“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?