"Daddy? Daddy, it's me. Wake up."
Mackenzie stepped into the bedroom and braced herself, turning from the sight of her dead father.
"What happened, Daddy?"
Her sister was in the room, too, standing on the other side of the bed, looking at their father with a disappointed look on her face.
"Steph, what happened?" Mackenzie asked.
"He called out for you and you didn't come. This is your fault."
"No!"
Mackenzie stepped forward again and then, knowing it was lunacy to do so, she still crawled onto the bed and snuggled up next to her father. Soon, she knew, his flesh would be cold and pale.
Mackenzie woke with a start, the nightmare jarring her awake at 3:12 AM, matted in sweat. She sat there, breathing hard, and despite herself, she started to cry.
She missed her dad so much that it hurt.
She sat there, alone, crying herself to sleep.
But it would be hours, she knew, before she fell back asleep. If at all.
In a strange way, she yearned to throw herself back into the case. Somehow, that was less painful.
*
When Mackenzie arrived at Carol's Diner a few hours later, she was awake and alert. Looking across a small diner table at Agent Ellington, the idea of how much her nightmare had affected her, of how easily she had gotten spooked last night, was embarrassing. What in the hell was wrong with her?
She knew what it was. The case was getting to her, stirring up old memories she thought she had laid to rest. It was affecting the way she lived. She'd heard of this happening to others before but had never experienced it herself until now.
She wondered if Ellington had ever experienced it. From her side of the table, he looked well-polished and professional-the spitting image of what Mackenzie expected an FBI agent to be. He was well built but not massive, confident but not cocky. It was hard to imagine him being rattled by much of anything.
He caught her looking and rather than looking away embarrassed, she held his gaze.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Nothing, really," she said. "I'm just wondering what it's like to know that with a single phone call, you can get the Bureau looking into something that it would take me several hours to convince the local PD to look into."
"It's not always that smooth," Ellington said.
"Well, with this case, the Bureau seems motivated," Mackenzie pointed out.
"The ritualistic set-up of the murder scenes practically screams serial killer," he said. "And now, with another body discovered, it seems that's exactly what we have."
"And has Nelson been accommodating?" she asked.
Ellington smiled and it showed signs of a subtle charm lurking under his finely composed exterior. "He's trying to be. Sometimes the small-town mentality is hard to break out of."
"Don't I know it," Mackenzie said.
The waitress came by to take their orders. Mackenzie opted for a veggie omelet while Ellington ordered a huge breakfast platter. With that distraction over, Ellington clasped his hands together and leaned forward.
"So," he said. "Where do we stand on this?"
Mackenzie knew he was giving her a chance to show him how she worked. It was in his tone and the slight smile that barely touched the edges of his mouth. He was ruggedly handsome and Mackenzie was slightly uncomfortable with how often her eyes were drawn to his mouth.
"We have to wait on the leads for now and really study them," she said. "The last time we had what we thought was a promising lead, we were dead wrong."
"But you busted a guy that was selling kiddie porn," Ellington pointed out. "So it wasn't a total waste."
"That's true. But still, I'm going to assume you've noticed the hierarchy of our local PD. If I don't figure this out soon, I'll be stuck in my position for a very long time."
"I'm not so sure about that. Nelson thinks highly of you. Whether or not he'd admit it to the other guys, well, that's a different story. That's why he has me helping you. He knows you can get this done."
She looked away from him for the first time. She wasn't sure how she'd get this case wrapped up if she didn't stop jumping at every little sound in her house and sleeping with her gun on the nightstand.
"I figure we start with the wood sample," she said. "We visit whoever is the local supplier of that sort of wood, right down to how it's sawed. If that doesn't produce anything, we're going to have to really start grilling the women that Hailey Lizbrook worked with. We may even have to get as desperate as to look through security cameras from the club she worked at."
"All good ideas," he said. "Another idea I'm going to pitch to Nelson is to have undercover officers on site at some of the strip clubs within a one-hundred-mile radius. We can pull some agents from the Omaha office if we need to. Looking back through old cases-which, I must say, you nailed right on the head during an earlier meeting according to Nelson-we may also be on the lookout for a man that's pursuing prostitutes as well. We can't just assume it's strippers."
Mackenzie nodded, even though she was beginning to doubt that the case she had recalled from the '80s where a prostitute had been strung from a line pole was related to this case. Still, it was nice to have her efforts acknowledged by someone with experience.
"Okay," Ellington said. "So I have to ask."
"Ask what?"
"It's clear that you're undermined at the local level. But it's also clear that you bust your ass and know your stuff. Even Nelson has told me that you're one of his most promising detectives. I had a look at your records, you know. Everything I saw was impressive. So why stay here where you're sneered at and not given a fair chance when you could easily be working as a detective anywhere else?"
Mackenzie shrugged. It was something she had asked herself multiple times and the answer, while morbid, was simple. She sighed, not wanting to get into it but, at the same time, did not want to pass up the opportunity. She'd spoken about her reasons for staying local with Zack a few times-back when they had still been communicating-and Nelson knew some of her history as well. But she could not remember the last time someone had willingly invited her to speak about it.
"I grew up just outside of Omaha," she said. "My childhood was…not the best. When I was seven years old, my father was killed. I was the one that discovered the body, right there in his bedroom."
Ellington frowned, his face filled with compassion.
"I'm sorry," he said softly.
She sighed.
"He was a private investigator," she added. "He'd been a beat cop for about five years before that, though."
He sighed, too.
"It's my theory that at least one out of every five cops has some sort of unresolved trauma from their past that is related to a crime," he said. "It's that trauma that made them want to protect and serve."
"Yeah," Mackenzie said, not sure how to respond to the fact that Ellington had just sized her up in less than twenty seconds. "That sounds about right."
"Was your father's killer ever found?" Ellington asked.
"No. Based on the case files I've read and the little bit my mother has told me about what happened, he had been investigating a small group that dealt in smuggling drugs in from Mexico when he was killed. The case was pursued for a while but was dropped within three months. And that was that."
"Sorry to hear it," Ellington said.
"After that, when I realized that there was a lot of lazy, sloppy work in the justice system, I wanted to do something in law enforcement, to be a detective, to be exact."
"So you achieved your dream by the age of twenty-five," Ellington said. "That's impressive."
Before she could say anything else, the waitress came by with her food. She set the plates out and as Mackenzie started to dig in on her omelet, she was surprised to see Ellington close his eyes and say a silent grace over his food.
She couldn't help but stare for a moment as his eyes were closed. She had not thought of him as a religious man and something about seeing him pray over his food touched her. She stole a glance at his left hand and saw no wedding ring. She wondered what his life was like. Did he have a bachelor pad with beer stocked in the fridge, or was he more of the type to have a wine rack and IKEA bookshelves lined with classic and modern literature?
She was working with an open book here. More interesting was how he had become an FBI agent. She wondered what he was like in an interrogation room, or in the heat of the moment when guns were drawn and a suspect was within a hair of either surrendering or opening fire. She knew none of these things about Ellington-and that was exciting.
When he opened his eyes and started eating, Mackenzie looked away, back to her food. After a moment, she couldn't help herself.
"Okay, so how about you?" she asked. "What led you to a career with the FBI?"
"I was a child of the eighties," Ellington said. "I wanted to be John McClane and Dirty Harry, only with more refinement."
Mackenzie smiled. "Those are pretty good role models. Dangerous, but risky."
He was about to say something else when his cell phone rang.
"Excuse me," he said, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out the phone.
Mackenzie listened in to his side of the conversation, which turned out to be short. After a few affirmative responses and a quick Thanks, he killed the call and looked forlornly at his food.
"Everything okay?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said. "We're going to need to box this up, though. The results from the wood sample came in."
He looked right at her.
"The lumber yard it originated from is less than half an hour away."