Before He Longs

As she stood and took the place in, Ellington approached her from behind and placed his arms around her waist. “So…yeah, this is the place.”

“Yeah, it is,” she said. “We need to tell your father thank you. Again. Or maybe just un-invite your mother so he will show up.”

“It might be a bit too late for that,” Ellington said. “Especially since that’s her, walking up the sidewalk to our right.”

Mackenzie looked in that direction and saw an older woman whom the years had been kind to. She was wearing black sunglasses that made her look exceptionally young and sophisticated in a way that was nearly annoying. When she spotted Mackenzie and Ellington standing in between two large beds of flowers and shrubs, she waved with a little too much enthusiasm.

“She looks sweet,” Mackenzie said.

“So do candy bars. But have enough of them and they’ll rot your teeth.”

Mackenzie couldn’t help but snicker at this, biting it down as Ellington’s mother joined them.

“I’m hoping you’re Mackenzie,” she said.

“I am,” Mackenzie said, unsure of how to take the joke.

“Of course you are, dear,” she said. She gave Mackenzie a lazy hug and a bright smile. “And I’m Frances Ellington…but only because it’s too much of a hassle to get my last name changed.”

“Hello, Mother,” Ellington said, stepping in to hug her.

“Son. My oh my, how on earth did you two manage to nail this place down? It’s positively gorgeous!”

“I’ve worked in DC long enough to make friends with the right people,” Ellington lied.

Mackenzie cringed inside. She absolutely understood why he felt the need to lie, but also felt at odds with being part of such a huge one involving her mother-in-law-to-be at this stage of their relationship.

“But not people that could help expedite the paperwork and legal ramifications of your divorce, I take it?”

It was a comment made with a bit of a sarcastic tone, meant to be a joke. But Mackenzie had interrogated enough people and knew enough about behaviors and facial twitches to know when someone was simply being cruel. Maybe it was a joke, but there was also some truth and bitterness to it.

Ellington, though, took in stride. “Nope. Haven’t made friends like that. But you know, Mom, I’d really rather focus on today. On Mackenzie—a woman who isn’t going to run me through the mud like the first wife you seem to be hung up on.”

My God, this is terrible, Mackenzie thought.

She had to make a decision right there and then, and she knew it might affect her future mother-in-law’s opinion of her, but she could deal with that later. She was about to make a comment, to excuse herself so that Ellington and his mother could have this tense conversation in private.

But then her phone rang. She checked it and saw McGrath’s name. She took it as the opportunity she needed, holding the phone close to her and stating: “So sorry, but I need to take this.”

Ellington gave her a skeptical look as she walked a bit further down the sidewalk. She answered the call as she hid herself behind some elaborate rose bushes.

“This is Agent White,” she answered.

“White, I need you to come in. You and Ellington both, I think. There’s a case I need to stick you two on ASAP.”

“Are you in the office right now? On a Sunday?”

“I wasn’t. But this call brought me here. When can the two of you be here?”

She grinned and looked to Ellington, still bickering with his mother. “Oh, I think we can make it pretty quickly,” she said.

Chapter Four

Being Sunday, there was no one at the desk in the small waiting area outside of McGrath’s office. In fact, his office door was standing open when Mackenzie and Ellington arrived. Mackenzie knocked on the door before entering anyway, knowing what a stickler McGrath could be when it came to privacy.

“Come on in,” McGrath called out.

When they entered, they found McGrath behind his desk, rummaging through several folders. Papers were strewn everywhere and his desk looked to be in a mild state of chaos. Seeing a usually tidy McGrath in such a state made Mackenzie wonder just what sort of case had managed to fluster him this much.

“I appreciate you coming so quickly,” McGrath said. “I know you’re using most of your free time to plan the wedding.”

“Hey, you tore me away from my mother,” Ellington said. “I’ll tackle whatever case you throw at me.”

“That’s good to hear,” McGrath said, selecting a pile of paper-clipped papers from the clutter on his desk and tossing it to him. “Ellington, when you first started as a field agent, I had you working cleanup in a case in Salem, Oregon. A deal with the storage units. You remember it?”

“I do, actually. Five bodies, all turned up dead in storage units. No killer was ever found. It was assumed that when the FBI got involved, he got scared and stopped.”

“That’s the one. There’s been an ongoing search for the guy but it’s come up with nothing. And it’s been the better part of eight years.”

“Did someone finally find him?” Ellington asked. He was looking through the papers McGrath had handed him. Mackenzie caught a peek as well and saw a few reports and details from the Oregon murders.

“No. But bodies have started to show up in storage units again. This time in Seattle. One was found last week, which could be ruled as coincidence. But a second was found yesterday. The body had been dead for a while—at least four days from the looks of it.”

“So then it’s fairly safe to say that the cases in Seattle are no longer being considered isolated incidents?” Mackenzie speculated.

“That’s right. So the case is yours, White.” McGrath then turned to Ellington. “I don’t know about sending you, though. I’d like to because you two manage to work well together despite the relationship. But this close to the wedding…”

“It’s your call, sir,” Ellington said. Mackenzie was rather surprised by how flippant he was being about the call. “But I do think my history with the Oregon case could benefit Macken—Agent White. Plus, two heads and all of that…”

McGrath contemplated it for a moment, looking back and forth between the two of them. “I’ll allow it, but this might very well be the final case the two of you are partnered on. I already have enough people uneasy with an engaged couple working together. Once you’re married, you can forget about it.”

Mackenzie understood this and even thought it was a good idea in principle. She nodded along with McGrath’s explanation as she took the papers from Ellington’s hand. She didn’t take the time to read them right there, not wanting to appear rude. But she scanned them just enough to get the gist.

Five bodies had been discovered in storage units in 2009, all found within a span of ten days. One of the bodies seemed to have been killed rather recently while one had been killed so long before its discovery that the flesh had started to rot from its bones. Three suspects had been brought in but were ultimately cleared thanks to alibis and a lack of any real evidence.

“Of course, we’re also not prepared to say there’s a direct link between the two, right?” she asked.

“No, not yet,” McGrath said. “But that’s one of the things I’d like you to figure out. Look for connections while trying to find this guy.”

“Anything else?” Ellington asked.

“No. Transportation is being handled as we speak, but you should be in the air within four hours. I’d really like this wrapped up before this maniac can net another five people like he did before.”

“I thought we weren’t saying there’s a direct link,” Mackenzie said.

“Not officially, no,” McGrath said. And then, as if unable to help himself, he smirked and turned to Ellington. “You get to live with that sort of scrutiny for the rest of your life?”

“Oh yeah,” Ellington said. “And I look forward to it.”

***

They were halfway back to his apartment before Ellington bothered calling his mother. He explained that they had been called away and asked if she would like to try to get together sometime after they got back. Mackenzie listened closely, barely able to hear his mother’s reply. She said something about the perils of a romantic couple working together and living together. Ellington cut her off before she could really get going.

When he ended the call, Ellington tossed his phone on the floorboard and sighed. “So, Mom sends her best.”

“I’m sure.”

“But the thing she said about husband and wife also working together…you prepared for that?”

“You heard McGrath,” she said. “That won’t happen after we’re married.”

“I know. But still. We’ll be in the same building, hearing about each other’s cases. There are days where I think that would be awesome…but others when I wonder just how weird it could get.”

“Why? You afraid I’m going to eventually overshadow you?”

“Oh, you already have,” he said with a smile. “You just refuse to acknowledge it.”

As they rushed to the apartment and then through the chore of packing, the reality of the situation hit her for the first time. This could be the last case she and Ellington ever worked on together. She was sure that they would look back on their cases together fondly when they got older, almost as a sort of inside joke. But for now, with the wedding still looming and two dead bodies waiting on the other side of the country, it was felt daunting—like the end of something special.

I guess we’ll just have to go out with a bang, she thought as she packed her bag. She peeked over at Ellington, also packing a bag for the trip, and smiled. Sure, they were about to head into a potentially dangerous case and lives were likely on the line, but she couldn’t wait to get on the road with him one more time…perhaps one last time.

Chapter Five

They arrived in Seattle with two crime scenes to visit: the location of the first victim, discovered eight days ago, and the location of the second victim, discovered just the day before. Mackenzie had never visited Seattle before so she was almost disappointed to see that one of the city’s stereotypes appeared to very much be true: it was drizzling rain when they landed at the airport. The drizzle held up until they were in their rental car and then grew to a steady pour as they headed out to Seattle Storage Solution, the location of the most recently discovered body.

When they arrived, there was a middle-aged man waiting for them in his pickup truck. He stepped out, unlatched an umbrella, and greeted them at their car. He handed them another umbrella with a lopsided smile.

“No one from out of town really ever thinks to bring one,” he explained as Ellington took it. He popped it up and, as chivalrous as ever, made sure Mackenzie was fully underneath it.

“Thanks,” Ellington said.

“Quinn Tuck,” the man said, offering his hand.

“Agent Mackenzie White,” Mackenzie said, taking the offered hand. Ellington did the same, introducing himself as well.

“Come on, then,” Quinn said. “No sense in putting it off. I’d rather be home, if it’s all the same to you. The body’s gone, thank Jesus, but the unit still gives me the heebie jeebies.”

“Is this the first time you’ve ever had something like this happen before?” Mackenzie asked.

“It’s the first thing this terrible, sure. I had a dead raccoon caught in a unit one time. And this other time, wasps somehow got into a unit, made a nest, and dive bombed the renter. But yeah…nothing this bad before.”

Quinn brought them to a unit with a black 35 plastered above the garage-style door. The door was open and a policeman was milling around in the back of the unit. He carried a pen and notepad, jotting down something as Mackenzie and Ellington entered.

The policeman turned to them and smiled. “You folks with the bureau?” he asked.

“We are,” Ellington said.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Deputy Paul Rising. I thought I’d be out here when you arrived. I’m taking notes on everything stored in here, hoping to find some sort of clues. Because as of right now, there’s exactly none.”

“Were you on the scene when the body was removed?”

“Unfortunately. It was pretty gruesome. A woman named Claire Locke, age twenty-five. She’d been dead for at least a week. It’s not clear if she starved to death or bled out first.”

Mackenzie slowly took in the sight of the unit. The back was stocked with boxes, milk crates, and several old trunks—typical things to be found in a storage unit. But the bloodstain on the floor made it quite different indeed. It wasn’t a very large one, but she guessed it could have resulted in enough blood loss to lead to death. Perhaps it was her imagination, but she was pretty sure she could still smell some of the stench the body had left behind.

While Deputy Rising went on about his business with the boxes and bins in the back, Mackenzie and Ellington started to investigate the rest of the interior. As far as Mackenzie was concerned, a bloodstain on the floor pointed to something else worth finding. As she looked around for any clues, she listened to Ellington as he asked Rising about the case details.

“Was the woman bound or gagged in any way?” Ellington asked.

“Both. Hands tied behind her back, ankles tied together, and one of those ball gags in her mouth. The blood you see on the floor there came from a small stab wound high in her stomach.”

Being bound and gagged at least explained why Claire Locke had been unable to make any noise to alert people on the other side of the unit walls. Mackenzie tried to imagine a woman locked in this crammed little space with no light, food, or water. It pissed her off.

As she slowly made a circuit around the unit, she came to the corner of the doorway. Rain drummed down in front of her, slapping at the concrete outside. But just along the inside of the metal door frame, Mackenzie spotted something. It was very low to the ground, at the very base of the frame that allowed the door to slide up and down.

She dropped to her knees and leaned in closer. When she did, she saw a splotch of blood on the edge of the groove. Not much…so little, in fact, that she doubted any of the cops had seen it yet. And then, on the floor just beneath the splotch of blood, was something small, ragged, and white.

Mackenzie gently touched it with her finger. It was piece of a torn fingernail.

Somehow, Claire Locke had managed to try to escape. Mackenzie closed her eyes for a moment, trying to envision it. Depending on how her hands had been tied, she could have backed up to the door, knelt down, and tried lifting the door upward. It would have been a futile attempt due to the lock outside, but certainly worth trying if you were on the verge of starving or bleeding to death.

Mackenzie waved Ellington over and showed him what she had found. She then turned to Rising and asked: “Do you recall if there were any additional injuries to Ms. Locke’s hands?”

“Yes, actually,” he said. “There were a few superficial cuts on her right hand. And I think most of one of her fingernails was missing.”

He came over to where Mackenzie and Ellington were standing and let out a little “Oh.”

Mackenzie continued looking but found nothing more than a few stray hairs. Hairs she assumed would belong to either Claire Locke or the owner of the unit.

“Mr. Tuck?” she said.

Quinn was standing just outside of the unit, perched under his umbrella. He was doing everything he could to not be standing in the unit—to not even be looking inside. At the sound of his name, though, he stepped inside reluctantly.

“Who does this unit belong to?”

“That’s the fucked up part,” he said. “Claire Locke had been renting this unit out for the last seven months.”

Mackenzie nodded as she looked to the back, where Locke’s belongings were stacked to the ceiling in neat little rows. The fact that it was her storage unit did add a degree of eeriness to it, but, she thought, might work to their advantage in eventually establishing motive or even tracking down the killer.

“Are there security cameras around here?” Ellington asked.

“I just have one right up at the front entrance,” Quinn Tuck said.

“We’ve watched all of the footage from the last few weeks,” Deputy Rising said. “There’s nothing out of the ordinary. Currently, we’re speaking to everyone who showed up here anytime during the last two weeks. As you can imagine, it’s going to be tedious. We still have a dozen or so people to question.”

“Any chance we could get our hands on that footage?” Mackenzie asked.

“Absolutely,” Rising said, though his tone indicated that she was nuts to want to go fishing through it.

Mackenzie followed Ellington to the back of the unit. Part of her wanted to rummage through the boxes and bins but she knew it would likely not lead to much of anything. Once they had leads or potential suspects, they may find something worthwhile but until then, the contents within the unit would mean nothing to them.

“Is the body still with the coroner?” Mackenzie asked.

“To the best of my knowledge,” Rising said. “Want me to call and let them know you’re coming?”

“Please. And see what you can do about getting us that video footage.”

“Oh, I can send that, Agent White,” Quinn said. “It’s all digital. Just let me know where you want me to send it.”

“Come on,” Rising said. “I’ll lead you to the coroner’s office. It’s just happens to be two floors below my office.”

With that, the four of them exited the storage unit and walked back out into the rain. Even under the umbrella, it was loud. It came down slow but hard, as if trying to wash away the sights and smells the unit had seen.

Chapter Six

As it turned out, Quinn Tuck was extremely helpful. It seemed he wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened just as badly as anyone. That’s why, when Mackenzie and Ellington got to the police station, he had provided a link for them to access all of his digital files from the security system at the storage complex.

They decided to start with the security footage rather than the body of Claire Locke. It gave them a chance to sit down and somewhat collect their bearings. It was nearing nightfall now and the rain was still coming down. As Deputy Rising got them set up with a monitor, Mackenzie looked back on the day and found it hard to believe that she had been standing in a picturesque garden and thinking about her wedding less than nine hours ago.

“Here are the relevant time stamps,” Rising said, slipping Mackenzie a piece of paper from his notepad. “There aren’t many.” He tapped his finger at one entry in particular, written in slanted handwriting. “This is the only time we see Claire Locke enter the complex. We pulled her DMV info and got her license plate number, so we know it’s her. And this,” he said, tapping at another entry, “is when she left. And these are the only times she shows up on the footage.”

“Thanks, Deputy,” Ellington said. “This helps tremendously.”

Rising gave a little nod of acknowledgment before backing out of the tiny spare office the agents had been given. The monotonous work took a while, but as Rising had indicated, the local PD had already done some of the work for them. They were able to fast-track the footage when there was no activity on the screen. They started by checking the time stamps on the sheet of paper. When the car said to belong to Claire Locke came onto the screen, Mackenzie zoomed in but was unable to see a driver. She waited, watching the featureless entrance of the complex for twenty-two sped up minutes before Locke’s car was shown leaving. In the time she had spent there, no one else had arrived and no other cars had left.

“You know,” Mackenzie said, “it’s entirely possible that she was not attacked at the storage unit.”

“You think someone killed her elsewhere and brought her to the site?”

“Maybe not killed her somewhere else, but potentially abducted her. I think seeing her body will help determine that. If she shows signs of starvation or dehydration, that basically tells us that she was dumped there.”

“But according to the report, the lock was bolted from the outside.”

“So maybe someone else has the key,” Mackenzie suggested.

“Probably someone in one of the other cars on these days and days of footage.”

“Most likely.”

“You want to stay here and roll through this while I go check out the body?” Ellington asked. “Or the other way around?”

Mackenzie pictured the poor woman, alone in the dark and unable to so much as scream for help. She envisioned her stumbling in the dark to try to find some way to at least try to get that door open.

“I think I’d like to check the body. You good here?”

“Oh yeah. This is streaming at its finest. No commercials or anything.”

“Good,” she said. “See you in a bit.”

She leaned down and kissed him on the side of the mouth before leaving. She did it naturally and without much thought, even though it wasn’t the most professional thing. It was a good reminder of just why they wouldn’t be able to work together in this capacity after they were married.

Mackenzie left the little office space in search of the morgue while Ellington watched time unroll in fast-forward motion on the screen.

***

The question as to whether or not Claire Locke had experienced starvation or dehydration of any degree during her time in the storage unit was answered the moment Mackenzie saw her. While Mackenzie was not an expert on the subject, there was a hollow look to the young woman’s cheeks. There might have been a similar look to her stomach as well but it was not clear due to the incision the coroner had made.

The woman who met her at the morgue was a rotund and eerily pleasant woman named Amanda Dumas. She greeted Mackenzie warmly and stood back against a small steel table that was adorned with the tools of her trade.

“Based on your examination,” Mackenzie said, “would you say that the victim experienced severe hunger or dehydration before she died?”

“Yes, though I don’t know to what extent, exactly,” Amanda said. “There’s very little fatty acid in her stomach—hardly any at all. That, plus some signs of muscle deterioration, indicates that she experienced at least the first pangs of starvation. There are telltale signs of dehydration as well, though I can’t be sure that either of those is what killed her.”

“You think she bled out first?”

“I do. And quite frankly, that would have been a blessing for her.”

“Based on what you’ve seen with the body, do you believe she was alive when she was placed in the storage unit?”

“Oh, without a doubt. And I’d say it was against her will as well.” Amanda stepped forward and pointed to the abrasions on Locke’s right hand. “Looks like she put up a fight of some kind and then tried her best to escape at some point.”

Mackenzie saw the cuts and noted that one of them looked rather ragged. It could have easily been placed there by the grooved runner that the unit door ran within. She also saw the fingernail that had been torn.

“There’s also bruising along the back of her head,” Amanda said. She used a comb-like tool to move Claire’s hair aside. She did so with a loving sort of respect and care. When she did this, Mackenzie was able to see an angry purple bruise along the upper base of her neck where her skull joined it.

“Any signs that she was drugged?” Mackenzie asked.

“None. I still have one chemical analysis I’m waiting on, but based on everything else I’ve seen, I’m not expecting anything from it.”

Mackenzie assumed the bruise to the back of the head along with the ball gag found in her mouth was more than enough reason for Claire Locke to not have raised any fuss or alarm when she was carried into the storage unit. She thought about the video footage again, certain that the driver of one of the cars was responsible for her murder—and the death of the other person found last week, according to the reports.

Mackenzie looked back down at the body with a frown. It was a natural reaction to always feel some sort of remorse for anyone who had been murdered. But Mackenzie was feeling a stronger sense of sadness with Claire Locke. Maybe it was because she could picture her all alone in that dark storage unit, unable to properly move or call out for help.

“Thanks for the information,” Mackenzie said. “My partner and I will be in town for a few days. Let me know if anything shows up in that last chemical report.”