Before He Preys Read online

  Dr. Haggerty shook her head.

  “Have a seat,” Jimmy said, pointing the gun to the couch he had sat on several times in the last few months. “I think you and I are going to have a long day together.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  Weldon’s Drugstore had turned out to be just as big of a waste of time as Glory Baptist Church. While there was a decent drop from the back of the building to the pavement below, there were too many obstacles. To get to the third floor, a killer would have to break down a locked door to the second floor—a lock which Mackenzie had been forced to pick and had barely been able to get into at all.

  Not only that, but when they had gotten to the third floor, the windows were boarded up and reinforced with some sort of wired screen.

  When they left and headed back to the station, Mackenzie did not feel like she was having to resort to going back to square one. She did her best to see it as having eliminated two potential sites. On the way back to the station, Tate had called her to let her know that he had added the church and the drugstore to the rotation of the afternoon and that night’s rounds for officers out on patrol.

  As for Mackenzie, she knew she had to set a plan in place. Even if it meant coordinating with Tate and his men to canvass the streets all night, she had to do something. As she headed back to the motel, she wondered for perhaps the first time if the killer might eventually venture away from dropping his victims from tall places. In a place like Kingsville, he’d run out of options soon enough. She wondered if this case would be any easier to figure out if she could remove the bridge and the water tower from the equation. If heights were taken out, what kind of killer would he look like?

  He likes to exploit his victims in some strange way, she thought. If those pictures on the USB and his drawings are any indication, he has an enormous bloodlust. But he’s patient—patient enough to make someone climb the ladder at the water tower, patient enough to capture Malory Thomas and carry her out to Miller Moon Bridge.

  She dwelled on these thoughts as she pulled her car into the motel parking lot. As much as Ellington was not going to want to take an even more distant back seat on this, she planned to take over the laptop. She actually hoped that with him there and their ability to rekindle the chemistry of their working relationship, she’d be more productive. She figured she could start by looking into any brutal murders within a fifty-mile radius over the course of the last three years or so. She could probably get Tate to look into his own files at the station to expedite the process.

  However, when she entered the motel room, all of those plans and ideas froze up for a moment. Even before she had the door fully open, she heard Ellington’s voice. He was speaking to someone in a pleading manner, something she was not at all accustomed to.

  “…and I’ve done nothing at all that would be considered defiant towards a supervisor.”

  Mackenzie quietly closed the door behind her and stood there, giving him an inquisitive look. He shook his head slowly. She did not like the fact that he looked very worried. He then mouthed one word to her that explained everything.

  “McGrath.”

  Her nerves instantly started to act up. She had learned how to deal with McGrath in her own way, no longer fearing the man whenever she was called to his office. But she also knew him well enough to know that while he did not use his power as an intimidation tool very often, he had no problem using it when he had no choice. By the look on Ellington’s face, she wondered if that was what was going on right now.

  She wanted to ask him to put the call on speaker mode but she knew all too well that McGrath would be able to tell. So she stood very close to Ellington, trying to eavesdrop. She could hear most of the words. She gathered that McGrath had somehow figured out that Ellington had not only come to see her, but that he had taken on a part in the investigation. Just as she felt she was caught up, she heard McGrath ask: “And do you even know where in the hell White is?”

  “She actually just stepped in, sir.”

  Mackenzie heard McGrath tell Ellington to put her on the phone. Ellington handed it over with a sorrowful look on his face.

  “This is Mackenzie,” she said.

  “Dammit, White…what in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Trying to find a killer, sir.”

  “Don’t be a smart ass. When Ellington showed up there last night, why did you not send him back home? You knew he was suspended and that having him around while you were working on an active case—an active case that seems to be going nowhere, I might add—would only make things worse for him.”

  “Because he and I know where to draw the line, sir,” she said. “Agent Ellington would never do anything to jeopardize a case or his career.”

  “Bullshit. If that’s the case, why do I have it on the records right here in front of me that he logged into the database two different times today, spending a total of three hours looking at files?”

  Shit, she thought. I should have thought to make sure he logged in under my account.

  “I don’t know what to say, sir. I can assure you, though, that he—”

  “I don’t want your assurances. Where are you on this case, anyway? I assume it can’t be too good if you have Ellington digging for straws while you’re getting nowhere.”

  “It’s more of the same,” she said, hating to admit it. “We have a suspect that looked to be the guy but no one has seen him for nearly a week.”

  “Is it the guy that attacked you last night?” McGrath asked.

  “It seems that way. His name is Jimmy Gibbons and he’s—”

  “I don’t care who he is. Listen, White…Director Wilmoth has seen enough to think his nephew was indeed murdered. And he thanks you for opening that up. But he also agrees with me that this is not something you need to be wasting your time on. Between the State Police and a different pair of agents, this case can be wrapped. Given the situation with Ellington, I want both of you back here this afternoon.”

  “No way,” she said, unable to stop the words from coming out of her mouth. “With all due respect, this town is a shithole. We’ll find him soon. A day. Two at most.”

  “Good. Then I can send Yardley and Harrison to take care of it with the utmost confidence. I want you back here, in my office, in no more than three hours. Am I understood?”

  Mackenzie gripped the phone tightly, wanting to throw it, wanting to scream at McGrath. But she buried all of that in the pit of her stomach and gritted her teeth.

  “Yes sir,” she hissed.

  And for perhaps the first time in her FBI career, she killed the call before McGrath did.

  Ellington, who had been standing directly beside her to listen in the entire time, hung his head. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t even try that,” Mackenzie said. “This is not your fault.”

  “Well, me coming down here didn’t help matters at all, now did it?”

  “I won’t argue with that,” she said with just a bit of bitterness. “But I’m glad you did, which proves that maybe I’m not the best agent to be on this right now.”

  “So you’re giving up just like that?”

  “Yes. It’s bad enough that one of us is suspended. I’m not trying to test McGrath’s patience right now. Besides…I was able to prove that these deaths weren’t suicides. With what we have and the help of Sheriff Tate and his men, I think Harrison and Yardley will be a great team to wrap this up.”

  “And you’re fine with McGrath’s decision?” he asked, perplexed.

  “Hell no I’m not fine with it,” she said. “But it’s not worth arguing. Now can we please start winding things down here before McGrath decides to make your suspension permanent?”

  “I guess,” Ellington said. It was clear that he was not happy with the turn of events.

  Mackenzie wasn’t either; actually, she was pretty much furious. But she also knew that there was nothing she could do but obey McGrath’s orders. Right now, one of the most important t
hings in her life was making sure Ellington could eventually reclaim his rightful place within the bureau. And if her handing a case off to two other agents was a sign that she could play ball and might make things easier for Ellington, she was fine with it.

  “Hey,” she said, taking his hand. “It will be okay.”

  She kissed him and he nodded. “Maybe,” he said. “Eventually. I think it might be better right now if you could just give me an answer to that question I asked you last night.”

  She smiled and said, “I’m sure it would. But for right now, I need to go let Tate know that he’s going to have two other agents to babysit tomorrow.”

  She kissed him again and left the room. She was halfway across the parking lot toward her car when she realized that she was, in fact, so pissed off at McGrath’s decision that she had made fists, digging her nails into the meat of her palms until they had made little red puncture marks, showing just the slightest bit of blood.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  It all nearly seemed formulaic as far as Mackenzie was concerned. She’d met with McGrath for no more than five minutes. She gave him all of her reports, which he would turn over to Harrison and Yardley. He scolded her a bit for so willingly taking Ellington in and then thanked her for her hard work and getting Director Wilmoth off of his ass. After that, he’d sent her on her way.

  She nearly went looking for Harrison, wishing him luck and filling him in, but she decided not to. She wanted him to take the case and run with it as if it were his own. If she walked into his office and went over everything with him, it would feel like she was handing him her leftovers. She knew Harrison needed to grow in his role, so she left it alone. She headed back to the apartment that she and Ellington had been sharing for the last month and a half and found him starting dinner in the kitchen.

  “How’s McGrath?” Ellington asked.

  “Fine. He’s just glad to have Wilmoth off of his case. How are you?”

  “Decent. I got a call from the bureau attorney on the drive back from Kingsville. The woman who made the allegations is starting to have second thoughts. Apparently someone at the field office where she’s working now asked her for more details before she took it all the way to court. It looks like certain details she’s alleged aren’t lining up.”

  “So you’re in the clear?” Mackenzie asked.

  “No. Not yet. But things are looking much better than they were yesterday.”

  She stepped in to help him with dinner, slicing an onion for the homemade stir fry he was making. “I’m sorry for getting so bent out of shape over your suspension,” she said. “If I’m being honest, I think it just boils down to feeling betrayed—which is stupid because I didn’t even know you when these things happened.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “If the roles were reversed, I would have been jealous as hell. I get it. I think with me, though, it’s just the sad fact that this is what the world has become. Men can’t keep their hands to themselves so now whenever there’s even a suggestion that a man has been handsy or inappropriate it has to be taken this seriously. So yeah…I think you had every right to get upset.”

  “I do trust you, you know.”

  “I know,” he said, stirring the contents of the frying pan.

  “And it’s because I trust you that I’m even considering the question you asked me last night.”

  He chuckled. “I figured you wouldn’t give me an outright yes or no right at the time of the proposal. It’s not like you.”

  “The fact that you understand that and appreciate it speaks volumes,” she said with a chuckle of her own.

  It felt off to be doing something as domesticated as preparing a meal together when, just five hours ago, she had been exploring a little Baptist church for any signs that it might be the next scene along a murderer’s path. She knew she would not be able to stop thinking about the case until the killer was captured and, as such, she found herself wanting to reach out to Harrison just to make sure he and Yardley had everything they needed. She respected Harrison a great deal and felt that with the right tutelage, he could be an amazing agent. She saw no sense in being bitter about him stepping in to finish the assignment and wished him the best.

  Besides…the sooner he and Yardley brought the killer to justice, the sooner she could put it out of her mind.

  She and Ellington finished out the afternoon in the way she assumed most married couples without children would. They watched the news, caught up on straightening up the apartment, and had a spontaneous quickie in the bathroom just before Ellington got into the shower.

  While he showered, Mackenzie gave in to her thoughts on the Kingsville case. She texted Harrison just to get an update. She assumed that she and Yardley would be in Kingsville by now, introducing themselves to Sheriff Tate. The text she got in response a few minutes later was not at all what she had been expecting.

  Nothing yet, Harrison replied. We’re heading out in the morning. Due to meet with the Sheriff around 8 am.

  Mackenzie sighed and set her phone down. The lack of urgency on McGrath’s part told her all she needed to know. Whether because of a lack of results or from instruction coming from Director Wilmoth, the Kingsville case was slowly taking a back seat. She figured that unless the killer was apprehended or more bodies started piling up, it would soon be nothing more than a footnote for some agent riding a cubicle for most of the day.

  She felt that this was a mistake. While McGrath had asked for her thoughts and theories about the case after pulling her off of it, he hadn’t seemed too invested. She felt certain the killer would strike again and given the schedule so far, it could be any day now. Maybe as soon as tonight. The fact that there was no agency presence or even cooperation from the State Police seemed sloppy and irresponsible.

  Following Harrison’s response, Mackenzie knew that any hope of sleeping well that night was out of the question. She went to her laptop and looked at all of the case files she had accumulated. She didn’t think McGrath would have an alert programmed for when she logged into the database but didn’t want to run the risk.

  When Ellington was out of the shower, she was behind the laptop, scrolling through her notes and the grisly pictures from the Kingsville PD.

  “Should you be doing that?” he asked playfully.

  “Someone needs to,” she said. “McGrath is waiting until tomorrow to send Harrison and Yardley to Kingsville. Every murder has been after sundown. And based on the schedule this guy is keeping so far, he could hit again any night now.”

  “You think McGrath would hear you out?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I’d rather not take the chance. I could call him with my concerns and he might tell me to keep away from the case. Yes, he pulled me from it but he didn’t tell me to drop it completely. If I can find something here to help them—or even something to send to Tate—I might be able to sleep tonight.”

  “Seems risky,” he said. “Makes no sense for both of us to be suspended.”

  “I don’t think he’d suspend me over something like this,” she countered.

  It was clear that Ellington wanted to push the matter, but he remained silent. He’d seen her push slightly beyond the limits of what was expected of her before. She supposed he also knew that ever since the beginning, McGrath had come to almost expect some pushback whenever he gave her orders.

  And besides…whenever she had pushed back in the past, it had netted significant results. So she continued to pore over the files, taking extra care to study the small bit of information from the Kingsville PD on Jimmy Gibbons.

  After a while, Ellington went into the living room and she heard the muffled sound of the television through the walls. She looked at the clock and saw that it had somehow come to be 8:45. She was starting to become convinced that she’d simply lost her opportunity to contribute to this case.

  She closed down the laptop and sat at her desk, thinking. She closed her eyes and thought of the bridge and the water tower, what it had felt like t
o stand at the top of both of the structures while looking down at the world. Maybe it had been more than just the feeling of control for the killer—for Jimmy Gibbons.

  But what else could it have been?

  She thought back to her brief trip through his home, seeing that single picture of his parents on the wall. There had been something creepy about it, almost like it was a monument of some kind.

  But that hadn’t been the only picture in the house, had it? No, there had been the sketches Gibbons had made and the USB.

  Thinking of the sketches, Mackenzie pulled them up on her phone. She scrolled through each one, both impressed and disgusted at the talent Gibbons showed with a pencil. The sketches were more than just comic book violence and gore. They were realistic, the creation of someone who had obsessed over the gruesome pictures she had found on that USB. In one of them, she even saw a very faint sketch of a bridge in the background and—

  She zoomed in on the bridge. It had been drawn faintly, as if it were way off in the background. And it wasn’t just any bridge. The shape of it was very familiar to her, as she had seen it several times in the last few days.

  It was Miller Moon Bridge.

  Slowly, see scanned through the rest of the pictures, looking for other drawings of the bridge. After four more pictures, she did not find a representation of the bridge but she did see something else in the background of another one. Like the sketch of the bridge, it was faint, pushed back into the distance by a light shading technique where the solid lines were barely even there at all. In this picture, the shape in the background was very easily identified as a water tower.

  Daring to hope that there might be something else to find in the other sketches, Mackenzie scrolled to the next one. And right there in the next one in line, she saw what she was looking for.