Savage by Nancy Holder Page B

lurking within everyone, the more she was convinced that if he hadn’t killed anyone in Wolf Springs he must have at some point in his life. There was so much glorification of savagery, of the brutish nature. He even urged his readers to eat their meat raw whenever practical. Katelyn was alarmed that her stomach actually growled when she read that section.
    “ ‘Deep in his psyche, man has never lost his instinct to kill, and that’s a good thing’,” she read aloud.
    She put the book down. Whoever, whatever, Jack Bronson was, he was a sicko, and moving to the top of her suspect list. She stood up and stretched her back and glanced at the clock. It was midnight.
    She crossed to the windows and peered out. No one, not man nor beast seemed to be stirring outside. She couldn’t decide if she was relieved or disappointed.
    She flexed her left hand. It seemed to have healed completely from Wanda Mae’s bite. Belatedly she wondered if there was blood on the ground outside from the fight. There had to be, she realized — Wanda’s, at least.
    She stiffened. What would the hunters make of that when they came back? Still, she wasn’t sure what she could do about that. Maybe she could say she’d seen some kind of animal kill a rabbit outside if anyone asked. That would be less suspicious than the smell of freshly dumped bleach outside.
    She glanced back at the book. Jack Bronson seemed to be smiling at her from the cover. And it wasn’t a nice, warm smile. It was an I’m-a-psychopathic-killer kind of smile.
    On a sudden whim she sat down at her computer, launched a browser and did a search for Jack Bronson. Thousands of hits came back and she gritted her teeth in frustration. She began to scroll through, automatically dismissing all the bookseller sites and promotion sites.
    Finally she tried adding the word “criminal” to the search. The fifth result from the top of a smaller list looked promising. She clicked on it and found a rant by an angry guy named Eric Custer who claimed that Jack Bronson had brainwashed his boyfriend. The tirade went on for pages and Katelyn skimmed it, hoping that the man might have actually dug up some dirt on Jack.
    Finally, quite a ways in, Eric started dishing about what he’d found in his own investigation of Jack Bronson. A couple of disappointed customers. No big surprise there. But there was another surprise: Jack Bronson had mysteriously appeared out of thin air a decade before the man’s article. Before that, there had been no record of him.
    That was because “Jack Bronson” had changed his name so that people wouldn’t know he’d been charged with three assaults. Apparently there was also a string of hunting violations. Katelyn read the section eagerly, hoping there was evidence that would point to him as the current killer.
    And then she read a sentence that stopped her cold.
    Jack Bronson’s birth name is John McBride.

7
    KATELYN STARED IN shock at the name for several seconds before her heart started back up. Jack Bronson’s last name was McBride? Her last name? The family name etched in the stained glass window on the landing of this very cabin? Her brain shot off in a hundred directions at once, seizing puzzle pieces and trying to fit them together. Her father, shot with a silver bullet. Her mother, knowing. A piece of stolen silver just outside the Inner Wolf Center.
    Did Trick know about Jack Bronson? Was that why they’d broken into the Inner Wolf Center instead of coming through the front door?
    The name Eric Custer was highlighted in blue letters, signifying a link, but when she clicked on it, she got a 404 Error — no such page. She typed in his name and more links popped up — dozens of them — and she tried some of them. They were all broken. Wearying of the dead ends, she searched for John McBride. As with Eric Custer, there were dozens of John McBrides. Jack Bronson definitely wasn’t the John McBride who was married to the country singer Martina