by Blake Pierce
“Thank you, sir,” she said.
He only nodded at her and then closed the door. Mackenzie stepped down from his front steps and headed further down the street. She wondered how long it would take for Bryers to realize that she had stayed behind. A small part of her (perhaps the part that knew this disobedience could very well cost her a future within the FBI) wanted to switch her cell phone to silent so she’d conveniently not hear the phone if he called to ask just what in the hell she thought she was doing. But of course, that would be immature and she wasn’t going to run away from the trouble she knew full well she was creating for herself.
So she continued to go door to door. Out of the first five doors she knocked on, three were answered. One was answered by a young girl, surely no older than twelve. Right away, Mackenzie could hear the sounds of the girl’s parents arguing loudly in another room. The girl looked irritated and Mackenzie felt awkward over the whole ordeal. It was an awkwardness that she carried with her to the sixth house along the street, beginning to think that this whole thing had been a terrible idea on her part.
At the sixth house on her ill-advised search, she knocked on the door. She listened for motion on the other side and heard a woman’s voice calling out. “One minute!”
Mackenzie waited twenty seconds or so before the door was answered. An older overweight woman answered the door. She looked tired and exhausted from simply coming to answer the door.
“Can I help you?” the woman asked with a tired yet cheerful tone.
Very quickly, Mackenzie gave the woman the same spiel she had given the other two adults she had spoken with in the last ten minutes. The woman looked concerned as Mackenzie filled her in but shook her head.
“No. I haven’t seen anything like that,” she said. “Then again, I’m usually back in my bedroom. I’ve been bedridden for a few weeks now. I haven’t been feeling the best lately so I stay holed up back there.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Mackenzie said. Then, recalling how a very sensitive Becka Rudolph had complained that she was cold and distant, she added: “I hope the health problems aren’t too serious.”
“Not too bad,” the woman said. “Nothing some healthy food and a better lifestyle won’t change. I just really need to drop some of this weight.” The lady said it in a way that made it clear she never truly expected to do such a thing.
“Well, I wish you the best,” Mackenzie said. “Thank you for your time.”
“Of course,” the woman said. “I do hope you catch the man you’re looking for.”
Same here, Mackenzie said as she turned away from the woman and started back for the street.
As she took her first few steps, she thought she heard something…maybe nothing more than an additional thumping noise as the old woman gave her door a final push to close it. It was a muted noise, barely there at all.
You’re jumping at the slightest noise, she told herself. Don’t make a fool of yourself.
Still, Mackenzie stood there, motionless for a moment. She looked at the house, waiting to hear the sound again, but it never came.
What she did hear was her phone ringing in her pocket. She grabbed it and saw that it was Bryers.
“Shit,” she said.
She took a deep breath, gave the house a final look, and then answered the call.
***
Lauren Wickline opened her eyes and saw only darkness. She blinked rapidly, pushing panic away as she realized the darkness was natural—just the absence of light and not blindness. The last thing she remembered was a fist coming fast toward her. And now here she was, in the darkness.
She tried crying out but could not. She tried opening her mouth but there was something pressed against it. She experientially flicked her tongue forward and felt some sort of cloth pressed tightly to her lips. She felt something hard beneath her back and realized that she was lying down. She rolled over and got to her knees, then pushed up in an attempt to get to her feet. She made it about halfway before the top of her head struck something hard. It made her fall back down and she barely saved her face by throwing her arm out at the last minute.
I’ve been kidnapped, she thought almost absently. I knew I should have stayed away from this part of town…Damn it, Lauren, what were you thinking?
She could barely remember the face of the man at the door but she could remember feeling uneasy when he’d spoken to her. He’d attacked her and now here she was, captured and in some dark confined space that smelled like dust and dirt.
She told herself not to panic, not to start crying, but the tears were already there. As they came, another thought came to her.
He must have knocked me out. And if that’s the case, something must have stirred me up out of the darkness. I must have heard something. I must have—
And then she heard a woman’s voice. Lauren couldn’t make out any words, just slight murmuring. And then she remembered…like coming out of a thick sleep and trying to cling to the last remnants of a dream. The thing that had woken her up. It had been a woman’s voice. A fragile voice.
“One minute…”
That’s what she had heard. Someone had been shouting it. Someone close by.
In the dark, Lauren began to whine. Through the cloth that was tied around her face, it sounded almost like air escaping from a balloon. She tried to loosen the gag but it was too tight in her mouth, and the knot was small and tight and she couldn’t get her fingers to work against it. She looked through the darkness, her cries growing louder as she did her best not to surrender to the panic that was swelling up inside. Ahead of her, she could see the faintest little sliver of light. She crawled toward it, whining through the cloth. As she scrawled, she began to make more sense of the floor beneath her. It felt like unpolished wood. Here and there she also felt strips of dirt. It made her think that she was inside some sort of unfinished structure. But feeling the dirt, she imagined herself in a cellar where there were spiders and snakes in the corners, maybe creeping closer and closer to her.
She reached the sliver of light and saw that it was nothing more than a small amount of light being revealed through a small door. She fumbled at the door, looking for a handle, but there was none.
She slammed her hands against the door, feeling the same sort of wooden surface that was beneath her knees. She shouted as much as she could against the gag on her mouth. Her own muffled shouts rattled in her head but even in the enclosed darkness, she knew that it was not going to sound very loud to anyone on the other side of the door.
She paused and listened, again hearing the muffled sound of a woman speaking. It was still muffled but then a second woman responded. This woman was closer, her voice clearer and decipherable.
“Then again, I’m usually back in my bedroom. I’ve been bedridden for a few weeks now.”
Lauren thought she could imagine what was happening. Someone had knocked on the front door. The woman closest to her had said One minute! Now that woman was speaking with another woman. And maybe, Lauren dared hope, the other woman was here, looking for her. Maybe she could help.
Lauren slammed at the door until her hands stung. She felt one of her knuckles split open, blood flowing right away. She stopped banging when she realized it was doing no good. She backed up and turned herself around so that her feet were against the small door. She then drew her feet back and started kicking at the door like she was riding a bike—one foot after another after another.
There was no give to the door and she could barely even sense it buckling and shifting within its frame. She tried shouting again with one final kick that made her knee ache.
When she was done, she listened for the conversation of the two women.
But she fell into despair as she realized they had gone quiet.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Are you trying to get yourself kicked out of the Bureau?” Bryers bellowed into the phone.
Mackenzie hadn’t heard Bryers this angry before. Somehow, it was worse than hearing McGrath’s v
oice of rage. Maybe it was because Bryers had gone to bat for her like no one else had before and she felt like she had let him down.
“You said yourself,” Mackenzie argued, “that I had been placed into an impossible situation. I’m just trying to make it a little more manageable.”
“I am not your boss.” Bryers said, “but I am going to tell you right now that if you don’t have your ass back home within the hour, you’re going to be in a world of trouble. What the hell did you expect to do, anyway? Just hunt the guy down on your own?”
“No, I—”
“This whole time I thought the Scarecrow Killer praise had slid right off your back. But it seems it’s all gone to your head, hasn’t it? You’re not invincible, White. And maybe you’re not as good as everyone keeps telling you…you’re certainly not as smart as I thought you were.”
“Are you done, Bryers?”
He gave an exasperated laugh. “No, I’m good. I’m afraid it might be you that’s done, White. And I hate to do this, but if you don’t give me your express word right now that you’re going back home, I’m going to report you.”
“Fine,” Mackenzie said, not caring that she sounded like a spoiled child. “I’ll head to the car right now and if the killer is here and we give him a few more hours to land another victim, then what?”
“That’s not for you to worry about,” Bryers said.
Mackenzie was so frustrated with the answer that she hung up on him. She pocketed her phone and although it sickened her to do so, she turned to head back for her car. She disagreed with his mindset but she knew that he was right. She was not only putting herself in potential danger, she was basically going out of her way to disobey a supervisor that was doing whatever he could to make sure she didn’t get expelled.
She made her way back down Estes Street. When she was about to cross over to Sawyer, which would lead her to her car on Black Mill Street, she stopped to let a turning truck pass by. The driver gave her a cursory glance, a stare that was on the verge of checking her out in a sexual way. She rolled her eyes at him, watched the truck pass by, and then crossed the street.
When she did, a realization struck her like a bullet. Something she had missed moments ago…just before she thought she’d heard the additional thumping noise as the old woman had closed the door.
She thought of the old woman and the very brief conversation they’d had. The woman had claimed to have been in poor health—well, not poor health but laid up at least. She’d also gone so far as to say that a healthier diet and lifestyle would do her some good. And she’d been overweight…by quite a bit.
It might not be too much of a stretch to think that she might have called on Dana Moore’s Natural Health Remedies for assistance. And if she’d not been feeling well, it might also make sense that she’d called upon Avon…if not to make herself feel better with the often-therapeutic assistance of makeup, but just to keep from leaving the house. Hadn’t Becka Rudolph even said something about Dana planning to visit some woman in this area that was overweight?
All of a sudden, that extra thump she thought she’d heard seemed a little more important.
Torn, Mackenzie again found herself at a literal crossroads as she stood at the intersection. She looked back toward the house where the old lady had answered the door. While she certainly hadn’t seemed like a killer, there could easily be much more to the situation than she could understand from having spoken to the woman for a total of one minute.
She was already here…and the house was almost within sight from where she stood. Would it really make things much worse to postpone taking Bryers’s advice for another five minutes?
She stood at the crossroads, torn, staring back at the house. Her future, she knew, was on the line. She could step forward, to safety.
Or back, to getting fired. To being sent back to Nebraska.
Mackenzie took a deep breath and silenced her phone.
She turned around and went back.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
When Mackenzie came to the yard, she stopped and examined the side of the house. From the right side, she saw nothing of interest. Just a mostly dead yard and a few long-forgotten pieces of lumber. She walked as casually as she could along the street until she got to the left side of the house. There, she saw what appeared to be an addition to the house that had been built on as an afterthought. It was made of plywood and had cheap-looking vinyl siding covering most of it.
From what she could tell, there were no windows on the addition. A single door sat in the wall to the left. A set of concrete stairs sat crooked on the ground below it. While the structure gave her no real cause for concern, she did find it odd and almost out of place. She also noticed that the bottom of the add-on was layered in a series of boards and what looked like some cheap sort of sealant that had been painted over with black paint.
She thought about calling Bryers to report this but knew that it would only invite him to get angrier with her. She was already stepping into the fire. It made no sense to help Bryers and McGrath stoke the coals.
Mackenzie looked away from the eyesore of the add-on and to the house’s front door. She supposed she could knock again and ask to come in so she could ask some more questions. But if there was something going on here, knocking would give away the element of surprise. The unfortunate run-down from the house on Black Mill Street was proof of that.
More aware than ever that she was completely unarmed, Mackenzie steeled up her courage and walked into the yard. She kept her eyes on the house, making sure no one was looking out at her through the windows or coming out of the front door. She slunk around toward the back yard, her eyes fixed on the back side of the house where the ugly addition that had been built on seemed to call to her.
***
His ma was out of her room. He guessed she was just hungry. It was dinner time and the only time she willingly came out of her dungeon of a room was to shove more food into her face. She was sitting on the couch when he walked in, giving him a thoughtful look.
“I’ll start on dinner in a second,” he said. He walked into the kitchen and set the bag he had brought in from the truck down on the table. When he’d put the teenage girl in the crawlspace, he’d realized that the gag he used was fraying. So he’d gone down to Wal-mart and picked up a few cheap scarves.
“You’re not my slave, Jim,” she said. “I can make my own dinner.”
“The last time you tried making dinner, you burned everything and the smoke alarms went off,” Jim said. “It’s okay. I’ll make it.”
“Okay,” she said absently.
This was the relationship they had. At some point during her fall in health and his realization that a life of love and marriage and socializing with other people was not for him, their roles had switched. She was very much the child now and Jim was the resentful parent that wished like hell things could be different.
As he pulled a box of spaghetti noodles from the cupboard, she called out to him from the living room. “Did you see any police cars on your way in?” she asked.
“No,” he said, his heart instantly blaring an alarm that seemed to pulse in his head. “Why would you ask that?”
“Some lady came by, said she was with the FBI,” Ma said. “She said they were looking for a fugitive that was on the run or something.”
He dropped the unopened box of noodles on the counter and walked quickly into the living room. “How long ago was this?” he asked.
She shrugged, as if she really didn’t care. “Five minutes ago?” she said. “Maybe ten?”
Jim thought about the woman he had seen on the street when he had turned off of Sawyer and onto Estes Street. He’d thought she looked out of place, almost like she was lost. He’d even grinned to himself when he wondered if she might be trying to sell something door to door.
“Is something wrong?” Ma asked him.
He dashed to the couch and spread the curtains open. The yard was empty, as was the street in front of the h
ouse (with the exception of his truck). There was so sign of the woman that he had passed—or any other people, for that matter.
Paranoid, he thought. This is a bad part of town. There’s about a thousand reasons the FBI might be in the area.
He wanted to believe that, but something felt…wrong.
He tried to ignore it. He went into the kitchen and started boiling a pot of water for the spaghetti. But before the first of the bubble started to rise, a pit of worry started to form in his stomach. He stood there motionlessly, holding a frying pan from the cupboard.
He looked into the living room. His mother was looking through a magazine, zoned out.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, gripping the frying pan.
He felt sick all of a sudden. But under the broiling in his gut and the pressure in his head, there was also a sense of excitement. It was similar to the way he felt when he strangled the people he captured. It was that feeling that pushed him on through the back of his mother’s house and to his small addition.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Mackenzie approached the door and was not at all surprised to find it locked. The door itself was flimsy, made of a very cheap and hollow wood. When she rattled at the knob, the door shook slightly in its frame. She thought long and hard about simply kicking it down. One or two swift kicks would do the job.
If she’d had a weapon, she might have done that. She stepped away from the door and looked around the place. She went to the back of the building and saw more scattered lumber. Most of it was mildewed and rotten, having sat discarded ever since the addition had been made. She quietly hunted through the wood and found a solid portion of a two-by-four near the bottom. As she did so, the top of the pile slid off and clattered against the back side of the building.
The thudding noise the wood made against the exterior wall was eerily familiar.