Before He Takes. Блейк Пирс
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this type of guy doesn’t line up with being so bold. He lurks in darkness. He sneaks up on them. There’s nothing at all overt about this guy.”
Bateman nodded at this, his eyes wide and a smile on his face. She’d seen the look before. It was the look of a man who was not only impressed by the way she thought, but appreciated it. She saw the same look on the face of the female officer and an overweight man at the end of the table, still enjoying the free dinner. Deputy Wickline was nodding at her comment, scribbling notes down in a legal pad.
“Sheriff,” Ellington said, “do we have any idea the average amount of traffic that goes through that route at that time of day?”
“A state-sanctioned traffic monitor and report from 2012 estimates that between six in the afternoon and midnight, there’s an average of about eighty vehicles that will pass through State Route 14. It really isn’t a very busy road. But keep in mind, it’s just been the author and Crystal Hall that were taken from 14. The first missing person, Naomi Nyles, was abducted off of County Road 664.”
“And what’s the traffic like there during that time of day?” Mackenzie asked.
“Almost nothing,” Bateman said. “I think the number was around twenty or thirty. Deputy Wickline, do you know any different?”
“Sounds about right,” Wickline said.
“And speaking of the author,” Mackenzie continued. “Delores Manning, thirty-two. She lives in Buffalo but has family just outside of Sigourney. Her tires were flattened by broken glass fragments in the road. The glass is quite thick and had been painted black to prevent glare and shine from the headlights. Her agent reported her as missing about half an hour after her car was discovered by a passing truck around two in the morning. Agent Ellington and I spoke with her mother and sister today and they could provide no solid leads. As a matter of fact, there seem to be no solid leads at all to any of these disappearances. And unfortunately, that’s all we have.”
“Thank you, Agent White,” Bateman said. “So where do we go from here?”
Mackenzie smirked a bit and nodded to the Chinese food on the back table. “Well, it’s a good thing you planned ahead. I think the best place to start is to go over any unsolved disappearances within a one-hundred-mile radius over the last ten years.”
No one objected but the looks on the faces of Bateman, Wickline, and the other officers said enough. The female officer shrugged in defeat and raised her hand dutifully. “I can get on records and pull all of that,” she said.
“Sounds good, Roberts,” Bateman said. “Can you have results for us in an hour? Get some of the desk-riders out front to help.”
Roberts got up and left the conference room. Mackenzie noticed that Bateman watched her a bit longer than the other men in the room.
“Agent White,” Bateman said. “Do you happen to have any ideas as to what kind of suspect we should be looking for? In a fairly small town like Bent Creek, the quicker we can rule people out, the quicker we can point you to the sort of person you’re looking for.”
“Without clues of any kind, it could be hard to pinpoint,” Mackenzie said. “But so far, there are a few certain things we can assume. Agent Ellington, would you like to take over on this part?”
He smiled at her as he took a bite out of an egg roll. “Please, keep going. You’re doing just fine.”
It was an odd back-and-forth between them that she hoped wasn’t too obvious to others in the room. She had been trying to show respect—to show him that she was not trying to run the show. But he, in turn, had shrugged it off. For now, it seemed that he almost appreciated the fact that she was assuming the lead.
“First of all,” she said, doing her best not to be thrown off course, “the suspect is almost certainly a local. His ability to study traffic patterns along these back roads shows a rigorous kind of patience that makes him a bit easier to profile. If the suspect has gone through this much trouble to abduct these women, then past cases involving kidnapping and abduction suggest that he is not taking these women to kill them. As I said, he seems to be sneaky. Everything we know about him—attacking when they are vulnerable, in the dark, and apparently planning the act—points to a man with non-violent tendencies. After all, what’s the point of painstakingly plotting an abduction only to kill the victim moments later? It indicates that he is collecting these women, for lack of a better term.”
“Yes,” Roberts, the female officer, said. “But collecting them for what, exactly?”
“Is it terrible to assume it’s a sex thing?” Deputy Wickline asked.
“Not at all,” Mackenzie said. “In fact, if our suspect is shy, that’s one more check mark on the profile for us. Shy men that go after women in such a way are usually too shy or otherwise burdened socially to romance women. It’s usually the case with rapists that do everything they can to not hurt the women.”
She got a few more of those admiring glances from around the room. But given the topic that was being discussed, she couldn’t appreciate it.
“But we can’t know for sure?” Bateman asked.
“No,” Mackenzie said. “And that’s where the pressure is on us. This isn’t just a killer that we are hoping won’t strike again. This man is psychotic, and dangerous. The longer it takes to find him, the longer he has to do whatever he wants with these women.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Filled with Chinese food and an abundance of information on the three abductees, Mackenzie and Ellington left the Bent Creek PD at 9:15. The only motel in town—a Motel 6 that looked like it hadn’t been painted, decorated, or looked at twice since the ’80s—was five minutes away. It was no surprise at all to find two vacant rooms, which they booked for the night.
When they left the office and stepped back out into the night, Mackenzie looked around the parking lot. Bent Creek truly was a very small town. It was so small, in fact, that the business owners apparently worked together to ensure an efficient use of space. This was evident in the fact that a small bar sat on the other side of the parking lot from the Motel 6. It made sense, Mackenzie thought. Anyone that needed to stay in a motel in Bent Creek was likely going to need a drink.
She certainly could go for one.
Ellington patted her on the back and started in that direction. “Drinks are on me,” he said.
She was starting to enjoy the dry and rather basic humor that existed between them. They both knew that there was a shifting awkwardness between them but it had been buried. To get around it, they had created a tentative friendship based on their jobs—jobs that insisted they think logically and approach things with a no-nonsense attitude. So far, it was working quite well.
She joined him as they crossed the parking lot and when they stepped inside the bar—unoriginally named Bent Creek Bar—the gloom of the night was replaced by a smoky and dank sort of twilight that only existed in small-town bars and honkytonks. An old Travis Tritt song was playing on a dusty jukebox in the corner as they took a seat at the edge of the bar. They both ordered beers and, as if that staple of a bar visit had been their cue, Ellington somehow went straight back into work mode.
“I think those offshoot roads off of State Road 14 are worth looking into,” he said.
“Same here,” she said. “I find it odd that it wasn’t mentioned in any of the copious notes the police put up on that board.”
“Maybe they just know the geography of the place better than we do,” Ellington suggested. “For all we know, they could just be little dirt tracks that dead end. Any reason you didn’t ask about them while you were running the conference room?”
“I almost did,” she said. “But they’d put it all together so well…I didn’t want to step on any toes. This whole thing of a cooperative police department bending over backwards for us is new to me. I’ll get to it tomorrow. If it was crucial or important, they’ve either already checked them or they would have at least mentioned it to us.”
Ellington