Before he Kills (A Mackenzie White Mystery—Book 1) (6 page)

Mackenzie and Porter stood around
Traylor, one on each side. Mackenzie watched closely, noticing that Traylor
pulled up his browser very quickly. Still, Mackenzie had seen his home screen
and was pretty sure she had seen enough.

She stepped away from Traylor as he
showed Porter that his search history was at zero. She also listened to him
explain to Porter that he always deleted his browsing history to get rid of
cookies and junk in his cache. She let Porter discuss this age-old excuse with
him while she peeked out into his hallway. There were no pictures on his walls,
just clutter on the floor along the walls. Among the mess, she saw an empty box
that raised an alarm.

Mackenzie walked back into the living
room as the conversation between Porter and Traylor continued to get a little
more heated.

“Excuse me,” she said, speaking over
them. “Mr. Traylor, I don’t doubt you. I’m fairly certain you had nothing to do
with the murder of Hailey Lizbrook. I will tell you that a lot of factors were
pointing to you, right down to the poles behind your shed out back. But no, I
don’t think you killed anyone.”

“Thank you,” he spat sarcastically.

“White,” Porter said, “what are you—”

“But I
am
going to need you to
tell me what other inappropriate things you’ve been involved in.”

He looked surprised, almost insulted.
“Nothing,” he said. “I know my record isn’t stellar. Once you’re a registered
sex offender, your life never goes back to the way it was. People look at you
differently and—”

“Save it, please,” Mackenzie said. “Are
you sure you haven’t been involved in anything you shouldn’t?”

“I swear it.”

Mackenzie nodded and then looked to
Porter with a thin smile. “Detective Porter, would you like to cuff him or
should I do it?”

Before he could answer, though, Traylor
was on the move. He collided with Mackenzie, trying to knock her down and make
his way to the hall. He clearly hadn’t been expecting her to be so solid,
though. She braced her feet and locked her knees as Traylor rammed into her,
causing him to rebound in confusion.

“Shit,” Porter muttered, fumbling for
his service pistol.

As he scrambled for his gun, Mackenzie
threw a hard elbow into Traylor’s chest as he tried to pivot around her. He let
out a
whoof
and gave her a surprised look. He started dropping to a
knee, but before it even touched the floor, Mackenzie grabbed him by the back
of the neck and slammed him down to the floor.

Traylor cried out as Mackenzie planted a
knee into his back and whipped out her handcuffs like a magician working with
handkerchiefs.

“Never mind,” Mackenzie said, cutting
her eyes at Porter. “I’ll do it.”

With that, she slapped the cuffs on
Traylor’s wrists as Porter stood motionless, his hand still frozen by his hip
where his gun still remained holstered.

*

Mackenzie looked at the plastic bag and
was sickened by what she was pretty sure was on the USB drives inside. There
were eleven of them in all. After some harsh interrogation, they’d discovered
that these USBs were what Traylor had been going for when he’d made the mistake
of trying to dash past Mackenzie.

“Hot damn,” Nelson said, looking a bit
too happy as Clive Traylor was placed into the back of a police cruiser. “It’s
not the arrest I wanted today, but I sure will take it.”

A little less than an hour had passed
since Traylor had denied being involved in anything suspicious. In that hour,
his laptop had been confiscated and his history had been recovered. Several USB
drives had also been found in the house, filled with photos and videos. With
what was found on his computer, including websites visited in the last two
days, and the USB drives, Clive Traylor had been in possession of more than
five hundred images and twenty-five videos of child pornography. More than
that, he was selling the files online. The most recent transaction had been to
an IP address in France for a sum of two hundred dollars—a transaction that had
been confirmed by Traylor’s bank.

Clive Traylor had been nowhere near the
cornfield where Hailey Lizbrook had been killed two nights ago. Instead, he had
been online, distributing child pornography.

When Mackenzie had seen the icon for
incognito browsing software on Traylor’s home screen and then the box for
IP-blocking hardware in Traylor’s hallway, she had been able to put the pieces
together. The fact that Traylor was a known sex offender had made the equation
all the easier to solve.

Nelson was standing with Mackenzie and
Porter while Traylor was driven away.

“We think we just touched the surface of
this,” he said. “Once we can get past that software he had installed, I think
we’re going to find a hell of a whole lot more. Damn good work, you two.”

“Thanks, sir,” Porter said, clearly at
odds with taking the praise that Mackenzie mostly deserved.

“By the way,” Nelson said, looking
directly at Mackenzie now, “I sent some guys to the shed out back. There was
nothing there—just some unfinished handmade stuff—a bookshelf, a few tables,
things like that. I even had them check the poles behind the shed and it turns
out they’re made of pine, the same as the stuff he’s building. So it was just a
huge coincidence.”

“I was
sure
this was the guy,”
Porter said.

“Well, don’t let this set you back,”
Nelson said. “The day is young.”

Nelson left them, heading over to speak
with the tech crew that was working on getting deeper into Traylor’s laptop.

“That was sharp thinking in there,”
Porter said. “I would have missed both of those things—the software on his
computer and the hardware box.”

He sounded depressed, almost sad.

“Thanks,” Mackenzie said, a little
uncomfortable. She wanted to tell him how she had come to her conclusions but
figured that would only irritate him. So she kept quiet, as always.

“Well,” Porter said, clapping his hands
together as if the matter were now totally resolved. “Let’s get back to the
station and see what else we can dig up on our killer.”

Mackenzie nodded, taking her time to get
into the car. She looked back to Clive Traylor’s house and the shed in the
backyard. She could see the ends of the poles from where she stood. On the
surface, yes, this had seemed like a sure thing. But now that it had turned out
to be something else entirely, she was again faced with the fact that they were
pretty much back to square one.

There was still a killer out there and
with each minute that passed, they were giving him another chance to kill
again.

As a boy, one of his favorite pastimes
was to sit out on the back porch and watch their cat stalk around the yard. It
was particularly interesting whenever it came upon a bird or, on one occasion,
a squirrel. He’d watched that cat spend up to fifteen minutes stalking a bird,
toying with it until it finally pounced on it, tearing out its neck and sending
its little feathers into the air.

He thought of that cat now, as he
watched the woman arrive home from yet another night at work—a place of
employment where she stood up on a stage and pandered her flesh. Like that cat
from his childhood, he had been stalking her. He’d nixed the idea of taking her
at her workplace; the security was tight and even under the murky glare of the
early morning streetlights, there was too much of a chance of getting caught.
Instead, he’d waited in the parking lot of her apartment complex.

He parked directly in front of the
stairs on the far right side of the complex, as those were the ones she used to
go to her apartment on the second floor. Then, after three o’clock, he’d
climbed those stairs and waited on the landing between the first and second
flight of stairs. It was poorly lit and dead quiet at this time of the night.
Still, as a decoy, he had an old cell phone that he would quickly place to his
ear and pretend to talk into if someone happened to pass him.

He’d followed her for two nights now and
knew that she’d get home sometime between three and four in the morning. On both
of the occasions where he had followed her and parked on the opposite side of
the street, he had only seen one person use those stairs between three and four
in the morning, and they had been clearly drunk.

Standing on the landing, he had seen her
car pull up and he now watched as she got out. Even dressed in street clothes,
she seemed to flaunt her legs. And what had she been doing all night? Showing
those legs, making men yearn.

She approached the stairwell and he
brought the phone to his ear. A few more steps and she’d be right in front of
him. He felt his calf muscles tightening, waiting to spring, and he once again
thought of his childhood cat.

Hearing the light sounds of her
footfalls below, he started pretending to talk. He spoke quietly but not in a
conspiratorial way. He thought he might even give her a smile when she showed
up.

And then she was there, coming up around
the landing, heading for the second flight of stairs. She glanced at him, saw
that he was occupied and looked harmless, and gave him a little nod. He nodded
back, smiling.

When her back was to him, he acted
quickly.

His right hand went into his jacket
pocket, pulling out a rag that he had soaked in chloroform seconds before
getting out of the car. He used his other arm to wrap around her neck, dragging
her backwards and off of her feet. She was only able to let out a tiny little
yelp of surprise before the rag was pressed against her mouth.

She struggled immediately, biting down
and somehow managing to dig into his pinky. Her bite was hard and he was sure
she had bitten clean through his finger at first. He pulled back for just a
moment, but it was enough for her to get away from him, wrenching away from the
grip he had applied around her neck with the crook of his left arm.

She started up the stairs and let out a
whimper. This whimper, he knew, would evolve into a scream in no time. He dove
forward, reaching out and grabbing that silken bare leg. The stairs struck him
in the chest and stomach, knocking the wind from him, but he was still able to
pull hard at her leg. With a desperate little cry, she went falling to the
ground. There was a shuddering
crack
as her face struck the stairs.

She went limp and he instantly crawled
up the stairs to get a closer look. She’d struck her temple on the stair.
Surprisingly, there was no blood, but even in the weak light, he could tell
that a knot was already starting to form.

Moving quickly, he put the cloth back
into his pocket, finding that she had gnawed into his pinky pretty good. He
then picked her up and found that there was no sturdiness in her legs. She had
been knocked out cold.

But he’d dealt with this before, too. He
picked her up from the side the knot was forming on and leaned all of her
weight on that side. He then dragged her down the stairs with one arm around
her waist, her feet dragging uselessly behind her. With his other hand, he
brought the dead phone up to his other ear just in case they passed someone in
the fifteen feet or so that separated them from his car. He had his lines prepared
just in case that happened:
I don’t know what to tell you, man. She’s
drunk—like passed out drunk. I figured it was best to take her back to her
house.

But the late hour didn’t necessitate
that bit of acting. The stairs and the parking lot were absolutely dead. He got
her into his car without incident, never seeing anyone.

He cranked his car and pulled out of the
parking lot, heading east.

Ten minutes later, as her head knocked
softly against the passenger window, she muttered something that he could not
understand.

He reached over and patted her hand.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s all going to
be okay.”

Mackenzie was reading over the final
report on Clive Traylor, wondering where she went wrong, when Porter stepped
into her office. He still looked a little disgruntled from the morning. Mackenzie
knew he’d been sure Traylor had been their guy and he
hated
being wrong.
But his constant irritable mood was something Mackenzie had gotten used to a
long time ago.

“Nancy said you were looking for me,”
Porter said.

“Yes,” she said. “I think we need to pay
a visit to the strip club that Hailey Lizbrook worked at.”

“Why?”

“To speak with her boss.”

“We’ve already spoken to him on the
phone,” Porter said.

“No,
you
spoke to him on the
phone,” Mackenzie pointed out. “For a grand total of about three minutes, I
might add.”

Porter nodded slowly. He stepped fully
into the office, closing the door behind him. “Look,” he said, “I was wrong
about Traylor this morning. And you impressed the hell out of me with that
takedown. It’s clear that I haven’t been showing you enough respect. But that
still doesn’t give you the right to talk down to me.”

“I’m not talking down to you,” Mackenzie
said. “I’m simply pointing out that in a case where our leads are next to zero,
we need to exhaust every possible avenue.”

“And you think this strip club owner
might be the murderer?”

“Probably not,” Mackenzie said. “But I
think it’s worth talking to him to see if he can lead us to anything. Besides
that, have you checked the guy’s rap sheet?”

“No,” Porter said. The grimace on his
face made it clear that he hated to admit this.

“He has a history of domestic abuse.
Also, six years ago, he was involved with a case where he supposedly had a
seventeen-year-old working for him. She came out later on and said she only
managed to get the job by performing sexual favors for him. The case was thrown
out, though, because the girl was a runaway and no one could prove her age.”

Porter sighed. “White, do you know the
last time I stepped foot in a strip club?”

“I’d rather not know,” Mackenzie said.
And by God, did she get an actual
smile
out of him?

“It’s been a long time,” he said with a
roll of his eyes.

“Well, this is business, not pleasure.”

Porter chuckled. “When you get to be my
age, the line between the two sometimes blurs. Now come on. Let’s go. I imagine
strip clubs haven’t changed
that
much in the last thirty years.”

*

Mackenzie had only seen strip clubs in
movies and although she hadn’t dared tell Porter, she hadn’t been sure what to
expect. When they walked inside, it was just after six o’clock in the evening.
The parking lot was starting to fill with stressed out men coming off of their
work shifts. A few of these men gave Mackenzie a little too much attention as
she and Porter walked through the lobby and toward the bar area.

Mackenzie took the place in as best she
could. The lighting was dim, like a permanent twilight, and the music was loud.
Currently, two women were on a runway-like stage, dancing with a pole between
them. Wearing only a pair of thin panties each, they were trying their best to
dance in a sexy manner to a Rob Zombie song.

“So,” Mackenzie said as they waited for
the bartender, “has it changed?”

“Nothing except the music,” Porter said.
“This music is terrible.”

She had to give it to him; he wasn’t
watching the stage. Porter was a married man, going on twenty-five years.
Seeing how he was focused on the rows of liquor bottles behind the bar rather
than the topless women onstage made her respect for him go up a notch. It was
hard to peg Porter as a man who respected his wife that much and on such an
account, she was happy to be proven wrong.

The bartender finally came over to them
and his face went slack right away. While neither Porter nor Mackenzie wore any
sort of police uniform, their attire still presented them as people that were
there on business—and probably not business of the positive kind.

“Can I help you?” the bartender asked.

Can I help you?
Mackenzie
thought.
He didn’t ask us what he could get us to drink. He asked if he
could help us. He’s seen our kind in here before. Strike one for the owner.

“We’d like to speak to Mr. Avery,
please,” Porter said. “And I’ll have a rum and Coke.”

“He’s busy at the moment,” the bartender
said.

“I’m sure he is,” Porter said. “But we
need to speak with him.” He then took his badge out of his interior coat pocket
and flashed it, returning it back as if he had just pulled off a magic trick.
“But he needs to speak to us or I can make some calls and make it
really
official. It’s his call.”

“One second,” the bartender said, not
wasting another minute. He walked to the other side of the bar and went through
double doors that reminded Mackenzie of the kind she’d seen in saloons in those
cheesy Western movies.

She looked back to the stage where there
was now only one woman, dancing to Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil.” There
was something about the way the woman moved that made Mackenzie wonder if
strippers lacked dignity and therefore did not care about exposing their
bodies, or if they were just
that
confident. She knew there was no way
in hell she could ever do something like that. While she was confident in many
things, her body was not one of them, despite the many lewd glances she
received from random men from time to time.

“You look a little out of place,”
someone beside her said.

She looked to her right and saw a man
approaching her. He looked to be about thirty years old and as if he had been
sitting at the bar for a while. He had that sort of gleam to his eyes that
she’d seen in many a drunken altercation.

“There’s a reason for that,” Mackenzie
said.

“I’m just saying,” the man said. “You
don’t see many women in places like this. And when they
are
here,
they’re usually here with a husband or boyfriend. And quite frankly, I don’t see
the two of you,” he said, pointing to Porter, “as being an item.”

Mackenzie heard Porter chuckle at this.
She wasn’t sure what annoyed her more: the fact that this man had gotten brave
enough to sit beside her or that Porter was enjoying every minute of it.

“We’re not an item,” Mackenzie said. “We
work together.”

“Just here for the after-work drinks,
huh?” he asked. He was leaning in closer—close enough for Mackenzie to smell
the tequila on his breath. “Why don’t you let me buy you one?”

“Look,” Mackenzie said, still not
looking at him. “I’m not interested. So just move along to the next unwitting
victim.”

The man leaned in closer and stared at
her for a moment. “You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”

Mackenzie turned to him finally and when
they locked eyes, something in the man’s gaze shifted. He could tell she meant
business, but he’d had a few drinks too many and apparently just couldn’t help
himself. He placed a hand on her shoulder and smiled at her. “I’m sorry,” he
said. “What I meant to say is, well, no, I meant what I said. You don’t have to
be a bitch about—”

“Get your hand off of me,” Mackenzie
said softly. “Last warning.”

“You don’t like the feel of a man’s
hand?” he asked, laughing. His hand slid down her arm, groping now rather than
simply touching. “I guess that’s why you’re here to look at naked women, huh?”

Mackenzie’s arm came up with lightning
speed. The poor drunk man didn’t even realize what had happened until after
she’d thrust her forearm into his neck and he was falling off of his barstool,
gagging. When he hit, it made enough noise to attract one of the security
guards that had been standing by the edge of the lounge area.

Porter was then on his feet, stepping in
between the guard and Mackenzie. He flashed his badge and, to Mackenzie’s
surprise, stood nearly toe-to-toe with the much larger guard. “Slow down, big
boy,” Porter said, all but rubbing the guy’s face with his badge. “In fact, if
you want to avoid the spectacle of having someone arrested in this seedy
establishment, I suggest you toss this jack-off out of here.”

The guard looked from Porter to the
drunk man on the floor, still coughing and gasping for air. The guard
understood the option he was facing and nodded. “Sure thing,” he said, hauling
the drunk man to his feet.

Mackenzie and Porter watched as the
guard escorted the drunk man to the door. Porter nudged Mackenzie and chuckled.
“You’re just full of surprises, huh?”

Mackenzie only shrugged. When they
turned back around to the bar area, the bartender had returned. Another man
stood beside him, staring down Mackenzie and Porter as if they were stray dogs
that he didn’t trust.

“You want to tell me what that was all
about?” the man asked.

“Are you Mr. William Avery?” Porter
asked.

“I am.”

“Well, Mr. Avery,” Mackenzie said, “your
patrons need to do a better job of keeping their mouths shut and their hands to
themselves.”

“What’s this about?” Avery asked.

“Is there somewhere more private we can
speak?” Porter asked.

“No. Here is fine. This is the busiest
time of the day for us. I need to be here to help tend bar.”

“You sure do,” Porter said. “I ordered a
rum and Coke five minutes ago and I still haven’t seen it.”

The bartender scowled and then turned to
the bottles behind him. In his absence, Avery leaned forward and said, “If this
is about Hailey Lizbrook, I already told your other cop buddies everything I
know about her.”

“But you didn’t talk to me,” Mackenzie
said.

“So what?”

“So, I take a different approach than
almost everyone else, and this is our case,” she said, nodding toward Porter.
“So I need you to answer more questions.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Well, if you don’t,” Mackenzie said, “I
can interview a woman named Colby Barrow. That name sound familiar? I believe
she was seventeen when she started working here, right? She got the job by
performing oral sex on you, I believe. The case is dead, I know. But I wonder
if she’d have anything to tell me about your business practices that might have
been swept under the rug six years ago. I wonder if she might be able to tell
me why you don’t seem to give a damn that one of your dancers was killed three
nights ago.”

Avery looked at her like he wanted to
slap her. She almost wanted him to try it. She had encountered far too many men
like him in the last few years—men that cared noting for women until the lights
were out and they needed sex or something to punch on. She held his gaze,
letting him know that she was much more than a punching bag.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

Before she answered, the bartender
finally delivered Porter’s drink. Porter sipped from it, smiling knowingly at
Avery and the bartender.

“Did Hailey have men that came in and
usually flocked to her?” Mackenzie asked. “Did she have regulars?”

“She had one or two,” Avery said.

“Do you know their names?” Porter asked.

“No. I don’t pay attention to the men
that come in here. They’re just like any other men, you know?”

“But if it came down to it,” Mackenzie
said, “do you think some of your other dancers might know their names?”

“I doubt it,” Avery said. “And let’s face
it: most of the dancers ask for the man’s name just to be nice. They don’t give
a shit what their names are. They’re just trying to get paid.”

“Was Hailey a good employee?” Mackenzie
asked.

“Yes, she was, actually. She was always
willing to work extra shifts. She loved her two boys, you know?”

“Yes, we met with them,” Mackenzie said.

Avery sighed and looked out to the
stage. “Listen, you’re welcome to talk to any of the girls if you think it will
help figure out who killed Hailey. But I can’t let you do it here, not right
now. It would upset them and screw with my business. But I can give you a list
of their names and phone numbers if you absolutely need it.”

Mackenzie thought about this for a
minute and then shook her head. “No, I don’t think that will be necessary.
Thanks for your time, though.”

With that, she got up and tapped Porter
on the shoulder. “We’re done here.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I still need to
finish my drink.”

Mackenzie was about to argue her point
when Porter’s phone rang. He answered it, pressing his free hand to his other
ear to block out the godawful noise of the current Skrillex song blaring from
the PA. He spoke briefly, nodding in a few places before hanging up. He then
downed the remainder of his drink and handed the car keys to Mackenzie.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It seems I
am
done,” he said.
Then his face became set. “There’s been another murder.”