By eight o’clock that morning, Mackenzie found herself at the nexus of the case. She was serving as the liaison for the small police forces of Morrill County, three ragtag forces out of Belton and other small communities within the county. She was organizing and sending out teams to canvass the areas, looking for anyone with any background information on a man named Greg Redman. She was also working closely with the FBI—communicating with Penbrook in the Omaha field office and Harrison and Yardley out of the headquarters in DC.
She could also feel the headache she’d been sensing growing by leaps and bounds. She’d taken three ibuprofen shortly after leaving the motel but so far, it had done nothing.
It all had the feeling of finality, of some sort of massive storm that was gathering its clouds and building toward something catastrophic.
The first hope of some sort of break came in the form of a call from Harrison just after lunch. Mackenzie and Ellington were parked in the lot of the Belton Legion Hall when the call came in. The car smelled of hot coffee and fried breakfast foods from the diner in town—which had actually served to make Mackenzie more alert and energized.
“So here’s what we’ve got on Greg Redman, former resident of Belton, Nebraska,” Harrison said through the phone. “He moved from Belton to Seattle, Washington, in 1999. He worked as a call center stooge for one of those fraudulent places that reportedly help people get out of student loan debt. He lost his job there in 2002 when he got into some sort of altercation with a supervisor. After that, there’s not much. We can see where he bought a plane ticket to Nicaragua in 2003 and then applied for a loan for a car in El Paso, Texas, in 2011…a loan he was denied for. That’s where it dead-ends.”
“So no history of Omaha?” Ellington asked.
“Nothing.”
“What about existing family in the Belton or Elm Branch region?” Mackenzie asked.
“Nothing. His mother died when he was four and his father remarried. From what I see here, he’s currently living in Connecticut.”
“What about Nicaragua? Do we know why he went there?”
“No clue. And honestly, we have no idea how long he was there. I don’t have records of when he came back into the country. Those records clearly have to exist somewhere, but we’re still digging.”
Mackenzie’s phone got an incoming call, showing Fredericks’s number on the display.
“Thanks, Harrison,” she said. “But I have an incoming that I need to take. Keep up the good work and please keep us posted.”
She switched over to the incoming call from Fredericks.
“Got something new?” Mackenzie asked.
“One of my officers ran into a man that knew your father,” Fredericks said. “When they were talking, it was discovered that this guy new Gabriel Hambry.”
“But Hambry was in Omaha,” Mackenzie said. “The files show that he’s lived there for at least ten years.”
“That’s exactly right,” Fredericks said. “But I had another guy run a report and he discovered that Hambry moved to Belton with his family in 1977. When he got older, he moved out of Belton and rented a place in Elm Branch. Want to take a guess at where he lived?”
Click.
Mackenzie could almost literally feel something clicking into place within her head. That’s it, she thought. That’s the connection. And maybe even the motive.
“My father’s apartment building.”
“Bingo. Also…one other thing. We also did some digging into Wanda Young. I told you about how her family was basically made of money and she was typically thought of as this holier-than-thou moneybags type, right?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, she went through a rebellious streak in her early twenties. Wanted to piss Mommy and Daddy off. Dyed her hair. Slept around. But she didn’t move far away. For a period of exactly a year and a half, she was also a resident of your father’s apartment building.”
From beside her, Ellington breathed, “Holy shit…”
“Do you think your guys can run—”
“I already have a small team assembled to see if we can put the rest of the pieces together,” Fredericks said. “At the risk of seeming bossy, I will say that they could maybe use some help if we want this knocked out quickly.”
“We may just lend a hand,” Mackenzie said. “Thanks, Sheriff.”
She and Ellington looked at one another after the call, both absorbing what this latest revelation might mean. Ellington looked a bit alarmed.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“I call bullshit. You look pale and you’ve been wincing a lot. Rubbing at your temples, too.”
“It’s just a headache. It’ll pass.”
“You need to rest. How much sleep have you had?”
She brushed the conversation away with a lazy sweep on her hand.“I’m going to go ahead and shatter the word coincidence,” Mackenzie said, getting them back on track. “The killer lived there. Wanda Young and Gabriel Hambry lived there. Jimmy Scotts lived somewhere in Elm Branch…and as of right now, I’m betting on it being in those apartments.”
“Do we have a definitive timeline of when your father owned and operated the building?” Ellington asked.
“No…but that’s a damned good place to start.”
***
By noon, she had placed a few more information requests. She had called Harrison and asked him to get the residence histories of Jimmy Scotts and Dennis Parks. She’d then called the field office in Omaha and spoken with Penbrook. He had his men digging into the state documents regarding land and property ownership and leasing to see how long Benjamin White had been in possession of the rental properties on Spruce Street in Elm Branch.
She and Ellington then joined three officers at the Belton PD, trying to expedite some of those requests by good old-fashioned hand-to-paper research. Mackenzie took the time to dig through the records and pull out her father’s records, which were scattered here and there throughout the paper files and digital archives, though they were far from complete. She looked through his arrest records and reports, looking for any kind of an event that might have somehow involved him with someone with the capacity to be a serial killer.
The only questionable thing she came across was a very sketchy detail near the end of his career as a policeman. She supposed this was around the time he had possibly gone undercover. A few arrests before the lapse in his records, he had taken down three men who had been working toward getting roughly twenty pounds of heroin into Morrill County. In fact, if she took anything away from going through his career records, it was that he played a simple role in the law enforcement of the area, but he had done it well.
She also had one of the women who worked up front search the database for any criminal records pertaining to Gabriel Hambry, Dennis Parks, or Jimmy Scotts. The only pings she got back were an overdue parking ticket from Parks and a drunk and disorderly from Jimmy Scotts. The drunk and disorderly came from just five years ago, long after his time in Elm Branch was over.
However, a knock on the door to the small records room ended up giving her much more information and insight. It was an officer who had been very diligent in helping Mackenzie and Ellington find the records they needed. He was a younger guy who seemed over the moon to help in their investigation.
“We’ve got an ID on one of the vagrants from Omaha,” he said.
“Did you get a call from Washington on that?” Mackenzie asked.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “We found it here in the office but then reached out to your friend Agent Harrison for photo confirmation.”
“So you’re saying one of the vagrants from Omaha was a local?”
“Yeah. A guy named Sam Hudson. He lost his job here back in 2013. We’re not sure how he ended up in Omaha but we’re ninety percent sure he was one of the more recent ones to be killed. And if it does turn out to be him, we think the younger vagrant—the twelve-year-old—was his son. Your people in DC are confirming right now.”
“Can you get me a physical address for his time here in Belton?” she asked.
“We’re pulling it right now,” he said.
Mackenzie nodded her thanks and as she did, a massive pain flared through her head. She winced against it and instantly started massaging the area around her temples.
“You okay?” Ellington asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “This headache…it’s screaming at this point. I took some meds for it this morning and it’s not touching it.”
“Then get back to the motel and get some rest.”
“It’s one thirty in the afternoon.”
“So?” Ellington asked. “Listen to me. I’m here now and these guys here at the PD are kicking ass. Go rest. I don’t care if it’s just an hour. You need to get some sleep. I promise you that I will call you if we find anything new. You have my word on that.”
She would usually not even consider such a request—especially not when she felt that she was close to breaking a case. But this headache seemed to not be going anywhere and she knew if she didn’t rest her eyes, it was going to get miserable quickly.
“You call me even with the smallest break,” she said. “Swear it.”
“I swear,” Ellington said. He even held up his hand in a little mock salute, as if the other hand was on a Bible and he was in a courtroom.
He then leaned in and kissed her, right in front of the two officers that were still in the records room with them. It was a bit embarrassing, but it also meant the world to her. With a final gaze into his eyes, Mackenzie stepped away from the table and left the Belton Police Department.
Outside, walking to her car, she had to narrow her eyes. The glare of the sun was agony to her headache and right away, she knew she had made the right decision. It was not a decision she would have made on her own, helping her to realize just how much of an asset Ellington was to her. It made her feel foolish for being so ridiculously upset with him these last few days.
In the car, she pulled the sun visor down and sped back to the motel. She knew Ellington would remain true to his word and call her the moment he learned anything. It was with that assuredness that she headed back to the motel, looking forward to resting. Even if she could not fall asleep, the very act of just lying down in a dark room with her eyes closed would help the headache. She’d had them before and while they were a massive bitch to contend with, they could also be easily managed if she took the time to do so.
At the hotel, she popped two more ibuprofen, placed a Do Not Disturb sign on her door, and lay down. The pain still seemed to shred at the inside of her head. She used an old trick she’d heard about but never tried, getting a washcloth from the bathroom and soaking it in cold water. She rested it over her eyes as she rested and, miraculously, felt sleep rushing forward.
It came quickly despite the pain and although the headache refused to budge, sleep insisted itself upon her and within five minutes, she was out.