“It’s okay,” Mackenzie said, more for her own benefit than his. “You can stop.”
Hall did so, gladly. He stood back while Mackenzie took a single step into the unit. Because of the opened door, the inside was littered with old moldy leaves, little scant piles of dust and dirt, and rat droppings. Still, it just had the feel of a place where a lot of vile things had gone down; it was a feeling she was starting to trust, some sort of weird sensor in her heart or brain that was becoming finely tuned as her career went on.
“Is her family still around?” Mackenzie asked.
“Just a grandmother. And she’s in an assisted living home about an hour away with dementia.”
There was nothing worthwhile in the unit, but that was okay with Mackenzie. If Hall had needed to bring her out here to show her just what he’d had to endure, she could forgive him for that.
“I got a partial inventory list from two of the sites,” Mackenzie said. “You were present at all five sites, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“Was there anything at all that stuck out to you?” she asked. “Anything that seemed out of place or sitting outside of all of the boxes and bins that just looked randomly placed?”
He looked her in the eyes, his stare locked and cold. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m working a hunch…some things I’ve seen at the two sites in Seattle. It seems like a weak link—even almost coincidental. But if I could tie it back to the murders here…”
“Little tea cups,” Hall said. “In two of the units. And then right here in Shana Batiste’s unit, there were these cutesy little play food things—pretend grapes, bread, butter. Like a kid plays with, you know?”
“Yeah, I know…”
And that was all that needed to be said by either of them. Everything else was communicated in their eyes—that this was a definite link. And that it made the murders much more disturbing.
“Shit,” Hall said.
And with that, he lowered his head and went back to the car. Mackenzie stood there a moment longer, looking back into the decrepit unit as if trying to peer into its bloody past.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Back at the station, Hall invited her in for coffee. It was inching in near one o’clock in the afternoon and Mackenzie wanted to be back on the road no later than four, but she accepted. She thought it might be borderline cruel to make Detective Hall relive the hell he’d lived through eight years ago and then just leave him to his thoughts.
As she sat down in his office and he handed her a cup from the Keurig in the corner of the room, it was as if he read her thoughts. He sat down and let out a deep sigh.
“I imagine you want to get back to Seattle as quickly as possible,” he said. “While you were hanging back at the last unit, I called ahead and had one of the officers get together the information on any family members of the victims that are still around here. As it turns out, I was wrong. There’s only one family close by. The second closest is about two and a half hours away, out near the coast somewhere.”
“Which family is still in Salem?”
“The Barkers. Jade Barker’s parents are both still living in Salem. The father was hospitalized for a while after Jade’s death. He wasn’t eating well, got dehydrated, and just fell flat out sick. Jade had a brother, too. But he’s serving some time in prison for attempted rape and damn near beating some guy to death outside of a bar—both events occurring the weekend after his sister’s funeral. Needless to say, those five bodies found so close together with no hope of finding the killer…it tore these families apart.”
Mackenzie sipped from her coffee as Detective Hall slid a piece of paper over to her. It was a plain sheet of notebook paper, with an address.
“Debbie Barker is newly retired and sells some sort of upcycled crafts at local farmer’s markets,” Hall said. “Chances are pretty good you’ll catch her at home.”
Mackenzie took the slip of paper and downed more of her coffee. “I know this wasn’t easy for you, Detective. Thank you for your help.”
“No problem. Just…do me a favor and catch this guy, would you?”
She smiled a little nervously. “I intend to. And you’ll be among the first to know when I do.”
***
Just before she pulled into the driveway of the Barker residence, Mackenzie wondered how Detective Hall had known so much about the Barkers. She assumed it was because he had kept tabs on them after the murder of their daughter. It was something that police officers and agents sometimes fell into when they were unable to solve a case. They cast all of their feelings of failures and inadequacy into making sure they knew how the relatives were doing, how they were holding up. It was a noble thing, but also quite sad as well.
As it turned out, Hall had been absolutely correct in his assumption. When Mackenzie got out of her car in the Barkers’ driveway at 1:45, she saw the garage door open and could hear the whirring of some small electrical appliance. As she walked up the driveway and got closer to the garage, she was able to see inside. She saw a woman of about sixty or so hunched over a work bench with a small hand-sander. She was working on an oval-shaped object, oblivious to the rest of the world.
Mackenzie waited a moment, not wanting to scare her. She did not make her presence known until the woman—presumably Debbie Barker—shut the sander down and removed the protective eyewear from her head. Mackenzie knocked lightly on the edge of the garage and said, “Hello.”
Debbie turned around with a bit of a jump and smiled uncertainly. “Um, hello. Can I help you?” There was sawdust in her hair and on her shirt and, despite her unexpected visitor, she looked rather happy. Mackenzie hated where she was about to take this woman.
“Yes, you can,” she said. “I’m Special Agent Mackenzie White, with the FBI. I know it might seem sudden and out of the blue, but I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about your daughter.”
The slight smile on Debbie Barker’s face faded. She shook her head and turned immediately back to her project, already picking the sander back up. “No thanks,” she said. “That part of my life is behind me and as you know, Jade is no longer with us.”
“With all due respect, there were four others as well,” Mackenzie said. “And now there are two more.”
Debbie hesitated. She didn’t turn back around to face Mackenzie. She just stood there as if frozen in place. “When?” she asked.
“Just within the last week or so. In Seattle. The sites and the way it’s happening are seemingly identical to what happened here in Salem. I’d like to think we can bring this guy in this time but I need your help.”
Debbie finally turned back around. She was crying, the sander and her project now forgotten. “You have to understand how painful it is for me to go back to that time,” she said. “It destroyed not just our family but…it ruined everything. It took years to move on.”
“And that’s why I’ll keep the questions low-key and as non-intrusive as I can. Does that sound okay?”
“What do you need to know? I talked to what seemed like hundreds of policemen and FBI agents. I don’t have anything new to offer.”
“Well, I was curious about the sort of things Jade kept in her unit. You ended up with a great deal of her things, right?”
“I did. It’s all up in the attic but—and please don’t take this the wrong way—I’m not about to let you tear through it.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Mackenzie said. “But what I’m interested in learning about is if there was anything in the unit that you didn’t expect. Was there anything out of the ordinary?”
Debbie let out a laugh and looked down at her hands, as if there was a joke written there. “Yeah, some things did shock me. She was apparently a fan of those trashy period romance novels with the guy with his shirt ripped off on the front. She always told me she preferred classic stuff, you know? But…yikes. Those terrible novels. You know the kind?”
“I do. Anything else?”
“Yes,” Debbie said curtly. It almost seemed as if she didn’t want to keep going. “There was a pitcher and a little plate. But they were toys, you know? Like tea party stuff. At the time, right after we found her, I didn’t even think twice about it. But as I moved her stuff here, me and her father, I saw those things. They were unpacked and just sort of sitting there by themselves. And it made no sense for Jade to have them. All this time I figured it might have been some inside joke between her and her old roommate in college. But I asked her roommate about it a few years back and she said she had no idea.”
“It might sound odd,” Mackenzie said, “but do you think you’d be willing to part with them?”
Debbie considered it for a moment and then nodded. “I guess so. It’s done nothing but raise questions anyway. Do you think they’re related to the cases in some way?”
The truth was, Mackenzie was pretty certain they were related. But telling Debbie Barker that would do nothing but raise painful memories. “We don’t know yet,” she said. “We’re just doing everything we can to ensure that the Seattle cases are indeed linked to the Salem cases. And for now, we’re pursuing every avenue we can.”
The look on Debbie’s face made it clear that she knew she was being fed a line of bullshit. Still, she nodded and headed for the door that led inside. “Give me a second,” she said as she entered the door, making it quite clear that Mackenzie was not allowed inside.
While she waited, Mackenzie pulled out her phone and texted Ellington. Any luck on your end?
She pocketed the phone and looked around at the things Debbie was creating. From what Mackenzie could tell, Debbie was making high-end farmhouse objects. There was a sign with a stenciled coffee cup on it, and another that said MENU with a perfect little square for a chalkboard to go into.
While she looked, her phone dinged. It was a return text from Ellington. Slow but productive. Family members of the victims have all but been ruled out. Most of the questioning done. You?
She quickly responded with: Things have been eye-opening here in Oregon.
In the same moment she pocketed the phone, the door into the house opened. Debbie Barker stepped out, holding a small plastic bag. She handed it over to Mackenzie as if there were rotting food inside of it.
“I hope it helps,” Debbie said. “And I hope you can find the monster that did this. I just can’t even imagine the sort of person who would…”
Mackenzie wouldn’t even allow herself to nod. She knew where Debbie was going with the comment, of course, but she had seen more than enough people in her career who were capable of such a thing.
She’d also seen the family members of victims, years removed from the trauma. After a while, they tended to no longer think of the person who took the lives of their loved ones as a mere human; in their minds, the killer became a boogeyman or a monster.
But Mackenzie knew that this was not the case. She knew that there were no monsters, only monstrous drives in the hearts of men. And because of that—because she was only after men and not monsters—she knew she had a good chance at catching them.
As she stood in Debbie’s garage, a broken mother who had worked hard to put the past behind her, Mackenzie vowed to herself that the man who had taken the life of Debbie Barker’s daughter would be no different.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Kelly Higdon knew she wasn’t going to make it back to work on time, but she didn’t care. It was one of those days where she had a million things to do over the course of her hour-long lunch break. Besides…no one ever came back when they were supposed to. She worked at the kind of place where some people came back from lunch with margaritas on their breath or, as was the case with her supervisor and the married receptionist, reeking of sex.
So if she was yelled at for being fifteen minutes late for trying to cram four errands into the space of an hour, they could kiss her ass. She hated the job anyway. She wanted to be a journalist, not writing dry and often bloated proposals for a telecom company.
She came to the destination of her final errand with that mindset driving her. She drove through the main gate of Griffin Brothers Storage City, listening to the contents of the cardboard box in her backseat rattling around. Everything in that box had been in her boyfriend’s apartment forty minutes ago. When he came home and found them missing, maybe he’d figure out that she was dumping him without calling for an explanation. And if he did call, then she’d send him the picture she had been texted earlier in the day. A picture of her boyfriend’s unmentionables in another woman’s mouth—a picture that had been taken as some sort of foreplay or turn-on game by the woman in the picture.
Kelly drove through the wide alley that sat between the rows of units. It was 12:50 in the afternoon so there was practically no one there. Therefore, she didn’t bother parking all nice and perfect in front of her unit. Besides, she was just going to drop the box off and leave.
She got out of the car, grabbed the box out of the back, and punched in the five-digit code on her lock. She heard the click, grabbed the handle, and gave it a hefty push up. It opened to reveal her rather messy storage unit. She knew she needed to clean it out eventually; she had shit from childhood that she knew she didn’t need or even want. She was a pack rat, plain and simple. As she set her box down among the stacks of her belongings, she spotted her old Strawberry Shortcake record player.
Seriously, Kelly, she thought. What in the hell do you need that for?
This thought was interrupted by a voice from behind her.
“Hey, um, could you move your car?”
She turned around, trying to hide the irritation from her face. She saw a man standing there, looking quite embarrassed to even be asking the question at all.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was just leaving.”
He turned to leave her alone, giving a quick nod of thanks. As she started out too, she noticed that he had stopped at her car. He took a quick look around and then turned back to her.
The blow seemed to come out of nowhere. She was too busy trying to figure out what he was holding in his hand to think about warding off the hit. She heard and felt the blow when it came and as she stumbled to the ground, she finally saw the length of steel pipe in his hand in a hazy sort of blur.
He came into the unit with her then and she tried to get a look at his face but the world went dark before she could focus on those maniacal black eyes.
***
When Kelly opened her eyes again, she thought she was going to throw up. The pain in her head was monstrous. She tried to cry out but discovered that her mouth was taped shut. Below her, the world seemed to be moving. She was being jostled around, which she assumed was why she had managed to come to.
She then recalled being struck by the lead pipe and the man coming into her storage unit.
Kelly squealed beneath the tape and the noise was weak, like the sound of a creaky door. In response, she felt something squeeze tight around her back. She moaned against the tape and then did her best to settle herself, to figure out just what the hell was happening to her.
She didn’t have time for this, though. As soon as she decided to try to calm herself, she felt herself falling. It was a very short fall. She landed on something relatively soft and then, for the moment, she was stationary. She took that moment to look up and take inventory of the situation.
She was in a small room. There were a few boxes located around the room, pushed up against the wall. A single bulb shone down on her from a roof that looked to be made of tin or some sort of metal.
A storage unit…but not mine. Where the hell…?
A man stepped into her view. She recognized him at once. He was not holding a lead pipe this time, but that made him no less sinister. Kelly tried to crawl away but could not. Her hands were bound behind her and when she tried to back up, it put incredible strain on her shoulders. She also found that her feet were bound in the same way, with rope or some kind of cord.
“I know you’re scared,” the man sai
d. “But it will be over before you know it. From what I understand, when you start to lose enough blood, time goes by very fast as your brain starts to panic…as your heart starts to slow down.”
Kelly wanted to beg for her life, wanted to tell him she’d do anything he wanted if he’d let her go.
But the gag would not let her speak. And besides that, the look he had in his eyes told her that he was beyond bargaining. He already had what he wanted.
Kelly started to cry. The tears came quick, blurring her vision.
It was a slight mercy, really. The tears clouded her vision and she did not see the knife when he slowly descended on her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mackenzie returned to Seattle at 6:12 that evening. It was drizzling rain yet again but it did not bother her as much as it had the day before. As she walked into the police department with the bag Debbie Barker had given her, she felt like they finally had a path to follow. Of course, they had no idea how to truly travel down that path, but at least it gave them a clear avenue to pursue.
She found Ellington in the tiny conference room they were working out of. He was standing in front of a dry erase board where he had pinned a geographical map of the area and penned the names of the storage facilities. At the small table, Deputy Rising and another policeman sat with papers and files scattered around the table.
It was awkward to have them there. Mackenzie’s first reaction to seeing her fiancé at work was to kiss him. Of course, that would not be appropriate, so she simply joined Rising and the other officer at the table.
Mackenzie White 10-Before He Longs Page 6
