Before He Preys

by Blake Pierce

  “What do you think?” Tate asked.

  Mackenzie took one last look at the bottom half of the face and then tossed the folder on the table.

  “I think I want to ride with you on the way to this raid.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  Mackenzie was coming to realize that every back road in and around Kingsville looked exactly the same; they were nothing more than long winding stretches of blacktop that meandered through the country. They were almost identical with the exception of a break in the trees for fields or smalls trips of land where houses had been thrown up. Riding in Tate’s passenger seat, she almost felt like she was on some strange roller coaster taking her over dips and rises into unknown places.

  Jimmy Gibbons lived down a lengthy gravel drive where a few other houses stood off of the road. The entire stretch of land looked like a trailer park, only with lower-class houses instead of mobile homes. Slanted porches, roofs in need of some work, ancient air conditioners hanging out of dingy windows, dripping pools of water onto the lawn. Tate pulled into a small dirt driveway in front of one of those houses with another car behind them, carrying Andrews and Roberts.

  “His supervisor says he’s tried calling three times and Jimmy never answers,” Tate said. “My bet is that he’s not here.”

  “Based on what happened to me and the circumstances you’ve already pointed out, we have the authority to go in anyway.”

  “You ever kicked a door down?” Tate asked, a bit sarcastically.

  “Yes, actually. More than I care to admit.”

  He parked the car and they got out together. The morning was quiet with the exception of a dog barking manically somewhere further off down the long gravel road they had come down. They waited for Roberts and Andrews to join them and then approached the dingy front porch as a foursome in a single file line.

  Mackenzie gestured for Tate to take the lead, wanting to give him full authority in his own backyard. He wasted no time, knocking hard on the door and instantly calling out. “Jimmy! Jimmy Gibbons! Answer the door!”

  The porch was quiet. Even the barking dog off in the distance fell silent. Mackenzie had been in this same situation enough times to sense that there was no one home. Tate looked at her and she nodded.

  “You have five seconds,” Tate yelled, “or we’re coming in regardless.”

  While Tate did not bother counting out loud, he did wait a full five seconds before throwing his shoulder into the door. He rebounded off if it, though it did buckle in its frame. Frustrated, he then drew his foot back and delivered a fierce kick. He staggered a bit but the door popped open, cracking the frame that held it.

  As Tate collected himself, Mackenzie stepped inside. She didn’t pull her Glock free, but her right hand habitually went to it and hovered there. Inside, she found a home that was not quite in a state of squalor, but one that had not seen a caring or loving touch in a very long time. The place had the smell of dust and old food. The living room, which was the first room from the front door, was furnished with an old stained rug, a recliner, a single lamp, and a television. DVDs were scattered here and there, as well as bits of newspapers and magazines.

  Slowly, Tate came in behind her. Andrews and Robert followed, flanking him and then heading elsewhere into the house. Mackenzie looked around the living room for a moment but found nothing of interest—certainly nothing that would pin three murders on Gibbons.

  She made her way into a small hallway off of the living room that led to one of the house’s two bedrooms. Andrews was already there, gingerly leafing through a few stacks of papers that sat on an old oak desk against the far wall.

  “Anything?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Just some really messed up drawings. He seems to be pretty gifted artistically. Just…well, fucked up in the head.”

  Mackenzie looked through the stack of papers and saw what he meant. There were profiles of faces that looked to have been shot in the head, portions of the brow and forehead missing. There were graphite sketches of bodies on the ground, pools of lead around them. Mackenzie wondered if these drawings were the imagined results of people falling from high places. She scattered them out across the desk. There were eleven of them in all and she took quick snapshots of each one with her phone.

  Other than the scattered papers on the desk, the room was uncluttered. The bed was made and the walls held not a single picture. A single dresser stood on the same wall as the desk. Mackenzie looked through the drawers and found only clothes (including lots of black hoodies as Tate had indicated) and, in one of the top drawers, a thumb drive.

  She took the drive out and showed it to Andrews. “Any chance you think there’s a laptop here?”

  “Doubtful,” he said. “If so, he should have sold the damn thing and got a better house. Laptop would be worth more than this dump.”

  Ignoring Andrews’s attitude toward the place, Mackenzie pocketed the thumb drive and checked elsewhere in the house. She went into the bathroom and looked for any signs of medications. There was no medicine cabinet, just a little plastic tote shoved in the back of the small linen closet. There was nothing in it other than over-the-counter meds and Band-Aids.

  Although Tate and his men seemed to conduct a thorough investigation of the house, Mackenzie followed behind them. The kitchen was sparse. There wasn’t even a table in it or the very small dining area that sat adjacent to it. The fridge was stocked with beer, milk, some cheese, and a partially opened container of bologna.

  In the other, smaller bedroom, she saw the only photograph in the place. It was a photo of a couple, hand in hand, walking along what appeared to be a pier. The photo was a bit older and the attire of the couple made Mackenzie assume it had been taken sometime in the early eighties.

  As she was looking at it, Tate came into the room. “It’s the only picture in the place,” he said. “That seem weird to you?”

  “Maybe a bit,” she said. “Depends on his personality, I suppose. Any idea who they are?”

  Tate shrugged. “I’ve only been in town for twelve years. I’m not one of those small-town sheriffs that know the town history and everyone’s family tree. If I had to put money on it, I’d assume it’s Jimmy’s parents.”

  “I’d make that same assumption,” she said. “Do you know anything about them?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. I can call down to the station and get someone to look into it, though. If you think it’s necessary. Maybe Andrews or Roberts will know something, too.”

  “Might not be a bad idea,” she said. “We need to know something about him other than he’s left-handed and hasn’t shown up to work in a week.”

  “Did you see the drawings in the bedroom?” Tate asked.

  She nodded and then showed him the thumb drive. “Found this, too. I didn’t see a laptop in your car. Did I miss it?”

  “No…no laptop. Just a tablet.”

  “I’d like to see what’s on this as soon as possible,” she said.

  “As soon as you’re done here, we can rush back to the station and get you a laptop. In the meantime, I can have someone digging up information about Jimmy’s parents and as much other stuff in his past as we can get.”

  “I think we’re good here,” she said. “I get the feeling he never really spent much time at home anyway.”

  She wasn’t sure if this was relevant to the case or not. It felt like the sort of place someone might simply check in and sleep and nothing else. She imagined Jimmy Gibbons out in the forests, perhaps studying Miller Moon Bridge and the water tower. Maybe he looked at them with the same discernment as someone who looked up to the night sky. Or maybe he looked to them as something else.

  And with that thought in her mind, she looked back to the photo of the couple on the wall. It seemed eerie in the absence of anything else within the house. When she turned away to leave, she felt as if the people in that picture were watching her go, their eyes settling in on her like they were waiting to tell her something.

  **
*

  True to his word, Tate had Mackenzie behind a laptop as soon as they got back to the station ten minutes later. He set it up in his own office, closing himself and Mackenzie in the office by themselves. There seemed to be a little jealousy among Andrews and Roberts, all of which did not affect Tate at all. Mackenzie realized that the more she got to see the sheriff at work, the more she appreciated him.

  She inserted the thumb drive and brought up the file directory. She felt a sickening dread in her stomach when she saw the directory. There were numerous JPEG icons; roughly one hundred of them in all. Apparently, Tate felt the same sensation at seeing the multiple rows of JPEGs.

  “Shit,” he said. “This is going to be bad, isn’t it?”

  She didn’t bother trying to soften things for him. Sure, there was always the chance that the pictures might be nothing more than porn. But so far, this case suggested that something so innocent was not worth hiding. No, she expected much worse.

  She clicked the first image and her hunch was proven correct.

  The first image showed a figure lying face down on concrete. Blood, bits of skull and gore, and other dark material littered the ground all around the body. The left knee was bent back, the right foot shattered. While she had no way of knowing for sure, she was pretty sure this was a body that had fallen from a great height.

  The second image was much of the same. This time, though, the body was lying on its side. The lower half of the face had essentially been pulverized. The victim appeared to be an Asian woman, relatively young.

  “Jesus,” Tate said from behind her.

  Mackenzie knew what the other images held, but she had to do her job. She had to be as thorough as possible.

  After several pictures, the means of death changed. The first dozen or so looked to be suicides via jumping. She ruled out the idea that they were all Jimmy Gibbons’s victims within five pictures. The backgrounds of a few of them showed entirely different cities. One was somewhere in Japan while another looked to be somewhere in New York if the signage in the background was any indication.

  Following the supposed jumpers, she saw images of other suicides. Gun blasts to the head, some with powerful guns. Slit wrists in a bathtub. She saw one where it looked like a man had tried to decapitate himself with a skill saw.

  “This guy’s a sicko,” Tate said. “How in the hell did he get these pictures anyway?”

  “You’d be surprised how easy it is to get this sort of thing online,” Mackenzie said. “A few of them are pretty clearly photos taken from crime scenes—probably even somehow taken from case files.”

  “But why?” Tate asked. He was no longer even looking at the pictures. Instead, he was facing the door, as if anxious to be away from the laptop.

  “Could be any number of reasons,” she said. “But based on these pictures, I think I do get a better idea of what kind of person we’re dealing with. And honestly, I don’t even know if any type of fear or appreciation of heights has anything to do with it. I think it’s about control and some sick fascination with the destruction of his victims. He’s trying to make as big of a mess as he can.”

  “So what the hell do we take away from this?” he asked.

  It was a good question, one that she was focused on enough to close out of the visceral and morbid pictures. “For some reason, it’s about gore for him,” she said. “Shock value. All of those pictures…the bodies were in terrible shape. I feel like most of them were either suicides or intentional violent crimes. But there was not one single picture of someone hanging from a noose, or slumped over dead in their car from suffocating on the exhaust fumes.”

  “So he’s not only killing these people, he’s trying to make a mess out of doing it,” Tate said.

  “Yeah, it seems that way.”

  “So how the hell are we supposed to know who the next victim is?” Tate asked. “Or where he’s going to strike next?”

  Before Mackenzie could answer, there was a knock at the door. Andrews opened it and peeked his head inside. “So, we got results on Jimmy Gibbons’s parents. And they’re pretty damned interesting.”

  “Spill it, then,” Tate said. “Don’t tease it! We don’t have time for that shit!”

  “Brian and Beth Gibbons—both died in a tragic car accident. They were crossing a small country bridge somewhere in the southern part of the state. There were icy conditions and they went skidding. The barrier along the side of the bridge was old and dilapidated and the car went right over. They fell seventy feet, straight into the water. The mom died in the water and the husband died in the back of an ambulance.”

  “So where the hell was Jimmy Gibbons when all of this happened?”

  “In the back seat. He was three at the time, in a car seat. The way the reports read, his mother died because she saved him. The father got himself and his both to safety. Jimmy was touch and go for a minute with a lot of water in his lungs but he pulled through.”

  “So you’re telling me,” Mackenzie said, “that we’ve got a killer throwing people from great heights that also had parents die from their own fall from a great height?”

  “Looks that way,” Andrews said.

  Mackenzie thought hard and no matter which direction her mind tried to go, the simplest solution seemed the most logical.

  “Sheriff, I realize you’ve got a small force here, but I think we need to stake out anything taller than fifty feet in this town.”

  “Well, that won’t be much. There’s the old Weldon Drugstore building and Glory Baptist Church. That bell tower is damn near seventy-five feet in the air, I’d guess. And there’s a bunch of old grain silos, but they’re all out of commission and I don’t even think you can get to the tops of them anymore.”

  “Start with the drug store and the church,” she said. “If you need to get the State guys on it, call them up.”

  “You think he’s going to do it again?” Tate asked.

  “I do,” she said, pulling the thumb drive from the laptop, the images still swimming in her mind. “And I think he’s going to do it sooner rather than later.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  While Tate was busy scrambling his small forces, Mackenzie sped back to the motel to meet with Ellington. When she entered the room, she found him diligently sitting behind the laptop, looking through the FBI database just like she had asked him. He looked tired and frustrated, telling her without a word how the search was going.

  “Nothing, I take it?” she asked.

  “There’s plenty, actually,” he said. “But filtering through it all would take a team. And it would be a long, grueling process. How about you? Any movement?”

  “It looks like we have a very solid lead,” she said. “Now it’s just a matter of finding him because he seems to have split his home within the last few days.”

  “Any likely spots for his next victim?” Ellington asked.

  “Just a few,” she said. “We’re looking into those right now.”

  “Anything I can do except sit here behind a computer?”

  “No. I can’t have you get into more trouble. Even if McGrath does know you would have come here, you have to play it smart. This harassment thing will blow over soon enough but you going in direct defiance of a suspension won’t go away so easily.”

  “I know,” he said with a sigh.

  “Look…I’ll send you over some pictures I took from the suspect’s house. Analyze them. Scrutinize the hell out of them. Let me know if you find something—anything—that might tip us off about any patterns or motive she might have. I haven’t had a chance to study them yet.”

  “Okay, I can do that. But look…I don’t know if it’s worth me hanging around much longer. I came last night out of protective instincts. And since you still haven’t answered the question I asked you last night…”

  “I didn’t, did I?” she said playfully.

  “No, you did not.”

  She simply nodded, kissed him on the side of the mouth, and headed for the
door. “I’ll send you those pictures within the next fifteen minutes or so.”

  As she made her way out the door, he called out to her. She wasn’t sure she had ever heard him say her name with so much concern in his voice. “Mackenzie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful out there.”

  “I will,” she said.

  They shared a heartfelt glance as she walked outside, leaving him alone with the laptop again. Knowing he was there but could not be by her side as she headed out to hopefully tie this case up made her feel impossibly lonely. And of course, his question from last night still weighed heavy on her heart.

  Marriage, she thought as she raced to her car. That came out of nowhere, didn’t it?

  It had. It was an unexpected surprise, but one that had her soaring on the inside. She was pretty certain she would say yes, but she could not have that significant life event altering her mental state while she seemed to finally be getting closer to the bottom of this case.

  So let’s go ahead and wrap the damn thing up, she thought as she got into her car and started the engine. She called Tate and as the phone started to ring, she could feel things moving forward—the ringing of the phone almost like a signal to start a countdown. She had felt this before and it usually proved to be right. With just about any case, there came a point where she could feel the end coming—for better or for worse. She felt it now, even as Tate’s voicemail picked up after just the second ring.

  You really need to upgrade that fucking phone, Mackenzie thought.

  She tossed the phone down. No sooner had it hit her passenger seat than it started to ring. She saw Tate’s number, calling her back. A little miffed, she answered the call.

  “Got an update for me?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Sorry I missed your call. This damned phone…” He stopped and sighed before continuing. “We’ve already got three men out by Weldon’s canvassing the place,” Tate told her through the cell phone. “I’m headed out to Glory Baptist Church with Officer Roberts right now if you want to join us.”