Before He Longs

Chapter Seven

Mackenzie knew nothing about the boyfriend, as there was nothing about him in the notes. All she knew was that his name was Barry Channing and that he lived at 376 Rose Street, Apartment 7. When she knocked on the door of Apartment 7, it was answered by a woman who looked to be in her late fifties or so. She looked tired and saddened—and clearly not happy to have a visitor after nine o’clock on a rainy Sunday night.

“Can I help you?” the woman asked.

Mackenzie nearly double-checked the number on the door but instead stated, “I’m looking for Barry Channing.”

“I’m his mother. Who are you?”

Mackenzie showed her ID. “Mackenzie White, with the FBI. I was hoping to ask him some questions about Claire.”

“He’s really in no state to talk to anyone,” the mother said. “In fact, he—”

“My God, Mom,” a male voice said, coming toward the door. “I’m okay.”

The mother stepped aside, making room for her son to stand in the doorway. Barry Channing was rather tall and had close-cropped blond hair. Like his mother, he looked low on sleep and it was clear that he had been crying.

“You said you’re with the FBI?” Barry said.

“Yes. Do you have a few minutes?”

Barry looked at his mother with a small frown and then sighed. “Yes, I have some time. Come in, please.”

Barry led Mackenzie into the apartment, down a thin hallway, and into a generic-looking kitchen. His mother, meanwhile, sulked on further down the hallway and out of sight. As Barry settled into a chair at the kitchen table, Mackenzie heard a door close rather forcefully from somewhere else in the apartment.

“Sorry about that,” Barry said. “I’m starting to think my mother was closer to Claire than I was. And that’s saying a lot, seeing as how I purchased an engagement ring two weeks ago.”

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Mackenzie said.

“I’ve been hearing that a lot,” Barry said, looking at the tabletop. “It was unexpected and while I did cry like a baby when the police told me yesterday, I’m managing to keep it together. Mom came over to stay with me to help me get through the funeral and I’m thankful for her help, but she’s a little overprotective. Once she’s gone, I’ll probably let all the grief out, you know?”

“I’m going to ask what might seem like a dumb question,” Mackenzie said. “But do you know of anyone that might have any reason to do this to Claire?”

“No. The police asked the same thing. She didn’t have any enemies, you know? She and her mother didn’t get along, but it wasn’t nearly to the level that would cause this. Claire was a sort of private person, you know? No close friends or anything…just acquaintances. That sort of thing.”

“When did you see her last?” Mackenzie asked.

“Eight days ago. She came by here to see if I had anything I needed to put in her storage unit. We had a laugh over it. She didn’t know I had the ring. But we both knew we were going to get married. We started making plans for it. Her asking if I had anything to put in her unit was just another way of reinforcing it, you know?”

“After that day, how long passed before you started to get frightened? I don’t see where you filed a missing persons report or anything like that.”

“Well, I’m taking classes at the community college, getting my GPA up to get back to college and finally finish. It’s a huge workload and that’s on top of a job where I put in forty to forty-five hours a week. So there would be four or five days that would go by where Claire and I wouldn’t see one another. But after three days and no texts or calls, I did start to get worried. I went by her apartment to check on her and she didn’t answer. I thought about calling the police, but it seemed stupid. And really, deep in the back of my head, I wondered if she had just up and left me. That maybe the whole idea of getting married had scared her or something.”

“On that last time you saw her, did she seem okay? Was she acting out of the ordinary?”

“No, she was great. In a good mood.”

“By any chance, do you know what she was going to the storage unit to store?”

“Probably some of her textbooks from college. She’d been carrying them around in her trunk for a while.”

“Do you know how long she’d been renting that unit?”

“About six months. She was moving stuff from California and storing it. Again…we had this thing where we felt we were going to get married so instead of moving stuff straight into her apartment, she left some of it in the unit. It’s why she rented it at all, I think. I told her she didn’t need it but she kept saying how it would be so much easier when we moved in together.”

“I asked about Claire having any enemies…but how about you? Is there anyone that would do this to hurt you?”

Barry looked stunned, as if he had never considered such a thing. He shook his head slowly and she thought he might start weeping. “No. But I almost wish there was. It would help to make sense of this. Because I just don’t know anyone that would want Claire dead. She was just…she was very kind. The sweetest person you could ever meet.”

Mackenzie could tell that he was being sincere. She also knew that she was not going to get anything out of Barry Channing. She placed one of her business cards on the table and slid it over to him.

“If you think of anything at all, please call me,” she said.

He took the card and only nodded.

Mackenzie felt that she should say something else but it was one of those moments where it was clear that there was nothing more to say. She made her way to the door and as she closed it behind her she felt a pang of regret as she heard Barry Channing begin to cry.

The rain outside was little more than a mist now. As she walked back to her car, she called Ellington, hoping the rain would die out completely. She wasn’t quite sure why it was bothering her so much. It just did.

“This is Ellington,” he answered, never one to check his display before answering.

“You done with watching TV yet?”

“I am, actually,” he replied. “I’m working with Deputy Rising right now to cross off the people on the list that they’ve already spoken to. Anything new on your end?”

“No. But I want to go to the storage unit that the first body was found in. Can you get that information from Rising and meet me in front of the station in about twenty minutes? And see if someone can get the owner on the phone.”

“Can do. See you then.”

They ended the call and Mackenzie drove on, thinking of the grieving boyfriend she had left behind…thinking of Claire Locke, alone in the dark, starving and terrified in her last moments.

Chapter Eight

Mackenzie and Ellington arrived at U-Store-It at 10:10. The facility was different from Seattle Storage Solution in that it was an actual building. The structure itself looked as if it had once been a small warehouse of some kind but the exterior had been prettied up with simple landscaping that was only half revealed in the small lights that bordered the sidewalk. Because they called ahead, a light was on inside as the owner and manager of the place waited for them.

The owner met them at the door, a small and overweight man with glasses named Ralph Underwood. He seemed pleased to have them there and didn’t make much of an attempt to hide the fact that he was quite taken with Mackenzie.

He led them through the front of the building, which consisted of a small waiting area and even smaller conference room. He’d done a good job of making the place look warm and cozy but it still had the smell of an old warehouse.

“How many units do you have here?” Ellington asked.

“One hundred and fifty,” Underwood said. “Each unit has a door along the back so things can easily be loaded and unloaded from the outside rather than having to come in through the front of the building.”

“Seems pretty efficient,” Mackenzie said, never having seen a storage complex that was held totally within another building.

“You said on the phone you were interested in learning more about the body I found two weeks ago, correct?”

“That’s right,” Mackenzie said. She’d had Rising send her over the report and she read from it now, on her phone. “Elizabeth Newcomb, age thirty. According to the police report she was found in her own storage unit, dead due to a stab wound to the chest.”

“I don’t know about all of that,” Underwood said. “All I know is that when I came in that morning and walked the grounds like I always do, I saw something red along the edge of the unit door. I knew what it was right away but tried to convince myself I was wrong. But when I unlocked the unit, there she was. Lying on the floor, dead, in a pool of blood.”

He told the story as if he were sitting at a campfire. It irritated Mackenzie a little but she also knew that people with a bent toward the dramatic were often good sources of information.

“Ever find anything like that before?” Ellington asked.

“No. But I tell you…I’ve had about a dozen or so units abandoned. It’s in my contract that if the unit has not been opened at least once within three months, I call the user just to make sure they’re still interested in the space. If there has been no communication after six months, I sell the units at auction, belongings and all.”

Mackenzie knew that this was a common practice but as far as she was concerned, it seemed nearly illegal.

“Some of the things people leave in these units are…well, disturbing,” Underwood went on. “In three of the abandoned units I’ve had, there was all kinds of sex toys. Someone had fifteen guns in theirs, including two AK-47s. One unit apparently belonged to a taxidermist because there were four stuffed animals…and I’m not talking teddy bears, you know?”

Underwood took them through a door at the back of the little entrance wing. There was no transition after the door; they walked through and were standing in a very wide hallway. The floor was concrete and the ceiling sat about twenty feet overhead. Now, more than ever, Mackenzie was convinced the place had once indeed been a warehouse of some kind. The units were broken into clusters of five, each cluster broken by a hallway that ran to the side of the building both ways. The clusters were on each side of the building, set up in a way that, when you looked down the central middle hallway, there seemed to be no end to them. Now that they were inside, Mackenzie saw the depth and range of the place for what it was. The building was easily one hundred yards long.

“The unit you want to see is just right up here a bit,” Underwood said. They walked along for about two minutes, Underwood going on and on about the odd collectibles he had found in some of the abandoned units, as well as treasures like mint condition toys, valuable comics, and one honest-to-God unopened safe that had more than five grand in it.

He finally brought them to a stop in front of a unit marked C-2. He had apparently pre-selected the key before their arrival; he dug a single key out of his pocket and unlocked the deadbolt lock on the door runner. He then slid the door up, revealing the musty inside. Underwood flicked a light switch on the wall and the light that shone down from the room revealed a mostly empty storage unit.

“No family has been by to claim her things?” Mackenzie asked.

“I got a call from her mother four days ago,” he said. “She’s coming by at some point, but she didn’t set a date or anything.”

Mackenzie walked around the unit, looking for anything that might look similar to what they had seen in Claire Locke’s unit. But either Elizabeth Newcomb had not had the fighting spirit of Claire Locke or the evidence of her struggles had already been cleaned up by the PD and local detectives.

Mackenzie went to the few stacked belongings in the back. Most of them were in plastic bins, labeled with masking tape and black magic marker: Books and Magazines, Childhood, Mom’s Stuff, Christmas Decorations, Old Baking Stuff.

Even the manner in which they were stacked seemed very organized. There were a few small cardboard boxes filled with photo albums and framed pictures. Mackenzie looked in a few of the albums but saw nothing that would help. She only saw pictures of smiling family members, beachfront vistas, and a dog that had apparently been a very cherished pet.

Ellington walked over to her and looked around at the boxes. He had his hands on his hips, one of his telltale indicators that he was at a loss. It still surprised her from time to time just how well she knew him.

“I think anything that might have been here to find was already found by the police,” he said. “Maybe we can find something in the files.”

Mackenzie was nodding, but her eyes had fallen on something else. She walked to the far corner, where three of the plastic storage bins had been stacked on top of one another. Tucked exactly in the corner, so far back that she had missed it during her initial inspection, was a doll. It was an older doll, its hair matted and little smudges of dirt on its cheeks. It looked like something that might have been stolen from the set of a cheesy horror movie.

“Creepy,” Ellington said, tracing her gaze.

“And oddly out of place,” Mackenzie said.

She picked the doll up, careful to keep her hands in one position on the back of it, just in case it might be some sort of clue. Sure, at first glance it seemed like just a random object in someone’s storage bin—perhaps something thrown in at the last minute, as an afterthought.

But everything else in this unit is meticulously stacked and organized. This doll stands out. And not only that, it’s almost as if it were meant to stand out.

“I think we need to bag it up,” she said. “Why is this one object not boxed up and put away? This place is eerily neat. Why leave this out?”

“You think the killer placed it there?” Ellington asked. But before the question was fully out of his mouth, she could tell that he was considering it as a very real possibility as well.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think I want to go take another look at Claire Locke’s unit again. And I also want to see how quickly we can get a full case file for the murders in Oregon that you worked on…back in the early days.” She said the last bit with a smile, never missing an opportunity to tease him for being seven years older than she was.

Ellington turned back to Underwood. He was hanging out by the door, pretending not to eavesdrop. “I don’t suppose you ever spoke with Ms. Newcomb outside of renting her the unit, did you?”

“Afraid not,” Underwood said. “I try to be friendly and hospitable to everyone but there’s just so many of them, you know?” He then eyed the doll Mackenzie still held and frowned. “Told you…lots of weird shit in these units.”

Mackenzie didn’t doubt it. But this particular weird item seemed sorely out of place. And she fully intended to find out what it meant.

Chapter Nine

Due to the late hour, Quinn Tuck had understandably been pissed off when Mackenzie had called. Still, he told them how to get into the complex and where the spare set of keys were. It was just before midnight when Mackenzie and Ellington opened up Claire Locke’s storage unit again. Mackenzie couldn’t help but feel that they were running in circles—not a feeling that was especially encouraging so early in the case—but she also felt that this was the right move.

With the doll from Elizabeth Newcomb’s unit in mind, Mackenzie stepped back into the unit. Perhaps it was just being aware of the late hour, but the place seemed a bit more foreboding this time around. The bins and boxes stacked in the back weren’t quite as perfect as the ones in Elizabeth Newcomb’s unit, but they were still tidy.

“A little sad, isn’t it?” Ellington said.

“What’s that?”

“These things…these bins and boxes. Chances are no one who cares about what’s inside of them will ever open them.”

It was a sad thought, one that Mackenzie tried to push to the back of her mind. She walked to the back of the unit, feeling almost like an intruder. She and Ellington both checked over the contents for any dolls or other disturbances, but found nothing. It then occurred to Mackenzie that she was expecting to find something as obvious as a doll. Maybe there was something different, something smaller…

Or maybe there’s no connection here at all, she thought.

“You see this?” Ellington asked.

He was kneeling next to the right wall. He nodded toward the corner of the unit, in a thin space between the wall and a stack of cardboard boxes. Mackenzie dropped down to her knees as well and saw what Ellington had spied.

It was a miniature teapot—not miniature as in a small teapot, but more like a playset teapot that little girls might use for an imagined tea time.

She crawled forward and picked it up off the floor. She was rather surprised to find that it was made not of plastic, but of a ceramic material. It felt just like a real teapot, only it was no bigger than six inches tall. She could set the entirety of the thing in her hand.

“If you ask me,” Ellington said, “there’s no way that was set there by accident or by someone just tired of packing shit into the unit.”

“And it didn’t just fall out of a box,” Mackenzie added. “It’s ceramic. If it had fallen from a box, it would have shattered on the floor.”

“So what the hell does it mean?”

Mackenzie had no answer. They both looked to the little teapot, quite pretty but also dingy—just like the doll in Elizabeth Newcomb’s unit. And despite its small size, Mackenzie felt that it represented something much larger.

***

It was 1:05 when they finally checked into a motel. Mackenzie was tired but also invigorated by the puzzle that the doll and the little teapot offered. Once in the room, she took a quick moment to change out of her work clothes and into a T-shirt and gym shorts. She powered up her laptop as Ellington changed into more comfortable clothes as well. She logged into her email and saw that McGrath had assigned someone to send them every single file they had on the Salem, Oregon, storage unit murders from eight years ago.

“What are you doing?” Ellington asked as he stepped up beside her. “It’s late and tomorrow is going to be a long day.”

Ignoring him, she asked: “Was there nothing in the Oregon cases that pointed to any of this? To a doll, a teapot…anything like that?”

“I honestly don’t recall. Like McGrath said, I just ran cleanup. I questioned a few witnesses, tidied up reports and paperwork. If there was anything like that, it didn’t stand out. I’m not ready to say the cases are linked. Yes, they are eerily similar, but not identical. Still…it might not hurt to eventually look into it. Maybe meet with the PD in Salem to see if anyone closer to the case remembers anything like that.”

Mackenzie trusted his word but couldn’t help but scan through several of the files before giving in to the need to sleep. She felt Ellington rest a hand on her shoulder and then felt his face next to hers.

“Am I being lazy if I turn in?”

“No. Am I being over-obsessive if I don’t?”

“No. You’re just being very dedicated to your job.” He kissed her on the cheek and then fell into the room’s single bed.

It was tempting to join him—not for any extracurricular activities, but to just enjoy some sleep before the frantic pace tomorrow would be sure to bring. But she felt that she had to find at least a few more potential pieces to the puzzle, even if they were buried in a case from eight years ago.

From a cursory glance, there was nothing to be found. There had been five people killed, all found in storage units. One of the units had contained more than ten thousand dollars’ worth of valuable baseball cards and another had contained a macabre collection of medieval weaponry. Seven people had been questioned in regards to the deaths but none had ever been convicted. The theory the police and the FBI had worked with was that the killer was abducting his victims and then forcing them to open up their storage units. Based on the original reports, it did not appear as if the killer was stealing anything from the units, although it was obviously next to impossible to be certain of this.

From what Mackenzie could see, there were no peculiar items left behind at the scenes. The files contained pictures of the crime scenes and of the five victims, three of the storage units had been in a messy state, having not seen an obsessively organized touch like that of Elizabeth Newcomb.

Two of the crime scene images were strikingly clear. One was from the scene of the second victim, and the other from the fifth victim. Both units had been in a state of what Mackenzie thought of as organized chaos; there were piles of things here and there, but they were thrown together haphazardly.

Looking at the picture from the second crime scene, Mackenzie scoured the background, zooming in as much as she could without causing the screen to go all pixelated. Near the center of the room, on top of three precariously stacked boxes, she thought she saw something of interest. It looked like a pitcher of some kind, perhaps something to put water or lemonade in. It was sitting on what appeared to be a plate of some kind. While there were other random objects sitting out in the open, these appeared to have been placed with care in the very center of the room.

She stared until her eyes started to ache and could still not be certain what she was looking at. Knowing that it might be a long shot, she opened up an empty email to send directly to two agents she knew would act fast and efficiently—two agents whom, she randomly thought, she and Ellington needed to invite to their wedding: Agents Yardley and Harrison.

She attached the files she had received to the email and wrote a quick message: Could either of you look into the files for these cases and see if anyone ended up taking an inventory of what was inside the storage units? Maybe check with the owners of the storage facilities.

Knowing that there was very little left to do, Mackenzie finally allowed herself to go to bed. Because she was so tired and the day came falling down on her in a heap, she was asleep less than two minutes before her head hit the pillow.

Even when the eerie sight of the doll from Elizabeth Newcomb’s storage unit surfaced in her head, she managed to ignore it—for the most part—and drift soundly to sleep.