“You bring us dinner?” Ellington asked, pointing to the plastic bag she carried in.
“No. What I’m bringing us is a clear link between the Salem, Oregon, cases and our two murders.”
She then filled them in on her conversation with Debbie Barker and the time she had spent with Detective Hall. As she went through it all, she set the play pitcher and plate on the table. As she did, Rising slid two pictures on the table as well. Someone had apparently recently taken pictures of the little teapot and the doll that had been found at the Newcomb and Locke murder scenes.
“I’ll admit,” Rising said, “I thought trying to follow a trail based on a doll and a teapot was a little farfetched. But this sort of seals it for me.”
“Yeah, she’s pretty good like that,” Ellington said with a wink toward Mackenzie. “Any thoughts on what we’re going for here, Agent White?”
“Teapots and plates and dolls suggests to me that the killer has some weird tea party theme in mind. Why? I have no idea. And why leave them so easily out in sight? He wants us to see these things, but why?”
“Living out some messed up childhood fantasy?” Rising suggested.
“No clue,” Mackenzie said. “But I think we have to at least consider that possibility. Plus, as strange as the connections may seem, we now know two things about him. He likes to store his victims in their own storage units, and he has a thing for tea party–related items.”
“Meanwhile,” Ellington said, “we’ve been trying to figure out a pattern to where he might strike next. There are twenty-one storage unit complexes in the city and another twelve in surrounding smaller towns. Sadly, two existing sites just aren’t enough to triangulate on anything. We can’t predict anything yet.”
“Any idea why he’s choosing storage sheds at all?” Rising asked.
“No, but it’s a great question,” Mackenzie said. “It could be because they feel so isolated and confined.”
“They?” Ellington asked. “You mean the storage units or the killer?”
She’d meant the units but the way Ellington phrased the question made her wonder. Surely if a killer was sticking to small spaces to store his dead and then leaving playful keepsakes at the scenes, there had to be a psychological aspect to why he was doing these things.
“Did you get any feeling as to why the killer wrapped things up in Oregon?” Rising asked.
“Well, it’s a much smaller area in Salem. Eventually, the net would have grown too tight as he ran out of storage complexes to use.”
“And he still racked up five bodies,” Ellington said. “With a city the size of Seattle, there’s no telling how much he can get done.”
“So what the hell do we do?” Rising asked.
“How much manpower can you give us?” Mackenzie asked.
“As much as you need.”
“Good. I think it might be unrealistic to keep an eye on every storage facility in the area. But I do think every owner should be notified. They need to know to take extra security precautions. They need to know what’s going on, but without spooking their clientele. But for now, I’d like to revisit something Agent Ellington asked…about if I was referring to the storage units as isolated and confined or the killer. What if the killer feels that way? What if it’s an aspect of his personality that he’s reflecting in the murders?”
“That’s deep shit,” Rising said.
“It is. Do you guys have a psychologist on staff here?”
“No,” Rising said. “But we do all see the same shrink. An older lady that specializes in working with law enforcement and soldiers with PTSD.”
“Would you be willing to call her as soon as possible to see if she’d speak with me? If she can do it in the next few hours, that would be ideal.”
“Sure thing,” Rising said. He waved to the other officer to follow him. They left the room quickly, leaving Ellington and Mackenzie to themselves.
Mackenzie surprised herself when she practically marched across the room and kissed Ellington. It was no innocent little hello, how are you sort of kiss, either. It was a passionate one that spoke volumes. He returned it, if not a little hesitantly, and when she felt his hands at her back, she felt herself relaxing.
Ellington broke the kiss after about five seconds. He looked at her, amused and curious. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just…some of the stories I heard today in Salem were rough. And then I got in here and saw you hard at work…I just needed to kiss you. Is that okay?”
“That is absolutely okay,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be better when we can summon up a tangible lead in this case. I hate to sound defeatist, but I’m not getting a good feeling about this one.”
“Yeah, it’s not looking promising, is it? I hate these cases where you almost have to have someone come up dead in the hopes of getting more clues.”
The weight of that remark hung between them. She kissed him once more, this one nothing more than a peck on the cheek, and sat back down. She stared at the little plate and teapot as if willing them to offer up answers from their pasts.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Having heard about the two recent murders, the police psychologist had seemed pleased to meet with Mackenzie and Ellington. She volunteered to meet with them over a late dinner around eight o’clock, which had Mackenzie and Ellington rushing back to their hotel. Mackenzie loved to travel but the one thing she did not like about it was the stagnant feeling she sometimes felt on her afterward.
While Ellington checked his email and fielded a call from Deputy Rising, Mackenzie hopped in the shower. As she washed, she could not get the haunted look in Detective Hall’s eyes out of her mind. She also clearly saw the interior of that last ramshackle storage unit gone to waste and something about it chilled her.
She thought of a killer checking out the sites of his abductions, already planning to take them elsewhere as a final resting place. That meant he was having to travel with them, to haul them from one place to the other. And based on forensic results, they were all betting on the victims being alive when they were dumped.
Unless he’s waiting on them at the units and then attacking them there, she thought.
It was a good theory, but the video evidence from the Claire Locke murder did not support it. For someone to have gone to the complex and waited for her and then left, that meant the footage would have shown the same car coming and going, as well as showing Claire Locke arriving but not leaving afterward. And there was no such occurrence on that footage.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the shower curtain sliding open. Startled, she turned and saw Ellington. He was peering in at her, just as naked as she was.
“You clean yet?” he asked.
“Yeah, almost done.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed. He started to close the curtain back but Mackenzie stopped him.
“It’s a shower,” she said, pulling him in. “It won’t take much to get clean again.”
Smiling, he joined her and they picked up where they’d left off in the conference room.
***
The psychologist’s name was Janell Harper. She was sixty-one but looked fifty and when Mackenzie and Ellington met her at the restaurant of her choice for dinner, she was enjoying a glass of red wine while reading something on her phone. She looked up at Mackenzie and Ellington as they sat down and Mackenzie decided at once that she liked her. Harper did not bother with a fake smile or pleasantries. She knew why they were here and didn’t bother pretending that everything was fine.
“Thanks for meeting with us,” Mackenzie said. “I know it was very last minute.”
“Not a problem at all. I’d heard about the one murder…but this second one was news to me. Are you suspecting a serial killer?”
“We know it’s a serial,” Mackenzie said. “He’s done this before, in Oregon. Five victims and he was never caught.”
“My God,” Harper said.
> “It was the same in Oregon,” Ellington said. “Bodies stored in storage units in an injured and bound state. They were left there to starve or bleed out—whichever came first.”
“What can you tell me about the killer?” Harper asked.
“Well, that’s why we came to you,” Mackenzie said. “He leaves his crime scenes clean. No prints, no hairs, nothing. He stabs them once in the upper stomach, the cut almost always in the exact same place. And then he leaves them.”
“Any signs of rape or molestation?” Harper asked.
“All signs point to no, but the pathologist hasn’t one hundred percent ruled it out.”
“He will, I suspect,” Harper said. “If there was sex involved, it would be evident. Anyone who binds and gags someone—it’s about control and dominance. So if he was having sex with the women, he’d humiliate and dominate them in that way as well.”
“He does seem to be leaving behind little puzzle pieces,” Mackenzie said. “A doll in one unit. A play teapot in another. Toy plates and pitchers in others.”
“That makes me think he’s either mourning or celebrating something from his childhood. He’s trying to get a tea party together. While the act may seem morbid to us, we have to peek into the mindset of someone who has no problem capturing, binding, and killing women. This tea party he seems to want to set up may be the key. Of course, it’s just symbolic. But he may not know this.”
She stopped here, as the waiter came by the table and took their orders. Mackenzie realized that she was ravenous and ordered a surf and turf dinner. And she was already considering what she might have for dessert. With their orders placed, the waiter left them alone again. Mackenzie picked up exactly where they had left off.
“When you think of the storage units as the location for the end game of each murder, what do you see in terms of personality?” Mackenzie asked.
“Well, it’s very interesting because it could go one of two ways. My first instinct is that he has a hoarding mentality—that the concept of keeping things stored in safe places where they are easily accessible appeals to him. But even that in and of itself is contradictory because as a general rule, hoarders aren’t much for organization.”
“So you think he enjoys the idea of keeping his victims in a place where he can easily find them later?” Ellington asked.
“Perhaps. But I feel that my first instinct might be closest to the truth. If he’s leaving these women unattended in storage units, it might be because he fears them getting lost elsewhere. And when you tie the tea party paraphernalia into it as well, I think it points back to where he grew up. I’d bet you the bill for our dinner that the killer grew up in a house that was very messy and cluttered.”
“That makes sense, but it doesn’t really help us profile the killer.”
“Sure it does. A bit, anyway. Your killer is likely not a very messy person. It might be why he only stabs them once and leaves. It also suggests that he might be storing them in these units because he doesn’t want their bodies to make a mess anywhere. His house, his car, even the victims’ homes.”
“It would also explain why he’s not leaving any physical traces behind at the crime scenes,” Ellington said.
“Tell me…of the storage units you’ve seen him use, were they tidy or just crammed full of stuff stacked haphazardly to the walls?”
“There were one or two that I wouldn’t have considered immaculate,” Mackenzie said. “But for the most part, yes…they’ve been well organized and tidied up.”
“It makes me wonder if they were like that before the killer used them,” Harper said.
“You think he’s cleaning the place after he stabs them?” Ellington asked.
“I think it’s a possibility. I have a storage unit myself. So does my mother-in-law. Neither of them would be considered clean. I know where everything is, but it’s still nothing more than a vaguely organized chaos. I won’t make such a brash assumption and say that all storage units are like that, but I would venture a guess to say that more are disorganized than not.”
It certainly gave Mackenzie something to think about. She wasn’t sure if it helped to develop a profile on the killer or not, but it did open up a whole new perspective on the case.
“There’s another thing I wonder if you’ve considered,” Harper said. “Profiling aside, the killer might very well be using the storage units because of how infrequently they are used. I hate to put the idea in your head if it isn’t already there, but what if there are more out there? Many more? And it’s just a matter of someone finding them?”
“Cold cases,” Mackenzie said, feeling absolutely inferior in the moment. “Missing persons reports.”
“Shit,” Ellington said.
It wasn’t exactly an avenue they had missed, but one that had been staring them in the face and had simply not yet been noticed.
“Please know,” Harper said, “that I don’t offer that suggestion under the assumption that you’re not doing your job well. But if we’re going with the line of thought that this killer had some sort of aversion to messiness or even clutter, he’d opt for locations that would go undisturbed for quite some time. Sure, he could dump them in the woods, but the woods in and of themselves are quite messy.”
“And I guess it’s harder to have a tea party out in the dark woods,” Ellington said in a joking tone.
“You jest, but there’s something to that. This killer wants things clean. Organized. Undisturbed. But the tea party aspect insinuates that there’s something more to it. Something he maybe missed out on as a child as a result of a messy home or a lack of organization.”
Mackenzie’s mind was reeling, trying to connect trains of thought so they’d all run on the same track. Nothing Janell Harper had given them were huge revelations by any stretch of the imagination, but it did give Mackenzie many new angles to view the case from.
Their dinner arrived, and Mackenzie ate as quickly as she could without seeming too unladylike. The conversation did not stall, but they only discussed the two Seattle murders in more detail. Every new detail they gave Harper only had her nodding, reinforcing her sketched-out profile.
Mackenzie was already thinking of cold cases and missing persons reports. She knew that even one missing persons report or abduction account could very well lead them to the killer. Unfortunately, in a city the size of Seattle, finding one case to connect to their killer would not be easy. But they had to start somewhere.
With this plan hatching in her head, Mackenzie slowed her eating a bit. She decided to enjoy it…because she had a long night of digging ahead of her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mackenzie and Ellington headed back to the police station directly after their dinner with Janell Harper. While Mackenzie connected her laptop to the department’s network, Ellington called up Deputy Rising to see if he wanted to lend a hand. Within half an hour, they had a little information center set up in the small conference room. Rising had enlisted the help of two other officers, a female officer named Dentry and an aging man named Willard.
As the first hour passed, Mackenzie had the printer humming, printing out case files and reports. She also had the whiteboard mostly covered in notes. She and Ellington were working on collecting cold cases within a thirty-mile range over the past eight years while Dentry and Willard looked over any missing persons cases within the past year. They identified seven possible cases that fit the description—women between the ages of eighteen and fifty—and started to dig into them.
Meanwhile, Rising was looking deeper into the rental process for the storage unit complexes that Claire Locke and Elizabeth Newcomb had been discovered in. The hope was that they could perhaps find some clues, no matter how small. How long had they been renting the unit? Did they pay on time? Had either of the women complained about possible break-ins to their units?
It wasn’t the most glamorous way to crack a case, but Mackenzie had always appreciated the old-fashioned art of sitting down and just drowning in r
esearch. Sometimes it wasn’t a high-speed chase or last-minute thrill that cracked a case; sometimes it was simple research.
At 9:55, Officer Dentry brought a two-page file to Mackenzie. She looked a little relieved, as if she was holding in excitement. For a moment, Mackenzie wondered if the woman had managed to find the clue that was going to help them find the killer.
“This file is on a woman named Angela Hernandez,” Dentry said. “She was reported missing eight months ago by her husband. Of the seven active cases we came across, she most closely resembles what we’re looking for. She rented a storage unit over at U-Store-It.”
“Do we know if any family members cleaned it out after her disappearance?” Mackenzie asked.
“No way of knowing,” Dentry said.
“Get a man named Ralph Underwood on the phone. He’s the owner of U-Store-It. Tell him that Agents White and Ellington need to know everything there is to know about the unit belonging to Angela Hernandez.”
Dentry nodded and as she left the room, another thought occurred to Mackenzie. As odd as it seemed, speaking with Janell Harper had unlocked some mental door. She was now allowing herself to explore the case from all angles and it was unearthing new ideas.
She took out her phone and dialed up a number she had been given earlier in the day. It rang three times before Detective Alan Hall answered. “Hello?”
“Detective Hall, I’m sorry to bother you at such an hour, but I was wondering if you might be able to lend me some information on the storage unit cases. Something I overlooked earlier today.”
“If I know the answers, sure, I’d like to help however I can.”
“I’d like to see if I can find out how long each unit had been rented by the victims before their deaths. I’d also like to know if they were rented in cash or with a credit card. Lastly, I’d like to know the names that they were rented under. Consider it a red flag if it was anyone’s name other than the victim’s.”
“Should be easy to get you that stuff. I’m pretty sure it’s all in the last case file that was put together. I’m at home, though. Let me call the station and get someone to email it to me. Give me half an hour or so?”
Mackenzie White 10-Before He Longs Page 7