Before He Harms. Блейк Пирс

twenty. She was blonde and had a face that most would consider pretty. But there was some quality to her, even in her emotionless dead face, that made Mackenzie think the girl may have been a runaway or a vagrant. That, or she’d been through some trauma recently. Her skin simply had a pallor to it that spoke of grime and hard living.

      “No identity,” she said, speaking to herself more than to Ellington. “I wonder if she was from WITSEC.”

      “Witness protection?” Ellington said. “That’s a bit of a leap. Especially with a license you think might be a fake.”

      “Well, she has no real ID and she was running hard from someone. If she was with witness protection and on the run, that would give us at least somewhere to start looking. Maybe someone from her past found her.”

      “That’s why I love you,” Ellington said. “You’d rather look hard at a theory without legs than admit you have nowhere to start.”

      “There’s always somewhere to start,” Mackenzie said, still eyeing the photos. “It’s just that sometimes the place you start is the hardest.”

      She pulled out her phone, her eyes bouncing back and forth between her contacts and the pictures of the dead girl on the table.

      “Who you calling?” Ellington asked.

      “I’m going to have DC patch me through to the US Marshals office to see if they’ll get me a list.”

      Ellington, clearly surprised by the suggestion, nodded comically. “Yeah, good luck with that.”

      As the phone was answered and she was placed on hold and then finally patched through to the Marshals office, she continued to eye the pictures. The injuries sustained by the vehicle striking her weren’t obvious in the pictures, but the harsh slit across her throat was glaring. The pavement in the pictures was slightly wet and glistening, making the dark red coming from her neck almost surreal.

      “This is Assistant Chief Manning,” a rough voice said through the other end of the phone. “Who is this?”

      “This is Special Agent Mackenzie White, with the FBI. I’m working a case in Salt Lake City that I believe may involve a young woman out of WITSEC. We have absolutely no ID. Her prints aren’t in any database and the driver’s license found on her body is a fake. I’m taking a shot in the dark and hoping she might be in your system.”

      “Agent White, you know I can’t give you the identities of people under our security. That would be breaking about a dozen different laws and regulations.”

      “I’m aware of that. But what if I sent you a picture? Using facial recognition, you could maybe come up with something and—”

      “Pardon me, but even if you only suspect she might be with WITSEC, sending a picture back and forth breaks even more rules.”

      “Being that it’s a crime scene photo, I think it’s permissible,” Mackenzie snapped. “She was hit by a vehicle and then had her throat slit. So I’m not sending you a glamour shot.”

      Manning gave a deep sigh that indicated Mackenzie was about to get her way. “Send the picture over and I’ll have someone run a facial recognition search. Of course, I can’t promise anything. But I’ll see what we can do.”

      “Thanks.”

      “We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.” He gave her the information of where to send the picture before hanging up.

      Ellington had been looking over the coroner’s report while she spoke with Manning. “Got your way, huh?”

      “Was there ever any doubt?”

      He shook his head and handed the coroner’s report over to her. “This is the most recent, fresh off the presses about five hours ago. Sort of interesting, don’t you think?”

      She scanned the report, looking over the obvious content until she came to the most recent updates. What she found did indeed seem interesting. According to the most recent updates from the coroner and the medical examiner, it appeared that the victim had suffered several broken bones in the past that had not healed correctly. Two ribs, the left wrist, and a buckle fracture along her right arm. According to the coroner’s notes, the bones of the left wrist looked as if they had never been properly set at all.

      “You thinking domestic abuse?” Mackenzie asked.

      “I think she was running away from someone and she had a history of broken bones that weren’t set. So yeah…domestic abuse and maybe even something darker. I wonder if she was maybe held captive. She doesn’t look the healthiest, you know. The report has her listed as weighing one hundred and fifteen pounds. And you can see it in her face in the pictures…she looks sort of…I don’t know…”

      “Hardened,” Mackenzie finished for him.

      “Yeah, that’s a good word for it.”

      “So maybe she was a prisoner or captive and she managed to get away from her abuser. And when he caught up to her, he figured it was going to be easier to kill her rather than capture her again.”

      “But for someone to be so carefree about that, it would mean the abuser must have known she had no identity.”

      It was a good point, one that left them in silence to mull it over individually. Mackenzie thought of a girl, potentially running through a damp field and then down a rain-slicked road. She had been barefoot, apparently carrying her sandals. The scenario presented two questions, but she wasn’t sure which one was more important.

      The first was where was she running away from?

      The second, as she pondered it, started to seem more pressing. “Where was she going?” Mackenzie asked out loud. “It can’t be a coincidence that she chose that neighborhood. I know there is no evidence that it was her that ran through the field Sheriff Burke mentioned, but what if she did? She could have gone in any direction and chosen any neighborhood. So why that one?”

      Ellington smiled as he nodded, catching on to her enthusiasm. “Why don’t we go find out?”

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      They were fortunate in that it was a Saturday and most of the cars within the neighborhood were parked in driveways or opened garages. They arrived back in the Plainsview neighborhood at 3:10, parking in the same spot they had met Sheriff Burke. It was a sunny March afternoon, not quite chilly but certainly not warm either. Regardless, Mackenzie did not expect to have much of a problem finding people to speak with.

      “You take the right, I’ll take the left,” Ellington said as they got out of the car.

      Mackenzie nodded, knowing that most partners opted not to take the split-up approach. But she and Ellington trusted one another on a level that allowed for this. It came not only in their strong work partnership, but from the bonds of marriage as well. They separated without any fanfare and took their respective sides of the street.

      The first house on Mackenzie’s side was a no-brainer, as a mother and her daughter were in the front yard. The daughter was maybe six years old, pedaling a Little Tikes tricycle up and down the sidewalk. The mother was sitting on the porch, scrolling on her phone. When Mackenzie approached, she looked up and offered a smile.

      “Can I help you?” she asked. Her tone indicated she did not want to help at all, especially if Mackenzie was selling something.

      Mackenzie got a little farther away from the little girl before she pulled her badge and introduced herself. “I’m Agent Mackenzie White, with the FBI. My partner and I are scouring the neighborhood to see if we can find out any information on the hit-and-run from two nights ago.”

      “Nope,” she said. “I told the cops the same thing. The way they tell it, they think it happened after midnight, and everyone in my home is asleep by eleven.”

      “Do you happen to know who found the body?”

      “Not for sure. There’s all sorts of rumors circulating and I don’t know which ones to believe. After a while, I just topped paying attention to them, you know?”

      “Any