by Blake Pierce
From her right, she could hear a clinking sound. This was followed by a murmur of desperation and a soft shuffling noise.
“Be still,” a voice said. “It will be over soon. You are dying like Jesus. You, too, will be glorified.”
Mackenzie couldn’t see what was happening because the mower was blocking her line of sight. She fought against whatever was binding her wrists, but to little effect. They were tied tightly together. All the wrestling accomplished was cutting the side of her wrist on the edge of the riding mower’s grass guard.
The pain and instant blood spilled from her skin was a godsend, though. An idea entered her mind that seemed both desperate and logical all at once. Again moving as quietly as she could, Mackenzie shifted her body to the right. She had to twist her shoulders awkwardly but she managed to align the tight binding around her wrists with the mower guard. She raised her arms and lowered them, up and down up and down, as quietly as she could.
She had no idea if it was working—if the guard was cutting through whatever had her wrists bound. She could tell that it was not anything steel or metal…it was maybe rope or some sort of heavy-duty cloth, or—
The garage was then filled with the heavy sound of a hammer striking a nail. A guttural cry of agony, muffled yet unmistakable, followed it. Mackenzie cringed at the noise but also used it to her advantage, taking the two or three seconds to intensify her awkward sawing motions.
She started to feel the pressure around her wrists loosen. She looked down at her ankles and saw that they had been tied with some sort of thick twine. If it was the same material that was holding her wrists together, she assumed she’d be able to saw through it fairly easily.
The murmured pain of Tim Armstrong became a gasping sort of wheezing. The scurried commotion of him writhing against the floor had come to a stop.
I’m going to hear him die if I don’t hurry up, she thought.
Again, she heard the clinking of nails and then a clatter as a hammer was dropped to the floor.
“I know it hurts,” the man said to Armstrong. “But it will be over soon. Lean on those everlasting arms until then. He’s waiting for you, Pastor. He’s waiting for you and you’ll rejoice in his presence.”
He is doing it as a form of glorification, she thought as she continued to saw. He thinks he’s doing them a favor—thinks he’s delivering them to Christ.
Two more slow and purposeful motions of her shoulders and she felt her wrists come completely free. Rather than leap up right away, she took a moment to flex her hands and stretch her wrists. She then quickly reached down and untied the twine around her ankles. It came off easily enough and when she was finally free, she got into a crouching position.
No gun, she thought. A head that feels like it’s cracked down the center and vision that’s still not one hundred percent. Not the best odds.
She glanced over the hood of the mower and took a single moment to take in the situation.
Apparently, the hammering blow she had heard seconds ago had not been Armstrong’s second hand being nailed into the beam. However, a fresh sheen of blood on his right hand suggested that the nail there had been better reinforced with that particular blow.
The killer was hunched over the cross-in-the-making, taking up another huge nail in his hand and moving it toward Armstrong’s other hand. She saw a good deal of blood along the killer’s right arm. She wondered if that’s where her shot had landed, high on the arm near the shoulder.
She could only see the left side of the killer’s face. He looked rather haggard, a beard on his face that was unruly and going gray. He wore a tight skull-fitting hat on his head, the type that looking like an athletic stocking cap. His eyes were narrowed into hard lines, making it almost hard to see his brown eyes. He was going about his work with dedication and grit.
As for Armstrong, he was still alive but in a state of shock. His eyes were narrow and dreamy, his limbs tight but not rigid against the killer’s touch.
Her gun was sitting at the killer’s feet. The hammer was in his hand.
Behind him, hanging from a small rack bolted to the wall, she saw a shovel, a hoe, a small pitchfork, and a shop broom. He had all the weapons on his person or behind him, and she had none.
I do have the element of surprise, she thought.
But then, in that moment, even that was taken away from her.
The killer looked up from his work, perhaps just to check on her and her previously comatose state. When he saw that she was up, he paused for just a moment. He then dropped the hammer and nails and went for the Glock.
Mackenzie did her best to use her surroundings. She grabbed the first thing she saw—the canister of gasoline. She picked it up, grateful to find that it was at least halfway full, and slung it around. It felt like a stupid attack, but enough of the gasoline came gushing out of the nozzle to work. It splashed into his face, into his eyes. He cried out and stumbled back, instantly trying to wipe the gas away from his eyes.
Mackenzie took advantage of this by hauling herself up and over the hood of the mower and delivering a hard kick to the killer’s chest. He went stumbling back hard and rebounded from the front wall of the shed. He came screaming forward toward her and she easily fended him off with a hard back elbow into the same place she had just landed a kick.
The killer doubled over, gasping. Mackenzie stepped forward to continue her assault and slap handcuffs on him but that’s when her left foot slipped on the splattered gasoline on the floor. She barely slid, but it was just enough to give the killer a window of opportunity.
He came rushing at her and took out her knees. They both went backward in an awkward tumble. Mackenzie’s legs jumbled up in Tim Armstrong’s legs and she went falling. The pastor was screaming the entire time, yelling through his gag.
The killer hit the ground, his hand falling on the Glock. As Mackenzie sat up, her vision swimming and her head crying out in hellish pain, her hand found the killer’s hammer. And just like that, their roles were reversed.
She had an advantage, though. She knew how to use a hammer easily. He, on the other hand, had to look down to the gun to make sure it was ready to fire.
She used that moment to send a hard right-handed arc to his chin, using the hammer as a medieval form of brass knuckles. She heard something in his jaw pop as he went to the wall again. The gun clattered to the floor but he forgot about it the moment his impact sent the shovel and pitchfork falling to the floor.
He grabbed the pitchfork and tried jabbing outward with it. But she was too fast, already on him. She wrapped his head in a headlock and when he screamed, she could feel it in her bones. He tried readjusting the pitchfork so that the prongs were facing them. He tried pushing her forward, directly into the prongs, but she was too strong. He pushed and pushed against her and that’s why she was so surprised when he stopped and suddenly pushed in the opposite direction.
He slammed her hard into wall and once again, her head felt like someone had cracked it open like a melon. The pain was immeasurable and for a sickening moment, she thought she was going to pass out again.
He came rushing forward with the pitchfork and that was all it took for her to cling to consciousness. Her eyes scanned the place for an instant and when she saw her Glock sitting at her feet, she dropped to the floor as if her legs had melted into it.
She was fast, but not fast enough. As she hit the floor, the outermost prong caught her right arm. It barely grazed her, but it was enough to slice through the skin and instantly draw blood. Another inch or so, and it would have pinned her to the ground, the prong holding her steady.
She cried out as her hand retrieved the Glock. Without much aim, she lifted it upward and pulled the trigger.
A warm splash of blood splashed down on her.
The pitchfork hit the floor about two seconds before the killer’s body followed.
The shot had taken him directly under the chin. The results were just too grisly; Mackenzie had to make herself look a
way.
She took a few deep breaths and sat up, aware that the killer’s blood was all over her but unable to find the strength to care in that moment.
“Pastor Armstrong…help is coming…help is on the way…”
She pulled out her phone as she tried to get to het feet. She had just enough awareness to punch Ellington’s number before the blackness descended down into her again and she, too, joined the killer and Pastor Armstrong on the shed floor.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
It was three weeks before Mackenzie returned to work. With six stitches in the side of her head just above the temple, and twenty-one stitches in her arm, she was confined to desk duty. And that was fine with her; in the aftermath of what had happened in the shed and her painful recovery afterward, there was a lot to digest.
On her first day back, she spent most of the time slowly reading over the documents and reports from the case. She had to read slowly and concentrate more than usual. Her head still ached from time to time. She could still feel the aftermath of the concussion the doctors had diagnosed her with and even something as simple as reading several pages of documents would take its toll on her mind.
Slowly and with a great deal of focus, she was able to put together in chronological order the facts that she had received from Ellington as he had nursed her and assisted her back to health as well as he could for the last three weeks from their apartment.
The killer’s name had been Thomas Hamel. He had been born and raised in a rural community in Virginia where he attended a Baptist church with his mother and then, after his parents’ divorce, a Catholic church with his mother. In each church, he had witnessed grotesqueries that he had written about at length in journals found in his apartment in Georgetown. At the age of ten, he’d seen a fistfight erupt in his church when it was discovered that a deacon had been sleeping with the pastor’s wife. The church had split and friendships had dissolved right in front of his ten-year-old eyes.
Then at the age of thirteen, when getting involved in his mother’s Catholic church, rumors of sexual abuse had started flying around. And while there had never been any proof, two church leaders had stepped down amidst the allegations. Taking this as basically an admission of guilt, Hamel and a few of his friends had been caught spraying graffiti on the front of the church.
Nothing much had happened after that. Hamel had attended college, become involved in a church, got married, had a divorce, and, somehow, had ended up trying to start up his own church. It never got off of the ground and afterward, when he applied to two separate Bible colleges, he was turned down.
Aside from the vandalism charge as a teen, Hamel had no record to speak of. But the journals uncovered in his apartment spoke of hatred towards “fake Christ-followers and apologists” while also speaking of his love for and desire to glorify Jesus Christ in any way possible. He also spoke of his admiration for certain religious leaders in the area; the names of Fathers Costas and Coyle, Pastor Woodall, and Reverend Tuttle were among them.
And that’s where things got really chilling.
Hamel had listed fourteen religious leaders and fourteen churches in his meanderings. He had full intentions of killing fourteen religious leaders and then turning himself in—his own form of “crucifixion.”
As for Tim Armstrong, the man who had nearly become Hamel’s fifth victim, he would soon be going in for the second of three surgeries on his right hand. He’d likely never have full use of the hand but it seemed as if the doctors would be able to salvage it.
Hamel left no family; no children and an ex-wife who seemed to not really care about his death when the bureau had notified her.
The guy’s whole life, right here in a few sheets of paper, Mackenzie thought. And it’s over…just like that. One bullet…that I fired.
She didn’t regret it. She knew full well that in the fight she’d had with him, he would have killed her if she had not managed to come out on top. But she looked back to the reports of his childhood—how a kid had been so affected and skewed because of the church’s influence on him.
“Hey, you,” said a voice from her doorway.
She looked up and saw Ellington standing there.
“Hey,” she said.
“Um…so what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you crying?”
She had no idea she had been crying but the moment Ellington pointed it out, she could feel the tears flowing down her face. She wiped them away, embarrassed, and shrugged.
“I don’t know,” she said.
He came into the room and saw the documents on her desk. “Don’t do that to yourself,” he said. “He’s dead. And because you stopped him, there are ten men that are still alive. He would have killed all of them. Don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Look…I just talked to McGrath,” Ellington said. His voice was heavy and somber. “He wants me and you in his office as soon as possible. You got a few minutes?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking to the documents on the desk. She’d actually be glad to step away from them for a while. “You know what it’s about?”
“Sort of. Just…come on.”
This can’t be good, she thought. Sure, I know this blow to my head had everyone scared for a day or two, but surely this isn’t some request to slow down…is it?
As they rode the elevator up together, Ellington placed a reassuring arm around her. She leaned into him, trying to understand why she had been crying in her office and having no awareness of it. There was something about it that was scary.
They arrived at McGrath’s office and found him simply sitting at his desk. There was a single file folder in front of him. When they entered, he looked up at them with his usual no-nonsense sternness.
“Thank you, Agents,” he said. “Have a seat.”
They both sat in the chairs in front of McGrath’s desk. It was becoming an all too familiar feeling to Mackenzie. A small part of her still felt the way she had the first time she’d been in this office—like the grade school kid who had just been sent to the principal’s office.
“White, let me start by saying this…you were absolutely right about that last case. I was distracted by something else and just…well, my priorities were fucked. You did an amazing job and I apologize sincerely for sending you out to that church alone. You continue to impress me and all I can do is continue to offer my apologies.”
“Thank you, sir. That means a lot.”
“Well, I’m letting you know that because in terms of me being distracted and irritable, there was something else brewing under it all—another case that came to my attention while you were tracking down our killer.”
“What kind of case?”
McGrath looked uncertain—an emotion that made him look about ten years older. He let out a sigh that was pure nervousness.
“White, what I’m about to tell you, Agent Ellington already knows. And he knows because I have told him. And I explicitly ordered him not to tell you. Or anyone else for that matter. But now that you seem to have healed and in light of recent intel that has come across my desk, I think it’s time to fill you in.”
“What’s going on?” she asked.
She eyed Ellington suspiciously. She hated the fact that she felt betrayed because he had been keeping something from her. She always tried to put her professional leanings over the emotional side of things but still, the sting was there.
“Even after you came back from Nebraska, things continued to sort of slide downhill,” McGrath said. “I was preoccupied with it, knowing I’d have to tell you. Look…the FBI field office in Omaha got a break six days ago. There was a fingerprint found on Gabriel Hambry’s jaw. That print was followed up and they discovered that it belonged to a man who had recently committed suicide. That man’s name was Dennis Parks.”
“Am I supposed to know that name?” she asked.
“Probably not. But I just received the report this morning that Par
ks was a fifty-nine-year-old who once worked with your father.”
Mackenzie felt like the floor had fallen out from under her. No, she did not recall the name Dennis Parks, but for there to be such a huge connection to her father…it was beyond anything she’d been expecting.
“There’s one more thing,” McGrath said. “Those vagrants that were being killed…they weren’t just vagrants. There’s more to it than that. And even now, as we get more information, it doesn’t quite make sense.”
“I don’t understand,” Mackenzie said.
Her head was hurting and she felt herself getting emotional. McGrath looked at her with a reserved sort of resignation.
“I’m sending you to Nebraska,” he said. “I want you to be fully dedicated to this case and I want answers. It seems like this is getting much bigger than we had expected.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “What about the vagrants? And exactly who is Dennis Parks?”
McGrath started speaking, answering her questions. And the deeper he got into it, the easier it was for Mackenzie to look beyond the pain in her head. She took in every bit of information and, for the first time since visiting Nebraska a few weeks ago, she felt that the end of her father’s case was near.
And this time, by God, she was going to make sure it reached its conclusion.
NOW AVAILABLE!
BEFORE HE HUNTS
(A Mackenzie White Mystery—Book 8)
From Blake Pierce, bestselling author of ONCE GONE (a #1 bestseller with over 900 five star reviews), comes book #8 in the heart-pounding Mackenzie White mystery series.
In BEFORE HE HUNTS (A Mackenzie White Mystery—Book 8), victims are turning up dead in FBI Special Agent Mackenzie White’s home state of Nebraska—all shot in the back of the head, and all bearing the card “Barker Antiques.” The same card her father’s murderer left on his body years ago.
With a sudden urgency in the present, the time has finally come for Mackenzie to face her ghosts, to face her darkest past, and to find her father’s killer.