzie sat there, waiting, burning up
inside as she could hear the next victim’s screams in her head. Each passing
minute was agony.

Finally, she floored the gas and peeled
out of there.

She pulled up Holy Cross on her GPS.

Disobeying a direct order like this
might mean her job, her entire future.

But she had no choice.

She only hoped she could make it there
and back before it was too late.