Before he Kills

“Porter,” she said.

“What is it?” he asked, clearly annoyed that he’d been interrupted.

“I think I’ve got weapon prints here.”

Porter hesitated for a second and then walked over to where Mackenzie was hunkered down in the dirt. When he squatted down next to her, he groaned slightly and she could hear his belt creaking. He was about fifty pounds overweight and it was showing more and more as he closed in on fifty-five.

“A whip of some kind?” he asked.

“Looks like it.”

She examined the ground, following the marks in the sand all the way up to the pole – and while doing so, she noticed something else. It was something minuscule, so small that she almost didn’t catch it.

She walked over to the pole, careful not to touch the body before forensics could get to it. She again hunkered down and when she did, she felt the full weight of the afternoon’s heat pressing down on her. Undaunted, she craned her head closer to the pole, so close that her forehead nearly touched it.

“What the hell are you doing?” Nelson asked.

“Something’s carved here,” she said. “Looks like numbers.”

Porter came over to investigate but did everything he could not to bend down again. “White, that chunk of wood is easily twenty years old,” he said. “That carving looks just as old.”

“Maybe,” Mackenzie said. But she didn’t think so.

Already uninterested in the discovery, Porter went back to speaking with Nelson, comparing notes about information he’d gotten from the farmer who had discovered the body.

Mackenzie took out her phone and snapped a picture of the numbers. She enlarged the image and the numbers became a bit clearer. Seeing them in such detail once again made her feel as if this was all the start of something much bigger.

N511/J202

The numbers meant nothing to her. Maybe Porter was right; maybe they meant absolutely nothing. Maybe they’d been carved there by a logger when the post had been created. Maybe some bored kid had chiseled them there somewhere along the years.

But that didn’t feel right.

Nothing about this felt right.

And she knew, in her heart, that this was only the beginning.

CHAPTER TWO

Mackenzie felt a knot in her stomach as she looked out of the car and saw the news vans piled up, reporters jockeying for the best position to assault her and Porter as they pulled up to the precinct. As Porter parked, she watched several news anchors approach, running across the precinct lawn with burdened cameramen keeping pace behind them.

Mackenzie saw Nelson already at the front doors, doing what he could to pacify them, looking uncomfortable and agitated. Even from here she could see the sweat glistening on his forehead.

As they got out, Porter ambled up beside her, making sure she was not the first detective the media saw. As he passed her, he said, “Don’t you tell these vampires anything.”

She felt a rush of indignation at his condescending comment.

“I know, Porter.”

The throng of reporters and cameras reached them. There were at least a dozen mics sticking out of the crowd and into their faces as they made their way past. The questions came at them like the buzzing of insects.

“Have the victim’s children been notified yet?”

“What was the farmer’s reaction when he found the body?”

“Is this a case of sexual abuse?”

“Is it wise for a woman to be assigned to such a case?”

That last one stung Mackenzie a bit. Sure, she knew they were simply trying to land a response, hoping for a juicy twenty-second spot for the afternoon newscast. It was only four o’clock; if they acted quickly, they might have a nugget for the six o’clock news.

As she made her way through the doors and inside, that last question echoed like thunder in her head.

Is it wise for a woman to be assigned to such a case?

She recalled how emotionlessly Nelson had read off Hailey Lizbrook’s information.

Of course it is, Mackenzie thought. In fact, it’s crucial.

Finally they entered the precinct and the doors slammed behind them. Mackenzie breathed with relief to be in the quiet.

“Fucking leeches,” Porter said.

He’d dropped the swagger from his step now that he was no longer in front of the cameras. He walked slowly past the receptionist’s desk and toward the hallway that led to the conference rooms and offices that made up their precinct. He looked tired, ready to go home, ready to be done with this case already.

Mackenzie entered the conference room first. There were several officers sitting at a large table, some in uniform and some in their street clothes. Given their presence and the sudden appearance of the news vans, Mackenzie guessed that the story had leaked in all sorts of directions in the two and a half hours between leaving her office, heading to the cornfield, and getting back. It was more than a random grisly murder; now, it had become a spectacle.

Mackenzie grabbed a cup of coffee and took a seat at the table. Someone had already set folders around the table with the little bit of information that had already been gathered about the case. As she looked through it, more people started filing into the room. Porter eventually entered, taking a seat at the opposite end.

Mackenzie took a moment to check her phone and found that she had eight missed calls, five voice messages, and a dozen e-mails. It was a stark reminder that she’d already had a full caseload before being sent out to the cornfield this morning. The sad irony was that while her older peers spent a lot of time demeaning her and throwing subtle insults her way, they also realized her talents. As a result, she kept one of the larger caseloads on the force. To date, though, she had never fallen behind and had a stellar rate of closed cases.

She thought about answering some of the e-mails while she waited, but Chief Nelson came in before she could get the chance. He quickly closed the conference room door behind him.

“I don’t know how the media found out about this so quickly,” he growled, “but if I find out that someone in this room is responsible, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

The room fell quiet. A few officers and related staff started to look nervously at the contents of the folders in front of them. While Mackenzie didn’t care much for Nelson, there was no denying that the man’s presence and voice commanded a room without much effort.

“Here’s where we stand,” Nelson said. “The victim is Hailey Lizbrook, a stripper from Omaha. Thirty-four years old, two boys, ages nine and fifteen. From what we can gather, she was abducted before clocking in for work, as her employer says she never showed up the night before. Security footage from the Runway, her place of employment, shows nothing. So we’re working on the assumption that she was taken somewhere between her apartment and the Runway. That’s an area of seven and a half miles – an area that we currently have a few bodies investigating with the Omaha PD right now.”

He then looked to Porter as if he were a prized pupil and said:

“Porter, why don’t you describe the scene?”

Of course he’d choose Porter.

Porter stood up and looked around the room as if to make sure everyone was paying close attention.

“The victim was bound to a wooden pole with her hands tied behind her. The sight of her death was in a clearing in a cornfield, a little less than a mile off the highway. Her back was covered in what appeared to be lash marks, placed there by some sort of a whip. We noted prints in the dirt that were the same shape and size of the lashes. While we won’t know for absolutely certain until after the coroner’s report, we are fairly certain this was not a sexual attack, even though the victim had been stripped to her underwear and her clothes were nowhere to be found.”