by Blake Pierce
***
Mackenzie’s first reaction to meeting Kirk Peterson was that the man was gorgeous. When he smiled at her as she sat down across the table from him at a Starbucks ten minutes away from the airport, she thought he looked like a more masculine version of Ryan Reynolds. He was ridiculously handsome but had a gruff quality to him that made her think he would be a great wilderness explorer. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. A five o’clock shadow painted the lower half of his face and a set of deep brown eyes dominated the upper half.
He was dressed in a basic white button-up shirt, a tie, and a pair of dark jeans. Aside from his cup of coffee, he also had a single file folder sitting on the table.
“Hey there,” he said, offering his hand. “Kirk Peterson.”
“Mackenzie White,” she said. “Thanks for meeting with me.”
“Of course. I understand that this recent case might have potential links to the death of your father.”
“Well, that’s what Porter says,” she said. “But he didn’t have much information.”
“Be straight with me here,” Peterson said. “You’re trying to get a jump on this before it lands in federal hands, right?”
“Right.”
“In that case, I think you should hear about the case I just wrapped up.” He slid the folder over to her but did not take his hand off of it right away. “You might want to lean over it. If someone walks by and sees some of the pictures in there, they might upchuck their chai teas and mocha lattes.”
She opened up the folder, leaning in. As she started looking through the documents and photos, Kirk Peterson started giving her the basics of the case.
“It started off as a wife calling me up to bust her husband for potentially cheating on her and slowly wiping out their son’s college savings. So I staked him out and found out that he was not cheating on his wife but he was having some late-night meetings with a group of people I am fairly certain are part of a drug cartel operating out of New Mexico. This made no sense because this guy was clean as a whistle. No record, no priors, assistant coach on his son’s Pee Wee football team, the whole ten yards.
“So once I got enough proof to present the wife and the police, I knew that I had to make a hard call—a call that would shatter a perfect suburban life. Only, about half an hour before I made the call to the wife, I got a call of my own. It was from the local PD out in Morrill County, where the guy lived. His wife found him dead in their bedroom from two bullet holes to the back of the head. She was in the house when it happened and does not recall hearing any gunshots.”
Mackenzie looked to the several photos in the folder. Her heart skipped a beat. The pictures could have been ripped straight out of her nightmares. A man lay face down on his bed, blood on the sheets, headboard, and walls. She could not see the man’s face, making it that much easier for her to imagine that it was her father.
“And you’re certain the wife didn’t do it?” Mackenzie asked. “She thought he might be cheating on her. Maybe she got jealous and—”
She trailed off, already feeling that it was a thin thread to chase.
“I thought the same thing,” Peterson said. “But it doesn’t check out. The police are certainly looking into it and I’m sure the feds will grill her hard when they take it over. But I can almost guarantee you that the wife didn’t do it.”
He paused here, as if waiting for her to catch up. She still had a few documents to go through, mostly crime scene photos that, thankfully, did not include the body. She thumbed through the rest almost casually but then stopped when she neared the end.
She blinked her eyes impulsively to make sure they were working right. She stared down at one of the pictures…a document where two images had been placed side by side. For a moment, she literally forgot to breathe.
“Yeah,” Peterson said. “I wanted you to see that for yourself. There’s no way I could have explained it properly.”
She only nodded. The document showed two images. One was the front of a business card and the other was the back of the business card with something scribbled on it.
“This was found on the scene?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She stared at it even longer. The front of the business card read:
Barker Antiques: Old or New Rare Collectibles.
The words stung her heart. She’d seen this business card before—but not this exact business card.
It had been found in her father’s pocket after his death.
But the words on the back of this one made it quite unique. There had been nothing on the back of the card found in her father’s pocket nearly twenty years ago.
She looked to the words and felt a weak little cry crawling up her throat.
There was a name scribbled on the back of this new card, written in thin, leaning cursive.
Benjamin White.
Her father’s name.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“This makes no sense.”
The words felt thin coming out of Mackenzie’s mouth. Twenty minutes had passed since she’d seen the picture of the business card and they had promptly left the Starbucks. They were currently in Peterson’s car. He was driving as she looked numbly through the documents again.
“I know,” Peterson said. “Maybe visiting the scene will help. I understand that you have a knack for dissecting a scene.”
“You said this was in Morrill County?”
“Yeah. The house is about an hour and forty minutes away. You okay to be in the car with me for that long?”
An hour and forty minutes, she thought with some dry humor. Just shy of the distance between Quantico and Strasburg.
“Yeah,” she said. She was no longer sidetracked by his looks. The light weight of the folder in her lap felt heavy now, the only thing her brain could focus on. She looked to the photos of the man on the bed—a man named Jimmy Scotts, according to the information in the file. She did her very best to not impose her father’s image over the pictures but it was hard.
“That connection,” Peterson said. “The business card. You have any ideas?”
“None,” Mackenzie said. “When my father was killed, the cops and the FBI searched everywhere but could not find a Barker Antiques. There was one place in Maine, but the business card was very different and was owned by a seventy-year-old veteran. They checked the place out tirelessly but there was no connection.”
“I got the same results,” Peterson said. “The place seems to not exist.”
“But why would someone print up business cards for a fake business?”
“Beats me,” Peterson said. “It’s like you said…it makes no sense.”
That’s an understatement, she thought as she finally looked away from the folder to her lap and to the eerily familiar Nebraska landscape out of Peterson’s window.
***
Their circuit through Morrill County took them on a route that featured Chimney Rock out in the distance. Mackenzie watched it crest in the distance and, for the first time, realized that there was something about Nebraska that she missed. The beauty of the long stretches of land, the isolated feel, the wide open skies.
Her nostalgia was short-lived, though. Twenty minutes after putting Chimney Rock in the rearview, Peterson pulled his car into a small suburban neighborhood. He took a few turns deeper into the neighborhood and finally came to a stop in front of a cute two-story home.
“The wife is with her sister right now, out in Omaha,” Peterson said. “She already gave me the go-ahead to revisit. The local police are okay with it, too. Honestly, I think they’re sort of hoping the feds sweep in here as quick as they can.”
They stepped out of Peterson’s car and entered the Scotts residence. While the place was empty, it had the feel of a space that had recently been filled with people coming and going; it was a feeling Mackenzie had grown accustomed to ever since starting her position as a detective not too far from here, actually.
Peterson led her through the house,
toward the bedroom. She took note of the box of tissues on the coffee table in the living room. Several crumpled used ones littered the table and the floor. She observed every detail she could find just to distract herself: a slightly crooked picture frame on the wall, the dust on top of a decorative lamp stand in the hallway, and a Superman figure lying in the floor outside of a bedroom further down the hallway.
But she could no longer distract herself when Peterson opened the last door along the hallway. He pushed it open and Mackenzie followed him inside.
The bed had been stripped but the scene otherwise looked just as it did in Peterson’s photos, sans a body. The splatters of blood on the wall and headboard remained.
“How long ago was he killed?” she asked.
“About forty-eight hours or so,” Peterson said.
“And has anyone been in here since you left that you know of?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe some forensics guys from State. Just because this was originally my case, I’m not exactly a cop, no matter how much the wife tried to place me in charge of it.”
Mackenzie walked slowly around the bed. She grimaced when she studied the blood splatters on the wall. They went at a slight right slant, indicating that Jimmy Scotts had been shot at something of an angle; the shooter had likely been standing just to his left when they pulled the trigger. Scotts had also probably been asleep to have been shot in the back of the head and not stirring at all.
“You said the wife was home when it happened?” she asked.
“Yeah. In the living room, watching Jimmy Fallon. She didn’t know he was dead until she came to bed and felt the blood on the sheets.”
“If Fallon was on, this was probably between ten thirty and eleven thirty, yeah?”
“That’s what we figure.”
“And you’re sure the wife wouldn’t be a suspect?”
“Extremely doubtful.”
“Any chance I could talk to her?”
“I can give you her information if you really want it, but she won’t talk to you. She’s devastated. And I doubt you could talk to her later. Not unless you can work some magic to get yourself assigned to the case.”
She studied the room, looking behind her. There were two windows along the rear wall. She walked to them and checked them for signs of breaking and entering. There were a few scuff marks along the outer rim of the frame, but nothing damning.
“I’m heading out back,” she said.
“Going to check the windows?” Peterson asked. “I did that. But just to cover my bases. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking the blood splatter is at an angle and that the shooter had to be behind him and shooting from the left. I also think he was very quiet but not quiet enough to come through the window right beside the bed. One of these windows has to be where the guy came in from. That or the front door.”
Peterson made a hmmm sound as he followed her out through the front door and around the side of the Scotts’ yard. The backyard was tiny, the lot overtaken by a thin strip of trees that separated most of the block from the next block over. The yard itself was maybe a quarter of an acre, not very large at all.
She went to the window and found it just slightly too high to look into. This instantly made her look to the ground. She looked for any signs of clear indentations—of the shooter having to use something as a stepping stool of sorts to get to the window. She searched for two minutes and came up with nothing. She then scouted the yard for any object someone could use to climb a bit higher to the window. Again, she saw nothing. There was a red bike, presumably Jimmy Scotts’ son’s, leaning against the far back wall of the house, but a quick check of it showed no signs of someone having used it as a makeshift stepladder.
“Need a boost?” Peterson asked with a smile as she started looking to the windows again.
“No thanks,” she said, trying not to sound cold.
They went back inside, back to the bedroom. There, Mackenzie opened the windows, popped the screen out, and peered into the yard. With her head sticking out of the window, she could get a pretty good look at the outside frame. Again, she could see nothing to indicate forced entry.
She looked back to the stripped bed. “Has anyone checked the victim’s contacts to see if he knew anyone that might know of a place called Barker Antiques?”
“Not that I know of. You think someone should?” he asked.
“Yes. And the bureau will assign someone to it when they take over.”
With that, she started for the hallway. Peterson fell in behind her, clearly a little intimidated by her. “You done here?” he asked.
“Yes, I think so,” she said. “You mind taking me back to…?”
“To where?” he asked. “Your car?”
She thought for a moment before asking: “Do you have anywhere to be anytime soon?”
“No. Not today.”
“There’s a little town about an hour east of here. Belton. You know it?”
“I do. That’s where your father d—well, where you grew up, right?”
“How’d you know that?” she asked.
“I read the files on your father when this went down,” he said. “It’s sort of a part of my job as a PI.”
“Well then, good work. You mind driving me? I figure it saves me a bit of time rather than having you drive me all the way back to Lincoln just so I can head back out.”
“Not a problem,” he said.
They went to his car and pulled back out onto the highway. They headed east and within several minutes, Mackenzie felt a tightening in her chest and an urgency in her breathing.
After twenty years, she was going back to the house where her father had died…the house from her nightmares.
She was, she supposed, going back home.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
It was no real surprise for Mackenzie to find that the house she had been raised in up until the age of eleven was abandoned. From the looks of it, it had been abandoned for quite some time. She wondered if any other family had even bothered with the place after her family had moved out nearly twenty years ago.
As a matter of fact, most of the town of Belton looked to be in the same shape. It had never been a big town, boasting a population of just over two thousand when Mackenzie had been a girl. On their way through, they’d passed multiple businesses with boarded windows and For Rent/Lease signs. Only a few places remained in business: the corner store, a barber, and the local café, which she was quite surprised hadn’t gone under; it had been only hanging by a thread when she had lived here.
Her childhood home seemed to summarize the fate of Belton, Nebraska. The roof was mostly stripped of its shingles. The front porch was still standing but looked on the brink of collapse. The windows were filthy, covered in a brown tinge brought on by age and neglect.
“Home sweet home, huh?” Peterson asked as they walked toward the porch.
Mackenzie could only manage a weak chuckle. She looked to the left and saw that the house her neighbors had lived in was the in the same state. An old faded realty sign had long ago fallen over in the overgrown yard. Beyond the neighboring house, there was only forest. Mackenzie looked beyond her childhood home and saw thin trees behind it and, much further back, the start of a dying cornfield that started the line of someone else’s property.
When she stepped up onto the porch, her heart leaped in her chest. Are you really doing this?
Before she had time to focus on that question, she pushed against the front door. She was not at all surprised to find it locked. She saw no signs of Realtor presence and it was clear the place had gone to ruin. No one owned it. No one cared about it.
With a sick sort of pleasure, Mackenzie lifted her leg and delivered a hard kick to the door. Her aim was spot on, connecting just below the knob. The door flew backward, taking a chunk of the old rotted frame with it.
“Shit,” Peterson said. “You sure about that?”
“If it becomes an issue, the owner can cha
rge me,” she said.
Peterson shrugged and gestured her inside. “Your show,” he said.
Mackenzie took a deep breath, steadied herself, and then stepped inside.
Seeing the house in such a state of neglect gutted her. There was no furniture, no pictures, and no real sense of living space. She just saw empty rooms, the carpet musty and discolored in most of them. This house had really only existed in her memories and those memories now felt like lies. This did not feel like the place she had grown up in, but rather some weird model of it.
Still, she knew which room had been the living room. She could also tell which room along the small hallway had been hers and which had been Stephanie’s. She knew it all too well, like information that had been burned into her brain through the power of nightmares. She knew full well that she could spend time in each of those rooms and come up with a few memories—some that might even do her some good.
But she wasn’t here to reminisce. She was here to face her past, to face a moment that still haunted her—to face a moment from her childhood that had all of a sudden come back into her life in a very real and unexpected way.
She skipped all of the other rooms and headed directly toward the back of the house. She could see the door to her parents’ room and for a terrifying moment, she was certain it was no different from the night she had pushed it open and discovered her father’s body.
She felt her hands trembling. Her heart was like some motorized piston in her chest. She stopped in front of the door, frozen for a moment. Then, without bothering to turn toward Peterson, she said: “I’d like some time to myself if you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” Peterson said. “I’ll be out at the car. Just yell if you need me.”
She nodded absently, still staring at the door.
When she heard Peterson walking through the front door, his footfalls creaking on the old porch, she reached out to the door. With a hand that felt weightless, she pushed it open.