“I’m not so sure about that. Nelson thinks highly of you. Whether or not he’d admit it to the other guys, well, that’s a different story. That’s why he has me helping you. He knows you can get this done.”
She looked away from him for the first time. She wasn’t sure how she’d get this case wrapped up if she didn’t stop jumping at every little sound in her house and sleeping with her gun on the nightstand.
“I figure we start with the wood sample,” she said. “We visit whoever is the local supplier of that sort of wood, right down to how it’s sawed. If that doesn’t produce anything, we’re going to have to really start grilling the women that Hailey Lizbrook worked with. We may even have to get as desperate as to look through security cameras from the club she worked at.”
“All good ideas,” he said. “Another idea I’m going to pitch to Nelson is to have undercover officers on site at some of the strip clubs within a one-hundred-mile radius. We can pull some agents from the Omaha office if we need to. Looking back through old cases – which, I must say, you nailed right on the head during an earlier meeting according to Nelson – we may also be on the lookout for a man that’s pursuing prostitutes as well. We can’t just assume it’s strippers.”
Mackenzie nodded, even though she was beginning to doubt that the case she had recalled from the ’80s where a prostitute had been strung from a line pole was related to this case. Still, it was nice to have her efforts acknowledged by someone with experience.
“Okay,” Ellington said. “So I have to ask.”
“Ask what?”
“It’s clear that you’re undermined at the local level. But it’s also clear that you bust your ass and know your stuff. Even Nelson has told me that you’re one of his most promising detectives. I had a look at your records, you know. Everything I saw was impressive. So why stay here where you’re sneered at and not given a fair chance when you could easily be working as a detective anywhere else?”
Mackenzie shrugged. It was something she had asked herself multiple times and the answer, while morbid, was simple. She sighed, not wanting to get into it but, at the same time, did not want to pass up the opportunity. She’d spoken about her reasons for staying local with Zack a few times – back when they had still been communicating – and Nelson knew some of her history as well. But she could not remember the last time someone had willingly invited her to speak about it.
“I grew up just outside of Omaha,” she said. “My childhood was…not the best. When I was seven years old, my father was killed. I was the one that discovered the body, right there in his bedroom.”
Ellington frowned, his face filled with compassion.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly.
She sighed.
“He was a private investigator,” she added. “He’d been a beat cop for about five years before that, though.”
He sighed, too.
“It’s my theory that at least one out of every five cops has some sort of unresolved trauma from their past that is related to a crime,” he said. “It’s that trauma that made them want to protect and serve.”
“Yeah,” Mackenzie said, not sure how to respond to the fact that Ellington had just sized her up in less than twenty seconds. “That sounds about right.”
“Was your father’s killer ever found?” Ellington asked.
“No. Based on the case files I’ve read and the little bit my mother has told me about what happened, he had been investigating a small group that dealt in smuggling drugs in from Mexico when he was killed. The case was pursued for a while but was dropped within three months. And that was that.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Ellington said.
“After that, when I realized that there was a lot of lazy, sloppy work in the justice system, I wanted to do something in law enforcement, to be a detective, to be exact.”
“So you achieved your dream by the age of twenty-five,” Ellington said. “That’s impressive.”
Before she could say anything else, the waitress came by with her food. She set the plates out and as Mackenzie started to dig in on her omelet, she was surprised to see Ellington close his eyes and say a silent grace over his food.
She couldn’t help but stare for a moment as his eyes were closed. She had not thought of him as a religious man and something about seeing him pray over his food touched her. She stole a glance at his left hand and saw no wedding ring. She wondered what his life was like. Did he have a bachelor pad with beer stocked in the fridge, or was he more of the type to have a wine rack and IKEA bookshelves lined with classic and modern literature?
She was working with an open book here. More interesting was how he had become an FBI agent. She wondered what he was like in an interrogation room, or in the heat of the moment when guns were drawn and a suspect was within a hair of either surrendering or opening fire. She knew none of these things about Ellington – and that was exciting.
When he opened his eyes and started eating, Mackenzie looked away, back to her food. After a moment, she couldn’t help herself.
“Okay, so how about you?” she asked. “What led you to a career with the FBI?”
“I was a child of the eighties,” Ellington said. “I wanted to be John McClane and Dirty Harry, only with more refinement.”
Mackenzie smiled. “Those are pretty good role models. Dangerous, but risky.”
He was about to say something else when his cell phone rang.
“Excuse me,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out the phone.
Mackenzie listened in to his side of the conversation, which turned out to be short. After a few affirmative responses and a quick Thanks, he killed the call and looked forlornly at his food.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “We’re going to need to box this up, though. The results from the wood sample came in.”
He looked right at her.
“The lumber yard it originated from is less than half an hour away.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mackenzie had always loved the smell of freshly cut wood. It went back to Christmas holidays spent with her grandparents after her father had died. Her grandfather had heated his house with an old wood stove and the back end of the house had always smelled of cedar and the not entirely unpleasant smell of fresh ash.
She was reminded of that old wood stove as she stepped out of the car and into the gravel lot of Palmer’s Lumber Yard. To her left, a saw mill was set up, running a huge tree down a belt and toward a saw that was roughly the size of the car she had just stepped out of. Beyond that, several piles of freshly downed lumber waited its turn for the saw.
She took a moment to watch the process. A loader that looked to be a mix of a small crane and a toy-grabbing machine lifted the logs and deposited them onto an archaic-looking machine that pushed them into a belt. From there, the logs were led directly to a saw which she assumed was adjusted for each log by a mechanism or control panel that she could not see from where she sat. As she turned away from this, she saw a truck going out of the lumber yard’s exit with a trailer of crudely cut timber stacked about twelve feet high.
Oddly enough, she thought of Zack as she watched it all. He had applied to work at a place like this on the other end of town right around the time he’d landed the job at the textile mill; when he’d discovered the rotating shifts available at the mill, he’d taken it, hoping for more time off. She thought he might have been good working with lumber; he’d always had a knack for building things.
“Looks like hard work,” Ellington said.
“Ours is pretty rough, too,” she said, happy to have the thoughts of Zack out of her head.
“That it is,” Ellington agreed.
In front of them, a basic concrete building was identified only by black stenciled letters over the front door reading OFFICE. She walked alongside Ellington to the front door and was once again taken aback when Ellington opened the door for her. She didn’t think she’d ever been shown such a display of chivalry or respect from anyone on the force since the first day she’d carried a badge.