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Before He Takes

CHAPTER SIX

Mackenzie knew that the closest FBI field office to Bent Creek was in Omaha, Nebraska. The thought of returning to Nebraska in an official capacity was intimidating, yet at the same time, almost fitting. Still, she was beyond relieved when Heideman called them to let them know that the current base of operations for the case was in the Bent Creek police department.

She and Ellington arrived there just after six that evening. As she walked toward the front doors of the station with Ellington, feelings of working as a woman in law enforcement in the Midwest came creeping back in. It was in the nearly misogynistic way some of the men in uniform looked at her. The change of clothes and title had apparently done nothing. Men were still going to see her as second class.

The only difference now was that she didn’t give a shit if she offended anyone or hurt their feelings. She was here on bureau business to help a small and fledgling police force figure out who was kidnapping women from their back roads. She was not going to be treated the same way she had been the last time she worked in the Midwest as a detective for the Nebraska State Police.

She quickly discovered that part of her assumptions upon entering the station were wrong. Maybe the change of title and stature did mean something. When they were escorted back to the primary conference room, she saw that the local PD had ordered Chinese food for them. It was spread out on a small coffee bar in the back of the room, along with a few two-liter bottles of drinks and snacks.

Thorsson and Heideman were already enjoying the comped dinner, shoveling portions of lo mein noodles and orange chicken onto their plates. Ellington gave her a what are ya gonna do? sort of shrug and headed for the table as well. She did the same as a few other people filtered in and out of the room. While she was sitting down at the conference table with a portion of sesame chicken and a crab rangoon, one of the officers she had seen on the side of State Route 14 approached her and extended his hand. Again, she saw his badge and recognized him as the sheriff.

“Agent White, right?” he asked.

“I am.”

“Good to meet you. I’m Sheriff Bateman. I hear you and your partner went up near Sigourney to talk to the mother of the most recent victim. No results?”

“Nothing. Just a potential source of information to cross off the list. And a pretty good confirmation that we’re not dealing with a case of a daughter that simply decided not to call her mother when plans changed.”

Clearly disappointed by this, Bateman nodded and turned back for the front of the room where two other officers were in conversation.

As Ellington took a seat beside Mackenzie, they both looked to the front of the room. A man who had earlier introduced himself as Deputy Wickline was placing pictures and printouts on a dry erase board with magnets. Another officer—the only other female in the room—was writing a series of notes along the other side of the board.

“Looks like they run a tight ship around here,” Ellington said.

She had been thinking the same thing. She had come in assuming this would be something of a sloppily put together circus as it had been with the Nebraska State PD when she had worked there. But so far, she was impressed with how the Bent Creek PD was organizing things.

Several minutes later, Sheriff Bateman checked in with the officers at the board and ushered the two male officers out. The female stayed behind and took a seat at the table. Bateman closed the door and went to the front of the room. He glanced around at the four FBI agents and three remaining officers in the room.

“We got dinner because I have no idea how long we’ll be here,” he said. “We don’t generally get a lot of bureau presence in Bent Creek so this is new to me. So please, Agents, let me know if there is anything we can do to make things smoother. For now, I’ll turn this over to you agents.”

He took a seat, leaving Ellington and Thorsson to give one another a quick confused look. Thorsson grinned and gestured to the front of the room, giving the responsibility to the agents from DC.

Ellington nudged Mackenzie lightly under the table as he said: “Yes, so Agent White will walk us through the information we have so far, as well as any current theories we have.”

She knew he was trying to rib her by throwing her under the bus in such a way, but she didn’t mind. In fact, a small selfish part of her wanted to be in front of the room. Maybe it was some girlish revenge fantasy to come back to this area of the country and run a conference room in a way she had never been allowed to do in Nebraska. Whatever the reason, she went to the front of the room and took a quick look at the dry erase board that had been put together.

“The work your officers did here,” she said, pointing to the board, “pretty much spells the story out for me. The first victim is a resident of Bent Creek. Naomi Nyles, forty-seven years of age. She was reported missing by her daughter and was last seen two weeks ago. Her car was found on the side of the road in no apparent state of disrepair. I believe officers within this very building were able to crank the car just fine and bring it back here.”

“That’s correct,” Deputy Wickline said. “The car is still in the impound lot, as a matter of fact.”

“The second missing person was twenty-six-year-old Crystal Hall. Her employer is Wrangler Beef in Des Moines and they have confirmed that she was sent to a cattle farm just outside of Bent Creek. The owner of the farm confirms that Crystal did show up for a planned meeting and left the property shortly after five in the afternoon. Her credit card history shows that she grabbed dinner at the Bent Creek Subway at five fifty-two.” She pointed to where one of the helpful officers had already jotted this information down on the board.

“The question that raises,” Bateman said, “is when she was abducted. Her car was not discovered until around one thirty in the morning. For someone to not notice her car or at least report it, even on State Route 14, means that there’s a good chance she was elsewhere in town before heading back home. I seriously doubt someone would have been bold enough to nab her between six thirty and seven thirty. And if they were that bold…”

He trailed off here, as if not liking how he needed to end the comment. So Mackenzie took the liberty and finished for him.

“Then it means it would be someone familiar with the area,” she said. “Particularly with the traffic patterns on State Route 14. However, the profile for this type of guy doesn’t line up with being so bold. He lurks in darkness. He sneaks up on them. There’s nothing at all overt about this guy.”

Bateman nodded at this, his eyes wide and a smile on his face. She’d seen the look before. It was the look of a man who was not only impressed by the way she thought, but appreciated it. She saw the same look on the face of the female officer and an overweight man at the end of the table, still enjoying the free dinner. Deputy Wickline was nodding at her comment, scribbling notes down in a legal pad.

“Sheriff,” Ellington said, “do we have any idea the average amount of traffic that goes through that route at that time of day?”

“A state-sanctioned traffic monitor and report from 2012 estimates that between six in the afternoon and midnight, there’s an average of about eighty vehicles that will pass through State Route 14. It really isn’t a very busy road. But keep in mind, it’s just been the author and Crystal Hall that were taken from 14. The first missing person, Naomi Nyles, was abducted off of County Road 664.”

“And what’s the traffic like there during that time of day?” Mackenzie asked.

“Almost nothing,” Bateman said. “I think the number was around twenty or thirty. Deputy Wickline, do you know any different?”

“Sounds about right,” Wickline said.

“And speaking of the author,” Mackenzie continued. “Delores Manning, thirty-two. She lives in Buffalo but has family just outside of Sigourney. Her tires were flattened by broken glass fragments in the road. The glass is quite thick and had been painted black to prevent glare and shine from the headlights. Her agent reported her as missing about half an hour after her car was discovered by a passing truck around two in the morning. Agent Ellington and I spoke with her mother and sister today and they could provide no solid leads. As a matter of fact, there seem to be no solid leads at all to any of these disappearances. And unfortunately, that’s all we have.”

“Thank you, Agent White,” Bateman said. “So where do we go from here?”

Mackenzie smirked a bit and nodded to the Chinese food on the back table. “Well, it’s a good thing you planned ahead. I think the best place to start is to go over any unsolved disappearances within a one-hundred-mile radius over the last ten years.”

No one objected but the looks on the faces of Bateman, Wickline, and the other officers said enough. The female officer shrugged in defeat and raised her hand dutifully. “I can get on records and pull all of that,” she said.

“Sounds good, Roberts,” Bateman said. “Can you have results for us in an hour? Get some of the desk-riders out front to help.”

Roberts got up and left the conference room. Mackenzie noticed that Bateman watched her a bit longer than the other men in the room.

“Agent White,” Bateman said. “Do you happen to have any ideas as to what kind of suspect we should be looking for? In a fairly small town like Bent Creek, the quicker we can rule people out, the quicker we can point you to the sort of person you’re looking for.”

“Without clues of any kind, it could be hard to pinpoint,” Mackenzie said. “But so far, there are a few certain things we can assume. Agent Ellington, would you like to take over on this part?”

He smiled at her as he took a bite out of an egg roll. “Please, keep going. You’re doing just fine.”

It was an odd back-and-forth between them that she hoped wasn’t too obvious to others in the room. She had been trying to show respect—to show him that she was not trying to run the show. But he, in turn, had shrugged it off. For now, it seemed that he almost appreciated the fact that she was assuming the lead.

“First of all,” she said, doing her best not to be thrown off course, “the suspect is almost certainly a local. His ability to study traffic patterns along these back roads shows a rigorous kind of patience that makes him a bit easier to profile. If the suspect has gone through this much trouble to abduct these women, then past cases involving kidnapping and abduction suggest that he is not taking these women to kill them. As I said, he seems to be sneaky. Everything we know about him—attacking when they are vulnerable, in the dark, and apparently planning the act—points to a man with non-violent tendencies. After all, what’s the point of painstakingly plotting an abduction only to kill the victim moments later? It indicates that he is collecting these women, for lack of a better term.”

“Yes,” Roberts, the female officer, said. “But collecting them for what, exactly?”

“Is it terrible to assume it’s a sex thing?” Deputy Wickline asked.

“Not at all,” Mackenzie said. “In fact, if our suspect is shy, that’s one more check mark on the profile for us. Shy men that go after women in such a way are usually too shy or otherwise burdened socially to romance women. It’s usually the case with rapists that do everything they can to not hurt the women.”

She got a few more of those admiring glances from around the room. But given the topic that was being discussed, she couldn’t appreciate it.

“But we can’t know for sure?” Bateman asked.

“No,” Mackenzie said. “And that’s where the pressure is on us. This isn’t just a killer that we are hoping won’t strike again. This man is psychotic, and dangerous. The longer it takes to find him, the longer he has to do whatever he wants with these women.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Filled with Chinese food and an abundance of information on the three abductees, Mackenzie and Ellington left the Bent Creek PD at 9:15. The only motel in town—a Motel 6 that looked like it hadn’t been painted, decorated, or looked at twice since the ’80s—was five minutes away. It was no surprise at all to find two vacant rooms, which they booked for the night.

When they left the office and stepped back out into the night, Mackenzie looked around the parking lot. Bent Creek truly was a very small town. It was so small, in fact, that the business owners apparently worked together to ensure an efficient use of space. This was evident in the fact that a small bar sat on the other side of the parking lot from the Motel 6. It made sense, Mackenzie thought. Anyone that needed to stay in a motel in Bent Creek was likely going to need a drink.

She certainly could go for one.

Ellington patted her on the back and started in that direction. “Drinks are on me,” he said.

She was starting to enjoy the dry and rather basic humor that existed between them. They both knew that there was a shifting awkwardness between them but it had been buried. To get around it, they had created a tentative friendship based on their jobs—jobs that insisted they think logically and approach things with a no-nonsense attitude. So far, it was working quite well.

She joined him as they crossed the parking lot and when they stepped inside the bar—unoriginally named Bent Creek Bar—the gloom of the night was replaced by a smoky and dank sort of twilight that only existed in small-town bars and honkytonks. An old Travis Tritt song was playing on a dusty jukebox in the corner as they took a seat at the edge of the bar. They both ordered beers and, as if that staple of a bar visit had been their cue, Ellington somehow went straight back into work mode.

“I think those offshoot roads off of State Road 14 are worth looking into,” he said.

“Same here,” she said. “I find it odd that it wasn’t mentioned in any of the copious notes the police put up on that board.”

“Maybe they just know the geography of the place better than we do,” Ellington suggested. “For all we know, they could just be little dirt tracks that dead end. Any reason you didn’t ask about them while you were running the conference room?”

“I almost did,” she said. “But they’d put it all together so well…I didn’t want to step on any toes. This whole thing of a cooperative police department bending over backwards for us is new to me. I’ll get to it tomorrow. If it was crucial or important, they’ve either already checked them or they would have at least mentioned it to us.”

Ellington nodded and took a gulp of his beer. “Hell, I nearly forgot,” he said. “I was sorry as hell to hear about Bryers. I only worked with him a few times and it wasn’t in a close capacity. But he seemed to be a genuinely nice man. One hell of an agent, too, from what I hear.”

“Yeah, he was pretty awesome,” Mackenzie said.

“I don’t know if you’d want to know this or not,” Ellington said, “but there was quite a bit of controversy about pairing you with him when you came in. Bryers was something of a hot commodity. One of the best. But when the idea was given to him, he was all for it. I think deep down, he always wanted to be a mentor. And I think he got a good one for his first try.”

“Thanks,” she said. “But I don’t quite feel as if I’ve proven myself just yet.”

“Why not?”

“Well…I don’t know. Maybe it will hit me when I can wrap a case without getting McGrath pissed off at me over some detail or another.”

“He only does it because he expects so much out of you. You came in like this fuse on a stick of dynamite that had already been lit.”

“Is that why he has me partnering with you right now?”

“No. I think he just wanted me on this because of my connection with the Omaha field office. And between you and me and no one else, he wants you to succeed on this one. He wants you to knock it out of the park. With me on board, you won’t be able to resort to one of your patented solo endings that you’re so prone to.”

She wanted to argue this point but she knew he was right. So instead, she drank from her beer. The jukebox was now churning out Bryan Adams and somehow, she was ordering her second beer.

“So tell me,” Mackenzie said. “If I wasn’t on this one with you, how would you be handling it? What approaches?”

“Same as you. Working closely with the PD and trying to make friends. Taking notes, coming up with theories.”

“And do you have any?” she asked.

“None that you didn’t already nail in that conference room. I’m thinking we’re onto something…thinking of this guy as a collector of sorts. A bashful loner. I feel pretty safe in saying he’s not getting these women just to kill them. I think you’re exactly right on all those points.”

“The thing that gets under my skin,” Mackenzie said, “is thinking of all of the other reasons he would be kidnapping and collecting women.”

“Did you notice that Sheriff Bateman kept a female officer in the room the whole time?” Ellington asked.

“Yeah. Roberts. I assumed it was to keep the conversation centered on the facts and not speculations. Speculations regarding why the suspect would be keeping women. Talking about rape and sexual abuse is a little easier when there isn’t a woman around.”

“That kind of stuff bother you?” Ellington asked.

“It used to. Sadly, I’ve gotten almost jaded about it. It doesn’t bother me anymore.” This wasn’t one hundred percent true, but she didn’t want Ellington to know it. The truth of the matter was that it was often things like these that drove her to be the absolute best she could be.

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” he asked. “That part of your humanity that sort of becomes numb to things like this?”

“Yeah, it does,” she said. She hid herself behind her beer for a moment, a little shocked that Ellington had just taken such a step. It had been a small step for him but it also showed a degree of vulnerability.

She finished her beer and slid it to the edge of the bar. When the bartender came over, she waved him off. “I’m good,” she said. Then, turning to Ellington, she said: “You said you were paying, right?”

“Yeah, I got it. Hold on a second and I’ll walk you to your room.”

The slight excitement she felt at this comment was embarrassing. To stop it in its tracks before she could even entertain it, she shook her head. “Not necessary,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”

“I know you can,” he said, sliding his own empty glass toward the edge of the bar. “Another for me,” he told the bartender.

Mackenzie waved to him as she made her way out. As she walked across the parking lot, that small and eager part of her couldn’t help but wonder what it might be like to walk back to the motel with Ellington by her side, pushed forward by the uncertainty that would await them once the doors were closed and the blinds were drawn.

***

It took less than twenty minutes for the sting of lust to subside. As usual, she used work to distract herself from such lures. She opened up her laptop and went directly to her e-mail. There, she found several e-mails that had been sent to her by the Bent Creek PD over the last half a day or so—just another way they were starting to spoil her, really.

They had provided maps of the area, the only four missing persons reports within the area over the last ten years, the traffic analysis conducted by the state of Iowa in 2012, and even a list of all arrests made in the last five years that involved subjects with a history of assault. Mackenzie pored through it all, taking a bit of extra time to look at the four missing persons cases.

Two of them were assumed to have been runaways and after reading the reports, Mackenzie agreed. They could both be used as a template for angst-ridden teenagers who were tired of small-town life, leaving home earlier than their parents would have liked. One of them was a fourteen-year-old girl who had actually contacted her family two years ago to let them know she was living quite comfortably in Los Angeles.

The other two were a little harder to understand, though. One case involved a ten-year-old boy who had been abducted from a church playground. He’d been missing for three hours before anyone even raised much of a fuss about it. Local gossip mills suggested it was the grandmother who took him because of a hairy family situation. The family drama, plus the gender and age of the victim, made Mackenzie doubt there was any connection to the current kidnappings.

The fourth case was more promising but still seemed a little thin. The first red flag was that it involved a car accident. In 2009, Sam and Vicki McCauley had been run off of the road during an ice storm. When police and the ambulance arrived, Sam was barely alive and died on the way to the hospital. He had begged to know how his wife was. From what they could tell, Vicki McCauley had been thrown from the vehicle, but her body had never been found.

Mackenzie looked through the report twice and could not find any descriptions of what had caused the car to leave the road. The term icy road conditions was used several times and while that was a good reason, Mackenzie thought it might be a good idea to go deeper. She went through the report several times and then reread Delores Manning’s report. The fact that there was a car accident of some kind seemed to be the only connection between the two.

She then shifted gears and tried to weave the current three victims into those scenarios. It was nearly impossible, though. The two unexplained cases were assumed runaways and while both were female, it left far too many options open. More than that, the three current victims were taken from their cars. Maybe because being stranded on the road was a fairly common occurrence. It was a far cry from nabbing a teenage runaway. It simply didn’t fit.

This guy doesn’t want runaways or troubled teens that storm out to get a rise out of mom and dad. He’s going after women. Women that are, for some reason or another, out in their cars at night. Maybe he realizes the hope that the apparent kind stranger instills in people—women especially.

On the flip side of that, though, was the fact that she knew most women would assume the worst of a strange man on the side of the road. Especially when their cars were busted and it was dark.

Maybe they know him, then…

That seemed like a stretch, too. From the information they had gathered from Tammy and Rita Manning, Delores likely didn’t know anyone in Bent Creek.

She went back to the McCauleys’ case, mainly because it was the only one with even the thinnest thread of similarity to it. She pulled her e-mail back up and opened the most recent mail from the Bent Creek PD. She replied to it and wrote:

Thanks so much for the help. I was wondering if I could get a few other things as soon as possible. I’d like to get a list of family members related to the McCauleys that live within a fifty-mile radius, along with contact information. If you have the number for Delores Manning’s agent, that would be great, too.

She felt almost lazy requesting the information in such a way. But if they were offering to help so effortlessly, she wanted to use the Bent Creek PD as a resource as much as she could.

With that done, Mackenzie opened up another file…a file that she had managed to tuck away and not obsess over for nearly three weeks now. She opened it up, cycled through the files, and pulled up a single photograph.

It was a business card with her father’s name scrawled on the back. On the other side, showed in another photo, was a business name in bold lettering: Barker Antiques: Old or New Rare Collectibles.

And that was it. She already knew that no such place existed—not as far as she or the FBI could tell—which made it all the more frustrating. She eyed the card and felt a pull at her heart. She was about two and a half hours away from the place her father had died and maybe three hours away from where the business card in the photo had been found—nearly twenty years after her father’s death.

It was not her case…not really. McGrath had given her something of an under-the-table pass at assisting when she could but so far, the case had remained cold. She thought of Kirk Peterson, the detective who had uncovered the new clues that had reopened her father’s case. She nearly called him up but realized that it had somehow gotten to be 11:45. And besides that, what would they talk about other than the silence coming from the current and reopened cases?

But she needed to call him. Maybe after this case, when she could give Peterson and the case her full attention. It was about time she got that damned monkey off of her back.

She readied herself for bed, brushing her teeth and changing into a thin pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. Just before she settled into bed, she checked her phone one last time for any late incoming mails.

She saw that her e-mail request for information from the Bent Creek PD had already been responded to, having come in a mere seventeen minutes after she had sent it. She jotted the information down in her files and made a mental schedule for the following day. She then finally allowed herself to turn off the lights and go to bed.

She did not like ending a day and turning out the lights on unanswered questions. It was an unsettling feeling that she supposed she’d never get used to. But she had adapted long ago, finding a way to sleep a few fitful hours while the answers to her questions lurked in the darkness of night comfortably out of her grasp.