Allison Brennan - The Prey

“You were a child, Rowan. A child forced to grow up very fast.”

“Bobby was different.”

Rowan never forgot Bobby’s cruelty. The silent terror he’d inflicted on all of them. Even Mama.

“Some people are just born evil,” John said.

She didn’t disagree. “I think Bobby took the worst of Daddy and twisted it. I mean, he was the oldest. He knew what was going on. He used to push Mel and Rachel around just like Daddy did to Mama. He’d hit them.”

“And no one did anything.” John’s voice was full of shock. Not a surprise. After all, he had had a perfect childhood.

“Once Mel went to Daddy. Told him that Bobby had hit Rachel so hard she fell down the stairs. Daddy and Bobby had a huge fight in the garage. Bobby left for days. And I was glad. So glad.

“But he came back.”

With a vengeance, Rowan thought. That was a year before the murders. When he turned eighteen, she had hoped he’d move out for good. But he didn’t.

“Bobby called my father weak and pussy-whipped. I didn’t know what that meant at the time. But he never challenged him to his face, except that one time. It was when Daddy wasn’t home that Bobby terrorized us. He broke Peter’s arm when he was a toddler. I saw him do it. But he told me if I told the truth, he would kill me. I believed him and told Mama it was an accident.”

“No one would blame you, Rowan,” John said.

“Would anything have been different if I’d told the truth then?” she continued, almost as if she hadn’t heard him. “Would Bobby have been sent away? Punished? Anything?”

She shook her head and released a deep, weary sigh. “I’ll never know.” She laughed, but felt no humor. Only a deep, pervading emptiness. She wondered if she’d ever feel whole again.

John squeezed her hand, held on with both of his. She felt cold to the touch. His throat was raw and scratchy. Tears of anger and rage threatened and he swallowed them down. No child should ever have to go through what Rowan did. The senselessness, the horror of everything she’d endured stabbed at his heart.

But what really angered him was not simply young Bobby’s evil. It was her parents. What had they been doing living with an abusive son, a young man who tormented them and their other children? How could they do nothing? How could her mother sit in the house, let her children witness her abuse, and not get them out of there?

There were two older girls. Couldn’t one of them have gone to the authorities? Surely they witnessed Bobby’s anger; they’d obviously been subject to it themselves. Yet Rowan placed everything on her own shoulders, as if she were the only one who could have done something yet had failed to act.

If only he could explain to her, reassure her, that her actions and inactions had nothing to do with what happened.

“Rowan, none of it was your fault,” John said quietly.

She shrugged. Had she even registered what he’d said? “I guess what I’m saying is that I expected Bobby to do something bad. Real bad.”

“Why do you think your father broke?”

“I just don’t know. It’s why I studied criminal psychology in college. It’s why I joined the FBI. For answers. And I found answers. But not about my daddy. Just the standard: Abusive spouses often kill or are killed.”

John pulled her to him. He couldn’t stand to hear the self-torture in her voice. Evil knew no bounds. Rich or poor, male or female, old or young. He didn’t know what made Robert MacIntosh kill his wife, but it had broken him forever. Twenty-three years without speaking, without even acknowledging the presence of another human being.

But Bobby MacIntosh was another story. If he was right and Rowan’s brother was the cause of the three-week, premeditated, expertly plotted killing spree, then his evil heart was more twisted, and far saner, than his father’s.

Roger Collins paced the waiting room of Beaumont, the maximum-security prison where Bobby MacIntosh had been incarcerated for the past year. The warden was transferring him into a private conference room, but Roger waited for Rowan.

He wanted to strangle John Flynn, but at the same time feared his theory was right. That Bobby MacIntosh was not in Beaumont, but instead was free and terrorizing Rowan.

Good intentions aside, he’d made a big mistake. A mistake that cost seven people their lives. And maybe more.

Bobby MacIntosh at eighteen-hardly a man-was more dangerous than most hardened criminals with decades of assaults under their belts. No remorse, and he certainly took a special glee in his killing night.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Special Agent Roger Collins,” Bobby MacIntosh had said twenty-three years ago when Roger interviewed him in a Boston jail cell.

Roger stood outside the cell and stared at the kid who’d killed three of his sisters.

“Lily is going to testify against you,” he’d told Bobby, wanting to see him squirm. “She’s alive and well and wants to send you to the electric chair.”

Bobby’s eyes narrowed as he glared at Roger.

“Massachusetts doesn’t have a death penalty. It’s unconstitutional,” he mocked.

“Too bad. I would have happily flipped the switch. Lily would have, too. You tried to break her, but she’s strong. Stronger than you think. Stronger than you’ve ever given her credit for. When she gets on the stand, not one juror is going to vote to acquit. You are going to spend the rest of your life in prison.”

He’d approached the bars, stood inches from them. He’d never felt such loathing toward a suspect in his life. After listening to Lily’s story, Roger hated this kid.

“And if you think you’ll be living for long behind bars,” he said, his voice low and even, “think again.”

Bobby just stared at him, his eyes mocking, casually reclining on the cot. “You don’t know me,” Bobby said, shaking his head. “I’m a survivor. And if you think I’m spending the rest of my life behind bars, you’re the one who’s deranged.”

Bobby sat up, put his hands on his knees, and narrowed his eyes. The hard anger in his face made Roger involuntarily swallow. This was the man Lily feared, the brother she had lived with for ten years, who killed without remorse. He did it for sheer pleasure.

“I will kill Lily. Not now, not tomorrow. Someday. I’ll take her scrawny neck and break it in two.”

“Don’t count on it,” Roger had said through clenched teeth. He turned and stormed out of the jail. But he heard Bobby MacIntosh’s final words.

“Don’t underestimate me, asshole.”

The next day he took Lily to see her father. And the strong little girl completely fell apart and needed to be sedated. It was only then that he feared she wouldn’t be able to take the stand, that testifying might permanently harm her. And after everything she’d gone through, he didn’t want her to face even more.

Bobby attempted to escape on the way to a preliminary hearing. He’d shot and killed two guards and had been gunned down. While he was in surgery, Roger prayed to a God he barely believed in that He would send Bobby to hell, where he belonged.

But the young killer lived.

Fortunately, the circumstances were different this time. Bobby had killed two cops. Roger convinced the D.A. that Lily wasn’t strong enough to withstand a trial. They tried MacIntosh for the murders of the cops instead of the murders of his family. Life in prison, no possibility of parole.

Damn Massachusetts; he should have gotten the death penalty.

Roger went to Lily and told her Bobby had been killed trying to escape.

Thinking back, it had been a good plan. MacIntosh was in prison, Lily spared the agony of the trial and the fear that her brother was alive and would hurt her. She grew up believing he was dead and couldn’t harm her. And she’d grown up lovely. Beautiful, smart, devoted. He’d pushed her into the FBI because she had the empathy and brains to make an outstanding agent.