Блейк Пирс - Before He Longs

“After that day, how long passed before you started to get frightened? I don’t see where you filed a missing persons report or anything like that.”

“Well, I’m taking classes at the community college, getting my GPA up to get back to college and finally finish. It’s a huge workload and that’s on top of a job where I put in forty to forty-five hours a week. So there would be four or five days that would go by where Claire and I wouldn’t see one another. But after three days and no texts or calls, I did start to get worried. I went by her apartment to check on her and she didn’t answer. I thought about calling the police, but it seemed stupid. And really, deep in the back of my head, I wondered if she had just up and left me. That maybe the whole idea of getting married had scared her or something.”

“On that last time you saw her, did she seem okay? Was she acting out of the ordinary?”

“No, she was great. In a good mood.”

“By any chance, do you know what she was going to the storage unit to store?”

“Probably some of her textbooks from college. She’d been carrying them around in her trunk for a while.”

“Do you know how long she’d been renting that unit?”

“About six months. She was moving stuff from California and storing it. Again…we had this thing where we felt we were going to get married so instead of moving stuff straight into her apartment, she left some of it in the unit. It’s why she rented it at all, I think. I told her she didn’t need it but she kept saying how it would be so much easier when we moved in together.”

“I asked about Claire having any enemies…but how about you? Is there anyone that would do this to hurt you?”

Barry looked stunned, as if he had never considered such a thing. He shook his head slowly and she thought he might start weeping. “No. But I almost wish there was. It would help to make sense of this. Because I just don’t know anyone that would want Claire dead. She was just…she was very kind. The sweetest person you could ever meet.”

Mackenzie could tell that he was being sincere. She also knew that she was not going to get anything out of Barry Channing. She placed one of her business cards on the table and slid it over to him.

“If you think of anything at all, please call me,” she said.

He took the card and only nodded.

Mackenzie felt that she should say something else but it was one of those moments where it was clear that there was nothing more to say. She made her way to the door and as she closed it behind her she felt a pang of regret as she heard Barry Channing begin to cry.

The rain outside was little more than a mist now. As she walked back to her car, she called Ellington, hoping the rain would die out completely. She wasn’t quite sure why it was bothering her so much. It just did.

“This is Ellington,” he answered, never one to check his display before answering.

“You done with watching TV yet?”

“I am, actually,” he replied. “I’m working with Deputy Rising right now to cross off the people on the list that they’ve already spoken to. Anything new on your end?”

“No. But I want to go to the storage unit that the first body was found in. Can you get that information from Rising and meet me in front of the station in about twenty minutes? And see if someone can get the owner on the phone.”

“Can do. See you then.”

They ended the call and Mackenzie drove on, thinking of the grieving boyfriend she had left behind…thinking of Claire Locke, alone in the dark, starving and terrified in her last moments.

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.