Before He Preys. Блейк Пирс

was no coroner in the entire county. Even the Office of the Medical Examiner was an hour and a half away from Kingsville, located in Arlington. Rather than driving back to DC only to most likely head right back to Kingsville, Mackenzie returned to her motel room and made a series of calls. Ten minutes later, she was phoning into a Skype session with the coroner who had overseen the Malory Thomas’s and Kenny Skinner’s bodies. Kenny Skinner’s body was not yet fully prepared and ready to evaluate, so that made things a bit harder.

      Still, Mackenzie placed the call and waited for an answer. The man on the other end was one whom Mackenzie had worked with a few times on other cases, a middle-aged man with wiry gray hair named Barry Burke. It was nice to see a familiar face after the morning she’d had. She still couldn’t quite shake the sounds of loss that had come out of Pam Skinner as she left their house.

      “Hey there, Agent White,” Burke said.

      “Hey. So I’m being told that there’s not much we can get from the body of Kenny Skinner yet, is that right?”

      “I’m afraid so. At the risk of sounding crude, it’s a pretty big mess. If you let me know what you’re looking for, I can send it to the top of the priorities list.”

      “Any fresh scratches or bruising. Any signs that he might have been involved in a struggle.”

      “Will do. Now…I assume you need to know the same about Malory Thomas, right?”

      “That’s right. Do you have anything?”

      “You know, we might. I hate to say it, but when we get a body that is pretty obviously a suicide, there are certain things that instantly drop to the bottom of our list of priorities. So yes…we found something on Malory Thomas that, in all honesty, could be nothing. But if you’re looking for scratches…”

      “What do you have?” she asked.

      “Give me one second and I’ll shoot you a picture,” he said. He clicked around for a while and then the paperclip icon popped up in the Skype window.

      Mackenzie clicked it and a JPEG opened up on her screen. She was looking at the underside of Malory Thomas’s right hand.

      Mackenzie zoomed in on the picture and saw what Burke was talking about right away. Between the first and second knuckle of three of the fingers, there were very apparent cuts and abrasions. The cuts looked very ragged and, while not bloody, raw and grisly all the same. There were two very large scratches on the upper part of her palm that looked like they might also be fairly recent. Lastly, there appeared to be some form of very faint indention in the meat of her hand just above the palm, making a small half-circle shape. For some reason, this one stuck out more so than the others. It seemed odd, and that usually meant it was the smoking gun she was looking for.

      “Does that help you at all?” Burke asked.

      “I don’t know yet,” Mackenzie said. “But it’s more than what I had a minute ago.”

      “Also, this might be of note…one second.” Burke rolled away from his desk for about ten seconds and then came back into view. He was holding a small plastic bag. Inside of it was what looked like a piece of tree bark. He held it closer to the camera. Mackenzie saw a piece of wood about an inch wide and an inch and a half long.

      “This was in her hair,” Burke said. “And the only reason we found it interesting is because it was the only piece of it in her hair. Usually when something like this is found on a body, particularly in the hair, there’s a good amount of it. Wood chips, mulch, things like that. But this was the only piece.”

      “Weird question for you,” Mackenzie said. “Can you snap a picture of that and send it to my email?”

      “Hey, that’s one of the least weird requests I’ve gotten this week. Job perks, you know…”

      “Thanks for the meeting,” Mackenzie said. “Any idea when you’ll be able to get a better look at Kenny Skinner?”

      “I’m hoping within a few hours.”

      “I hope to be back in DC tonight. I’ll reach out when I get back and hopefully be able to make it by there.”

      With those plans set in place, they ended the call. Mackenzie emailed the picture of Malory Thomas’s palm to her cell phone and then headed out at once. She thought of the scrapes and the barely there indention on the woman’s hand, as well as the single piece of wood. It all meant something…she could feel it trying to click into place in her head.

      Rather than puzzle it over in the motel, she figured there was no better place to go over it than the scene of the alleged crime. Her only hope was that Miller Moon Bridge was less somber and sinister-looking in the light of day.

***

      When she reached the turn-off that led to the gravel road that dead-ended at Miller Moon Bridge, she was pleased to see a county police car parked along the edge. The bored-looking officer looked up when she pulled her car in alongside his. She flashed her badge and he waved her on after squinting closely at it.

      Within a quarter of a mile, she reached the END STATE MAINTENANCE sign. It was at this point that the road became nothing but gravel. She took it slowly, listening to the crunch of pebbles beneath the car while it kicked up dust. After another mile or so, the first white struts of Miller Moon Bridge came into view, rising slightly in the air at a slanted angle. She came around a bend and then saw the whole thing, stretched out over the drop-off where a very dry riverbed sat underneath. While it didn’t look quite as spooky in the daylight, the structure did show its age.

      She parked several feet away from where the wooden planks began. She tried to imagine driving a car to the other side of this thing thirty or forty years ago and the mere thought of it terrified her. As she stepped onto the planks, she looked to the other side. There were two concrete barriers standing about four feet tall between the end of the bridge and the start of a road that was clearly no longer being used. It quite literally felt like she was stepping out onto the very edge of the world, where everything came to an end.

      As she walked slowly along the bridge, she pulled up the picture of Malory’s palm. She also opened the attachment in the email Burke had sent her after the Skype call. She opened up the image of the small piece of wood, having them both at the ready. She had no idea what she was looking for but felt confident she’d know it when her eyes fell on it.

      As it turned out, that didn’t take very long.

      She’d made it about ten feet across the bridge when she noticed the layout of the beams and struts that ran along the sides of the bridge. They all, of course, ran underneath it for support, but on the other side of the white rails that separated the bridge from the open space beyond, there was a single iron strut that stuck out about two feet wider than the bridge. It was just wide enough for someone to step out onto.

      She looked down the length of the bridge and counted three different struts. She went to the rail and hunkered down to get a closer look. The strut in front of her also supported five smaller struts than ran beneath the bridge. These smaller ones were attached to the larger ones with large bolts. The bolts were capped off with what looked like smooth metal caps, worn and rusted with age.

      Mackenzie looked at the picture of Malory’s palm, zooming in on the indentation in her skin. Slightly circular, the curves looking very much like the circumference of the metal caps on the strut.

      She ran her finger carefully over the metal cap. Yes, it was smooth – probably put there to hide the rougher edging of whatever industrial bolt had been used to attach the struts – but the edges of the caps were a little rough around the edges.

      Mackenzie got back to her feet and slowly walked a bit farther down the bridge. She saw the same layout, one after another. Five bolts, the ends of which were covered by those smooth iron caps. There would then be a break in the spacing of the caps, and then there would be five more. She counted three sets of five in the first iron strut, and then five in the next.

      She didn’t get to the third iron strut on the last portion of the bridge, though. When she was about halfway down the bridge, she came to a spot where the wooden base of the bridge’s frame poked out just a