Before He Longs

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.”