Allison Brennan: The Hunt

“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.