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Before He Preys
CHAPTER SIX
She was stirred awake by the ringing of her cell phone. The bedside clock told her that it was 6:40 as she reached for it. She saw McGrath’s name on the display, had just enough time to wish it were Ellington instead, and then answered it.
“This is Agent White.”
“White, where are we on this case with Director Wilmoth’s nephew?”
“Well, right now it seems like a clear-cut suicide. If it plays out the way I think it will, I should be back in DC this afternoon.”
“No foul play at all?”
“Not that I can see. If you don’t mind my asking…is Director Wilmoth looking for foul play?”
“No. But let’s be real…a suicide in the family for a man of his position isn’t going to look good. He just wants the details before the public gets them.”
“Roger that.”
“White, did I wake you?” he asked gruffly.
“Of course not, sir.”
“Keep me in the loop on this,” he said and then ended the call.
A hell of a way to wake up, Mackenzie thought as she got out of bed. She went to the shower and when she was done, a towel wrapped around her, she walked out of the bathroom to the sound of her phone going off yet again.
She did not recognize the number, so she picked it up right away. With her hair still wet, she answered: “This is Agent White.”
“Agent White, this is Jan Haggerty,” said a somber-sounding voice. “I just finished reading your email.”
“Thanks for getting back to me so soon,” Mackenzie said. “I know it’s asking a lot for someone in your profession, but is there any way you and I could meet for a chat sometime today?”
“That’s not a problem at all,” Haggerty said. “My office is out of my home and my first appointment isn’t until nine thirty this morning. If you give me half an hour or so to prepare for my day, I can see you this morning. I’ll put on some coffee.”
“Sounds great,” Mackenzie said.
Haggerty gave Mackenzie her address and they ended the call. With half an hour to spare, Mackenzie decided she should do the grown-up thing and give Ellington a call. It would do neither of them any good to hide away from the issue at hand and just hope the other simply forgot about it or was able to sweep it under the rug.
When he answered the call, he sounded tired. Mackenzie assumed she had woken him up, which wasn’t all that surprising since he tended to sleep in on the days he had off. But she was pretty sure she also detected some hopefulness in his voice.
“Hey,” he said.
“Good morning,” she said. “How are you?”
“I don’t know,” he said almost right away. “Out of sorts would be the best way to describe it. But I’ll survive. The more I think about it, the more sure I am that this will all blow over. I’ll have a little blemish on my professional record, but as long as I can return back to work, I think I’ll manage. How about you? How’s your super-top-secret case?”
“Pretty much over, I think,” she said. When she had called him last night on her way to Kingsville, she had not shared too much information with him, just letting him know that it was not a case that would place her in any danger. She remained careful not to spill too much information now. It sometimes tended to happen among agents when a case was closed or close to being closed.
“Good,” he said. “Because I don’t like how things ended with us when you left. I don’t…well, I don’t know what I need to apologize for. But I still feel like I’ve done you a disservice in all of this.”
“It is what it is,” Mackenzie said, hating the sound of such a cliché coming out of her mouth. “I should be back by tonight. We can talk about it then.”
“Sounds good. Be careful.”
“You, too,” she said with a forced chuckle.
They ended the call and while she felt a bit better having spoken to him, she couldn’t deny the tension she still felt. She didn’t allow herself time to dwell on it, though. She headed out into Kingsville in search of a bite to eat to pass the time before heading to Dr. Haggerty’s house.
***
Dr. Haggerty lived alone in a two-story Colonial-style house. It sat in the center of a beautiful front yard. A thick group of elms and oaks in the backyard hovered behind the house like nature’s own form of drop shadow. Dr. Haggerty met Mackenzie at the front door with a smile and the scent of freshly brewed strong coffee right behind her. She looked to be in her late fifties, with a head of hair that was still managing to maintain most of its chestnut brown. Her eyes took Mackenzie in from behind a small set of glasses. When she invited Mackenzie inside, she gestured through the front door with rail-thin arms and a voice that was little more than a whisper.
“Thanks again for meeting with me,” Mackenzie said. “I know it was short notice.”
“No worries at all,” she said. “Between you and me, I hope we can come up with enough cause for me to have Sheriff Tate put a bug in the county’s ear to demolish that damn bridge.”
Haggerty poured Mackenzie a cup of coffee and the two women sat down at the small table in a quaint breakfast nook just off the kitchen. A window by the side of the table looked out to those oaks and elms in the backyard.
“I assume you’ve been informed about the news from yesterday afternoon?” Mackenzie asked.
“I have,” Haggerty said. “Kenny Skinner. Twenty-two years old, right?”
Mackenzie nodded as she sipped from her coffee. “And Malory Thomas several days before that. Now…can you tell me why you’ve been on the sheriff’s case about the bridge?”
“Well, Kingsville has very little to offer. And while no one living in a small town wants to admit it, there is never anything for a small town to offer teens and young adults. And when that happens, these morbid landmarks like the Miller Moon Bridge become iconic. If you look back at the town records, people were ending their lives on that bridge as early as 1956, when it was still in use. Young kids these days are exposed to so much negativity and self-esteem issues that something as iconic as that bridge can become so much more. Kids looking for a way out of the town go to the extremes and it’s no longer about escaping the town…it’s about escaping life.”
“So you think that the bridge gives suicidal kids an easy way out?”
“Not an easy way out,” Haggerty said. “It’s almost like a beacon for them. And those that have jumped off of the bridge before them have just led the way. That bridge isn’t even really a bridge anymore. It’s a suicide platform.”
“Last night, Sheriff Tate also said that you find it hard to believe that these suicides can’t all just be suicides. Can you elaborate on that?”
“Yes…and I believe I can use Kenny Skinner as an example. Kenny was a popular guy. Between you and me, he likely wasn’t going to amount to anything extraordinary. He’d probably be perfectly fine to ride out the rest of his life here, working at the Kingsville Tire and Tractor Supply. But he had a good life here, you know? From what I know, he was something of a ladies’ man and in a town like this – hell, in a county like this – that pretty much guarantees some fun weekends. I personally spoke with Kenny within the last month or so when I ran over a nail. He patched it up for me. He was polite, laughing, a well-mannered guy. I find it very hard to believe he killed himself in such a way. And if you go back through the list of people that have jumped off of that bridge in the last three years, there are at least one or two more that I find very fishy…people that I would have never pegged for suicide.”
“So you feel that there’s foul play involved?” Mackenzie asked.
Haggerty took a moment before she answered. “It’s a suspicion I have, but I would not be comfortable saying as much with absolute certainty.”
“And I assume this feeling is based on your professional opinion and not just someone saddened by so many suicides in your small hometown?” Mackenzie asked.
“That’s correct,” Haggerty said, but she seemed almost a little offended at the nature of the question.
“By any chance, did you ever see Kenny Skinner or Malory Thomas as clients?”
“No. And none of the other victims from as far back as 1996.”
“So you have met with at least one of the suicides from the bridge?”
“Yes, on one occasion. And with that one, I saw it coming. I did everything I could to convince the family that she needed help. But by the time I could even manage to get them to consider it, she jumped right off that bridge. You see…in this town, the Miller Moon Bridge is synonymous with suicide. And that’s why I’d really like for the county to tear it down.”
“Because you feel that it basically calls to anyone with suicidal thoughts?”
“Exactly.”
Mackenzie sensed that the conversation was basically over. And that was fine with her. She could tell straightaway that Dr. Haggerty was not the type to exaggerate something just to make sure her voice was heard. Although she had tried to downplay it out of a fear of being wrong, Mackenzie was pretty sure Haggerty strongly believed that at least a few of the cases weren’t suicides.
And that little bit of skepticism was all Mackenzie needed. If there was even the slightest chance that either of these last two bodies were murders and not suicides, she wanted to know for certain before heading back to DC.
She finished off her coffee, thanked Dr. Haggerty for her time, and then headed back outside. On the way to her car, she looked out to the forest that bordered most of Kingsville. She looked to the west, where the Miller Moon Bridge sat tucked away down a series of back roads and one gravel road that seemed to indicate all travelers were coming to the end of something.
As she thought about those bloodstained rocks at the bottom of the bridge, the comparison sent a small shiver through Mackenzie’s heart.
She pushed it away, starting the engine and pulling out her cell phone. If she was going to get a definitive answer on any of this, she needed to treat it as if it was murder case. And with that mindset, she supposed she needed to start speaking to the family members of the recently deceased.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Before visiting the family of Kenny Skinner, Mackenzie called to get explicit permission from McGrath. His response had been short, clear, and to the point: I don’t care if you have to talk to someone on the fucking Little League baseball team, just get it figured out.
That confirmation pushed her toward the residence of Pam and Vincent Skinner. The way McGrath explained it, Pam Skinner was formerly Pam Wilmoth. An older sister to Deputy Director Wilmoth, she worked from home as a proposal specialist for an environmental agency. As for Vincent Skinner, he just happened to be the owner of Kingsville Tire and Tractor Supply, having provided a job for his son since Kenny was fifteen.
When Mackenzie knocked on the door, neither of the Skinners greeted her. Instead, it was the pastor of Kingsville Presbyterian Church. When Mackenzie showed him her ID and told him why she was there, he let her in and asked her to wait in the foyer. The Skinner family lived in a nice house on a corner lot in what she assumed would be considered Kingsville’s downtown area. She smelled something cooking, wafting down from a long hallway. Elsewhere in the house, she could hear the ringing of a cell phone. She also heard the muffled voice of the pastor, letting Pam and Vincent Skinner know that there was a lady from the FBI there to ask a few questions about Kenny.
It took a few minutes but Pam Skinner eventually came to meet her. The woman was red-faced from crying and looked as if she had not slept a wink the night before. “Are you Agent White?” she asked.
“I am.”
“Thanks for coming,” Pam said. “My brother told me you’d be coming by at some point.”
“If it’s too soon, I can – ”
“No, no, I want to get it out now,” she said.
“Is your husband at home?”
“He’s elected to stay in the living room with our pastor. Vincent took this incredibly hard. He fainted twice last night and goes through these little moments where he just refuses to believe it’s happened and – ”
As if out of nowhere, a huge sob escaped Pam’s throat and she leaned against the wall. She hitched her breath and swallowed down what Mackenzie was sure was grief that needed to come out.
“Mrs. Skinner…I can come back later.”
“No. Now, please. I’ve had to stay strong all night for Vincent. I can manage a few more minutes for you. Just…come on to the kitchen.”
Mackenzie followed Pam Skinner down the hallway and toward the kitchen, where Mackenzie started to recognize the smell she’d noticed earlier. Apparently, Pam had put some cinnamon rolls in the oven, perhaps in an effort to continue putting off her sorrow for her husband. Pam checked on them half-heartedly as Mackenzie settled down at a stool by the kitchen bar.
“I spoke with Dr. Haggerty this morning,” Mackenzie said. “She’s been lobbying to have the Miller Moon Bridge torn down. Your son’s name came up. She said she finds it very hard to believe that Kenny would have taken his own life.”
Pan nodded emphatically. “She’s absolutely right. Kenny would have never killed himself. The idea is absolutely ridiculous.”
“Do you have any strong and valid reasons to suspect that someone would want to harm your son?”
Pam shook her head, just as furiously as she had nodded it moments before. “I thought about that all night. And it brought up some harsh truths about Kenny, sure. He had some guys that might not have cared too much for him because Kenny tended to steal women away from their boyfriends. But it never came to anything serious.”
“And in the past few weeks, you hadn’t heard Kenny say anything or act in a certain way that might indicate that he was having thoughts about hurting himself?”
“No. Nothing of the sort. Even when Kenny was in a bad mood, he managed to light up a room. He rarely even got angry about anything. He wasn’t a perfect child but by God, I don’t believe there was a single ounce of anger or hatred in him. I just find it absolutely beyond comprehension that he would have killed himself.”
Another sob escaped her throat between the words killed and himself.
“Do you know if he had any sort of ties to that bridge?” Mackenzie asked.
“No more than the other teens and young adults in town. I’m sure he likely did some drinking or some flirting down there, but nothing out of the ordinary.”
Mackenzie could sense the dam about to break within Pam Skinner. Another minute or two and she was going to snap.
“One more question, and please know that I have to ask it. But how certain are you that you knew your son well? Do you think there might have been some second life secrets he was keeping from you and your husband?”
She thought for a moment as tears trailed down her eyes. Slowly, she said, “I suppose anything is possible. But if Kenny was hiding some sort of second life from us, he was doing it with the skill of a spy. And while he was a great kid, he was not very committed to things. For him to have to hide something like that…”
“I follow you,” Mackenzie said. “I’m going to leave you to deal with this now. But please, if you think of anything else in the coming days, call me right away.”
With that, Mackenzie got to her feet and placed her business card on the countertop. “I’m so very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Skinner.”
Mackenzie left quickly but not in a rude way. She could feel the weight of the family’s loss until she was back outside, the door closed behind her. And even then, on the way to her car, she could hear the sounds of Pam Skinner finally letting out her grief. It was beyond haunting and it broke Mackenzie’s heart a little bit.
Even when she was out of the driveway, the noise of Pam Skinner’s crying swept through her head like a fall breeze rattling dead leaves across an abandoned street.
CHAPTER EIGHT
There was no coroner in the entire county. Even the Office of the Medical Examiner was an hour and a half away from Kingsville, located in Arlington. Rather than driving back to DC only to most likely head right back to Kingsville, Mackenzie returned to her motel room and made a series of calls. Ten minutes later, she was phoning into a Skype session with the coroner who had overseen the Malory Thomas’s and Kenny Skinner’s bodies. Kenny Skinner’s body was not yet fully prepared and ready to evaluate, so that made things a bit harder.
Still, Mackenzie placed the call and waited for an answer. The man on the other end was one whom Mackenzie had worked with a few times on other cases, a middle-aged man with wiry gray hair named Barry Burke. It was nice to see a familiar face after the morning she’d had. She still couldn’t quite shake the sounds of loss that had come out of Pam Skinner as she left their house.
“Hey there, Agent White,” Burke said.
“Hey. So I’m being told that there’s not much we can get from the body of Kenny Skinner yet, is that right?”
“I’m afraid so. At the risk of sounding crude, it’s a pretty big mess. If you let me know what you’re looking for, I can send it to the top of the priorities list.”
“Any fresh scratches or bruising. Any signs that he might have been involved in a struggle.”
“Will do. Now…I assume you need to know the same about Malory Thomas, right?”
“That’s right. Do you have anything?”
“You know, we might. I hate to say it, but when we get a body that is pretty obviously a suicide, there are certain things that instantly drop to the bottom of our list of priorities. So yes…we found something on Malory Thomas that, in all honesty, could be nothing. But if you’re looking for scratches…”
“What do you have?” she asked.
“Give me one second and I’ll shoot you a picture,” he said. He clicked around for a while and then the paperclip icon popped up in the Skype window.
Mackenzie clicked it and a JPEG opened up on her screen. She was looking at the underside of Malory Thomas’s right hand.
Mackenzie zoomed in on the picture and saw what Burke was talking about right away. Between the first and second knuckle of three of the fingers, there were very apparent cuts and abrasions. The cuts looked very ragged and, while not bloody, raw and grisly all the same. There were two very large scratches on the upper part of her palm that looked like they might also be fairly recent. Lastly, there appeared to be some form of very faint indention in the meat of her hand just above the palm, making a small half-circle shape. For some reason, this one stuck out more so than the others. It seemed odd, and that usually meant it was the smoking gun she was looking for.
“Does that help you at all?” Burke asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Mackenzie said. “But it’s more than what I had a minute ago.”
“Also, this might be of note…one second.” Burke rolled away from his desk for about ten seconds and then came back into view. He was holding a small plastic bag. Inside of it was what looked like a piece of tree bark. He held it closer to the camera. Mackenzie saw a piece of wood about an inch wide and an inch and a half long.
“This was in her hair,” Burke said. “And the only reason we found it interesting is because it was the only piece of it in her hair. Usually when something like this is found on a body, particularly in the hair, there’s a good amount of it. Wood chips, mulch, things like that. But this was the only piece.”
“Weird question for you,” Mackenzie said. “Can you snap a picture of that and send it to my email?”
“Hey, that’s one of the least weird requests I’ve gotten this week. Job perks, you know…”
“Thanks for the meeting,” Mackenzie said. “Any idea when you’ll be able to get a better look at Kenny Skinner?”
“I’m hoping within a few hours.”
“I hope to be back in DC tonight. I’ll reach out when I get back and hopefully be able to make it by there.”
With those plans set in place, they ended the call. Mackenzie emailed the picture of Malory Thomas’s palm to her cell phone and then headed out at once. She thought of the scrapes and the barely there indention on the woman’s hand, as well as the single piece of wood. It all meant something…she could feel it trying to click into place in her head.
Rather than puzzle it over in the motel, she figured there was no better place to go over it than the scene of the alleged crime. Her only hope was that Miller Moon Bridge was less somber and sinister-looking in the light of day.
***
When she reached the turn-off that led to the gravel road that dead-ended at Miller Moon Bridge, she was pleased to see a county police car parked along the edge. The bored-looking officer looked up when she pulled her car in alongside his. She flashed her badge and he waved her on after squinting closely at it.
Within a quarter of a mile, she reached the END STATE MAINTENANCE sign. It was at this point that the road became nothing but gravel. She took it slowly, listening to the crunch of pebbles beneath the car while it kicked up dust. After another mile or so, the first white struts of Miller Moon Bridge came into view, rising slightly in the air at a slanted angle. She came around a bend and then saw the whole thing, stretched out over the drop-off where a very dry riverbed sat underneath. While it didn’t look quite as spooky in the daylight, the structure did show its age.
She parked several feet away from where the wooden planks began. She tried to imagine driving a car to the other side of this thing thirty or forty years ago and the mere thought of it terrified her. As she stepped onto the planks, she looked to the other side. There were two concrete barriers standing about four feet tall between the end of the bridge and the start of a road that was clearly no longer being used. It quite literally felt like she was stepping out onto the very edge of the world, where everything came to an end.
As she walked slowly along the bridge, she pulled up the picture of Malory’s palm. She also opened the attachment in the email Burke had sent her after the Skype call. She opened up the image of the small piece of wood, having them both at the ready. She had no idea what she was looking for but felt confident she’d know it when her eyes fell on it.
As it turned out, that didn’t take very long.
She’d made it about ten feet across the bridge when she noticed the layout of the beams and struts that ran along the sides of the bridge. They all, of course, ran underneath it for support, but on the other side of the white rails that separated the bridge from the open space beyond, there was a single iron strut that stuck out about two feet wider than the bridge. It was just wide enough for someone to step out onto.
She looked down the length of the bridge and counted three different struts. She went to the rail and hunkered down to get a closer look. The strut in front of her also supported five smaller struts than ran beneath the bridge. These smaller ones were attached to the larger ones with large bolts. The bolts were capped off with what looked like smooth metal caps, worn and rusted with age.
Mackenzie looked at the picture of Malory’s palm, zooming in on the indentation in her skin. Slightly circular, the curves looking very much like the circumference of the metal caps on the strut.
She ran her finger carefully over the metal cap. Yes, it was smooth – probably put there to hide the rougher edging of whatever industrial bolt had been used to attach the struts – but the edges of the caps were a little rough around the edges.
Mackenzie got back to her feet and slowly walked a bit farther down the bridge. She saw the same layout, one after another. Five bolts, the ends of which were covered by those smooth iron caps. There would then be a break in the spacing of the caps, and then there would be five more. She counted three sets of five in the first iron strut, and then five in the next.
She didn’t get to the third iron strut on the last portion of the bridge, though. When she was about halfway down the bridge, she came to a spot where the wooden base of the bridge’s frame poked out just a bit from beyond the iron strut. Not much…maybe three inches. But it was enough for Mackenzie to realize that the beams and struts beneath the bridge were partially made of wood – perhaps just the original frame or additional construction.
She again went to her knees and leaned a bit out past the safety railings. She ran her hand along the little bit of exposed wood. It was old and brittle but quite hard. She compared the color and texture of the wood to the small piece that Burke had bagged and showed to her. Even with the glare of her cell phone, she could tell that it was the same.
But if she jumped, how the hell did it get into her hair?
She was pretty sure the picture of Malory’s palm answered that question.
If the indention of one of those caps was on her palm, she didn’t jump. She was hanging from the bridge…maybe trying to save herself. And the wood chip in her hair…if she was hanging from this very spot, it’s not too hard to believe that this old wood might have flaked off into her hair as she tried to regain her grip.
She ran her thumb over the five caps along the strut in front of her one by one. At the one second to the end, she felt a roughness to the cap’s ending. It was certainly rough enough to cause those paper-thin abrasions on Malory’s hand.
With her heart in her chest, Mackenzie looked down over the rail. The rocks that had ultimately killed Malory Thomas and Kenny Skinner waited down there. Even from this height, she could see the discoloration where there had been blood less than twelve hours ago.
I’m standing where they stood, Mackenzie thought. They were standing right here moments before they died.
She then looked back to the picture of the indentation in Malory’s palm, and then back to the bolt caps. And then she corrected her thought: They were standing right here moments before they were murdered.
