Free The Shack by William P. Young Page B

day’s strategy.
    Special Agent Samantha Wikowsky was sitting at a card table doing some map-work and drinking a large dripping bottle of water when Mack walked up. She offered him a grim smile, which he didn’t return, and an extra bottle, which he accepted. Her eyes were sad and tender but her words were all business.
    “Hey, Mack.” She hesitated. “Why don’t you pull up a chair?”
    Mack didn’t want to sit down. He needed to do something to stop his stomach from churning. Sensing trouble, he stood and waited for her to continue.
    “Mack, we found something, but it’s not good news.”
    He fumbled for the right words. “Did you find Missy?” It was the question that he didn’t want to hear the answer to, but desperately needed to know.
    “No, we didn’t find her.” Sam paused and started to stand up. “But, I do need you to come and identify something we found down in that old shack. I need to know if it was—” she caught herself, but it was too late, “I mean, if it is hers.”
    His gaze went to the ground. He again felt a million years old, almost wishing he could somehow turn himself into a big unfeeling rock.
    “Oh, Mack, I’m so sorry,” Sam apologized, standing up. “Look, we can do this later if you like. I just thought . . .”
    He couldn’t look at her and even found it difficult to come up with words that he could speak without falling apart. He could feel the dam about to burst again. “Let’s do it now,” he mumbled softly. “I want to know everything there is to know.”
    Wikowsky must have signaled the others because, although Mack didn’t hear anything, he suddenly felt Emil and Tommy each take one of his arms as they turned and followed the special agent down the short path to the shack. Three grown men, arms locked in some special grace of solidarity, walking together, each one toward his own worst nightmare.
    A member of the forensic team opened the door of the shack to let them in. Generator-powered lighting illuminated every part of the main room. Shelving lined the walls, an old table, a few chairs, and an old sofa that someone had hauled in with no little effort. Mack immediately saw what he had come to identify and, turning, crumpled into the arms of his two friends and began to weep uncontrollably. On the floor by the fireplace lay Missy’s torn and blood-soaked red dress.
    For Mack, the next few days and weeks became an emotion-numbing blur of interviews with law enforcement and the press, followed by a memorial service for Missy with a small empty coffin and an endless sea of faces, all sad as they paraded by, no one knowing what to say. Sometime during the weeks that followed, Mack began the slow and painful merging back into everyday life.
    The Little Ladykiller, it seemed, was credited with taking his fifth victim, Melissa Anne Phillips. As was true in the other four cases, authorities never recovered Missy’s body, even though search teams had scoured the forest around the shack for days after its discovery. As in every other instance, the killer had left no fingerprints and no DNA. He’d left no useful evidence anywhere, only the pin. It was as if the man were a ghost.
    At some point in the process, Mack attempted to emerge from his own pain and grief, at least with his family. They had lost a sister and daughter, but it would be wrong for them to lose a father and husband as well. Although no one involved was left unmarked by the tragedy, Kate seemed to have been affected the most, disappearing into a shell, like a turtle protecting its soft underbelly from anything potentially dangerous. It seemed that she would only poke her head out when she felt fully safe, which was becoming less and less often. Mack and Nan both worried increasingly about her, but couldn’t seem to find the right words to penetrate the fortress she was building around her heart. Attempts at conversation would turn into one-way monologues, with sounds bouncing off her stone visage. It