As Mackenzie headed for the door, Nelson stopped her. “That’s some damn fine work, Mackenzie. And I’ll tell you something else, too: Ellington was singing your praises when he got back to Quantico. I got a call from his director and they were complimenting you.”
“Thanks.”
“Now if I could just keep you from chasing down overweight online journalists and scaring the hell out of them, I think you’d have a promising career ahead of you. That Pope creep has had two different lawyers calling after you. I don’t think he’s going to leave this alone.”
“Sorry, Chief,” she said, meaning it.
“Well, push that to the back burner,” Nelson said. “For now, let’s concentrate on catching this killer. Journalists are almost as bad but at least Ellis Pope isn’t stringing women up by poles and beating them to death.”
She cringed internally at how lightheartedly Nelson was referring to the victims. It reminded her that, even in the midst of a sudden and unexpected stream of confidence and praise from the man, he was the same creature of habit he had been when she had first started working under him.
“And if it’s okay with you,” he said, “I’m driving up with you. If I’ve put you in charge of this scene, I’d like to be your wingman.”
“Sure,” she said, instantly hating the idea.
As they walked out of the conference room, she looked around for Porter. It was funny in an ironic sort of way how much she’d prefer to share a car with Porter as this case drew to a close. Maybe it was familiarity or just the fact that she still felt like Nelson was a little too much of a chauvinist to take her seriously, despite praises from the FBI.
But Porter had gotten lost in the shuffle and excitement as everyone had filed out of the conference room. She did not see him in the hallway as she stopped by her office to retrieve her badge and gun and he was nowhere to be found in the parking lot.
Nelson met her at the car and it wasn’t even a question of who would drive. He instantly got behind the wheel and seemed very impatient as he waited for her to get into the passenger seat and buckle her seat belt. She did her best to hide her irritation but thought it really didn’t matter. Nelson was so caught up in the prospect of catching the Scarecrow Killer that she was basically an afterthought – just the cog in the mostly man-driven machine that had brought them this far.
Suddenly, Ellington’s suggestion of trying to get into the FBI seemed more appealing than ever.
“Ready to catch this asshole?” Nelson asked as they pulled out of the parking lot behind two patrol cars.
Mackenzie bit at her bottom lip to hide the sarcastic smile that tried to spread there and said:
“More than you know.”
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Mackenzie’s phone started ringing less than ten minutes into her ride with Nelson. She checked the number on the display and although she had not yet saved it, it was fresh and familiar in her mind. She had nearly forgotten that Ellington had sent a text stating that he would call her. She knew he’d sent the text that morning but it seemed like a very long time ago. She checked the time on her phone’s task bar and saw that it was only 3:16. This day was turning out to be incredibly long.
She ignored the call, not wanting to add another level of complexity to what was turning out to be an already chaotic afternoon. At the same time she was ignoring Ellington’s call, Nelson was on the phone with Nancy. He spoke curtly, straight and to the point. It was clear that he was on edge and beyond stressed out, something that Mackenzie was beginning to feel herself.
He ended the call several seconds later and started nervously tapping at the steering wheel with his thumbs. “Nancy just spoke to the State boys,” he said. “They’ll have a helicopter flying over the area within an hour and a half.”
“That’s good news,” Mackenzie said.
“Tell me,” Nelson said. “Do you think he’s killing the women before he puts them on the poles or does he kill them there?”
“There’s nothing solid to prove either way,” Mackenzie said. “However, the first scene in the cornfield makes me think the women are alive when he puts them on the poles. There were marks on the ground where the whip or whatever he uses was dragged.”
“So?”
“So, he was pacing. He was anxious and biding his time. If the woman was already dead, why wait around with the whip?”
Nelson nodded and gave her a smile of appreciation. “We’re going to nail this bastard,” he said, still drumming on the steering wheel.
Mackenzie badly wanted to join in on his enthusiasm, but something felt incomplete. She almost felt as if she had overlooked something but could not for the life of her figure out what it was. She remained quiet, pondering this silently, as Nelson drove on.
They entered what Nelson was referring to as the Area of Interest twenty minutes later. She had listened to several brief phone calls from Nelson’s end during the drive and gathered that Nelson was setting up a perimeter of sorts to block in an area of thirty square miles. The area consisted of mostly scrub land and secondary roads. A few of those secondary roads were surrounded by cornfields just like the site of the original crime scene that had started all of this madness.
As Nelson drove them down such a road, the BC radio squawked at them. “Detective White, are you out there?” a man’s voice asked.
Mackenzie looked to Nelson, as if for approval. He gestured to the CD radio installed under the dash with a smile. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s your show.”
Mackenzie unclasped the mic from the radio and clicked down the send button. “This is White. What have you got?”
“I’m out here off of State Route 411 and came across a side road – nothing more than an old gravel road, really. The road heads straight into a cornfield and is not on the maps. It’s about half a mile long and dead ends into a small clearing in the cornfield.”
“Okay,” she said. “Did you find something?”
“That’s putting it lightly, Detective,” the officer on the other end said. “I think you need to get out here as fast as you can.”
It was beyond eerie to find herself standing in another cornfield. It was almost like she had come full circle, only it did not feel like she was coming to the end of something. Quite the contrary, it felt like she was starting all over.
She stood at the edge of the clearing with Nelson and Officer Lent, the man that had contacted her on the radio. The three of them stood among the thinned cornstalks and looked out to the small clearing.
A wooden pole had been erected in the middle of the clearing. Unlike the other poles they had recently seen that were identical to this one, there was no body strung up on it. The pole was bare and looked almost like some weird sort of ancient monolith in the empty clearing.
Slowly, Mackenzie walked up to it. It was cedar, the same as the other three. She got down to her knees and felt the earth around the bottom of the pole. It was soft and had very obviously been loosened and then packed back down rather recently.
“This pole hasn’t been here very long,” Mackenzie said. “The loose dirt is very fresh. I’d almost guess it was done earlier today.”
“So he preps the sites before he brings his victims,” Nelson speculated. “I don’t know if that’s genius or cocky.”
While Mackenzie was repulsed by the word genius being tied to the killer in any way, she ignored him. She went to the back of the pole and instantly spied the etchings along the bottom, several inches from the loose dirt that held the pole into the ground: N511/J202.