He left Gallatin Lodge before anyone was up. He didn’t want to run into Miranda here, not yet. She hadn’t known yesterday he was staying here, and he wondered if her father had since told her.
He thought not.
Nick met him at McKay’s, a diner around the corner from the police station. The restaurant hadn’t changed much since he’d been away. Vinyl blue-and-white checked tablecloths, condiments centered in the middle, gray walls, and red plastic flowers sagging in sconces between marginally clean windows. Country music interspersed with a pair of wannabe comedians from the morning radio show filtered through the speakers bolted high in each corner of the room.
He asked Fran, the waitress, to refill his travel mug but didn’t feel much like eating before the autopsy. He ordered toast, more to soak up the caffeine than because he was hungry.
Nick didn’t look like he’d slept any more than Quinn had. He’d aged as well-twelve years ago, when Quinn first came to Bozeman, Nick had been a twenty-three-year-old rookie as shiny as a new penny. Now, lines crossed his face and knowledge burned in his eyes.
Murder aged you.
“What’s the plan?” Quinn asked.
“I have a ranger coming out to take down any trees we need for evidence, and twenty-six law enforcement personnel, two who double as crime scene technicians.” Nick glanced at his watch. “We have two hours before we need to be there.”
“If we find the shack?”
“We’ll process the scene and send the evidence to the State Crime Lab in Helena.”
“You mentioned on the phone last week that Rebecca had been abducted outside her place of business. Any witnesses?”
Nick shook his head. “No one saw anything.”
“Rebecca Douglas was in a public parking lot, not stranded by the side of a road. No one saw or heard anything?”
“I interviewed everyone who was at the Pizza Shack that night, even if they’d left long before Rebecca was abducted. If anyone saw anything, it didn’t look suspicious.”
“I wonder if she knew him,” Quinn speculated out loud.
“It’s always been a possibility that the Butcher is someone familiar to the college girls.”
“Have you run all University staff and students who have been there for at least fifteen years?”
“We’ve run all staff who meet the profile through the criminal database, but no one pops. The worst we have is a sociology professor who was arrested in the 1970s for civil disobedience, and a janitor who was arrested for a felony DUI eight years ago.”
“Do it again,” Quinn said. Nick’s brow furrowed, and Quinn backtracked. He didn’t want Nick to think he was taking over. “What I mean is, we should focus on all single white males who were at the University either as a student, staff member, or professor under the age of thirty-five at the time Penny went missing.”
“Thirty-five?”
Quinn nodded. “The original profile suggested that the Butcher was a single white male between twenty-five and thirty-five, and that he knew at least one of his victims.
“We’d thought at first that he knew Miranda or Sharon, either from campus, the Lodge, or where Sharon worked,” he continued. “But when we determined that Penny Thompson had been the Butcher’s first victim, the odds are that Penny knew her attacker and Miranda and Sharon were strangers.”
“But there were hundreds of potential suspects,” Nick said. “I remember going on dozens of interviews and getting nowhere.”
Quinn remembered. Far too many people had had contact with Penny, and when they’d narrowed it to those who knew her well-the boyfriend, her professors, her teaching assistants-no one fit the profile. It didn’t help that her disappearance was three years before Miranda’s and Sharon’s kidnapping.
Quinn refrained from comment as the waitress approached with their toast. Bozeman was a small town, even with a university of twelve thousand students knocking on the city limits. Ears were big; mouths were bigger.
“Sheriff Donaldson was convinced Penny was killed by her boyfriend,” Nick said. “But that never panned out. There was no evidence to connect him to her disappearance. Once we suspected she was the Butcher’s first victim, her father had already gotten rid of the car.”
Nick finished his coffee and slammed the ceramic mug on the table. “We’re floundering, Quinn. The bastard has racked up another victim and we have no evidence, no witnesses, no suspects. The press is going to have a field day.”
“We found her quickly. That’s always good news. When’s the autopsy?”
Nick glanced at his watch. “Ten minutes. We should head over there.” He drained his coffee.
Quinn dreaded the autopsy. He didn’t know what he feared more: looking at the body of Rebecca Douglas on the table, or picturing Miranda under the same knife.
Fran approached the table with a carafe of fresh coffee and a newspaper. “Just delivered,” she said as she slapped the paper in front of Nick. “If you don’t mind me saying, Elijah Banks is an asshole and everybody knows it. His mother must be rolling over in her grave, poor woman.”
BODY FOUND IN WOODS
No confirmation on identity
from Sheriff’s Department
