CHAPTER TWO

While Mackenzie was well aware that a stereotype of the government was that everything moved slowly, she also knew that this was not usually the case with the FBI getting their agents on the scene. Just fourteen hours after being called into McGrath’s office, Mackenzie was pulling a rental car into a parking spot in front of a row of townhouses. She pulled in next to a police cruiser and took note of the officer sitting inside.

Beside her, in the passenger seat, Harrison was going over the notes on the case. He had been mostly quiet during the trip and Mackenzie had nearly started to try to open up the lines of conversation. She couldn’t tell if he was nervous, intimidated, or a bit of both. But rather than force him to start speaking to her, she thought it might be best for his development to come out of his shell on his own – especially if McGrath planned on them working together as partners for the foreseeable future.

Mackenzie took a moment to process everything she knew about the case. She reclined her head back slightly, closed her eyes, and pulled it all forward. Her tendency toward obsessing over the details of case files made it rather easy for her to simply delve into her own mind and rifle through them as if there were a mental filing cabinet within her skull.

A dead couple, which brings a few questions to the surface right away. Why both of them? Why not just one?

Got to keep an eye out for anything that might seem even remotely out of place. If jealousy is driving these killings, it’s likely from someone that envies their lives in some way.

No forced entry; the Kurtz family willingly let the killer inside.

She opened her eyes and then opened the door. She could speculate all she wanted based on what she had seen in the files. But none of that would be as effective as stepping foot into the crime scene and having a look around.

Harrison stepped out of the car alongside her and into the bright Miami sunshine. She could smell the ocean in the air, salty and with just the faintest traces of a fishlike smell that wasn’t necessarily unpleasant.

As she and Harrison closed their doors, the officer in the police car next to them also stepped out. This, Mackenzie assumed, was the officer who had been tasked with meeting them. Forty or so, she looked pretty in a plain sort of way, her short dirty blonde hair catching the shine from the sun.

“Agents White and Harrison?” the officer asked.

“That’s us,” Mackenzie said.

The woman offered her hand as she introduced herself. “I’m Officer Dagney,” she said. “Anything you need, just let me know. The place has, of course, been cleaned up but I’ve got a whole file filled with pictures taken when the scene was fresh.”

“Thanks,” Mackenzie said. “To start off, I think I’d like to take a look inside first.”

“Of course,” Dagney said, walking up the stairs and retrieving a key from her pocket. She unlocked the door and gestured for Mackenzie and Harrison to step inside ahead of her.

Mackenzie smelled bleach or some other sort of cleaner right away. She recalled the report stating that a dog had been trapped inside the house for at least two days and had used the bathroom several times.

“The bleach,” Harrison said. “Is that from cleaning up the dog’s mess?”

“Yes,” Dagney said. “That was done last night. We tried to leave it as it was until you guys arrived but the stench was just – it was bad.”

“That should be fine,” Mackenzie said. “The bedroom is upstairs, correct?”

Dagney nodded and led them up the stairs. “The only thing that’s been changed up here is that the bodies and the top sheet have been removed,” she explained. “The sheet is still there, on the floor and placed on a plastic sheet. It had to be moved, though, just to get the bodies off of the bed. The blood was…well, you’ll see.”

Mackenzie noticed that Harrison slowed his approach a bit, falling safely in behind her. Mackenzie followed Dagney to the bedroom door, noticing that she stayed at the doorway and did everything she could not to look inside.

Once she was inside the room, Mackenzie saw that Dagney had not exaggerated, nor had the reports she had read. There was a lot of blood – much more than she had ever seen at one site.

And for a horrifying moment, she was standing in a room in Nebraska – a room in a house she knew was now abandoned. She was looking at a blood-soaked bed that contained the body of her father.

She shook the image away at the sound of Harrison’s footsteps slowly approaching behind her.

“You good?” she asked him.

“Yeah,” he said, though his voice sounded a bit breathless.

Mackenzie noted that most of the blood was on the bed, as was expected. The sheet that had been removed from the bed and stretched out on the floor had once been an off-white. But now it was mostly covered in dried blood, going a rusty shade of maroon. She slowly approached the bed, pretty sure that there would be no evidence. Even if the killer had accidentally left behind a hair or anything with DNA, it would be buried in all of the blood.

She looked to the splatters on the wall and carpet. She eyed the carpet in particular, looking to see if any of the blood splatter could be the edge of a shoe.

There might be tracks of some kind, she thought. To kill someone in such a way – to have so much blood at the scene – the killer would have to have gotten some on him. So even if there are no tracks, maybe there’s stray blood somewhere within the house, blood he might have accidentally left behind on his way out.

Also, how did the killer get them both while in bed? Killing one, the other would have likely woken up. Either the killer is that fast or he staged the scene with the bodies in bed after committing the murders.

“This is a mess, huh?” Harrison said.

“It is,” Mackenzie said. “Tell me…do you see anything right off hand that you’d consider a lead, a clue, or anything to look deeper into?”

He shook his head, staring at the bed. She nodded in agreement, knowing that all of the blood would make it very hard to find any evidence. She even got down on her hands and knees, peering under the bed to see if there was anything under there. She saw nothing but a pair of slippers and an old photo album. She slid the album out and flipped through it. The first few pages showed a wedding, from the bride walking down the aisle of a large church to the happy couple cutting into their cake.

With a frown, she slid the album back where she had gotten it from. She then turned back to Dagney, still standing at the bedroom door with her back mostly turned. “You said you have files with photos, right?”

“I do. Give me a second and I can bring it all in.” She answered quickly and with a bit of urgency, clearly anxious to get back downstairs.

When Dagney was gone, Harrison walked back out into the hallway. He looked back into the bedroom and sighed deeply. “Have you ever seen a crime scene like this?”

“Not with this much blood,” she answered. “I’ve seen some grisly sites, but this one tops the list for amount of blood.”

Harrison seemed to think hard about this as Mackenzie exited the room. They headed back downstairs together, stepping into the living room just as Dagney came back in the front door. They met at the bar area that separated the kitchen from the living room. Dagney placed the folder on the bar and Mackenzie opened it up. Right away, the first picture showed the same bed upstairs, coated in blood. Only in the picture, there were two bodies – a man and a woman. The Kurtzes.

Both of them were clothed in what Mackenzie assumed was what they wore to bed. Mr. Kurtz (Josh, according to the reports) was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of boxers. Mrs. Kurtz (Julie) was wearing a spaghetti-strapped tank top and a pair of skimpy gym shorts. There were a variety of photographs, some taken so close to the bodies that Mackenzie caught herself cringing a few times. The photo of Mrs. Kurtz’s sliced neck was particularly gruesome.

“I didn’t see any positive ID on the weapon used within the reports,” Mackenzie said.

“That’s because no one had figured it out. Everyone just assumed a knife.”

A very big knife, at that, Mackenzie thought as she tore her eyes away from the body of Mrs. Kurtz.

She saw that apparently, even in death, Mrs. Kurtz had reached out for the comfort of her husband. Her right hand was draped almost lazily across his thigh. There was something very sweet about it but it also broke her heart a little.

“And what about the first couple that was killed?” Mackenzie asked.

“That was the Sterlings,” Dagney said, pulling several pictures and sheets of paper from the back of the folder.

Mackenzie looked at the pictures and saw a scene similar to what she had seen in the previous photos, as well as upstairs. A couple, lying in bed, blood everywhere. The only difference was that the husband in the Sterling photos had either been sleeping in the nude or had had his clothes removed by the killer.

These scenes are far too similar, Mackenzie thought. It’s almost as if they were staged. She looked over the similarities, looking back and forth between the Kurtz and Sterling photos.

The bravery and sheer will to kill two people at once – and in such a brutal way. This guy is incredibly driven. Very motivated. And apparently not opposed to extreme violence.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Mackenzie said, “but the Miami PD are working under the assumption that these were routine home invasions, correct?”

“Well, we were at first,” Dagney said. “But from what we can tell, there are no signs of looting or theft. And since this is the second couple to be killed in the last week, it seems less and less likely they were simple home invasions.”

“I’d agree with that,” she said. “What about links between the two couples?” Mackenzie asked.

“So far nothing has come up, but we’ve got a team working on it.”

“And with the Sterlings, were there any signs of a struggle?”

“No. Nothing.”

Mackenzie again looked back down at the pictures and two similarities jumped out at her at once. One of them in particular made her skin crawl.

Mackenzie glanced back at the Kurtz photos. She saw the wife’s hand resting dead on her husband’s thigh.

And she knew right then: this was indeed the work of a serial killer.