Before he Kills (A Mackenzie White Mystery—Book 1) (15 page)

Stupid.

The word ricocheted in his head as he
passed the intersection of Highway 32 and State Route 411.

Stupid.

If he needed any proof that God was on
his side, it came in the timing of it all. He had been headed for the site of
the fourth murder—what would become his fourth city—when he saw the police car
heading down State Route 411. When he saw it, he kept heading straight down
Highway 32, his heart hammering in his chest.

Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe
the cop was on routine patrol, looking for speeding drivers.

Or maybe they had found the pole. He
knew they were investigating him; he’d seen the Scarecrow Killer stories in the
papers but had not bothered to read them or watch the snippets about his work
on television. He was not doing this for the attention or publicity. He was
doing this to spread God’s wrath, and to teach the world about love, mercy, and
purity.

Of course, the police would not
understand this. And if they had found the site that had been destined to raise
up his fourth city, it could be over for him. He would not be able to finish
his work and that would not please God.

The fourth site would have to change.
Maybe it would help him, in the long run. Perhaps the police would be so
preoccupied with trying to find him at this fourth site that he could finish
out his work elsewhere without risk of being caught.

He came to a convenience store on
Highway 32 and turned his truck around in the parking lot. He headed back
toward the intersection and passed through without giving State Route 411 a
passing glance.

With his sacrifice already chosen and
readied, he could still build his fourth city tonight, as he had planned.

He would continue his work elsewhere.

*

She opened her eyes and a flare of pain
exploded in her head. She cried out and found that her voice sounded
odd—muffled, almost. She tried lifting her hand to her mouth but realized she
was unable to do so. She realized there was a cloth gag over her mouth, tied
tightly and cutting into the corners of her mouth.

She blinked rapidly, trying to make the
pain in her head go away. As her eyes started to focus and the haze of
grogginess departed, she started to get a sense of where she was. She was on a
hardwood floor that was layered with dust. Her arms were tied behind her back and
her ankles were also tied together. She had been stripped to her underwear.

It was this last fact that brought
everything slamming back into her memory. A man had come out of nowhere last
night as she had gotten home. It had been four o’clock and she had…God, what
had
she done?

But the bright pink bra she was wearing
made it impossible to forget what she had done last night. She had tried her
best to convince herself that an
escort
was different from what those
other
women did. She was classier, more controlled.

But at the end of the day, she’d done
the same thing those other women did. She’d been paid handsomely (hey, fifteen
hundred dollars for an hour and a half of “work” wasn’t too shabby) and
afterwards had not felt as bad as she’d expected to.

But then there had been that man, coming
out of the shadows. He’d only said
hello
and then his arm had wrapped
around her neck. She’d smelled something for a moment and as she had slipped
into blackness, she heard him whispering into her ear about sacrifices and
bitter waters.

And now she was here. Her panties were
still on and there was no pain, so she was pretty sure she hadn’t been raped.
But still, she was in trouble.

She tried getting to her knees but every
time she came close, her tied ankles made her tip over, slamming her shoulder
into the floor. She lay there, weeping, and tried to remember the last thing
the man had said to her before whatever he had placed to her nose and mouth had
pulled her under.

Slowly, she remembered it. And
surprisingly, the lunacy of it made her want to sag and give up rather than
figure a way out of this.

Don’t worry,
he said
. I
will build a city for you.

It took Mackenzie a little over an hour
to reach Holy Cross Catholic School, pushing ninety the whole way. School had
let out for the day by the time she arrived, and as she hurried up the stairs
and was guided by the receptionist, she found she had caught the principal at a
good time of day.

The principal was a rotund lady who
filled just about every stereotype Mackenzie had ever had about nuns. Warm and
inviting at first, Principal Ruth-Anne Costello was all business and rather
curt once Mackenzie was in the woman’s office and taking a seat at the front of
her desk.

“We’ve heard rumblings about this so-called
Scarecrow Killer,” Principal Costello said. “Is that why you’ve come here?”

“It is,” Mackenzie said. “How did you
know that?”

Principal Costello frowned, but it was
the sort of frown that held more anger than disappointment. Mackenzie thought
it was a frown that could be found on most staff members at any given time of
the day in a school like this one.

“Well, those poor women are strung up on
wooden poles and flogged, correct? The religious symbolism is unmistakable. And
whenever a killer does his work in the name of terribly misguided religious
principles or a warped and misguided interpretation of religion, it is
always
the private religious schools that are put under a microscope.”

Mackenzie could only nod. She knew that
this was true; she’d seen it several times since she had started working toward
her career as a freshman in college. But her silence also came from the fact
that Principal Costello was right: the religious undertones to the Scarecrow
Killer’s actions
were
obvious. Mackenzie had felt it herself when they
had found the first body. So why the hell had she ignored them?

Because I was afraid to
voice it to
Nelson and Porter out of fear of being wrong and then promptly ridiculed,
she thought.

But now she had a chance to correct that
ignorance and she’d be damned if she was going to let it go to waste.

“Well,” Mackenzie said, “we do have a
very specific profile. I was hoping that if I could speak to you or maybe
someone that has been here for a long time, I could maybe find a potential
suspect. And even if not a suspect, maybe someone that knows something about
the killings.”

“Well,” Costello said, “I’ve been here
for thirty-five years. I was a guidance counselor first and then became the
principal, a position I’ve held for nearly twenty years.”

She stood up and walked to the left side
of her office where a row of ancient-looking filing cabinets lined the wall.
“You know,” Costello said, “you aren’t the first detective to come sniffing
around when a crime is committed that seems to have religious influence. Not by
a long shot.”

Costello pulled four folders from the
cabinet and brought them back to the desk. She plopped them down on the desk
with enough force to show that she was clearly irritated. Mackenzie reached out
to scoop them up but Costello’s hand was already pointing to them. Without
looking at Mackenzie, Costello started talking again, tapping at each folder
with her plump index finger.

“This one,” she said, pointing to the
first folder, “is Michael Abner. When he was here in the early seventies, he
assaulted a girl on the playground and was caught masturbating in the girl’s
restroom in fifth grade. However, he died in 1984. A terrible car accident, I
believe. So he’s clearly not a suspect.”

With that, Costello removed Michael
Abner’s folder from the desk. She then promptly eliminated two other folders,
as one of them had died five years ago from lung cancer and another had spent
his life in a wheelchair—obviously not the sort of person that could cart
around wooden poles to murder scenes.

“This last one,” Costello said, “belongs
to Barry Henderson. While attending Holy Cross, he got into several fights, one
of which sent two boys to the emergency room. When he returned from his
expulsion, he began sending the teachers dirty letters, an activity which
culminated in his attempted rape of the school art teacher while singing his
mother’s favorite hymn. This happened in 1990. I regret to inform you, though,
that he cannot be your suspect either. He has been a resident of the Westhall
Home for the Criminally Insane for the last twelve years.”

Mackenzie made a mental note to verify
that, then watched as Costello placed the folders back into her cabinet. When
she closed it, she gave it a little slam that filled the office like a bomb.

“And those are the only students you’ve
had in the last thirty-five years that would be capable of crimes like the
Scarecrow Killer is committing?”

“We have no possible way of knowing
that,” Costello said. “With all due respect, we do not keep tabs on every
student that has the potential for a life of crime. That would involve detailed
reports on every child that breaks even the slightest rule. The four I just
showed you were the most extreme cases, and I have had those on hand for the
last several years because it saves a great deal of time when we are approached
by the police, especially when they have come up with what they believe are
fitting profiles. They always want to blame religion for crimes they cannot
solve on their own.”

“There’s no blame here,” Mackenzie said.

“Of course there is,” Costello said.
“Tell me, Detective. Have you come here to simply find the name of a suspect or
what sort of religious doctrine warped them so badly that they are now
committing these horrible acts?”

“I don’t care
how
the information
comes,” Mackenzie snapped. “I just need to find out who is killing these women.
The
why
is secondary at this point.”

Mackenzie started to feel idiotic for
coming to Holy Cross. What had she been expecting, anyway? A nice and tidy
solution? An old student that matched Ellington’s profile to a tee?

“Thank you for your time, Mrs.
Costello,” she said softly. She got up and headed for the door. As her hand
fell on the knob, she was stopped by Principal Costello.

“Why do you think that is, Detective White?”

“What?”

“Why does law enforcement come looking
for answers from religion when they can’t solve what they believe are
faith-based crimes?”

“It just matches the profiles in most
cases,” Mackenzie said.

“Does it?” Costello asked. “Or is it
because humans can’t accept evil for what it really is? And because we can’t
accept it, we have to find something just as intangible to blame it on?”

A question rose to her lips, one that
she was unable to bite back before it came out.

“What
is
evil, Ms. Costello? What
does evil look like?”

Principal Costello grinned thinly. It
was a haunting grin, an expression that hinted at some sort of dark
understanding.

“Evil looks like you. It looks like me.
We live in a fallen world, Detective. Evil is everywhere.”

The doorknob under Mackenzie’s hand
suddenly felt very cold. She nodded and took her leave, not bothering to look
back at Principal Costello for a goodbye.

As she made her way down the
labyrinthine halls of Holy Cross, her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She
retrieved it and saw Nelson’s name and number on the display. Her heart fell.

The killer,
she thought.
He
showed up while I was away and Nelson is going to have my ass for it.

She answered the call with a knot of
fear in her stomach. “Hey, Chief.”

“White,” he said. “Where are you?”

“Holy Cross Catholic School,” she said.
“I’m following up on Ellington’s profile.”

Nelson was quiet for a moment as he
considered this. “We can go over why the hell you’d defy my order and waste
time going there later,” he said. “For now, I need you to swing by the station
on your way back through.”

“But what about Route 411?” she asked.
“I’d like to get back out before rush hour.”

“Another reason you had no business
wasting time following up on Ellington’s lead. Just come here now.”

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

But Nelson had already ended the call,
leaving Mackenzie to listen to nothing more than a dead line.

Her sense of unease grew even larger
when Mackenzie walked into the station and saw Nancy sitting at the front desk.
When Mackenzie came in, Nancy gave her only a brief smile and then looked back
down to her desk. This was extremely uncharacteristic for Nancy, a woman who
usually seemed to stretch her face to accommodate a smile for anyone that came
in the station’s front doors.

Mackenzie nearly asked Nancy if she knew
what was going on but decided not to. The last thing she wanted was to seem
weak and out of the loop as she tried to spearhead the closing to this case. So
she bypassed the front desk and headed to the back, marching dutifully toward
Nelson’s office.

She opened the door and stepped in,
trying to appear confident and as if she were fully in control. But even now,
as she closed the door behind her, she knew that taking two and a half hours
out of her afternoon to visit Holy Cross had been a mistake. She’d been jumping
at shadows in an attempt to be as perfect as possible, making sure she
exhausted every opportunity, especially ones offered by impressive FBI agents,
to get to the bottom of this case.

Nelson looked up to her and for the
briefest of moments, an anxious expression crossed his face.

“Have a seat, White,” Nelson said,
nodding to the chairs on the opposite side of his cluttered desk.

“What’s going on?” she asked. The nerves
were evident in her voice but that was the last thing on her mind as Nelson
seemed to size her up.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said. “And you
are not going to like the solution. Our scum-sucking friend Ellis Pope has
lodged a formal complaint against you. For now, he’s keeping it quiet—just
between us and his lawyer. But he says if immediate action isn’t taken, he’ll
take it to the papers. Usually I wouldn’t even care about such a threat, but
the papers and even some of the television media have painted you as the head
of this investigation. If Pope goes to the media with his complaint, things are
going to get
very
bad.”

“Sir, I was acting on impulse,” Mackenzie
pleaded. “A mysterious figure was lurking at the edge of a murder scene. It was
private property. He was trespassing. He then took off suspiciously. Was I
supposed to just let him run? All I did was stop him. I didn’t assault him.”

He frowned.

“White, I’m on your side on this. One
hundred percent. But there’s another factor that I can’t get past. The State PD
is involved now. They caught wind of the confrontation with Pope, too. There’s
also the fact that you were MIA when they showed up to the scene on State Route
411 this afternoon. I’m pissed about that one myself. But they saw it as sloppy
work on your part. Not a good impression.”

He raised a hand before she could talk.

“As if that wasn’t enough, I got a call
from Ruth-Anne Costello about half an hour ago. She complained about your being
rude and aggressive. She, too, lodged a complaint.”

“Are you
serious
?”

Nelson looked depressed as he nodded his
head.

“Yes, unfortunately, I am. Add all of
that up and we get a shit storm.”

“So what do we do to fix this?” she
asked. “What is Pope asking for to stay quiet? How can we appease the State and
make the nun happy?”

Nelson sighed and then sneered toward
the ceiling, making it apparent that he was not happy with what he was about to
say.

“It means that effective immediately, I
have to take you off of the Scarecrow Killer case.”

Mackenzie felt her skin grow cold. The
thought of the killer out there, continuing to kill, and her being unable to
try to stop it, was just too much for her.

She didn’t know what to say.

Nelson’s frown deepened.

“I went to bat for you and tried to get
them to ease up,” he said. “I even tried to simply let them allow you to finish
up this case and then get expelled for a week or so. But Pope and the State PD
weren’t having it. My hands are tied on this one. I’m sorry.”

Mackenzie felt fury replacing the fear
that had been boiling up in her stomach. Her first instinct was to lash out at
Nelson but she could tell that he was pretty angry about this turn of events,
too. Plus, given the way he had been showing her more respect in these last few
days, she didn’t doubt him when he said he had tried everything he could.

This was not his fault. If anyone was to
blame, it was Ellis Pope. And, quite possibly, she herself as well. Ever since
she’d heard that creaky floorboard three nights ago, she’d not been herself.
Things going askew with Ellington had not helped, either.

Yes, this was mostly on her. And that
was perhaps the worst thing of all.

“So who handles the case now?” Mackenzie
asked.

“The State Police. And they’ve got the
FBI on stand-by if they’re needed. But being that we think we have the exact
location of where the killer is coming next, we’re hoping it’s going to be a
pretty simple case.”

“Sir, I don’t even…”

She stopped here, not knowing what to
say. She had never been much of a crier, but she was so angry as she sat in
Nelson’s office that her body seemed to have no other way to express it other
than the threat of tears.

“I know,” he said. “This sucks. But when
it’s all said and done—when this asshole is behind bars and the paperwork is
being done—I’m going to make sure your name is all over it in the best ways
possible. You have my word on that, White.”

She stood up in a state of shock,
looking to the door as if it might transport her to some magical world where
this conversation had never happened.

“So what am I supposed to do now?” she
asked.

“Go home. Get drunk. Do whatever you
need to do to shake this off. And when the case is closed, I’ll call you and
let you know. The State won’t care about this ordeal once the killer is
arrested. Ellis Pope will be all we have to worry about and that should be easy
once you’re not in the spotlight.”

She opened the door and stepped out.

“I’m sorry as hell, White,” he said
before she closed the door. “I really am.”

She could only nod as she closed the
door behind him.

She made her way through the hallway,
keeping her eyes on the floor so she would not have to look anyone she passed
in the eye. As she made her way out to the front of the station, she looked up
to Nancy. Nancy, apparently assuming that Mackenzie was now in the know, gave
her a polite frown.

“You okay?” Nancy asked.

“I will be,” Mackenzie said, not knowing
if it was true or not.