The Hunt

PROLOGUE

I don’t want to die.

Her breath came in shallow gasps, her mouth gaped open as she violently pulled air in and pushed it out. In. Out. Focus. Run, Miranda, run! But be quiet. Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Wasn’t that a Dr. Seuss book? A hysterical giggle threatened to escape but she swallowed the sound. Quiet. Above all, breathe quietly.

Miranda grimaced at the thrashing behind her. A sob escaped from her friend.
Sharon
, shut up!
she wanted to scream.
He’ll hear you! He’ll kill us!

She ran faster even though Sharon was falling farther and farther behind. Daylight was scarce. One, two hours left at the most.

If they didn’t make it to the river, he would find them.

I don’t want to die. I’m too young. Please God, I’m only twenty-one. I won’t die! Not here, not like this.

Miranda’s sight blurred as sweat dripped into her eyes. She didn’t dare wipe her face for fear of losing her balance on the rocky terrain. Her bare feet ached with each step, but they were so cold only the sharper rocks cut through the numbness.
Watch where you’re going! One wrong step and you’ll break your leg and he’ll find you . . .

A faint, familiar echo reached her ears. She wanted to stop and listen but didn’t dare slow her pace. She scurried another hundred feet before putting a name to the sound.

Water! Running water.

It had to be the river. What she’d promised Sharon would lead to freedom. She silently thanked Professor Austin and his tedious geology class. Without it, she wouldn’t have known where to run, wouldn’t have recognized the signs indicating a river was close. After the miles she and Sharon had already covered, surely now they would make it.

From behind, a shriek.

Miranda stopped at Sharon’s startled cry, then whipped around, her heart gripped with dread. Sprawled on the hard ground, Sharon lay half obscured by undergrowth, sobbing in pain.

“Get up!” Miranda urged, panic clawing her.

“I can’t,” Sharon sobbed, her face buried in decaying leaves.

“Please,” Miranda begged, not wanting to backtrack. She glanced over her shoulder, toward freedom. The water so close.

She looked back at Sharon and bit her lip.
He
was still out there. If she stopped to help her friend, he’d kill them both.

She took a step toward the river. Guilt tickled Miranda’s spine. She
knew
she could make it alone.

“Go,” Sharon said.

Miranda almost missed the single word. Her eyes widened at the implication. “No, not without you. Get up!”

For a moment, Miranda thought Sharon hadn’t heard her, whether by choice or distance. Then, slowly, the blonde pushed herself up on all fours. Sharon’s terrified eyes locked with Miranda’s.
Please, Sharon, please,
Miranda willed.
Time is running out.

Sharon grabbed a small sapling and braced herself. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

Miranda sighed in relief as Sharon took a shaky step forward. She began to turn toward the river, toward freedom.

Whap-whap!

The shot echoed in the forest. The flutter of wings and the squawking of startled birds broke the silence. As Miranda watched, Sharon’s chest opened. Deep red, darkened by shadows of dusk, spread across the filthy white shirt. In the moment between life and death, Miranda watched Sharon’s stunned expression turn to bliss. Relief.

Death was better than suffering.

“Sharon!” She covered her mouth with her hand, tasting and smelling rotting dirt. The coppery scent of blood hung in the air. Her chest heaved with mute sobs as she watched Sharon’s body fall to the ground.

“Run.”

That voice.
Bloodcurdling in its dry, grave monotone. The same emotionless pulse he’d used when he fed them and whipped them; when he touched them or raped them.

She trembled even before she recognized his silhouette. In camouflage pants and a thick black coat, he stood among the trees, face obscured by a cap and the darkening sky. Three hundred feet away? Two hundred? Closer? She would never make it. She would die.

His shout echoed through the mountainside. He took one step forward, cradling a rifle. He brought the stock up to his shoulder.

Miranda ran.

CHAPTER

1

Twelve Years Later

Nick Thomas stared at the outline of the petite body under the blinding yellow tarp. He pinched the bridge of his nose, swallowing anger so bitter he could taste it. The foul stench of death surrounded him and he turned away.

He still pictured the dead, broken body of twenty-year-old Rebecca Douglas as he’d found her only an hour ago.

“Sheriff?”

Nick looked up as Deputy Lance Booker approached. He was clean-cut, a good cop, though a mite wet behind the ears. Much like Nick had been twelve years ago when he’d been called out to his first murder scene. “Deputy.”

“Jim said there’s a guy claiming to be an FBI agent at the road wanting to be let through. Quincy Peterson.”

Quinn. Nick hadn’t seen him in years, ten to be exact, but they’d shared an e-mail relationship since he was elected sheriff more than three years ago. After the Croft sisters had been found.

Now there were seven dead girls. Seven that they knew about.

“Let him through.”

“Yes, sir.” Booker frowned, but relayed the orders through his walkie-talkie. In matters that would as a rule fall under their local jurisdiction, no law officer welcomed outside interference, and usually Nick was no different. He didn’t mention that it was his call to Quinn last week that precipitated this visit.

Nick turned and walked away from the deputy, away from the bright tarp, down the path to where Rebecca Douglas’s last steps were evident. He squatted next to an unusable footprint, a mess in wet, hardening mud. It might have been Rebecca’s last step. Or the killer’s. It had rained nearly three inches in the last two days, a deluge that saturated a ground recently recovered from a cold, wet
Montana
winter. The clouds had broken this morning, the sky such a vivid blue and the air so refreshing that Nick would have enjoyed it if he hadn’t been called to a crime scene.

He closed his eyes and breathed the clean, crisp air of his
Gallatin
Valley
. He loved
Montana
, the vast beauty and sheer majesty of its mountains, its swift rivers, green valleys, big sky. The people were good, too, down-to-earth. They cared about their neighbors, took care of their own. When Rebecca Douglas was declared missing, hundreds of men and women—many from the university where she’d been a student—had scoured the wilderness between Bozeman and Yellowstone looking for her.

Nick’s jaw tightened in restrained fury. Good people, but for one. One who had killed Rebecca and at least six other women in the past fifteen years. And other women were still missing. Would they ever find their bodies? Had the harsh
Montana
weather or four-legged animals obliterated their remains? He’d never forget finding Penny Thompson’s remains—nothing but a skull and scattered bones. She was identified through her dental records.

Nick surveyed the area. Tall pines grew primarily downslope; as the mountain rose the trees thinned out. The ancient, heavily overgrown road he’d driven on was unmapped. Possibly an old logging trail, it appeared to end here, in this natural clearing roughly thirty feet square. On the edge of this clearing, Rebecca’s body lay.

They’d mark off the area in grids and search for anything that might possibly lead back to the killer. But if it was the same bastard, they’d find nothing. He was so damn perfect in his every crime that even their one surviving witness could tell them little. Defeat weighed heavily in Nick’s heart, but he would not give up.

Sometimes, he hated his job.

He turned when he heard an SUV roll into the clearing, rocks and muddy clumps of leaves shooting out from the backs of all four tires. Sun reflected off the windshield and Nick shielded his eyes to watch Quinn approach.

The SUV jerked to a stop behind Nick’s dark green police-issue truck. The driver’s door opened and Quincy Peterson jumped out, slamming the door behind him and striding toward Nick. Quinn hadn’t changed much since Nick had last seen him, still looked more like a damn cover model than a fifteen-year veteran of the FBI. Nick stood and absently brushed the dirt off his jeans.

“Rebecca Douglas?” Quinn nodded toward the covered body. His face was blank, but his dark eyes revealed the same anger and sadness that Nick felt.

“Yep. We’ll need a positive ID, but—” There was no doubt it was the missing woman. He glanced at Quinn and raised an eyebrow at the bandage over his left eye. “Bar fight?” he asked, half joking.

Quinn reached up and touched the bandage as if he’d forgotten it was there. “The last few days have been eventful,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it later.” He glanced around. “When are you processing the scene?”

“I wanted you to check it out first, but I have my men waiting up on the main highway.”

Nick didn’t know why the Fed made him feel so inferior. Maybe it had something to do with Quinn’s quiet confidence, his knack for seeing through bullshit, always getting to the heart of the matter. Or maybe it was because Nick had puked his guts out at his first murder scene and Quincy Peterson hadn’t.

Or maybe it was because the woman Nick loved was in love with Quinn.

Despite all that, there was no one Nick trusted more than Special Agent Quincy Peterson.

Quinn bent down, pulled on latex gloves, and lifted the tarp. His square jaw clenched and a vein twitched in his neck at the sight.

Rebecca had been beautiful. Now, her long blonde hair was tangled, matted, and caked in mud. The happy face reproduced on thousands of flyers was gone. She was swollen, bruised, grotesque in death. The recent rains had cleaned some of the dirt from her naked body, leaving her pale and blue.

Her neck had been cut, slashed deep with a sharp knife, though there was very little blood to see. Most of it had been washed into the ground by the storm, along with any trace evidence. Her body showed signs of abuse. Torture. Bruises of all shapes and hues of purple covered her skin. Her breasts had been clamped into some sort of vise. The strange marks wouldn’t have indicated that to most eyes, but both Nick and Quinn had read the coroner’s reports for each of the six other women murdered in these woods, and had grown familiar with this killer’s M.O.

Quinn removed the tarp to study the victim’s legs and feet, much as Nick had done when he first arrived on scene. Her left leg was crooked, broken. Her feet were covered in raw blisters and deep cuts. From running.

She was thin, so pale, empty. Clinically, her gaunt skin told the cops that she’d bled out, her life drained from her. She’d died quickly; nobody could survive long with their carotid artery sliced open. Small consolation for the previous week of terror she’d lived through.

Quinn covered the body. “Coroner been called?”

Nick nodded. “He’ll be out by noon. He was in the middle of an autopsy on that hiker we found up on the north ridge the other day.”

“So who found the body?”

“Three boys—the McClain brothers and Ryan Parker. The Parkers have a spread three, four miles west of here. The boys took a couple horses for the day, were going to shoot their .22s at rabbits and whatnot.” He shrugged and added, “It’s Saturday.”

“Where are they now?”

“A deputy took them home. Told them to sit tight at the Parkers’ until I came by.”

Quinn nodded, surveying the scene that Nick had marked with yellow and black crime scene tape. Observing the clearing, the old path, the trees.

“It looks like she came up through that brush over there,” Nick gestured. “I checked it out, but didn’t go down the trail yet.”

“If you can call it a trail,” Quinn said, frowning at the overgrowth. “I’ll take a quick look while you call in your team. How many people do you have?”

“I have a dozen of my own men right now, more later, and a crime scene specialist. I’ll need volunteers if we’re going to do this right.”

“Agreed. The more eyes the better, but no hotshots. We can’t have someone going off half-cocked.”

Quinn put his hand on Nick’s shoulder. “I know you were hoping the bastard dropped dead after Ellen and Elaine Croft were found. I’m sorry I couldn’t come out personally then. But Agent Thorne is good. She would have found something.”

Nick agreed, but he still felt so damn helpless. The Butcher was the only bastard who had ever gotten away with murder under his watch. “It’s been three frickin’ years! Three years since he killed. And we had nothing then—no clues, no leads, no suspects.”

“And there are other girls missing.” Quinn didn’t need to remind him. The missing girls haunted Nick in his sleep.

“It’s been slow, but we’re gathering evidence,” Quinn continued. “We have casings, bullets, a partial from Elaine Croft’s locket. We’ll get him.” Quinn turned and Nick watched him walk down the path. He sounded so confident. Why couldn’t Nick feel the same?