Before he Kills

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

His living room was mostly dark, illuminated only by the thin shafts of morning sun that managed to creep through the blinds. He sat in an old ragged armchair and looked to the old roll-top desk against the far corner of the room. The cover was rolled up, revealing the items he had kept from each sacrifice.

There was a pocketbook with a wallet inside. Within the wallet, there was a driver’s license belonging to Hailey Lizbrook. There was also a skirt that had belonged to the woman he had hung up in the field; a chunk of strawberry blonde hair with black dye at the tips from the woman he had placed behind the abandoned house.

There was still room for reminders he would bring back from the rest of his sacrifices – reminders of each woman he took for the sake of the work the Lord had delegated for him. While he was pleased with how things had gone so far, he knew that there was still work to be done.

He sat in the armchair, staring at his reminders – his trophies —and waited for the sun to finish rising. Only when the morning was fully engaged was he to start working again.

Looking at the items on the roll-top desk, he wondered (not for the first time) if he was a bad man. He didn’t think so. Someone had to do this work. The hardest jobs were always left to those who did not fear to do them.

But sometimes when he heard the women scream and beg for their lives, he wondered if there was something wrong with him.

When the shafts of lights on the floor went from a translucent yellow to an almost too-bright white, he knew the time had come.

He rose from his chair and walked into the kitchen. From the kitchen, he exited the house through a screen door that led into his backyard.

The yard was small and enclosed by an old chain-link fence that looked both out of place and somehow camouflaged by the neglect of the neighborhood. The grass was tall and overrun with weeds. Bees buzzed and other nameless insects scurried as he approached, making his way through the tall grass.

At the back of the yard, taking up the entire back left corner, was an old shed. It was an eyesore on the already ugly property. He went to it and pulled the door open on its old rusty hinges. It creaked open, revealing the dank darkness inside. Before stepping in, he looked around to the neighboring houses. No one was home. He knew their schedules well.

Now, in the safe light of 9 AM, he stepped into his shed and slid the door closed behind him. The barn was thick with the smell of wood and dust. As he entered, a large rat scurried along the back wall and made its exit through a slot in the boards. He paid the rodent no mind, heading directly to the three long wooden poles that were stacked to the right side of the shed. They were stacked in a miniature pyramid shape, one on top of the other two. Ten days ago, there had been three others there. But those had been put to good use to further his work.

And now, another must be prepared.

He walked to the poles and ran his hand lovingly along the well-worn cedar surface of the one stacked on top. He went to the back of the shed where a small work table was set up. There was an old handsaw, its teeth jagged and rusty, a hammer, and a chisel. He took up the hammer and the chisel and returned to the poles.

He thought of his father as he hefted the hammer. His father had been a carpenter. On many occasions, his father would tell him that the Good Lord Jesus had also been a carpenter. Thinking of his father made him think of his mother. It made him remember why she’d left them when he’d only been seven years old.

He thought of the man that lived up the street and how he would come over when his father was not home. He recalled the squeaking bedsprings and the filthy words that came from the bedroom among his mother’s cries – cries that had sounded both happy and hurt all at the same time.

“Out secret,” his mother had said. “He’s just a friend and your daddy doesn’t need to know anything about it, right?”

He’d agreed. Besides, his mother had seemed happy. Which was why he’d been so confused when she left them.

He set his hands on the top pole and closed his eyes. A fly on the wall might have thought that he was praying over the pole or even communicating with it somehow.

When he was done, he opened his eyes and put the hammer and chisel to use.

In the scant light that came in through the cracks in the boards, he started to chisel.

First came N511, then J202.

Next would come a sacrifice.

And he would claim that tonight.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Mackenzie found herself walking into a small coffee shop with the barest flicker of hope. After she’d made the awkward call to her sister, she’d placed another phone call to someone she hadn’t spoken to in quite some time. The conversation had been brief and to the point, concluding in agreeing to meet over coffee.

She looked up now and spotted the man she had called right away. He was hard to miss; in a crowd of rushed people on their way to work, mostly young and well-dressed, his white hair and flannel shirt stood out drastically.

He was turned away from her, and she approached him from behind and placed a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“James,” she said. “How are you?”

He turned and smiled widely at her as she sat down in front of him.

“Mackenzie, I swear you just get prettier and prettier,” he said.

“And you just get smoother and smoother,” she said. “It’s good to see you, James.”

“Likewise,” he said.

James Woerner was pushing seventy but looked closer to eighty. He was tall and skinny, something that had once prompted the officers he once worked with to call him Crane, after Ichabod Crane. It was a name that he’d adapted to himself after he retired from the force and had spent eight years as a consultant for the local PD and, on two occasions, for the state police.

“So what’s going on that might be so bad as to have you reach out to an old fart like me?” he asked.

There was humor in the question but Mackenzie felt herself shrinking away from him as she realized that James was the second person in less than two hours to assume that she had called because she was in a spot of trouble.

“I was wondering if you ever had a case that got under your skin,” she said. “And I don’t mean something that just bothers you. I’m talking about a case that affects you so badly that you get paranoid when you’re at home and it feels like every failed lead is your fault.”

“I assume you’re talking about the poorly named Scarecrow Killer?” James asked.

“How…” she almost asked but then realized she knew the answer, even as James answered it for her.

“I saw your picture in the paper,” he said before sipping his coffee. “I was happy for you. You need a case like this under your belt. I seem to remember telling you that you were destined to crack cases like this several years ago.”

“You did,” she said.

“Yet you’re still hanging out in the trenches with the local PD?”

“I am.”

“Is Nelson treating you okay?”

“As well as he can, given the crew he has working for him. He’s all but put me at the front of this case. I’m hoping it’s a way for him to let me prove myself so all of the macho bullshit from the others can come to an end.”

“Still working with Porter?”

“I was, but he was reassigned when an FBI agent showed up.”

“Working with the feds,” James said with a smile. “I believe that was another prediction I made about you. But I digress.”

He smiled and leaned forward.

“Tell me about why this case is affecting you so badly. And if you keep it at a surface level, I’ll take my coffee and leave. I have a busy day of doing absolutely nothing ahead of me.”

She smiled.

“The glamorous retired lifestyle,” she said.

“You’re damned right,” James said. “But don’t try to sidestep.”

She knew better than to dance around a direct request. She’d learned that when he had taken her under his wing five years ago, teaching her the basics of profiling and how to get into the mind of a criminal. The man was stubborn as hell and always got right to the point – which, Mackenzie always thought, was why they had gotten along so well.

“I think it’s because it’s a man that seems to be killing only women. More than that, he’s killing women that use their bodies to make a living.”

“And that bothers you why?”

It stung her heart to say it, but she got it out anyway.

“It makes me think of my sister. And when I think of my sister, I think of my father. And when I go there, I feel like a failure because I haven’t caught this guy yet.”

“Your sister was a stripper?” James asked.

She nodded.

“For about six months. She hated it. But the money was good enough to help her get on her feet after a rough patch. It always made me sad to think of her doing that for a living. And while I don’t see my sister on those wooden poles when I visit the sites, I know that the chances are good that the women this guy is killing probably had lives very similar to Steph.”

“Now, Mackenzie, you do know that always going back to your father when things aren’t going your way on a case is self-abuse, right? There’s no need to torment yourself over that.”

“I know. But I can’t help it.”

“Well, let’s look away from that for now. I assume you called me for guidance of some sort, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the bad news is that everything I have read in the news is dead-on to what I would say. You’re looking for a man with an aversion to sex that has likely had issues with a wife, sister, or mother in his life. I’d also add, though, that this guy doesn’t get out much. His inclination to display his victims in such rural areas makes me think he’s a small-town boy. He probably lives in a ramshackle part of town. If not this town, then certainly nowhere outside of a one-hundred-mile radius or so. But that’s just a guess.”

“So we could narrow our search for someone that has cedar poles at the ready in the seedier parts of town?”

“For a start. Now, tell me, are there any details you have noticed about the scenes that might have taken the back seat to the overarching horridness of the scenes themselves?”

“Just the numbers,” she said.

“Yes, I read about them, but only twice. The media is too obsessed with the profession of the women to dwell on something they don’t understand right away. Like those numbers. But remember: never take a crime scene for granted. Every scene has a story to tell. Even if that story is hidden in something that is seemingly trivial at first, there’s a story. It’s your job to find it, read it, and figure out what it means.”

She pondered that. What, she wondered, had she overlooked?

“There’s something else I need to ask you,” she said. “I’m about to do something I’ve never done before and I don’t want it to make my situation worse. It could potentially get deeper under my skin.”

James eyed her for a moment and gave her the same sly smile that had sometimes creeped her out when he had served as her mentor. It meant he had figured something out without being told and he now held that over her.

“You’re going back to the murder scenes,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’re going to try to enter the mind of the killer,” he said. “You’re going to try to see the scenes as a man with some flaw inside of him – with a hatred of women and a deranged sort of fear towards sex.”

“That’s the plan,” she said.

“And when are you doing this?”

“As soon as I leave here.”

James seemed to consider this for a moment. He took another sip from his coffee and nodded his approval.

“I know you’re fully capable of it,” he said. “But are you mentally ready?”

Mackenzie shrugged and said, “I have to be.”

“That can be dangerous,” he warned. “If you start seeing the scenes through the eyes of the killer, it can also distort the way you’ve been trained to see those sorts of scenes. You need to be ready for that – to draw the line between that sort of dark inspiration and your ultimate need to find this guy and take him down.”

“I know,” Mackenzie said softly.

James drummed his fingers along the sides of his cup. “Would you like for me to come with you?”

“I thought about asking you,” she said. “But I think this is something I’m going to have to do by myself.”

“That’s probably the right decision,” James said. “I must warn you, though: as you try to see things from a killer’s point of view, never allow yourself to jump to conclusions. Try to start fresh. Don’t close your mind off with assumptions like, this guy just hates women. Let the scene talk to you before you project yourself towards the scene.”

Mackenzie grinned in spite of herself. “That sounds pretty New Age,” she said. “Have you turned a new leaf?”

“No. The leaves stop turning after retirement. Now, how much longer do you have before you set out on this little quest?”

“Soon,” she said. “I’d like to visit the first one by noon.”

“Good,” he said. “That means you have some time. So, for the time being, push this Scarecrow Killer crap to the side. Go order yourself a coffee and entertain an old man for a while. What do you say?”

She gave him a look that she had tried so hard to keep from him for the year or so he’d mentored her. It was the look of a young girl looking to her father with a need to please and make him happy. While she had never psychoanalyzed herself to uncover this truth, she had known it right away, from the first week she’d spent two hours of two days with him. James Woerner had been a father figure to her during that time in her life and it was something for which she would be forever grateful.

So when he asked her to grab a cup of coffee and keep him company, she happily obliged. The cornfield, the gravel roads, and that old abandoned house had been sitting for ages, unmoving. They could wait another hour or so.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Under James Woerner’s brief tutelage, one of the things he had praised her for over and over again was her instinct. She had a gut, he had said, that was better than reading palms or tea leaves for an indication of what to do next. That’s why she wasted no time with the cornfield where Hailey Lizbrook’s body had been discovered or the open field where the second body had been strung up.

She went directly back to the abandoned house where the latest victim had been displayed. During her first visit, she’d felt as if the darkened windows had been a set of eyes, watching her every move. She had known it deep in her heart then and there that the scene had more to offer. But after everything that had happened with Ellis Pope, it had been an inclination that she had not been able to investigate.

She parked her car in front of the place and stared at the house through the windshield for a moment before getting out. From the front, the house looked just as foreboding, like the model for every haunted house that had ever been committed to page or film. She looked at the house, trying to see it the same way a murderer would see it. Why choose this location? Was it the house itself or the overwhelming sense of isolation that had appealed to him?

This, in turn, made her wonder how long the killer had scoped out the sites for where he would display his victims. The coroner’s reports seemed to indicate that the bodies were brought to these sites and killed – not killed beforehand and simply put up for viewing at the display sites. Why? What was the point?

Mackenzie finally got out of the car. Before walking toward the dilapidated porch, she walked around the side of the house and to the place where the third victim had been strung up. The body and the pole had been removed; the area was visibly unsettled, trampled by the foot traffic of the handful of authorities that had visited the site. Mackenzie stood where the pole had been, the hole still visible and the loose dirt perfectly outlining it.

She hunkered down and placed her hand on the hole. She looked to the surrounding forest and the back of the house, trying to see what the killer had seen in the moment he had started to assault the woman. A chill traced her spine as she closed her eyes and tried to envision it.

The whip he was using had multiple lashes at the end, potentially barbed, gauging from the wound patterns. Even still, it had to be used with great force to open up the flesh the way it did. He would probably stalk the victims first, walking circles around the pole, enjoying their cries and their pleading. Then something happens. Something clicks in his head or maybe the victim says something that triggers him. That’s when he starts whipping them.

Here, at this location, he had attacked with more fury than before; the lashes weren’t contained just to the back as they had been before, but reached to the chest and stomach, a few even slicing into her lower buttocks. At some point, the killer thinks his work is done and stops. And then what? Does he make sure they are dead before he leaves the site in a truck or a van? How long does he stay here with them?

If he’s killing for more than just pleasure but out of some aversion to women and/or sex, then he probably hangs out for a while, watching them bleed, watching the life slip out of their eyes. As they die, maybe he is then brave enough to look at their bodies, to cup a breast experimentally with a trembling hand. Does he feel safe or powerful, disgusted or elated to see them bleed, to watch the cloak of death fall over them, leaving their bare bodies on display?

Mackenzie opened her eyes and looked to the hole that her hand still rested on. The reports showed that all three holes had been dug crudely with a shovel, at a rapid pace rather than with much cleaner and more accurate post-hole diggers. He’d been in a hurry to get things started and then he’d placed the poles in each hole and packed the dirt back in. Where had the women been then? Drugged? Unconscious?

Mackenzie stood up and walked back to the front of the house. While she had no real reason to believe the killer had been inside, the fact that he had selected the yard outside as one of his trophy stands made the house guilty by association.

She stepped up onto the porch and it creaked under her weight right away. In fact, the entire porch seemed to settle around her weight. Somewhere out in the forest, a bird called out in response.

She made her way inside the house, pushing past a mostly deteriorated wooden door that scuffed against the floor. She was instantly assaulted by the smell of dust and mildew, the overall scent of neglect.

Stepping into the house was like stepping into a black-and-white movie. Once inside, that old gut instinct that James had once held in such a high regard told her there was nothing abnormal here, no huge a-ha sort of clue that would bring this case to a close.

Still, she couldn’t resist. She explored the empty rooms and hallways. She observed the cracked walls and peeling plaster, trying to imagine a family once living in this ruined space. Eventually, she made her way to the back of the house where it looked like a kitchen had once thrived. Old cracked linoleum clung to the floor in curling sheets, revealing a rotten floor beneath. She looked across the kitchen and saw the two windows that looked to the backyard – the same two windows that she’d felt were staring at her on her first time out here.

She walked across the kitchen, sticking beside the neglected counter along the far wall in order to avoid the questionable floor. As she moved, she realized how utterly quiet it was in the house. This was a place for ghosts and memories, not a desperate detective reaching blindly for some sense of what a killer was going through. Regardless, she made her way to the rear wall and looked out of the first window, sitting to the left of an old battered kitchen sink.

The location of where the pole and the third victim had been was visible from the window without obstruction. From inside the house, it did not look nearly as intimidating. Mackenzie tried to envision the order of things from her place at the window, as if looking at the imagined scene through a TV. She saw the killer bringing the woman to the pole that he had already placed there. She wondered if she was unconscious or somehow inebriated, wobbling on her feet with his hands under her arms or at her back.

That spurred a thought that no one had bothered checking yet. How does he get them to the pole? Are they knocked out? Drugged? Does he simply overpower them? Maybe we should get the coroner to check for any substance that causes lethargic behavior…

She stared at the scene for a bit longer, starting to feel the seclusion of the forest along the backyard pressing in on her. There was nothing out there, only trees, hidden animals, and just the slightest stirring of wind.

She exited the kitchen and made her way back out into what had once been a living room. An old scarred desk sat against the wall. It was visibly warped along the top and many of the scattered papers on it looked like leaves that had been cast to the ground and rained on for years. Mackenzie made her way over to the desk and rummaged through the few papers.

She saw invoices for pig feed and grain. The oldest was dated June of 1977 and came from a farm supply in Chinook, Nebraska. Notebook paper that had been aged so badly that its blue lines were missing held someone’s faded handwriting. Mackenzie glanced over the writing and saw what looked to be notes for a Sunday school lesson. She saw references to Noah and the flood, David and Goliath, and Samson. Under the mess of paper were two books: a devotional called God’s Healing Word and a Bible that looked so old that she feared it would crumble into dust at her touch.

Still, she found that she was unable to look away from the Bible. Seeing it brought to mind visions of the crucifixion that she had learned about during the handful of times she had ventured into a church with her mother at an early age. She thought of Christ on the cross and what it had represented, and found herself reaching for the book.

She thought of the cross Christ had died on and superimposed that sight with the sight of those three women on their poles. They had ruled out religious motive but she couldn’t help but wonder.

She opened the Bible and flipped past the front matter, heading directly for the table of contents. She knew very little about the Bible, so half of the names of the books were not familiar to her.

She scanned the table of contents absentmindedly, about to put it down, when suddenly she spotted something and her heart started beating faster. The names of the books. The numbers beside them.

As she saw the abbreviations, it reminded her of something else.

The pole.

The numbers.

N511

J202

With trembling hands, she started at the top of the Contents page, placing her finger on Genesis. She then scrolled down with her finger, looking for a book that began with “N.”

Within seconds, she stopped at the listing for the book of Numbers.

She flipped through the dusty pages, the smell of rot wafting into her face. She located Numbers and then scanned through for Chapter 5. When she found that, she then ran her finger along the page until she came to verse 11.