Before He Sins

by Blake Pierce

  “Well, maybe we should save this conversation for an hour from now,” she spat. The hell of it was that he was right. It was the smarter move.

  “Or we can wait until I get back. I should be wrapped up by tonight. Maybe sooner. I don’t see why I won’t be back in DC by tomorrow afternoon sometime.”

  “This sucks,” she said, hating the simplistic and childish way it sounded.

  “It does,” he said. “But I promise…you missed nothing. I’ll let you read the case files when I get back. I’ll even let you see them before I hand them in to McGrath.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think he’ll like that.”

  “Well, he made me keep a secret from you yesterday. So I guess you and I will just hide one from him.”

  She did feel betrayed at the situation but also knew that to voice it and get into an argument over the phone would do absolutely nothing. If anything, it would only set her back in regards to the current case. And she would not allow herself to be tripped up in such a way.

  “Okay. But yes…I want to read those case files when you get back.”

  “Cross my heart. It’s looking like I should be back sometime late tonight. I’ll let you know when I get back.”

  When they ended the call, it took everything within Mackenzie not to call up McGrath right away and ask him just what in the hell he thought he was doing. Ellington was right; sending her to Nebraska would have certainly slowed down her current case…but she still felt slighted—like she had been left in the dark on purpose.

  Shoving that down, she pulled out into the street. She pushed away all feelings of anger and betrayal, replacing them with the image of the Crouse’s son, slowly creeping back down the hall toward the sound of his wailing father.

  CHAPTER TEN

  After making a quick information request over the phone to the bureau, Mackenzie got an address for Chris Marsh. It just happened to be the same address for his parents, Leslie and Russell Marsh. As the morning started to get away from her, she hoped to catch Marsh before he potentially left for work. It was a twenty-five-minute drive from the Crouse residence, having her pull into the Marsh driveway at 7:52.

  It was a much smaller house than the Crouse residence, the type of house that had likely been built in the ’70s or early ’80s and had undergone absolute no modifications at all—not even a fresh coat of paint on the exterior. When she saw no cars in the driveway, she feared that she had missed her window of time, certain that no one would be home.

  She went to the front door and knocked anyway. As she waited, she took in the sounds of a typical quiet morning in the DC suburbs: faraway engines, a murmur of industrial machinery somewhere, a dog barking, a car horn here and there. And somewhere among it all, there was a killer—if he wasn’t, in fact, behind this door.

  As if the thought had summoned someone, the door was answered. On the other side, she saw a young man of about twenty-one or so. He looked tired and a little confused. He was wearing a baggy Nirvana T-shirt and a pair of equally loose athletic shorts. His long black hair swept over his left eye and behind his neck.

  “Are you Chris Marsh, by any chance?” Mackenzie asked.

  “That’s me,” he said, now seemingly very confused. “Who’s asking?”

  She slowly took out her badge and gave her usual introduction. “Mackenzie White, with the FBI. I need you ask you a few questions.”

  His eyes went wide but she saw no fear there; it was complete confusion and maybe a bit of disbelief. “Well, um, this is my parents’ house and they’ve already left for work, so…”

  “Of course,” she said. “Although, I know that you are at least twenty years old and you get your mail delivered here. So this is your place of residence and since you’re not a minor, it’s within the law for me to question you here.”

  She kept on a cheerful tone the entire time, trying to set him at ease. She’d love to get a much clearer picture of his mental state before she walked into the house. So far, from what she could tell, he had just woken up to having an FBI agent on his doorstep. He was understandably taken off guard and surprised.

  “I guess come on in, then,” he said. “I mean, what’s going on? Am I in trouble or something?”

  “No. But your name has come up in a case I’m working on and I’m hoping you can—”

  “Oh my God,” Chris said. “Is it Woodall? That killer guy got him?”

  “That’s a pretty great guess,” Mackenzie said. “How’d you get there?”

  “I heard about that Catholic priest. How he was crucified on the door to his church. And then that other one a few days ago…I saw that on the news yesterday. And…well…if my name came up and you’re here…I’m assuming it’s because of some nasty things I’ve shared recently. You’ve spoken to Mr. Crouse, I take it?”

  “I have.”

  “Yeah, then come on in,” he said, stepping aside.

  Chris spent a few moments apologizing for the state of the place. His mom and dad had already left for work. Chris himself had not gone to college, he explained, and because he was between jobs, he was living in his parents’ basement. He explained all of this as he sat down in a small recliner and Mackenzie settled in on one side of a small couch in the Marshes’ living room.

  “So what do you know about what’s happened to me?” Chris asked.

  “I know what you accused Pastor Woodall of. And I know that you confided in Mr. Crouse, showing him text messages and pictures. And please know that he did not give up that information easily. Quite frankly, he was a wreck when I left.”

  Chris shrugged. “I get it. In light of recent events, I understand why he’d offer up that information. But…I guess I don’t get why you’re here.”

  “For starters, I’d like to know your whereabouts last night.”

  Chris sat back hard in the recliner. He looked mortified in an instant. “What? You think I did it? That I’ve been the psycho nailing people to churches?”

  “I think your name came up as the only person with a known grievance against the most recently deceased and it’s my job to eliminate all possibilities.”

  After saying this, she watched another change flutter across Chris’s face. He went from being mortified to angry and defensive. The shift in his eyes was nearly uncanny. “Well, that’s pretty fucking offensive,” he shouted. “I guess pinning gross murders on the kid that’s been sexually abused makes sense since I have to be all kinds of fucked up, right?”

  He was on his feet now, screaming at her. Mackenzie also got to her feet, very slowly. Something about the immediate shift in emotion raised alarms in her head. There might be some sort of mental issue here—an unknown factor that she had to treat with as much caution as she would if she suspected he was hiding a concealed weapon.

  “Chris, I’m just here to ask some simple questions. And I’ll only tell you one single time that responding in such a way is only going to make this worse for you.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Chris said, trembling now and speaking much quieter. “I would have loved to kill him. It’s a sin I’ve wrestled with for months. The things he did to me…the things he threatened…”

  “Chris, let’s just sit back down and talk this out.”

  “What’s to talk about?” he asked. Again, there was a mood shift that came out of nowhere. He was screaming again. He took a step toward her, closing the distance between them to less than ten feet. “You think I killed him. That’s why you’re here, right?”

  “Chris, you can’t—”

  He screamed so suddenly that Mackenzie’s hand flinched down and to her right, ready to go for her Glock. She hesitated, though, a little embarrassed by her reaction. And maybe, in the end, it was that hesitation that made Chris think he had some sort of an opening.

  He charged at her, lowering his head and squaring up his shoulders like he was a linebacker. It was a clumsy stance and he was being propelled by whatever strange and almost fugue-like anger she’d seen come across his face. Becaus
e of that, she easily blocked the attack. In doing so, she locked his head loosely with her right hand, grabbed his arm with her left, and threw him over in a makeshift hip toss. He landed half on and half off of the sofa, eventually falling to the floor.

  Before he even had time to realize what had happened, Mackenzie was pulling his arms behind his back and slapping handcuffs on him. He screamed at her again, a sound of pure fury that seemed to dissolve as his shoulders and struggling legs started to give up the fight. He seemed out of sorts again; she imagined that another of those expression changes was taking place on his face as she hauled him to his feet.

  “I didn’t kill him,” Chris said, whimpering now.

  Mackenzie wheeled him around and looked him in the eyes, making no effort to hide her frustration. “Even if you didn’t,” she said, “you did just make a run at an FBI agent. So either way, you’re headed to an interrogation room.”

  “But I don’t—I don’t know—”

  She could see on his face that he was clearly confused. His eyes were wide and wandering, switching between fear, panic, and confusion.

  Yeah, she thought. There’s got to be some sort of mental condition at work there. Maybe the trauma of the abuse at the hands of Woodall.

  Whatever the case, she still had to do her job. So she led him back through the door and to her car where she guided him into the back seat. By the time she had gotten behind the wheel, Chris Marsh was a blubbering mess in the back seat.

  He made no attempt at conversation as she pulled out of the small driveway and into the street. But on the few occasions she looked into the rearview, she caught that same vacant look in his eyes—the desperate stare of someone who was lost and was only now discovering it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  By ten o’clock, Mackenzie had allowed herself two cups of coffee. She downed them as she worked with Harrison and Yardley to pull together a complete work-up of the life and times of Chris Marsh. And it hadn’t taken long for many of Mackenzie’s assumptions to be proven correct.

  From early childhood, Chris Marsh had suffered from severe attachment disorder, something he did not fully recover from until the age of twelve. Once the parents had been contacted and told that their son was currently being held by the FBI under suspicion of involvement in a murder case, the mother had been quite helpful in filling in the blanks. Chris had also been diagnosed with autism at a young age, but very low on the spectrum. By the time he was eight, the diagnosis had no longer held any sway.

  Mackenzie and Yardley discussed this while Harrison was making calls to the leadership groups of Cornerstone Presbyterian and Blessed Heart to see if he could find any links between those churches and Chris Marsh. The more Mackenzie got to know Yardley, the more she liked her. She was a sharp agent, but maybe a bit naïve. Still, it was evident that she had no problem playing second fiddle, as long as she was learning something in the process.

  “Okay, so what do the medical records say?” Mackenzie asked as they sat at a table adjacent to the interrogation room.

  Yardley thumbed through a few pages sitting in front of her and shook her head. “He hasn’t seen any doctor for more than two years. The last visit was for strep throat. The last recorded psych evaluation of any kind was when he was thirteen and the results look to be all right from what I can tell. We’re having an expert check that right now.”

  Even if it’s just a brief smattering of red flags in his psych history, there’s no telling what Woodall’s abuse brought back to him, Mackenzie thought. Especially if he suffered from an attachment disorder as a young kid.

  She kept thinking of those mood switches, though. Something was certainly unhinged within the young man. To go from tired and accommodating to angry and defensive in less than ten minutes…that was pretty spectacular.

  “Thanks for all of your help,” Mackenzie said. “Can you try to speed the psych records evaluation up? And light a fire under Forensics, would you? I’m still waiting on results from the nails found at the earlier scenes.”

  Yardley nodded, eager to help. Mackenzie left the table and headed out toward the interrogation room. There was a single agent standing guard. When he saw Mackenzie coming his way, he nodded to her and took a set of keys out of his pocket. He unlocked the door to the interrogation room and let her in. When it slid closed quietly behind her, she saw that Chris Marsh looked to be in a docile state.

  It was the first time she’d laid eyes on him since she’d pulled into the parking garage with him in tow. From there, he’d been escorted into the building by three other agents while Mackenzie had taken a few moments to update McGrath. She saw no glimmer of that fury in his eyes but that meant nothing to her—it had not been there when he had first answered the door at his parents’ house, either.

  “Do you think we can have a conversation now, Mr. Marsh?” she asked.

  Chris nodded. “Yeah. Listen…I’m sorry as hell about earlier. I got freaked out and upset and I just…I don’t know. I snapped.”

  “Does that happen often?”

  “No. I get mad pretty easily, but never like that. But the last month or so, I’ve just felt like this giant ball of pent-up anger and frustration, waiting to go ballistic. And, well, you were the first person to tell me about Pastor Woodall. I hate him…I really do. But at the same time, he was part of my life. Without him, I don’t think I could have admitted it to myself.”

  “Admitted what?”

  “That I’m gay. I think maybe I’ve always known. That’s how I started meeting with him. Asking him to talk to me about it. And after a few months…well, we started things up.”

  “Was he abusive the entire time?” Mackenzie asked.

  “No, not at all. But I think over time…maybe a few months or so, he started to realize what he was doing and what it might cost him. He’d tell me about it and I suggested that we just end it. He was much older and I did know the risks he was taking. But when I seriously started talking about it, that’s when he’d get violent.”

  Mackenzie digested this, taking it all in while watching his face. Whatever had caused him to lash out at her several hours ago was gone. Something inside of him had broken in that time and she now found herself looking at a broken young man.

  She was glad that the affair and the abuse itself had little relevance on the case. The idea of it made her cringe, made her see the recently deceased as a monster. So she did her best to push it aside without making Chris feel as if his trauma was not being belittled.

  “Chris…did anyone other than Eric Crouse know about the affair?”

  “No. I mean…who am I going to tell? I’m ashamed of it. Not the gay part…although my parents still don’t know. But the affair. I mean…he had a wife. He had three kids, one of which is nearly my age.”

  “You’re certain of this? You don’t think Pastor Woodall maybe told someone?”

  “I highly doubt that. He had everything to lose. He had absolutely no reasons to go public. Not to anyone. But I can’t know for certain.”

  That’s an extremely valid point, she thought.

  “Chris, have you ever attended church services at Blessed Heart Catholic Church or Cornerstone Presbyterian?”

  “No. My family has always gone to Living Word. My folks were pretty adamant about it. They liked it because it was nondenominational. Mom grew up as a Catholic and regrets every minute of it.”

  “And now let me go back to where I was trying to lead the conversation earlier,” Mackenzie said. “It all goes back to you being the only name we’re getting that would have a viable grudge against Pastor Woodall. I need to know where you were all night last night. Do you have proof of where you were?”

  “My parents,” he said. “I never even left the house last night. And most of the night, I was online, looking for jobs. I sent off a few emails and filled out a couple of forms. One of them was pretty close to midnight, I think. You’re welcome to check out my computer for all of that proof.”

  She nodded, not wan
ting to tell him that there was likely already someone looking over the contents of his computer right now.

  “Thank you,” Mackenzie said. “I think that’ll be all for now, Chris.”

  She got up to leave, but he stopped her pretty quickly. “Agent White? Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  Chris seemed to choose his words very carefully before speaking. He would not meet her eyes as he asked the question, staring at his hands which were clasped in his lap.

  “If he did this stuff with me—the sex and abuse, I mean—do you think I’m the only one? If there are other guys out there that he’s messed with, I hate to think what they might be feeling. You know? There were times when I just wanted to kill myself.”

  A man of Woodall’s age, with a huge congregation, who threatened and abused a boy out of fear of having a homosexual affair exposed, Mackenzie thought. That’s a damned good point. The chances of Chris being the first are slim to none.

  “I don’t know,” Mackenzie said. “But that’s one of the things that we need to look into for sure.”

  As she left the interrogation room, something Chris had said in passing came back to her. It was an empty comment almost, one that most people would have just glossed over. But as she stood outside of the interrogation room, it now seemed pretty important. She had asked him if he had ever attended Blessed Heart or Cornerstone Presbyterian.

  No, he’d said. And then he’d gone on to say: My folks were pretty adamant about it. They liked it because it was nondenominational. Mom grew up as a Catholic and regrets every minute of it.

  There had to be a link between the three men who had been killed. Somewhere, there had to be some sort of connection. She’d heard of lapsed Catholics or people transitioning from Baptist to Lutheran and so forth. She also knew that it might be something of a culture shock for someone from a Presbyterian background to start attending a Catholic church.