fancied himself a hunter, criminologists would have another term for him: serial killer.
When his early human prey lost their appeal, Aleksandr needed a new challenge, and it was during an assignment in Asia that he found it. A contact in Bangkok led him to an illegal hunting operation in Myanmar, long before a cease-fire agreement ended the nation’s sixty-year civil war. Poaching was rampant in the vacuum left in the absence of a national government. He had been promised the freedom to pursue endangered animals, including the Asiatic black bear and leopard. The local guides were talented hunters, but the area was simply shot out in terms of game. The outfitter offered him a village girl as a consolation prize, which Aleksandr accepted. It wasn’t until they brought her to the camp that he realized she was not just another female being forced to fulfill his sexual desires. She had been accused of cheating on her husband and her punishment was death. Aleksandr was being offered the thrill of hunting a human being.
She was released, barefoot and terrified, into a jungle clearing at midnight and allowed to run through the night to make her escape. The temperature was already soaring when they found her tracks at dawn, her tiny feet making deep impressions as she ran. Aleksandr had hunted his entire life but had never felt such adrenaline, even when killing whores. He knew he would never again feel any real passion for pursuing four-legged beasts. They had to bring in hounds when her tracks disappeared in a thickly canopied boulder field; the ancient monoliths offered no sign of her footsteps.
The dogs had her bayed in a tree by lunchtime, their deafening barks making the scene all the more chaotic. The guide offered Aleksandr a battered AK, but he refused it; the gun would be too quick an end.
He took a dha, a simple but effective swordlike machete, from one of the trackers and began to pelt his terrified and dehydrated prey with stones. She shouted out in agony as one of the rocks struck her knee. A well-placed stone to her temple knocked her unconscious and she fell limply from her lofty perch, striking the ground with a hollow thud. The baying barks of the dogs rose to a fever pitch, and Aleksandr yelled for their handlers to drag them back so that they could not attack his kill.
A painful slash of the dha across her naked thigh shocked the girl awake. Aleksandr paused and looked into her eyes; her enlarged pupils revealed nothing but terror. The pleasure receptors in Aleksandr’s brain sparked and flushed his body with endorphins. Holding the blade downward in a two-handed grip, he pushed it slowly into her bony chest, feeling the last beats of her heart pulsing through the blade.
CHAPTER 13
Kumba Ranch, Flathead Valley, Montana
THE ENTIRE FAMILY WAS gathered, drinks in hand, on the expansive deck of the ranch’s main house, with its commanding view of the largest lake on the property. All were dressed up for the occasion. For the men, that meant clean blue jeans, dress shirts, wool vests, and boots. Reece had gone into Whitefish to shop. It felt good to be wearing clothes that weren’t borrowed. The ladies had taken the opportunity to class it up even further.
“You men clean up well for a bunch of glorified ranch hands,” Annika teased. She was wearing an emerald green dress that clung tightly to her tall, slender frame. Her eyes were the color of her dress and, like her husband’s, almost luminescent. She carried herself with a quiet confidence, and she showed an unmistakable affection for her husband; their subtle physical contact, a touch on the back here, a grip on the elbow there, was that of a couple deeply in love. Reece could not have been happier for the two of them but couldn’t help but think of Lauren, briefly wondering where he would be today had she not been killed.
Jonathan and Caroline Hastings, both in their early sixties, made a handsome couple. A lifetime of honest hard work had kept their tall bodies lean. Caroline wore a broad-brimmed hat religiously to protect her face and neck from the sun’s devastating rays, a habit passed to her by her mother as a child on the family’s ranch outside of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. The result was a face that made her appear far younger than her actual age, with only the finest of lines peeking from the corners of her eyes. Jonathan