Before He Preys

by Blake Pierce

  She climbed into bed just past eleven but knew right away that she would not be falling asleep anytime soon. Her mind kept going back to Ellington and what he was going through. More than that, she was starting to understand that she was beginning to rely on him far too much. She wasn’t sure how she felt about this; it was one thing to admit that you were in love with someone but a totally different thing altogether to admit that being apart from a specific person made you feel lonelier than you ever had before. And if she was being honest with herself, that’s where she was headed—if she wasn’t there already.

  That would at least explain why she had felt so off…so different…on both occasions when she had come to Kingsville. It was her first case without him by her side since they had become involved and quite honestly, it felt too different. She wasn’t sad, per se, but she did feel incomplete.

  This is pathetic, she thought to herself while she was lying in bed, wishing sleep would come quickly. I sound like the end of Jerry Maguire and I am starting to hate myself a little bit. Maybe I was so upset about the sexual harassment allegations not because I was disappointed in him, but because I was angry—angry that something dumb he had done in his past can so heavily affect what he and I have now.

  And that’s what scared her the most. It’s what made a very small part of her wonder if she should call things off with him. He made her feel safe, secure, and loved. But depending on him so heavily made her wonder how it might affect her judgment in the future and, as a result, her career. While she had never considered herself a feminist, she also had never seen herself as the type of woman who would ever need a man to make her life feel complete.

  Yet here she was…

  The thoughts felt heavy, like stones sitting on her chest. But those same stones helped her to eventually sink into sleep even when she was intimately aware of the absence of Ellington on the other side of the bed.

  ***

  The cornfields were such a staple of her dreams that it felt like stepping into a theme park. She knew what to expect along the edges and main walkways but it was the things that existed within the field that she knew could ruin her. So when she started to dream of those Nebraska cornfields for only the second time since bringing her father’s murderer to justice, she did so with a reluctant familiarity.

  She was standing in the middle one of the rows, looking out toward a horizon painted with the reds and golds of sunset. There was blood on the stalks and faint footprints along the row. She followed the footprints, feeling an impending sense of danger almost right away. She went for her Glock but discovered that it wasn’t there. In fact, the holster wasn’t there—nor were her pants.

  She was standing naked in the cornfield, a fact that brought Malory Thomas to her sleeping mind. The dirt was warm under her bare feet, reminding her of sand along the beach. She walked along the row, gazing ahead toward the fractured light of the sunset through the stalks. She took two steps, then three—and then the ground changed.

  The stale dirt changed into wood, the wooden planks of some type of walkway. The cornfield all around her was the same with this one exception. She walked on, the cornstalks nudging at her as she passed. The wood was smoothed with age under her feet and as she looked around, she saw that there was no dirt beyond the wooden planks, just cornstalks that seemed to grow out of the planks. Mackenzie stopped walking, gently pulled a few of the leaves from the stalks aside, and looked out.

  On the other side of two rows of stalks, there was open air. There was a drop-off. And waiting at the bottom was the dried riverbed beneath the Miller Moon Bridge.

  She was standing on the bridge. No rails, just cornstalks from some other terrible moment in her life, as if all the memories she had made were somehow knitting themselves together to haunt her.

  Startled, she cried out and took a few steps back. She briefly felt the stalks on the other side of the bridge at her back but by then it was too late. Her retreating left foot stepped out into open space as she stepped backward. She fought for balance but had already lost the battle with gravity.

  She was falling. Both of her feet went cartwheeling in the air. And as she fell, the bridge and the cornstalks growing fainter as she dropped, she saw the dangling shape of Malory Thomas on the side of the bridge. Malory was screaming for help but all Mackenzie could do was scream right back in response.

  She shouted, waiting for the impact, waiting to strike and feel that last blast of pain from the rocks at the bottom of the bridge.

  Her ears were filled with ringing, rhythmic and far away, something familiar to follow her down.

  She jerked awake and realized that the ringing sound was the ringing of her cell phone.

  She grabbed her phone and checked the call and the time all at once. It was 4:50 in the morning and the call was from Sheriff Tate.

  “This is Agent White,” she answered.

  “You’re back in town, right?” he asked her.

  “Yeah, at the motel. What’s up?”

  “We got another body. You think you can come check it out?”

  She saw the strange hybrid bridge from her dream and the thought of looking down from it jarred her. She tried to tell herself it was simply because she was not fully awake yet.

  “Yeah. Are you guys already there, at the bottom of the bridge?”

  “Well, no. This one isn’t at the bridge. You know where the water tower is?”

  “Yes.” She had seen it on both passes into town and made arrangements to be there as soon as she could. She splashed some cold water on her face and got dressed as quickly as she could. And even as she pulled her car out of the motel parking lot five minutes later, she could not shake the feeling from her dream—an intense and guttural sensation of falling.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Mackenzie was fortunate enough to fall in behind a police cruiser on its way to the tower. With the twists and turns of the country back roads, there was no way she would have found it as easily as she had assumed. She followed the cruiser down a road that was very similar to the one that led to Miller Moon Bridge, only instead of gravel, this one turned off onto a dirt road. A few hundred feet down, they passed through a chain-link fence, the gate of which had already been opened.

  She drove through the dust kicked up by the car ahead of her until it came to a stop. The water tower stuck up out of the pre-dawn darkness, as if welcoming them.

  When she got out of the car, she saw that the patrol car she had followed in had been driven by Officer Roberts. He gave her a nod of acknowledgment as they walked together past two other police cars.

  The only other police on the scene were Sheriff Tate and Deputy Andrews. They were standing with a man in a polo shirt and a pair of battered khakis. The lone pickup truck parked by the patrol cars bore a County Maintenance decal on its door. Mackenzie assumed he was a county employee, probably responsible for opening up the gate she had driven through.

  Mackenzie could already see the shape of the body, lying directly below the water tower. The scene was a little less formal than the Kenny Skinner scene beneath the bridge; the only lights being used were the headlights from the maintenance truck and the sheriff’s car.

  “We have an ID yet?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Her name is Maureen Hanks. Thirty-two. We haven’t told anyone just yet, not even the family. She’s got a three-year-old daughter.”

  Saying this seemed to choke Tate up a bit. Cautiously, Mackenzie approached the body. It wasn’t in as bad a shape as Kenny’s body. From the looks of it, the only visible injury was a broken neck. There was some blood, haloed around her head. Mackenzie imagined that once the body was moved, there would be much more.

  “How was she discovered?”

  Sheriff Tate only frowned in response, letting Deputy Andrews answer. “Her husband reported her missing at about one in the morning,” he said. “We had an officer drive around looking for her…honestly, nothing too engaged. There are rumors about her and another man, though I don’t know
that they’ve reached her husband. So the officer went around town, looking for some of the spots we’ve busted teens for parking and messing around. He found her body here a little after four in the morning…a little over an hour ago.”

  “Any idea who the lover might be?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Well, it’s all speculation,” Andrews said, “but all signs point to a guy named Bob Tully. He’s got a clean record, a pretty good guy if you want to know the truth. Well, if you take out the whole part about having sex with another man’s wife, I suppose.”

  Mackenzie looked away from Maureen Hanks’s body and started to slowly circle the water tower. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for just yet, outside of an obvious way to get to the small walkway that circled the top of the tower.

  She found that access point on the backside of the tower. It was a thin ladder made of metal rails. It seemed study enough, though a bit narrow. The idea of having to climb it repeatedly for a job made her stomach lurch a bit. She heard Tate approaching, shining a flashlight upward for her. The county maintenance man was walking behind him, keeping a distance as if he really wanted nothing to do with it.

  “So this ladder is just here, in the open, all the time?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” the maintenance man said. “It’s bolted to the side of the supports that hold the tower up. It stops up there on the platform.”

  “To your knowledge, has there ever been trouble with people going up there to just goof off?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” he said. “That gate you came through is always locked. Now, if we’re being honest, there is a back way to get to it.” He pointed to the left, where a strip of trees was shrouded by the night. “About fifty yards beyond that grove of trees and brush, there’s an old field. Used to be a hay field, I think. There’s then a series of old hunting and logging roads that wind around for a ways until you get back to the main roads. If someone really wanted to get to the tower, they could come that way, through those trees.”

  Mackenzie walked underneath the tower. She could feel the immense size and weight of it over her head. As she looked upward, Tate followed her gaze with his flashlight beam. As the light trailed up the thick supports, Mackenzie pointed.

  “Right there,” she said. “The graffiti. See it?”

  Tate brought the light back down and focused it in on where someone had scrawled some markings with spray paint. They walked closer and saw that there were other markings, too. Some were scratched in with a knife, others scrawled in marker. Dennis loves Amy. For a good time call 555-2356, ask for Paul’s MOM. NIN forever! ANARCHY!

  There was more, but it was all the same—almost copied and pasted from any other graffiti site. Crude drawings of genitals, off-the-cuff remarks about women.

  “You ever busted anyone in town for graffiti?” Mackenzie asked Tate.

  “Yeah, actually,” Tate said. “It’s this twenty-year-old guy that tagged one of the old grain silos out on the other side of town a year or so ago. He’s a little firebug, too. Starting fires in open fields, setting old dumpsters on fire behind the convenience store, things like that.”

  “Well, the graffiti is proof that at least a few people are either scaling the gate along the road or coming in the back way. And if someone came here to throw this woman off of it, it would have to be the back way most likely.”

  “Do you even think there’s a chance it was a suicide?” Tate asked.

  “No. Not based on what I’ve learned from the details that are slowly emerging in the cases of Malory Thomas and Kenny Skinner.”

  “But why the water tower?” the maintenance man asked.

  “Because the killer has likely seen that you guys are keeping the road to Miller Moon Bridge under a watchful eye. He had to find somewhere else to go.”

  “But that raises another question altogether,” Tate said.

  “It does,” Mackenzie agreed. “Why does he need a high place? If he wants to kill these people, why doesn’t he just do it some simpler way? Why take the time to cart them out to the bridge or to somehow force them to climb this ladder?” she said, nodding toward the ladder that led up to the platform that encircled the water tower.

  With a slightly queasy feeling in her stomach, she walked over to the ladder. She looked up and tried to imagine someone forcing her to climb it. What would it take? A gun to her back? Some threat of bodily harm?

  “Sheriff, do you have a kit in your car to dust this thing for prints?”

  “We do. One second.”

  While Tate went back to his car and spoke with Deputy Andrews for a few moments, Mackenzie went back to the body of Maureen Hanks. She was fully clothed, and aside from the discoloration and swelling around her obviously broken neck, she saw no signs of any sort of a struggle. She realized that she’d once again have to be patient and await autopsy results. More waiting, more back and forth with DC, trying to figure out an avenue.

  Or I could just stay here for a while, she said. I’ve got the man that was sleeping with her to talk to and then there’s the local arsonist Tate mentioned. There’s plenty to do here—plenty of reasons to keep me away from DC while this thing with Ellington settles down.

  Tate and Andrews came back over with an evidence kit while Roberts and the maintenance employee remained back at the cars. Mackenzie stepped aside, letting the officers do their job. She watched as Andrews expertly brushed for prints. Andrews did the work, testing the first four rungs of the ladder for prints. When he was done five minutes later, he gave her a shrug.

  “We’ll run these, but I wouldn’t expect too much. We know Maureen’s prints will be on it and probably at least one or two county employees’.”

  “It’s at least something,” Mackenzie said, again looking up the ladder. She then looked at Tate and asked: “Can I borrow that flashlight?”

  He handed it over to her and looked instantly up the ladder. Apparently, he knew what she had in mind. “Want a second pair of eyes?”

  “Thanks, but I think I’m okay. How far up is it?”

  “I believe it’s just over one hundred and thirty feet,” Andrews said.

  Honestly, she rather did want someone else to accompany her. But the thought of being up there on an already tight space with another person made her apprehensive.

  Mackenzie tucked the flashlight in the pocket of her jacket. It was a larger Maglite, the back end of it sticking out of her pocket. Slowly, she started climbing up. She was fine for the first few rungs but once she saw the ground slowly disappearing from beneath her, she started to get shaky. Her fear of heights wasn’t an intense one but it was strong enough to give her pause.

  She kept her eyes focused in front of her, watching her hands as they went from one rung to the next. Sensing the legs and supports of the water tower close by helped to ground her but she still felt almost stranded as she made her way up.

  She finally made it to the platform, having to pull herself up by metal handles along the edges of the safety railing that bordered the platform. She stepped as close as she could to the water tank, willing herself not to look down. She trailed the light all around the platform. It was dirty and scuffed up but unobstructed. She walked beyond the pump and valves along the rear end of it and continued the complete circuit around the platform.

  She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Maybe nothing…maybe she just wanted to get a feel for what it would be like to be standing on this thin space, knowing someone who was with you meant to do you harm.

  But more importantly than that, she thought, what sort of headspace do you have to be in to have the desire to bring someone up here with the express intent of pushing them over the side?

  Finally, she allowed herself to look down over the rib-high safety rail. She saw the cars, shooting their headlights forward. The shadows of Tate and Andrews stretched out into the darkness. The maintenance employee and Officer Roberts looked like little action figures stacked together by the cars.

  And then there was, of cours
e, Maureen Hanks. Her body looked almost like part of the landscape. If not for the angles of her knees and elbows, one might think someone had discarded some garbage down below from this height.

  Maybe that’s an MO for the killer. From up here, it all seems small. Small and very insignificant.

  It was an eerie feeling to have while standing on a thin strip of iron and metal while one hundred and thirty feet in the air. But at the same time, she could not deny the feeling that she was somehow superior over what she saw down below while standing so high up. It was, she thought, exactly the sort of feeling a killer might need to touch upon to find a sense of self-worth.

  It was this slight etching of a profile that gave her the courage to slowly walk back around to the ladder. But the moment her foot went out into open space for the rung, she thought of her dream, of how being claimed by gravity was just one slippery rung away.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Mackenzie allowed Sheriff Tate to ride along with her as they went to the address of Lawrence King. King was the twenty-something they had mentioned as being something of the town’s resident arsonist. On the way to King’s mobile home, Tate did his best to describe the suspect without being too derogatory.

  “He’s not mentally disabled or anything,” Tate explained. “But he’s just…slow. I don’t know how else to explain it. You talk to him and he’s just not all there.”

  Mackenzie nodded because she had seen the type before. Usually people who lived with a bent toward the destruction of only small things (rather than the kinds of massive destruction that came to mind when thinking of terrorists), had a vacant look in their eyes. They spoke like they were calculating each word, perhaps making sure they weren’t giving anything away—making sure they weren’t opening a doorway into vulnerability.