by Blake Pierce
“Did you ever hang out with Will and his family?” Mackenzie asked. “Playdates, sleepovers, anything like that?”
“Oh yeah, sure. We used to ride bikes all the time. Usually just around his house. Sometimes at the park, but that ended for me after Will went missing, my mom sort of lost her mind after that. She never let me do much of anything after Will disappeared.”
“And at the park, do you ever remember Will getting into any altercations? Were there ever any suspicious characters back then, hanging out at the park?”
“Not that I remember,” he said. “Later, when I got to high school, some kids went out there to drink and smoke pot every now and then. I do remember there being a few instances of the cops having to break tough on homeless people ambling through and bothering people every now and then. Asking for spare change and stuff, you know?”
Mackenzie thought that might be worth looking into but at the same time, she felt that Will Albrecht’s disappearance might be a dead end. It was starting to feel less and less related to the deaths of Jon Torrence and Marjorie Leinhart.
She was searching for any other follow-up questions to make this trip worth it when her cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number on the display as she answered, but it had a Strasburg area code.
“This is Agent White,” she said.
“Agent White, this is Sheriff Clements. You and your partner might want to get back out here.”
“Oh yeah? We’re in Strasburg right now,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Well, we’ve got another body on our hands. And this one is fresh.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
This time, Clements didn’t meet them with a golf cart. Instead, he had an ATV waiting for them behind the visitor’s center. Neither Mackenzie nor Bryers had ever driven one but Mackenzie figured it couldn’t be so hard. She gladly took the driver’s position, gripping the handlebars with a slight stir of excitement. With Bryers clinging on to the back bars, she steered them out down the central path and stopped when they came to two other carts blocking any further progress.
One of Clements’s deputies was sitting at this makeshift roadblock. Mackenzie remembered his face from their first venture out into Little Hill. He gave them only the faintest of nods as a salutation.
“Follow me, please,” was all he said.
Without another word, the officer led them into the woods. They were led in a totally different direction this time, headed directly to the east of the last crime scene. It instantly made Mackenzie more aware that the killer had to know these forests well. Almost as well as a park ranger, she thought with suspicion.
They had been walking for five minutes when Mackenzie started to hear arguing voices from up ahead. It was much the same as it had been at the first crime scene in Little Hill State Park. It irritated her to no end; these men were too worried about who held the most sway out here rather than trying to find the killer. In front of her, even the officer that was leading them let out a sigh, making it clear that he thought it was stupid, too.
As they drew closer, Mackenzie could make out all of what was being said. She followed behind the officer but, at that point, was really just following the voices of dissention further up ahead.
“—and if you have a problem with it, you can call my chief!”
“Fuck your chief! If you have issues with me being out here, you can call the governor!”
“He wouldn’t get off his ass to answer the phone!”
“Back up, would you, you’re too close to the evidence!”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job!”
Finally, Mackenzie started to see the men. There were only five of them today: Clements, Smith, and three park rangers. She recognized one of the park rangers as Charlie Holt, the man with the weird acorn obsession. His partner, Joe Andrews, was also there. They were all standing very close together in what looked like the moments before a nasty playground-type brawl.
“Gentlemen,” she said loudly. “Can we keep it together, please?”
“Watch your tone,” Clements said.
“Same goes for you,” Bryers said, stepping forward. “Could you please all show some respect to the deceased and act like grown men?”
Everyone fell quiet again as their attention was drawn back to the reason they were all gathered there.
Mackenzie took it all in but had to focus fairly hard. It was…well, it was bad. It was easily the worst condition she had ever seen a body in. The fact that it was indeed very fresh as Clements had said on the phone made it that much worse. The others managed to keep quiet and stay a respectful distance away while she and Bryers took it in.
“My God,” Bryers said.
Mackenzie only nodded. The head had been severed from the body but didn’t look too much like a human head. What Mackenzie was seeing made her think of what a pumpkin looks like after it has been tossed away after Halloween. The sight was almost too gruesome to make sense of so she turned her attention to the body, sprawled about twenty feet away from the smashed head.
The state of the body wasn’t much better. There were large bruises everywhere. From what Mackenzie could tell, the entire chest seemed to be caved in. The left arm was also in a bad state, as the shoulder had not only been dislocated but nearly removed from the body altogether. Mackenzie was fairly certain that an autopsy would reveal that the shoulder had been pulverized. There were also several deep gouge marks in the buttocks and the right leg had clearly been broken; the knee was in the same sort of shape as the busted shoulder.
“Who found the body?” he asked.
“We did,” Smith said. “We got a call this morning from a James Madison University student. She said her friend had gone missing—that she had been camping in these woods last night. We were already on the way over here with a drone, hoping to use it to surveil the area. We sent it up right away and found the body within half an hour.”
“Did you find her campsite?”
“We did,” Charlie Holt said. “We haven’t made it over there yet, though. We literally just got here fifteen minutes ago.”
“Did the girl that called have anything useful?”
“No,” Smith said. “We haven’t called her yet.”
“With all due respect,” Clements said, “the iron is hot. I think we need to strike.”
“Strike what?” Mackenzie asked. “Without leads, there’s no striking.”
“Well, it’s your show,” Smith said. “I’ll gladly pass over the power to you on this.” He looked over to the three park rangers, one of whom looked like he might puke at any moment. “Anyone got a problem with that?”
All three of them shook their heads.
“Thank you,” Mackenzie said. She looked to Bryers for approval and he gave it with a thin smile and a nod.
“Okay. Rangers…have you already given the instruction to shut the park down?”
“Yes,” said Andrews.
“And how many men can you get on shift today?”
“As many as six,” Holt said.
“Get all six of them,” she said. “Station them at whatever secondary or maintenance roads you have coming in and out of the park. How many are there?”
“Three,” answered Holt.
“That’s perfect, then. Have them stationed at those roads, making sure no one gets in or out without the proper ID. How soon can you make that happen?”
All three of the park rangers seemed to step up in that moment. Given a specific instruction that they were in charge of apparently snapped them out of whatever funk they’d had brewing between the local and state PD. Still, she wasn’t quite sure as to how skilled they would be.
“They’ll be stationed at the entrances within twenty minutes,” Andrews said, pulling out his phone.
“I need someone to be the point man for the rangers,” Mackenzie said. “Who wants that duty?”
“That would be me,” Andrews said. Mackenzie noticed that Charlie Holt sort of rolled his eyes behind Andrew
s when he volunteered.
“Good,” she said. “I need you to come up with a list of potential sites that someone could potentially live for several days within the park and not be seen.”
“I doubt there are places like that,” Andrews said. “There’s the few maintenance sheds but that’s it.”
“And those are under twenty-four-hour surveillance,” Charlie Holt added.
“Keep in mind, Agent White,” Andrews said, “the farther away from the main trails you go, the thicker the terrain gets. We’re talking briars, thickets, things like that. But I’ll get you a list of sites.”
She then looked to Smith and found it was harder to give him orders, as he had been the only one to really show her respect this entire time. “Officer Smith, I need you to get on the phone with the student that called the missing person report in. Do we know who the victim is?”
“Miranda Peters. Nineteen years old. An English major at JMU. The friend is Cho Liu. She was supposed to meet her here last night for some astronomy project. Cho got here about two hours late and when she arrived, Miranda was nowhere to be found.”
“Can you break the news to her and see what she can tell you?”
“Can do,” he said with a frown.
“Clements,” she said, “since the park is within your jurisdiction, I need you with us. Can you take us to the campsite? Andrews, I need you with us, please.”
“Yeah, gladly,” he said, taking one last look at the grisly sight before him.
“Everyone good?” Mackenzie asked.
She got a series of nods, and a smile from Bryers.
“Call me the moment anything of note pops up,” she said. “Clements was right: the iron is hot. Let’s find something to strike out and nail this sonofabitch before an entire nation of news crews makes it that much harder for us.”
***
The campsite was about two miles away from where the body had been dumped. It required them to get on the ATV again, going around the roadblock and deeper into the park. It took them ten minutes of riding on the cart and another eight minutes of walking to reach it. Clements led the way through the forest, looking to the screenshot from the drone for reference to make sure they were on the right track. Mackenzie, Bryers, and Andrews followed behind him.
“This makes no sense,” Mackenzie said. “The body this morning was fresh. Two hours…three at most, right? So how is he getting around without a car or anything with wheels? Even if he has an ATV or something, there would be tire tracks somewhere.”
“Not to mention that we’d hear an ATV running through here,” Andrews said.
“It has to be someone within the park,” Mackenzie said. “Andrews, given the size and shape of the park, what are the chances that someone could have dumped the body in that location two hours ago and then made it out of the park’s borders?”
“It’s possible,” he said. “But they’d have to really be hauling ass.”
Mackenzie thought about this for a moment. She knew that if they yielded no results in the next few days, the local PD and maybe even the FBI would have several men out in the forests, scouring the land inch by inch. She wondered idly how many more would have to die before the State flew in a helicopter rather than offering up a drone.
The idea that the killer could still be within the park was infuriating. It made Mackenzie move with urgent speed, her thoughts racing just as fast as her feet.
When they finally arrived to the campsite, Mackenzie’s sense of urgency only increased. The campsite was small and desolate looking. A single tent had been pitched, a single-sleeper that had been staked into the ground without much thought or expertise. A little battery-operated lantern had been kicked over, still shining uselessly in the afternoon sunlight. A telescope was knocked over at the edge of the small clearing.
Mackenzie picked up a stick from the ground and walked over to the tent. The entrance flap was unzipped, allowing her to push the flap back with the stick so she did not taint the scene with her fingerprints. Inside, there wasn’t much to see: a pillow, a sleeping bag, and a single backpack. From what she could tell, nothing had been gone through. The killer had not been interested in theft; he’d just wanted Miranda Peters.
She crawled out of the tent and saw Bryers and Clements scouring the ground. She noticed that Bryers had hunkered down to a knee and was looking closely at a particular section of ground.
“Find something?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. He pointed to an area that went downhill—back toward the small rise in the ground they had come up. The foliage and dirt on the ground wasn’t necessarily messy but there did seem to be a disturbance of sorts. But that wasn’t what Bryers was pointing at.
“Is it just me trying to stretch?” he said. “Or is that part of a shoeprint?”
He was right. It was a print. It was only a partial print, but it was there in the dirt. And to be so noticeable, it had to have been recent. She studied it closely, taking down every mental note she could about it.
She knew right away that this was not Miranda Peters’s print. From the look of her body, she had weighed around one thirty, one forty at most. But this shoeprint was large. She figured it was at least a size 11. The pattern of the underside as well as the shape of it also indicated that it was likely a work boot of some kind.
“What have we got?” Clements asked, walking over and clearly not wanting to be left out.
“A potential shoeprint from the killer,” Mackenzie said. “A work boot, from the looks of it.” She got to her feet and looked in the direction the print seemed to have been coming from. She pointed behind them and slightly to the right. “It looks like he was coming from that direction. Is there anything back there?”
“Just trees and more trees,” Clements said. “I’d say the park grounds go on another twenty miles or so in that direction. One of the maintenance roads cuts through for a bit at some point, but that’s it.”
“Maintenance for what?” Bryers asked.
“That particular road connects the visitor’s center to the electrical shed,” Andrews said. “That’s where the breakers for the light posts and spotlights along the river are.”
“Any security cameras out at that shed?” Mackenzie asked.
“None, unlike the sheds that hold ATVs, chemicals, and so on.”
She snapped a picture of the shoe print with her phone and took one last look around the site. “Clements, can you get some men out here quickly to dust the area for prints? The tent, the telescope, the lantern…everything.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Work with Smith to work out a schedule to have the drone flying over the park. Keep an eye out for oddities of any kind…no matter how small. Do you have the manpower to keep men checking out the footage?”
“We do.”
“Great. And please keep me posted.”
They left the campsite and headed back for the golf cart. Mackenzie tried her hardest to organize everything that needed to be done, making lists within her head. But much to her dismay, she kept getting sidetracked by flashes of Miranda Peters—her head severed and mashed in, her body beaten and broken.
She often found herself wanting to get into the head of the killers she chased down. It helped her to understand their motives and how they worked. But this time, she was struggling to put an MO together. The man clearly wanted to be found…it was evident by the way he was dumping the bodies. But perhaps he saw some sort of sport to it…trying to see how long he could keep it up before he was caught.
That meant that the killer was working with the impression that he had nothing to lose; even if he was apprehended, he would not care. And that made him incredibly dangerous. There was no clear direction, no reasoning at all.
This time, the idea of trying to get into a killer’s head seemed a little too much. How was she supposed to understand the brutality and disrespect for human life on a level like she had seen with Miranda Peters?<
br />
Stepping into a mind like that would be frightening. For the first time in her career, Mackenzie wondered if this case was too dark and warped for her to fully grasp.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
He listened to the screams of the woman he had taken from the campsite as he sipped from a Mason jar of moonshine. He was watching the sun come up from his ramshackle front porch. The trees blocked most of the sunrise but the light that did make it through was pristine and golden. It made the woods seem to come alive.
This woman was a little different from the others he had taken. This one had some fight in her. She had come to before he had gotten her back to his cabin. He’d had to hit her again using the handle from an axe he had lost the blade to some time ago. And then when he had dumped her into the hole in the ground—nothing but a shallow grave, really—and covered it with the thick sheets of plywood—her screams had been defiant rather than pleas for help.
So far, all of his victims had begged for their life. They’d offered him money, or sex, or just about anything he could imagine. But not this one. She’d told him that when she got free, she’d slit his throat. She’d cut off his dick. She’d break his legs and torture him.
Of course, those defiant screams had only lasted for an hour or so. After that, they had become plain old screams—screams she probably hoped would go traveling through the woods and fall on helpful ears. And now her screams were hoarse and desperate. Soon, she’d barely be able to speak, much less scream.
He knew none of her screams were doing any good. He was far enough out in the forest where her screams would not be heard. And just in case, the enclosed hole in the earth, topped off by the thick plywood sheets, kept her screams trapped in the earth, only slipping through into the air as a series of sad little vibrations.
With the pleasant burn of moonshine in his stomach and the warmth of the morning sun on his face, he left the porch and walked back inside his little cabin. It was a tiny little shack of a place, completely off the grid. He did not own a computer, a TV, a phone. He had given up on electric lights about five years ago, realizing that it was just stupid to pay some of the little money he had for electricity he rarely even used.