Before He Harms

by Blake Pierce

  “Any evidence that anyone attempted to scrub the paint away from the bumper?” Ellington asked.

  “They checked. There’s absolutely nothing. The fact the truck is pretty filthy isn’t helping either. The amount of dust and pollen may have actually made the paint harder to analyze. That’s what they tell me, anyway.”

  “Thanks,” Mackenzie said flatly.

  Burke nodded and left the room again. She did her best to stay focused on the task at hand, getting back to what they had been discussing.

  “You think you can get your insider to help? Even in the smallest of ways?”

  “If we act quickly, I think so. No matter how loyal these people might be, the fact that Cole has been arrested and we currently have another member in custody as well, it’s going to cause uncertainty. It just takes a few people to raise questions before everything will start to slowly unfold.”

  Amy suddenly sat bolt upright in her chair. She no longer looked tired at all. Instead, she looked nervous and energized. “Oh my God.”

  “What is it?”

  “My roommate. She’s going to be freaking out.”

  “I thought Bethany was your roommate.”

  “She was. But there’s another one. She’s….well, she had a much harder time at the Community than anyone I can think of. I need to call her.”

  Mackenzie handed Amy her cell phone. As Amy pressed in the numbers, she looked at Mackenzie and asked: “She won’t come out of the house, much less drive. Could we go pick her up?”

  “Of course.”

  Mackenzie waited, watching as Amy put the phone to her ear. About ten seconds later, Amy’s eyes narrowed and she looked at the phone as if it might explode at any moment. She pressed Redial and tried again.

  “She’s not answering,” Amy said as the phone stated to ring in her ear again. When it got to voicemail, she killed the call and pushed the phone back to Mackenzie.

  “What if they…?” Amy said.

  “Come on. Let’s go check. There’s no need to worry for right now, right?”

  “She would have answered the phone. Oh my God…”

  Mackenzie got up and headed for the door. Amy did the same, following slowly behind and doing her best to stifle her sobs. Heading for the door, Mackenzie sent Ellington a text to let him know where she was headed, not wanting to interrupt any progress he might be making with Barton.

  In the back of her head, Mackenzie knew it might not be the best idea to take Amy with her. If the news was indeed bad, there was no telling how Amy might take it. But the alternative would have been to argue with the girl about going with her and that was both time and effort Mackenzie was not prepared to waste at four in the morning.

  They left the station together, heading across the parking lot. The early morning hours were quiet and desolate, broken only by Amy’s quiet sobs.

  ***

  They had been on the road for only two minutes—roughly nine minutes from Amy’s house—when Amy started to talk. Mackenzie did not ask her or prompt her in any way. The young woman simply started to talk. By the time she got the first sentence out, Mackenzie realized she was venting. It was more or less an impromptu therapy session.

  “Shanda got it very bad,” Amy said. “A lot of the stuff I endured, she got it just as bad. Maybe worse. You can’t even imagine what it’s like. It’s living in horror every day, but doing it in this environment that is peaceful and quiet. And you never know when the abuse is going to come. Mostly it was at night, yeah, but every now and then it would be in the middle of the day.”

  She stopped here, gazing out the window as if trying to decide if she should keep going. She did not look in Mackenzie’s direction the entire time. It made Mackenzie realize how long all of this had been pent up. It had to be hard to release it all to someone who had never been through it all.

  “There was one day when I was sitting on the edge of the cornfield, shucking corn. Women did that sometimes, sitting at the edge of the field while the men worked. It’s weird as hell…in some respects they almost cherished women. In the Community, women were not meant to work hard or spend too much time doing work a man would be better suited for. It was usually just cleaning, feeding the livestock, shucking corn, things like that. But this day…one of my husbands decided he needed to get laid. And something had pissed him off earlier in the day—I have no idea what it was. So he came over to me, pushed me out of the chair, hiked my skirt up, and took me. Right there, out in the open. A few men watched it happen and…”

  “It’s okay,” Mackenzie said. “You don’t have to…”

  But Amy shook her head vehemently. She had to get it out.

  “When he was done, I didn’t even have time to really recover from the act and the embarrassment before one of my other husbands came to me. It was almost like he had to one-up the one before him. It was rough and it was degrading and when he was done, he just left me there on the ground. One of the other women came over to see if I was okay and when she tried to help me back to my house, her husband came over and slapped her. He yanked her away and left me to sort it all out on my own.”

  “Amy, how many men were your husband?”

  “There were three. Men can share the same wives, but they have to be in agreement. They do this so they can trade women around to sort of keep things fresh.”

  Mackenzie wanted to know more but she was aware that it would only anger her. And God knew she had enough of that surging through her at the moment. So she kept quiet, letting Amy control the tide of the conversation.

  It had come to the end, though, Amy having exorcised the demons she had managed to pull to the surface. It resulted in a very tense silence that lingered in the car until Mackenzie pulled the car to a stop in front of Amy’s house. She hadn’t yet placed the car into park before Amy was opening the passenger’s side door and scrambling out.

  Mackenzie parked and did her best to catch up to her. She nearly made it, sprinting up the sidewalk and reaching the porch steps just as Amy reached the front door. But Amy stopped before entering and it took Mackenzie about two seconds to figure out why.

  The front door was already open. It was opened only a crack, a little wedge of darkness revealed. Amy reached out to open it, a cry already starting to escape her throat.

  Mackenzie pulled her weapon and raced up the stairs. “Amy, wait—”

  But Amy pushed the door open. It would not open all the way. There was something on the inside pushed against it, preventing it from opening the entire way.

  Mackenzie caught sight of a small hand on the floor. She reached out to take Amy, but Amy had already seen it. She slipped away from Mackenzie’s grip and squeezed through the doorway. As Mackenzie followed, Amy fell to the floor and screamed.

  “Watch your eyes,” Mackenzie said. She reached for the light switch and flipped them on.

  The scene was simple, yet brutal. A young woman that Mackenzie assumed to be Shanda was lying on the floor. She was on her back, staring up to the ceiling. She’d been badly beaten about the head. A pool of very fresh blood surrounded it. The death was so fresh that Mackenzie noted the wound on the left side of the girl’s head that was still pumping out blood.

  “Amy, don’t look,” Mackenzie said.

  She reached down and attempted to pull Amy away. It took some prodding and strength, but the woman eventually came away from her roommate and friend. She let out a choked sob and started to fall in toward Mackenzie. Mackenzie, thinking Amy was coming in for an embrace of comfort, opened her arms.

  Instead of an embrace, she received a harsh slap right across her face. It staggered her for a moment and all of her instinct in training nearly had her respond in kind.

  “This is your fault, too,” Amy said.

  Mackenzie strongly disagreed but said nothing. She was still reeling from the unexpected slap across her face.

  “Because of you, they know about me. They know where I live and now Shanda is dead.”

  “Amy…they killed a
girl right there, out on your street several nights ago before we even got here. Did you ever think the escaped girls are inadvertently leading them here? Or it could be your insider, a woman that—”

  Amy reared back and brought another slap forward. This time, Mackenzie caught it with her free hand. She then holstered her weapon and gave Amy’s arm a slight twist.

  “Hit me again and I will arrest you.”

  “They know where I live! Shanda is dead, you’ve only helped them find me, and now they know where I live!”

  Mackenzie released Amy. She fell to the ground by her dead roommate and started wailing. Mackenzie felt her own heart sagging, her emotions strapping into a roller coaster with broken tracks.

  She pulled out her phone and when she called up Ellington, she was surprised to find tears in her eyes. She wiped them away and made sure her voice was ready to speak to him while she waited.

  “Everything okay?” he asked in lieu of an actual greeting.

  “No. Amy’s roommate has been murdered. And it’s very recent.”

  She looked down to Amy and the dead girl. She saw all the blood and started to feel that perhaps Amy was right. Maybe a great deal of this was her fault after all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  Mackenzie snapped awake at the sound of the door opening.

  For a moment, it took her a while to remember where she was. She saw Ellington’s face and was confused for a moment when he was not bringing Kevin into the room.

  Oh, this isn’t my bedroom. This is a spare office in the Fellsburg Police Station.

  She had no idea when she had fallen asleep. The last thing she could clearly remember was Amy sobbing hysterically as she and Ellington had brought her in. Currently, she and the Jane Doe were in holding while matters with Marshall Cole and Bob Burton were sorted out. It all came rushing back in a panicked blur.

  “Sorry,” she told Ellington. “I must have fallen asleep.”

  “You did. But it was for like ten minutes. I thought you’d want to know that we’re just about out of time with Marshall Cole. They’ve already started prepping the paperwork for his release. I imagine Bob Barton will be out soon after that.”

  This pissed her off, but she’d known it was coming. “We’ve got almost twelve more hours with Burton. What the hell happened?”

  “Just what we’ve been warned. Cole or his minions even mention religious freedom and you can hear the collective sphincter of the local law enforcement tighten up.”

  “There’s got to be some way…”

  “We’re working with the BP management to get security footage from the station. If we can get hard evidence that backs up the report that he had a crowbar and was coming after the girls, we can keep him longer. I don’t know what good it will do since he’s clearly not the killer. But the manager is already saying that the cameras don’t reach that far.”

  “Amy must have known that,” Mackenzie said. “That’s why she had Jane Doe hiding on that side of the building. She really didn’t want anyone to know what was going on…”

  “She doesn’t trust us, the police….no one.”

  “Well, can you blame her?” Mackenzie asked. “A man like Marshall Cole can’t be touched. He’s about to be released and head back to that violent brothel he calls a home.”

  Mackenzie checked her watch. It was 7:48. She was hungry but the thought of eating made her feel nauseous. Maybe some coffee would tide her over. Maybe it would wake her up and set her thoughts in order. With Marshall going back, it made things a bit more difficult.

  Actually, what made things very difficult was the fact that Bob Barton had been in the station, locked in an interrogation room, when Shanda had been murdered. It proved he was not the killer, leaving the question of why he had appeared out of the blue at the BP station with a crowbar in hand.

  She got to her feet and left the office with Ellington trailing behind her. Just as she was close enough to the break room to smell the coffee, her phone rang. It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet, and seeing McGrath’s name in the caller display sent a jolt of worry through her.

  Scary, yes, she thought. But at least it’s not one of the grandmothers again…

  She answered the call, the worry mingling with her hunger and exhaustion. She felt wretched.

  “This is Agent White.”

  “Agent White, can you please tell me what exactly is taking place down there?”

  Based on the curt question and the tone he used, she assumed that he already knew the basics. She wasn’t sure how, though. Not unless Burke or some other member of the Fellsburg PD had contacted him with complaints.

  “Well, sir, it seems that the little bit of information you sort of sidestepped giving us had to do with a religious community. Every single lead we’ve had has led us towards them and now we find ourselves with a fourth victim and a cult leader who seems to know his way around every question we can throw at him. Sir, did you know the depth of this group when you sent us down here?”

  “With all due respect, Agent White, you are in no position to ask questions. As a matter of fact, I want you to wrap up any loose ends in terms of paperwork and then come home on the next flight out. I’m pulling you and Ellington off of this case.”

  “You’re fucking joking, right?” Mackenzie asked. She didn’t realize until the question was out of her mouth exactly what she said. She knew if she had not been so tired and thinking with her right mind, she would have filtered such a comment.

  “I highly suggest you watch your tongue with me, Agent White. If you like, I can give you further reprimands when you get back.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. We haven’t slept in about thirty-two hours. But sir…what did we do to have you pulling us?”

  Hearing the question, Ellington gave her an expression that mirrored the brash question she had asked.

  “We’ve had complaints filed,” he said. “Two of them.”

  “From whom?”

  “You know I can’t give you the names. But I can give you the complaints that were filed.”

  As she was about to ask for the complaints, she looked ahead of her, toward the bullpen. She saw Marshall Cole sitting at a desk. He was answering an officer’s questions and the officer was typing something into a computer. Cole smiled at her and it told her everything she needed to know.

  The bastard was about to be released—and about two hours early.

  “What complaints?” she asked through gritted teeth.

  “Well, the first one was concerning your arrest of the leader of the Community. We have multiple witnesses who live on the grounds who say you were incredibly rough with him. That you basically berated him in front of his people.”

  “Well, I’m a woman and I dared question him. To him, that’s punishable by death apparently.”

  “Agent White, last warning. Watch your tongue. You’re getting a taste of what the FBI up there in Salt Lake City went through. And if you and Ellington make this harder than it has to be, it’s going to serve as nothing more than another warning. It will make no law organization ever want to go after them again. So please…do the smart thing.”

  “Fine. I will go on record, though, as saying that while I may have been a bit more physical than I needed to be with him, there was nothing excessive. Now, what was the other complaint?”

  “You made another arrest late last night, correct?”

  “Yes, we did. A man trailing a young woman. He nearly assaulted her with a crowbar.”

  “We have a complaint there as well. We’re being told you insulted his people and the Community. There is also some sort of injury. A left wrist sprain, I believe.”

  “Sir, we barely even touched him…”

  “This is bullshit,” Ellington said.

  “I believe you…more or less,” McGrath said. “It’s hard to do after the way this conversation started. All the same, I need you two off the case and back home.”

  “If we do that, what happens to the murder case?
There are four now, sir. And we’re close to getting some answers.”

  “All the same. The SLC branch can wrap it.”

  “You know as well as I do how that will end. They’ll handle it with kid gloves and—”

  “This conversation is over, Agent White. Tidy up what you need to and then get on the first plane home. If I don’t get a report that you’ve arrived home within twelve hours, it’s going to be bad news for both of you.”

  He ended the call there. Mackenzie took a deep breath, doing everything she could not to throw the phone down the hall or to punch the wall directly in front of her.

  “He wants us home?” Ellington asked.

  “Yes.”

  She stewed in it for a moment, trying to think of something—of anything—she could do in the next twelve hours that would help to nail this case closed. As her mind tried to scrape something together, she sipped on a bitter cup of coffee. She was tired, she was frustrated, and she was starting to not want to battle the anger that was slowly building within her. She felt like a time bomb was ticking away inside of her, with no idea how much time was remaining until the explosion.

  As she and Ellington made their way out of the break room, they were approached by a younger-looking cop. He looked bright and fresh, a man who had gotten a solid seven or eight hours of sleep the night before. Mackenzie hated him a bit.

  “I wanted you to know we were all rooting for you,” the officer said. “When I heard you guys had two of those bastards in, I was sure that was it. But I just heard that Cole is getting out of here. But you know…at least you put a scare into them. That’s got to count for something, right?”

  “Not to the four women that have been killed in the past week,” Mackenzie said.

  “It’s going to be interesting to see how he spins it,” the officer said. “That fucker is like a savant when it comes to speaking to people.”