The Hunt (6 page)

“Much obliged, Richard,” Nick said. “We’ll need to search on foot to avoid contaminating possible evidence.”

Parker nodded. “Yes, yes. Of course.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I thought—I guess I thought that it was over.”

I didn’t,
Quinn thought. “Serial killers only stop when they are incarcerated or die.”

“But it’s been three years.”

Quinn shook his head. “There is every reason to believe Corinne Atwell was also a victim of the Butcher, and she went missing May first of last year. The wilderness is unforgiving. Animals, weather, terrain. We may never know how many girls he’s killed.”

“What’s the FBI’s interest this time?” Parker raised his eyebrow. “You weren’t here when the twins were found.”

“Actually,” Nick corrected him, “Special Agent Thorne was here after the Croft sisters were abducted, and again when Corinne Atwell turned up missing. I called Agent Peterson in last week because of his familiarity with the case. I don’t have to tell you that the resources of the federal government are far greater than our county’s.”

Quinn had no more time for small talk. Kids needed to be interviewed as soon as possible after witnessing a crime or finding evidence. If left too long to think about things, their minds tended to replace facts with fantasy, much of it from television. “Where are the boys, sir?”

“In the barn.” Parker motioned for Quinn to sit. “I’ll get them for you.”

“No need. I think they’ll be more comfortable if they’re doing something with their hands. Grooming horses sounds like a good task.”

“I’ll take you,” Parker said.

Nick held Quinn back several feet behind Parker to speak to him privately. “I want to see the horses’ hooves,” he said quietly. He couldn’t imagine that the boys would have any reason to lie, but he liked to confirm statements with solid evidence.

The stable stood several hundred feet behind the house and Quinn heard the low murmur of the boys within the stalls.

“Ryan! Sheriff Thomas is here to talk to you.”

Ryan Parker was almost eleven, the image of his father with blond hair and brown eyes. Unusually handsome for a young boy, he seemed older, almost worldly, compared to the McClain brothers.

“Ryan,” Nick began, “this is Special Agent Quincy Peterson. He’s with the FBI.”

Ryan’s eyes widened with excitement. “The FBI? Really? Can I see your badge?”

“Ryan,” his father said sternly.

Quinn ignored Parker and squatted down so he looked up at the boy. “Sure,” he said as he pulled his wallet out of his jacket pocket. He flipped it open and showed his badge and credentials to the wide-eyed kid.

Ryan didn’t touch, but looked with interest. “Do you have to go to a special school to be a special agent?”

“After four years of college, I spent sixteen weeks at a special training camp called Quantico. I also took an extra year to get a master’s degree in criminology.”

“Is it hard?”

“Parts of it. You want to be a federal agent?”

Ryan glanced at his father, and Quinn noticed a touch of fear in the boy’s eyes. Perhaps his father simply expected him to follow in his footsteps, Quinn thought. He could relate. The fact that he wasn’t “Doctor Peterson” still weighed heavily in his parents’ house. “Maybe,” Ryan said, noncommittal.

“Can Sheriff Thomas and I ask you and your friends a few questions?”

“About the dead girl.”

“Yeah.”

Sean and Timmy McClain were brushing a horse, though they’d been listening with interest, evident from the fact that the smaller brother was brushing air.

“Guys, come over here,” Quinn called.

They dropped the grooming tools in a bucket and rushed over, introducing themselves. Sean was the older brother, acting tough and important. Timmy, the smaller boy, couldn’t stop moving, his eyes wide with interest. Quinn noted Ryan’s leadership role in the trio as he stood and the boys gathered behind him, sitting on stacks of hay. Quinn didn’t like the way Richard Parker stood formally at the side, looking every inch a judge, but considering this was an informal interview with minors, he couldn’t very well ask the father to leave. Especially when the father was an attorney.

“Ryan, why don’t you tell me what you boys were doing this morning, in your own words. Timmy, Sean, pipe up if you think of anything to add. There are no right or wrong answers. And no one remembers everything, so one of you might remember something another doesn’t. Understand?”

They all nodded as Quinn and Nick took out their notepads. Ryan spoke. “We took the horses out at seven this morning. Sean and Timmy spent the night because we wanted to go early, and they live in town.”

“Mom works weekends,” Timmy said with a bob of his head. “We come here a lot.”

“It’s probably fun to hang out at a ranch with horses and cool stuff to do,” Quinn said, smiling.

Timmy nodded. “Oh, yeah, and we get to—” His brother hit him hard in the arm.

“Shut up,” Sean said. “They only want to know about the dead girl.”

Timmy looked sheepish.

“That’s okay,” Quinn told the younger boy. “You never know what might be important in an investigation.”

The boys had left the ranch early and ridden across the pasture to the east. They took an overgrown trail intending to find an Indian burial site on the north ridge.

“You know you aren’t supposed to go that far,” Parker admonished. “That’s a treacherous path. You’re damn lucky one of the horses didn’t break a leg.”

“I’m sorry, Pa,” Ryan said, looking down.

“Go on,” Quinn said. Just what he needed was a scared kid and belligerent dad. “Where’s the Indian site you were looking for?”

“We don’t know. That’s why we were looking. Gray, you know, the caretaker at the Lodge down there,” he motioned vaguely south, “says it’s up on the north ridge, above Mossy Creek. Even he doesn’t know exactly where it is, just that it’s there and we’d know it if we saw it. We looked all last summer and couldn’t find it. And since it’s been raining all week, this was the first good day to look for it.”

Quinn remembered Gray. How could he forget the time he spent at the Gallatin Lodge when he was investigating Sharon Lewis’s murder? Or the weekends he came to visit Miranda on personal time?

Shaking his head, he pushed Miranda from his mind. It was harder now that she’d crept in, unbidden, but he had to focus on his job.

His job was to stop the Butcher.

Nick said, “You didn’t get to Mossy Creek.”

Ryan shook his head. “The horses started acting a little spooked, and then we heard a large animal. We steered them into a clearing and saw a brown bear sniffing at something. I fired my rifle to scare him away. Then we saw her.”

Ryan and Timmy had stayed in the area while Sean—the oldest of the three at twelve—took the old logging trail back to the main road and rode his horse three miles to the nearest phone.

“Did you touch the body?”

They all shook their heads vigorously. “I went close,” Ryan said. “A couple feet away. It didn’t seem real, you know? Until, well, until I saw it was that girl who’s missing. That’s when Sean went to get help. But I didn’t want to leave her there, you know? The bear could come back and, well, I just didn’t want to leave.” He looked down at his hands clasped tightly in front of him.

Quinn reached over and squeezed Ryan’s shoulder until the boy looked him in the eye. “You did the right thing.”

He stood and his joints popped from squatting so long, reminding him that he’d be forty this fall. “Thank you, Judge,” Quinn said as he turned to face Richard Parker.

An impeccably dressed blonde with vivid green eyes stood next to Parker with a blank expression. Parker’s wife? Quinn was surprised he hadn’t heard her approach.

“Mrs. Parker?” he asked, hand extended.

She took his hand, her grip surprisingly strong for someone who looked so fragile. Her fingers were icy cold, though the day had warmed considerably since he’d viewed the victim earlier this morning. “Delilah Parker.” Her voice was smooth and cool.

“Special Agent Peterson, ma’am.”

“I’ve made lemonade and banana bread in the kitchen, if you would care for some.”

Quinn was about to decline when Nick said, “Thank you, Mrs. Parker. We are much obliged at your hospitality.”

She beamed at Nick. “Excuse me, I’ll ready a tray.” She hurried off.

Quinn dragged his heels as they followed Judge Parker to the house. “We need to get back to the ridge.”

“Some things you don’t do. Refusing food from Mrs. Parker is one of them.”

“Playing politics,” Quinn mumbled sarcastically.

“Ten minutes will save me months of headache. Believe me. I declined the first time, too.” Nick rolled his eyes.

Quinn wasn’t quite sure what to make of the Parker family. Though the judge joined them in the dining room, Quinn noticed he and his wife didn’t speak much to each other.

Mrs. Parker’s impromptu get-together was surprisingly elaborate. She served the lemonade in crystal and the banana bread with fresh whipped cream on white bone china. Quinn felt uncomfortable with the formality, but Nick seemed to accept it with ease. When Quinn complimented her on a beautiful home, she beamed. The Stepford Wife of
Montana
, he thought, hiding a grin.

Nick was true to his word. Ten minutes later they were on their way, headed back to the stable to collect samples from the horses’ hooves before leaving.

“What’s with Parker’s wife?” Quinn asked as he shut the passenger door of Nick’s truck. “A little formal for a morning snack, wouldn’t you say?”

Nick shrugged as he started the ignition and drove down the long, winding road leading from the Parkers’ ranch to the main highway. “She likes entertaining. I declined the first time I came out here years ago when a couple of their cattle had been stolen. After I was elected, Judge Parker explained that his wife takes hospitality seriously, and he’d appreciate it if I accepted in the future.”

“You should have told me Parker was a judge. I didn’t even remember he was an attorney.”

“Nonpracticing at the time. He was on the Board of Supervisors. Now, he’s a state Superior Court justice. Word is he’s up for consideration to the Appellate Court.”

“That’s a big jump.”

Nick shrugged. “He has friends in high places.”

“Wonderful,” Quinn said cynically.

Nick shot him a glance. “You’re not thinking that Richard Parker has anything to do with what’s been happening to these girls?”

Quinn didn’t say anything for a minute. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “We have no witnesses, and Miranda only had vague impressions of her attacker’s shape and size.”

The Butcher not only kept his victims bound in chains to the floor, but he blindfolded them. Miranda swore she would know him by smell, but a man’s scent would be next to impossible to get a conviction on. They needed hard evidence.

Quinn hadn’t realized how much he had missed Miranda until he saw her today. He’d wanted to touch her, make sure she was really there, in the flesh and not another dream.

“She led us to the shack she’d been held in,” Nick continued. “She tracked down where the Croft sisters had been imprisoned. Miranda has led us to more evidence than anything you or I could have done on our own.”

Quinn knew it, and he knew why. The very reasons why Miranda would have made a damn good FBI agent were the same reasons why she would likely have gotten herself killed.

Miranda was driven, steadfast, unwavering in her pursuit of a killer. But she was obsessed with the Butcher. The case ate at her until it consumed her existence. Quinn didn’t blame her. Hell, who would? The bastard had destroyed her life. She’d had to rebuild it, brick by brick. And, amazingly, she had become an intensely strong woman. No longer a victim, but someone whom Quinn greatly admired for her ability to heal.

While she had dealt with being raped and tortured better than any victim he’d ever met, she hadn’t handled the survivor’s guilt. She blamed herself for Sharon’s murder, and her decision to join the FBI was more to avenge Sharon than to become an agent. And, ultimately, it was her need for vengeance that showed up in the psychological tests. Quinn had gone to bat for her time and time again, but when faced with the results of repeated sessions with the shrink, he had to agree Miranda wasn’t ready.

He ran a hand over his face and closed his eyes. Because he’d loved her, and because his recommendation as much as her qualifications led to her acceptance into the Academy in the first place, he’d insisted that he be the one to tell her.

It hadn’t gone well.

He would never forget the look of betrayal in Miranda’s deep blue eyes when he told her she was out of the Academy. Was it really ten years ago? Damn, he missed her.

“Shit,” Nick muttered as he slammed on the brakes. Quinn jerked in the passenger seat, opened his eyes.

There were at least thirty Jeeps, trucks, and cars parked along Route 84. Quinn scanned the area. “Miranda finally gained some sense. Her Jeep isn’t here.”

Nick glanced at Quinn as he carefully turned onto the rough logging road. “You think she didn’t just drive in?”