Mackenzie White 10-Before He Longs

by Pierce, Blake

  She shook her head curtly. It was another of their little signals to one another—her way of telling him to drop it now before she got really angry.

  Up ahead, Rising was giving his turn signal. Mackenzie waited with anxiousness, suddenly wanting to get out of the car as soon as possible.

  ***

  Mackenzie stepped out of the car without saying a word to Ellington. She watched as Rising approached the front office to Bellevue Storage. It was a small one-room building, protected by an electric key pad.

  “The owner was very understanding and cooperative when I called him,” Rising said. “Gave me the code to get into his office for the spare key. He was hesitant at first but he’d gotten wind of the murder at Seattle Storage Solutions and seemed to be very concerned. He was so scared about a bad public image, I think he might have given me the deed to the place if I’d asked for it.”

  Rising tapped in the numbers carefully, clearly respecting the privacy of the owner.

  “He staying away from the potential crime scene?” Mackenzie asked.

  “No. He’s on the way down right now just in case we need anything else.”

  Mackenzie waited by the door as Rising went inside to retrieve the key to Unit 32. Ellington stepped up beside her but didn’t bother trying to say anything. The tension between them was thick, almost like a physical presence between them. Ellington knew her well enough to let the issue set for a while longer, especially now that they were potentially on the brink of making a discovery regarding this case.

  Rising came out with the key and the three of them started walking down the paved grounds. It was a nicer outdoor facility, the units well cared for and spaced apart a few feet so that each unit wasn’t right on top of its neighboring units. There were two street lamps, one on either side of the lot that contained the units. It did a fair job of lighting the area, but not quite enough to set Mackenzie’s mind at ease. She took her Maglite out once again and trailed it along the front sides of the units. When she did, she saw that they were separated almost like houses along a street. Even numbers were on the right, odd on the left.

  Unit 32 came into view twenty seconds later. As they passed by Unit 30, Mackenzie stopped. She sniffed the air and started to worry.

  “What is it?” Ellington asked.

  Rising took another step forward and then he stopped too. “Damn.”

  Something smelled foul up ahead. Mackenzie tried her best to imagine what it might be other than a dead body but she knew that was exactly what it was. It was similar to the smell that had been reported to Quinn Tuck before he had discovered the body of Claire Locke. Mackenzie had smelled it before as well, a few different times on different cases. It was a smell you never quite forgot.

  “Need me to open it?” Mackenzie asked Rising.

  The deputy shook his head and stepped forward. He slid the key into the lock and turned it. The click of the lock releasing seemed impossibly loud in the silence of the night. Almost instinctually, Mackenzie checked her watch. It had somehow gotten to be 12:16.

  Ellington grabbed the little handle at the bottom of the roll-up door and slid it up.

  Before it was open even a quarter of the way, the smell came rolling out in waves. Mackenzie cringed and shielded her nose and mouth with the crook of her elbow. Rising wasn’t quite as skilled at containing himself. He let out a little moan, turned away from the agents, and puked.

  “My God,” Ellington said, taking a step back.

  He looked to Mackenzie and shot her a glance that seemed to ask: Are you okay? The argument they’d had in the car was now on hold.

  Mackenzie nodded and aimed her light into the unit.

  It was almost entirely empty. There were three plastic bins in the back, along with a cheap-looking safe. Mackenzie spotted a small cup of some kind sitting on the floor in front of the bins but she looked away from it quickly.

  The body lying a few feet from the open door was much more deserving of her attention.

  It was a woman, clothed in a T-shirt with a band name on it and a pair of jean shorts that rode pretty high. There was dried blood in her short-cropped blonde hair. She was lying on her side, as if to make sure to greet whoever opened her unit door. Because she was looking directly at them, Mackenzie could tell right away that this woman had been here for a very long time.

  It was more than the smell, which was still hard to deal with. It was also the look of her skin. It was pale and started to decay. Mackenzie guessed the body had been here for at least a month. Maybe more.

  A single stab wound had been placed high in her stomach. Her hands were tied behind her back and her ankles had been bound together. A thick belt had been clamped around her mouth, pressing a white cloth down into her mouth.

  For the first time in her run as an agent, Mackenzie had to look away. She’d seen dead bodies before—even partially decayed ones—but this was different somehow. This woman was dressed. This woman had been placed here on purpose, left to die and be found like some weird little scavenger hunt.

  She’d been used, discarded, and forgotten. Worst of all, the fact that she was apparently not part of the missing persons list they had compiled earlier in the night meant that she had no one in her life who had cared or noticed that she had gone missing. And even if someone had noticed, they had not cared enough to check up on her.

  “Mac,” Ellington said. “Step outside. It’s okay.”

  Not that she needed his approval, but she took his advice. When she stepped outside, Rising looked at her with an embarrassed expression. “Sorry,” he said. “It kind of snuck up on me.”

  Mackenzie only nodded as she collected her breath and her thoughts. Somehow, the night seemed even quieter than it had when they had arrived. And, of course, as she looked up into the cloudy sky, a spitting of rain started to fall.

  ***

  The owner of the complex arrived ten minutes later. By then, Mackenzie had collected herself well enough to head back inside. Rising ran to the main office to meet the owner, just to let him know what was going on—and to suggest that he not come out there with them. Rising had seemed more than happy to be the one to get that particular task.

  Mackenzie knew that the body might have many answers to offer but they’d mostly be discovered by the coroner. This was the logic she used to look beyond the rotting body and take a look at what else was in the unit.

  She immediately checked out the little cup she thought she’d seen. It was sitting in front of one of the bins. It had cute little flowers painted on it. Written in red letters was the word SUGAR. Like the teapot they had found in Elizabeth Newcomb’s unit, it was very small—likely part of a child’s tea set.

  “You were right,” Ellington said. “He’s been waiting. Waiting for us to catch up. Jesus…how many more do you think there are?”

  She thought about it for a minute, thinking back to something Janell Harper had told them about the mindset of their killer. “I think this might be it,” she answered. “Or at least the only one he’d killed before Claire Locke. If there were more and he was indeed getting impatient with us, that slip of paper would have had several other units on it, too.”

  “Unless it’s not just that he’s waiting,” Ellington said. “Maybe all of it is a game to him. He’s showing us a playful side by leaving the fucking tea set everywhere. And the doll. Maybe he’s playing some kind of a game with us, too.”

  Mackenzie didn’t think this was the case. There was something desperate about the way he was splitting up the elements of the tea party. It had the feel of a kid who wanted to play, but didn’t know how to go about making friends. She kept this to herself for the moment, though; the last thing she wanted was to drive a wedge even farther between them.

  They opened up each bin one by one, hoping to find something else. They worked quickly, an unspoken agreement between them to get the hell away from the stench of the body as quickly as possible.

  There wasn’t much of anything in the bins. One of t
hem did contain a few old fliers and promotional booklets for outlet stores. There were some for Old Navy and a few for Pottery Barn. The name on the address label was Lindsay Nettles. Mackenzie wanted to assume this would be the woman currently lying on the concrete floor, but given the way this case had been going, she just didn’t know.

  As she looked through the third bin, rummaging past a few paperback books and old CDs, there was a light knock on the side of the unit. She looked up and saw Rising standing there rather timidly.

  “Agents, I spoke to the owner just now. He’s looking through the paperwork. I think you might want to hear what he’s been telling me.”

  Glad to be done with the unit for now, Mackenzie and Ellington followed Rising back to the little office building. The moist night air smelled like heaven as far as Mackenzie was concerned. It was refreshing, but the scent of the body still clung to the inside of her nostrils.

  They entered the office as the owner was digging through a drawer in a small filing cabinet that sat behind the counter. He looked over his shoulder as they entered and gave them a sleepy smile.

  “Hey there,” he said. “I’m Leroy Johnson. I’ve been running this place for the last three years and I have never seen anything like what Deputy Rising was telling me you found.”

  “You hadn’t smelled anything over the last few days?” Ellington asked.

  “I thought I did three days ago,” Leroy said. “Just a light whiff, though. But every now and again, someone will hit a skunk out in the road, or even a stupid deer that gets lost and ends up in the middle of the road. It’s rare, but it happens. I thought that was all it was. Didn’t even think about it again.”

  “Tell them what you told me,” Rising said. “About the man.”

  Leroy pulled a sheet of paper from the cabinet, shut the drawer, and then gave his full attention to Mackenzie and Ellington.

  “The deputy was telling me that you found a woman’s body in that unit,” Leroy said. “He also told me about the case you’re working on, finding women in their storage units. But Unit 32 did not belong to a woman.”

  “You’re sure?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Certain of it,” he said, handing her the paper he had taken out of the cabinet. “I even remember this guy. Tall drink of water, with dark hair. Had a bandage over his nose, right across the bridge.”

  Mackenzie looked at the paper. It was an application to rent one of the units. She scanned the paper and came to the name and signature. She furrowed her brow and showed it to Ellington.

  “Mark Riley,” he read. “But right there…the address on this is different than the one we visited earlier.”

  Mackenzie had noticed this, too, but wasn’t sure it meant anything. Maybe this asshole was just toying with them.

  “Can you look to see if you have any units rented out to Lindsay Nettles?”

  “Sure. One second.”

  He went back through his filing cabinet, looking for the information. It was one of those times where Mackenzie did not see the appeal in doing things the old, simpler way. An Excel spreadsheet on a computer and they’d have the information in one second.

  But Leroy only took about twenty seconds. He pulled a file and showed it to them. “Lindsay Nettles. She’s been renting a unit for about six months now. Unit number 36.”

  Mackenzie handed Lindsay’s application to Rising. “You know where this address is right off the top of your head?”

  “Lovingston,” he said. “It’s probably about a thirty-minute drive from here…maybe twenty from Seattle. Little no-name town.”

  “Can you plug this address into your GPS?” she asked. “And then place the call to your department about the body. I need the coroner out here ASAP. I’m going to go get a look at Lindsay Nettles’s unit.”

  Having anticipated this, Leroy had already taken the spare key from his inventory. He tossed the key over the counter to Mackenzie.

  “This floors me,” Leroy said. “And now that I think of it, there was a man last week that went into his unit. Came in here and said he thought he smelled something kind of foul. But I didn’t think anything of it. Didn’t even bother going out to look into it.”

  “Don’t start doing that,” Mackenzie said. “You can’t place any of the blame on yourself. There’s no way you could have known.”

  She took the key and wasted no time heading back outside. As she passed by the unit that had been signed out to Mark Riley, she only glanced into it. The smell was just as bad, even with the door having been open for about ten minutes.

  Mackenzie unlocked Unit 36 and drew the door up. She wasn’t sure what she was going to find, but she was sure it couldn’t be worse than what they had found two units down. When the door was rolled up, an automated light came on overhead. It shone down on the contents of Unit 36 and Mackenzie found herself holding her breath.

  At first glance, there was nothing there. A few cardboard boxes, an old writing desk, and a crate of old tools. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  So why go through the trouble of moving three of her bins into his unit?

  It made no sense…unless it was the killer’s way of helping them identify the body and directing them to her unit.

  She stepped inside and looked around. As she did, she saw a doll sitting on the floor between a crate and a cardboard box. Unable to help herself, Mackenzie picked it up. It looked eerily similar to the one they had found in the abandoned house. This one had a little tea cup taped to its hand.

  Fuming, Mackenzie tossed the doll to the ground. She kicked it, feeling juvenile when she realized it felt incredibly good. Still, as she stormed back out of the unit, she could not shake the feeling that the damned doll was watching her leave.

  Smiling at her, even…like it knew a secret.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Mackenzie was starting to feel as if they were being toyed with. It was bad enough that despite the number of scenes the killer had visited, they still had no real leads. But now that it seemed that he had them on some strange cat-and-mouse chase that he was very much in charge of, Mackenzie was starting to get pissed off.

  It was 1:34 in the morning as she and Ellington turned off of the main highway, onto the secondary feeder road. The address they had taken from Leroy’s application had pointed them here. Deputy Rising had confirmed that there were indeed several houses back in a small thicket of woods down this road. He had then called a few officers to join him at Bellevue Storage to go over the two units in question.

  As Ellington drove them further down the road, Mackenzie became more and more certain that they’d find a house just as abandoned as the first one. The question was whether or not the killer had elected to leave them any eerie clues at this location.

  “Forgive me for saying so,” Ellington said, “but it looks like something’s eating at you. I truly apologize if the whole discussion with my mother pissed you off.”

  “It wasn’t the part about your mother,” she said. “It was how you described me. But—and don’t take this the wrong way—I couldn’t care less about what you think of me right now. I’d much rather just try to close this fucking case.”

  The car went quiet. It was rare that Mackenzie used such an expletive and whenever she did, it seemed to rattle Ellington. Apparently, he decided that it would be best to simply let her stew in it for a while longer because he did not try to break through to her again.

  The address came up on their right in the form of a long driveway that appeared to be a gravel road. In the approaching glow of headlights, it looked like an expanse that simply opened up into the forest and then swallowed the road entirely.

  The driveway went down a small hill and then came to a stop at an aluminum carport. An old Civic sat beneath it. To the left of the carport stood a simple one-story house, the kind that reminded of Mackenzie of the shack-like structures in larger cities that were the types of places people on government housing assistance lived.

  There were no lights on inside the house. As
they stepped out of the car, everything around them was quiet and still.

  They shared an uneasy look over the hood of the car. Both of them unholstered their sidearms as they started toward the house. Mackenzie waited until they reached the porch to switch on her Maglite, not wanting to take the chance of alerting anyone who might be inside.

  On the porch, she tried the front doorknob just for the hell of it. When it turned easily in her hand and the door swung open, she expected the worst: a man waiting with a gun, pointing directly at them; a dead body on the floor; a trap. But there was nothing of the sort. There was only the interior of a house.

  But unlike the previously deserted one, this one had been lived in. For all she knew, someone was asleep in a bedroom down the hall to her right even as they entered. But as Mackenzie slowly moved through the living room, she could sense that they were alone. It was another of those innate talents that had come over the past two years working as an agent. Yes, this house had been lived in, but no one had been here for quite some time.

  The living room was small, containing a small couch, a TV stand holding an older model television, and a coffee table littered with empty soda cans, used napkins, and…

  “Shit,” Ellington breathed.

  He had spotted the other items on the coffee table as well.

  Three tea cups, all sitting in a triangular shape.

  Mackenzie put a finger to her mouth, the universal hush gesture. She then pointed to the hallway, assuming there was a bedroom there. Yes, her hunch told her that they were alone but her hunches had been wrong in the past.

  They walked quietly down the hallway. The place was empty. No pictures on the walls, no decorations of any kind in the hallway. There was a bathroom on the left, and a linen closet beside that. There were two bedrooms side by side on the right side of the hallway. The doors to both were open. The first held a bed, a bedside table, and a clock. The closet was open, revealing just a few crumpled T-shirts and a pair of pants.