Before He Takes

by Blake Pierce

  He started to get up from the ground, not seeing Ellington moving in to his left. Ellington also drew his gun and held it steady, inches from Young’s back. “Do what the lady says.”

  Slowly, Young placed his hands above his head and laced his fingers together. He was still hitching for breath from being dropped from the doorway, about three feet from the ground.

  “Trying to draw a gun on an FBI agent,” Ellington said. “What could you be hiding that’s so important?”

  “Fuck both of you,” Young said.

  “That’s not very nice,” Ellington said. “Agent White, if you’re okay here, maybe I’ll go take a look inside really quick?”

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  Moving quickly, Ellington went into the trailer. Within ten seconds, Mackenzie could hear an exaggerated whistling noise from Ellington. He was back out thirty seconds later, carrying a few glass vials and several small bags of what looked like either small crystals or large grains of sea salt.

  “Nice cheap little meth lab you have in there,” Ellington said.

  Mackenzie realized that this was the second drug bust they had inadvertently made in less than twenty-four hours. What are the chances? she thought.

  With her gun still trained on Mitch Young, she started to hear the sounds of sirens in the distance as Bateman and his men raced to the scene. In the isolated spaces within the trees off of State Route 14, it sounded almost like ghosts approaching.

  The positive takeaway was that they had captured another of Bent Creek’s main drug sources. The negative, of course, was that the containers out back were empty. Mitch Young was not their guy.

  She took a moment to look at the surrounding trees, wondering just how deep those woods went and how easy it might be for someone to hide there, watching traffic at night and waiting to strike one more time.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Outside of chain restaurants, Bent Creek had only two other options. Two hours after leaving Mitch Young’s residence, Mackenzie and Ellington found themselves in one of those options, a greasy spoon called Bull’s. It was a steakhouse that also specialized in ham-based dishes. Mackenzie thought it would be strange to live in a town known primarily for its slaughterhouse and regularly dine at a place like this.

  It was one of the main reasons she ordered a Cobb salad for dinner. Ellington had a burger, fries, and a cup of soup. As they dug into their meal, it occurred to her that they had not even really discussed whether or not to go out for dinner. It was an unspoken thing, an assumed decision that took no conversation. She’d heard about this kind of thing between partners before, but they were not partners. This was the first time they had spent any considerable time together, so being able to come to such conclusions in such a way was a little strange.

  “I think Bateman is starting to get pissed,” Ellington said. “I think he feels like we’re showing him up.”

  “Both of those arrests today were totally haphazard,” Mackenzie said. “We weren’t actively seeking to make those arrests.”

  “Yeah. But I get where the unrest would come from,” Ellington said.

  “You know,” she said, “I know it might ruffle some feathers in the community, but I think we’re getting to the point where we need to just get warrants and search every farm out here. Random unexpected drug busts are fine, but we’ve still got a man out there that’s been kidnapping women.”

  “It’s a thought,” he said. “There are eleven farms in a twenty-mile radius.”

  “Twenty-four if you spread it to fifty miles,” she said, one-upping him.

  “That’s a lot of police work,” Ellington said. “Bateman is a pussycat but I don’t know how he’d take to that. Especially since we’re making him look a little incompetent.”

  “Well, you and I can narrow it down to four or five,” Mackenzie said. “Bring Thorsson and Heideman along. It’s a start. Maybe that’ll ease Bateman’s mind over it.”

  “Call it in, then,” Ellington said. “I think Bateman has a thing for you, anyway.”

  “No way,” she said, between bites of her salad. “I’m pretty sure there’s a thing going on between him and Roberts.”

  “Yeah? How do you know?”

  “A woman’s intuition, I guess.”

  “Does that work for nailing ghostlike kidnappers?” he asked. “I guess not, huh?”

  “Not so much.”

  They finished up their dinner and drove back to the Motel 6. On the way, Mackenzie placed the call to Bateman. As Ellington has suggested, Bateman was not an instant fan of the idea.

  “Look, Agent White,” he said. “I get where you’re coming from. I really do. But if you start snooping around people’s farms just because we have no other leads, you’re going to get some honest and hardworking people riled up. Between you and me…the majority of the farms out here skirt some agricultural laws. Nothing terrible, mind you—just minor infractions. They all know it and probably wouldn’t take too kindly to the FBI snooping around.”

  Small-town mentality, she thought. It might be one of the reasons Bateman and his men were never able to locate the drug sources and make arrests; they were too afraid of stepping on toes and offending locals.

  “Look,” he said. “Let me make some calls around and see what I can do. Can we touch base on this in the morning?”

  She almost blurted out that waiting for the morning left an entire night for the kidnapper to strike again. Instead, she very calmly asked, “How many cars will be out on patrol tonight?”

  “Four at all times. I have some men working sixteen-hour shifts to make it happen.”

  “Well, give us a call of we can be of service.”

  Mackenzie ended the call and instantly noticed Ellington’s skeptical look. He had pulled into the motel lot, parking the car in front of their rooms. “Um, did you just volunteer me to help with scout duty on the back roads?”

  “Maybe.” She looked to her watch and added, “That gives us about four and a half hours to sleep.”

  “Well, before we do I think we should take a look at the topological maps the Bent Creek PD e-mailed me earlier. From what I can see on my phone, they did a great job. They even overlaid the roads onto it from another map. I really want to take a look at those dirt tracks with the chains in front of them.”

  “Good idea,” she said.

  They went to Ellington’s room, where he synced his phone to the iPad he sometimes carried around for reading and e-mails. As he pulled the maps up on the larger iPad screen, Mackenzie glanced around his room and wondered what it might be like to just stay here when they were done with the maps and coming up with any theories the maps might lead them to.

  “Okay,” Ellington said, pointing to the screen. “So here are the two little dirt tracks on State Route 14. This one right here dead-ends into what looks like just an empty field. It’s pretty damn close to where Mitch Young’s trailer is. This other dirt road, though…it looks like it might have branched off into other tracks or dirt roads at some point. See it?”

  Mackenzie did see what he was talking about. The dirt track stopped but then, a little bit further up on the map, seemed to pick back up and snake out in three different directions. Eventually, though, they all petered out into nothing.

  “No farms back there,” she said.

  “Well, not currently. But a property owner that may have once had a farm back there might be worth looking into.”

  “So we need to find out who owns the land back there,” Mackenzie said. “But if I’m being honest, that feels like a long shot, too.”

  “Definitely,” Ellington said. “But I’m still going to keep kicking every rock I can to see what’s underneath.”

  “Ah, you and your rocks,” she said with sigh.

  “It’s something I’ve always thought was a good way to look at investigating,” Ellington said. “One of the many nuggets of wisdom I took away from my training.”

  “How long have you been an agent, anyway?” Mackenzie ask
ed.

  “This will be my sixth year.”

  “And have you ever been stumped like this before?”

  “A few times,” he said. “But in every case but one, we ended up getting our guy.”

  “What was the one case you didn’t?”

  Ellington gave her a perplexed look and she nearly recanted the question. But he smiled and sat on the edge of the bed as he started to answer.

  “My third year as a field agent, I was tasked with helping track down a guy that was taking pictures of women leaving work, printing them out, and then mailing the pictures to them. Only he had defaced the pictures. Drew pornographic things on them, punched out the eyes in the pictures, that sort of thing. Just as I joined on, he sent a picture to a woman—a mother who had lost her daughter the year before. Her kid went missing and then turned up six weeks later, dead in the Hudson River. The picture the guy sent her was a picture of her daughter. She was wearing the clothes she’d been in on the day she went missing and was bound and gagged in the picture. And that was the last we ever heard from him.”

  “No more letters after that?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Nothing. We looked for that bastard for six months, trying to figure it out, and to this day, we don’t have the first clue. I see—shit, never mind.”

  “No…what? You see what?”

  He hesitated for a moment before he continued on. They both sensed that they were breaching some sort of line—going deep in a rather quick fashion.

  “I see that picture sometimes,” Ellington said. “Of the little girl. She was seven years old. I see the picture he sent the mother sometimes and I want to puke. It makes me sick that we never came close to catching him.”

  “I guess that case is haunting you right now, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yeah, it is.”

  She realized that she had subconsciously taken several steps closer to him. She was standing directly in front of him and he looked up at her from his place on the bed. She saw a bit of pain in his eyes as he recounted the story.

  Slowly, she reached out to him. She ran her thumb along the side of his face. He took the hand by his face and ran his fingers along the back of it. He then gently pulled her close to him as he stood up.

  They were face-to-face now, their noses nearly touching. The pain in his eyes was still there but was fading out. It was replaced by something else, some hopeful energy that made her feel warm.

  “Mackenzie,” he said. “I don’t know if—”

  He was interrupted by the ringing of a phone. It was Mackenzie’s, still sitting on the table they had viewed the maps on. She let out a shaky breath and chuckled.

  “I know, right?” Ellington said, giving her hand a squeeze. “Great timing.”

  “Probably for the best,” she said. She grabbed her phone and suddenly found it very hard to look at him. She made sure she had her senses about her and then answered the phone. “This is Agent White.”

  “White, it’s Bateman. How soon can you and Ellington make it to the hospital?”

  “I don’t even know where the hospital is,” she said. “Why? What’s happened?”

  “We’ve found Delores Manning.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Whatever little spark had nearly ignited between Mackenzie and Ellington was instantly put out as she relayed the news of Bateman’s call. The news was so monumental that they were able to totally sidestep the awkwardness of the moment as they headed out to the car and then sped to Cedar Rapids, where Delores Manning had been checked in an hour and fifteen minutes ago.

  Mackenzie continued to get calls as Ellington drove at speeds near ninety miles an hour toward Cedar Rapids. Some came from Bateman and others came from Agent Thorsson. Thorsson and Heideman had gone back to the Omaha field office earlier in the day and had offered to come back out. Mackenzie had politely declined the assistance, asking only for the details as they came in.

  The details were: Two police officers from the Cedar Rapids police department had come to the hospital with Delores Manning. She had been discovered by a switchman at the freight yard on the eastern end of Cedar Rapids. That same switchman had been punched by a vagrant, who was pursued and held by three other switchmen and was then properly arrested once Delores was found in the train car. She’d been badly beaten; the men who found her in the train car assumed she was dead at first.

  As Mackenzie and Ellington walked quickly into Mercy Medical Hospital, Ellington stood close to her, whispering softly.

  “I’ve let you lead this thing so far,” he said. “Are you okay with this? Questioning a woman who has just come to and is just now realizing what happened to her?”

  “Yes, I’ll be fine.” She knew he was just looking out for her, but she couldn’t help but resent the fact that he even had to ask.

  After getting Manning’s location from the front desk, they took the elevator to the intensive care unit. The moment they stepped out, Mackenzie spotted the two policemen by a door on the far end of the hall. She marched that way, already reaching for her ID. When the policemen saw her and Ellington, she saw the looks of relief on their faces.

  “I’m Agent White, and this is Agent Ellington,” she said as they all gathered at Delores Manning’s door. “How is she?”

  “The last report we got from the doctor said that she’s come around but is in pain. Her family has been contacted and a grief counselor is due in the next hour or so.”

  “Do you know if she’s in any shape to talk?” Ellington asked.

  Before either of the cops could answer, a doctor came striding over. He looked tired and a little out of sorts. He also looked a little annoyed that there was such a large group around the doorways of one of his patients.

  “I’d rather she not speak right now,” the doctor said. “She’s out of the woods, yes. But initial CT scans show a mild subarachnoid hemorrhage. If she’s too stressed or pushed too hard, there’s the risk of a stroke. There’s also the very real worry of edema—we’ll have to keep an eye on her in the next day or so to stay on top of that. And then there’s the minor skull fracture and concussion.”

  “Does she know what happened to her?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Mostly, yes,” the doctor said. “She remembers nothing of it, but she knew it as soon as she came to. The vagrant did a number on her. All tests show that the abuse was just the beating. We don’t see any signs that she was raped.”

  A small relief is still a relief, Mackenzie thought. “What about where she was before that? Does she remember that?”

  “Barely. God, it’s terrible. This woman has been through hell,” the doctor said. “She’s talked about bits and pieces—”

  “Doctor, I respect the health and well-being of the patient, as well as your job,” Mackenzie said. “But I believe Delores can provide us with information that might possibly lead us to two other women that have been kidnapped in the last few days. I need to speak with her as soon as possible. Of course you can be there. If you feel she’s at risk, you can tell me to stop and you’ll get no argument from me.”

  The doctor thought it over for a minute and slumped his shoulders. “At the first sign of distress, you’re done. Line your questions up now because I doubt she’ll last thirty seconds if she has to recall her trauma. I simply can’t risk a stroke.”

  “Understood,” Mackenzie said.

  With that, the doctor opened Delores’s door and led them inside. The two cops remained at their posts outside the door.

  Thankfully, Delores did not look quite as bad as Mackenzie had been expecting. Her head was bandaged heavily on the right side and there was a thin brace around her neck. There was a bruise on the right side of her face and red rings around her eyes that showed she had been crying.

  “Delores,” the doctor said, “these are agents with the FBI. They want to ask you some questions but I have told them that if you start to react a certain way, I am going to kick them out. Is that okay with you?”

  “Yes,” Delores
said. Her voice was ragged and weak. She looked at Mackenzie and Ellington with hope in her eyes as they came to the left side of the hospital bed.

  “Are you up to answering some questions?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Yes,” she said again. “My head is pounding despite the painkillers, but I’m mostly here.”

  “I’ll be quick,” Mackenzie said. “First, you should know that you were one of three women that have been abducted from backwoods roads within the Bent Creek area in the last two weeks. You were the second to be taken from State Route 14. As of right now, we have no idea where the other two women are. Is there anything you can tell us about where you were being held before you escaped?”

  “Some kind of barn or shed. I heard…grunts, squeals. That kind of thing. Animals maybe. I was being kept in like a box…a container of some kind. Maybe the kind that farmers use to carry animals down highways. Slats in the front.”

  “Do you remember exactly where you got on the train?”

  Delores shook her head. “It all looked the same, from what I can remember. Just trees. I think…yeah, I believe I could actually hear the train horn from time to time when he had me in that box.”

  “Do you recall how long you ran?” Mackenzie asked.

  “No. I mean…it wasn’t far. Maybe a mile. Maybe two? I’m just not sure.”

  “Did you see anything when you escaped?” Mackenzie asked.

  “I know I did but I don’t really remember. It’s all foggy. I remember another barn, I think. And…oh God. I forgot. Until now, I forgot.”

  “What did you forget?” Ellington asked.

  “When I got out of the barn…there was someone else screaming from one of the other barns. A woman. I talked to her briefly…can’t remember what I told her. But I didn’t have time to save her. I had to get away…”

  Delores started weeping and when she did, she grimaced. It seemed to Mackenzie that the act of weeping made her head hurt even worse.