Before he Kills (A Mackenzie White Mystery—Book 1) Read Free

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