by Blake Pierce
“Oh, hi.”
“Did I call too late?”
“No,” she said. “What’s up? Do you have something new?”
“No, I’m afraid not. In fact, I got word tonight that we won’t have the results on that wood until morning.”
“Well, at least we know how the day will start,” she said.
“Exactly. But listen, I was wondering if you could meet me for breakfast,” he said. “I’d like to go over the case details with you. I want to make sure we’re on the same page and not missing even the smallest detail.”
“Sure,” she said. “What time do you—”
She stopped here, looking toward her bedroom door.
For a split second, she’d heard something move out there. Once again, she’d heard that damned floorboard creak. But more than that, she’d heard a shuffling sound. Slowly, she got out of bed, still holding the phone to her ear.
“White, you still there?” Ellington asked.
“Yes, I’m here,” she said. “Sorry. I was asking what time you’d want to meet.”
“How about seven o’clock at Carol’s Diner? You know it?”
“I do,” she said, walking to the doorway. She looked out and saw only shadows and dark, muted outlines. “And seven sounds good.”
“Great,” he said. “I’ll see you then.”
She barely heard him as she stepped out of her bedroom and into the small hallway that led to the kitchen. Still, she managed to get out a “Sounds good,” before hanging up.
She cut on the hallway light, revealing the kitchen and making the living room look murky. Just like several nights ago, there was no one there. But, just to make sure, she walked into the living room and cut on the light.
Of course, there was no one there. The room offered no places to hide and the only thing unchanged about it was the missing Xbox that Zack had taken with him. Mackenzie looked around the room one more time, not liking the fact that she had spooked so easily. She even walked across the creaky board, testing its noise and comparing it to what she had heard.
She checked the lock on the front door and then headed back to her bedroom. She looked back behind her one more time before cutting out the lights and returning to sleep. Before she turned her lamp off, she took her service pistol out of the bedside drawer and placed it on top, within arm’s reach.
She looked at it in the gloom of the bedroom, knowing that she’d not need it but feeling safer that it was right there, in plain sight.
What was happening to her?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Daddy? Daddy, it’s me. Wake up.”
Mackenzie stepped into the bedroom and braced herself, turning from the sight of her dead father.
“What happened, Daddy?”
Her sister was in the room, too, standing on the other side of the bed, looking at their father with a disappointed look on her face.
“Steph, what happened?” Mackenzie asked.
“He called out for you and you didn’t come. This is your fault.”
“No!”
Mackenzie stepped forward again and then, knowing it was lunacy to do so, she still crawled onto the bed and snuggled up next to her father. Soon, she knew, his flesh would be cold and pale.
Mackenzie woke with a start, the nightmare jarring her awake at 3:12 AM, matted in sweat. She sat there, breathing hard, and despite herself, she started to cry.
She missed her dad so much that it hurt.
She sat there, alone, crying herself to sleep.
But it would be hours, she knew, before she fell back asleep. If at all.
In a strange way, she yearned to throw herself back into the case. Somehow, that was less painful.
*
When Mackenzie arrived at Carol’s Diner a few hours later, she was awake and alert. Looking across a small diner table at Agent Ellington, the idea of how much her nightmare had affected her, of how easily she had gotten spooked last night, was embarrassing. What in the hell was wrong with her?
She knew what it was. The case was getting to her, stirring up old memories she thought she had laid to rest. It was affecting the way she lived. She’d heard of this happening to others before but had never experienced it herself until now.
She wondered if Ellington had ever experienced it. From her side of the table, he looked well-polished and professional—the spitting image of what Mackenzie expected an FBI agent to be. He was well built but not massive, confident but not cocky. It was hard to imagine him being rattled by much of anything.
He caught her looking and rather than looking away embarrassed, she held his gaze.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing, really,” she said. “I’m just wondering what it’s like to know that with a single phone call, you can get the Bureau looking into something that it would take me several hours to convince the local PD to look into.”
“It’s not always that smooth,” Ellington said.
“Well, with this case, the Bureau seems motivated,” Mackenzie pointed out.
“The ritualistic set-up of the murder scenes practically screams serial killer,” he said. “And now, with another body discovered, it seems that’s exactly what we have.”
“And has Nelson been accommodating?” she asked.
Ellington smiled and it showed signs of a subtle charm lurking under his finely composed exterior. “He’s trying to be. Sometimes the small-town mentality is hard to break out of.”
“Don’t I know it,” Mackenzie said.
The waitress came by to take their orders. Mackenzie opted for a veggie omelet while Ellington ordered a huge breakfast platter. With that distraction over, Ellington clasped his hands together and leaned forward.
“So,” he said. “Where do we stand on this?”
Mackenzie knew he was giving her a chance to show him how she worked. It was in his tone and the slight smile that barely touched the edges of his mouth. He was ruggedly handsome and Mackenzie was slightly uncomfortable with how often her eyes were drawn to his mouth.
“We have to wait on the leads for now and really study them,” she said. “The last time we had what we thought was a promising lead, we were dead wrong.”
“But you busted a guy that was selling kiddie porn,” Ellington pointed out. “So it wasn’t a total waste.”
“That’s true. But still, I’m going to assume you’ve noticed the hierarchy of our local PD. If I don’t figure this out soon, I’ll be stuck in my position for a very long time.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Nelson thinks highly of you. Whether or not he’d admit it to the other guys, well, that’s a different story. That’s why he has me helping you. He knows you can get this done.”
She looked away from him for the first time. She wasn’t sure how she’d get this case wrapped up if she didn’t stop jumping at every little sound in her house and sleeping with her gun on the nightstand.
“I figure we start with the wood sample,” she said. “We visit whoever is the local supplier of that sort of wood, right down to how it’s sawed. If that doesn’t produce anything, we’re going to have to really start grilling the women that Hailey Lizbrook worked with. We may even have to get as desperate as to look through security cameras from the club she worked at.”
“All good ideas,” he said. “Another idea I’m going to pitch to Nelson is to have undercover officers on site at some of the strip clubs within a one-hundred-mile radius. We can pull some agents from the Omaha office if we need to. Looking back through old cases—which, I must say, you nailed right on the head during an earlier meeting according to Nelson—we may also be on the lookout for a man that’s pursuing prostitutes as well. We can’t just assume it’s strippers.”
Mackenzie nodded, even though she was beginning to doubt that the case she had recalled from the ’80s where a prostitute had been strung from a line pole was related to this case. Still, it was nice to have her efforts acknowledged by someone with experience.
“O
kay,” Ellington said. “So I have to ask.”
“Ask what?”
“It’s clear that you’re undermined at the local level. But it’s also clear that you bust your ass and know your stuff. Even Nelson has told me that you’re one of his most promising detectives. I had a look at your records, you know. Everything I saw was impressive. So why stay here where you’re sneered at and not given a fair chance when you could easily be working as a detective anywhere else?”
Mackenzie shrugged. It was something she had asked herself multiple times and the answer, while morbid, was simple. She sighed, not wanting to get into it but, at the same time, did not want to pass up the opportunity. She’d spoken about her reasons for staying local with Zack a few times—back when they had still been communicating—and Nelson knew some of her history as well. But she could not remember the last time someone had willingly invited her to speak about it.
“I grew up just outside of Omaha,” she said. “My childhood was…not the best. When I was seven years old, my father was killed. I was the one that discovered the body, right there in his bedroom.”
Ellington frowned, his face filled with compassion.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly.
She sighed.
“He was a private investigator,” she added. “He’d been a beat cop for about five years before that, though.”
He sighed, too.
“It’s my theory that at least one out of every five cops has some sort of unresolved trauma from their past that is related to a crime,” he said. “It’s that trauma that made them want to protect and serve.”
“Yeah,” Mackenzie said, not sure how to respond to the fact that Ellington had just sized her up in less than twenty seconds. “That sounds about right.”
“Was your father’s killer ever found?” Ellington asked.
“No. Based on the case files I’ve read and the little bit my mother has told me about what happened, he had been investigating a small group that dealt in smuggling drugs in from Mexico when he was killed. The case was pursued for a while but was dropped within three months. And that was that.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Ellington said.
“After that, when I realized that there was a lot of lazy, sloppy work in the justice system, I wanted to do something in law enforcement, to be a detective, to be exact.”
“So you achieved your dream by the age of twenty-five,” Ellington said. “That’s impressive.”
Before she could say anything else, the waitress came by with her food. She set the plates out and as Mackenzie started to dig in on her omelet, she was surprised to see Ellington close his eyes and say a silent grace over his food.
She couldn’t help but stare for a moment as his eyes were closed. She had not thought of him as a religious man and something about seeing him pray over his food touched her. She stole a glance at his left hand and saw no wedding ring. She wondered what his life was like. Did he have a bachelor pad with beer stocked in the fridge, or was he more of the type to have a wine rack and IKEA bookshelves lined with classic and modern literature?
She was working with an open book here. More interesting was how he had become an FBI agent. She wondered what he was like in an interrogation room, or in the heat of the moment when guns were drawn and a suspect was within a hair of either surrendering or opening fire. She knew none of these things about Ellington—and that was exciting.
When he opened his eyes and started eating, Mackenzie looked away, back to her food. After a moment, she couldn’t help herself.
“Okay, so how about you?” she asked. “What led you to a career with the FBI?”
“I was a child of the eighties,” Ellington said. “I wanted to be John McClane and Dirty Harry, only with more refinement.”
Mackenzie smiled. “Those are pretty good role models. Dangerous, but risky.”
He was about to say something else when his cell phone rang.
“Excuse me,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out the phone.
Mackenzie listened in to his side of the conversation, which turned out to be short. After a few affirmative responses and a quick Thanks, he killed the call and looked forlornly at his food.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “We’re going to need to box this up, though. The results from the wood sample came in.”
He looked right at her.
“The lumber yard it originated from is less than half an hour away.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mackenzie had always loved the smell of freshly cut wood. It went back to Christmas holidays spent with her grandparents after her father had died. Her grandfather had heated his house with an old wood stove and the back end of the house had always smelled of cedar and the not entirely unpleasant smell of fresh ash.
She was reminded of that old wood stove as she stepped out of the car and into the gravel lot of Palmer’s Lumber Yard. To her left, a saw mill was set up, running a huge tree down a belt and toward a saw that was roughly the size of the car she had just stepped out of. Beyond that, several piles of freshly downed lumber waited its turn for the saw.
She took a moment to watch the process. A loader that looked to be a mix of a small crane and a toy-grabbing machine lifted the logs and deposited them onto an archaic-looking machine that pushed them into a belt. From there, the logs were led directly to a saw which she assumed was adjusted for each log by a mechanism or control panel that she could not see from where she sat. As she turned away from this, she saw a truck going out of the lumber yard’s exit with a trailer of crudely cut timber stacked about twelve feet high.
Oddly enough, she thought of Zack as she watched it all. He had applied to work at a place like this on the other end of town right around the time he’d landed the job at the textile mill; when he’d discovered the rotating shifts available at the mill, he’d taken it, hoping for more time off. She thought he might have been good working with lumber; he’d always had a knack for building things.
“Looks like hard work,” Ellington said.
“Ours is pretty rough, too,” she said, happy to have the thoughts of Zack out of her head.
“That it is,” Ellington agreed.
In front of them, a basic concrete building was identified only by black stenciled letters over the front door reading OFFICE. She walked alongside Ellington to the front door and was once again taken aback when Ellington opened the door for her. She didn’t think she’d ever been shown such a display of chivalry or respect from anyone on the force since the first day she’d carried a badge.
Inside, the noise from outside was muffled to a dull roar. The office consisted of a large counter with rows of filing cabinets behind it. The smell of cut wood permeated the place and there seemed to be dust everywhere. A single man stood behind the counter, writing something in a ledger as they entered. When he regarded them, it was clear that he was a bit confused—probably by Ellington’s suit and Mackenzie’s business-casual attire.
“Hey there,” the man behind the counter said. “Can I help you?”
Ellington took the lead, which Mackenzie was fine with. He’d shown her the utmost respect and had more experience than she did. It made her wonder where Porter was. Had Nelson kept him back at the office to go over the photos? Or was he on interview detail, maybe speaking with Hailey Lizbrook’s co-workers?
“I’m Agent Ellington, and this is Detective White,” Ellington said. “We’d like to speak with you for a moment about a case we’re trying to wrap up.”
“Um, sure,” the man said, clearly still confused. “Are you sure you have the right place?”
“Yes, sir,” Ellington said. “While we can’t reveal the full details of the case, what I can tell you is that a pole has been found at each of the scenes. We took a sample from the wood and our forensics team led us here.”
“Poles?” the man asked, looking surprised. “Are you talking about the Scarecrow Killer?”
&nbs
p; Mackenzie frowned, not liking the fact that this case was already becoming a staple of public conversation. If a lonely man in a lumber yard office had heard about it, the chances were good that news of the case was spreading like wildfire. And among it all, her face was plastered to newspapers featuring the story.
Indeed, he looked her over, and she thought she could see recognition in his face.
“Yes,” Ellington said. “Have you had anyone out of the ordinary come by to purchase these poles?”
“I’d be happy to help you,” the man behind the counter said. “But I’m afraid it’s going to be something of a rabbit trail for you. See, I only receive and sell lumber from companies or smaller wood yards. Anything that leaves here is usually going to another lumber yard or to a company of some sort.”
“What sort of companies?” Mackenzie asked.
“It depends on what kind of wood we’re talking about,” he said. “The majority of my wood goes to construction companies. But I also have a few clients that are into wood crafting for things like furniture.”
“How many clients run through here in the course of a month?” Ellington asked.
“Seventy or so on a good month,” he said. “But the last few months have been pretty slow. So it might be easier to find what you’re looking for.”
“One more thing,” Mackenzie said. “Do you place any sort of markings on lumber that goes out of here?”
“For larger orders, I’ll sometimes place a stamp on one piece per load.”
“A stamp?”
“Yeah. It’s done by a small press I have outside. It puts the date and the name of my lumber yard on the piece.”
“But nothing engraved or carved?”
“No, nothing like that,” the man said.
“Would you be able to pull up the records on which clients have brought pre-cut cedar poles?” Ellington asked.
“Yes, I can do that. Do you know what size?”
“One moment,” Ellington said, reaching for his phone, presumably to pull up the information.
“Nine feet,” Mackenzie said, pulling the figure from memory.