The Prey Read online

  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 seemed to move the sky. 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 filthy 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 made out 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 shared an e-mail relationship since he’d been elected sheriff more than three years ago. After the Denver sisters had been found.

  Now there were seven dead girls. 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. Nick 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 heavy deluge that saturated a ground recently recovered from a cold, wet Montana winter. The clouds broke 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 turned up 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 had been identified through her dental records.

  Nick surveyed the area. Tall pines grew primarily downslope; as the mountain rose the trees thinned out. Possibly an old logging trail, the ancient, heavily overgrown road he’d driven on was unmapped. 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 heavy 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 shut and striding toward Nick. Quinn hadn’t changed much since Nick had last seen him, he 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 quite 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 that 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 back the tarp. His square jaw clenched and a vein twitched in his neck at the sight.

  Rebecca had been beautiful. Now, her long blond hair was tangled, matted and caked in mud. The happy face reproduced on thousands of flyers was gone. She was swollen, purple, grotesque in death. The recent rains had washed 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. It had been washed into the ground by the rain, 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 white, so pale, lifeless. Clinically, her gaunt, thin skin told the cops that she’d bled out, her life drained from her. She died quickly; nobody could survive long with the carotid artery sliced open. Small consolation for the previous week of terror she’d lived through.

  Quinn covered
the body again. “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 Rebecca’s 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 underbrush 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 just take a 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 hot shots. 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 Denver 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 Nick. 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 Denver’s locket. We’ll get him.” Quinn turned and walked down the path. He sounded so confident. Why couldn’t Nick feel the same?

  He glanced down at the outline of Rebecca Douglas. At least she would have a proper burial. Closure for her family. But not for him.

  He thought of Miranda.

  He started toward his truck. He’d put in the call for all available law enforcement to head to this location. Then he heard the unique but familiar sound of a Jeep bouncing over the rough trail. He didn’t need to see the vehicle to know who approached.

  “Damn.”

  The red Jeep jerked to a stop behind Quinn’s rental. Almost before the truck halted, Miranda Moore jumped out, the mud no match for her heavy boots and confident stride. Deputy Booker approached her, and she glared at him without stopping as she pulled a red down-filled vest over her black flannel shirt. In any other situation, Nick would have grinned at the way Booker backed off.

  Then she focused her sharp blue eyes on him.

  His heart quickened and his stomach lurched. If only he’d had more time to prepare for her inevitable arrival. If he’d been warned she was on her way, he could have steeled himself for the confrontation.

  “Miranda,” he said as she approached, “I—”

  “Damn you, Nick!” She poked a finger at his chest. “Damn you!” Nothing intimidated Miranda. Though she was tall for a woman—at least five-foot-nine—he had six inches and a hundred pounds on her. You’d think he’d intimidate her, that any man would frighten her after what she’d gone through, but he guessed he shouldn’t be surprised. She was a survivor. She didn’t expose her fear.

  “Miranda, I was going to call you. I didn’t know for certain it was Rebecca. I didn’t want you to have to go through it again.”

  Her darkening eyes told him she didn’t believe him. “Screw that. Screw you! You promised you’d call.” She brushed past him and strode over to the tarp, staring at the covered body. Her fists clenched, her shoulders reverberated in tension.

  Nick wanted to stop her; to protect her from seeing another dead girl. Most of all, he wanted to protect her from herself.

  And she’d always been perfectly clear that she didn’t want Nick’s protection.

  Miranda worked to control her temper. She shouldn’t have yelled at Nick, but dammit! He’d promised. For seven days she’d been searching for Rebecca, the nightmares destroying the few hours of sleep she allowed herself. He’d promised she’d be the first to know when they found her.

  Neither she nor Nick had expected to find Rebecca alive.

  She stared at the yellow tarp in the middle of the quiet earth tones of the land and inhaled sharply, her throat raw with hot anger and unwanted, ice-cold fear. Her fists squeezed into tight balls, her nails digging into her palms. She knew it was Rebecca Douglas. But she had to see for herself, force herself to look at the latest victim. For strength, for courage.

  For vengeance.

  She pulled latex gloves over her long fingers, knelt beside the still woman, and fingered the edge of the tarp. “Rebecca,” she said, her voice a whisper, “you’re not alone. I promise you I’ll find him. He’ll pay for what he did to you.”

  She swallowed, hesitated, then drew back the tarp to reveal the girl she’d been searching for, twenty hours a day for the last seven days.

  At first, Miranda didn’t see the swollen face, the slit throat, or the many cuts washed clean by the rain. The image of the young twenty-year-old in Miranda’s mind was beautiful, as she had been when she was alive.

  Rebecca had a contagious laugh, according to her best friend Candi. Rebecca cared about those less fortunate and volunteered one night a week reading to the infirm at Deaconess, according to her career counselor Ron Owens. A straight-A student, Rebecca had wanted to be a veterinarian, according to her biology teacher Greg Marsh.

  Rebecca hadn’t been perfect. But no one had shared the less attractive stories while she’d been missing.

  No one would ever repeat them now that she was dead.

  As she watched, the image of Rebecca she’d held so close to her heart during the hours and hours of searching morphed into the broken body before her.

  “You’re free,” she told her. “Free at last.”

  Sharon. I’m so sorry.

  “No one can hurt you anymore.”

  She reached over and touched her hair, brushed a matted piece to the side, cupped her cheek.

  Stay in control.

  She repeated her mantra. How many times would she have to go through this? How many dead girls would they bury? She’d thought it would get easier. But if she didn’t keep her emotions tight and protected, she feared she’d collapse under the enormity of the Butcher’s continued success—and her own failure to stop him.

  She eased the tarp over Rebecca’s face, hating to do it. The act of covering the body reminded Miranda of the other dead girls they’d found. Of Sharon.

  The morning Miranda led them to Sharon’s body was so cold she’d shivered constantly under the half dozen layers of clothing she wore. She’d wanted to return the day after she’d been rescued, but she hadn’t been allowed to leave the hospital. When she’d tried walking on her own, her damaged feet had failed her.

  She’d been too numb to cry, too tired to argue. She’d mapped out the location as best she could remember, but the search team couldn’t find Sharon.

  Miranda couldn’t bear the thought of her friend’s body exposed for yet another night. Leaving her to the bears and cougars and bugs. So the following morning she withstood the pain in her legs and led the search team and law enforcement back to where Sharon lay. She had to see her one last time.

  She might have been in shock; that’s what the doctors said. But she walked with help. She knew where Sharon had fallen, would never forget it. She brought them to the spot, and there Sharon lay. Exactly as she’d fallen when the hunter killed her.

  Silence filled the air, b
irds and animals mourning with the humans. Even the spring wind held its breath; not one leaf rustled as everyone finally grasped exactly what had happened to Miranda and Sharon.

  The sudden cry of a hawk split the stillness, and the wind gently blew.

  The medic covered Sharon’s body with a bright green plastic tarp while the sheriff’s team started searching for evidence. Miranda couldn’t stop staring at the tarp. Sharon was dead underneath it, reduced to a lump under a sheet of plastic. So wrong, so inhuman.

  It was then that Miranda had first broken down and cried.

  An FBI agent carried her the three miles back to the road. His name was Quincy Peterson.

  The Prey is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Ballantine Books Mass Market Original

  Copyright © 2006 by Allison Brennan

  Excerpt from The Hunt copyright © 2006 by Allison Brennan

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming mass market edition of The Hunt by Allison Brennan. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eISBN 0-345-49076-2

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  v1.0