Before he Kills
“I don’t know how the media found out about this so quickly,” he growled, “but if I find out that someone in this room is responsible, there’s going to be hell to pay.”
The room fell quiet. A few officers and related staff started to look nervously at the contents of the folders in front of them. While Mackenzie didn’t care much for Nelson, there was no denying that the man’s presence and voice commanded a room without much effort.
“Here’s where we stand,” Nelson said. “The victim is Hailey Lizbrook, a stripper from Omaha. Thirty-four years old, two boys, ages nine and fifteen. From what we can gather, she was abducted before clocking in for work, as her employer says she never showed up the night before. Security footage from the Runway, her place of employment, shows nothing. So we’re working on the assumption that she was taken somewhere between her apartment and the Runway. That’s an area of seven and a half miles – an area that we currently have a few bodies investigating with the Omaha PD right now.”
He then looked to Porter as if he were a prized pupil and said:
“Porter, why don’t you describe the scene?”
Of course he’d choose Porter.
Porter stood up and looked around the room as if to make sure everyone was paying close attention.
“The victim was bound to a wooden pole with her hands tied behind her. The sight of her death was in a clearing in a cornfield, a little less than a mile off the highway. Her back was covered in what appeared to be lash marks, placed there by some sort of a whip. We noted prints in the dirt that were the same shape and size of the lashes. While we won’t know for absolutely certain until after the coroner’s report, we are fairly certain this was not a sexual attack, even though the victim had been stripped to her underwear and her clothes were nowhere to be found.”
“Thanks, Porter,” Nelson said. “Speaking of the coroner, I spoke with him on the phone about twenty minutes ago. He says that while he won’t know for sure until an autopsy is conducted, the cause of death is likely going to be blood loss or some sort trauma – likely to the head or heart.”
His eyes then went to Mackenzie and there was very little interest in them when he asked: “Anything to add, White?”
“The numbers,” she said.
Nelson rolled his eyes in front of the entire room. It was a clear sign of disrespect but she trudged past it, determined to get it out to everyone present before she could be cut off.
“I discovered what appeared to be two numbers, separated by a slash, carved into the bottom of the pole.”
“What were the numbers?” one of the younger officers at the table asked.
“Numbers and letters actually,” Mackenzie said. “N 511 and J 202. I have a picture on my phone.”
“Other pictures will be here shortly, just as soon as Nancy gets them printed out,” Nelson said. He spoke quickly and forcefully, letting the room know that the issue of these numbers was now closed.
Mackenzie listened to Nelson as he droned on about the tasks that needed to be carried out to cover the seven-and-a-half-mile area between Hailey Lizbrook’s home and the Runway. But she was only half-listening, really. Her mind kept going back to the way the woman’s body had been strung up. Something about the entire display of the body had seemed almost familiar to her right away, and it still stuck with her as she sat in the conference room.
She went through the brief notes in the folder, hoping some small detail might trigger something in her memory. She leafed through the four pages of information, hoping to uncover something. She already knew everything in the folder, but she scanned the details anyway.
Thirty-four-year-old female, presumed killed the previous night. Lashes, cuts, various abrasions on her back, tied to an old wooden post. Cause of death assumed to be blood loss or possible trauma to the heart. Method of binding suggests possible religious overtones while woman’s body type hints at sexual motivations.
As she read through it, something clicked. She zoned out a bit, allowing her mind to go where it needed without interference from her surroundings.
As she put the dots together, coming up with a connection she hoped she was wrong about, Nelson started to wind down.
“…and since it’s too late for roadblocks to be effective, we’re going to have to rely mostly on witness testimony, even down to the most minute and seemingly useless detail. Now, does anyone have anything else to add?”
“One thing, sir,” Mackenzie said.
She could tell that Nelson was containing a sigh. From the other end of the table, she heard Porter make a soft sort of chuckling noise. She ignored it all and waited to see how Nelson would address her.
“Yes, White?” he asked.
“I’m recalling a case in 1987 that was similar to this. I’m pretty sure it was right outside of Roseland. The binding was the same, the type of woman was the same. I’m fairly certain the method of beating was the same.”
“1987?” Nelson asked. “White, were you even born yet?”
This was met with soft laughter from more than half of the room. Mackenzie let it slide right off. She’d find the time to be embarrassed later.
“I was not,” she said, not afraid to tangle with him. “But I did read the report.”
“You forget, sir,” Porter said. “Mackenzie spends her free time reading cold case files. The girl is like a walking encyclopedia for this stuff.”
Mackenzie noticed at once that Porter had referred to her by her first name and called her a girl rather than a woman. The sad thing was that she didn’t think he was even aware of the disrespect.
Nelson rubbed at his head and finally let out the thunderous sigh that had been building up. “1987? You’re sure?”
“Almost positive.”
“Roseland?”
“Or the immediate surrounding area,” she said.
“Okay,” Nelson said, looking to the far end of the table where a middle-aged woman sat, listening diligently. There was a laptop in front of her, which she had been quietly typing on the whole time. “Nancy, can you run a search for that in the database?”
“Yes sir,” she said. She started typing something into the precinct’s internal server right away.
Nelson cast Mackenzie another disapproving look that essentially translated to: You better be right. If not, you just wasted twenty seconds of my valuable time.
“All right, boys and ladies,” Nelson said. “Here’s how we’re going to break this out. The moment this meeting ends, I want Smith and Berryhill heading out to Omaha to help the local PD out there. From there, if needed, we’ll rotate out in pairs. Porter and White, want you two to speak with the kids of the deceased and her employer. We’re also working on getting the address of her sister.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Nancy said, looking up from her computer.
“Yes, Nancy?”
“It seems Detective White was right. October of 1987, a prostitute was found dead and bound to a wooden line pole just outside of the Roseland city limits. The file I’m looking at says she was stripped to her underwear and flogged severely. No signs of sexual abuse and no motive to speak of.”
The room went quiet again as many damning questions went unspoken. Finally, it was Porter that spoke up and although Mackenzie could tell he was trying to dismiss the case, she could hear a hint of worry in his voice.
“That’s almost thirty years ago,” he said. “I’d call that a flimsy connection.”
“But it’s a connection nonetheless,” Mackenzie said.
Nelson slammed a hefty hand down on the desk, his eyes burning into Mackenzie. “If there is a connection here, you know what it means, right?”
“It means we may be dealing with a serial killer,” she said. “And even the idea that we may be dealing with a serial killer means we need to consider calling in the FBI.”
“Ah, hell,” Nelson said. “You’re jumping the gun there. You’re jumping an entire arsenal, in fact.”
“With all due respect,” Mackenzie said, “it’s worth looking into.”
“And now that your hardwired brain has brought it to our attention, we have to,” Nelson said. “I’ll make some calls and get you involved in checking it out. For now, let’s get cracking on things that are relevant and timely. That’s it for now, everyone. Now get to work.”
The small group at the conference table started to disperse, taking their folders with them. As Mackenzie started out of the room, Nancy gave her a small smile of acknowledgment. It was the most encouragement Mackenzie had gotten at work in more than two weeks. Nancy was the receptionist and sometimes fact-checker around the precinct. As far as Mackenzie knew, she was one of the few older members on the force who had no real problem with her.
“Porter and White, hold on,” Nelson said.
She saw that Nelson was now showing some of the same worry she had seen and heard in Porter when he spoke up moments ago. He looked almost sick with it.
“Good recall on that 1987 case,” Nelson told Mackenzie. It looked like it physically hurt him to pay her the compliment. “It is a shot in the dark. But it does make you wonder…”
“Wonder what?” Porter asked.
Mackenzie, never one for beating around the bush, answered for Nelson.
“Why he’s decided to go active now,” she said.
Then she added:
“And when he’ll kill again.”
CHAPTER THREE
He sat in his car, enjoying the silence. Streetlights cast a ghostly glow on the street. There weren’t many cars out at such a late hour, making it eerily tranquil. He knew that anyone out in this part of town at such an hour was likely preoccupied or doing their dealings in secret. It made it easier for him to focus on the work at hand – the Good Work.
The sidewalks were dark except for the occasional neon glow of seedy establishments. The crude figure of a well-endowed woman glowed in the window of the building he was studying. It flickered like a beacon on a stormy sea. But there was no refuge in those places – no respectable refuge, anyway.
As he sat in his car, as far away from the streetlights as he could get, he thought about his collection at home. He’d studied it closely before heading out tonight. There were remnants of his work on his small desk: a purse, an earring, a gold necklace, a chunk of blonde hair placed in a small Tupperware container. They were reminders, reminders that he had been assigned this work. And that he had more work to do.
A man emerged from the building on the opposite side of the street, breaking him from his thoughts. Watching, he sat there and waited patiently. He’d learned a great deal about patience over the years. Because of that, knowing that he must now work quickly made him anxious. What if he was not precise?
He had little choice. Already, Hailey Lizbrook’s murder was on the news. People were searching for him – as if he were the one who had done something bad. They just didn’t understand. What he had given that woman had been a gift.
An act of grace.
In the past, he’d let much time pass between his sacred acts. But now, an urgency was upon him. There was so much to do. There were always women out there – on street corners, in personal ads, on television.
In the end, they’d understand. They’d understand and they’d thank him. They would ask him how to be pure, and he would open their eyes.
Moments later, the neon image of the woman in the window went black. The glow behind the windows died out. The place had gone dark, the lights cut off as they closed for the night.
He knew this meant that the women would be coming out of the back at any moment, headed to their cars and then home.
He shifted into drive and drove slowly around the block. The streetlights seemed to chase him, but he knew that there were no prying eyes to see him. In this part of the city, no one cared.
At the back of the building, most of the cars were nice. There was good money in keeping your body on display. He parked at the far edge of the lot and waited some more.
After a long while, the employee door finally opened. Two women came out, accompanied by a man that looked like he worked security for the place. He eyed the security man, wondering if he might be a problem. He had a gun under the seat that he would use if he absolutely had to, but he’d rather not. He hadn’t had to use it yet. He actually abhorred guns. There was something impure about then, something almost slothful.
Finally, they all split up, getting in their cars and heading off.
He watched others emerge, and then he sat upright. He could feel his heart pounding. That was her. That was the one.
She was short, with fake blonde hair that bobbed just over her shoulders. He watched her get into her car and he did not drive forward until her taillights were around the corner.
He drove around the other side of the building, so as not to draw attention to himself. He trailed behind her, his heart starting to race. Instinctively, he reached under his seat and felt the strand of rope. It eased his nerves.
It calmed him to know that, after the pursuit, there would come the sacrifice.
And come, it would.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mackenzie sat in the passenger seat, several files scattered in her lap, Porter behind the wheel, tapping his fingers to the beat of a Rolling Stones song. He kept the car tuned to the same classic rock station he always listened to while driving, and Mackenzie glanced up, annoyed, her concentration finally broken. She watched the car’s headlights slice down the highway at eighty miles per hour, and turned to him.
“Can you please turn that down?” she snapped.
Usually, she didn’t mind, but she was trying to slip into the right frame of mind, to understand the killer’s MO.
With a sigh and shake of his head, Porter turned down the radio. He glanced over to her dismissively.
“What are you hoping to find, anyway?” he asked.
“I’m not trying to find anything,” Mackenzie said. “I’m trying to put the pieces together to better understand the killer’s personality type. If we can think like him, we have a much better chance of finding him.”
“Or,” Porter said, “you can just wait until we get to Omaha and speak to the victim’s kids and sister like Nelson told us.”
Without even looking at him, Mackenzie could tell that he was struggling to keep some wise-ass comment in. She had to give him a little credit, she supposed. When it was just the two of them on the road or at a crime scene, Porter kept the wisecracks and degrading behavior to a minimum.
She ignored Porter for the moment and looked to the notes in her lap. She was comparing the notes from the 1987 case and the Hailey Lizbrook murder. The more she read over them, the more she was convinced that they had been pulled off by the same guy. But the thing that kept frustrating her was that there was no clear motive.
She looked back and forth through the documents, flipping through pages and cycling through the information. She started to murmur to herself, asking questions and stating facts out loud. It was something she had done ever since high school, a quirk that she had never quite grown out of.
“No evidence of sexual abuse in either case,” she said softly. “No obvious ties between the victims other than profession. No real chance of religious motivations. Why not go for the full-on crucifix rather than just basic poles if you’re going for a religious theme? The numbers were present in both cases but the numbers don’t show any clear significance to the killings.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Porter said, “but I’d really rather be listening to the Stones.”
Mackenzie stopped talking to herself and then noticed that her notification light was blinking on her phone. After she and Porter had left, she’d e-mailed Nancy and asked her to do a few quick searches with the terms pole, stripper, prostitute, waitress, corn, lashes, and the sequence of numbers N511/J202 from murder cases over the last thirty years. When Mackenzie checked her phone, she saw that Nancy, as usual, had acted quickly.
The mail Nancy had sent back read: Not much, I’m afraid. I’ve attached the briefs on the few cases I did find, though. Good luck!
There were only five attachments and Mackenzie was able to look through them pretty quickly. Three of them clearly had nothing to do with the Lizbrook murder or the case from ’87. But the other two were interesting enough to at least consider.
One of them was a case from 1994 where a woman had been found dead behind an abandoned barn in a rural area about eighty miles outside of Omaha. She had been tied to a wooden pole and it was believed that her body had been there for at least six days before being discovered. Her body had gone stiff and a few woodland animals – believed to be bobcats – had started eating at her legs. The woman had a lengthy criminal record, including two arrests for soliciting sex. Again, there had been no clear signs of sexual abuse and while there had been lashes on her back, they had not been nearly as extensive as what they had found on Hailey Lizbrook. The briefing on the murder said nothing about numbers being found on the pole, though.
The second maybe-related file concerned a nineteen-year-old girl that had been reported as kidnapped when she did not return home for Christmas break from her freshman year at the University of Nebraska in 2009. When her body was discovered in an empty field three months later, partially buried, there had been lashes on her back. Images were later leaked to the press, showing the young girl nude and engaged in some sort of lurid sex party at a fraternity house. The pictures had been taken one week before she had been reported missing.
The last case was a bit of a stretch, but Mackenzie thought they could both potentially be linked to the ’87 murder and Hailey Lizbrook.
“What you got there?” Porter asked.
“Nancy sent me briefs from some other cases that might be linked.”
“Anything good?”
She hesitated but then filled him in on the two potential links. When she was done, Porter nodded his head as he stared out into the night. They passed a sign telling them that Omaha was twenty-two miles ahead.
“I think you try too hard sometimes,” Porter said. “You bust your ass and a lot of people have taken notice. But let’s be honest: no matter how hard you try, not every case has some huge link that is going to create some monster case for you.”
“So humor me,” Mackenzie said. “At this very moment, what does your gut tell you about this case? What are we dealing with?”
“It’s just some basic perp with mommy issues,” Porter said dismissively. “We talk to enough people, we find him. All this analysis is a waste of time. You don’t find people by getting into their head. You find them by asking questions. Street work. Door to door. Witness to witness.”
As they fell into silence, Mackenzie started to worry about just how simplistic his view of the world was, how black and white. It left no room for nuance, for anything outside of his predetermined beliefs. She thought the psycho they were dealing with was far too sophisticated for that.
“What’s your take on our killer?” he finally asked.
She could detect resentment in his voice, as if he really hadn’t wanted to ask her but the silence had got the best of him.
“I think he hates women for what they represent,” she said softly, working it out in her mind as she spoke. “Maybe he’s a fifty-year-old virgin who thinks sex is gross – and yet there’s also that need in him for sex. Killing women makes him feel like he’s conquering his own instincts, instincts he sees as gross and inhuman. If he can eliminate the source of where those sexual urges come from, he feels in control. The lashes on the back indicate that he’s almost punishing them, probably for their provocative nature. Then there’s the fact that there are no signs of sexual abuse. It makes me wonder if this is some sort of attempt at purity in the killer’s eyes.”
Porter shook his head, almost like some disappointed parent.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “A waste of time. You’ve got yourself so far into this you don’t even know what you think anymore – and none of that is gonna help us. You can’t see the forest for the trees.”
The awkward silence blanketed them again. Apparently done speaking, Porter turned the radio up.
It lasted only a few minutes, though. As they neared Omaha, Porter turned the radio back down without being prompted this time. Porter spoke up and when he did, he sounded nervous, but Mackenzie could also hear the effort he was putting forth to sound like he was the one in charge.
“You ever interviewed kids after they lost a parent?” Porter asked.
“Once,” she said. “After a drive-by. An eleven-year-old boy.”
“I’ve had a few, too. It’s not fun.”
“No, it’s not,” Mackenzie agreed.
“Well look, we’re about to ask two boys questions about their dead mom. The topic of where she works is bound to come up. We have to handle this thing with kid gloves – no pun intended.”
She fumed. He was doing that thing where he spoke down to her as if she were a child.
“Let me lead. You can be the comforting shoulder if they start crying. Nelson says the sister will also be there, but I can’t imagine she’d be any reliable source of comfort. She’s probably just as wrecked as the kids.”
Mackenzie actually didn’t think it was the best idea. But she also knew that when Porter and Nelson were involved, she needed to choose her battles wisely. So if Porter wanted to take charge of asking two grieving kids about their dead mom, she’d let him have that weird ego trip.
“As you want,” she said through clenched teeth.
The car fell into silence again. This time, Porter kept the radio turned down, the only sounds coming from the shifting of pages in Mackenzie’s lap. There was a larger story in those pages and the documents Nancy had sent; Mackenzie was sure of it.
Of course, for the story to be told, all of the characters needed to be revealed. And for now, the central character was still hiding in the shadows.
The car slowed and Mackenzie raised her head as they turned down a quiet block. She felt a familiar pit in her stomach, and she wished she were anywhere but here.
They were about to talk to a dead woman’s kids.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mackenzie was surprised as she entered Hailey Lizbrook’s apartment; it was not what she had expected. It was neat and tidy, the furniture nicely centered and dusted. The décor was very much that of a domesticated woman, right down to the coffee mugs with cute sayings and the pot holders hanging from ornate hooks by the stove. It was evident that she had run a tight ship, right down to the haircuts and pajamas on her sons.
It was very much like the family and home she always dreamed of having herself.
Mackenzie recalled from the files that the boys were nine and fifteen; the oldest was Kevin and the youngest was Dalton. It was clear as she met him that Dalton had been crying a lot, his blue eyes rimmed with puffy red splotches.
Kevin, on the other hand, looked angry more than anything else. As they settled in and Porter took the lead, it showed perfectly clear when Porter tried speaking to them in a tone that was somewhere between condescending and a preschool teacher trying too hard. Mackenzie winced inside as Porter spoke.
“Now I need to know if your mother had any men friends,” Porter said.
He stood in the center of the room while the boys sat on the living room couch. Hailey’s sister, Jennifer, was standing in the adjoining kitchen, smoking a cigarette by the stove with the exhaust fan running.
“You mean like a boyfriend?” Dalton asked.
“Sure, that could be a male friend,” Porter said. “But I don’t even mean like that. Any man that she might have spoken to more than once. Even someone like a mailman or someone at the grocery store.”
Both of the boys were looking at Porter as if they were expecting him to perform a magic trick or maybe even spontaneously combust. Mackenzie was doing the same. She had never heard him use such a soft tone. It was almost funny to hear such a soothing tone come out of his mouth.
“No, I don’t think so,” Dalton said.
“No,” Kevin agreed. “And she didn’t have a boyfriend, either. Not that I know of.”
Mackenzie and Porter looked to Jennifer over by the stove for an answer. All they got in response was a shrug. Mackenzie was pretty sure Jennifer was in some sort of shock. It made her wonder if there might be another family member that could take care of these boys for a while, since Jennifer certainly didn’t seem like a fit guardian at the moment.