by Blake Pierce
“Maybe,” Mackenzie said, although she was pretty certain it was a solid link. She drained the remainder of her coffee and got to her feet.
Bryers did the same behind her and Mackenzie took note that he was moving with great effort. He looked like he was on the verge of falling asleep. There was a look in his eyes that was almost glassy, making her wonder what the hell he had gotten himself into in the little bit of time she had stepped away.
Mackenzie extended her hand and shook with Kayci. “Thanks for your time and your help. We’re going to do our very best to find your brother and make sure he gets home.” She then turned to Wendy, still as motionless as stone in an armchair on the other side of the living room.
“Thanks again, Mrs. Woerner,” Mackenzie said.
Wendy said nothing. She did not even nod. It was a morbid thought, but Mackenzie couldn’t help but wonder if the mother had already resigned herself to the fact that there was a very good chance that when her son was discovered, he would be dead.
Mackenzie and Bryers left the house and headed for their car. “What did you think of that last note in his notebooks?” Mackenzie asked. “If Brian Woerner ran a blog dealing with mistrust of the government and conspiracies, he’d do just about anything to find out why there was a heavy police presence in the park—especially why there would be a drone. He seems like a real Alex Jones–type.”
“That’s got to be it,” Bryers said, opening the driver’s side door. “He spotted the drone flying over the park and got curious. Maybe he—”
He did not finish his sentence. In fact, as Mackenzie got into the passenger seat, she heard him make a soft coughing noise and then there was a thump along the side of the car. She looked over and saw that he had fallen over and was bracing himself against the side of the car.
Mackenzie rushed out of the car, running around the hood and going to his side as quickly as she could. She got there just in time; the moment she reached his side, he started to collapse, leaning to the left. Mackenzie caught him and he was nothing but dead weight.
“Bryers? Bryers, what is it?”
He shook his head and let out a heavy breath.
He took a moment to collect himself. Slowly, his strength seemed to return. He propped himself against the side of the car and blinked his eyes rapidly like a man who had suddenly been stirred away.
“Well, that’s embarrassing,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, Mac.”
“Sorry? For what?”
“For not being honest. For not telling you sooner.”
“Telling me what?”
He looked her in the eyes with the most emotion she’d ever seen from him and said: “I’m dying.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
“Dying?” Mackenzie said, her voice panicked and a little too aggressive within the confines of the car.
Bryers had refused to speak about it right away. It had been ten minutes since his near-collapse. They were currently headed to the Strasburg PD to check in with Clements and Smith. Now that he seemed to have gathered his wits and had no fear of collapsing again, he seemed more open to talking about it. Still, Mackenzie had insisted on driving.
“Yeah. And pretty quickly, it would seem.”
“How can you be so glib about it?” she asked. She was somewhere between angry and concerned and could not figure out which to focus on.
“I have to,” he said. “The doctors are saying it’s too late to really reverse anything. So it’s either worry needlessly and say woe is me or I can go out on a better note.”
“What is it?” she asked. “What were you diagnosed with?”
“Stage four pulmonary hypertension,” Bryers said. “Apparently I’ve had it for years and just never knew it. By the time I saw a doctor for some slight chest pain and shortness of breath and they caught it, it was too late.”
“My God,” she said, the anger now fading out and letting concern take over. “There’s nothing they can do?”
“There are treatments and experimental medicines with no real results. I could try them but they’ve told me the chances are slim. I could commit myself to staying in the hospital for all of those avenues but it could all fail and that would have me wasting the end of my life in a damned hospital bed. And I’m not doing that.”
“How long do you have?” she asked.
Bryers shook his head. “I’m not having this conversation with you,” he said. “The last thing I need is a partner watching over me like a child. No offense.”
“And keeping this to yourself makes you seem like one of those old hermits that wants to be left alone. People that think no one can help them. No offense.”
He smirked at her. “You know how to throw an argument, huh?”
“How long, Bryers?”
“On the high end, maybe eighteen months.”
“And the low?”
He sighed and looked out of the window. “Maybe six.”
“Jesus…”
“I’m fine with it,” Bryers said. “Honestly, it’s not affecting my day-to-day too much.”
“Except for passing out randomly,” Mackenzie said with some spite.
“Yes, except for that.”
“How the hell is McGrath letting you work with such a diagnosis?” she asked.
“Because he doesn’t know. I haven’t told him. And you damn well better not, either. Remember, Mac…I’m keeping a secret for you, too.”
She looked at him, aghast. “Bryers…you can’t—”
“I’m not spending the end of my life in a hospital,” he said. “But I will tell you this. I promise you this: when this Little Hill case is wrapped up, I’m done. I’ll tell McGrath and go home to wait to die.”
Mackenzie cringed. “Stop being so fatalist about it.”
Bryers laughed out loud, a laugh that became a cough as it tapered off. “I’m dying, Mac. Seems like the perfect time to be fatalist.”
Anger was creeping back in now—not just at the situation itself but her inability to control it. She thought she’d be the same way if ever faced with such information. She’d work and work up until the final moments when she could no longer operate. She set her jaw and did her best not to lash out at him—and her best not to start crying.
“I won’t jeopardize this case,” Bryers said “You have my word. If I start to feel faint again like I did in the Woerners’ house, I’ll let you know and I’ll sit out for a bit.”
“It’s not the case I’m worried about,” she said. “I’m worried about you.”
“Like I said. It’s too late now. So I’m just going to do my best to be useful with the time I have left. And please don’t get offended when I say this, but I really don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
He said this last part in a stern voice that she had not heard from him in the past. It upset her, but again, she could see where he was coming from. She’d likely handle it the same way. So she said nothing. The car remained quiet all the way back to the Strasburg PD.
***
Three hours later, exhaustion hit her. Fortunately, it was after speaking with Clements and Smith, a meeting she had managed to get through without falling asleep. So far, there were no leads to the fourth victim other than his car, which had turned up no evidence. They had split up duties to keep the case going, with the park rangers canvassing the forest, Clements and his men working on a stricter barricade into and out of the park, and Mackenzie and Bryers tasked with digging deeper into who Brian Woerner was. Did he have enemies? Had he stirred up trouble on his blog?
Mackenzie figured she’d read through blog entries, particularly the comments sections, back in the hotel room until she fell asleep.
Those plans, however, were upended when they walked out of the Strasburg police station and she saw Harry Dougan standing by her car.
He smiled at her, as if he were bestowing some enormous favor upon her. She didn’t even pretend to return it. She wondered why McGrath would send more agents out here when he knew damned good and w
ell that with the park rangers, local PD, and the state PD, it was already something of a circus.
Bryers cut her a smile and got into the car. He gave Harry a half-hearted wave as he got into the passenger seat. He then scrolled through e-mails on his phone, giving Mackenzie a moment with Harry.
“What are you doing here?” Mackenzie asked him.
“I’m free for two days,” Harry said. “I thought I might come up and see if I could lend a hand. I hear there’s a possible fourth victim.”
“We’re good here, Harry,” she said.
“You and Bryers? And the park rangers, I hear. Yeah…too many cooks in the kitchen, huh?”
“Exactly. Which is why I don’t understand why you’re here.”
“I’m on my own time,” he said. “I wanted to help. I wanted to see you.”
“God, Harry, really? Look…I’m going to say this once with at least some sort of filter but after this, I can’t promise niceties. I can’t have you here right now. There’s just too much going on and I can’t add you to the pile of shit that’s getting out of hand.”
“Out of hand?” he asked. “What do you mean?”
She couldn’t even look at him. For reasons she hadn’t yet digested, the fact that he had showed up unannounced like some unwanted knight in shining armor pissed her off.
“What I mean is that there’s a lot more going on in my life right now than just this case,” she said. “And I don’t need you here to make it more complicated.”
“Well, I drove all this way. Can’t we at least have dinner or something?”
“No, we can’t,” she said.
“What the hell is wrong?” he asked. “I thought you’d be happy to—”
“To what?” she yelled. “To politely dance around the fact that you have a thing for me that I have tried so hard not to flat out reject? It’s not going to happen, Harry. And while you’re a good agent, we don’t need you here right now. So both of your reasons for coming up here uninvited are useless. So please…leave.”
She saw the pain come into his face for only a split second before she turned her back to him and got into the car. She slammed the door, cranked the engine to life, and wasted no time backing out of the parking spot. She caught one more glance of him as she pulled out and felt a little heartless for not caring how hostile she had just been.
“Ouch,” Bryers said.
She nodded, still pissed. “Yeah, I could have handled it better. But I don’t have time to waste with…with trivial nonsense. I feel like we’re running out of time.”
Bryers nodded, looking gravely out of the window.
“I know the feeling.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
The forests of Virginia at night were like some private orchestral performance as far as he was concerned. He listened to it while sitting in an old wooden chair and sipping from another Mason jar filled with what his father had once called White Lightning—a recipe that had been passed down through the men in his family ever since Prohibition had damn near ruined the country.
Honestly, he didn’t care much for the taste. There wasn’t much of a taste anyway. But he liked the burn. He liked the way it could make him feel almost disconnected from the world when he’d had enough.
He was usually filled to the brim with that burn when he set to work. Capturing the people to help him spread his joy was easy; they were brought to him, given to him by hands far gentler than his own. But when the time came to take the seeds from the people that he kept in the hole in the floor in his back room, he needed the burn. He needed to feel lighter than anything around him. He needed to be detached. It was gruesome work, but it was necessary.
He looked to the moon over the scraggly trees. He knew that just hours before, there had been something flying over the woods. One of those drones he’d read about in a magazine a few months ago. He guessed that meant the authorities were on to him. He’d known it would happen eventually. It was why he had paused for so long after the first victim. He’d gotten scared there, sure that the police would find out what he was doing.
But so what if they did? When he’d first heard the call, he knew that he would end up having to sacrifice himself. And that was fine with him. Who was he, but a servant to everything he saw before him? The trees shrouded in night, the scant clouds kissing the edges of the half-full moon, the songs of crickets, tree frogs, and even a loon or two off in the distance.
Yes, he had been called. He had been called to spill blood and return the living seeds of human flesh to the earth from which it had come.
He sensed that his work was almost done. Whether that meant that this fourth sacrifice would finish his work or that the police would soon find him, he did not know. And that was okay, because he was not meant to know.
With his head feeling heavy and his stomach rumbling, he went back inside his cabin. The smell of the moonshine he was making filled the place. It was fermenting in two large buckets in the back of his central living space. As he walked toward them, he could make out the sounds of his next sacrifice in the next room over.
He had learned a lesson with the last one. She had nearly escaped him, making him take another hard look at how he restrained the sacrifices. Being this close to the end, everything had to go perfect.
He wasn’t ready to kill this one just yet. The sacrifices needed to suffer first. They needed to feel true danger, true hunger. They needed to appreciate their death when it was delivered. It made their flesh and blood more pliable for the soil—richer and more pure.
He walked into the addition to his small cabin. He looked to the benches, to the sledgehammer and the axe. He then looked to the plywood sheets on the ground, containing the next sacrifice. The man had fallen quiet about an hour ago and had not made a peep since.
Just to check, he stamped his foot down on the sheets of plywood. Instantly, the man hidden in the ground beneath them started to squeal. He was weeping, he was screaming, and he was begging all at the same time.
He nodded and walked back out to the buckets. The moonshine wasn’t quite ready but it was close enough. He scooped some up in his jar, took a long pull from it, and felt the burn.
A day…maybe two.
That’s when he would kill this man—the man that was likely to be the final sacrifice to the forest—to nature.
He wondered if he should explain his work to them before he killed them. Perhaps it would make them appreciate him a bit more. Maybe it would make the absolute certainty of death easier to accept.
But in the moment when he raised the axe or some other blade, he had seen something in their eyes several times: a blankness, an absolute shock of nothing, which seemed to carry them away right down to their final abrupt cry. And in that final moment, he knew there was no reasoning with them. They would understand nothing.
No one would ever understand—not unless they, too, had heard the call.
A call to set a corrected path for nature. A call to reset things, to thin things out.
He supposed he was doing God’s work, really. He was removing the filth of human preoccupation into something divine. He was returning the blood, flesh, and offal back to the earth from which it had come. And in that, he was a saint.
From the back room, he heard the next sacrifice moaning weakly. The sacrifice seemed to already know that his time was short.
Some simply had to pay their debt sooner than others.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
Mackenzie felt defeated as she drove toward Quantico the following morning. She was eating a sausage biscuit she had grabbed at a drive-thru and wondering just how long she’d be able to keep up this pace. It was 6:45 when she and Bryers passed the Leaving Strasburg sign. They were leaving with no real leads and with a trail on the fourth victim that was unbearably cold.
She knew it was silly to feel defeated. But when McGrath had called and ordered them back because it seemed like a waste of manpower to stay near Little Hill, what else was she supposed to think?
> The morning slogged on. When she finally got into her apartment just after eight a.m., she allowed herself a lingering shower. While standing under the hot water and letting her muscles loosen up, she did her best to prepare herself for a day filled with research and digging while knowing that a killer was very likely still active in Strasburg. The helicopter was set to start passing over later today and there was a fragile hope that it would help. She knew, though, that the State was stingy with resources and if there were no results within a day or so, the helicopter would be sent right back to wherever it had come from.
She left her apartment as quickly as she could, needing to feel productive. She went to headquarters and spent several hours compiling bios on the victims only to come to the conclusion that they had nothing in common. She even had an intern run cross checks to see if any of the user names in the comments sections of Brian Woerner’s blog might be one of the other victims. But that turned out to be a dead end as well.
As if this wasn’t frustrating enough, she had the other two monumental obstacles in her head: Bryers’s announcement of his ill health and the eventual reopening of her father’s case. She was expecting McGrath to call her at any moment to let her know that the bureau had taken on a new case in Nebraska that was linked to her father’s old case but so far, there had been nothing.
And that, in a way, was good. Because she now had the sickening idea that maybe her mother had known about it. That would be a fairly big lead. And then questions would be asked about why she had not yet reached out and spoken with her mother.
And that was not something she was willing to answer just yet.
On the heels of all of that was knowing that she had totally mistreated Harry. Yet, while she knew it was a case of terrible timing on his part and nothing more, she was rather glad that it had come to that. The Band-Aid had been ripped off and she could now cleanly cut that questionable part of her new life away.
