Before He Preys

CHAPTER THREE

Work only provided distance for a few more hours. Even when Mackenzie checked in with Harrison to make sure he didn’t need assistance on the small wiring fraud case he was working on, she was out of the building by six. When she arrived back at the apartment at 6:20, she found Ellington behind the stove. He didn’t cook often and when he did, it was usually because he had idle hands and nothing better to do.

“Hey,” he said, looking up from a pot of what looked like some sort of stir-fry.

“Hey,” she said in return, setting her laptop bag down on the couch and walking into the kitchen. “Sorry I left the way I did earlier.”

“No need to apologize,” he said.

“Of course there is. It was immature. And if I’m being honest, I don’t know why it upsets me so much. I’m more worried about losing you as a partner than I am about what this might do to your professional record. How messed up is that?”

He shrugged. “It makes sense.”

“It should but it doesn’t,” she said. “I can’t think about you kissing another woman, especially not in a way like that. Even if you were drunk and even if she did initiate things, I can’t see you like that. And it makes me want to kill that woman, you know?”

“I’m sorry as hell,” he said. “It’s one of those things in life I wish I could take back. One of those things I thought was in the past and I was done with.”

Mackenzie walked up behind him and hesitantly wrapped her arms around his waist. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Just mad. And embarrassed.”

Part of Mackenzie feared that he was being dishonest with her. There was something in his posture, something about the way he couldn’t quite look at her when he talked about it. She wanted to think it was simply because it was not easy to be accused of something like this, to be reminded of something stupid you’d done in your past.

Honestly, she wasn’t sure what to believe. Ever since she’d seen him walking by her office door with the box in his hands, her thoughts toward him were mixed up and confused.

She was about to offer to help with dinner, hoping some normalcy might help them to get back on track. But before the words could come out of her mouth, her cell phone rang. She was surprised and a little worried to see that it was from McGrath.

“Sorry,” she said to Ellington, showing him the display. “I should probably take this.”

“He probably wants to ask if you’ve ever felt sexually harassed by me,” he said snidely.

“He already had the chance earlier today,” she said before stepping away from the sizzling noises of the kitchen to answer the phone.

“This is White,” she said, speaking directly and almost mechanically, as she tended to do when answering a call from McGrath.

“White,” he said. “Are you home yet?”

“Yes sir.”

“I need you to come back out. I need to speak with you in private. I’ll be in the parking garage. Level Two, Row D.”

“Sir, is this about Ellington?”

“Just meet me there, White. Get there as quickly as you can.”

He ended the call with that, leaving Mackenzie holding a dead line in her hand. She pocketed it slowly, looking back toward Ellington. He was removing the pan from the stove, heading to the table in the little dining area.

“I have to grab some to go,” she said.

“Damn. Is it about me?”

“He wouldn’t say,” Mackenzie said. “But I don’t think so. This is something different. He’s being really secretive.”

She wasn’t sure why, but she left out the instructions to meet him in the parking garage. If she was being honest with herself, something about that didn’t sit well with her. Still, she grabbed a bowl from the cabinets, spooned some of Ellington’s dinner into it, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Both of them could tell that it felt mechanical and forced.

“Keep me posted,” Ellington said. “And let me know if you need anything.”

“Of course,” she said.

Realizing she hadn’t even yet removed her holster and Glock, she headed directly for the door. And it wasn’t until she was back out into the hallway and heading for her car that she realized that she was actually quite relieved to have been called away.

She had to admit that it felt a little cliché to be slowly creeping along Level 2 of the parking garage across from headquarters. Meeting in parking garages was the stuff of bad TV cop dramas. And in those dramas, shady parking garage meetings usually led to drama of some kind or another.

She spotted McGrath’s car and parked her own car a few spaces away. She locked up and strolled down to where McGrath was waiting. Without any formal invitation to do so, she walked to the passenger side door, opened it, and climbed in.

“Okay,” she said. “The secrecy is killing me. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong per se,” McGrath said. “But we’ve got a case about an hour or so away in a little town called Kingsville. You know it?”

“Heard of it, but never been there.”

“It’s about as rural as you can imagine, tucked away in the last stretch of backwoods before all of the commotion and interstates of DC take over,” McGrath said. “But it actually might not be a case at all. That’s what I need you to go figure out.”

“Okay,” she said. “But why couldn’t we have this meeting in your office?”

“Because the victim is the deputy director’s nephew. Twenty-two years old. It looks like someone tossed him from a bridge. The local PD in Kingsville say it’s probably just a suicide, but Deputy Director Wilmoth wants to make sure.”

“Does he have any reason to believe it was a murder?” she asked.

“Well, it’s the second body that’s been found at the bottom of that bridge in the last four days. It probably is a suicide if you want my opinion. But I had the order passed down to me about an hour ago, straight from Director Wilmoth. He wants to know for sure. He also wants to be informed as soon as possible and he wants it kept quiet. Hence the request to meet with me here rather than in my office. If anyone saw you and I meeting after hours, they’d assume it was about what is going on with Ellington or that I had you on some special assignment.”

“So…go to Kingsville, figure out if this was a suicide or murder, and then report back?”

“Yes. And because of recent events with Ellington, you’ll be flying solo. Which shouldn’t be an issue as I expect you’ll be back late tonight with news that it was a suicide.”

“Understood. When do I leave?”

“Now,” he said. “No time like the present, right?”

CHAPTER FOUR

Mackenzie discovered that McGrath had not been exaggerating when he had described Kingsville, Virginia, as backwoods. It was a little town that, in terms of identity, was tucked somewhere between Deliverance and Amityville. It had a creepy rural vibe to it but with the small-town rustic charm of what most people likely expected of smaller southern towns.

Night had completely fallen by the time she arrived at the crime scene. The bridge came into view slowly as she carefully drove her car down a thin gravel road. The road itself was not a state-maintained road yet was also not completely closed off to the public. However, when she closed in to less than fifty yards of the bridge, she saw that the Kingsville PD had put up a row of sawhorses to keep anyone from going any farther.

She parked alongside a few local police cars and then stepped out into the night. A few spotlights had been set up, all shining down the steep bank to the right side of the bridge. As she approached the drop-off, a young-looking policeman stepped out of one of the cars.

“You Agent White?” the man asked, his southern accent cutting into her like a razor.

“I am,” she answered.

“Okay. You might find it easier to walk across the bridge and go down the other side of the embankment. This side is steep as hell.”

Thankful for the tip, Mackenzie walked across the bridge. She took out her little Maglite and inspected the area as she crossed. The bridge was quite old, surely having long ago been shut down for any sort of practical use. She knew that there were many bridges scattered across Virginia and West Virginia that were very similar to this one. This bridge, called Miller Moon Bridge according to the basic research she’d managed to do on Google during traffic-light stops along the way, had been standing since 1910 and shut down for public use in 1969. And while that was the only information she’d been able to get on the location, her current investigation was pulling out more details.

There wasn’t much graffiti along the bridge, but the amount of litter was noticeable. Beer bottles, soda cans, and empty bags of chips were tossed to the edges of the bridge, pushed against the metal edging that supported the iron rails. The bridge wasn’t very long at all; it was around seventy-five yards, just long enough to span over the steep embankments and the river below. It felt sturdy under her feet but the very structure of it was almost feeble in a way. She was very aware that she was walking on wooden boards and support beams nearly two hundred feet in the air.

She made her way to the end of the bridge, finding that the police officer had been right. The land was much more manageable on this other side. With the help of the Maglite, she saw a beaten path that wound through the high grass. The embankment went down at close to a ninety-degree angle but there were patches of ground and rocks jutting out here and there that made the descent quite easy.

“Hold on a minute,” a man’s voice said from below. Mackenzie glanced forward, toward the glare of the spotlights, and saw a shadow emerging and coming her way. “Who’s there?” the man asked.

“Mackenzie White, FBI,” she said, reaching for her ID.

The shadow’s owner came into view moments later. He was an older man with a huge bushy beard. He was wearing a police uniform, the badge over his breast indicating that he was Kingsville’s sheriff. Behind him, she could see the figures of four other officers. One of them was taking pictures and moving slowly in the shadows.

“Oh, wow,” he said. “That was quick.” He waited for Mackenzie to draw closer and then extended his hand. He gave her a hearty handshake and said, “I’m Sheriff Tate. Good to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Mackenzie said as she reached the end of the embankment and found herself on flat land.

She took a moment to take in the scene, expertly illuminated by the spotlights that had been set up along the sides of the embankment. The first thing Mackenzie noticed was that the river wasn’t much of a river at all – not in the location beneath Miller Moon Bridge, anyway. There were what looked like a few meandering puddles of stagnant water hugging the sides and sharp edges of rocks and large boulders that took up the area the river should have passed through.

One of the boulders among the rubble was massive, easily the size of two cars. Splayed out on top of this boulder was a body. The right arm was clearly broken, bent impossibly beneath the remainder of the body. A stream of blood was trailing down the boulder, mostly dried but still wet enough to seem as if it was still flowing.

“Hell of a sight, ain’t it?” Tate asked, standing beside her.

“Yes, it is. What can you tell me for sure at the moment?”

“Well, the victim is a twenty-two-year-old male. Kenny Skinner. As I understand it, he’s related to someone higher up on your ladder.”

“Yes. The nephew of the FBI’s deputy director. How many men out here currently know that?”

“Just me and my deputy,” Tate said. “We already spoke with your pals in Washington. We know this needs to be kept quiet.”

“Thanks,” Mackenzie said. “I understand there was another body discovered here a few days ago?”

“Three mornings ago, yeah,” Tate said. “A woman named Malory Thomas.”

“Any signs of foul play?”

“Well, she was naked. And her clothes were found up there on the bridge. Other than that, there was nothing. It was assumed to be just another suicide.”

“You get many of those around here?”

“Yeah,” Tate said with a nervous smile. “You could say that. Three years ago, six people killed themselves by jumping off of this fucking bridge. It was some kind of record per location for the state of Virginia. The year after that, there were three. Last year, it was five.”

“Were they all locals?” Mackenzie asked.

“No. Out of those fourteen people, only four living within a fifty-mile radius.”

“And to your knowledge, is there maybe some sort of urban legend or reasoning behind these people taking their lives off of this bridge?”

“There’s ghost stories, sure,” Tate said. “But there’s a ghost story tied to just about every decommissioned bridge in the country. I don’t know. I blame these screwed up generation gaps. Kids these days get their feelings hurt and think offing themselves is the answer. It’s pretty sad.”

“How about homicides?” Mackenzie asked. “What’s the rate like in Kingsville?”

“There were two last year. And so far, only one this year. It’s a quiet town. Everyone knows everyone else and if you don’t like someone, you just stay away from them. Why do you ask? You leaning towards murder for this one?”

“I don’t know yet,” Mackenzie said. “Two bodies in the span of four days, at the same location. I think it’s worth looking into. Do you happen to know if Kenny Skinner and Malory Thomas knew one another?”

“Probably. But I don’t know how well. Like I said…everyone knows everyone in Kingsville. But if you’re asking if maybe Kenny killed himself because Malory did, I doubt it. There’s a five-year difference in age and they didn’t really hang with the same crowds from what I know.”

“Mind if I have a look?” Mackenzie asked.

“Be my guest,” Tate said, instantly walking away from her to join the other officers who were scouring the scene.

Mackenzie approached the boulder and the body of Kenny Skinner apprehensively. The closer she got to the body, the more aware she became of just how much damage had been done. She’d seen some pretty grisly things in her line of work, but this was among the worst.

The stream of blood was coming from an area where it appeared Kenny’s head had smashed against the rock. She didn’t bother examining it closely because the black and red illuminated in the spotlights wasn’t something she wanted popping back into her head later in the night. The massive facture in the back of his head affected the rest of the skull, distorting the facial features. She also saw where his chest and stomach looked as if they had been puffed out from within.

She did her best to look past all of this, checking over Kenny’s clothes and exposed skin for any signs of foul play. In the harsh yet inefficient beam of the spotlights, it was hard to be sure but after several minutes, Mackenzie could find nothing. When she stepped away, she felt herself start to relax. Apparently, she’d been tensed up while observing the body.

She went back to Sheriff Tate, who was speaking with another officer. They sounded as if they were making plans about notifying the family.

“Sheriff, do you think you could have someone pull the records for me on those fourteen suicides over the last three years?”

“Yeah, I can do that. I’ll make a call here in a second and make sure they’re waiting for you at the station. And you know…there’s someone you might want to call. There’s a lady in town, works out of her home as a psychiatrist and special needs teacher. She’s been on my ass for the last year or so about how all of the suicides in Kingsville can’t just be suicides. She might be able to offer something you might not find in the reports.”

“That would be great.”

“I’ll have someone include her information with the reports. You good here?”

“For now, yes. Could I please have your number for easier contact?”

“Sure. But the damned thing is glitchy. Need to upgrade. Should have done it about five months back. So if you call me and it goes to voicemail right away, I’m not ignoring you. I’ll call you right back. Some stupid thing with the phone. I hate cell phones anyway.”

After his rant on modern technology, Tate gave her his cell number and she saved it into her phone.

“I’ll see you around,” Tate said. “For now, the coroner is on the way. I’ll be damn glad when we can move this body.”

It seemed like an insensitive thing to say but when Mackenzie looked back at it and saw the gore and broken state of the body, she couldn’t help but agree.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was 10:10 when she walked into the police station. The place was absolutely dead, the only movement coming from a bored-looking woman sitting behind a desk – what Mackenzie assumed served as dispatch at the Kingsville Police Department – and two officers talking animatedly about politics in a hallway behind the dispatch desk.

Despite the lackluster feel of the place, it was apparently very well run. The woman at the dispatch desk had already copied all of the records Sheriff Tate had mentioned and had them waiting in a file folder when Mackenzie arrived. Mackenzie thanked her and then asked for a motel recommendation in the area. As it turned out, Kingsville only had a single motel, less than two miles away from the police department.

Ten minutes later, Mackenzie was unlocking the door to her room at a Motel 6. She’d certainly stayed in worse places during her tenure with the bureau, but it wasn’t likely to get any glowing Yelp or Google reviews. She paid little attention to the lacking state of the room, setting the files down on the little table by the single bed and wasting no time in diving into them.

She took some notes of her own while she read through the files. The first and perhaps most alarming thing she discovered was that of the fourteen suicides that had occurred in the last three years, eleven of them had been from the Miller Moon Bridge. The other three included two gun-related suicides and a single hanging from an attic beam.

Mackenzie knew enough about small towns to understand the allure of a rural marker like the Miller Moon Bridge. The history and the overall neglected creepiness of it was appealing, especially to teens. And, as the records in front of her showed, six of the fourteen suicides had been under twenty-one years of age.

She pored over the records; while they weren’t as explicitly detailed as she would have liked, they were above par for what she had seen from most small-town police departments. She jotted down note after note, coming up with a comprehensive list of details to help her better get to the bottom of the multiple deaths that were linked to the Miller Moon Bridge. After an hour or so, she had enough to base a few rough opinions.

First, of the fourteen suicides, exactly half had left notes. The notes made it clear that they had made the decision to end their lives. Each record had a photocopy of the letter and all of them expressed regret of some form or another. They told loved ones they cherished them and expressed pains that they could not overcome.

The other seven could almost be looked at as typical suspected murder cases: bodies discovered out of nowhere, in rough shape. One of the suicides, a seventeen-year-old female, had shown evidence of recent sexual activity. When the DNA of her partner had been found on and in her body, he had provided evidence in the form of text messages that she had come to his house, they’d had sex, and then she’d left. And from the way it looked, she had launched herself off of the Miller Moon Bridge about three hours later.

The only case out of the fourteen that she could see that would have warranted any sort of closer look was the sad and unfortunate suicide of a sixteen-year-old male. When he had been discovered on those bloodied rocks beneath the bridge, there had been bruises on his chest and arms that did not line up with any of the injuries he had suffered from the fall itself. Within a few days, police had discovered that the boy had been routinely beaten by an alcoholic father who, sadly enough, attempted suicide three days after the discovery of his son’s body.

Mackenzie finished off the research session with the freshly put together file on Malory Thomas. Her case stood out a bit from the others because she had been nude. The report showed that her clothes had been found in a neat pile on the bridge. There had been so sign of abuse, recent sexual activity, or foul play. For some reason or another, it simply seemed that Malory Thomas had decided to take that leap in her birthday suit.

That seems odd, though, Mackenzie thought. Out of place, even. If you’re going to kill yourself, why would you want yourself exposed like that when your body is found?

She pondered it for a moment and then remembered the psychiatrist Sheriff Tate had mentioned. Of course, now that it was nearly midnight, it was too late to call.

Midnight, she thought. She looked to her phone, surprised that Ellington had not tried reaching out. She supposed he was playing it smart – not wanting to bother her until he thought she was in a good place. And honestly, she wasn’t sure what sort of place she was in. So he’d made a mistake in his life long before he knew her…why the hell should she be so upset about that?

She wasn’t sure. But she knew that she was…and in that moment, that was really all that mattered.

Before turning in for bed, she looked at the business card the woman at the station had placed in the file. It was the name, number, and email address of the local psychiatrist, Dr. Jan Haggerty. Wanting to be as prepared as possible, Mackenzie fired off an email, letting Dr. Haggerty know that she was in town, why she was there, and requesting a meeting as early as possible. Mackenzie figured if she had not heard from Haggerty by nine tomorrow morning, she’d go ahead and place a call.

Before turning out the lights, she thought about calling Ellington, just to check on him. She knew him well enough; he was probably having a pity party for himself, likely downing several beers with plans of passing out on the couch.

Thinking of him in that state made the decision much easier for her. She turned out the lights and, in the darkness, started to feel like she might be in a town that was darker than others. The kind of town that hid some ugly scars, forever in the dark not because of the rural setting but because of a certain blemish on a gravel road about six miles from where she currently rested her head. And although she did her best to clear her thoughts, she fell asleep with images of teenagers falling to their deaths from the top of Miller Moon Bridge.

CHAPTER SIX

She was stirred awake by the ringing of her cell phone. The bedside clock told her that it was 6:40 as she reached for it. She saw McGrath’s name on the display, had just enough time to wish it were Ellington instead, and then answered it.

“This is Agent White.”

“White, where are we on this case with Director Wilmoth’s nephew?”

“Well, right now it seems like a clear-cut suicide. If it plays out the way I think it will, I should be back in DC this afternoon.”