Before He Preys Read online

  “What is it?” she asked over the guard, looking at Ellington.

  He shook his head. “Not right now,” he said. “Just…let it go for now.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked. “The guards…the box…have you been fired? What the hell happened?”

  He shook his head again. There was nothing mean or dismissive about it. She figured it was the best he could do in the situation. Maybe something had occurred that he couldn’t talk about. And Ellington, loyal to a fault, would not speak if he had been asked to stay quiet.

  She hated to do it, but she didn’t press him any farther. If she wanted direct answers, there was only one place to get them. With that in mind, she ran back into the building. This time she took the elevator, taking it back to the third floor and wasting no time marching down the hall toward McGrath’s office.

  She didn’t bother checking in with his secretary as she headed for his door. She heard the woman call her name, trying to stop her, but Mackenzie went in. She did not knock, just walked right into the office.

  McGrath was at his desk, clearly not at all surprised that she was there. He turned toward her and the calmness on his face infuriated her.

  “Just remain calm, Agent White,” he said.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Why did I just see Ellington escorted from the building with a box of his personal belongings?”

  “Because he’s been released from duty.”

  The simplicity of the statement did not make it any easier to hear. Part of her was still wondering if there had been some huge mistake. Or if this was all some huge elaborate joke.

  “For what?”

  She then saw something she had never seen before: McGrath looking away, clearly uncomfortable. “It’s a private matter,” he said. “I understand the relationship between the two of you, but this is information I can legally not divulge due to the nature of the situation.”

  In all of her time working under McGrath, she had never heard so much legalistic bullshit come out of his mouth at one time. She managed to quash her anger. After all, this was not about her. There was apparently something going on with Ellington that she knew nothing about.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked. “Can you tell me that much?”

  “That’s not for me to answer, I’m afraid,” McGrath said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m actually pretty busy.”

  Mackenzie gave a little nod and backed out of the office, closing the door behind her. The secretary behind her own desk gave her a nasty look that Mackenzie ignored completely. She walked back to her office and checked her mail to reconfirm that the remainder of her day was a slow void of nothing.

  She then hurried out of the building, doing her best not to look like something was troubling her. The last thing she needed was for half of the building to be aware that Ellington was gone and that she was rushing out behind him. She’d finally managed to overcome the prying eyes and almost legendary rumors of her past within the workplace and she’d be damned if she’d create another reason for the cycle to start all over.

  ***

  She felt confident that Ellington had simply gone back to their apartment. When she’d first met him, he’d been the kind of man who would maybe go directly to a bar in an attempt to drown his sorrows. But he had changed in the last year or so—just as she had. She supposed they owed that to each other. It was a thought she kept in mind as she opened the door to her apartment (their apartment, she reminded herself), hoping to find him inside.

  Sure enough, she found him in the small second bedroom they used as an office. He was unpacking the things he’d had in his box, tossing them haphazardly onto the desk they shared. He looked up when he saw her but then quickly looked away.

  “Sorry,” he said with his head turned. “You’re not exactly catching me on my best day.”

  She approached him but resisted placing a hand on his shoulder or an arm around his back. She had never seen him so out of sorts. It alarmed her a bit but, more than anything, made her want to see what she could do to help.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it?” he asked. “I’ve been suspended indefinitely.”

  “What the hell for?” She again thought of McGrath and how uncomfortable he had looked when she had posed this same question to him.

  He finally turned to her again and when he did, she could see embarrassment on his face. When he answered her, his voice was trembling.

  “Sexual harassment.”

  For a moment, the words didn’t make much sense. She waited for him to smile at her and tell her that he was just kidding, but that never happened. Instead, his eyes locked on hers, waiting for her reaction.

  “What?” she asked. “When was this?”

  “About three years ago,” he said. “But the woman just came forward with the allegations three days ago.”

  “And is the allegation a valid one?” she asked.

  He nodded, taking a seat at the desk. “Mackenzie, I’m sorry. I was a different guy back then, you know?”

  She was angry for a moment, but she wasn’t sure at who: Ellington or the woman. “What sort of harassment?” she asked.

  “I was training this younger agent three years ago,” he said. “She was doing really well so one night, a few agents took her out to celebrate. We all had a few drinks and she and I were the last ones left. At the time, the thought of hitting on her had never crossed my mind. But I went to the restroom and when I came out, she was right there waiting for me. She kissed me and it got heated. She pulled away—maybe realizing it was a mistake. And then I tried to go back in. I’d like to think that had I not been drinking, her pulling away would have been the end of it. But I didn’t stop. I tried to kiss her again and didn’t realize she wasn’t returning it until she pushed me away. She pushed me off of her and just stared me down. I told her I was sorry—and I meant it—but she just stormed out. And that was it. A sad little encounter between bathrooms. No one forced themselves on anyone else and there was no groping or other misconduct. The next day when I got to work, she had asked to be transferred to another agent. Within two months, she was gone, transferred to Seattle, I think.”

  “And why is she bringing this up now?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Because it’s the popular thing to do these days,” Ellington snapped. He then shook his head and sighed. “Sorry. That was a shitty thing to say.”

  “Yes, it was. Are you telling me the whole story? Is that all that happened?”

  “That’s it,” he said. “I swear it.”

  “You were married, right? When it happened?”

  He nodded. “It’s not one of my prouder moments.”

  Mackenzie thought of the first time she’d spent any significant time with Ellington. It had been during the Scarecrow Killer case in Nebraska. She had basically thrown herself at him while she had been in the midst of her own personal dramas. She could tell that he had been interested but in the end, he had declined her advances.

  She wondered how heavily the encounter with this woman had been weighing on his mind during that night when she’d offered herself to him.

  “How long is the suspension?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “It depends. If she decides not to make too big of a stink about it, it could be as little as a month. But if it goes big, it could be much longer. In the end, it could lead to a total termination.”

  Mackenzie turned away this time. She couldn’t help but feel a little selfish. Sure, she was upset that a man she cared very deeply about was going through something like this, but at the root of it all, she was more concerned with losing her partner. She hated that her priorities were so skewed, but that’s the way she felt in that moment. That and an intense jealousy that she loathed. She was not the jealous type…so why was she so jealous of the woman who had reported the so-called harassment? She’d never thought of Ellington’s wife with any hints of jealousy, so why this woman?

  Because sh
e’s causing everything to change, she thought. That boring little routine I was falling into and growing comfortable with is starting to crumble.

  “What are you thinking?” Ellington asked.

  Mackenzie shook her head and looked at her watch. It was only one in the afternoon. Pretty soon, her absence would be noticed at work.

  “I’m thinking I need to get back to work,” she said. And with that, she turned away from him again and walked out of the room.

  “Mackenzie,” Ellington called out. “Hold on.”

  “It’s okay,” she called out to him. “I’ll see you in a little bit.”

  She left without a goodbye, a kiss, or a hug. Because even though she had said it, things were not okay.

  If things were okay, she wouldn’t be fighting back tears that seemed to have come out of nowhere. If things were okay, she wouldn’t still be trying to push away an anger that kept trying to claw its way up, telling her that she was a fool to think that life would be okay now, that she was finally due a normal life where the haunts of her past didn’t influence everything.

  By the time she reached her car, she had managed to bring the tears to a stop. Her cell phone rang, Ellington’s name popping up. She ignored it, started the car, and headed back to work.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Work only provided distance for a few more hours. Even when Mackenzie checked in with Harrison to make sure he didn’t need assistance on the small wiring fraud case he was working on, she was out of the building by six. When she arrived back at the apartment at 6:20, she found Ellington behind the stove. He didn’t cook often and when he did, it was usually because he had idle hands and nothing better to do.

  “Hey,” he said, looking up from a pot of what looked like some sort of stir-fry.

  “Hey,” she said in return, setting her laptop bag down on the couch and walking into the kitchen. “Sorry I left the way I did earlier.”

  “No need to apologize,” he said.

  “Of course there is. It was immature. And if I’m being honest, I don’t know why it upsets me so much. I’m more worried about losing you as a partner than I am about what this might do to your professional record. How messed up is that?”

  He shrugged. “It makes sense.”

  “It should but it doesn’t,” she said. “I can’t think about you kissing another woman, especially not in a way like that. Even if you were drunk and even if she did initiate things, I can’t see you like that. And it makes me want to kill that woman, you know?”

  “I’m sorry as hell,” he said. “It’s one of those things in life I wish I could take back. One of those things I thought was in the past and I was done with.”

  Mackenzie walked up behind him and hesitantly wrapped her arms around his waist. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Just mad. And embarrassed.”

  Part of Mackenzie feared that he was being dishonest with her. There was something in his posture, something about the way he couldn’t quite look at her when he talked about it. She wanted to think it was simply because it was not easy to be accused of something like this, to be reminded of something stupid you’d done in your past.

  Honestly, she wasn’t sure what to believe. Ever since she’d seen him walking by her office door with the box in his hands, her thoughts toward him were mixed up and confused.

  She was about to offer to help with dinner, hoping some normalcy might help them to get back on track. But before the words could come out of her mouth, her cell phone rang. She was surprised and a little worried to see that it was from McGrath.

  “Sorry,” she said to Ellington, showing him the display. “I should probably take this.”

  “He probably wants to ask if you’ve ever felt sexually harassed by me,” he said snidely.

  “He already had the chance earlier today,” she said before stepping away from the sizzling noises of the kitchen to answer the phone.

  “This is White,” she said, speaking directly and almost mechanically, as she tended to do when answering a call from McGrath.

  “White,” he said. “Are you home yet?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I need you to come back out. I need to speak with you in private. I’ll be in the parking garage. Level Two, Row D.”

  “Sir, is this about Ellington?”

  “Just meet me there, White. Get there as quickly as you can.”

  He ended the call with that, leaving Mackenzie holding a dead line in her hand. She pocketed it slowly, looking back toward Ellington. He was removing the pan from the stove, heading to the table in the little dining area.

  “I have to grab some to go,” she said.

  “Damn. Is it about me?”

  “He wouldn’t say,” Mackenzie said. “But I don’t think so. This is something different. He’s being really secretive.”

  She wasn’t sure why, but she left out the instructions to meet him in the parking garage. If she was being honest with herself, something about that didn’t sit well with her. Still, she grabbed a bowl from the cabinets, spooned some of Ellington’s dinner into it, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Both of them could tell that it felt mechanical and forced.

  “Keep me posted,” Ellington said. “And let me know if you need anything.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  Realizing she hadn’t even yet removed her holster and Glock, she headed directly for the door. And it wasn’t until she was back out into the hallway and heading for her car that she realized that she was actually quite relieved to have been called away.

  ***

  She had to admit that it felt a little cliché to be slowly creeping along Level 2 of the parking garage across from headquarters. Meeting in parking garages was the stuff of bad TV cop dramas. And in those dramas, shady parking garage meetings usually led to drama of some kind or another.

  She spotted McGrath’s car and parked her own car a few spaces away. She locked up and strolled down to where McGrath was waiting. Without any formal invitation to do so, she walked to the passenger side door, opened it, and climbed in.

  “Okay,” she said. “The secrecy is killing me. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong per se,” McGrath said. “But we’ve got a case about an hour or so away in a little town called Kingsville. You know it?”

  “Heard of it, but never been there.”

  “It’s about as rural as you can imagine, tucked away in the last stretch of backwoods before all of the commotion and interstates of DC take over,” McGrath said. “But it actually might not be a case at all. That’s what I need you to go figure out.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But why couldn’t we have this meeting in your office?”

  “Because the victim is the deputy director’s nephew. Twenty-two years old. It looks like someone tossed him from a bridge. The local PD in Kingsville say it’s probably just a suicide, but Deputy Director Wilmoth wants to make sure.”

  “Does he have any reason to believe it was a murder?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s the second body that’s been found at the bottom of that bridge in the last four days. It probably is a suicide if you want my opinion. But I had the order passed down to me about an hour ago, straight from Director Wilmoth. He wants to know for sure. He also wants to be informed as soon as possible and he wants it kept quiet. Hence the request to meet with me here rather than in my office. If anyone saw you and I meeting after hours, they’d assume it was about what is going on with Ellington or that I had you on some special assignment.”

  “So…go to Kingsville, figure out if this was a suicide or murder, and then report back?”

  “Yes. And because of recent events with Ellington, you’ll be flying solo. Which shouldn’t be an issue as I expect you’ll be back late tonight with news that it was a suicide.”

  “Understood. When do I leave?”

  “Now,” he said. “No time like the present, right?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Mackenzie discovered that McGrath
had not been exaggerating when he had described Kingsville, Virginia, as backwoods. It was a little town that, in terms of identity, was tucked somewhere between Deliverance and Amityville. It had a creepy rural vibe to it but with the small-town rustic charm of what most people likely expected of smaller southern towns.

  Night had completely fallen by the time she arrived at the crime scene. The bridge came into view slowly as she carefully drove her car down a thin gravel road. The road itself was not a state-maintained road yet was also not completely closed off to the public. However, when she closed in to less than fifty yards of the bridge, she saw that the Kingsville PD had put up a row of sawhorses to keep anyone from going any farther.

  She parked alongside a few local police cars and then stepped out into the night. A few spotlights had been set up, all shining down the steep bank to the right side of the bridge. As she approached the drop-off, a young-looking policeman stepped out of one of the cars.

  “You Agent White?” the man asked, his southern accent cutting into her like a razor.

  “I am,” she answered.

  “Okay. You might find it easier to walk across the bridge and go down the other side of the embankment. This side is steep as hell.”

  Thankful for the tip, Mackenzie walked across the bridge. She took out her little Maglite and inspected the area as she crossed. The bridge was quite old, surely having long ago been shut down for any sort of practical use. She knew that there were many bridges scattered across Virginia and West Virginia that were very similar to this one. This bridge, called Miller Moon Bridge according to the basic research she’d managed to do on Google during traffic-light stops along the way, had been standing since 1910 and shut down for public use in 1969. And while that was the only information she’d been able to get on the location, her current investigation was pulling out more details.