Before he Kills. Blake Pierce

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СКАЧАТЬ it down. She’d been choking it down for the last three months, ever since she’d been assigned to work with him. From day one, Porter had made no secret about his dislike for her. After all, she had replaced Porter’s partner of twenty-eight years who had been released from the force, as far as Porter was concerned, to make room for a young female.

      Mackenzie ignored his blatant disrespect; she refused to let it affect her work ethic. Without a word, she went back to the body. She studied it closely. It hurt to study it, and yet, as far as she was concerned, there was no dead body that would ever affect her as much as the first she had ever seen. She was almost reaching the point where she no longer saw her father’s body when she stepped onto a murder scene. But not yet. She’d been seven years old when she walked into the bedroom and saw him half-sprawled on the bed, in a pool of blood. And she had never stopped seeing it since.

      Mackenzie searched for clues that this murder had not been about sex. She saw no signs of bruising or scratching on her breasts or buttocks, no external bleeding around the vagina. She then looked to the woman’s hands and feet, wondering if there might be a religious motive; signs of puncture along the palms, ankles, and feet could denote a reference to crucifixion. But there were no signs of that, either.

      In the brief report she and Porter had been given, she knew the victim’s clothes had not been located. Mackenzie thought this likely meant that the killer had them, or had disposed of them. This indicated to her that he was either cautious, or borderline obsessive. Add that to the fact that his motives last night had almost certainly not been of a sexual nature, and it added up to a potentially elusive and calculated killer.

      Mackenzie backed to the edge of the clearing and took in the entirety of the scene. Porter gave her a sideways glance and then ignored her completely, continuing to talk to Nelson. She noticed that the other policemen were watching her. Some of them, at least, were watching her work. She’d come into the role of detective with a reputation for being exceptionally bright and highly regarded by the majority of instructors at the police academy, and from time to time, younger cops – men and women alike – would ask her genuine questions or seek her opinion.

      On the other hand, she knew that a few of the men sharing the clearing with her might also be leering, too. She wasn’t sure which was worse: the men that checked out her ass when she walked by or the ones that laughed behind her back at the little girl trying to play the role of bad-ass detective.

      As she studied the scene, she was once again assaulted by the nagging suspicion that something was terribly wrong here. She felt like she was opening up a book, reading page one of a story that she knew had some very difficult pages ahead.

      This is just the beginning, she thought.

      She looked to the dirt around the pole and saw a few scuffed boot marks, but not anything that would provide prints. There was also a series of shapes in the dirt that looked almost serpentine. She squatted down for a closer look and saw that several of the shapes trailed side by side, winding their way around the wooden pole in a broken fashion, as if whatever made them had circled the pole several times. She then looked to the woman’s back and saw that the gashes in her flesh were roughly the same shape of the markings on the ground.

      “Porter,” she said.

      “What is it?” he asked, clearly annoyed that he’d been interrupted.

      “I think I’ve got weapon prints here.”

      Porter hesitated for a second and then walked over to where Mackenzie was hunkered down in the dirt. When he squatted down next to her, he groaned slightly and she could hear his belt creaking. He was about fifty pounds overweight and it was showing more and more as he closed in on fifty-five.

      “A whip of some kind?” he asked.

      “Looks like it.”

      She examined the ground, following the marks in the sand all the way up to the pole – and while doing so, she noticed something else. It was something minuscule, so small that she almost didn’t catch it.

      She walked over to the pole, careful not to touch the body before forensics could get to it. She again hunkered down and when she did, she felt the full weight of the afternoon’s heat pressing down on her. Undaunted, she craned her head closer to the pole, so close that her forehead nearly touched it.

      “What the hell are you doing?” Nelson asked.

      “Something’s carved here,” she said. “Looks like numbers.”

      Porter came over to investigate but did everything he could not to bend down again. “White, that chunk of wood is easily twenty years old,” he said. “That carving looks just as old.”

      “Maybe,” Mackenzie said. But she didn’t think so.

      Already uninterested in the discovery, Porter went back to speaking with Nelson, comparing notes about information he’d gotten from the farmer who had discovered the body.

      Mackenzie took out her phone and snapped a picture of the numbers. She enlarged the image and the numbers became a bit clearer. Seeing them in such detail once again made her feel as if this was all the start of something much bigger.

N511/J202

      The numbers meant nothing to her. Maybe Porter was right; maybe they meant absolutely nothing. Maybe they’d been carved there by a logger when the post had been created. Maybe some bored kid had chiseled them there somewhere along the years.

      But that didn’t feel right.

      Nothing about this felt right.

      And she knew, in her heart, that this was only the beginning.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Mackenzie felt a knot in her stomach as she looked out of the car and saw the news vans piled up, reporters jockeying for the best position to assault her and Porter as they pulled up to the precinct. As Porter parked, she watched several news anchors approach, running across the precinct lawn with burdened cameramen keeping pace behind them.

      Mackenzie saw Nelson already at the front doors, doing what he could to pacify them, looking uncomfortable and agitated. Even from here she could see the sweat glistening on his forehead.

      As they got out, Porter ambled up beside her, making sure she was not the first detective the media saw. As he passed her, he said, “Don’t you tell these vampires anything.”

      She felt a rush of indignation at his condescending comment.

      “I know, Porter.”

      The throng of reporters and cameras reached them. There were at least a dozen mics sticking out of the crowd and into their faces as they made their way past. The questions came at them like the buzzing of insects.

      “Have the victim’s children been notified yet?”

      “What was the farmer’s reaction when he found the body?”

      “Is this a case of sexual abuse?”

      “Is it wise for a woman to be assigned to such a case?”

      That last one stung Mackenzie a bit. Sure, she knew they were simply trying to land a response, hoping for a juicy twenty-second spot for the afternoon newscast. It was only four o’clock; if they acted quickly, they might have a nugget for the six o’clock news.

      As she made her way through the doors and inside, that last question СКАЧАТЬ