BEFORE HE LAPSES

by Blake Pierce

  Mackenzie then laid out the situations of each girl. It was grisly to think of them in such a way, but when it came to a case with a rushed timeline, it was sometimes the best way.

  First victim, Jo Haley. Sex, followed by strangulation. Found in bedroom.

  Second victim, Christine Lynch. Sexual activity but no intercourse. Also strangled. Found in kitchen.

  Third victim, Marie Totino. Bruise to head and skull fracture. Bound nude, mouth taped. Not clear, though evidence of strangulation.. Discarded in river.

  Mackenzie went back and forth over those notes, looking for a story that made sense. She tried to play every scenario out in her head but there was only one that seemed to stick…and even that one felt flimsy.

  There’s an element of sex to two of them…three if you count the fact that Marie Totino was nude and bound. The one where there is clearly actual intercourse, the victim was left lying in bed, as if the killer wasn’t concerned about leaving any evidence behind. And then the latest was bound and gagged. Those two indicate that the killer might crave power as well as sex—the feeling that he is dominant over his partner.

  Dominance. Power…but a sense of urgency that seems to escalate with each victim.

  There was something there…something that Mackenzie couldn’t quite grasp. It was like a name on the tip of your tongue, a name her brain could not come up with.

  “I’m going to get ready for bed,” Ellington said.

  Mackenzie nearly said So soon? But then she saw the time. Somehow, it had gotten to be 12:10.

  “Yeah, good idea,” she said. “Even from a backseat view, tomorrow could be hectic.”

  “I’m surprised Yardley or Harrison haven’t called yet.”

  “I’m not. The one thing Yardley and I have in common is that we hate asking for help. Calling to even check in might seem like weakness to her on the first night. I imagine we’ll hear from them early tomorrow.”

  “More reason to get to bed, then,” Ellington said.

  They shut down their laptops and got ready for bed. They did even this in a routine-like manner that seemed to foreshadow the years of marriage that waited ahead of them. They climbed into bed and Mackenzie drifted off with Ellington’s arm around her, his hand on her stomach. She thought of what was growing beneath that hand and then, inexplicably, she saw Marie Totino in the river, bitterly cold and with her back scraped raw.

  And for reasons that were far beyond her, this made Mackenzie cry. She thought of the dead look on Sandra Totino’s face as she tried to understand a world where her daughter had been stripped naked, killed, and tossed into a cold river. Mackenzie wept for several minutes, doing her best to keep it in.

  She grabbed Ellington’s hand, still on her stomach, and he squeezed it sleepily. He pulled her to her and when she realized that he was still awake, turned to him, sank her head into his shoulder, and cried hard. At some point she fell asleep and even though she knew she still had several weeks before the baby started to kick, she could swear she could feel it shifting around in her womb.

  ***

  When she woke up six and a half hours later, the bread crumbs she’d been toying with in her mind the night before were still scattered in her head. Even before she had fully opened her eyes, she started to sort through them again.

  Sex. Power. Control.

  She then thought of the Totino family and all of the different political campaign literature in Marie’s room. At some point, she had likely worked closely with Daniel Humphrey, the campaign manager for an up and coming politician who had nearly pulled off a major upset in a local election for city council.

  What must a near-win like that do to the mind of the man who had set it all up? A man who wasn’t a politician, but liked to rub shoulders with them?

  Power. Control.

  She got out of bed and walked to the bathroom, where she brushed her teeth and put up her hair. When she walked back out and pulled her laptop out of her laptop bag, Ellington stirred behind her.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Just want to check on something.”

  He sat up in bed and looked over at the clock. Mackenzie knew that he’d feel guilty to see that it was 6:10. He hated to sleep past 5:30 but she also knew that he was also not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. It was extremely rare that they got to sleep in. She was curious to see if he elected to get out of bed or if he’d try to catch a few more hours of sleep.

  He decided to roll out of bed. He walked over to her, kissed her cheek as her laptop booted up, and then started his morning routine. Mackenzie smiled, feeling another surge of comfort when she realized just how well they knew one another. On mornings where they weren’t rushed, she knew that Ellington spent the first hour or so running through a workout routine and then a shower. The hotel room wasn’t very spacious, so when he started his workout—a circuit that included sit-ups, crunches, planks, burpees, and other moves Mackenzie wasn’t very familiar with—he did so between his side of the bed and the bathroom door.

  As he exercised, Mackenzie started doing some early morning research. She started by looking up Daniel Humphrey’s social media accounts. They were all listed as private pages, not granting access to anyone other than those who sent him friend requests. Give that he dabbled in politics, she supposed she understood this. She was about to give up on this route until she discovered that he had two Facebook profiles—one for his professional life and another for his personal life. For the first time, she actually saw the man. He was quite handsome, a thirty-nine-year-old that could easily pass for thirty. While it was indeed his personal profile, it was still quite heavy with political leanings.

  She went to his list of friends and quickly scrolled through. The number of females far outweighed the males, and many of them were professional-looking women. A few, though, were cliché selfies, layered with a filter as the women gave sexy little looks and poses to the camera. She went to the search field and typed in the names of the victims.

  Jo Haley first. And there she was, listed as a friend of Humphrey.

  She tried Marie Totino next and sure enough, she was there, too.

  With a small stirring of excitement in her stomach (that was definitely not the baby), she tried Christine Lynch next.

  She was listed in his friends, as well.

  It was the first solid link between all three victims.

  Feeling a lead building around her, Mackenzie then Googled his name but there wasn’t much to come up. She then tried typing in Neil Rooney along with his name and got a few more results—namely articles on some of the campaign rallies from last year. Humphrey’s name was mentioned in a few articles and he dropped a few lines about how great he thought his candidate was.

  From what Mackenzie could tell, the rallies that Humphrey helped to organize tended to draw a much younger audience. Last November, during the campaign in which Rooney had nearly managed to be elected vice president of the Baltimore City Council, he would often play tracks by Rage Against the Machine or Rise Against. Rooney’d quoted a line from Breaking Bad during a debate—a moment that had caught national attention for a day or so.

  Try as she might, she could not find any stories about violence or altercations at the rallies. It wasn’t like he was a presidential candidate or anything; the rallies were usually very small, numbering no more than two hundred or so.

  She then quickly Googled Rooney. Right away, she saw that he checked out. He was always on the road, traveling the country. He seemed like a legit guy—like the kind of guy Mackenzie would vote for. He was a professed Christian and he gave money to various charities all around the world. She saw pictures of him visiting Sierra Leone and parts of India, helping the impoverished. She read articles about his perseverance as he stayed by his mother’s side as breast cancer slowly killed her.

  She was about to give up when one last idea came to her. She typed in the search terms Daniel Humphrey, Baltimore, and crime.

  The first headline that pop
ped up caught her attention. It was such a stand-out that she was sure she would have eventually found it had she continued to dig during her initial search on Daniel Humphrey.

  She clicked on the story and read it, still feeling that sense of some sort of foundation being built under her feet—the foundation for a lead. There might be something to it. Maybe…

  “What are we looking at?”

  She had been so engrossed in her research that she had not heard Ellington get out of the shower and come up behind her. He was dried off and partially dressed—wearing his boxers and buttoning up his shirt.

  “Daniel Humphrey,” she said. “I was thinking last night…about a killer that goes from strangulation after sex to sloppily disposing a body in a river.”

  “And what, exactly, were you thinking?”

  She took him down the trail, explaining her idea that the killer might be someone who craved not just the sexual aspects of what he was doing, but the control of it all. That’s why each murder scene seemed to be less sexually oriented and more about the control of the victim. And when trying to profile a killer based on control, the only people they had really come across that fit that description was William Holland.

  “I thought we agreed he was innocent,” Ellington said.

  “I think he likely is. But then I wondered about this Humphrey guy. I checked his Facebook and found all three of our victims in his friends list. And think about it. Aside from crooked politicians, what other desperate sort of people are going to be power hungry, doing whatever they can do to experience some sort of control—over their lives, over others, and so on?”

  “Wannabes,” Ellington said. “People, for instance, that might help politicians organize rallies and help with voter sign-up.”

  “Campaign managers, perhaps,” Mackenzie said.

  “What about Rooney?” Ellington asked. “Is he clean?”

  “He seems like a saint,” Mackenzie answered. “Besides, one look at his travel schedule and I’m pretty sure he’d be ruled out anyway. But it doesn’t matter…I think Humphrey is where we go next. If he’s not our man, he’s at least a damn good lead. I found this article,” she said, gesturing to her laptop. “It tells the story of a woman that came forward last summer, claiming that three years ago, Humphrey drugged and raped her and one of her friends. She says he threatened to kill them if they told anyone. This woman came forward, claiming that she had been paid off for her silence. She said Humphrey had told her that he could ensure a spot on the team of a politician that is no longer even active so long as she slept with him. They had a relationship for a while but things got toxic. She says the last time they were together, he drugged her and her friend…and then raped them both.”

  “What about the friend?”

  “She never said anything. Nothing from her at all from what I can see.”

  “Is the woman’s story worth believing? Do we know who she is?”

  “Her name is Kathy Clements. I haven’t had a chance to look her up yet. But this article claims that following the supposed events she claimed to have happened, she quit her job and deleted all of her social media accounts.”

  “Seems like a bullshit story to me, then.”

  “Same here. But if she was paid off and threatened…maybe these were ways for her to keep quiet.”

  Ellington shrugged. “Could be. I’ll make a call and see what I can find out about her.”

  He did just that, placing a call to the bureau’s resource desk. No sooner had he started speaking to someone on the other end than Mackenzie’s phone rang. When she saw the name on the display, she wasn’t quite sure how to feel.

  It was Yardley. And Mackenzie knew that Yardley was not the type to call for help. So either something had gone very bad or McGrath was throwing another curveball at them. She answered the call, trying to sound as calm as possible.

  “Good morning, Agent Yardley.”

  “Hi, Agent White. Or, well, I guess it’s Agent Ellington now, huh?”

  Mackenzie cringed a bit. It did sound rather odd. Maybe that was a discussion she and Ellington needed to have in the very near future.

  “How is everything going?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Decent. I think Deputy Wheeler has us set up about as well as he can. I have all the files and case notes, including all that you left here for us. So thanks for that. Look…with news of the murders circulating around campus, things are a little odd here. Very precarious, you know?”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I was hoping you and Ellington could meet with us sometime today. Maybe around lunch time. We have a few people to interview between now and then.”

  “Yeah, I think that can be arranged. You need anything else from us?”

  “I don’t think so. But we can discuss all of that over lunch.”

  It felt weird to be placed in such a position, knowing there was so much to be done but unable to do the majority of it. As they finished up the conversation, arranging a time and meeting place, Mackenzie felt another of those flutters in her stomach. This time, she knew it was not nerves or any sort of anxiety. Her baby was moving. She’d read about this several times—how even before a bay started to kick, some women might feel what were known as “flutters” as the growing baby grew and shifted.

  She smiled, realizing that it was almost like a sign—like her baby telling her that it was okay to take a back seat, given what she was currently going through.

  And maybe it was right. Maybe it was time to step aside, to let this new phase of her life properly take over. It was, of course, easier said than done and even as she and Yardley made plans for that afternoon, she couldn’t help but feel a little resentful.

  When she was off of the phone, Ellington, also freed from his call, looked at her quizzically.

  “What’s funny?” he asked.

  “What? Nothing…”

  “You’re smiling. Like…almost about to laugh.”

  “Oh. I…well, I think the baby is moving.”

  “What? Like kicking? Isn’t it too early for that?”

  “It is. But this is what’s known as the flutters. Honestly, it could just be gas.”

  “Really? You think that’s it?”

  She smiled again and shook her head. Ellington came to her and wrapped his arms around her. “You think I could feel it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s pretty tiny.”

  He placed his hand on her stomach anyway, hoping. As he waited, he asked: “Who was on the phone?”

  “Yardley. She and Harrison want to meet with us later today.”

  Ellington made a hmmm noise, an indication that for once, Mackenzie was handling an inferior role better than he was. But he said nothing. In fact, neither of them said another word for several minutes as they sat where they were, Ellington waiting to see if he could feel his child move.

  In that moment, in Mackenzie’s mind, there was no case. It was her and her family. And while the concept of family had always been skewed to her, given how she was raised, it made her heart swell. Her husband, her child…this was going to be her world soon.

  It was enough hope and gratitude to make it seem like the world outside had the potential to be perfect, even if just for a single day.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  They met with Yardley and Harrison at the very same café where they’d spoken with Melissa Evington. It seemed like the most logical spot, as it was in the heart of the student commons. While they all knew that there was concern spreading all around campus, it was not detectable in the commons. Mackenzie wondered if this was namely because in broad daylight, in the center of campus, students felt safe. Even on those manicured lawns and well-maintained sidewalks at night, as they walked to their dorms and apartments, they should all feel safe.

  It made Mackenzie feel uneasy. She looked around at all of the students within the common area, of all of the females in particular—in the café, in the main walkway, in the lounge, and coming in and out of the resource area—a
nd wondered how many of them did indeed fear the idea of a serial killer but were too proud to show it.

  “First of all,” Yardley said, “I think it’s bullshit that you guys were pushed to the back of this. We’ve seen the same case files you’ve seen and have come to the same conclusions as you. We’re about to head out to Jo Haley’s apartment to have a look around but you know as well as I do, it’s not going to lead to much.”

  “What leads are you currently looking into?” Ellington asked.

  “Everything keeps coming back to William Holland,” Harrison said. “Something about it doesn’t add up. I mean, it doesn’t make sense that he’d be the killer, but that’s where all the signs are pointing.”

  “Have to be careful with that,” Mackenzie said. “If we arrest anyone on staff at the college now that the story is out, it could be chaotic. And if we arrest him and turn out to be wrong, that’s going to be bad for the school and the bureau.”

  “Also,” Yardley said, “the police have the cell phones belonging to Christine Lynch and Jo Haley. They’re both password protected, but they say we should have access to text messages and call histories within several hours.”

  “Great.”

  “How about you guys?” Yardley asked. “Anything new?”

  “Yes, actually. I found a link this morning, for all three girls. We heard about this local politician, Neil Rooney. A lot of younger voters are getting behind him. But what’s more interesting is the story on his campaign manager—a nobody by the name of Daniel Humphrey. Not only does he have Jo, Christine, and Marie all as friends on his Facebook profile, but he’s also at the center of a story of an alleged double-rape.”