Before He Covets (A Mackenzie White Mystery—Book 3) Read online

  It made her think that they were not looking for just any killer. They were looking for someone that took the time to plan and was smarter than the average criminal.

  It also made her think that if Will Albrecht was someone linked to the more recent murders, he was dead. He had probably died within a few hours of being abducted. Mackenzie wondered if bits of his body had remained in the forest, somewhere outside of the search perimeters. She wondered if his bones were still out there, cleaned of flesh and muscle by woodland animals.

  It was a morbid way to think, but if she was going to get into the mind of a killer this severe, her thoughts were going to have to take something of a twist. To sever fingers, heads, and legs…it spoke of some sort of mental imbalance but also patience and determination.

  She tried to come up with a quick profile in her head. Probably a male. Not very strong physically but quite rigid in terms of mental stamina. So far there seemed to be no connection between Jon Torrence and Marjorie Leinhart, so the killer might be selecting victims at random. The only link she could see was Little Hill State Park—and that was a pretty wide target.

  With a heavy sigh, she pushed herself away from her kitchen table. After reading through the material for over an hour, trying to find something of substance, she realized that it was getting late but she was not tired at all. If anything, she seemed to have an extra bit of adrenaline still surging.

  She needed to step away from the paperwork for a while. She needed to give her mind a break. She needed to tap into something normal. She was quickly coming to understand that she had to put forth extra effort to make sure she remembered that she did have something of a regular life behind the veil of her identity as an agent. Of course, some of that life of normalcy was connected to the FBI.

  And while part of her wanted to call Harry and ask him out for a drink, she opted against it. She didn’t want to further confuse him and she certainly didn’t want to get derailed from the case with his endless questions and not-so-subtle subtleties about how badly he wanted to sleep with her.

  So she flipped on the TV and checked the local and national news. She sat in front of the TV for an hour, flipping through the news channels, and was relieved to find that she didn’t see any mention of the Campground Killer. She wondered, though, if that might be different in the morning. She knew the media acted quickly and bad news tended to spread faster than good.

  With the sense of being pushed by a clock she could not see, she finally made herself go to bed. When she closed her eyes, she saw the woods in Little Hill State Park. She pictured a young boy riding his bike around a curb and then imagined the blank space of twenty seconds from a parent’s perspective.

  It was that harrowing image that settled into her mind as she gradually fell asleep.

  ***

  Mackenzie was standing in a large open field. The grass swayed like the sea, coming up to her seven-year-old knees. Her parents were sitting beside her in the grass. Her father was slowly unspooling a kite that seemed to swim in the wind over their heads. It was high up there, so high that Mackenzie thought it could actually touch the sun.

  “Can it go higher, Daddy?” she asked with a giggle.

  “I don’t know, Mac,” he said. “We’re just about out of string. But you can come over here and hold it if you want.”

  She nodded and dashed over to her father. She took the spool and grinned at the feeling of the wind pulling the kite. She started giggling wildly.

  “Look, Daddy! I’m doing it!”

  She started to dance around and when she did, the spool dropped from her hands. It went rolling through the high grass, the kite pulling it as the wind started to carry it away, uncontrolled.

  “Whoops!”

  Still giggling, she chased after it. When she reached it and placed a hand down, though, she was in such a panic over losing the kite that she nearly stepped on the rabbit that was splayed out in the grass.

  She let out of a little squeal and leaped back.

  “What is it?” her dad asked. Her mother was right behind him, worried about her squealing.

  The three of them stared down at the rabbit. It was small but not quite a baby. A huge gash occupied the area where its stomach should have been, Blood and muscle showed through. The grass around it was stained with blood. It twitched its back legs uselessly and stared in frozen fright up at the three humans.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Oh, honey…” her mom said.

  “It looks like another animal got it. Maybe a fox.”

  “Gross,” Mackenzie said. She then looked closer at the rabbit. “It’s hurting, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it looks like it.” He seemed to think hard about something and then said, “Maybe you should turn away, kiddo. I can help it.”

  “How?”

  Her mother put an arm around her and turned her away. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go get the kite.”

  Mackenzie nodded and started to walk away from her father and the dead rabbit. Still, she heard the crack as something broke. Later on in life, she understood that this had been her father breaking its neck, putting it out of its misery.

  As her mother led her through the field, toward a kite that would in real life get away from them and get tangled in a tree, she saw Bryers standing in the field. He was coughing heavily and looked ghostly pale.

  “That’s called a mercy killing,” Bryers said between coughs.

  She turned back to where her father stood and saw that he was holding the rabbit in hands. He approached slowly, offering the corpse to her.

  She screamed then, a scream that tore through the dream and into the waking world where Mackenzie jerked awake, still screaming.

  Mackenzie sat there, breathing hard. She didn’t bother trying to go back to sleep. She could not remember ever having such a terrible nightmare before. Like the usual dream she had of her father dead on his bed, this dream had also taken a memory from her childhood and used it for its base. The scene in the field had actually happened when she was seven years old. Everything in the dream had been accurate up until the moment after she’d heard the cracking of the rabbit’s neck.

  Everything else had simply been fuel from the nightmare.

  She did find herself thinking of that damned rabbit from time to time. It had crept into her dreams for a while as a child, and on the nights where the dreams truly haunted her, she would wake up, certain there was a mostly dead rabbit limping across her bedroom floor.

  When she slid out of bed and headed back to the kitchen to look over the notes again, it was 4:45. She put on some coffee, fried a few eggs, and went to work.

  To wake herself up, she started jotting down details of the case on a notepad. It was an exercise she’d used ever since middle school, a way to memorize things and unlock the meaning that might be hiding in the simplest of problems.

  Jon Torrence—left leg, right hand (still missing)

  Marjorie Leinhart—right leg and all fingers (never found), attempted beheading

  Will Albrecht – abducted from trail, never found

  Jon: runner. Marjorie: ?? Will: bike

  She wanted to rule out Will Albrecht’s disappearance. It didn’t seem to fit. If the kid had been the earliest victim of this killer, why had the body not been dumped like the others?

  It was an impossible question to answer but what she did know was that something about the unresolved nature of the abduction seemed to make it fit into the current case. And for now, she wasn’t prepared to eliminate any possible links.

  She then got out the color map of the park that Smith had provided her with. She made little marks at each of the sites where bodies had been discovered. As she placed the marks on the map, she thought about the terrible stories Charlie Holt and Joe Andrews had told her—how rangers sometimes had to undergo terrible situations without proper training. It made her look at the map with a whole new perspective as she tried to make sense of the pen points she ha
d placed on the map.

  After half an hour of this, Mackenzie poured herself a cup of black coffee. The restless fear still lurking in her heart from the nightmare, she was prepared to do whatever it took to find some answers.

  With her coffee in hand, she went to her couch and put on the TV. Within ten minutes, she saw a headline about the Campground Killer. It was on the local news but had not yet gotten any attention in the national media. Still…this was bad.

  She gulped down her coffee, readied herself for the day, and hurried in to work. She knew she was working against the clock—and if they didn’t solve this case soon, it would get too big for all of them.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Miranda Peters was pissed off.

  She was sweating, her arms were covered in mosquito bites, and one of the right legs of her telescope was busted. More than that, Cho Liu, her lab partner, was going to be very late. She’d texted about two hours ago. At least she’d been honest.

  Sorry. Tony came by. Need a good lay before coming to the woods. See you around 10:30.

  It was 10:37 now. Miranda was fully prepared for Tony to come tagging along with Cho. Miranda couldn’t imagine walking through these creepy woods at night by herself. It had taken enough nerve for her to do it in the thinning light of the afternoon five hours ago. She’d been carrying the telescope in its case, as well as her book bag and laptop case. Cho was going to have the same sort of load and Miranda didn’t envy her at all. That was going to be a brutal walk in the dark, even with a headlamp.

  She looked up to the moon through the telescope. She had managed to brace the busted leg with a small piece of wood and was pretty proud of the job she’d done. She focused the lens until she could make out the clear definition of the Byrgius crater and then slowly adjusted the telescope’s position to the east. In about an hour, she’d be able to see Venus quite clearly. Cho had the camera they would need and if she didn’t show up, this whole trip would be a bust.

  Not that it mattered. She was an English major and this astronomy class was just filler. It had been fun and, if she was honest, she’d been excited about the idea of a camping trip to catch Venus in its crescent phase. The instructor had offered every student the chance for extra credit through observing different astronomical events. Miranda and Cho had chosen to try capturing the phenomenon known as Venus’s Ashen Light.

  But none of that would matter if Cho didn’t get her ass here very soon. Miranda had an okay-at-best telescope, so it would take the lenses on Cho’s telescopic camera to capture the Ashen Light when it came into view in fifty-four minutes.

  Peering into the darkness through the scope, Miranda heard footsteps approaching from below the slight hill she had set up her tent and telescope on. Her heart sighed with relief. She never really thought Cho would let her down. They weren’t exactly best friends or anything, but Cho was very reliable.

  As the footsteps got closer, coming through the slight brush that broke off of the trail and up the hill Miranda and Cho had selected last week, Miranda looked away from the telescope.

  “It’s about time,” Miranda said. “Damn, girl…I hope you rocked his world because you had me worried.”

  Cho said nothing. And it was that initial silence that spooked Miranda for the first time. Cho was a chatterbox; she would have probably been talking right away, the moment she saw the small glow of Miranda’s battery-operated lantern light.

  “Cho?”

  Still no answer. But the footsteps kept coming closer and closer. Through the trees and the cruel darkness of night, Miranda started to see a figure emerging. It was then that she realized just how deep her trouble could become if this was not Cho. She was easily four miles away from the nearest road and a quarter of a mile away from the nearest trail. She was also nearly two hours away from college. Put that all together and she was basically stranded. And alone.

  “Cho…if this is some sort of prank, it’s not funny.”

  But the figure stepped out of the forest and the glow from her lantern revealed that this was not Cho. It was a man—about six feet tall and with facial features that seemed to swim in the shadows her lantern created.

  “Who are you?” Miranda asked.

  “Just a lover of nature,” the man said as he advanced toward her.

  “My boyfriend is just over that way,” Miranda lied, pointing to a thicket of bushes and trees to the right.

  The man only smiled and came closer. Miranda backed up, knocking the telescope over.

  “I have a gun,” she said, knowing the threat sounded thin. She did have a knife, but it was tucked away in one of the bags in her tent.

  The man only chuckled. In the darkness, it was the most menacing thing Miranda had ever heard. Fear spiked through her heart and her legs froze. Should she retreat into the woods? Should she go for the knife?

  The man dashed toward her with uncanny speed. He kicked over the battery-operated lantern as Miranda raced for the tent. She felt his hands on her leg, gripping it tight and pulling her out of the tent and toward him. She opened her mouth to scream but the sound was blocked when he placed a hand over her mouth.

  Again, she tried to scream but she only felt the vibrations of it through the hand cupped over her mouth. She felt herself lifted into the air as the world seemed to spin around her and then she was hauled over his shoulder. He was not very big but seemed to possess brute strength. She fought and fought and all she got for her efforts was a clubbing blow from his left hand that struck her directly in the forehead.

  The world went darker than the night around her. Before she slipped into unconsciousness, she watched the little flickering light from her lantern grow dimmer and dimmer as the stranger carried her deeper into the forest.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Even when she’d been nothing more than a patrol cop working the sleepy highways of Nebraska, Mackenzie had not liked to waste her time with leads that she knew would come to nothing. And while she felt her current lead was flimsy at best, she also knew that small inconsequential leads could often lead to productive thinking that opened up other opportunities.

  That’s what she hoped would happen with this current lead as Bryers pulled their car into the lot of a sloppy-looking garage called Strasburg Car Care. She could tell by the look on Bryers’s face that he also thought this was a waste of time. But simply being back in Strasburg seemed to pacify McGrath and as long as he was not breathing down their necks, Mackenzie was happy.

  A tenuous connection was what had brought them to Strasburg Car Care. While there had been no surviving local family to speak with about Will Albrecht’s disappearance, Mackenzie had been able to dig up the name of a close childhood friend. That friend had a rap sheet with a few DUIs and unpaid parking tickets, but nothing too serious. His name was Andy Vaughan, employee of Strasburg car Care since he had started working at the age of fifteen.

  When Mackenzie stepped through the garage doors, she saw her man right away. His identity was given away by the nametag over the breast pocket of his work uniform: ANDY. Currently, he was changing the oil on a truck that was easily thirty years old. When he saw Mackenzie and Bryers, he rolled his eyes.

  “Customers aren’t allowed in the garage,” he said, clearly annoyed.

  “We’re not customers,” Mackenzie said, flashing her badge.

  “Oh,” he said, his eyes going wide at the sight of her badge. “One second then, if you don’t mind.”

  “Take your time.”

  While they waited for Andy Vaughan to finish up, she and Bryers looked around the garage. Apparently, Andy was the only one working. And from the looks of the place, she figured a single employee per shift might be as much as Strasburg Car Care could afford.

  A few minutes later, Andy stepped out of the garage and waved them into the small office attached to the garage. “Sorry about that,” he said as he took a seat on a stool behind the counter. He wiped his hands on a shop rag and said, “What can I help you with?”

  “I’m
Agent White and this is Agent Bryers. I know it may seem like it’s coming out of left field, but we had a few questions about Will Albrecht.”

  He looked very confused at first and then a look of sadness came across his face. Something about the unexpected sorrow made him look much older than his twenty-six years. “Wow,” he said. “Okay. I’ll try to help but, man…I haven’t even thought of Will in years.”

  “We believe his disappearance could be linked to a recent case,” Mackenzie said. “So if you think hard on it, what can you tell us about what you remember about Will, the disappearance, and his family?”

  “Are you talking about the Campground Killer?” he asked. “How on earth is that linked?”

  “There is no clear link,” Mackenzie said, quickly dodging the question. “So, if you could please just focus on the question…”

  “Sure,” Andy said. “Well, if I can be frank, his family sucks. I know people deal with grief in their own ways and all, but they were just jerks afterwards. They wanted help from no one. They moved, you know? I’m not sure where, but not even a year after he disappeared, they up and moved. Seemed weird as hell to me.”

  It had seemed odd to Mackenzie as well but the records indicated that the family had been more than helpful with answering questions about the disappearance in the years that followed. They’d simply wanted to distance themselves from the community after their son had gone missing. Mackenzie understood it but also felt that it had been a little suspicious.

  “I know it seems like forever ago,” Mackenzie said, “but can you think of anyone that might have wanted to hurt Will or his family?”

  “Not at all,” Andy said. “Will was a cool kid, you know? And in a town like this, there are really no enemies…even when kids don’t get along in school, their parents would get together over beers and sort it out. It’s always been like that around here.”