Allison Brennan: The Hunt

It was Gray who had taught her about guns.

The three of them took the food and beverages to Miranda’s Jeep. As she was about to get in, her father grabbed her arm. His blue eyes, a pale reflection of her own, shone with worry and concern. “Randy, be careful.”

She nodded, unable to say anything for fear the tears she’d held at bay since her moment of weakness at the university would break free. She hopped in, waved, and drove away.

Bill watched the Jeep until it disappeared around the bend, just past the sign that announced: You’re always welcome at Gallatin Lodge . He took out his bandanna, blew his nose.

Gray clamped his large hand on his friend’s shoulder. “She’ll be okay, Billy. She has a strong spirit.”

“I know. I know.” He breathed in deeply, eased the fresh mountain air from his lungs. “She deserves to be happy. I just love her so much, I hate seeing her go through this over and over again.”

“It’s what she’s meant to do. You can’t force her down your path, just like Nick couldn’t force her down his.”

Bill glanced at his friend. “Quinn Peterson called for a room.”

“You give him one?”

“Yep.”

“Miranda ain’t gonna be too happy with that.”

“Don’t I know it.” But he had amends to make. He only hoped that Miranda would forgive him when she learned the truth.

Elijah Banks thanked the God he no longer believed in that his luck was finally changing.

He tore out the back door of Gazette headquarters in Missoula and jumped into his rusting pickup truck. A quick glance at his watch told him he had just enough time to swing by his apartment and grab an overnight bag.

The Butcher had struck again. Rebecca Douglas’s body had been discovered an hour ago, and while the sheriff was being all hush-hush about it, Eli’s sixth sense told him it was the Butcher.

Co-ed missing about a week. Found dead. Butcher. Damn, he wished he’d been there from the beginning, but his editor wouldn’t give him the time. Instead, he’d spent Monday and Tuesday in Helena writing about yet another political bribery trial, and the last three days interviewing old people who’d had their identity stolen.

Boring boring boring.

But now that he had a dead body to follow up, his editor had given him the assignment. His police contact had provided few details, only that the woman’s body had been found and Sheriff Thomas ordered radio silence, called in the coroner, and was currently out at the ridge off Cherry Creek Road, south of the interstate.

If he played his cards right, he could catapult himself off of this mountain hellhole and land himself a real reporter slot in a real newspaper in a real city.

His apartment was only half a mile from the paper. He kept the truck running, and ran upstairs to throw clothes and his shaving kit into a backpack. He grabbed his tape recorder, extra pencils and pads, and his journal.

Twelve years ago Eli had started the journal to document everything about the Butcher investigation. Even when he moved up to Missoula, he’d kept informed every time another college girl was abducted, another body found.

The Bozeman Butcher . He’d named the killer in the first article after Moore’s story got out. It wasn’t his first choice. He wanted to name the killer The Woman Hunter, but his editor at the Chronicle , the stupid jerk Brian Collie, didn’t want to piss off the hunting community and told him to come up with something else. “Butcher” didn’t really fit because the guy didn’t really butcher his victims. He hunted them, then either shot them or sliced their throat. But the moniker stuck.

Collie was still around, never having amounted to much of anything because he’d never aspired to be more than the editor of the two-bit paper in Bozeman. Unlike Eli. He’d beaten the town and gotten as far as Missoula. At the time, it seemed like the perfect step. First Missoula, next Seattle. Then New York.

The plan had stalled in Missoula. But now-now there was hope he wouldn’t be stuck here for the rest of his miserable life.

Five minutes later, he was pulling onto the interstate headed south, toward the cow town of Bozeman. Normally he dreaded the drive, but today he fidgeted with excitement.

A hot story was just what he needed to land him a choice job at a major paper. Good-bye Missoula. Hello New York City.

Quinn tapped his fingers on the dashboard of Nick’s police-issue SUV. He hated being in the passenger seat. It seemed to take twice as long to get anywhere.

“You didn’t give me a lot of details on the phone last week,” he said to Nick. “The Douglas girl was abducted on Friday night?”

“Her roommate called it in about one Saturday morning. She hadn’t come back to the dorm after her shift at the Pizza Shack, the one right off the interstate. The responding officer found her car in the lot, her keys on the passenger seat.”

“Her purse?”

“Missing.”

Few personal effects of the young women had ever been recovered, which made Quinn suspect the killer kept them as souvenirs. To remember his victims.

“We bypassed the standard missing persons wait time because I knew, in my gut, it was the Butcher.”

“Was her car disabled?”

“No.”

“That’s a change.” Quinn wondered why, when up to now every victim of the Butcher had been stranded by the side of the road. Evidence showed that each vehicle had been disabled with molasses in the gas tank. The molasses clogged the fuel filter, resulting in no gasoline reaching the engine. The car just died two or three miles after the victim’s last stop.

When Penny Thompson disappeared fifteen years ago, her car had been recovered down a steep ravine. There was blood on the steering wheel, but no definite sign of foul play; the investigators at the time felt she’d wandered off and gotten lost due to a head injury, but the case had been left open.

Three years later, when Miranda’s car was found by the side of the road halfway between Gallatin Gateway and her father’s lodge near Big Sky, the Sheriff’s Department quickly connected the dots and called in the FBI.

Quinn’s life had irrevocably changed from that day forward.

“Some people insisted it wasn’t the Butcher, but-”

“Your instincts were right on the money.”

“Unfortunately.”

“We have two distinct advantages,” Quinn said. “First, a change in M.O. He didn’t disable the car. Maybe he didn’t have time. Maybe he acted spontaneously. Or maybe Rebecca Douglas knew him, wasn’t scared of him when he came up to her.”

“I thought of that angle, but all of the interviews so far have yielded squat.”

“I’d like to go through your notes.”

“Whatever you need.” Nick paused. “What’s the other advantage?”

“We found her body so quickly. It doesn’t help that it rained last night, but maybe the coroner can find something to tie back to a suspect, a hair, a thread from his clothes, something.” After viewing the body earlier, Quinn didn’t hold out much hope there’d be any usable evidence found on the victim, but science constantly improved and if there was anything to be found, he was confident it would be.

“If we can find the shack where he kept her captive there’s a much better chance any evidence would still be helpful,” Nick said.

“Good point.” Even when they’d found the dilapidated structures where the Butcher had restrained his victims before releasing the women in the wilderness, any evidence had been tainted or destroyed. The dampness, mold, and rot of the shacks destroyed most biological samples. They had no DNA, no fingerprints except for a partial that came up blank in the AFIS database, and no suspects.