The Hunt

CHAPTER 3

Miranda broke every traffic law on the books driving back to Montana State University in Bozeman. She dreaded telling the search volunteers that Rebecca was dead.

Nick was right: they needed the resources of the FBI if they were going to catch the Butcher. But out of all the agents in the country, why Quinn Peterson?

She thought she’d gotten over his betrayal years ago. She loved her job, had a good home, family who loved her, and loyal friends.

Then she saw him; now she realized deep down, in the farthest recesses of her heart, in the corner she’d thought long hardened against love, she still ached for him.

Why couldn’t she be as nonchalant and formal as he had been? Miranda very much wanted it to appear that she didn’t care in the least that Quinn had both ruined her career and broken her heart.

Miranda pulled into one of the many parking lots on campus, gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles were white with the strain. She slammed the gear shift into park and shut off the engine. She tried to shove Quinn back into the mental compartment in which he’d been stuffed for years, but he didn’t go willingly.

She took a deep breath and watched a group of girls walk toward search headquarters in the Student Union Building. Then a pair of girls. Then a group of professors.

No one walked alone. Not when they were reminded about the Butcher. But how long would it take before they grew complacent again? A month? Two? A year? Miranda never forgot. The Butcher lived with her every minute of every day, taunting and tormenting.

The dean of students had allowed search volunteers to take over one of the large rooms in the Student Union to coordinate activities. Although Miranda worked for the Sheriff’s Department in the small Search and Rescue division, they didn’t have the space to bring in people to phone, copy flyers, distribute maps. Like the other times girls disappeared, the University provided the space they needed-anything to help. In times of tragedy, students and teachers united.

Why did it take death for people to see the value of life?

It had been three years since the last murder. Last known murder.

Miranda couldn’t forget the other girls who’d disappeared. This time last year it was Corinne Atwell. No one had seen her since her car was found in a ditch on Route 191 outside Gallatin Gateway. Was she a victim of the Butcher? Of another killer? Or had she run away? The very real possibility that Corinne had been the Butcher’s victim, her body decomposing in the wilderness somewhere in the millions of acres between Bozeman and Yellowstone where the Butcher hunted, haunted Miranda.

Thoughts like these creeping across her brain gave her insomnia.

Whack! Whack!

The whip came down once, twice, stinging her raw flesh and she tried to scream, but her voice had long since deserted her. She was left to her silent tears, and the echo of Sharon’s pleas.

Their pleas meant nothing to the faceless monster who tortured them. Their relief when he left soon turned to horror. They’d become dependent on him. He fed them, gave them water. If he left forever, they’d die, naked and chained to the floor in the middle of nowhere.

But he did return. To release them. So they could play the part of prey in his sick game. The hunter and the hunted.

Finding the Butcher meant more than justice. Only he could tell them who he had killed. That he had so much control over the grief of the living ate at Miranda constantly.

Rebecca had survived eight days in the hands of that madman, that murdering bastard. She had almost escaped. Almost.

As with Sharon, “almost” meant shit when you were dead.

Sitting in her car in the parking lot, Miranda took a deep breath. Closing her eyes, she buried her head in her arms, using the steering wheel as an armrest.

The tears came fast, anger and frustration boiling over in hot, salty rivulets down her cheeks. Her body, already sore from days of backbreaking searches, ached from the tension of facing Quinn again. She sobbed and shook, no sound escaping except the harsh intake of ragged breaths. It took her several minutes to control her grief. Even once she’d composed herself, it was hard to stay calm: when she looked at her face in the rearview mirror she saw death.

Seven times she had seen the dead girls. But there were nine young women still missing, their remains nothing but bones scattered in the wilderness. Bears and mountain lions didn’t care much for human dignity, didn’t adhere to Judeo-Christian burial rites.

Why me?

Why had she survived when so many others hadn’t? Why had he picked her in the first place? Why Rebecca Douglas or the Croft sisters? It made no sense. It hadn’t then, and it still didn’t now that she’d had twelve years to examine and reexamine everything leading up to her kidnapping, everything she’d endured in that godforsaken one-room torture shack, everything that had happened since she escaped.

She owed her father, that much she knew. If her father hadn’t taken her on the hunting trips she loathed as a child, she would never have known how to cover her tracks, how to deceive the hunter. She was the prey, but unlike the deer or bear her father hunted, she was an intelligent human being. She could outthink her pursuer, hide and run, run and hide, until she dove into the river… even if she had died in the icy water, she still would have won.

He would not have killed her. She would have escaped, stealing from him his trophy, his prize.

She’d not only won, but lived.

If Rebecca hadn’t fallen and broken her leg, would she have survived? Would she have made it to the road? Though not from Montana, Rebecca had been born and raised in the small, mountain community of Quincy, California. Similar terrain and-Miranda’s thoughts detoured from Rebecca.

Quincy. Damn, she couldn’t escape him.

Wiping the tears from her face, she glanced once more in the rearview mirror. No wonder Quinn thought she couldn’t handle the search. She looked horrible. She’d lost weight she couldn’t afford to lose. She hadn’t bothered with makeup and her dark hair, though clean, was limp.

What was she thinking? Why should she care what Quinn Peterson thought? He’d destroyed their bond long ago when he made it clear he thought her sanity hung by a thread.

She’d told him he was wrong, but he hadn’t listened. Well, she’d proven him wrong, hadn’t she? She was a functioning human being, doing just fine without the likes of Quinn Peterson.

She had responsibilities, and right now her duty was to tell the volunteers to stop searching. She dreaded this particular task, but she needed to handle it herself.

With a deep breath, she left the security of her Jeep and entered the makeshift search headquarters. Several students were on the phones, taking information or imparting details to aid in the search. A team had walked in just ahead of Miranda to pick up another section of the grid she’d mapped.

None of it mattered.

The tears she thought she’d buried sprang back into her eyes and she pinched the bridge of her nose. She swallowed them back. Not now.

The strangled cry of one of the girls snapped Miranda to attention.

“No. NO!”

Judy Payne, Rebecca’s roommate, was the one who’d called the police when Rebecca didn’t come home Friday night. She hadn’t left the headquarters since it had opened, answering phones, sending e-mails, printing thousands of flyers. Now, she stopped folding letters and stared at Miranda with wide eyes.

“Judy.” Miranda crossed the room to where the college girl sat, shaken.

“No, please.” Judy searched her eyes for something other than the truth, tears streaming down her face.

Miranda squatted next to the young, pretty blonde and took her hands. She had thought with each passing year it would be easier. The searches were well planned and executed, volunteers trained and competent, cops diligent and resolute. But it only got harder. Each time it was so much harder. Each missing girl took one more piece of Miranda’s soul with her to her grave.

“I’m sorry.” What else could she say? Sorry seemed so inadequate, so empty.

Judy collapsed into Miranda’s arms. Miranda held her, rocked her, murmured sounds into her ear, words that didn’t mean anything but she hoped comforted.

There was no need to say anything to the other dozen people in the room. Judy’s reaction told them what they needed to know. Tears rolled down the faces of the men and women who had believed, for a time, that they would find Rebecca alive.

Karl Keene, a young teaching assistant, approached them. Looking up, Miranda saw his eyes were also damp. She wanted to reassure him, and Judy, and everyone else, but there were no words. The weight of Judy’s grief fell hard on Miranda’s shoulders. What in the world could she reassure them about? That this time the police would find him? That this time he’d made a mistake?

She wanted to scream at the injustice that another girl was dead and they had nothing on her killer.

Instead, she reached out and squeezed Karl’s arm.

“I’ll take care of her,” he said, and took hold of the sobbing girl.

Miranda blinked back her own tears as she watched Karl wrap his arms around Judy and lead her outside. For a split second, she wished someone would hold her. Comfort her. Tell her everything was going to be okay, even if it wasn’t. Sometimes she needed to believe the lie.

But Quinn had given up on her, and she’d let Nick walk away. She had no one.

When they were gone, she noticed the other people in the room staring at her. She cleared her throat and spoke, her voice rough.

“Sheriff Thomas discovered Rebecca’s body this morning about four miles west of Cherry Creek Road and ten miles south of Route 84. Deputies are searching the area for clues, but-”

“It’s the Butcher?”

Miranda turned to the person who’d interrupted her, then looked down. It was Greg Marsh, Rebecca’s biology teacher, a squat, round man with rimless glasses.

“I-I can’t say. I-” she began.

“Yes you can. You were there.” He pointed to her feet. She looked down and blinked. She hadn’t noticed the mud caked on her boots.

“Greg, you know I can’t say anything.”

“You don’t have to.” He turned and left the room.

The others continued staring at Miranda. She needed to be alone, but she had a duty to everyone in this room. Though alive, they too were victims of the Butcher. Guilt crept down her throat as she fervently wished at times like these that she felt no responsibility to the victims, living or dead. What could she say to console Greg, Judy, the others?

She knew what Rebecca had gone through. And thanks to the newspapers detailing the tragedies each and every time the Butcher killed, so did everyone else. There was no consolation. Everyone knew Rebecca had been tortured, raped, and hunted like an animal.

Everyone knew the exact same thing had happened to Miranda.

She swallowed the humiliation, the pain, the fear-tinged anger boiling within. Few people talked to her anymore about her own abduction and escape. She knew they whispered among themselves about her, but she ignored it. She had to. Thinking, knowing, what people thought about her made dealing with her nightmares more difficult.

Miranda sighed in relief as tear-filled people gathered in the corner, murmuring among themselves. They didn’t expect her to talk, to placate them. To tell them everything was going to be all right when nothing would ever be all right until the Butcher was caught.

She walked over to the map she’d created of the area they’d been searching. She’d divided Gallatin County into four quadrants, uneven because of the mountainous terrain. Each quadrant was split into dozens of segments.

They hadn’t covered even two quadrants since last Saturday.

Six red dots, almost invisible to the naked eye, identified where the bodies of six college girls had been found. Hand shaking, she pulled a fine-tipped red pen from her pocket and placed a dot where Rebecca had died. The seventh victim. The seventh known victim, Miranda reminded herself.

She didn’t need the red dots to tell her where the bodies were found; she didn’t need the blue dots to tell her where the women were last seen. She had the same map-with far more detail-on the wall of her home office. Too many nights, she sat on her bed staring at the topography, willing the dots and lines and grids she’d created to tell her something, anything, about this bastard who hunted women.

A sob caught in her throat and she covered her mouth with her hands. She turned her attention to the dot southeast of Rebecca’s and touched it. Sharon’s spot.

She had to get back up the mountain. Only, Quinn was there.

Twelve years ago Quinn had been her rock, her support. He’d saved her in ways she remembered when she allowed herself to. Alone, in bed, with only her quiet tears for company.

She’d never forget meeting him at the hospital the day after she took the sheriff’s search team to where Sharon had been killed.

Though he’d carried her three miles the day before, she’d been too upset for a formal introduction. She hadn’t even known his name. And she was grateful he didn’t bring up her breakdown as he spoke to her while she lay in the hospital bed.

He didn’t coddle her like the nurses; he didn’t cry like her father; he didn’t shuffle his feet nervously like Sheriff Donaldson had when he interviewed her the day before.

Quinn Peterson stood like granite, tall, strong, firm, never wavering, never letting her see pity in his eyes.

Her entire body ached. The cuts on her feet stung even with the antibiotics and painkillers. Many of the cuts on her body had to be stitched, leaving scars she’d have for the rest of her life. The doctors had saved her breasts, though the damage had been severe.

She was alive, Sharon was dead. The scars on her skin were nothing compared to the jagged pain of guilt splitting her heart.

“You don’t have to do this,” Special Agent Quincy Peterson told Miranda when she said she would take him back to where she and Sharon had been held captive.

“Yes I do, Agent Peterson,” she’d said when they left the hospital. “I have to take you.”

She couldn’t think about her pain. Not now. She would do anything to find the man who murdered Sharon, because her best friend was dead and she was alive.

If it took going back to the rotting, moldy, rodent-infested hovel she’d been imprisoned in for seven hellish days, she would do it.

“I understand,” he said, and she believed he did. Everyone else who’d spoken to her seemed to want to placate her, but not this man. “Do you think you could call me Quinn? Agent Peterson seems too formal.”

“Okay.”

She had pinpointed the general area on the map and they drove in as far as they could before having to get out on foot, but they were three miles away.

If only they’d run in the other direction! They’d have hit a narrow road, but a road nonetheless. Would that have changed their fate? Would Sharon still be alive?

“I told her we should split up,” Miranda whispered when it was just her and Agent Peterson-Quinn.

“That was a good idea.”

“Sharon refused. We were so scared, I didn’t argue. And-” She stopped.

“Go on.”

“We didn’t understand why he was releasing us. Until we saw the gun. Then it was very clear-he wanted to hunt us down like animals. I don’t think we even thought about it, we certainly didn’t talk about it. We had no time. He told us to run.”

Run. Run!

“And we both knew exactly what he was going to do. He was going to kill us. Injured game.” She laughed bitterly.

During that walk, Quinn stayed at her side. Asked her quiet, firm questions. Never saying he was sorry. Never placating her. Never telling her she should have done something different, as she had the million times she’d questioned herself in the seventy-two hours since she’d been found on the bank of the Gallatin River.

She led them right to the decrepit shack in the middle of Nowhere, Montana, six miles west of the river where she’d jumped to her freedom. She stared at the rotting, worn planks that had been thrown up, seeming too weak to support the corrugated tin roof. She’d seen the outside of the shack for only a brief moment before she and Sharon started to run. But the inside of the cabin was burned into her mind.

Miranda couldn’t go inside. She sat in the dirt and cried.

Quinn went in. The sheriff’s people gathered evidence at his direction. Sheriff Donaldson was nearing retirement and wanted to catch Sharon’s killer as his swan song, so he took all advice from the FBI agent he’d called in the day before.

Quinn then sat down on the ground next to her.

“You’re going to get your nice pants dirty” was all she could think of saying. He certainly wasn’t dressed for a mountain trek, but he didn’t seem to care that his expensive shoes were scuffed and dirty.

“I will find this guy. I promise you, he will pay for what he did to you and Sharon.”

She stared at him, searching his dark eyes for pity, revulsion, or distaste. All she saw was strength, compassion, and anger.

“I will do everything I can to help.”

But in the end, for all the internal agony Miranda endured going back to the shack, searching the woods, finding the bones of a body they strongly suspected was the Butcher’s first victim, they couldn’t catch the killer. They didn’t have any clues to direct them. Little evidence, fewer leads, no suspects.

Two months later Quinn was called back to the Seattle field office. She thought she’d never see him again, and it hurt because she really liked him.

She was wrong. Quinn returned a month later, just to see her.

That was when she really began to heal.