Before He Preys

by Blake Pierce

  She agreed and listened to her phone ding twenty seconds later as Tate sent her directions. She pulled them up and for what felt like the hundredth time, found herself speeding through the twists and turns of a series of back roads that felt as if they had been totally forgotten by the rest of the world.

  ***

  When she pulled her car into the square gravel parking lot on the western side of Glory Baptist Church, Tate and Roberts were already there. They were walking toward the front entrance, a rustic white door that was in terrible need of a coat of paint. The small letter board sitting in the front lawn proclaimed: SUNDAY SERVICE: 10 AM.

  The church was located along one of the back roads, about a mile and a half away from what was considered the “center” of town. Like just about everything else in Kingsville, it was surrounded by open air and trees—which made the cemetery off to the back of the property seem creepy as hell. The very high bell tower was almost comically tall. Whoever had come up with the design for it when they were building the church had maybe done it as some kind of joke. Maybe a big ironic middle finger to those who would someday attend the church.

  “Has anyone called the pastor?” Mackenzie asked.

  “I tried,” Tate said. “He’s doing hospital visitation in Arlington. But his wife has been gracious enough to tell us where the spare key is.”

  As he said that, Tate walked up the steps and stood on this tiptoes. He leaned forward, ran his hand above the door, and found a small, loose piece of the wooden siding that made up the church’s exterior. He plucked the wood free and showed them the spare key that hung by a nail on the back side of the wood fragment. He removed the key, placed the wood down on the stoop, and slid the key into the old brass lock on the door.

  When they stepped inside the church, Mackenzie instantly thought of her childhood. It smelled like her grandmother’s attic, where she had once sat in an old musty chair and read volume after volume of the original Nancy Drew books. Underneath that smell there was also something like lemon—muted furniture polish that had likely been swept across the back of the pews recently.

  It was a small church from the inside. She looked up at the ceiling as they entered the sanctuary. It was about fifteen feet high and she tried her best to imagine the large bell tower over their heads. The three of them made their way through the sanctuary, toward the back of the room where a large door led to the rest of the building.

  They then entered a large room that was occupied with a few round tables and chairs, perhaps some kind of large classroom. The attic smell wasn’t as intense here, as it was drowned out by someone having mopped the floors recently. Mackenzie looked down at the floor for any clear signs that someone had recently walked through here but saw none.

  The rest of the church was what Mackenzie had always assumed a small-town church would be like. A single long hallway that contained a few classrooms. A small kitchen area sat to the back of the hallway and directly in the center, a single door was closed. A small sign had been printed out in plain Times New Roman type: Bell Tower Entrance Only!

  “Have you ever been up there?” Mackenzie asked Tate and Roberts.

  “Not once,” Tate said.

  “This is actually the first time I’ve ever stepped foot in this building,” Roberts said.

  “We’re all new here,” Tate said with a nervous grin. “So you might as well lead the way.”

  Mackenzie opened the door and stepped inside. There was a very small alcove of sorts, a quick turn to the right, and then a set of stairs that led up at an almost dizzying angle. The stairs were made of wood and easily at least fifty years old—probably closer to one hundred. Each one creaked under her weight, echoing as Tate and Roberts followed up behind her.

  She felt no immediate threat but still kept her hand close to her Glock. The closer to the top of the stairs she got, the dustier things started to get. There was very little light, coming from somewhere overhead and barely illuminating the stairwell. Just when she started to feel a little claustrophobic, she came to the top of the stairs.

  There was a small landing and then a set of five more steps that led directly up into the bell tower. From where she stood, Mackenzie could look directly up into the tower, peering into the underside of the huge brass bell. She made her way up the other small set of stairs and stood within the tower. The stairs led to a small walkway that led around the bell. She made her way over to the side of the tower that looked out onto the side yard of the church.

  “You good up there?” Tate called from the landing below.

  “Yeah. It’s crowded up here, though. Hang tight, would you?”

  Tate seemed fine with that as Mackenzie walked along the circumference of the tower. The bell itself was quite fascinating, a beautiful shade of brass that had only been made even more stunning by its exposure to the elements through the square window-like openings along the side of the tower.

  She looked out of the three openings, trying to recapture that sense of being above it all that she had felt on Miller Moon Bridge and on the walkway of the water tower. It took her a moment to realize that she was not going to find it here. The space was too enclosed. More than that, the drop was not a drop straight down. If someone fell out of one of the openings along the sides of the bell tower, they’d strike the roof first, hitting about twenty-five feet down.

  There was simply no sense of freedom up here, no sense of being in control. If anything, the presence of the bell made it extremely crowded. While forcing someone up those stairs might be easy enough, pushing them forcibly along the walkway around the bell would be a painstaking process. Not to mention, they’d have to break in just to gain access to the tower in the first place.

  She headed back for the stairs, shaking her head. “No dice,” she said as she walked back down to the landing where Tate and Roberts waited for her. “It’s just too crowded. And the drop is interrupted by the roof. If our killer is getting his thrills by dropping people from heights to watch them hit the ground below, this isn’t the place.”

  “You want to head over to Weldon’s Drug and get a feel for it?” Tate asked.

  “Might as well,” she said. But even then, she felt like it would be a dead end, too. Something about the idea of the killer operating from a confined space—even an abandoned building with a series of large and easily accessible windows—didn’t seem to line up with what she had seen of his work so far. Still, she wanted to remain thorough and if that meant visiting a potential murder site that she was pretty sure would not pan out, so be it.

  Besides, the alternative was reporting back to McGrath, letting him know that she was still coming up empty on this case. Given that, she marched back down the bell tower stairs with Tate and Roberts ahead of her. She still felt the sensation of the case coming to an end but started to wonder if it was going to be a successful end.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  He felt entirely exposed, walking across the lawn in the sunlight. He’d been hiding in the forest and even under the porches of unsuspecting people for the last week or so. To be back out in the light made him feel like he was risking his life. It made him feel like a vampire, which was fine with him. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be a vampire. Because whatever he was…he felt it was much, much worse than the blood-sucking undead.

  As he had slunk along the edges of the forest in preparation of getting his next victim, he had seen the cop cars whizzing by. He’d never seen such activity out of the police before, not during the ten years he’d lived in this awful little town. They were up to something—probably trying to find him or to figure out why he was doing the things he was doing.

  Good luck with that, he thought with a little smile.

  He looked at the house ahead of him. It was a nice house, one that he might have lived in at some point if his parents had not died when he’d been a young boy. He knew his parents had decent jobs when they had died and figured he might have eventually had a good life. He’d be popular in high school, go
to college, get a good job, get married, have a few kids.

  But he’d ended up with none of that. His parents had died and all of those dreams he’d had of a life imagined had died with them, falling helplessly into a river that had taken both of their lives.

  He walked across the yard and up onto the porch of the idyllic little country house. He did his best to seem normal, as if he belonged there. He had changed out of his black hoodie, opting for just a plain white T-shirt. He figured after the run-in with the cop on the water tower last night, they’d be looking for someone wearing a black hoodie. He felt naked without it, even more exposed.

  He pushed that feeling to the back of his head as he came to the front door of the house. He knocked lightly, casually, and did his best to put on a smile even though his insides felt like they were on fire. He’d been living on a pure adrenaline rush ever since he’d demanded that Malory Thomas strip naked in front of him while holding the gun to her head. That adrenaline had not evaporated when he had tried to do things to her but had ultimately failed. Apparently, too much adrenaline and nerves made it hard to get sexually excited—something he had been very sad to realize.

  It had also not evaporated when he’d watched her slam into the rocks beneath Miller Moon Bridge. Sadly, that’s what had gotten him excited, the parts of him that had failed him while she had stripped standing at full attention as he stared at her broken body beneath the bridge.

  He saw that moment in his memory as if it were just some long-ago movie he had seen. Right now, he was more focused on the door in front of him. He knocked once more, keeping that forced smile on his face.

  Finally, someone answered the door. The woman saw him, gave a very brief frown, and then tried on a smile of her own.

  “Jimmy,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I know I don’t have an appointment. But I really need to talk to you.”

  Dr. Jan Haggerty nodded and sighed. “Well, come on in. I’m with a client right now but I can see you for a bit when I’m done. You can sit in the den while I finish up.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Haggerty,” Jimmy said.

  He followed her in and when they split ways while she returned to her office and Jimmy went into her den, he dropped the fake smile.

  It was hard to smile when he was this scared.

  He once again found himself wishing he was a vampire. Then he could just stay in the darkness. He did all of his work by night anyway and he apparently loved the sight of blood—something he was only now beginning to accept and understand.

  If he was a vampire, maybe he wouldn’t be this scared.

  Or maybe not. No matter what you were, Jimmy figured, it was probably always a little spooky to realize that you were going to kill again.

  That you had to kill again just so life might start to make some sense.

  ***

  Jimmy Gibbons had spent time in Dr. Haggerty’s den a few times before. If one of her sessions with a client ran over, her den was where the next client would sit and wait for their turn. Dr. Haggerty always kept music on in the den, played through a Bluetooth speaker, usually tuned to some new age bullshit with wind noises and minimalist piano.

  Jimmy was looking through one of the books he had pulled off of her shelf—a picture book of Iceland and its fjords and skylights—when Dr. Jan Haggerty same into the den. She looked happy to see him as always. Jimmy was mostly happy to see her, too. She always made him feel welcome and warm. And even though she was a little north of fifty, Jimmy thought she was pretty hot.

  “So, Jimmy,” she said. “I’ve never known you to come by unannounced. Is everything okay?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’ve been having nightmares about my parents again.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “It’s been a while since you’ve been bothered by those, hasn’t it?”

  “A little over a year,” he said.

  “Have you been drinking?” Dr. Haggerty asked.

  Jimmy didn’t answer right away. She was not budging from her place by the den entrance. It was quite clear that she had no intention of turning this into an actual session. And that was fine with Jimmy. Actually, he preferred it. It would make the whole messy ordeal that much easier.

  “No, I haven’t been drinking,” he said. “But things are getting worse. I started something new…some new way to overcome it all.”

  “Overcome what, exactly?” Haggerty asked.

  “The nightmares. The guilt. All of it.”

  “What have you been trying, Jimmy? Please don’t tell me you’re doing some sort of drug.”

  “Oh, I thought about it. But no…just the Xanax you prescribed for me. This other thing…I think it might be helping but it’s also making me realize something else.”

  Dr. Haggerty finally moved away from the entranceway to the den and took a seat on the other end of the couch. “What are you doing?” she asked with an edge of worry to her voice.

  “I thought maybe I could overcome it all by going up on high places. I’ve never been scared of heights, not really, but I avoided them. Knowing my parents went off a bridge, it seemed like tempting fate to do anything involving heights, you know? So I tried it and it didn’t work at first.”

  “At first?”

  “Yeah, there was this loneliness. I started out on Miller Moon Bridge. I went at night and just looked down to where the water should be. On moonless nights, it’s like looking straight down into a pit. You can’t even see where the fall ends, you know? It made me feel small, which I didn’t like. But still…I think it did help me to put a stop to the dreams for a while. But then they started coming back and I had to try something different. I took someone up with me, Dr. Haggerty.”

  He stopped here and looked directly at her. He knew that the news of what he had been doing was spreading all around town. He knew that Dr. Haggerty would know all about Malory Thomas, Kenny Skinner, and Maureen Hanks. He was curious to see how she would react. He’d just given her enough to be considered a subtle confession.

  “A friend of yours?” she asked.

  “No. Just someone I’ve always sort of respected and wanted to get to know.” He chuckled here and shook his head. “I don’t think she liked it very much.”

  He could tell that Dr. Haggerty was doing her very best to keep her calm but her true feelings were lurking in her eyes and at the corners of her tightly drawn mouth. She was scared. She was worried.

  “Jimmy, I think we need to talk at length about this as soon as possible,” she said. “Let me check my calendar. I might be able to get you in tomorrow. Would that work for you?”

  “Yes. Thanks. Sorry to just drop by but…I don’t know. Something is happening to me and I don’t know how to stop it.”

  Not that I want it to stop, he thought.

  He waited for her to leave before he got up from the couch. He knew exactly what she was doing, and it certainly wasn’t checking her calendar. He’d seen the worry on her face and he had also seen all of those police cars darting up and down the road.

  He quietly followed her footsteps, leaving the den and crossing the large hallway that led into her study. She was stepping behind her desk and reaching for her cell phone. When he entered the room, she looked up and saw him. Her hand froze just above the phone.

  “I’ve seen you book appointments for me for two years now,” he said. “You don’t keep your calendar on your phone.”

  She nodded and picked it up. “Jimmy…what have you been doing? Do you…do you need some help?”

  “I think it might be too late for that,” he said. “But in your own way, you can help me. I need you to put the phone down. Who are you going to call anyway?”

  “Jimmy, this is serious,” she said, sounding as if she was on the verge of tears. “There’s a lady in town from the FBI. If we get you to them now, they can help.”

  “Maybe I don’t want help,” he said. “For the first time since I can remember, I feel happy.
I don’t know why…but something about it helps. It eases the tension. It makes the nightmares go away.”

  “Let me call the police,” she said. “I think it’s safest for everyone.”

  “No,” he said. He started slowly walking across the room. “I need you to come with me. Maybe when we’re up there, you’ll understand. Maybe then you can help me…if there is any help. Because honestly…when they fall and they scream…it’s magic. It’s like a drug. I don’t understand it. Maybe you could.”

  “Jimmy,” she said, raising the phone to start dialing. “Don’t do this.”

  “No…you don’t do that,” he said. And with that, he pulled the .09 millimeter from the holster hidden at the back waist of his pants.

  “I will shoot you,” he said. “I thought it was just watching people break when they fall from the bridge or the water tower. But I think it’s just the mess in general. I’ll be just as happy smearing your brains all over the wall. So please…put the fucking phone down.”

  She shuddered and did what he said. She was crying, though trying to hold most of it back. She was unlike the others. The others had wept openly, begging for their lives. Maureen had offered sex. Sex of any kind he wanted. He’d thought about it but in the end decided against it.

  Maybe she could help him after all.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Right now, just you. Lock your doors, forget about answering your phone or your emails. You and I are going to talk for a while before we head out. Maybe you can help me figure out why I’ve become this…this monster.”

  “Jimmy, you aren’t a monster.”

  He laughed at this, his grip on the gun growing tighter.

  “I don’t know about that. I get harder than I’ve ever been when I push them. And when they hit…that sound. The cracking. The breaking. I love it. With Kenny Skinner, he hit the rocks below the bridge in a way that made his head crack open. You want to know what it sounded like?”