Before He Takes
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“FBI?” she asked. “What the hell for?”
“Are you Tammy Manning?” he asked.
“I am,” she said.
“Can we come in?” Ellington asked.
Tammy eyed them in a way that was not suspicious but something closer to disbelief. She nodded and stepped back, allowing them in. The moment they walked inside, the thick smell of cigarette smoke engulfed them. The air was filled with it. A lone cigarette burned in an ashtray of dead butts on an old coffee table.
Another woman sat on the couch on the opposite side of the coffee table. She looked a little uncomfortable. Mackenzie thought she actually appeared a little grossed out to be sitting there.
“If you have company,” Mackenzie said, “perhaps we should speak outside.”
“She’s not company,” Tammy said. “This is my daughter Rita.”
“Hi,” Rita said, standing to shake their hands.
It was apparent that this was Delores Manning’s younger sister by about three or four years. She looked very similar to the photo of Delores that Mackenzie had seen on the back cover of Love Blocked.
“Oh, I see,” Ellington said. “Well, maybe it’s a good thing that you’re here too, Rita.”
“Why?” Tammy asked, plopping down next to her younger daughter. She plucked the cigarette from the ashtray and took a deep inhale.
“Delores Manning’s car was discovered abandoned with two flat tires on State Route 14 late last night. No one has seen her or heard from her since then. Not her agent, not any friends, no one. We were hoping you might know where she is.”
Before Ellington was done, Mackenzie had gotten the answer from the look of shock on Rita Manning’s face.
“Oh my God,” Rita said. “Are you sure it was her car?”
“We’re certain,” Ellington said. “It was complete with half a box of her latest book in the back. She had just come from a signing in Cedar Rapids.”
“Yeah,” Rita said. “She was…probably on the way here. That was the plan anyway. When she didn’t show up by midnight, I figured she just decided to stay at a motel somewhere.”
“Had you made plans for her to stay here?” Mackenzie asked. She was looking at Tammy when she asked it, but Tammy appeared to be more interested in enjoying her cigarette.
“Sort of,” Tammy said. “She called me last week and said she’d be in Cedar Rapids. Said she wanted to come by to visit, so I told her that was fine. I let Rita know and she got here yesterday right after lunch. Sort of a surprise.”
“I drove all the way up from Texas A and M,” Rita said.
“When was the last time you spoke with Delores?” Ellington asked Rita.
“About three weeks ago. We usually do an okay job of staying in touch.”
“What state of mind was she in the last time you spoke?” Mackenzie asked.
“Oh, she was on cloud nine. She had just signed on to do another three books with her publisher. We made plans to go out on the town drinking the next time she was in Texas.”
“You’re a student, I take it?” Ellington asked.
“Yes. A senior.”
“Mrs. Manning,” Mackenzie said, making sure the mother knew that she was being spoken to and not the daughter, “if you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t seem too bothered by this.”
She shrugged, exhaled a mouthful of smoke, and then ground the butt out in the overflowing ashtray. “I guess someone from the FBI knows more about how I should feel about something like this than I do?”
“I wasn’t saying that, ma’am,” Mackenzie said.
“Look…we’re talking about Delores here. She’s got a good head on her shoulders. I’m sure she called Triple A or some shit when the tires went flat. She’s probably already halfway back to New York by now. Making money, traveling the country. If she was in some kind of trouble, she would have called.”
“So she wouldn’t have been embarrassed to call for your help?”
Tammy actually thought about this for a minute. “Probably not. She would have called for help and then raised hell if I asked even one question. It’s just how she is.”
The resentment in her voice was almost as thick as the smoke in the air throughout the tiny trailer.
“So you have no idea where she might be?” Ellington asked.
“None. Wherever she is, she didn’t bother calling me to tell me about it. But that’s not too big of a surprise. She never really tells me much of anything.”
“I see,” Ellington said. He looked around the room with a frown. Mackenzie could tell that he was thinking the same thing she was thinking: That was a wasted hour-and-ten-minute drive.
Mackenzie looked directly toward Rita, currently a little pissed at the lack of help from Tammy. “We’ve got Bent Creek PD on it, as well as agents from two different offices. From what we know, she’s been missing for roughly twenty-nine hours. We’ll be in touch the moment we find anything.”
Rita gave a nod and a soft “Thank you.”
Both Mackenzie and Ellington paused a beat to give Tammy a chance to add anything. When she did nothing more than light up another cigarette and reach for the TV remote on the coffee table, Mackenzie headed for the door.
When she was outside, she breathed the fresh air in deeply and walked straight for the car. She was already opening the passenger side door when Ellington finally made it down the steps.
“You okay?” he asked her as he approached the car.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I just can’t stomach people that have no concern at all for the safety of their own flesh and blood.”
She was about to get into the car when the front door of Tammy Manning’s trailer opened. They both watched as Rita came down the stairs in a quick little jog. She came over to the car and let out a shaky sigh.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry about that,” she said. Mackenzie saw that Rita also seemed to be breathing much easier now that she was outside. “Things with Mom and Delores haven’t been the best ever since Dad died. And then when Delores became this well-to-do writer, something about it almost offended Mom.”
“You don’t have to explain personal problems,” Ellington said. “We see it from time to time.”
“Be honest with me…this thing with Delores…do you think she’ll be found? Do you think she might be dead somewhere?”
“It’s far too early to tell,” Mackenzie said.
“Was it…well, was there anything like foul play?”
Mackenzie recalled the spray-painted glass. She was pretty sure she still had some of the black flakes of the paint under her fingernails. But it was far too soon in the course of events to give such information to family members—not until more information could be obtained.
“Again, we just can’t know for sure yet,” she said.
Rita nodded. “Well, thanks for letting us know. When you do find out anything, just call me directly. Forget about Mom for now. I don’t know what her problem is. She’s just…I don’t know. An aging woman that let life beat the hell out of her and never bothered to pick herself back up.”
She gave them her number and then slowly walked back up the stairs. She gave them a quick wave goodbye as Ellington backed out of the parking spot and headed back through the trailer park.
“So what do you think?” Ellington asked. “Was this a wasted trip?”
“No. I think we now know enough about Delores to know that she would have called if her plans changed and she could have called.”
“How do you know that for sure?”
“I don’t know for sure. But from what I gathered from Tammy and Rita, Delores was trying to reconnect with her family. Rita said there was a strained relationship there. I don’t think Delores would have bothered calling to ask to come by for a visit if there was no hope for reconciliation. And if that’s the case, she surely would have called if plans changed.”
“Maybe she had a change of heart.”
“I doubt it. Daughters and mothers…when they get estranged…it’s tough. Delores would not have made the move of calling only to back out.”
“You’re analyzing this like a shrink,” Ellington said. “That’s impressive.”
Mackenzie barely noticed the compliment. She was thinking about her own mother—a woman she had not spoken to in a very long time. It was easy to strain a relationship that was supposed to be so pivotal to a woman’s life. She knew all about mothers who let their children down, so she could relate to Delores.
She wondered if Delores Manning was thinking of her mother in her desperate time. That was, of course, if Delores Manning was still alive.
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.”