It all has to mean something, right? she thought. This has to have an ending somewhere. In all of these notes and folders, there’s an answer. I just have to find it.
But then there was another thought, one that started clanging like an old rusty cymbal in her head.
But what if you don’t yet have all of the information? What if there’s something else left to find?
It was that thought, nagging like an insect around her head, that sent her walking out of the conference room. She had missed something, had overlooked something. Maybe it was because of the argument with Ellington or maybe it was the fact that this case was, for some reason she still could not identify, getting under her skin. Or maybe she was too preoccupied with the wedding or the strange way she had been feeling ever since they’d landed in Seattle.
There were a myriad of reasons that could be causing her to overlook things, but at the end of the day they were all just excuses. And she was better than that. She always had been.
What’s missing? What did we not see?
“You okay?”
She was barely aware that she had been wandering the hallways, lost in her own thoughts. The voice was Ellington’s approaching from behind.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just thinking. What did McGrath say?”
“He asked what the additional agents would be tasked with. I told him helping the local PD with the manhunt for the killer and the search for Brian Dixon and Daisy Walker, as well as any crime scene investigation. Because we have very little description of the man driving the truck, he was hesitant to give in. But he’s calling the Seattle field office in a bit. He thinks we can get some assistance as early as tomorrow morning.”
“Better than nothing, I guess.”
“Exactly.” He paused and then made a point to look directly into her eyes. “Mac…really. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m just tired. Really tired. And stressed out. Th wedding, this case, your mother, our fight, it’s just…too much all at once. And I loathe that our personal crap is interfering with work.”
“I get it,” he said. “I really do. Look…it’s already after nine. Why don’t you go back to the hotel and get to bed early. Based on what Dentry said about the forensics results, we’re going to probably have an early morning.”
She’d usually argue against such a notion but she knew it made sense. All she could do here was go over files she’d already read through a dozen times while waiting for any calls that might come in from the cops out on the street, actively looking for any signs of a killer or the missing couple.
“I think I’ll do that,” she said. “Same goes for you, though. Don’t stay here too long. Tomorrow’s going to be a long one. Just promise that you’ll call if anything new comes in.”
Ellington looked up and down the hall quickly and then, seeing that the coast was clear, kissed her on the forehead. “I won’t be too long. Go on and get some sleep.”
He gently nudged her toward the end of the hall, toward the lobby. He gave her a wave and then headed back to the conference room. Mackenzie watched him go for only a moment before heading for the lobby.
***
Mackenzie usually had trouble falling asleep any time before eleven but that was not the case tonight. She brushed her teeth, stripped completely naked, and climbed into bed. Thoughts of the case tried to keep her awake but the pull of sleep was much stronger. She was asleep five minutes after pulling her covers around her, less than forty-five minutes after she had parted ways with Ellington in the hallway of the Seattle PD.
While asleep, she dreamed. This was nothing new, as she had been plagued with bad dreams from a young age. Those bad dreams seemed to no longer be solely about her father anymore. Those had come to a slow end after she had finally wrapped his case and had managed to move in with her life.
Still, from time to time she would experience one that reflected some trauma or another, whether from her past or the present.
The dream that rolled through her head like a tsunami that night in Seattle was no different.
While her father rarely made an appearance, those damned cornfields somehow still played a part more often than not. It was as if the stalks and husks had somehow threaded themselves into her subconscious. The Scarecrow Killer and memories associated with him rarely showed up, so that was good. But as her dream self walked through the rows, she knew that meant that her dreams were still no longer her own.
In the dream, she walked out of a cornfield, husks and corn silk in her hair and her shirt. The field came to an end at an open dirt lot. A single storage shed stood there, slightly lopsided and dirty. Overhead, the sky was slate gray, indicating a storm was on the way.
She walked toward the storage unit and found the door already open. There was nothing inside. No boxes, no bins, not even any cobwebs or mounds of dust. It was absolutely void of anything.
Yet when she stepped inside, all of that changed. She was not standing inside a dingy storage unit, but a house. It was not a house that she had ever been in before. It was just an old generic abandoned house. The walls were chipped and cracked. The furniture was old, dusty, and neglected. As she passed through the living room, she saw Deputy Rising sitting on the moldy couch. He smiled at her and pointed to the right. She looked that way and saw a hallway. It seemed to go on forever, so deep and long that it ended in a singular point of darkness, like looking down a long tunnel.
She started down the hallway and found it populated with what looked to be hundreds of doors. They were all closed and each seemed to hide its own secret. She opened one and found a dead woman on the floor, her head removed. The next revealed a rat roughly the size of a tiger, burrowing into the wall.
The next door she came to was locked. She could not open it. This was just as well because there was a woman screaming behind it. She was screaming in terror and pain. Mackenzie was somehow certain these were the cries of her mother. She walked quickly away from this door and came to the next one.
This one opened freely under her hand. She stepped into a room that she had been in recently. It was the back room in the house they had assumed belonged to the killer. The boxes and boxes of tea items and dolls had been spilled over. Some of the dolls were scattered on the floor. Something wet and sticky came out of them, something like blood but far more exaggerated.
When she looked down, Mackenzie saw that she had stepped in the stickiness. It was on her feet and somehow crawling up her ankle, twirling itself around her legs.
She cried out and stepped backward. When she did, every single doll on the floor rolled over and stared at her. They were all smiling. One was even laughing in that creepy robotic way that some dolls were capable of.
She slammed the door closed and found herself back in the hallway. She went to the next door and opened it. The room on the other side was empty with the exception of a single item.
A bassinet sat in the center of the room. It was overflowing with that same sticky stuff that had been coming off of the dolls. Mackenzie let out a little moan as she watched a small pink arm reach up out of it.
She fell back into the hall and was caught by familiar arms. She looked up and saw that Ellington was there with her. He tried to draw her close but she fought to get away when she got a good look at his face.
He was looking down at her with a set of glass eyes, plucked straight from one of the dolls in the room a bit farther back. The glassy stare seemed to cut right into her and when he pulled her close to him, his embrace was plastic. He smiled at her and that sticky stuff came out of his mouth.
“Oh, you’re safe now,” he said. “It’s okay. You’re safe. You’re…”
***
“…safe. You’re okay.”
Mackenzie snapped awake with a gasping breath. She was in the motel room and Ellington was beside her. His hand was on her shoulder and the look of concern on his face made her slightly embarrassed.
Her heart hammered in her chest and she coul
d not keep her legs from trembling. She looked around the room, blinking in an attempt to convince herself that she was awake…to get the dream out of her head.
“Another bad one?” he asked.
She only nodded. She then looked to the bedside clock and saw that it was 12:25. “When did you get in?” she asked.
“Eleven. I think I had just drifted off to sleep when you started moaning in your sleep. You need to talk about it?”
“God no.”
She lay back down, feeling sleep already rushing back at her. She could not remember the last time she had felt this tired.
Only this time, despite the pull of sleep, she was not able to fall asleep so quickly. Remnants of the dream littered her mind. She wasn’t scared, but the dream had truly done a number on her. When she realized she felt out of whack, she moved her foot under the covers and ran it along Ellington’s ankle and calf. This was a sign she had used often in their relationship—a sign that she was having trouble sleeping and needed to be held. It was much easier than coming out and asking for it and Mackenzie White had never been the kind of woman who would make requests like “I need to be held” or “I want to snuggle.”
Ellington sleepily obliged. He rolled over and put his arm around her. She was amazed at just how quickly she felt comforted by his touch. It was more than his arm around her. It was the pressure of his chest against her back, the mere presence of him in the bed beside her. She breathed deeply, enjoying the feeling of it.
She interlaced her fingers with the hand that had come around her side and now rested just below her breasts. He gave her hand a squeeze, still half asleep, and Mackenzie drifted away. She came in and out of sleep for the next half an hour or so, still seeing that bassinet and the sticky stuff from the dolls. She pressed herself closer into Ellington and he tightened his arm a bit.
It was a gesture of security for both of them and nothing more. But there were certain parts of their anatomy that did not understand this. She started to feel him stirring below the waist as his body responded in a very natural way to his naked fiancée so tightly pressed against him. She responded by kissing his wrist and lightly pressing her lips to his fingers, still clasped through hers. She pressed her backside against him and he slowly began kissing her on the back of the neck.
Their bodies reacted the way they usually did in those sleepy hours between midnight and five when one of their minds just wouldn’t shut off. Mackenzie raised her hips slightly and reached her arm back to help guide him. When he entered her from behind, it made her feel just as secure as when he had put an arm around her.
Her back to his chest, they made love in slow yet urgent strides. It was one of the more intimate times in quite a while. When she arched her back as she reached her climax and stretched her arm back to caress the side of his face, he whispered “I love you,” into her ear.
And it was that statement that finally followed her down into a restful sleep, obliterating any remaining images from her horrifying dream.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
When the alarm of Mackenzie’s phone woke her up at six in the morning, her first reaction was one of disappointment. She had fully expected to get a call from forensics or Rising with some kind of an update. Having slept through until six without being awakened by the phone also meant that there had been no significant breakthroughs during the course of the night.
When she got out of bed feeling rested and sexually satisfied from the night, she felt almost guilty. She checked her phone for any texts or emails, but found none. As she rolled out of bed, Ellington came out of the bathroom, freshly showered.
“How do you feel this morning?” he asked.
“Much better,” she said.
It was mostly true. She felt well rested and the spontaneous intimate sex had been fantastic. But something still felt off. She felt a little sore, like she’d just run a small marathon, and something was out of whack with her stomach. But all in all, it was mostly minor. She could push through it and be back to normal after a shower.
As she dug out clothes from her suitcase in preparation for her shower, her phone rang. She answered it and was excited to hear Rising’s voice on the other end.
“I’m afraid there’s no news,” he said. “Still no word from forensics on that truck, though we expect to hear something soon.”
“Any news on the agents coming along from the Seattle field office?”
“Not yet. How about the two of you? What are your plans for the morning?”
“Not sure yet. I feel like it might do some good to revisit Roy’s Storage. Or maybe see if there’s anything we can do to help speed forensics along. There are a few other things, but I need to iron them out. We’ll see you soon, one way or the other.”
Rising seemed happy enough with that when they ended the call. As Mackenzie headed for the shower, still naked from the night before, Ellington started to get dressed.
“You told Rising there were a few other things,” he pointed out. “Like what?”
“I think I want to go back to the house—to the killer’s house. Maybe we missed something there.”
“Don’t you think we’d be of more use with Rising, forensics, and these new agents?”
“Certainly. Maybe the house is just something I’ll check out. You head to the PD and I’ll go over to the house. We’ll meet up in a few hours.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yeah. It’s been nagging at me since yesterday afternoon. I want to just run one more circuit around the place.”
“Okay. Just want to drop me off at the station on your way out?”
She nodded and went into the bathroom for her shower. She thought about the house and the boxes of tea party items and dolls. Images from last night’s dream came rushing back, particularly the bassinet, flooded with that sticky residue.
It was an image that made her uneasy, reminding her that there was one other thing she had to do outside of the case. And she was going to have to get it done today before it drove her crazy. She sped up her shower, scrubbing a little harder as if to wash away the memories of last night’s dream.
***
The house looked no less sinister in the daylight. Mackenzie arrived at 7:40, and while the sunlight coming in over the trees was quite pretty, the house seemed like one of those cliché stand-ins for a haunted house in a horror movie.
She gave the doghouse only a passing glance. The dolls inside were still having their own little eternal tea party.
Mackenzie made her way up the porch, realizing there was no guarantee that the killer wasn’t here. Granted, there was no car in the sorry excuse for a driveway, but that meant nothing. After all, he had apparently stolen a truck so he might currently be without transportation of any kind.
She brought her right forearm a little closer to her holstered Glock as she opened the front door and stepped inside. She walked into the living room slowly, feeling very much like a trespasser. The place was eerily quiet—so quiet that she could hear the buzzing of an insect somewhere within the house. She stood still for a moment, just taking in the sight of the place. Everything looked untouched since the previous visit, leading her to believe that if this was indeed the killer’s house, he had not been here for several days.
She wasted no time. She knew where she needed to go and did her best to convince herself that she was not uneasy. She’d seen characteristics of the unstable and unhinged several times in the course of her career, but this killer was getting to her like no other. Just thinking about the several boxes of dolls and discarded children’s dishes in the back room made her feel cold.
She wished Ellington was with her. She hated to feel like a scared little girl, but there it was, plain and simple. Chalk it up as just another way this case has emotionally wrecked me.
This thought brought to mind something else…the other task she needed to take care of but continued to put off.
The case first, she thought.
She walked down the hall
way and into the back room. The boxes, for a moment, looked as if they had been subtly slithering against the back wall. She fully expected to see that blood-like fluid from her dream come spilling out of them, cascading across the floor and coming for her legs. But as the shadows cast by the sunlight stopped with her own movement, the room was, of course, not alive. It was still and neglected.
She went to the boxes and started to look through them. This time, she was not rushed. She took her time, meticulously looking through each one.
There was an assortment of items. Some of the dishes were cheap plastic discs that could be picked up at just about any dollar store in the country. But then some of them were made of some type of very delicate porcelain. Some had chips and cracks while others looked pristine. The first two boxes were filled with things like that—teapots, tea cups, plates, and even a bag filled with plastic silverware and colorful cheap cutlery designed for use in a child’s play kitchen.
When she opened up the first box full of dolls, a chill rode up her spine. For a moment, she felt dizzy. She forged ahead, digging into the box and pulling out one doll after another. There was no rhyme or reason to them; some were newer and looked rather beautiful while others were clearly old and discarded, clearly leftovers from rummage sales.
As she reached the bottom of the first box of dolls, two seemingly small things happened. First, the idea of rummage sales sparked a vague notion in her head. Second, before she could catch that thought, she saw the small white smudge on the bottom of a doll’s foot. She looked at the smudge and saw that it looked to be some sort of paper, only it was sticky at the edges. She scraped at it with her fingernail and it came off rather easily, rolling up as if it were a sticker.
She then thought of her rummage sale notion. A sticker or some sort of a price tag.
Quickly, she went back over every doll she had just taken out of the box. The first one she came to was one of the nicer ones. It was not an expensive doll by any means but its owner had taken care of it. Located on the back of its neck was the smallest little speck of white. It was surrounded by a kind of dirty hue, from where something sticky had once been—a price tag, presumably.
Mackenzie White 10-Before He Longs Page 15
